This dangerous thinking goes like this: Why go to the trouble of protecting democracy when we’ll all—or some of us, at least—be flying away to heaven in the not-so-distant future? Why bother facing facts about the impending climate crisis if we’re moving on from this late great planet, anyway? Why bother caring whether poor Americans have health care today when God will be our primary care physician in heaven?

But eternal life does not simply mean endless loops on heaven’s golden streets. Eternal life, as John’s Gospel paints it, is far more complicated and more interesting than that. It really means experiencing the life of heaven now, in this world, and then also in the future. Maybe we should put a moratorium on the phrase “eternal life” and use a phrase that brings out its connection to the coming age: “life of the ages.”

Many Jews in Jesus’s time looked forward to a new age of justice and peace. Many saw the current age, dominated by Rome, as an age of evil and oppression that God, in enacting the new age, would judge—meaning overthrow or overcome. There will be a time, as the Hebrew poet-prophets envisioned, when the wolf will live with the lamb. People will beat swords into plowshares. They will turn weapons of war into farming tools. There will be a time when the plundering of the poor will cease, and everyone will have enough. There will be a time when Rome’s violence is overcome by the life-giving power of something called resurrection—which, in Jewish apocalyptic expectation, was not only about a person being raised but about an entire new age being inaugurated. Two ages: one, evil and unjust, dominated by empire, full of suffering; another, glorious and abundant, ruled by God, full of healing.

John’s Gospel sees the future age of heaven overlapping with the current age. It’s what biblical scholars call realized eschatology. The life of the end times, the so-called eschaton (from which we get the word eschatology), is being realized now. “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life” (John 3:36). Not will have eternal life, but—present tense—has eternal life. Whoever believes lives in this new age, the new era of justice and peace and wholeness, today.

And then, as so often in John’s Gospel, the narrative gives way to theological reflection. Here’s one of many head-scratching statements: “The one who comes from above is above all; the one who is from the earth belongs to the earth and speaks as one from the earth” (John 3:31).

On the surface, this simply sounds like more anti-body thinking, more Christians against the world, more eternal life as “I’m out of here” thinking. But it’s not: John sees reality spatially; heaven is above, yes, and earth is below, but that doesn’t mean that the two do not overlap. The age of heaven and the age of earth are intricately connected, and it takes a new birth to see heaven’s reality now, in our midst. The Greek word translated “again” can also mean “from above.” Heaven and earth are intertwined, but it takes an intermediary between the realms, someone like Jesus, the Word made flesh, to help us see their intrinsic union.

Photo by Sandie Clarke on Unsplash

Eternal life can’t help but broach the realms of politics. When John calls Jesus the one from heaven, the one from above, he is also making a claim about authority, or what we sometimes call sovereignty in theology-speak. “The one who comes from above is above all.” This is a political claim as well as a religious one. Read against the claims of empire, John’s words suggest that Caesar, exalted high above all other earthly rulers and credited with ushering in a Roman golden age, is not the ultimate ruler. Even if temples and monuments and military might and crucifixions seem to demonstrate Rome’s supremacy, the one who comes from heaven above is above all. Jesus launches the new age of heaven overlapping with earth—and we are invited to see it and participate in this new reality.

And so, when we vote on Tuesday, let’s remember that politicians do not hold ultimate spiritual power over us. True life, life of the ages, flows from God. The new age, the new era of God’s rule over and against imperial rule, has begun. The qualities of the new age fuel political change-making efforts of peace, justice, and mercy.

Eternal life turns out to be far more than a simple escape plan from reality; in John, eternal life, life of the ages, turns out to be a refusal to allow injustice and suffering and even death itself to have the last word in this life. Another reality, the life of heaven, is upon us. Those who dare to be born again or born from above are those who live from the subversive joy, the resolute hope, the vigilant peace, and the revolutionary love of heaven’s life now, this week, and in all the weeks to come.

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

Photo by Kiya Golara on Unsplash

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

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

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

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Traveling this weekend, here’s an old article that captures the sacred possibilities in the liminal space of travel and airports. Have a great week, everyone.

Most of us have our most formative image of what we believe God is like. It’s the picture of God that sticks and stays with us, whether we believe or disbelieve, and sometimes even against our better intention or interest.

There’s one metaphor in particular for God that subverts the biblical tradition: the Son of Man.

According to Walter Wink’s book The Human Being, the phrase “son of” was a way Jewish people categorized things in Hebrew. It meant “membership in a class or category.” Here are a few examples: “Son of a quiver” in the Bible is translated into English as “arrow.” “Son of a year” is translated as a “one-year-old baby.” “Son of oil” is an anointed one. “Sons of burning coal” are sparks of fire. “A son of strength” is translated a “valiant man.” “A son of death” is a person on the verge of dying.

According to the Hebrew, a son of man would simply be a human being. Yet when English Bible translators encountered the phrase “son of man,” they rarely translated it as “human being.” They kept the odd phrasing to read “Son of Man.”

Why is this?

Most Christians assume that when the Gospel writers use the phrase “Son of Man,” they are referring to Jesus. Son of Man becomes a Christological title, a way that we describe the nature and person of Jesus. It’s capitalized in English Bibles as a title, even though the phrase in Hebrew and Greek is not capitalized. The phrase becomes a secret messianic wink to the knowing reader: maybe Jesus is being modest, Christians may say, and he’s not one to trumpet his glory from the rooftops. Instead, he’s the Son of Man. Or Christians and thinkers will say the Gospel writers are claiming Jesus is a Son of Man for reasons of political safety, that they’re using this cryptic title to downplay his heavenly status for fear of persecution, but the readers—wink, wink—know that Jesus is not only a Son of Man like all other sons and daughters of humanity. No, Jesus is the Son of God, we insist.

