Or at least it seems to me, as I study mystical traditions, particularly Christianity, that men who seek God intensely are often drawn to caves.

The Hebrew prophet Elijah famously fled for his life and hid in a cave on Mt. Horeb/Mt. Sinai, where he heard the “still, small voice” of God (1 Kings 19). One of the first monks in Christianity, a man named Antony, pursued the outermost boundaries of solitude, settling in a cave on Mount Galala in Egypt. He stayed there for decades. I think of Benedict of Nursia—credited as the founder of Western monasticism—who left a middle-class family and liberal arts education to live in a cave at Subiaco, Italy. For three years, a monk named Romanus visited him and provided food by lowering it to him on a rope. Saint Francis found solace in limestone caves on Mount Subiaso to pray throughout his life—and even experienced the stigmata, or wounds of Christ, while in a cave in his latter years.

It’s not normal or even recommended behavior. But it is frequent enough in tradition and history to suggest something archetypal is afoot.

Photo by Devon Janse van Rensburg on Unsplash

I have absolutely no desire to sleep in a cave, but I am drawn to qualities that caves contain. Is part of the reason I experience the movie theater as a sacred space because it is a light beam of story shining in an enclosed, dark space? I enjoy pod-like hotels that fit bed and bathroom in a tiny box-like design. One time in my twenties, desperate for a cheap rental room, I stayed in a friend’s former walk-in closet. I folded the mattress up each morning and did yoga. It was perfect at the time. And I love staying at monasteries—most of which have far more than cave-like lodging!

What is this yearning for enclosed spaces, which might offer an entry to deep solitude? Is it a yearning for the womb, the feminine side of the self (anima), or the divine feminine? Or is it a misguided spiritual heroism that seeks extreme asceticism instead of integration with life? Is cave-dwelling a way of justifying avoidance of relationships and intimacy? In the movie The Mysteries of the Jesus Prayer, the narrators travel to the Kyiv Monastery of the Caves in Ukraine, where some monks chose to wall themselves off in darkness, only receiving food and water through a small hole in the wall. I gasped when I saw the caves, and could only think, “That can’t be good for you.” On a more superficial level, what is it that “man-caves,” replete with a flatscreen, surround sound, and a fridge for beer, hope to achieve?

There’s a political side to caves, too. Caves and underground tunnels allow dissidents and violent revolutionaries to hide from the surface, shielded in secrecy. It’s an uncomfortable question, but what are we to make of the tale of biblical David fleeing furious King Saul to hide in the cave of Adullam, where about four hundred men joined him and became outlaws? Caves can also serve as bases for terror operations. The Viet Cong in South Vietnam used elaborate tunnel and cave complexes to launch attacks during the Vietnam War. They slept, cooked, stored weapons, treated their wounded, set traps, and more, all in caves. In more recent years, Hamas has used extensive underground tunnels and caves for waging war against the Israeli state, hiding hostages, launching attacks, smuggling blockaded goods, and more.

In Rachel Kushner’s novel Creation Lake, an off-the-grid revolutionary named Bruno Lacombe is compelled by a radical critique of civilization’s violence to seek ever greater primal solitude. First, he abandons his house to live in the barn, then a hut, and then finally, caves on his property. He writes philosophical missives to a leftist movement, waxes mystical at times, and affirms cave-dwelling Neanderthals as superior human beings. Bruno’s quest is weird and highly disturbing, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Plus, Kushner is a master storyteller.

But back to caves as spots for spiritual quest. The spark that lit this ember of cave curiosity in me is Henri le Saux, or Swami Abhishiktananda, whom I’ve been writing about recently. He lived in a cave while on retreat at the mountain of Arunachala, after having been significantly moved by the presence and teaching of Hindu sage Ramana Maharshi, who resided there. Maharshi wrote of Arunachala:

To its caves, age after age, there has come a succession of those who are hungry for wisdom and renunciation, whom the Mountain, the divine Magnet, draws to its bosom, to teach them in its own silence, the royal path of the supreme Silence, and how to be established in the Self. (Quoted in Cave of the Heart, Shirley du Boulay)

Arunachala is worshiped as a manifestation of the Hindu god Shiva, and le Saux—while deeply devoted to Christ—experienced the spiritual power of its rocks and crevices.

What are we to make of the uses and abuses of men and caves? (Or is there a larger tradition and trend of women and caves that I am missing? Julian of Norwich in her anchorhold could be one example). What archetypal longing does it stir? What can we learn and unlearn from those who have sought cavernous depths?

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As befitting a hero and his rescuee, Jesus and I became close. My story became part of his story. He had saved me from torment, after all, so the least I could do was give him my gratitude. But it also became clear throughout church and youth group socialization that Jesus operated as more than a protective shield from sulfur. People talked to Jesus. They asked him for things like a healing for cousin Ray’s cancer or for Diane to say yes when Steve asked her to the prom. They shared their most vulnerable secrets and yearnings with Jesus and so I did the same. I mimicked the minister’s prayers of thanking Jesus for saving my life, but mostly, I pleaded with him for Casey to stop giving me charley horses in gym class. I confided in Jesus when I was scared. On good days, I cracked jokes to Jesus when no one was looking. We were buddies, Jesus and me.

Eventually, Jesus even became my boyfriend. Or at least that’s what my Christian college friends and I later called him. We poked fun at the songs of praise to God and Jesus that we sang. The lyrics resembled pop forty love ballads, nineties bridges, and repetitive choruses expressing lovers’ aching hearts:

I want to know you. I want to see your face.
I want to know you more!
I want to touch you. I want to see your face.
I want to know you more!

In college chapel services, the more enthusiastic the praise singer, the more spiritual I thought they were. The front-row attendees waved, raised, and pumped their hands, shouting ebullient “Yes, Lord’s!” and “We thank you Jesus’s!” I carried my share of cynical jadedness, but when it came to singing songs to Jesus, I was all heart, closing my eyes, tears streaming, hands uplifted with the eager ones.

Photo by John Price on Unsplash

There was just one problem: Jesus’ death loomed much larger than his life. Come to think of it, my Jesus didn’t really have much of a life. What was his story other than my story? Jesus and I had become close, yes, but who was he, exactly, other than the sacrificial firefighter warding off hell’s flames?

The premise of Professor Borgman’s Biblical Literature class at evangelical Gordon College sounded simple enough: to read the Bible as literature. To those of us raised on the Bible as an unerring, literal account of salvation, however, reading it literarily—instead of literally—was subversive. Borgman repeatedly pressed us toward the specifics of the text, which yielded surprising, contradictory, and jarring details. They were, admittedly, of the introductory sort that one immediately encounters in a Divinity School first-year course. (Genesis has two creation stories! Luke wrote the Gospel and the book of Acts as one epic story!) The simple practice of reading the biblical text and paying attention to its linguistic twists and storytelling signals changed how I understood the Bible and the story of Jesus itself. It refuted the belief I carried that the Bible somehow dropped wholesale from God to humanity, mediated by a few furiously dictating court stenographers—and it also helped me hear Luke’s Gospel as if for the first time.

For example, I learned that Jesus taught a specific Way. Not only does much of the action with Jesus and disciples take place “on the way” in Luke’s Gospel (Luke 10:38), but Jesus launches and models a way of justice, peace, and inclusion, especially for the lowly or marginalized. Mary sings of the Way through which “he has brought down the mighty from their thrones and exalted the lowly” (Luke 1:52). In his first sermon, Jesus quotes and claims the prophet Isaiah’s words have come true in his ministry: “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, to release the oppressed” (Luke 4:18). Jesus quoting Isaiah echoes a larger tradition of God’s Way of Jubilee in which debts are forgiven, the enslaved are liberated and the poor have what they need (Leviticus 25). Luke says Jesus’ arrival is like a great banquet, a time of feasting for everyone—especially the poor, broken, and wounded (Luke 14:15–23).

It turned out that the story of the Jesus I initially called “mine” was not really the story of Jesus. It was the story of me. The story of Jesus Christ includes me but—to state the spiritually obvious—is not only for me. To push Luke’s insight into the theological realm: Jesus is for others, for all others, especially those made “other” by oppressive powers. In the midst of the Nazi genocidal “othering” of Jewish people, the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer made “being there for others” the summary of Jesus’ identity. Jesus is the “man for others,” he wrote in his letters from a Nazi prison cell. Behind bars, he jotted down notes for a book he intended to write about “the experience that a transformation of all human life is given in the fact that “Jesus is there only for others” (Letters and Papers from Prison).

The simplicity of this statement conceals its subversiveness. “Of course Jesus is there for others,” we might think, when what we often really mean is that “Jesus is for others in my group.” We claim Jesus as our Jesus. Christ is for you, my evangelical upbringing taught, as long as you join my team and affirm Jesus as the exclusive way, truth, and life. Conversely, I’ve met plenty of liberal Christians who sneer at “those” Christians who still believe in miracles or Jesus’ bodily resurrection. Jesus is for you, it seems they are saying, as long as you are not an evangelical!

When exclusive religion meets imperial power, however, a more nefarious Jesus is created. Our Jesus becomes, falsely, the Jesus to which the world must bend its will, leaving murdered and enslaved bodies, along with stolen land, in his wake. The early church breathed a persecution-free sigh of relief when emperor Constantine converted to Christianity and the Roman Empire became Christian—but they also began populating Roman armies and providing theological justification for war and conquest. The fifteenth-century papal bulls, such as Pope Alexander VI’s Inter Caetera, provided spiritual justification for Catholic claiming of other lands and peoples, all in the name of the one true Christian religion. White male Christian slave traders in the United States wielded Paul’s words “Slaves, obey your masters” as a law from no less an authority than God.

But the imperial Jesus, too, is not Jesus. It is a Jesus twisted to match the image and story of the Empire, which conveniently ignores the actual story of Jesus. Jesus’ Way is, as Luke tells it, inclusion, solidarity with the marginalized, and expansive life-for-others. Such breadth and depth of love, however, is inherently threatening to the boundary-keepers of empire and religion.

There is also a third option in Christian tradition, beyond the narcissism of my Jesus and the racism of our Jesus: the Cosmic or Universal Christ. Jesus Christ is not only “for me” or even “for others”; Jesus Christ is also the divine presence in everything. Christ is not Jesus’ last name, as Franciscan author Richard Rohr is fond of saying, but God’s generative and living presence at the heart of reality itself.

I long suspected that there was infinitely more to Christ than the man. Biblical passages such as Colossians 1 tipped me off: “He is before all things and in him all things hold together” (Colossians 1: 17). John’s Gospel placed the Word, made flesh in Jesus, at creation’s beginning with and as God. Other passages, out of which Christ’s cosmic identity emerged, plain baffled me: what was this Wisdom that the writer of Proverbs wrote about, “appointed from eternity before the world began”? (Proverbs 8:23). The first Incarnation of Christ takes place not in Jesus’ birth but at the origin of the universe—all creation is God’s Beloved Child!

Christ’s presence is universal, which is a truth forgotten by many but remembered and heralded by Christian mystics throughout the ages. Consider the fourth-century theologian and bishop Gregory of Nyssa:

Who, looking at the universe, would be so feeble-minded as not to believe that God is all in all; that he clothes himself with the universe, and at the same time contains it and dwells in it? (see The Roots of Christian Mysticism, 39-40)

Or the seventh-century monk Maximus the Confessor:

He who has no beginning is seen in things that must have a beginning; the invisible in the visible; the intangible in the tangible. Thus he gathers us together in himself, through every object…enabling us to rise into union with him, as he was dispersed in coming down to us. (Roots of Christian Mysticism, 227-228)

Just because Jesus Christ is cosmic, however, does not mean that he is not personal. The Cosmic Christ is, at the same time, the particular Jesus of Nazareth. And just because Christ is in all things does not mean that Christ is any less in me. My story includes a Jesus that I still call “mine—God’s intimate and loving presence available to me—as I learned in my evangelical days, even as he also belongs to everyone and everything else. I can even hum some of those pop praise songs again because I still pray to “want to know you and seek your face!”

