You are deeply loved and God is not worried about you. You can rest and abide in that Love even as you throw a few things into the fire.
— Sarah Bessey, Field Notes for the Wilderness, p. 18
Photo: Sunrise, South Riding, Virginia, January 3, 2025
It may now be safe to say that our God does not need to be calmed down, nor is ever irate nor filled with wrath. All the mystics have come to see this. Julian of Norwich knows that she’s been told constantly of this angry Divine One but just can’t “find this God” in her experience. We still can’t shake the narrative of the God who seeks our measuring up and demands some high level of performance. We don’t measure up to this God; we just show up. We allow this Tender One to fill us extravagantly, then we go into the world and speak the whole language of it, unrestricted, openhearted, and loyally dedicated to its entirety. Tender glance meets tender glance. Behold the One beholding you and smiling.
For the Tender One, it’s simply never about worthiness. But, I’m afraid for us, it’s ONLY about worthiness. The centurion wants Jesus to cure his servant and humbly tells him: “Say but the word . . .” “I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof . . .” The centurion feels unworthy. But Jesus just wants to notice and connect to him. He pays attention to him. We stare at the cure and the faith of the guy, but Jesus wants us to look at how false our sense of unworthiness is. In the face of this tender glance, we find a God quite speechless — too in love with us to chitchat.
— Gregory Boyle, The Whole Language, p. 11
Photo: Sunrise over lake, South Riding, Virginia, January 18, 2024
You don’t have to be in love to have love in your life. Take stock of everything — and everyone — that fills your heart.
KEEP MOVING.
— Maggie Smith, Keep Moving, p. 158
Photo: Siblings, in-laws, and baby nephew, July 2024
Jesus’s ministry is not to gather the so-called good into a private country club and punish the outsiders, but to reach out to those on the edge and on the bottom, those who are last, to tell them they might just be first! That is almost the very job description of the Holy Spirit and, therefore, of Jesus. Some call it God’s unique kind of justice or “restorative justice.” God justifies things by restoring them to their true and full identity in himself, as opposed to retributive justice, which seeks only reward and punishment. To receive unearned love is their only punishment.
— Richard Rohr, Yes, And…, p. 220
Photo: Frozen lake, South Riding, Virginia, February 1, 2025
Now I don’t mean to start some kind of prooftexting war, as if arguing over theology were just a matter of slapping more verses down on the table than the other guy. I admit that one can seem to find an eternity of pain and abandonment all over the Bible – if that’s what one is looking for. And I suppose there are some evangelicals who would happily squint their eyes and apply some kind of strained interpretation to the verses I quote above to make the case that “all” never actually means “all” when talking about salvation. I used to do the same thing myself. But after years studying the Bible and the traditions of Christianity, I’ve finally given up. At some point, Christians have to stop defending the indefensible and accept the very thing that Christ came to earth to teach us: that God will always come down to us. God will never leave us abandoned. God will never leave us to face the darkness alone, no matter how deep it may be. At some point, we have to admit that, like it or not, “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:38-39).
— Derek Ryan Kubilus, Holy Hell, p. 68
Photo: South Riding, Virginia, January 18, 2025
Love without measure, love without cost, love without judgment is, after all, what all other spiritual practices are meant to develop in us.
— Joan Chittister, In God’s Holy Light, p. 21
Photo: January 20, 2023, South Riding, Virginia
People settle for saying that every human being is “worthy” or “valuable.” But these ideas are still stuck in the “measurable.” “He is a valuable member of our team.” “He is unworthy to be president.” But goodness is unshakable. Solid. The truth. There is not a thing one can do to make this not so. God does not hope that we become something other than what we are. The Pharisees kept trying to be somebody, but they didn’t know they already were. You teach children that they are valuable by valuing them. Not by insisting that they prove their value to you. There are lots of things and toxins and blindness that keep us from acknowledging this and seeing it as true, but nonetheless, it is immutably certain. Before we can love goodness, we need to find it, and see it. It’s there. It’s there.
— Gregory Boyle, The Whole Language, p. 37
Photo: Bull Run Regional Park, Virginia, March 29, 2024
God does not lead the soul by shaming it, just as a good parent would not shame his or her child. It doesn’t work anyway. We all have done it at times and, if we were raised in a punitive way ourselves, we still tend to think that is the way to motivate people — by shaming them or making them feel guilty. I’ve done it enough and I’ve received it enough to know that it eventually backfires. It never works. We close down and stop trusting after that, and we use all kinds of defense mechanisms to avoid further vulnerability. God’s way actually works — to love us at even-deeper levels than we can know or love ourselves. It is really quite wonderful, and one wonders why anyone would want to miss out on this.
— Richard Rohr, Yes, And…, p. 101
Photo: South Riding, Virginia, May 10, 2023
We ask ourselves, what can move the dial on God’s love for us? Nothing. It is always at its highest setting. After all, God’s love for me is zero dependent on my love for God. But our notion of God can atrophy and get stuck in our own arrested development. And it can be hard to shake the transactional god who puts us in debt. The I-love-you, now-love-me-back god. Yet our God is utterly reliable in this unconditional love that does not waver. It has pleased God not to be God without us. God never has second thoughts about loving us. Never.
— Gregory Boyle, The Whole Language, p. 4-5
Photo: Oregon Coast, May 17, 2023
That’s the funny thing about who Jesus has to be if he’s who we hope he is: He has to be able to out-love us. That means the scandalous dinner invite isn’t just for us, it’s for the people we despise, for those we disagree with, for everyone who pushes our buttons and boils our blood and twists our insides — and we have to be on board with that. Not only do we need to accept the fact that the table is wide open, but we have to be at the ready with a chair and an extra setting for those we find it most challenging to welcome. If you’re at all like me, you’ve spent a good deal of time and effort crafting what you believe is a compelling, air-tight case against breaking bread with certain people because of the message that would send to them. We don’t want people whose religion or politics or behavior are adversarial to ours to “get away with it” by giving them proximity or showing them generosity, and that self-righteousness feels good until we realize that someone somewhere is asking Jesus why he sits with us.
— John Pavlovitz, Rise, p. 18-19
Photo: Bull Run Regional Park, Virginia, April 7, 2023