But what if our Christological associations are wrong?

What if this phrase, which can almost definitively be traced back to Jesus’s lips, is a window into how he saw his vocation, ministry, and identity?

In the Bible, the Son of Man became an evocative tradition, a visionary thread that functioned as an archetypal image of God being revealed through humanity.

Here is Psalm 80: “Let your hand rest upon the one at your right hand, the son of man or human being whom you made strong for yourself.” The human being reference is ambiguous—it might be a future Israelite king, or it might be ancient Israel herself. Whoever the individual is, he stands as a fluid metaphor into which the people of ancient Israel can pour their highest hopes and dreams.

In Daniel, Chapter 7, the prophet envisions the Syrian empire and its domination system collapsing. “Beast” in apocalyptic imagery almost always refers to an empire, and in this vision, Daniel sees the beast put to death. Then we read: “As I watched in night visions, I saw one like a human being, one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven” (Daniel 7:13). What can this possibly mean? Is this son of man a messiah liberating the people from empire? Is it ancient Israel? Is it a guardian angel? Is it a prefiguration of Christ? We don’t know, but the metaphor lures us to imagine the collective potential of freedom and intimacy with God that humans can experience.

This “one like a human being” is a recurring image of humanity’s wholeness, power, and possibility. It haunts the collective unconscious of the Christian tradition and will not let us go.

People Can Forgive Like God, Too

If we read Mark 2:1-12—the story of the healing of a paralyzed man—with all this in mind, the meaning changes dramatically from what may be our typical interpretations.

Mark tells the story: After going on a whirlwind preaching, healing, and exorcism campaign in Galilee, Jesus makes his way back to Capernaum. Right from the start, he’s swamped with need. Everyone is there. The desperate, the sick, the poor, the paralyzed, and the crowds are all there. The scribes—those Torah law experts and guardians of orthodoxy—are there, too, checking out the new teacher’s credentials.

The paralyzed man and his friends are in urgent need, and the healing figure of Jesus looms large in their minds. It looms so large that they dig through the dirt roof of the house in which Jesus is teaching. The renegade rabbi Jesus tells the paralyzed man, “Your sins are forgiven.”

The scribes are incensed. Who does he think he is? Only God can forgive sins! This is when the text gets interesting, because Christians have traditionally read this story passage and responded with the theological assumption that this is a proof of Jesus’ divine status. This line of thinking goes: “Well, yes, only God can forgive sins, but Jesus is God, and so the fact that Jesus forgives the paralytic’s sins is simply a demonstration of Jesus’ divine status.” We read the assumption into the text that Jesus does what only God can do. The traditional reading says that the scribes’ error is not that they reserve forgiveness for God alone, but that they refuse to recognize Jesus’ divine identity.

Photo by khoi nguyen on Unsplash

Through Mark’s use of the Son of Man tradition, however, Jesus is saying the opposite of the traditional Christian reading.

He’s saying forgiveness of sins is not only the business of a grace-filled God; forgiveness of sins is also the business of grace-filled humans.

He says first to the scribes, “So that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins.” Then he turns to the paralytic, “Stand up, take your mat, and go to your home.”

Matthew’s version of this story ends with a powerful statement. Jesus tells the man to stand up, like he does in Mark, and then Matthew adds this: “When the crowds saw it, they were filled with awe and glorified God, who had given such authority to human beings” (Matthew 9:8). The story of the paralytic, then, is not about Jesus’s power; it’s about humanity’s power. Jesus is saying that the scribes have it backwards and that humanity’s task is to love as God loves, to include as God includes, to forgive as God forgives, to heal as God heals, to become fully human as God becomes fully human.

Projecting our Power onto Jesus

Have you ever put someone up on a pedestal and projected psychological need onto them, as if their affirmation will provide ultimate meaning for you? Years ago at Harvard Divinity School, I organized an event for a famous liberation theologian to come and give a talk. I was so excited. I’d been reading his books, using his work in my papers, and trying to live out his Jesus-inspired vision of solidarity with the marginalized. I’d been volunteering at the Catholic Worker soup kitchen. We organized some progressive campus groups to sponsor the talk, and he provideded a wonderful, challenging analysis of Luke’s gospel. A bunch of us went out with him for beers and nachos at a Divinity School hang-out afterwards. But I was so thrilled to get to know him, and so eager for him to like me, that I was tongue-tied and didn’t say a word when we were together at the bar. Other people were discussing and having a good time, but I was speechless. He even tried to ask me questions and engage me in conversation, and I only responded with one-word answers. I was tied up by knots of projection and anxiety, and I had given him too much power over me.

Christians have joined the paralytic man and his friends in putting Jesus up on a pedestal of projection that looks to Jesus to solve all our hopes, dreams, needs, and prayers. Yet by referring to himself, again and again, as the Son of Man, Jesus consistently denies and undercuts our tendencies to turn Jesus into an all-powerful god and turn ourselves into powerless dependents.

One can still believe that we, too, are the Son of Man—or the “Children of Humanity”—and affirm the beliefs like the Trinitarian affirmation that Jesus Christ is the second person of the Trinity. One can still embrace Jesus as the incarnation of God’s love on earth. However, Jesus the Son of Man—the human being in Mark Chapter 2—refuses the pedestal on which we would place him. He gives power back to human beings by claiming that the power of God’s forgiveness and healing is for humanity just as much as it is for God.