Jesus has to be for me if Jesus is to have any meaning. He may be the Word through whom all things were made and the light that enlightens the world (John 1), but unless I can experience that ongoing divine Creativity and Life in my life, it has no relevance for me. The same God who stretched sky and spun planets must mysteriously also know and care for the unique rhythm of my heartbeat. Otherwise, what’s the personal point? But if he’s only my Jesus, and not everyone and everything else’s Jesus, too, then Jesus has become far too small and only a narcissistic reflection of me. The real Jesus likely knows nothing about that small Jesus that, in truth, mirrors my ego. And as Thomas Merton memorably quipped in New Seeds of Contemplation, to be unknown of God is altogether too much privacy.

Jesus and I are still close, but we’ve redefined the relationship. There is no longer a distant, angry deity lingering behind him, seeing, knowing my faults, and ready to pounce with punishment. Jesus is still my rescuer, but not from hell—that mythic place of fire evoked more from Dante’s Inferno than the Bible itself—rather, Jesus has become the mirror to me of God’s love at the heart of reality. Jesus has not so much saved me from disaster but saved me for life. My Story of Jesus is, at the same time, Our Story of Jesus, which is simultaneously The Story of Christ unfolding throughout all reality.

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Juggling last days of summer childcare, work, and a family trip, and sharing an old favorite article. Enjoy!

Swami Abhishiktananda, Indore, 1973, CC BY-SA 3.0

That’s why I’m curious about the time before he goes to India, because no one really knows how his intense yearning to live in India initially gripped him, how he could say, “her call makes my heart ache.” His longing to go to India simmered for fourteen years while he lived in a Benedictine Abbey in Brittany, France—but just what prompted the call remains unclear. One of his close monastic friends, Father Lemarié, says: “It remains a mystery. There was absolutely nothing on the subject in the library at Kergonan [the monastery] (neither Upanishads, nor Bhagavad Gita) at most a few reviews of the missions to the East. It is certain that he had an inner call very soon after entering the monastery.” Did he come across his own copy of the Upanishads—even though Benedictine monks do not hold private property? Did a missions review of India stir an insatiable desire?

What’s also fascinating is that he hardly told anybody. The abbot gave him permission to begin inquiring about a mission in India, and so Henri wrote letters to other monasteries, church officials, anyone who might be able to help facilitate a move. Nothing worked out. At one point, some French monks in Tamil Nadu seemed interested in welcoming him, but that fell through. Years passed. He began to come to terms with the possibility of his inner desire not being realized, quasi-reconciling himself to an unhappy life as a monk in France.

Eventually, he wrote a letter to an Indian bishop as a last-ditch prayer to respond to his inner call, and the bishop passed the letter to a French priest named Father Jules Monchanin. This priest, too, had long sought a spiritual meeting of Christianity and Hinduism in his own heart and work. He ministered to folks in nearby villages in the diocese of Tiruchirapalli, lived as a hermit, and dedicated himself to studying Indian philosophy and religion. The two began trading letters and making plans. Le Saux became the companion in Spirit that Monchanin had been seeking, and vice versa. “There is something like an answer from heaven in this whole set of circumstances,” Henri wrote to his sisters.

Meanwhile, Le Saux’s move remained a secret to his fellow monks, except for the fellow brother who stumbled upon Henri in the woods one day practicing his Tamil! Henri set off for India in 1948, leaving the Brittany monastery—and stayed in India for the rest of his life.

What is it that set his heart on fire with a piercing call and longing to go to India? How did he manage to kindle his longing, and not extinguish it, over the many years? Why did he keep it a secret from mostly everyone? What are the secret longings and callings that we have? How can we faithfully nurture these inner desires toward their fruition, even when we have no present proof that that will happen? How can we welcome the creative pulse of the Spirit within us, adapt when necessary, but not shut it down?

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Merton first published a spiritual autobiography in 1948 entitled The Seven Storey Mountain. The book became an unlikely bestseller and, although it was not Merton’s intent, single-handedly served as a recruitment ad for monasteries across the United States. Merton tells of his conversion to Catholicism and the monastic life. It’s a story about a sincere spiritual seeker who turns his back on the contradictions and alienation of modern life in order to find wholeness in the disciplined and sacred severity of the monastery. On a retreat at the Abbey of Gethsemani, in rural Kentucky, Merton glimpsed the grounded cohesion for which he desperately longed—and so he made a radical shift in his life and joined.

His early writings are full of ebullience for the gifts the monastic life can bring. A sense of purposeful awe and unity pervaded his first visit to Gethsemani and he enthusiastically declared the monastery the spiritual “center of America.” He surmised, “I had been wondering what was holding this country together, what was keeping the universe from cracking in pieces and falling apart.… It is places like this monastery.”

On the surface, his life seems to perpetuate the stereotype that the spiritual life is separate from the active life and that so-called “contemplative” Mary is at odds with so-called “active” Martha (see Luke 10:38–42). Merton’s choice to spurn the world to find God in solitude and silence can be perceived as rejecting the lower active life in favor of a higher spiritual calling. And part of this is Merton’s doing. Clearly swept away by youthful romanticism, he called the monastery the “Court of the Queen of Heaven.” A more mature Merton later admitted that when he entered the monastery, he sought to escape the world’s evils in pursuit of heaven’s treasure.

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

Merton shows himself on a journey, like all of us, and never fixed in one place. His monastic conversion story, The Seven Storey Mountain, sold copies into the millions and brought the monk fame and notoriety. Yet he downplayed the book’s importance as he deepened in his spiritual journey. He wondered in his book The Sign of Jonas if the “world I am sore at on paper [in The Seven Storey Mountain] is perhaps a figment of my imagination.” Then, years after that, Merton had these self-deprecating words to say: “Due to a book I wrote 30 years ago, I have myself become a sort of stereotype of the world-denying contemplative—the man who spurned New York, spat on Chicago, and tromped on Louisville, heading for the woods with Thoreau in one pocket, John of the Cross in another, and holding the Bible open at the Apocalypse.”

He lit upon the paradoxical resolution of the age-old tension between contemplation and action—that the world is not “out there” separate from us. The world cannot be fled, only faced in the depths of ourselves, wherever we are. This is a strange and even miraculous place for Merton to land as, on the one hand, he became more and more drawn to the hermit’s life. In the mid-1960s, he began living in his own hermitage at Gethsemani, but his wide fame still drew many visitors who came to see him. By 1968, the year of his death, he had begun casting an eye to California and New Mexico for possible new hermitage sites. He traveled as far as Alaska to consider relocation, which he said was “the ideal place for solitude and the hermit life.” The mystery to be discovered here is that Merton’s perpetual quest for greater silence and solitude led not to isolation, but to connection. In the encounter with God in his own soul, he struck upon the inextricable connectedness of all things.

Contemplation, for Merton, became an awakening to the divine unity of reality that everyone could see—not the private and secret wisdom of a few. It is not possible, or even desirable, for most seekers of God to live in remote solitude or join a monastic order. I cherish going on retreat and revel in praying the monastic hours, but my true vocation is not to be a monk. My call is simply to be the most loving version of myself. Besides, I’m too busy driving the kids to soccer practice and reminding them to do their homework. Merton matters to me because he shatters the illusory barrier between the world and heaven, prayer and activity. He says, “I do not need to lock myself into solitude and lose all contact with the rest of the world; rather, this poor world has a right to a place in my solitude.” Solitude and the world are not at odds or even, in the end, separate. Merton struck upon this truth from one end of the spectrum by embracing the world as a solitary monk.

Now it is time for those of us more obviously in the world to embrace the monastic depths—which are the depths of grace that God pours forth toward us in all the stations of life in which we find ourselves.

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This is an adapted excerpt from my book The Holy Ordinary (Monkfish, 2024).

I’m so glad I didn’t. There’s a deep critique to be made about the cultural appropriation of yoga. Many, such as Liz Bucar in her Beyond Wellness, are doing that needed work. For my part, and in spite of its weaknesses, contemporary yoga changed my life. Chanting in yoga class nudged me to discover the chanting tradition in Christianity, most notably through Benedictine monasticism. And the yoga I experienced—appropriated as it was—compelled me actually to learn about Hinduism. I realized I didn’t have to be afraid of different traditions and spiritual expressions, whether in the form of the smiling Buddha statue, prayer forms from other religions, or even the metaphysical bookstore next to the coffee shop I worked at. The more expansive Jesus I was beginning to know didn’t seem to mind, and it turns out my nervous system didn’t, either. Gradually, I began learning about courageous, boundary-crossing seekers who welcomed spiritual truth wherever they found it. Two such individuals are the Benedictine monks turned Hindu renunciates Swami Abhishiktananda and Bede Griffiths.

Hospitality forms a key virtue in Benedictine spirituality. Benedict of Nursia, the founder of Benedictine monasticism and the author of the Rule of St. Benedict, wrote, “All guests are to be welcomed as Christ, for he himself will say: I was a stranger and you welcomed me (Matt. 25:35)” (RB, 53). In dangerous times of scapegoating and violence against the other, monks who welcomed strangers as Christ performed a subversive act that broke boundaries between “us” and “them.” This summer, I’ve been reading about Benedictine monks who took Benedict’s injunction even further by welcoming people, practices, and beliefs of other religious traditions—and allowed themselves to be changed in the process. Their names are: Swami Abhishiktananda, or Henri le Saux; Bede Griffiths, Thomas Merton, and Thomas Keating. I’ll be writing about them for a few weeks.

Both Henri le Saux—who became known as Swami Abhishiktananda—and Bede Griffiths started as Benedictine monks and felt an undeniable spiritual call to go to India. The call was less about converting other people and more about pursuing their own conversion through fulfilling an awakening spiritual desire. Bede famously wrote that he had to go to India to find the other half of his soul.

Once there, they immersed themselves more deeply in the spiritual path, taking Hindu ascetic robes. But their Christian hospitality to Hindu culture and religion did not only welcome Hindu insights—it transformed each of them in different ways and became a path of deepening in contemplative experience. Hospitality became not just what one person, community, or tradition can provide for another, but mutuality of heart and contemplative practice.

Abhishiktananda technically helped run a Christian-Hindu ashram called Shantivanam but, as his profile in this book points out, he mostly just ended up wandering around India on his spiritual quest. He visited the Hindu sage Ramana Maharshi on numerous occasions, and when Maharshi died, Abhishiktananda pursued a deepening relationship with the mountain Arunachala where Maharshi had lived. He wrote, “If Ramana was himself so great, how much more so must be this Arunachala which drew Ramana to himself?” Abhishiktananda settled in an empty cave, praying, “In silence you will teach me silence, Arunachala.” He felt an irresistible call to the vision of oneness and nonduality in Hinduism, and frequently struggled to reconcile his Christian faith with his pull towards advaita, or nondualism. He wrote:

I am like someone who has one foot on one side of the gulf, and the other on the other side. I would like to throw a bridge across, but do not know where to fasten it, the walls are so smooth.

Photo by Arunachala Photos on Unsplash

Bede Griffiths had a greater communal and organizational capacity than Abhishiktananda and continued Abhishiktananda’s initial work of founding the Hindu-Christian ashram Saccidananda (Shantivanam). Whereas Abhishiktananda later lived as a hermit in the Himalayas, Bede Griffiths committed to the prayer rhythms and day-in and day-out mundane realities of monastic living, staying at Shantivanam for twenty-five years. More on him in future weeks, too.

