When you think you know the shape and size of your life, when you think you know what is possible, something will happen to prove you wrong. Be open to this — you want to be wrong! Trust that your life is more elastic than you think: it can grow, be more, hold more.
KEEP MOVING.
— Maggie Smith, Keep Moving, p. 161
Photo: Blackwater Falls, West Virginia, April 24, 2025
When civilization has flourished, when great music, art, and literature have emerged, it’s always when human beings have felt good about being human. Human is something great to be. Being human is just a little less than God (Ps. 8:5). That’s exactly what faith gives us, a kind of extraordinary dignity. It gives us a sense of our own meaning: religion calls us “sons and daughters of God.” If we can do nothing else, we can give that back to the world: that we are created in the image of God, we have come forth from God, and we will return to God. We reflect part of the mystery of God. We are unique and apparently will never be created again.
When we see that the world is enchanted, we see the revelation of God in each individual as individual. Then our job is not to be Mother Theresa, our job is not to be St. Francis – it’s to do what is ours to do. That, by the way, was Francis’s word as he lay dying. He said, “I have done what was mine to do; now you must do what is yours to do.” We must find out what part of the mystery it is ours to reflect. There is a unique truth that our lives alone can reflect. That’s the only true meaning of heroism as far as I can see. In this ego-comparison game, we have had centuries of Christians comparing themselves to the Mother Teresas of each age, saying that she was the only name for holiness. Thank God we have such images of holiness, but sometimes we don’t do God or the Gospel a service by spending our life comparing ourselves to others’ gifts and calls. All I can give back to God is what God has given to me – nothing more and no less!
— Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs, p. 96-97
Photo: South Riding, Virginia, December 25, 2024
God, erase my humiliation
about being stubbornly finite.
Remind me again
how all these limitations
can still be called blessed.
Blessed are my bleary eyes
and long naps.
Blessed are my scattered thoughts
and unfinished checklists.
May my mortality feel as beloved
as my efforts.
Because in all things,
I long to be yours.
— Kate Bowler and Jessica Richie, The Lives We Actually Have, p. 25
Photo: South Riding, Virginia, January 18, 2025
The feeder is empty again
and no one is claiming
that the birds are greedy
for taking what they pleased.
Look at how the fat, pink flowers
are weighing the end of each branch,
sucking nutrients into each velvet petal.
How selfish.
Nature hungers, takes, and needs.
God, why can’t I?
Blessed are we, learning to take
what we need.
Sleeping past our alarms.
Reaching for another helping.
Staying a little longer
when the evening is unwinding.
— Kate Bowler, Have a Beautiful, Terrible Day! Daily Meditations for the Ups, Downs, and In-Betweens, p. 19
Photo: Tree Swallow, South Riding, Virginia, May 21, 2024
The word is made known in the person. It cannot be contained to the pages of Scripture alone. It is embodied and incarnated. If the word is constricted to the pages, the gospel is neutered. As a Christian, I believe that God is made known in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. The Jewish teacher who took the actual words of scripture and said, “You have heard it said, but I say to you…” suggests that there is more to God than simply knowing the scriptures. The fullness of God is discerned in the reality of existence. The word of God is experienced.
— Trey Ferguson, Theologizin’ Bigger, p. 12
Photo: South Riding, Virginia, January 23, 2024
Remember, not everything has to be done. And not everything has to be done by you. May you find a small place for rest that is life-giving and fits what is available to you today.
— Kate Bowler and Jessica Richie, Good Enough, p. 58
Photo: South Riding, Virginia, January 5, 2024
I am certain that God will bless me, but I don’t need to know how. When we think we know exactly how the one who made us is going to take care of us, we’re apt to ignore the angel messengers sent us along the way.
— Madeleine L’Engle, Glimpses of Grace, p. 55
Photo: South Riding, Virginia, October 21, 2023
It was not just the rich young man who asked Jesus how to be saved. All sorts of people in the gospels got saved before Jesus died on the cross. When Jesus healed, they experienced salvus, God’s salvation. They followed him. Lives were changed, transformed. Disciples did give up riches and goods that they might inherit eternal life. Tax collectors abandoned their jobs and surrendered their social standing to eat with him. Children, slaves, soldiers, peasants, fishermen, farmers, prisoners, the sick, the blind, the lame — when they encountered Jesus, they found salvation, the wholeness, the healing, the oneness with God that had only been the stuff of longing. Every miracle, every act of hospitality, all the bread broken and wine served, everything that Jesus did saved people long before Rome arrested and murdered him.
It was all this loving and healing and saving that got him in trouble with authorities. He was not killed so his death would save people; he was killed because he was already saving them. He threatened a world based in fear, one held in the grip of Roman imperialism, by proving that a community could gather in love, set a table of plenty, and live in peace with a compassionate God. Jesus did at-one-ment long before being nailed to a cross. At-one-ment was the reason the authorities did away with him. No empire can stand if the people it oppresses figure out that reconciliation, love, liberation, and oneness hold more power than the sword. So Rome lynched Jesus: tortured him and hung him on a tree. That is the raw truth under all those sophisticated atonement theories.
Jesus was born a savior, and he saved during his lifetime. “Fear not!” “Peace on earth!” He did not wait around for thirty-three years and suddenly become a savior in an act of ruthless, bloody execution. Indeed, the death was senseless, stupid, shameful, evil. It meant little other than silence without the next act — resurrection — God’s final word that even the most brutal of empires cannot destroy salvus. This is no quid pro quo. Rather, Easter proclaims that God overcoes all oppression and injustice, even the murder of an innocent one. At-one-ment means just that. Through Jesus, all will be renewed, made whole, brought back into oneness, reunited with God. Salvation is not a transaction to get to heaven after death; rather it is an experience of love and beauty and of paradise here and now. No single metaphor, not even one of Paul’s, can truly describe this. We need a prism of stories to begin to understand the cross and a lifetime to experience it.
— Diana Butler Bass, Freeing Jesus, p. 96-98.
Photo: Dunluce Castle, Ireland, July 2001
Accept that you do not get to choose who loves you, who keeps their promises, who forgives. But you can choose to love, to keep your promises, to forgive. Choose well. Have — and live — your own say.
KEEP MOVING.
— Maggie Smith, Keep Moving, p. 93
Photo: South Riding, Virginia, August 31, 2021
Whatever you do, do it with love. If you can’t feel love in your heart, then go for kindness, respect, patience — or stay silent. As difficult as it is to comprehend — and I grant you, it is difficult if not impossible to believe — absolutely everything in our lives is a stage set up for love.
— Caroline Myss, Intimate Conversations with the Divine, p. 262