When Jesus is only the Son of God and not also the Son of Man, it is too easy for Christians to ignore our responsibility to live out Jesus’s path of forgiveness and solidarity in our lives. The Son of Man can be found, feet tired and voice sore , eyes weary with weeping because of injustice and violence, humanizing God’s forgiveness and peace with action.

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Sermon from the archives. Have a great week, everyone.

My classmate’s question shocked me because I’d never heard the logic of evangelical salvation stated so baldly, and, much to my chagrin at the time, the fairness of the questioner’s logic seemed straightforward. Despite my then-unexamined assumptions about God, the afterlife, and other religions, I knew the student was right. What I didn’t know was how to make sense of this intuitive truth from the Bible. How to square this classroom revelation with my passionate Christian faith?

The story of Noah perhaps yields some insight. To begin, Noah is not a Jew. He is considered an ancestor to all humanity, coming onto the biblical scene long before the Jewish patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

Noah is not a Jew, and yet God makes a covenant with him. It’s the first covenant—a sacred agreement with God and another party—in the Bible.

The biblical story of Noah is embedded in the larger story of Genesis chapters 1-11. Scholars often name this narrative account “the primeval history” because it is about Adam, Eve, creation, geneaological “begats,” a devastating flood, Noah, and the origins of all tings. It’s not about Abraham, Moses, God’s call, covenant, formation, and a Law for a specific people. Beginning in Genesis chapter 12, God’s activity zooms in to focus on one family, Abraham’s family, but in chapters 1-11, God’s activity is mythic and universal.

One typical way of telling the Bible’s overarching story is to recall God’s covenants, or saving agreements, with a specific people: ancient Israel (one tribe of numerous in ancient Palestine). God makes a covenant with Abraham, and God raises up Moses as a deliverer of the people. Supported by Moses, God liberates the people from Egyptian slavery and gives them the Torah. Entire books such as Leviticus and Deuteronomy are written to expound on what it means to keep the covenant, and what the consequences will be when Israel does not keep it. Kings rise and fall, and their histories are judged on obedience or disobedience to the covenant. Prophets cry out to condemn ancient Israel’s faithlessness, injustice, and amnesia about the covenant.

In Genesis, before God’s particular call to that particular people, God offers a universal call, and creates a cosmic covenant with the universe, Noah, animals, and all flesh.

As early as chapter 6, Noah and God enter into a divine-human partnership. “The end of all flesh has come,” God declares to Noah, because Genesis says the earth was corrupt and filled with outrage. God sees that this humanity God has created is capable of horrendous suffering. For example, Cain murdered Abel, and his blood cried out from the soil. Then, Cain and his wife had a son, who had a son, and so on, until Lamech was born. Lamech, too, in chapter 4, chooses a life of violence rather than a life of loving relationship with God and others. He boasts to his two wives after killing a man: “For sevenfold Cain is avenged, and Lamech seventy and seven” (Genesis 4:24).

At the beginning of chapter 6, the Genesis writer laments that mythical “sons of God”—possibly an echo of a giants myth—have come to earth and had children with women. Check it out in Genesis 6:4, it’s wild stuff! The cumulative effect of humanity’s corruption is that God is fed up. God sees that “every scheme of the human creature’s heart’s devises only perpetually evil” (Genesis 6:5), and plans a flood to wipe everything out, and to start the creation project afresh. But before God opens heaven’s floodgates, God says, “I will set up my covenant with Noah” (Genesis 6:18).

After the flood, Noah—the archetypal righteous human—worships God. After forty days and nights of crashing waters, Noah and his family reach green ground again. Noah leads every creature out of the ark, and he builds an altar to worship as his first post-flood activity. Far before the sacrificial guidelines of Leviticus, priests, and established Israelite religion, Noah offers a sacrifice, and God smells the fragrant odor. God says in response: “I will not again damn the soil on humankind’s account” (Genesis 8:21). In the biblical imagination, Noah is what one scholar named Jean Danielou calls a “holy pagan.”

God’s climactic covenant occurs in chapter 9. God blesses Noah and his sons. In this re-creation story, God repeats the “be fruitful and multiply” commandment that God once gave to Adam and Eve. And God says, “I will establish my covenant with you, never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of the Flood” (Genesis 9:11). The sign of the covenant between God and all flesh and all creatures will not be a warrior’s bow of violence, but a reconciling rainbow between heaven and earth.

Photo by Anton Shakirov on Unsplash

God’s salvation, in other words, is not limited to one religion or one group of people. God’s activity is cosmic. Just so we don’t miss the point, Genesis chapter 10 includes a so-called “table of the nations,” which is a rather boring genealogical chapter that traces the lineage of human cultures at that time all the way back to Noah’s family. So you could even say that God’s covenant with Abraham emerges from God’s prior covenant with Noah, all flesh, all creatures, and all people, including the religions that they will create. The various paths to God from various religions all stem from God’s universal revelation symbolized through God’s cosmic covenant with Noah.

The breathtaking scope of God’s cosmic covenant reveals that God’s mercy and God’s mystery know no end. The Bible happens to be one library of God acting with a people, but there are other libraries and other conversations. Christianity is one beautiful way among many other ways to God. There are established ways set forth in Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, and Hinduism, but the universal quest for meaning is inherent in every human being. And if God’s covenant is truly with all flesh, then folks like conscious humanists, honest atheists, nature-lovers, and spiritual-but-not-religious people participate in God’s covenant, too.