In the meantime, I invite you to perceive the groundswell of union in God that Abhishiktananda experienced within. On his retreat in the Himalayas, dedicated only to reciting Psalms and chanting the sacred mantra OM, he wrote:

Not allowing myself to locate God anywhere outside me, but recognizing that within as well as without there is only He alone. For if there were God plus an “other,” he would no longer be God, the Absolute! Nothing is left but he who says, “I AM!” (Quoted in this book)

These two monks have expanded the hospitality of my heart. No longer do my Christian beliefs assume that I have the truth; rather, truth is far broader, deeper, and diverse than any one tradition, culture, or person, and we each have truths to share. Hospitality is the gesture and practice of opening my heart to receive the truth that you have to share, and sharing the truth that I have to share, with the dedicated hope that we both will be changed in the process.

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The author sees the cross of Christ as a peacemaking nexus point that breaks down dividing walls of hostility. Somehow, for the author, Jesus’s blood spilt on a Roman cross ended the cycle of retributive violence. In place of domination, it offered suffering love. It eradicated barriers between Jew and Gentile, oppressed and oppressor, and all groups long separated: “For he is our peace, who has made us both one, and has broken down the dividing wall of hostility” (Ephesians 2:14).

As we come to terms with our apocalyptic ecological crisis, many are discovering that a hostile wall, constructed by our own actions and industries, separates us from Earth.

Earth is longing and groaning for Christ’s peace, for a reconciled and mended body.

We are desperate for ecological peacemaking.

Ethicist Larry Rasmussen’s book Earth-Honoring Faith teaches me that:

Sometime around the middle of the last century, we changed.

Earth changed.

In the 1750s, the trajectory of industrial growth climbed slowly, and then in the 1950s, unfettered growth catapulted beyond anything Earth had witnessed before.

CO2 levels rose sharply in the last sixty years, causing New Yorker staff writer Elizabeth Kolbert to warn that they’re on track to nearly double that of preindustrial levels.

The global economy doubled.

We shifted the supply of the world’s energy from human and animal labor, to oil, coal, and natural gas. We paralleled our expansive industrial growth with skyrocketing population increases, from 1.6 billion people in 1900 to around 7 billion people in 2016.

When people multiply, and industry expands, and when a wall or Earth-fissure of hostility spreads, blessings and curses attend reality as well.

Rasmussen names other dramatic increases, increases that, when measured on graphs, likewise shoot up like hockey sticks during the years 1950 onwards.

Here’s what exploded in just several decades: foreign direct investment, water use, damming of rivers, urban population, paper consumption, McDonald’s restaurants, species extinctions, great floods, ozone depletion, and on and on. (See Earth-Honoring Faith, chapter 2).

We’re now living in what some people are calling the Age of the Anthropocene, which means the age in which humans have developed the capacity to change Earth irrevocably.

A wall of hostility between Earth and humanity expands over the globe. It’s revealed in Arctic ice melting, ocean acidification, Florida coasts threatened, and the Marshall Islands facing the terrifying prospect of being covered by water.

What have we done?

What’s wrong with us?

Why haven’t we changed even though we know the facts?

We have now become conscious that Earth’s vital signs are lagging.

Headlines confirm it regularly, but we are not rushing to the emergency room.

We are simply continuing business as usual, and worse, in denial of the dividing wall, and the death we are creating.

We are the problem, and yet the crisis has ballooned to become so large and seemingly insurmountable that we do not know how to act.

It feels that we are in the grip of an unseen, nearly unnamable power, a power that paralyzes us from saving ourselves and preserving the planet.

The writer of Ephesians knows that walls of hostility are constructed through power.

The writer dares to name such powers of division as both structural and spiritual.

The writer uses ominous terms to describe these realities, such as: principalities, powers, rulers of this present darkness, and spiritual hosts of wickedness in heavenly places.

This is the biblical language of authority, and elsewhere in the New Testament, such words are overwhelmingly used to describe political, economic, or structural power.

When Mark’s Jesus says Gentile rulers “lord it over” their followers, he’s referring to imperial rulers (Mark 10:42).

When John wishes to describe Jerusalem’s people of influence, he calls them “authorities” (John 7:48).

When Luke’s Pilate brings together the leaders to determine Jesus’ fate, he’s referring to the chief priests and the Roman officials.

These are the rulers, the powers, and the principalities of the Gospels.

The Ephesians’ writer dwells in the same politically charged world as the Gospel writers. The writer is a prisoner of the Empire, proclaiming peace amidst hostile divisions. And yet the writer moves beyond the literal naming of power into the realm of the symbolic. There are specific people, such as Pilate, the chief priests, and the imperial soldiers, but there are also ideologies, religions, governments, corporations, and structures that reinscribe division and alienation from our common planetary home.

And so the biblical language of power is particular, while also being fluid, multivalent, and evocative.

Powers and principalities are more than simply Pilate or Augustus or Nero or a CEO or a President.

Power takes on force, a culture, and a personality greater than the sum of its parts, and larger than the individual leaders at the helm. The writer of Ephesians knows that the struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against these larger dimensions that create hostility: principalities, rulers, and spiritual hosts.

Photo by Artem Shubas on Unsplash

It’s long clear now that behaviors such as changing light bulbs, recycling, and even driving electric cars, while all commendable, are largely impotent in the face of such power. Such networks of power are dedicated to denying and suppressing truth about Earth’s suffering at our hands. The spiritual flipside of dark money lobbying networks is what the Ephesians writer dares to name as world rulers of this present darkness, principalities and powers. In the ancient world, they called them demons.

Pentecostal Christians read this passage in Ephesians about the so-called “armor of God” and imagine they are waging war against airborne, invisible devils.

Liberationists embraced the concept of structural evil, but applied it one-dimensionally to corporations and governments.

And yet principalities and powers will not be pinned down with the ease of clarity. Their biblical and sociological meaning shifts, shuffles, and points to deeper, broader, more mysterious forces, realities at once spiritual and material, what Walter Wink calls “the inner aspects of external manifestations of power.”

Here’s where nonviolence peacemaking arises: To wage spiritual struggle against such powers of division requires not only the suffering love of Jesus; it also requires a powerful peacemaking stance by the collective body of Jesus, which is historically called the church.

The author uses the word “stand” four times in Ephesians 6:10-18, and it’s both a defensive and offensive position. The writer takes language from Rome’s military lexicon, describing the church in a spiritual formation akin to imperial soldiers. Romans used an aggressive formation called “the wedge”: They gathered legions together in a triangular shape, protected by shields, and used the concentration of soldiers to smash their way into enemy lines. The writer is saying that the vocation of the church is not passive. The church contending against world rulers and spiritual hosts must not sit on the sidelines of global crises, waiting for issues to become less controversial. The church is a community of active resistance to injustice that stands in spiritual combat formation. (My read of Ephesians here inspired by Ched Myers and Elaine Enns, Ambassadors of Reconciliation).

I know many readers have difficulties with the language of warfare. But spiritual combat in the Bible is far different than the Pentagon’s wars. The weapons of spiritual power do not harm bodies or Earth; they advance a loving realm through a belt of truth, a breastplate of justice, shoes of peace, a shield of faith, a helmet of salvation, and above all, by unceasing prayer (Ephesians 6:14-18). Such spiritual power links hands with Ghandi’s satyagraha or truth-force and Martin Luther King’s active nonviolence.

Of course, there’s a cost for such spiritual confrontation. Sometimes spiritual warriors land in jail. King wrote his own letter from behind Birmingham’s bars, and the writer of Ephesians likewise wrote as an ambassador of peace shackled by chains. Today, some of the most courageous voices confronting unjust powers are imprisoned.

To name such powers is to make real the reconciling vocation of Jesus: “For he is our peace, he has made us one, he has broken down the dividing wall of hostility” (Ephesians 2:14).

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Many people in the West have long been turning East to find spiritual meaning and discover what I’ve been calling the holy ordinary. From the Beatles and baby boomers taking up transcendental meditation, to D.T. Suzuki’s influential spreading of Zen in America, to Sri Swami Satchidananda opening the Woodstock music festival, to Hindu ashrams sprouting in rural Pennsylvania and Western Massachusetts where I live, to yoga exploding in popularity so much that it is today offered at your local YMCA, there has been a spiritual revolution underway of Westerners turning for wisdom to the East for over a generation.

I probably wouldn’t be a Christian today were it not for discovering yoga.

I went through a long stretch of being bored with church and Christianity, of not finding any substantive meaning in what I said I believed. This crucible of faith also happened to take place in the middle of my ordination process!

I served as a chaplain intern at a Boston hospital, enjoyed sponsorship for ordination by a Boston church, but when my life encountered crisis, the desire to worship and be with other Christians completely left me. It didn’t feel meaningful. And I felt disconnected from the deep grief I was carrying.

I found one place where I could experience an embodied connection to the Holy Spirit, a place where I could be real about my anger and sadness, and where I felt safe in allowing tears to stream down my face.

That was yoga class.

Photo by Grant McIver on Unsplash

And so, on many Sunday mornings, I didn’t tell anybody where I was going or apologize to the minister. I just skipped church and rolled out my yoga mat on the hardwood floor of Back Bay Yoga studio in downtown Boston.

I did downward dogs and upward dogs and headstands and handstands and wheels and cobras and camel poses.

The irony is that as I created distance from church, I found myself longing to belong more fully to my Christian tradition. I started sitting in silence and reading books about prayer and Christian mysticism. I went to Centering Prayer retreats. I learned how to chant the Psalms like Benedictine monks.

I grew thirstier to know and lead from within the depths of spiritual transformation that had existed all along in my home tradition, but which no one in church had ever told me was there.

Matthew the gospel writer turns East in a Bible passage Christians associate with the holiday called Epiphany. The Epiphany is intended to mean the revelation or “manifestation” of Christ.

Matthew writes about a group of people that I like to think of as the yogis of the day, known as Magi, coming to visit the newly born Jesus (Matthew 2).

They were not Jewish, nor were they Christ-followers. They were astrologers, likely from Persia, known for dabbling in the supernatural. The word “magi” comes from the Greek word magus, from which we get “magic.”

Magi dwelled in king’s courts, but they were not themselves kings. Some would have been philosopher-intellectual types, hanging out at the ancient equivalent of metaphysical bookstores. Some would have maintained esoteric beliefs such as providential revelation through stars. Some would have interpreted royal dreams. Some would have been snake-oil spiritual salesmen hawking cheap tricks.

These are the people who Matthew tells us first witnessed and worshipped the infant Christ.

Matthew contrasts the response to Jesus between these foreign magicians and Herod’s religious-political establishment. Upon hearing of the Messiah’s birth, Matthew says, Herod was troubled (Matthew 2:3), except it wasn’t only Herod quaking at the arrival of a new insurgency from heaven, it was all Jerusalem with him.

So Herod gathered the whole religious and political leadership together: the chief priests, scribes, their families, the intellectual class, to determine where it was that this threat to Herod’s power originated.

The answer is right there in their scriptures and they should have seen this coming:

“For out of you, Bethlehem, will come a leader who will shepherd my people Israel” (Matthew 2:6).

But Herod and his yes men were too fearful that the new king from nowhere would disrupt their fragile, brutal grip on power.

So Herod responded in the way that imperial power often responds to a threat, by fortifying his position, increasing surveillance and covert operations, and when all else fails, by unmitigated violence against the innocent.

Matthew’s choice of Magi visiting Christ first is unsettling.

Magi were demonized, ridiculed, and accused of all sorts of false behaviors. The Roman historian Tacitus called supernatural claims of magi nothing but absurdities, and Roman philosopher Pliny dedicated himself to refuting what he called “the fraudulent lies of the Magi.”¹⁰⁵

We can easily hear echoes of contemporary false accusations that “poor people just want a handout” or “immigrants are stealing our jobs.”

Early Christian interpretation of Matthew’s gospel didn’t treat the Magi any better. Theologian Justin Martyr foreshadowed conservative Christian fear of Eastern spirituality today by claiming this was a conversion story. The Magi, he said, left behind the evils of magic “upon turning to worship Christ.”

Clement of Alexandria heard in Matthew’s story a rejection of astrology, and a simultaneous embrace of the one true and new star of Christ.¹⁰⁶

We can even detect in Matthew’s story a tinge of ancient orientalism, which we would do well to remember in the midst of Western appropriation of Eastern spiritualities today. Matthew depicts a rather one-dimensional portrait of unnamed men from an unnamed location in the East who bear special powers and awareness of God’s plans.

The reality of Magi in Matthew’s day was more complicated than that—just as yoga is more than chanting Hare Om at Woodstock.

Even still, it’s these Gentile “others,” these Eastern strangers—not Herod’s court or the religious insiders—who understand the importance of Christ’s birth.

They’re the ones who take the journey.

They’re the ones who follow the star.

They’re the ones who fall down and worship.

They’re the ones who rejoice.

They’re the ones who bring gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

The Magi represent those who are drawn to Christ but who journey outside traditional religious structures.

American religion has broken as a new spiritual awakening erupts.

Many people within and outside the church find supplemental, often Eastern-inspired, ways of nurturing and deepening their spirituality. People study Buddhism, sit in insight meditation, go to yoga, and practice mindfulness.

Ours is a new spiritual landscape, and I’m convinced we should welcome it all.

Today’s Magi have a lot to teach us. One gift that an inclusive path of everyday mysticism can offer is permission and blessing for spiritual journeying in different directions. A holy, ordinary life in God can include the freedom to draw inspiration from other spiritual streams.

In the yoga pose savasana, also known as “corpse pose,” the practitioner lies completely still for several minutes or longer.

On a given morning, I can be found at 6am, before the kids wake up, my legs stretched out and my arms relaxed at my side. My breath slows, and I allow the ground to support me. I often cover myself with a blanket.

At least for these sacred minutes, I let go of the tension and worry that my body is carrying.

I’m enough.

Christ is closer to me than my breath.

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This post is excerpted from my book The Holy Ordinary.

“Therefore we intend to establish a school for the Lord’s service. In drawing up its regulations, we hope to set down nothing harsh, nothing burdensome. The good of all concerned, however, may prompt us to a little strictness in order to amend faults and to safeguard love.” —Rule of St. Benedict

My nature tends toward strictness. I often need to loosen up, slow down, and cut myself slack. If it were up to my psyche, prayer—and the spiritual life in general—would likely be reduced to strict discipline, combined with inevitable self-flagellation and shame when I don’t measure up. That’s why I value sixth-century St. Benedict of Nursia’s approach to the contemplative life—whose feast day took place yesterday, July 11. Benedict prioritizes balance in community according to individual need.

Balance has long been a core tenet of Benedictine spirituality. The rhythm of days for Benedictine monks is carefully orchestrated with time for praying Psalms, work, and meditative reading of Scripture and spiritual books. Work and prayer, or “Ora et Labora,” goes the motto. Benedict knew that a life of prayer needed also to involve embodied work on behalf of the community. Contemplation is not about me but how I serve as part of a whole. Former Benedictine Luigi Giola monk and theologian puts it this way:

Benedictine wisdom, summarized as “ora et labora” (“prayer and work”), manifests itself not only in the ordering of common prayer but also in that of food, sleep, manual work, and clothing.” (13, Saint Benedict’s Wisdom).

Benedictine balance is refreshingly earthy and attentive to the mundane details of life. In the instructions for the “cellarer” or monk responsible for meals, supplies, and so forth, Benedict urges the person to “regard all utensils and goods of the monastery as sacred vessels of the altar.” The ordinary is holy, from crusty, used pots to fresh kale.

The emphasis on balance in Benedictine spirituality is needed because our lives are so often profoundly out of balance. Whether it is our overwork, incessant activity, a relentless schedule, or simply checking our phones all the time, our feverish pace and fractured attention ensure that we remain unmoored. These days of democratic disdain and authoritarian aggression in the United States have me often tempted to stay informed about every new political development, reading as much commentary as I can muster. How often have I said “just a minute” to my children when skimming yet another article on my phone?

Photo by Jon Flobrant on Unsplash

To find Benedictine-inspired balance is to interrupt our obsessions. When the prayer bell rings in the monastery, you drop whatever project you are working on and go to eat lunch, or head to the chapel to chant Psalms. The prayer bell equivalent to my days is the unanticipated needs that throw my plans askew: the two-hour snow delay, the stomach bug that hits, the boiler that needs maintenance, the trip to school to drop off the forgotten instrument. These are sacred invitations to a more balanced life, if I will receive them. Theologian Ronald Rolheiser put it this way: “A parent hears the monastic bell many times during the day and has to drop things in mid-sentence and respond, not because they want to, but because it’s time for that activity and time isn’t one’s own, but God’s.”

Benedictine spirituality encourages “a little strictness” to keep ourselves accountable to the spiritual quest. I practice a “Rule of Life” adapted for contemporary folks outside the monastery through a community called the “Community of the Incarnation.” We commit together daily to take time for contemplative prayer, to pray the Psalms, to dedicate days of solitude, to engage in an ongoing transformation of life through the twelve steps, and more. When people ask me about the Rule of Life, and I share several of the commitments, they’ll say, “That’s a lot!” And it is a lot. A contemplative faithfulness to divine depths amid the complexities and chaos of parenting, relationships, and work makes a little strictness necessary. I’m convinced that many of us need some strictness in our lives, because our days are utterly full. If I don’t commit to spending time with God, I won’t do it—even if I sincerely wish I would. The strictness ensures I am not swept away by the tsunami of busyness, pressing demands, and nagging worries.

At the same time, Benedict hopes to set down “nothing harsh, nothing burdensome.” To balance many commitments, responsibilities, and relationships, I often need to moderate my strictness. If strictness becomes harsh, then more gentleness is required. Perhaps my practice of a Rule of Life compels me to rise early and meditate before the kids wake up. Or perhaps my morning will unfold differently, and I’ll take an opportunity to make waffles for the kids, and skip my morning Psalms. Perfection is not the purpose of contemplative prayer—intention is. The intention to hold balance means somehow to appreciate the more jagged edge of strictness, simultaneously made smooth by “nothing harsh,” with the ultimate purpose of safeguarding love.

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There’s a story in the book of Second Samuel in which the king—David—completely lets loose dancing in worship: “And David danced before the Lord with all his might” (2 Samuel 6:14).

David dances with fervor and freedom. This is one of my favorite passages of the Bible because it shows a male authority figure free in his body, dancing with unadulterated ecstasy. The vulnerability of David moving freely—leaping and dancing—is enough to make some blush, and enough to fill others with resentment.

In the passage, David is a political leader who leads the people and the armies as a unified nation. Like many other ancient kings, he also functions as ritual leader or priest: He offers sacrifices to God, he wears a linen ephod, which was basically a very revealing loincloth worn by priests, and he guides the people in movement: a response to God’s presence among the people. In this passage, there are songs, lyres, harps, tambourines, castanets, and cymbals. All of ancient Israel, led by an almost-nude King David, is dancing before the Lord with all their might. There are sweat, tears, instruments, and people falling over in the dirt, hands upraised.

This is not your typical Sunday morning church service—or at least not mine.

Ecstatic movement is seen in various instances throughout the Hebrew Bible. David’s dance echoes a story of former King Saul, when Saul still hung out with the wild-eyed prophet Samuel. It says in 1 Samuel 19:24: “As Saul was going, he fell into a prophetic frenzy, until he came to Naoith in Ramah. He too stripped off his clothes, and he too fell into a frenzy before Samuel.”

Saul, like David, experienced this ancient Yaweh trance dance.

Photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash

And in Exodus 15:20, directly after Israel is liberated from their oppressors in Egypt, we find this beautiful passage: “Then the prophet Miriam, Aaron’s sister, took a tambourine in her hand; and all the women went out after her with tambourines, and with dancing. And Miriam sang to them: “Sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously; horse and rider he has thrown into the sea.”

Dance is clearly a major part of ancient Israelite worship, just as it is for almost all tribal-based cultures and religions. And yet, except for Pentecostalism, it’s been lost in Christian churches as a valid form of worship. Of course, the sacredness of dance will not be eclipsed in culture, even though we don’t typically think of dance events like raves as a chance for transcendent praise (but they are).

Why is this?

We are too captivated by our towers of rational thought instead of giving praise with the rest of our bodies.

Do we have the courage to forsake our rational mind—or really, just balance it out with the rest of our body—to experience God?

And finally, David, further acts out the ritual role of priest by feeding the people. He offers the sacrifices to God, and then hosts a vast, collective meal. In 2 Samuel, 6:18-19, the people dance their hearts out, and then they eat:

When David had finished offering the burnt offerings and the offerings of well-being, he blessed the people in the name of the Lord of hosts, and distributed food among all the people, the whole multitude of Israel, both men and women, to each a cake of bread, a portion of meat, and a cake of raisins.

That sounds like a lot of people, and a good meal, too!

It seems that on many occasions when people experience God in the Bible, they end up eating together. This is, on one level, a profound and simple Eucharistic theology primer. When God shows up, share a meal. It prefigures Jesus feeding multitudes in his ministry, and the ritualized Eucharist that Christians practice today. In many ways, the Eucharist is simply God’s potluck, but God cooks the largest and best dishes all the time. All are invited. God is the ritual host, and we—like the multitudes of ancient Israel—just show up, party, and receive.

Have a great week, everyone.

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First, darkness. No time, and no space. Only emptiness, the formless void as imagined by the Genesis poet.

Then, 13.7 billion years ago, the big bang—an explosion of inconceivable density; matter and energy hurling galaxies, forming quarks and protons and electrons and worlds. (Big History, 4).

Then, 380,000 years after the Big Bang, huge clouds of hydrogen and helium forming stable atoms.

Then, density increasing, clouds compacting, the center temperature rising, protons fusing.

Then, the cosmic furnace known as a supernova and the ensuing resurrection through elements, particles, snowflakes, planets, and rocks.

Then, 4.5 billion years ago in the Milky Way galaxy, another supernova and a new star that we call the sun, on a planet that we call the Earth, there was lava and combustion and molecules and living organisms and DNA.

And there were single-celled creatures and multiple-celled creatures and plants and amphibians and reptiles and, for a time, dinosaurs, and then mammals and early primates and hominids and Neanderthal Man and homo sapies and you and me. (Big History, 11)

All because of stars.

David Christian calls his cosmic whirlwind tour Big History, but the Bible teaches Big History, too.

Psalmist singers and prophets like Isaiah and poets like the Genesis writer all couch their stories in the larger story of creation. Yet this Biblical Big History has nothing to do with seven-day creationists or “intelligent design.” We do not need to deny the Big Bang or our ancestral primates to join the biblical affirmation of God as Creator and animator of life. It’s possible, in spite of today’s materialist rejection of faith on the one hand, and literalist rejection of science on the other, to believe that matter and spirit are not separate.

The universe’s evolutionary story and the Bible’s creation and liberation story need not be at odds with one another. They are not rivals; they’re parallel perspectives of one unfolding reality.