Many of us have known God’s embrace was wider than one religion or claim to truth. We may have believed it intuitively because we heard it from the preacher’s pulpit. We may have struck upon inclusive insights in surprising places: a classroom, in nature, or through friendship with people of different backgrounds. Many of us have longed for a gentler, more compassionate God, but we viewed the Bible and religion as an impediment to inclusion rather than a resource. The impulses towards embracing holy pluralism are right there in Genesis.

God’s cosmic covenant with Noah ensures that the boundaries we place on ultimate meaning are not ultimate, and that of course Ghandi walks with God.

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Contemplation may seem initially liberating and exhilarating. For me, discovering a spirituality of depth, tradition, and dedicated practice renewed my inner life. Christianity possesses, as some scholar put it, technologies of transformation. The realization that Christianity’s lineages contained chanting, meditation, and Scripture-based prayer surprised and enlivened me. How come I had never known that Benedictine monks chant Psalms on a rigorous daily schedule, following equally rigorous musical notations?!

Discovering contemplative spirituality in the United States can also come with capitalistic gloss. It gleams shiny, at first, as if promising the newcomer instant growth upon purchase. There are plenty of ways to spend one’s money, often legitimately, on spiritual development, from conferences, books, online courses, retreats, Substack and Patreon subscriptions, to paying for spiritual direction. And at the same time, spiritual experiences and sophisticated knowledge are not the same as spiritual growth that lasts. It can all be used as a Ponzi scheme if we’re in it for ego, including self-advancement or the veneer of enlightenment.

Photo by Lhar Capili on Unsplash

After years of spiritual questing, retreats, conferences, and many, many books (including my own!), the simple heart of contemplative spirituality still stares me in the eyes: how will I show up with presence to my life in whatever I am doing? And even as I dedicate myself devotedly to contemplative practices, I am also convinced that the spiritual quest is not really about what practices I will do to show up, but in the end, how I show up. The fruit is what matters, rather than the pruning tools. Some people show up with natural grace and presence without praying a Psalm or sitting for an hour of meditation per day. Not me, mind you—I wish I had such natural grace—but many folks I know, including folks who are not (consciously) on a spiritual journey at all.

How will I show up to the self that is still here with all his wounds and gifts?

How will I show up to the world that is still here with all its wounds and gifts?

And typically, for me, the answer to that question is pretty boring.

It means continuing to do what I am doing while paying attention to the divine presence, and letting that be the fodder that feeds slow growth. Driving soccer carpools, throwing backyard football passes, roasting uneaten veggies, or finishing a work project are not glamorous, special, or particularly contemplative endeavors in themselves. The tasks of paying attention to the movements of the Holy Spirit and probing the pain and joy of being alive, all while juggling daily duties, are not glitzy. But they do produce sustained groundedness in God, even when I don’t feel grounded at all.

Contemplative practices sustain me. As I’ve written about before, I’m a part of a wonderful spiritual community—a “new monastic” community—that shares a substantive, adapted “rule of life” for modern living. It includes things like morning and evening prayer, silent meditation, reflection on the writings of mystical teachers, and more. And yet, with the practices as my foundation, I also realize that the point of the practices is simply to help me show up to what is present in my life—including the divine love that is always present. Will I meet today with reactivity or greater spaciousness, humility instead of defensiveness, tenderness instead of anger, and joy instead of fear? That’s not Instagram marketable work, but it is, I’m convinced, work that deepens our life in God, stumbling toward divine union.

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At the beginning of the academic year, students converge on my small town from all over the world. They plunge into orientation, first classes, dorm activities, sports, and the joyful embrace of familiar friends. But the newness does not stay on campus. It spills onto the benches by the local deli. And you can see the glimmer of possibility in faces crossing Main Street and through arms gesturing at the coffee shop in animated conversations.

New and returning students inspire me. Their energy and hope invite me—along with the rest of the community—to keep our hearts and minds open. They remind me that we are all still learning.

But what does it mean to be a student? And what does it mean to *know*?

The Hebrew Scriptures have a word for knowing: yada. The word can mean many things, but in some of the Bible’s most striking passages, knowing reaches beyond the possession of information. It has to do with relationship and responsibility. When Adam and Eve come together, Genesis says that Adam knew Eve. That prompted plenty of jokes in my evangelical upbringing about knowing someone “in the biblical sense.” But the word also takes on a moral weight elsewhere in the story—the tree of the knowledge of good and evil shares the same word association.

The book of Exodus tells us that a new king arose in Egypt who did not know Joseph. Joseph is the favorite son and discarded brother who rose the ranks in Pharoah’s courts from prison to palace. Perhaps the new king had heard Joseph’s name; what matters in the story is that he did not honor the relationship that had sheltered Joseph’s people, and soon he enslaved them. Later, at the famous scene of Moses meeting a burning bush, God tells an unwitting Moses that God has seen the people’s affliction, heard their cry, and knows their suffering. This knowing moves toward liberation.

We can know a great deal without knowing in this way. Our apps gather data about us to personalize our experience by selling us more things. We scroll past stories of suffering on our news or social media feeds, absorb a fact or crisis, and move on. Even in the academy, knowledge can become a badge of status or a way to keep other people out. But the best teachers always offer something different: they know their students as people, and they help students attend to the world beyond themselves.

Our capacity to collect and share information has grown enormously. Yet the pressing crises of authoritarianism, militarism, poverty, racial injustice, and unaccountable AI companies keep pressing the question: What becomes of what we know? Does it deepen our care? Does it change what we do?