Photo by Casey Horner on Unsplash

There are three different voices in the Hebrew prophet Isaiah’s book, and they each write from the formative groundlessness of the Babylonian exile. Nebuchadnezzar’s siege on Jerusalem started in 597 BCE. Israelite King Zedekiah attempted rebellion and sought strategic alliance with Egypt. Nebuchadnezzar, as you might imagine, was less than impressed. His armies responded with yet another siege, one that pounded on Jerusalem’s gates for two straight years until the city fell. In “Second Isaiah” or “Deutero-Isaiah”—that collection of chapters from chapter 40–55 that are dated to the sixth century—poetry and proclamation erupt like a spiritual supernova from the heart of ancient Israel’s experience in exile.

Here’s why the Big History of our cosmos holds up alongside Second Isaiah’s exilic testimony: for Isaiah and his editors, God’s creation of the world and God’s liberation of the oppressed are a part of the same story.

Chapter 42 is the first so-called “Servant Song.” It’s named such because Isaiah puts verse to God’s voice and says, “Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights” (42:1). Later Christians read this passage and surmised that Isaiah’s servant must have been a prefiguration of Jesus, yet it’s far more likely that he has Moses in mind.

The prophet transports the hearer’s heart back to heaven and earth’s origins. He tells the evolution story of ancient Israel, which begins with creation and culminates in a second exodus-freedom movement.

It goes like this: first, God created the heavens and stretched them out. God spread out the earth.

Then, remembering the story of spiritual ancestors, God breathed life into Adam’s nostrils, the first human being (gender-neutral in Hebrew at that point).

Then, that very same Creator God took a particular family and people by the hand, and gave them the gift of Torah, teaching, and Wisdom.

Then, when Pharaoh enslaved and oppressed them, God brought the prisoners out from darkness. God saved and redeemed ancient Israel, planting a revolutionary memory at the heart of early Judaism.

When the prophet Isaiah sees his own people imprisoned and displaced by the Babylonians, he activates the radical story of God unfurling creation and freedom yet again.

Here’s Isaiah 42:9: “See, the former things have come to pass, and new things I now declare.” A new exodus. A new freedom. New possibilities. New worlds. New creation.

Isaiah is no modern cosmologist, of course. His collection of writings predates Charles Darwin by roughly 2,500 years. Ancient Israelites affirmed not an evolutionary world, but a “three-tiered concept” of reality fixed in place by God. They believed the universe stacked hierarchically upon itself with heavens above, the underworld below, and earth sandwiched in between.

Isaiah asks, “Who created the heavens, who stretched them out?” (Isaiah 42:5). Faithful Israelites in those days had no Hubble telescope, but they gazed up at the sky, observed that it resembled a big blue dome, and inferred that God must have stretched out the heavens as a tent over the earth.

They had no knowledge of cosmic microwave background radiation, no Big Bang theory to make sense of it all. They had their story. They had their trust in God’s generative power, a trust that believed God issued forth worlds through speech itself: God spoke and it was. Most of all, they had praise: the jaw-dropping beauty of stars and mountains and sunsets was, and still is, enough to elicit ecstasy.

Lift up your eyes on high, and see: who created these stars? (Isaiah 40:26). God brought out their host, and numbered them, and called them by name, and called each of us by name.

The very Bigness of Big history can sometimes stir doubts about God’s naming of us; the sweep of evolution makes us feel, rightly, small, even insignificant.

Carl Sagan enlightened popular culture a generation ago with his “cosmic calendar.” He mapped out the universe’s evolutionary story as if it were unfolding through a year’s time. From January to February, the Big Bang blasted. In May, the Milky Way formed. In September, the solar system fit together. In October, photosynthesis converted the first light energy into chemical energy. In November, eukaryotic cells emerged. At the end of December, the dinosaurs stomped the earth. On December 31^st, at one second before midnight, Sagan’s calendar says Columbus “discovered” America (my scare quotes).

We are so small in cosmic history’s scope that Sagan says our entire history only occupies the last few seconds of the last minute of the cosmic calendar’s last day.

If spirit and matter are one, then there is no place where God is not, where God has not been. God was present, emerging and evolving at the Big Bang and God is present, emerging and evolving through us. Every ripple in the universe’s expanding fountain is flowing, not with an absence of meaning, but with a surplus of meaning.

In the words of St. Bonaventure: “God is the circle whose center is everywhere, and whose circumference is nowhere.” Or, in the words of Isaiah, the Creator of the ends of the earth is the same Creator who gives power to the faint and strength to the powerless (Isaiah 40:29). Those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles. (Isaiah 40:31). Billions of years separate us from the brilliant shimmer of the first star, and yet we are a part of the same star story.

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Coming in the future: slowly, as I’m able, I’ll be embarking on a new quest in this Substack and organizing the content in different sections. I anticipate four sections, all under my Substack site, and subscribers will be able sign up for one, multiple, or all: The Holy Ordinary, where I’ll continue writing on mysticism, contemplation, and everyday life; a new column called Flesh and Spirit, where I’ll write about desire, sexuality, the Bible (maybe a Song of Songs series?), along with reflections on purity culture; Revelations, where I’ll continue writing about apocalypse, spirituality, the book of Revelation, and politics; and Creativity and Culture, where I’ll organize my occasional writings about movies, art, and spirituality. Note: the Flesh and Spirit writings will be behind a paywall for paid subscribers only—because the only way I can justify trying out somewhat provocative and exploratory is within the trust and boundaries of a smaller community.

I will take my time rolling this out. In the meantime, I’m deeply curious about your thoughts and what topics would most resonate with you?

As always, thank you for reading!

What does it all mean?

It’s easy enough to decipher what John intends when using the disturbing image of the whore of Babylon. It’s a blistering economic critique of the Roman imperial system (see further below).

But images such as these are kindling for fire-ready Bible readers. And of course, cult leaders and overly enthusiastic end-times interpreters have long applied their “secret” readings to decode the text and misuse Revelation to serve narcissistic ends. David Koresh of catastrophic Waco-showdown, Branch Davidian fame, thought he was the Lamb referred to in Revelation 5, able to unseal and interpret letters from God. (The Lamb is clearly intended as a Christ image). More recently, during the COVID-19 pandemic, as misinformation spewed from every corner of the internet, various Christians remained convinced that the end times were upon us and that receiving a vaccine was the mark of the beast.

The abuse of this wild biblical book renders its interpretation that much more important, but also that much more avoidable. Who wants to go there? But after six years or so, I’m still convinced that apocalyptic as a genre serves as a tool to unveil injustice and illusion in favor of love and radical hope, and that Revelation’s meaning is both more accessible and more elusive than we collectively give it credit for. It is a genre text combining metaphorical images and tropes from the Hebrew Bible and New Testament. When we know the Bible, and when we’re not afraid to study history, we learn things like:

• The infamous “number of the beast”—666—probably refers to the Roman emperor Nero. (In scholar Craig Koester’s magisterial Revelation commentary, he breaks down textual variants and interpretive possibilities, explaining that in both Greek and Hebrew, letters also corresponded to numbers that spell Nero Caesar)

• Babylon the Great in Revelation 17 is definitively a symbolic allusion to the Roman Empire. (Many examples, but see here.)

• There are estimated between 400-800 Hebrew Bible references in Revelation, which hearers would have readily recognized:

  • John’s visionary visit to the divine throne room in Revelation 4 echoes the prophet Ezekiel’s visit (Ezekiel 1), with creatures resembling a lion, ox, eagle, and human, and more.

  • The angel’s offer to “Take and eat” a scroll in Revelation 10 is a direct re-enactment of Ezekiel eating a scroll in Ezekiel 3.

  • The reader of Revelation encounters disturbing plagues initiated by trumpet blasts and bowls of wrath, an allusion to the plagues God rains on the Egyptian empire in Exodus (turning water to blood, creating a breakout of painful sores on people, and destructive locusts).

Revelation 17–18 is a devastating takedown of Rome’s unjust economic system. In Revelation 18:9–19, we see an economic crash that calls to mind Wall Street in 1929: “The merchants of the earth will weep and mourn over her because no one buys their cargoes anymore—cargoes of gold, silver, precious stones and pearls, fine linen, purple, silk,” and so on. The people who work on trading ships will watch their livelihood disappear: “Every sea captain, and all who travel by ship, the sailors, and all who earn their living from the sea… will throw dust on their heads, and with weeping and mourning cry out.”

But the radicalism of its economic message does not help the misogyny of the whore of Babylon image go down smoothly. There’s just no justification or interpreting around the brutalized sexual violence in the Bible. See this post:

And so I’m back to my initial question: What does it all mean?

The more I pull at the “whore of Babylon” thread, the bigger and more complex the implications seem to be, revealing Christianity’s problem with bodies and sexuality in general. Because there is another woman in the book of Revelation. Actually, several other women. There is the bride of the Lamb, also represented as a city—the New Jerusalem—and who is shown immediately after the devastation of the whore of Babylon: “The marriage of the Lamb has come, and his bride has made herself ready; to her it has been granted to be clothed with fine linen, bright and pure.” (Revelation 19:7–8)

In chapter 21, John sees a full vision of the heavenly city arriving as part of a renewed vision of heaven and earth—and the city arrives as a bride that specifically counters the whore: “I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. (Revelation 21:2).

The whore is contrasted by the bride—and I’ll have to do a successive piece on the bride, because it is the culmination of the whole book of Revelation. But there is another woman in Revelation 12: the woman clothed with the sun (see this post below). She is a cosmic, pregnant woman wearing a crown of stars, and with the moon under her feet—and a clear allusion to the virgin Mary writ universal and divine.

The book of Revelation, and the Bible in so many places, is pervaded by a bride-virgin vs. whore dichotomy. In the Gospels, Mary Magdalene is the whore to Mary’s virginity. Nowhere in the text does it state that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute, but tradition in the form of a sixth-century sermon by Pope Gregory the Great read Luke’s Gospel as inferring that Mary Magdalene had engaged in “forbidden acts.” (See my review of Mary Magdalene the movie here, where I take up this issue).

Raphael, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

What if the dichotomy between whore and bride/virgin is itself the problem? Christians denied Mary, Jesus’s mother, her sexuality, because divinity surely couldn’t be birthed if sex was involved! By idealizing Mary, Jesus’s mother, as the Virgin, Christians projected transgressive (because healthy desire was sublimated at best, or shamed and rejected at worst) sexual desire onto Mary Magdalene, turning her into a whore. The book of Revelation continues the trope, but in a more violent, colorful, and politically savvy way.

To state the obvious, Christianity has a sexuality problem. It is a religion whose message is of spirit and flesh joining, of incarnation, and yet it has for most of its history affirmed virgins while demonizing whores. And that leaves those of us who seek to join spirit and flesh—including sexuality—with a problem. How can we seek to join our sexuality to sacredness when our religion has not done so—and even worse, when our religion has been used to control, shame, and abuse the holy gift of sexuality and desire in general?

This question seems to me to be a regrettably unavoidable question that is at the heart of an integrated Christian faith. And dialoguing with this question seems to be something that I am compelled to do. Not because I want to—I really wish that I had some other, any other, topic arising in me—but because I can’t stop thinking about it. Because it’s not just a matter of biblical interpretation, but also of personal experience, and the impacts of evangelical purity culture on me have been real. Because I’ve never written about it, and I have that excited-but-dread-filled butterfly feeling inside that I have to write about it. Also, I’m turning forty-six this July, and I’m finally relatively free from worrying about what people think of me—the quest for God, authenticity, and the desire to be helpful matter most.