Photo by Justin Morgan on Unsplash

The French philosopher and teacher Simone Weil wrestled with that question. Brilliant in the classroom, she also cared fiercely about workers and the suffering of people in poverty. She took leave from teaching to work in factories, wanting to understand industrial labor from inside it. She joined an anarchist brigade during the Spanish Civil War, though an accident cut short her time there. During the Second World War, she restricted her own food in solidarity with people living under occupation, worsening an already serious illness. Her commitments could be severe, even self-destructive. Her life does not offer a simple model to imitate. But she refused to let her ideas about suffering remain safely abstract. For Simone Weil, knowing implied commitment.

In one of her last notebooks, Weil wrote that a central task of teaching is to teach what it means to know. I hear in that line a question Weil lived as much as she studied: How do we learn to pay attention to reality, and to the people in it?

Which leads me to the story of the Good Samaritan.

In Luke’s Gospel, an expert in the law stands up to test Jesus. He asks what he must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus answers with a question of his own: What is written in the law, and how does the expert read it? The man answers well, naming the importance of loving God and loving neighbor. Jesus agrees, then gives him a straight-forward, demanding instruction: “Do this, and you will live.”

The man wants to justify himself, so he asks, “And who is my neighbor?” So Jesus tells him a story (my paraphrase):

A traveler has been beaten and left half-dead on the road. A priest sees him and passes by. A Levite sees him and passes by, too. Luke does not tell us why they cross to the other side. The point is plain enough without inventing an excuse for them: they see a person in need, and they keep going on their way.

Then a Samaritan comes upon the traveler. For Jesus’s audience, he is an unexpected hero, someone from a community with a long history of conflict and estrangement from Jews. He sees the wounded man and is moved with compassion. He bandages the man’s wounds, brings him to an inn, cares for him, and makes arrangements to pay for his continued care.

All three travelers see the man, but only one allows what he sees to make a claim on him. The Samaritan’s knowledge becomes mercy.

Jesus does not end by asking the expert to identify the proper boundaries of neighborliness. He asks which traveler became a neighbor to the wounded man. The expert answers: the one who showed mercy. “Go and do likewise,” Jesus says, and we don’t know whether he will or not.

Weil wrote an essay with the wonderfully unwieldy title “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God.” She argues that study can train our attention for prayer. A difficult problem, a paper covered in corrections, or a failed experiment can each teach us to pay attention with patience and humility. This habit of attention is one that helps us notice another person’s suffering, and trains us for the attention of heart required in contemplative prayer.

This is a beautiful, if demanding, claim about learning. Study alone will not make us compassionate or prayerful. The priest and the Levite saw the wounded man, but their seeing did not become care. The question is whether we will let what we learn interrupt us, ask something of us, and draw us toward another’s suffering—and even to the divine presence.

May our learning lead us into that kind of love.

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This post is updated from a sermon I gave a long time ago. I’ve been going through a particularly full season of life and will occasionally update old talks, articles, and sermons when I am not able to write new thoughts.

Sufferers of this malady relate to the rich fool in Luke chapter 12. Someone in Jesus’s crowd lobs him a loaded question, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me” (Luke 12:13). Disciples often called on rabbis to arbitrate legal disputes, but Jesus sidesteps the familial finance question for a warning about amassing wealth. “Be on your guard against all kinds of greed!” he says (Luke 12:15), and then weaves a yarn about a rich man who has a good year on good land with abundant crops.

Yet rather than respond with gratitude for the year’s provision, this man in Jesus’s story hoards for future days:

I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, he says, and there I will store my grain. And I will say to my soul, eat, drink, and be merry. In spite of the man’s blissful vision of retirement, God says: “You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be? (Luke 12:16–21)

Sufferers of affluenza—and I consider myself to be among them—strive to bend reality to our consumptive, commodified uses.

We build bigger barns to store our hopes and dreams and plans and stuff while life, joy, place, and the gift of uselessness pass by.

Jesus reminds us to consider ravens (Luke 12:24). They have nothing to show for themselves. They neither sow nor reap; in fact, ravens were associated both then and now with garbage and animal carcasses. The ravens are a little disgusting, and they do not store their food in barns, basements, 401(k)s; yet somehow God feeds them.

Or, consider lilies, Jesus says (Luke 12:27). They neither toil nor spin. They are beautiful, but they are, in a word, useless—yet Jesus tells us in Luke’s Gospel that they live clothed in the grass like royalty. Not even King Solomon dwelled in such glory (Luke 12:27). Ravens, lilies, and joyful activities like children playing have nothing to show for themselves, and yet they are enough. They are perfect in their apparent uselessness.

Of course, ravens and lilies play their own evolutionary roles—ravens, a Google AI overview tells me, “recycle nutrients back into the environment by consuming carrion and clearing organic waste.” Lilies “provide nectar and pollen” and “their bulbs stabilize mountain soils,” and more (see here). That’s slightly beside my point, except to say that even apparent uselessness has a (purposeless) purpose!

We, too, are enough in holy uselessness, but we have convinced ourselves that our world and our lives are insufficient. So we strive, overwork, invest, speculate, drill, fracture, and build data centers because we are addicted to the spectre of more, and more faster. Our success-saturated souls ache to hear Jesus’s words: “Do not keep striving for what you are to eat and drink; do not keep worrying” (Luke 12:29). Yet so many of us do worry, and so many of us are anxious. I believe the reason so many of us are anxious is because we have bought the lie that who we are and what we’re worth depends on our achievement, put-togetherness, accumulation, exploration and production yield—our quantitative usefulness.

Consider the Sabbath, Jesus says—that towering Jewish tradition of hallowed uselessness. It is a countercultural revolution declaring “enough.” God parceled out creation in six days, took a look around, saw that it was very good, and then rested and played on the seventh day. God sprinkled water and flung dirt around, like a child playing in a garden. The Sabbath is the crown of creation; in the words of Abraham Joshua Heschel, it is a “cathedral in time,” a heavenly block party of spiritual frivolity. It is the rhythm in creation, and the one day of the week, when—in a world of measurable achievements—we remind ourselves that our identity does not depend on household income or gross domestic product.

The Sabbath is rooted in our Scriptures such that it becomes far more than a day off. It becomes a leveling tradition of “enough” that affects even agricultural and economic relations: every seventh year, the Leviticus writer tells us that the land is to enjoy complete rest. And every seven times seven years, the Leviticus writer proclaims that in ancient Israel a year of jubilee is at hand, a year in which debts are forgiven and the enslaved are set free. It is a year when people live into the Exodus wilderness dream in which those who gathered much did not have too much, and those who gathered little had just as much as they needed. Sounds like democratic socialism or something!

Jesus’s vision of Sabbath, throughout Luke’s Gospel, reorients the disciples’ priorities so they embrace their God-given identity as having and being “enough.” As Luke’s Gospel unfolds, Sabbath affects political, economic, and religious dimensions. In Luke 4:18–19, Jesus rises in the synagogue and quotes the prophet Isaiah’s beloved yet no less subversive words: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release for the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

The year of the Lord’s favor is nothing less than the Jubilee Year, the Sabbath’s Sabbath, which is the Levitical year of liberating social and economic second chances. In Luke chapter 6, Jesus and his disciples pass through a grainfield on a Sabbath day. They are hungry, and—much to the Pharisees’ chagrin—they eat heads of grain. On another Sabbath, Jesus heals a man’s hand in the synagogue, and to Luke’s Pharisees who would twist God’s day of useless play into yet another obligatory religious task, Jesus replies, and I paraphrase: “The Sabbath serves humanity; not the other way around” (Luke 6:6–11). In the book of Acts, Luke portrays the earliest Christians embodying the Sabbath Jubilee in their communal life together. He writes: “There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need” (Acts 4:34–35).

Do not keep striving for what you are to eat and drink. Do not worry. Strive instead for the kingdom of heaven, and all these things will be given to you as well.

Consider the ravens and lilies, the counter-cultural vision of Sabbath, and consider, too, the radical possibility of prayer. Prayer is that discipline ever ancient and ever new that plunges our souls into the holy uselessness of God’s love. Prayer functions as a stick in the spoke of our hamster wheel of goal-oriented activity. Every time we engage in a practice that immerses us, mind, body, and soul, in the present moment, we say “No” to the dogged pursuit of more. No more money. No more recognition. No more property. No more success. No more productivity. No more praise. Enough. We have, and we are, enough.

Photo by Matt on Unsplash

The humiliating nothingness of contemplative silence, over time, retrains our hearts (for the love of God) to stop doing, to stop thinking about doing something more for at least several minutes a day. As we commit to contemplative prayer as a way of life, we gain greater access to that part of ourselves, which is also a part of God, that does not strive for significance from acquisitive action. It is that part of ourselves that rests in God and knows we are enough. The irony is that this rather useless place of rest, Sabbath, and play is exactly the fountain from which healing action can flow.

Consider, then, this present moment. Not your opinion or analysis about it. Not your mental reaction even to this article. Not the headlines that broadcast themselves urgent and breaking. Not the critical voice that only allows rest and prayer after constant struggle. Not the luring temptations of regret or nostalgic memories. Not the perpetually unfinished checklist of household chores. Do not consider the latest published research about the present moment, but the actual present moment.

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During my field education internship at a suburban church, and with family and friends in supportive tow, I talked about the Catholic Worker movement, poverty, and the unhoused men with whom I’d worked on Boston’s streets. I talked about what Dorothy Day called the “filthy, rotten system” that perpetuates poverty and violence, war and peace, and how Dorothy Day viewed the Catholic works of mercy, such as giving soup to a smelly man or visiting an imprisoned mother, as some of the most revolutionary acts a Christian could undertake.

I still believe these things, but I was angry, self-righteous, and I thought I was right and others were wrong. I was unable to listen to the quivering, furious older gentleman who cornered me after that first sermon to disagree with my words. Because here’s the thing: pronouncing convictions is not the same as spiritual transformation. In mainline Christian circles in which I’ve spent time, a “prophet” has become a rather one-dimensional figure who is unpleasant to be around. Someone we’d like to listen to, perhaps, assuming they take the hard stances on the issues with which we agree, but certainly not someone we’d trust with our vulnerabilities. I’ve also spent time in charismatic Christian circles in which the meaning of prophet functioned more like a psychic—but I’ll have to save those stories for another time.

The biblical prophets railed against injustice, but what undergirded their prophetic ministries was a profound encounter with God. Their proclamation of injustice went hand in hand with powerful, sometimes even ecstatic, experiences of God’s presence. Samuel, often credited as the Bible’s first prophet, famously warned against the injustices Israel would incur once she embraced a king: “These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you,” he said. “He will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots, and some to plow his ground and reap his harvest. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and your male and female slaves and your cattle and donkey and grain.” And yet this same Samuel, whose speech criticized the monarchy, lay in bed as a boy while God called out his name in an audible voice: “Samuel, Samuel!”