Photo by Martino Pietropoli on Unsplash

So, slowly, as I’m able, I’m going to embark on a new quest in this Substack. It will come with a slight rebranding, because readers of The Holy Ordinary might not have signed up for meditations on contemplation that also incorporate desire and the end of the world. I anticipate four sections, all under my Substack site, and subscribers can sign up for one, multiple, or all: The Holy Ordinary, where I’ll continue writing on mysticism, contemplation, and everyday life; Flesh and Spirit, where I’ll write about desire, sexuality, the Bible (maybe a Song of Songs series?), along with reflections on purity culture; Revelations, where I’ll continue writing about apocalypse, the book of Revelation, and politics; and Creativity and Culture, where I’ll organize my occasional writings about movies, art, and spirituality. Note: the Flesh and Spirit writings will be behind a paywall for paid subscribers only—because the only way I can justify trying out somewhat provocative, exploratory, and sensitive material is within the trust and boundaries of a smaller community.

I will take my time rolling this out. In the meantime, I’m deeply curious about your thoughts and what topics would most resonate with you?

As always, thank you for reading!

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My undergraduate alma mater is a small, evangelical Christian liberal arts college tucked away on the North Shore of Boston. I loved my time there and made some of the best friends of my life, and yet it was there that I struck upon further fear of bodies, my own and others. Each student signed a “Life and Conduct Statement” committing to refrain from sexual activity before marriage. It’s a pretty standard, if unrealistic, evangelical college practice. But the statement singled out LGBTQ+ people, requiring such students to sign and pledge that they will not participate in “homosexual practice.” Those who are afraid of LGBTQ+ bodies perpetuate fear upon those very bodies. It must be disorienting and terrifying to be queer in an institution that says you are divinely disordered.

My denomination today, the United Church of Christ, ordained its first gay minister in 1972, long before most other denominations had identified LGBTQ+ equality as an issue over which to battle. And yet, as seemingly affirming of bodies as my mainline church, and friends and colleagues appear to be, I have a nagging feeling that we are usually terrified of bodies, too. We mostly ignore sexuality as a topic to be discussed, relegating it to a de facto realm outside of faith. But this is to leave one of the most critical aspects of our lives separate from our spirituality. God and sexuality are inextricably linked—whether we are comfortable with it or not. Many of us are starving for a spirituality of the body that is more than “Don’t do that.”

Christians across the ideological spectrum are afraid of bodies. Christian fear of embodiment, and specifically sexuality, goes right back to the earliest Christians themselves. They picked up a strand of Plato’s philosophy that said our access to the spiritual truths of the soul is contaminated by the body. The way to God, they said, is away from the body, towards heaven “up there,” not through the body and towards heaven “right here.”

Early theologians revealed a profound ambivalence about bodies. Origen of Alexandria is one of the most forward-thinking intellectuals of the early church, teaching a breathtaking and universal scope to God’s love. But even he was plagued by Plato’s dualism and hatred for the body. Origen thought that dwelling in bodies was like military bootcamp for the soul. Eventually, with diligence and discipline, the soul could leave the body far behind, but only after having struggled against the mighty floodwaters of sexual temptation. Mystics could take the higher roads of celibacy and prayer and taste union with God, but those lesser spiritual beings who succumbed to marriage and child-rearing would have to wait until the afterlife to experience God’s full delights.

The apostle Paul is also a favored writer for those who prioritize spiritual flights of fancy over embodied reality. “Live by the Spirit,” Paul says, “do not gratify the desires of the flesh” (Galatians 5:16). On first glance, Paul’s binary categories of flesh and Spirit seem to fit right into a dualistic Platonic glove, locked in their all-too-familiar wrestling match. But the Jewish renegade Paul is up to more than simple denigration of bodies, and it all hinges around what he means by the term “flesh.” “Flesh” or the Greek sarx in Paul’s writings is not the same as body. They’re two different words. Flesh is sarx; body is soma. Paul speaks very highly of soma-body in other places, arguing for a resurrection from the dead that is not physically disembodied (1 Corinthians 15). Somehow, Paul believes, that when God restores creation through resurrection it will be the healing restoration of material reality, bodies, injustice, and the whole universe. Paul opposes the flesh to the Spirit, but Paul does not oppose the body to the spirit. Flesh or sarx in the letter to the Galatians means the desires we have that are opposed to God.

In all of us there is an existential struggle between spirit and flesh, a struggle between desire for God and desire for reality apart from God. Some of our desires lead to spiritual fruits such as love, joy, peace, patience, and kindness (Galatians 5:22–23). Some lead to destructive ways of living: jealousy, quarrels, factions, envy, anger (Galatians 5:19–21). Sarx is life alienated from God. Walter Wink describes sarx in Paul as “the self externalized and subjugated to the opinions of others.” When we are too nice and try to make everyone like us, or when we posture in public a different self than the one in private, or when we take our cues about what to think from the latest social media influencer, when we lock our suffering inside and pretend that everything is ok when it’s not, we are living life according to the flesh.

Sarx is not the body, it is the part of ourselves that is not free. One way for Christians to overcome their fear of the body is to reread Scripture and rediscover the Jewish, this-worldly, life-affirming heartbeat of the Bible. But we also need to engage in practices of prayer that honor rather than devalue or ignore our bodies. Protestants like myself are far too heady, which itself is a way of dishonoring the body. The poet Edwin Muir wrote about Scottish Presbyterians that “the word made flesh here is made word again,” and that pretty much sums up most Protestant worship services since the Reformation. And for those Christians who are unafraid to dance, raise their hands and pray for the sick, all too often they still combine their swaying songs with an anti-body theology.

One practice I’ve been doing lately that is shamelessly earnest and organically vulnerable is to hug trees. Yes, I’m a tree hugger. And I don’t hug the tree for five seconds, I do it for three to five minutes. The tree’s bark sometimes feels prickly and awkward. Occasionally, I feel bug legs crawling on my arms. It often takes me a minute to overcome my initial self-consciousness. But when I’ve done this in my backyard or on a hike with my dog, I linger with the tree, the tree lingers with me, and I eventually feel my body connected to the ground, to the tree, and to life.

Photo by Trent Haaland on Unsplash

Buddhists and yogis have much to teach Christians about the positive value of the body—as well as its inevitable impermanence. Buddhist-inspired mindfulness practices teach us to draw our attention to this moment, this breath, and this bodily sensation right now. I became a dedicated yoga practitioner because breathing and moving together intuitively felt like praying in my body. I didn’t have the language or theology to articulate it at the time, but my body knew what I was doing was sacred. Christians have work to do in order to knit prayer lives back together with bodies. Regardless of what form it takes, whether weeding the garden, walking mindfully, practicing yoga, or having conscious sex, praying through our bodies reminds us that Spirit reveals itself through our bodies and not in spite of them. And really, how else could we pray other than through and with our bodies? Embodied prayer is an invitation to a transformed, Spirit-soaked rhythm of life.

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This is an adapted excerpt from my book The Holy Ordinary. You can purchase it at all the places (with special recommendations for local libraries, Bookshop, and Hearts and Minds Bookstore.

In each of us, there is a dwelling place. A place where God dwells. I suspect that most of us have visited this dwelling place, at least on occasion. We may know the feeling of easeful rest when walking in the forest. We may know the crisp clarity of the air when we rise before the sun. We might have experienced or witnessed the indignity of injustice, and affirmed the image of God in our neighbor and in ourselves. We might have experienced a tremendous loss and had waves of overpowering grief crash over us. And when we thought we couldn’t go on, we somehow did. These moments of our lives are doorways into the dwelling places where God lives—and they are endless.

But most of us operate on the surface of life. I’m not trying to be unkind, I’m trying to be truthful. To live at a depth dimension of life, to remain in the dwelling places of God for a sustained time, takes profound grace along with dedicated practice. And busyness and frenetic activity—however productive and good—has taken over so many of our lives. We may take pride in our volunteer activities, or our activism. We may find powerful purpose in our jobs and our hobbies. These commitments can help increase our passion for life and our contribution to the common good.

But even as positive as our busyness can be, it is still possible to be active in all the right things and miss the meaning, miss being present to ourselves, and miss the divine presence that is always here. To be honest, that’s a key reason I transitioned from being a pastoral minister to a religious, contemplative editor: church busyness kept my wheels spinning while my life and my kid’s lives passed before my eyes! There is an endless depth to which we are called in this life, and in the life to come—and this life is too precious to miss it.

Jesus, in John’s Gospel, is all about depth and life. In an extended set of chapters from John 13-17 known as Jesus’s “farewell discourse,” Jesus is preparing for the fate he knows is coming and he is saying goodbye. He has taken basin and towel and washed the disciples’ dusty feet, including Judas, his betrayer. He has distilled his teaching—labyrinthine and complex in John’s Gospel as it is—to its heart: “Just as I have loved you, you should love each other.” He has witnessed Peter’s ego-filled proclamations of faith and loyal machismo—“I will lay down my life for you, Lord!”—even while predicting Peter’s denial. In chapter 14, Jesus is encouraging his followers: “Do not let your hearts be troubled. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places.”

This word for dwelling places, in Greek moné, is sometimes translated as rooms or mansions, but Jesus is decidedly not referring to a five-star, golden-gated, heavenly hotel. Instead, he’s saying that there is endless depth in the realm of God: “In my Father’s house are many dimensions of reality.”

Photo by Maksim Shutov on Unsplash

He’s also not projecting the suites with the best linens and flat-screens into the future; he’s saying these rooms are rooms that we can enter now as well as later! Jesus is inviting his followers into eternal life, but Christians turned eternal life into something that starts after death instead of a divine presence with which we abide in life and death. John famously has Jesus say that “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” But many Christians thought he was only talking about life later instead of life today.

The deeper meaning of “eternal life” in John’s Gospel really is about experiencing the life of heaven in this world, and also in whatever life that is still to come. Jesus’s message is not an evacuation plan for the next world, as author Brian McLaren has memorably said. It is the realm of God’s love, justice, and peace overlapping with our own realms, our own lives, and our willing participation with this overlapping reality. In chapter 15, Jesus will talk about this divine presence as something we abide with. He’ll use the metaphor of a vine and branches to describe the interconnection of intimate divine-human relationship. “Abide with me, as I abide with you.” We abide with Jesus by entering the place where he—where divine love—dwells.

A famous sixteenth-century Spanish mystic named Teresa of Avila also taught about divine dwelling places. Taking this symbol from John’s Gospel, she wrote a book about the mansions or dwellings we explore in our interior world on the way to deeper intimacy with God. Sixteenth-century Spain was not exactly a safe space to explore unfettered, experiential passion for God. The Spanish Inquisition functioned as the religious police state, compelling Muslim and Jewish people to convert to Christianity or face expulsion, and then the Inquisition investigated people who converted to determine the supposed authenticity of their conversion. Teresa’s grandfather was a converso, a Jewish man who converted to Christianity and hid his identity to remain in Spain.

In this context of religious authoritarianism, Teresa dared follow the Spirit’s aliveness that welled up within her. She called our souls an interior castle, at the center of which we find ourselves immersed and united with the presence of God, with Love. “In this castle,” she wrote, “are a multitude of dwelling places, just as in heaven there are many mansions.”

At twenty-one years old, she joined a Carmelite convent in Avila, Spain. She experienced several severe health crises in her twenties, and at one point was even pronounced dead! During her health struggles and recovery, she turned more intentionally and more intensely to the life of prayer. She read popular spiritual books of the time, she ruminated in prayer with Scripture passages, and she began to taste some of the more dramatic aspects of the Spirit that progressive Christians mostly avoid mentioning, things such as visions and various enraptured states. She called this her “second conversion,” and this deepening in the presence of God led her to spearhead a reform of Carmelite convents and to start a new branch of the Carmelites. She traveled tirelessly across Spain and founded thirteen new communities.