The prophet Jeremiah joins the prophetic chorus by rebuking the king’s house in chapter 21. “Thus says the Lord,” he says. “Execute justice in the morning, and deliver from the hand of the oppressor, or else my wrath will go forth like fire.” And yet Jeremiah’s hard-hitting woes to kings and oppressors are not ideological or partisan, but founded in divine intimacy. “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,” writes the prophet about his call. Jeremiah’s experience of God’s chosen vocation for him involves God putting out his hand and touching Jeremiah’s mouth, gifting this unready and improbable teenage boy with words from heaven.

The Hebrew prophets were early mystics.

They experienced deep intimacy, even union, with God, which strengthened and inspired their holy vocation. Yet some circles still bristle at the mention of a mystic, conjuring someone who retreats from the world’s crises in favor following personal bliss. But the mystical traditions tell a different story. Evelyn Underhill defines mysticism as “that organic process which involves perfect consummation of the Love of God.” She writes in another place, “Mysticism is the art of union with Reality.” Jesus in John’s Gospel reveals his mystical roots; he has experienced some closeness with Reality or the Absolute that he calls Abba, and so he prays that “all may be one, as you, Father, are in me, and I am in you.”

Thomas Merton's hermitage, Abbey of Gethsemani. Photo by Bryan Sherwood, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Mystics do not reserve the experience and awareness of union with Reality only for Jesus; mystics dare to claim that oneness with God and the world is possible for us, too. These prophets and mystics have such an unforgettable awareness of God that they can even say that their truest self and God are not separate. Augustine wrote, “God is more intimate to me than my very self.” Meister Eckhart said, “The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.” Mystics know that God’s flow through the world and through us is one.

Mystical prophets are needed today because they offer a third way beyond burnout-style activism and passivity. One-dimensional prophets burn out because anger and zeal are not enough to fuel the spiritual journey. Mystical prophets, however, have something to say that is deeper than commentary on the latest headline. Mystical prophets root their action and speech against social injustice in a centered-and hopeful place of love.

In the twentieth century, Trappist monk Thomas Merton exemplified contemplation and action. He mentored and corresponded with many leaders on the front lines of social movements. He typed hundreds, even thousands, of letters to people such as Dorothy Day and Daniel Berrigan and Joan Baez and liberation theologian Ernesto Cardenal and pacifist clergy member A.J. Muste. He lent his support to various social justice actions, especially against the Vietnam War and nuclear arms, but his monastic vows of silence and solitude grounded his thought and arguably made him one of the greatest spiritual writers in the twentieth century.

Merton wrote of the urgency and critical necessity of prayer, especially for modern-day Americans, and I quote at length from his book Contemplation in a World of Action:

He who attempts to act and do things for others or for the world without deepening his own self-understanding, freedom, integrity, and capacity to love, will not have anything to give others. He will communicate to them nothing but the contagion of his own obsessions, his aggressiveness, his ego-centered ambitions, his delusions about ends and means, his doctrinaire prejudices and ideas. We are living through the greatest crisis in the history of man; and the crisis is centered precisely in the country that has made a fetish out of action and has lost (or perhaps never had) the sense of contemplation. Far from being irrelevant, prayer, meditation and contemplation are of the utmost importance in America today.

Cultivating a life of prayer is about developing a discerning and critical stance from our constant activity so that when we act, it will come forth from a place of wisdom.

It’s easy to think that the essence of our lives is quantitative activity. We assure ourselves that we are important and that we matter when we’ve made a mark and when we have results to show for ourselves. But it’s okay to wait and discern the best way to use time and energy. It’s necessary to slow down, to rest, and to pray. And we learn how to pray, and as we deepen our awareness and experience of God, then our personality as prophets takes natural shape.

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The writer of Job asks in full earnestness: Where is the place of understanding? Where can wisdom be found? (Job 28:12)

It seems that the more we cast our hearts in search of wisdom, the more elusive she becomes.

Will we find wisdom in politics? I can’t help but think the words of Jesus seem more apt than ever: “If one blind person leads another, they will both fall into a ditch” (Matthew 15:14).

Will we find wisdom in social justice movements? All too often, tuning into the rhetoric of activists is to encounter strident calls to join their side, their cause, because the evil opposition brings nothing less than utter disaster. But even if they are right, are they wise? Are we wise?

To tune into a preacher’s preaching or a spiritual writer’s writing (this Substack is not exempt!) is all too often to witness the case for containing truth in one tribe, one denomination, or one religious tradition.

But where is wisdom to be found? Where is the place of understanding?

Surely wisdom does not abide by our opinions, our labels, our categories, our politics, or even our faith convictions.

Wisdom does not secure certainties; instead, she upends our assumptions.

The Bible contains a genre of Jewish wisdom literature: the Old Testament books Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, and Job; the intertestamental books the Wisdom of Solomon and Sirach. These writings stick out with their pithy lines, their terse verse pairings of ethical instruction, their short stories, and their parables. Like most of Jesus’s teachings, wisdom teachings are often “spiritual hand grenades, to quote writer Cynthia Bourgeault. Their meaning is not immediately obvious, and they first appear impenetrable, yet—like a Zen koan—if you sit with them and ruminate on them, they pierce your heart and gobsmack your consciousness. How else are we meant to understand statements such as: “love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you; blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven?” (Matthew 5).

The Wisdom of Solomon was written by a Greek writer who places Wisdom in old King Solomon’s voice. The scene is of Solomon praying in chapter 9 for heaven’s gift: “Give me the wisdom that sits by your throne,” he petitions God (Wisdom of Solomon 9:4). Yet it’s not Solomon himself who is praying these words; it’s likely a writer in first-century Alexandria, Egypt, garnering literary authority by evoking the reign of ancient Israel’s king.

The Jews of Alexandria in the first century needed some pseudonymic royal heft to carve out respect for themselves. They faced derision from all sides: Hellenistic and pagan philosophers who mocked their supposedly backward monotheistic belief in one God in the polytheistic, many-gods world of Greek culture and Roman imperialism.

More tragically, Alexandria’s Jews were ghettoized and killed in outbreaks of extreme violence under Emperor Caligula. In a survival tactic, Jewish writers merged their faith with Greek philosophical concepts so as to persuade, and at the very least, neutralize, their religion’s cultured despisers.

Wisdom literature in ancient Israel had patriarchal origins at first. It was transmitted from sages to attendants and lawyers and officials serving in the king’s royal court. It functioned, some think, similarly to how prep schools function: a pragmatic way to cultivate model leaders of upstanding ethics and faith who served the king.

Yet when the Babylonians crushed ancient Israel’s monarchy in the sixth century BCE, the institution of the king failed, and according to a line of thinking by feminist scholar Claudia Camp, something fascinating took place: Wisdom in the wake of monarchy’s fall became more wise: it became feminine. The promulgation of its teaching fell on parents and households rather than kings and courts. It became universal. Wisdom even became divine and she became a goddess of sorts.

The Wisdom that emerged from this post-monarchical time was not partisan wisdom that could be boiled down and cast in creeds, or centered around one ruler, one way, or one tradition. Because hoarding truth is not Wisdom. Exclusivity often attempts to make an end run around wisdom’s opposite, foolishness, and fails.

Wisdom is, instead, the heaven-sent Greek Sophia, named in Proverbs 1-9 (a probable later addition to the older Proverbs collection of teachings). Wisdom-Sophia is a “tree of life to those who lay hold of her” (Proverbs 3:18). She calls out, in Proverbs 8, beside the gates in front of the town, and her call is through Torah, to God’s chosen people, but also to all humanity and all reality: “My cry is to all who live,” Wisdom-Sophia says (Proverbs 8:4). Regardless of learning, belief system, or political identity, Wisdom says, “Take my instruction instead of silver, for wisdom is better than jewels” (Proverbs 8:10-11).

София Премудрость Божия // Новгородский государственный объединенный музей-заповедник "Holy Wisdom" icon, Novgorod museum. Wikimedia Commons.

The wisdom writers set Wisdom free to soar rather than to be placed in boxes. And often in the Hebrew tradition, the visions of God as Savior and as Wisdom co-exist in tension. God as Savior redeems from sin while God as Wisdom awakens to life.

YHWH liberates a particular people through so-called “mighty works,” but Wisdom, Jesus says, “is vindicated by all her children” (Luke 7:35). Not just her Jewish ones, Christian ones, Buddhist ones, or spiritual-but-not-religious ones, but by all those who would sit at Wisdom’s feet and learn.

Wisdom did not begin with the creation of Judaism or Christianity. Rather, wisdom was right there at the beginning, a divine sculptor of creation: “She was present when you made the world,” the voice of Solomon cries to God (Wisdom of Solomon 9:9). “Send wisdom forth,” therefore, from holy heavens to labor at my side, for she knows and understands all things” (Wisdom of Solomon 9:10). Or, in Proverbs 8, Wisdom claims, “When God established the heavens, I was there…When God marked out the foundations of earth, I was there, rejoicing” (Proverbs 8:27-31).

New Testament readers might be familiar with Wisdom’s family resemblance through John chapter one, although she is called there by a different name. Gospel writer John sadly changes Sophia Wisdom’s gender but keeps her lineage alive through Logos, the Word. Before the Word became flesh and moved into the neighborhood as Jesus, the Word was there in the beginning, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God (John 1:1).

Creation preceded incarnation; Word or Wisdom preceded Jesus. To put it another way: Jesus participates in and reveals divine Wisdom, but he does not exhaust her meaning, her identity, or her embrace.

Wisdom’s wide expanse simply won’t be pinned down.

Early Church thinkers likewise bathed in Wisdom’s stream. Like the Wisdom of Solomon’s writer, many early theologians wrote with an audience eye cast toward their sometimes-cultured despisers. A thinker named Justin Martyr became famous for his union of Platonic philosophy with Christianity. John 1 stirred in him the idea of what he called the Logos sower. He viewed the Word or Logos in John as a universal revelation of truth. The Logos surely finds fruition in Christianity through Jesus, Justin Martyr believed, but the Word sows seeds everywhere: in philosophy, art, religions, poetry, people, and in nature. God’s seeds of truth and beauty and justice and love are growing everywhere throughout the world.

How arrogant, then, of Christians to think that their religion might be the only garden of God, when it turns out that the very cosmos itself is a raised bed for God, the divine horticulturalist?

Who has learned your counsel, the voice of Solomon prays, unless you have given wisdom, and sent your holy spirit from on high? (Wisdom of Solomon 9:17). Only those who have been saved by Wisdom—not by dogmatic belief or joining the right group or being baptized by the right church or participating in the right cause—have learned such things.

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This sermon is from my files, preached on April 10, 2026, at First Congregational Church, Williamstown.

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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