Her reforming zeal unsurprisingly met fierce opposition. At one point, a section of the Carmelite order placed her under forced retirement—basically house arrest—in one of her monasteries, and she wrote her book The Interior Castle under such oppressive conditions. She experienced her life’s work being blocked by church dogmatism and institutional regression, and yet instead of writing bitter op-eds or pamphlets attacking her opponents as the Antichrist, she wrote about accessing deeper dwelling places in God in one of the most classic mystical texts ever written.

In this book, she writes there are seven dwelling places in the soul, the seventh of which is the soul’s union with Love. But one doesn’t just waltz into these dwelling places. They are more like speakeasies of the soul, necessitating preparation and a bit of advance knowledge to proceed. Entering these castle rooms requires moving beyond the distractions and delusions that hinder us. Continuing the medieval castle image, Teresa called these distractions and delusions reptiles. In the first dwelling place, she writes, there are “nasty creatures, like serpents and vipers and poisonous reptiles, [who] creep into the soul and do not let her perceive her radiance.” We could call them cell phones or social media.

And I want to linger on her insight about the soul’s radiance for a moment. Many Christians have so emphasized humanity’s sinful nature that the soul lost its radiance. The soul became soot. But Christians desperately need to correct this negative anthropology to nurture life-affirming people able to recognize the divine image and presence within each other and in reality. The soul is not soot, stained, or sinful at its core—it is radiant! Perhaps our inability to perceive its radiance is the real sin.

We give ourselves a gift, and we receive God’s gift, when we begin paying attention to our inner lives. When we pray, we enter a divine dwelling place that is always there for us and that sustains us amid our activities, our activism, and our commitments. It is one of the great respites that God gives us in this life—a divine place to dwell.

But there’s another verse in this passage of John’s Gospel that has been notoriously used to exclude those who can enter the dwelling place. It goes like this: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life, and no one comes to the Father except through me.” To quote Brian McLaren again, we treated this verse like it was saying the opposite of Jesus’s message:

I am in the way of your getting to truth and to life. I will keep everyone from getting to the Father—which is just another way of talking about the Source of Life—unless they get by me first… You should be very troubled, because if you believe in God, but not me, you will be shut out of my Father’s house heaven, where there are a few small rooms for the select few who hold correct beliefs and doctrines. (See this very helpful E-book)

The Greek word way is hodos, which means “a way, or a road, or a means of access” (John Sanford). Jesus offers a way, not an exclusive way—there are plenty of others—to the dwelling place of divine life and love. The Father is not a scary, severe, Puritan preacher, but the fruitful and fecund Source of Life and Being itself, the dwelling place of dwelling places. Our willingness to follow this way into an interior castle is the way of depth, the way of heightened creativity, the way of inner peace, and the way of enduring joy. It’s not a rejection of action but an integration of contemplation with action. This divine dwelling is available to us. Let’s visit it.

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I’m preaching this as a sermon to Northampton area churches today.

Adam is a cofounder of Community of the Incarnation, the new monastic community to which Mark belongs. Originally recorded as a public event hosted by the Center for Spiritual Imagination, their conversation explores spirituality, ordinary life, friendship, community, and practices that help sustain a more contemplative and compassionate way of being in the world.

Jews from all over the ancient world gathered that day in Jerusalem to celebrate the Feast of Weeks. On the fiftieth day after Passover, pilgrims streamed into the holy city for the annual harvest festival. As Gospel writer Luke tells the story, seekers surged from cities like Mesopotamia and Cappadocia, from islands like Crete, from the deserts of Arabia, from Rome itself, from—as Luke puts it—“every nation living under heaven.” The tongues of fire spread like brush aflame, sweeping the city and provoking a miraculous ability to speak in different languages. The centripetal force of the Roman Empire favored one language, Greek—and yet on this day, people from diverse lands heard home languages spoken not by the imperial elite, but by uneducated Galilean peasants like Peter.

Some were terrified.

Some were outraged.

Some blamed it on wine.

Some were inspired.

The impact and chaos of this dramatic occasion prompted the failed and forgiven disciple Peter to shout a sermon with fiery tongue, stirred with a twist of brimstone. Luke writes that Peter quoted the prophet Joel that day:

In the last days it shall be, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh. Your sons and daughters shall prophesy. Your young men shall see visions, your old men shall dream dreams. And I will show portents in the heavens above and signs on the earth below, blood, and fire, and smoky mist. (Acts 2:17-20)

Luke’s story boasts that Peter’s words torched three thousand hearts that day. The disciples enacted a mass baptism on the spot as a way of signaling in ritual form the Spirit’s transformation through tongues, as of fire.

Spirit and fire have a long history together.

In the Bible, God is perpetually revealing angels or the divine mystery itself through fire’s unforgettable burn.

Moses stood at the foot of Mt Horeb and encountered an angel who appeared to him in a burning bush.

God issued the Israelites’ Ten Commandments through a fiery billow: Before God spoke the words of Torah, God’s presence descended upon Mount Sinai in fire, and smoke filled the sky—as if from an industrial smokestack, but without the negative ecological implications.

In the book of Leviticus, after the priest Aaron’s ordination day, God’s fire from heaven burned up and consumed the animal offering.

Fire features in ancient mystical visions like that of Ezekiel or Daniel’s divine chariot.

Towards the end of the Bible, the ancient fantasy book Revelation pictures the Son of God, Jesus, with eyes flickering like a flame of fire (Rev. 1:18).

And in Luke’s Gospel, John the Baptist tells of Jesus’ s coming ministry with this ominous phrase: “He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire” (Luke 3:16).

Fire has dangerous edges.

It’s hot.

It burns.

It scars.

It kills.

Photo by Nadiia Ploshchenko 🇺🇦 on Unsplash

Street corner preachers often corner fire’s market by wearing sandwich boards declaring the end is near. Their boards carry flames or nuclear clouds, cheap paint displayed on plastic.

Yet I’m convinced we have to admit that fundamentalist fire finds its originating spark not only in misguided hearts and minds, but also in our texts and traditions. Revelation speaks of fire raining down from heaven, but even beloved prophets like Isaiah imagine God’s fury boiling over with fire (Isaiah 66:15-16). The fire of judgment, anger, retributive justice, and violence burns through Scripture and tradition.

Perhaps that’s a way of signaling that when it comes to fire and sacred text, we humans are careless?

In the book of Acts, the Spirit is the catalyst, like fire, for spreading and propelling a movement. The Spirit primarily reveals Her personality and heart in Luke’s tale not through judgment, but through mission. After an entire Gospel of Peter’s impulsive, foot-in-mouth moments, culminating in his denial of Jesus not once, but three times, we witness Peter finally find the converging mission of his life. And even if Luke is rounding up the numbers of converts in this passage like a televangelist, Peter’s passionate Pentecost speech must have been something to remember.

The trajectory of the book of Acts tells a story about the Spirit’s explosive appearance at Pentecost and the outward movement of love and inclusion that follows. This Spirit story starts in Jerusalem with a particular people and religion and, after the usual internal conflicts, personality struggles, a shipwreck, and some prison time, the story ends in Rome as universal good news for everyone. Spirit’s fire catalyzes and clarifies mission.

We fear fire.

Traditional religion often becomes protection against the Spirit’s transformation and mission. Churches become bastions against disruption, change, and solidarity, instead resembling rotary clubs instead of social movements. The Spirit then insists on moving elsewhere—because the Spirit’s flame cannot be contained.

The wisdom of desert father Abba Joseph from the fourth century captures both our religious plight and Spirit’s fiery invitation: A fellow monk went to see him and said:

Abba, as far as I can I say my little prayers, I fast a little, I meditate, I live in peace and as far as I can, I purify my thoughts. What else can I do?” Then the old man stood up and stretched his hands toward heaven. His fingers became like ten lamps of fire and he said to him, “if you will, you can become all flame.

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This is a Pentecost sermon I’ve been wanting to share on Pentecost Sunday for a couple of years now! Have a great week, everyone.

As a young boy of eleven, in 1948, Naim Ateek experienced Zionist soldiers taking over his Palestinian village of Beisan at gunpoint. One minute, he played outside his home. In the next moment, he witnessed the Zionists occupy his village, steal his house, end his father’s goldsmith business and family livelihood, and scatter his community. Looting residences, the soldiers forced the entire village onto buses, directing traffic one way for Muslims, toward Jordan, and another way for Christians, toward Nazareth. The boy did not know about the British’s Balfour Declaration, the 1917 edict stating that Palestine should be the home of the Jewish people. He did not know about the UN partition plan dividing up the already-populated land—but he experienced what it was like to be stripped of human rights. The Zionists said the expulsion would be temporary and that the village inhabitants could return in a couple of weeks. Of course, that never happened. During the Palestinian “Nakba” or “catastrophe,” the Zionists ethnically cleansed 750,000 Palestinians from their homes, driving them out from over 500 towns or villages (Ateek 5, also Ilan Pappe). Shouldn’t it be obvious that the “promised land” already had people living in it?

Naim Ateek’s memoir is entitled Call and Commitment: A Journey of Faith from Nakba to Palestinian Liberation Theology. The title captures the arc. Ateek is a Palestinian Christian priest, theologian, and peacemaker. He’s now in his mid-eighties, retired, and living with family in Texas. He spent his entire career in Palestine, inspiring a sturdy and significant movement of Palestinian Christians and friends called Sabeel who seek peace and justice in the Holy Land. I’ve been reading theology for twenty-five years, and only in the past couple of years, in the context of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, have I discovered his longtime, courageous work.

Ateek starts the book with his harrowing account of the Zionist takeover of his village, and the rest of Call and Commitment comprises his search for a faith and vocation that takes account of the injustice his people have suffered. Ateek grew up in an Anglican Palestinian Christian church, finished high school at a Baptist school in Nazareth, received a scholarship to attend college in Texas, completed graduate study in theology in California—and returned to Israel-Palestine to lead Anglican congregations. While he studied theology in California, he began to articulate a historically informed, theological response to Palestinian suffering and injustice, which eventually became a classic work (Justice and Only Justice), launching what is known as Palestinian Liberation Theology.

Photo of an almond tree in Nablus, Palestine by nour tayeh on Unsplash

The book, published by the Maryknoll order through Orbis Books, informs a movement and organization called “Sabeel.” Sabeel, Ateek explains, is “Arabic for ‘the way,’ and it also means a spring of fresh and life-giving water.” Founding the organization in Tiberias in 1993 near the Sea of Galilee—where Peter and disciples encounter the Risen Christ (John 20:1-20)—Ateek and colleagues chose “the name Sabeel to walk in the way of the footsteps of Jesus Christ who said, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life (John 14:6),’ the way of love and compassion, justice and truth, peace and reconciliation” (Ateek, 125).

Sabeel began to hold important theological conferences taking on such topics as “Faith and the Intifada,” “Jerusalem: What Makes for Peace,” “Challenging Christian Zionism,” and more. They began facilitating a “Speaker’s Bureau” of people equipped to share the story of Palestinian Christians with Holy Land visitors. Sabeel launched a publication called Cornerstone that continues to this day. Different branches of Sabeel formed, in Nazareth and Jerusalem, along with “Friends of Sabeel” organizations in the U.S. and worldwide. Friends of Sabeel once hosted a conference in Boston, at which Desmond Tutu spoke resoundingly about the similarities of apartheid in South Africa and Israel. It’s illuminating to read of the many noted Western theological voices Ateek has encountered through his years—and to consider the very small minority who had the fortitude even to take Ateek’s perspective and experience seriously and stand with the Palestinian people. The feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether is one who did so early on, writing the foreword to Justice and Only Justice.

It has taken me a long time to begin detangling myself from a culturally and religiously inherited Zionist bias and to become aware of the suffering of the Palestinians under decades of Israeli occupation. It has helped my heart to open and grieve by reading personal Palestinian Christian stories alongside theology and political history. It is hard to know what is mine to do amid such crises from my simple, rural life. It is hard to know what to say, since even speaking of Palestinian suffering today still stirs charges of antisemitism, not taking the Holocaust seriously, or somehow justifying terrorism. Naim Ateek’s life work and his witness of faith have helped me encounter the headlines with prayers for peace and the desire for solidarity.

From Sabeel’s weekly “Wave of Prayer”:

Since March 2, at least 2,846 people have been killed across Lebanon. The death toll includes more than 103 Lebanese medical workers killed and 230 injured in over 130 Israeli strikes. Meanwhile, more than 1.2 million people in Lebanon are expected to face acute hunger this year due to conflict, displacement, and economic pressures amid the latest war between Israel and Hezbollah, according to a United Nations‑backed report.

God of the oppressed, you understand the plea of the refugee; you know what it is like to be persecuted by empire. Lord, we look for your presence underneath the rubble and destruction in Lebanon and Gaza. We pray for the healing of the millions displaced and thousands injured. As we continue to cry for justice, help the world act to stop the violence and bloodshed and make peace a reality in our region.

Lord in your mercy…hear our prayer

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I’ve been on a retreat this weekend with the Community of the Incarnation. This is a post from 2024. See you next week!

“Then Mary said, ‘Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be unto me according to your word.” —Luke 1:38

Mary whispers her words of wisdom: “Let it be.” But there are many ways of letting be, and not all of them are wise. One cynical way to let it be is just to… give up. Let the coffee in cups lie in the sink until it becomes that moldy once-coffee paste. Let the diapers sag unchanged, the bills remain unpaid, the hair hang unkempt, the laundry unfolded because what’s the point? Let it be. One person can’t make much of a difference, we might think, so why not choose the way of avoidance? So this thinking goes: let the arctic ice melt, let other people worry about that Middle Eastern conflict while I carry on with my life, let other countries deal with the refugee crisis, let the plight of immigrants, Native peoples, and people of color worsen until, as a pastor in Germany once put it, it’s my life that is on the line and “there’s no one left to speak for me” (Martin Niemoller). With a shrug of the shoulders, a heart broken, and with bad news rising, the all-too-human tendency is simply to give up, to say, “Let it be.”

Angels always startle. They’re always showing up at the oddest times, provoking shudders and perplexity, voice caught in throat type of shock. Even in the span of two chapters in Luke’s gospel, the angel Gabriel travels widely. First, he’s in the sanctuary of the Temple, the holiest of holy places unannounced. He appears beside Zechariah, who is simply minding his own business and doing his priestly duties of offering sacrifices and incense. Zechariah is more than startled to see the angel. He’s terrified, and so the first thing angel Gabriel says is, “Do not be afraid” (Luke 1:13).

Then Gabriel goes far from the crowd to an insignificant town in Galilee called Nazareth, and the first words out of his mouth to Mary are “Greetings,” or—in other translations, “Rejoice, favored one! The Lord is with you” (Luke 1:28). But maybe he should have led with “Do not be afraid, Mary” because Luke writes that she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be. Gabriel’s exuberance is a little threatening. One way to read this is that Mary almost lets Gabriel’s response just be. She comes very close to walking away because whatever the message is, and whoever the heavenly being in front of her is, it means dramatic change. It means there’s no going back. It means that Mary will not have the resigned privilege of letting life be as it is anymore. Everything is at stake, and Mary has been singled out to be the bearer of God.

Photo by Keith Polischuk on Unsplash

The Lord is with Mary, but Luke tells us she’s perplexed and so the angel says, “Do not be afraid” (1:30). Gabriel continues: “A son will be conceived in your womb, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever” (1:32), which is to say that a new realm is approaching. The birth of Jesus in the Bible is not less about a baby and more about an era. The reign of David is approaching, which in ancient Israel’s imagination means that renewal is near. The glory days of peace and justice and collective healing are at hand.

Just verses later, Mary will sing this new realm: “My soul magnifies the Lord!” (1:46). The new son and the new realm are realities through which God brings elites down to size and lifts up the poor (1:52). God fills the hungry with good things—and for those who have had their fill, God asks for the rich, educated men to take a step back and consider the needs of the marginalized, the needs of young mothers like Mary. “Though they may be parted,” as the Beatles song goes, “there is still a chance that they will see.”

Mary understandably asks, “How can this be, since I am a virgin?” (1:34). Virgin birth is not a doctrine to argue about but the impossible becoming possible right before our eyes. Mary proclaims that the advent of such a realm only emerges through the work of God. Especially in those and these days.

The biblical “let it be” generates life when life is under siege. It births worlds where worlds are endangered. After all, the whole story starts with a resounding “Let it be”: Instead of “Let there be a military budget,” God in Genesis says, “Let there be light.” Instead of “Let there be oil and drilling,” God says “Let there be land and water and sun and moon.” Instead of “Let there be walls between us,” God says, “Let there be humans made in the very image of God.” Paul McCartney wrote that “When I find myself in times of trouble, Mother Mary comes to me.” Let spirit not be separated from matter, let God unite with this earth and these bodies, through the body born in Mary’s body and by Mary’s “let it be.”

“The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child will be holy, he will be called Son of God.” —Luke 1:35

After mother Mary wonders what sort of greeting this is from angel Gabriel, and after asking how this can possibly be, she finally whispers her words of wisdom: “Here am I, the servant of the Lord. Let it be with me according to your word” (1:38).

Let our resigned despair or our stuck perplexity turn into resolute courage. Let God’s new realm emerge right under empire projects and reconfigured world orders and Caesar Augustus’s nose. Let the potential of God be birthed in our lives. Mother Mary’s choice and ours does really come down to our willingness to “let it be.”

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Etty Hillesum’s chronicle of the unfolding horror taking place in Amsterdam and beyond is remarkable—but her resolute, nearly incomprehensible choice to choose life and God, as long as she had life, is even more so. She stared at the blood dripping from Nazi Germany’s dragon’s jaws, and she still danced, to use a metaphor from Canadian folk singer Bruce Cockburn. She wrote about life and death. She wrote about coming to terms with life in the ominous presence of death. And she said:

By “coming to terms with life” I mean: the reality of death has become a definite part of my life; my life has, so to speak, been extended by death, by my looking death in the eye and accepting it…It sounds paradoxical: by excluding death from our life, we cannot live a full life, and by admitting death into our life we expand and enlarge it.

Etty Hillesum and Jesus of Nazareth understood each other, I think. Etty lived as death in its most brutal incarnation encroached upon and stole the soul of a country. A twisted demonic experiment that resulted in millions murdered.

Etty danced in dragon’s jaws, and Jesus in John’s gospel likewise dances. He tangoes with the Jewish, Judean Temple leaders. These are the leaders who have the power to take his life and eventually do. He provokes them. He disputes with them. He claims authoritative teaching even over their teacher Moses, their guide who had ascended heaven’s heights. He distributes bread in a hungry Roman province. He disregards religion’s rules and offers wholeness and healing for the sick and wounded. He claims oneness with the Source of Being, a personal divine reality he names Father. He even dares to extend that oneness to his own followers.

Photo by siddharth kushwaha on Unsplash

He faces plots on his life, such as narrowly missed stonings. In John 11:8, despite the disciples’ attempt to point out the obvious—“Rabbi, the Jews were just now trying to stone you, and are you going to go there again?”—he goes again to Judea, to Jerusalem’s outskirts. He knows his beloved friend Lazarus will die, and he knows he will bring him back to life to reveal God’s glory. He knows that he himself will die, on the heels of claiming, of all things, “I am the resurrection and the life” (John 11:25-26).

And yet Jesus goes… in his own time, as usual. He tells his mother at Cana’s wedding (John 2:1-12) that his hour has not yet come, as if to say, “Don’t force my hand, even if it is to save the party by turning water into wine.” Later, despite Mary and Martha’s heartrending letter about Lazarus’s decline (John 11:3), he waits two days to respond. He even tells the disciples that Lazarus is sleeping, knowing full well that Lazarus is not dozing, but soon to be dead.

It’s as if the vision of God’s life has so captivated Jesus’ person that he simply does not deem the impending threats to diminish or steal that life as ultimate. John’s message through Jesus is clear: I have come so that they may have life, and have it abundantly (10:10). I am the resurrection and the life. For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes or trusts in him shall not perish but have eternal life (3:16).

It’s always worth remembering that the abundant life Jesus offers begins now and continues later. Eternal life—or better, “life of the ages,”—is the life and new age of heaven’s realm overlapping with our own. Despite wars, attacks on immigrants, unjust repealing of laws, the fragility of our own bodies, and the constant struggles we carry in our own souls, we are, at this moment, nevertheless, alive!

Mary Oliver’s memorable question (“What will you do with your one wild and precious life?”) haunts in the presence of death and all those powers that would vanquish life. And yet, on the other side of that haunting question is nothing less than liberation. As Etty Hillesum wrote:

As life becomes harder and more threatening, it also becomes richer, because the fewer expectations that we have, the more good things of life become unexpected gifts that we accept with gratitude.

Martha and Thomas in John’s Gospel are foils. Thomas, earlier on, thumps his chest at the imminent danger. “Let us go to Judea, that we may die with him,” treating Jesus’ movement as a test of typical male bravado and well-intentioned, if misunderstood, loyalty (John 11:16). We might laugh at Thomas, but we do the same in the presence of death: we don’t accept it, we “Rage, Rage, against the dying of the light,” to quote Dylan Thomas.

Martha, for her part, makes the mistake that most Christians have made with John’s Gospel, which is to think that Jesus’s eternal life is something saved later. Martha says to Jesus: “I know that he (my brother Lazarus) will rise again in the resurrection on the last day” (John 11:24). And Jesus replies, as if to say: “No, Martha. I’m not only talking about the resurrection at the end of days; I’m talking about the resurrection this day, because ‘I am the resurrection and the life’ and I’m standing in front of you.” John’s Gospel insists that eternal life is not only later; it’s now and later, embracing this life, all its woundedness, and even death itself.

To face death with the courage of life is not to deny death. It is to acknowledge death’s power fully while trusting a more whole vision. Jesus’s friend Lazarus dies. And Jesus, after having seemingly ignored Mary and Martha’s pleas for him to arrive and help the situation, is overwhelmed with grief and anger. “Jesus wept” (John 11:35), and in that short verse we know that the Logos—the Word made Flesh—is fully human, as the early doctrinal wars decided.

In the scene of John 11, Mary is weeping, and the Jewish leaders who are there (the very same ones who want Jesus dead) are weeping, too. The combination of compassion for his deceased friend Lazarus, his grieving friends Mary and Martha, and his fury at the religious leaders’ hypocrisy makes Jesus weep, too. The language is terse and emotional in these verses, for Jesus was “greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved” (John 11:33). The Greek translation of this phrase is connected to outward expressions of anger, often with physical gestures such as snorting. John’s picture is that Jesus is snorting in full-bodied grief and anger at death’s power and the suffering it creates. Ugly crying. It’s enough to galvanize Jesus to switch into full-on action mode in which he goes directly to the tomb, commands someone to roll away the stone, and finally shouts for dead Lazarus to come out. And Lazarus comes out, all bound with cloth, as a mummy (John 11:43-44).

Dare we stand in the places of death, the places of our world and lives that diminish life, and choose life anyway?

John gives us a courageous vision of resurrection, which is the vision of life rising again from what we once thought mistakenly was a tomb.

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

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

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

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

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

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

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

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

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

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