Christ Is Risen

Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.

Mary Magdalene came to the empty tomb and wept. She believed someone broke the sabbath and took his body away. Then she saw who she thought was a gardener, and asked if he knew what happened to the body of Jesus. Then she recognized him and cried out Rabboni, or “Teacher!”

The Magdalene is the apostle to the apostles, the first to carry the message of the risen, living Christ.

The empty tomb is not the end of the story; it is the beginning of ours.

The Life That Moves in Us

The Risen Christ, the Wild Christ, the One who transmuted hatred into forgiveness and death into life, is not out there waiting to be believed in. He is the living current already moving in us. The Cosmic Christ who is the seed of original blessing already planted, the viriditas already pressing toward the light.

Colossians 1:15-20
15. who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.
16. For by him all things were created, in the heavens and on the earth, things visible and things invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers; all things have been created through him, and for him.
17. He is before all things, and in him all things are held together.
18. He is the head of the body, the assembly, who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead; that in all things he might have the preeminence.
19. For all the fullness was pleased to dwell in him;
20. and through him to reconcile all things to himself, by him, whether things on the earth, or things in the heavens, having made peace through the blood of his cross.

In him is Life, the Light that shines into the darkness and the darkness could not overcome. What joy resides in the hearts of those who see the Cosmic Christ flowing through all things, making everything new, day by day, hour by hour. Such a sweet joy we celebrate in the One who is, the inner light that teaches us even to this very day, guiding us in love to all truth.

Our souls rejoice in the truth. The 13.8 billion year history of the cosmos and all the events that brought our world into being. We arose from this cosmos and revel in the glories of creation.

The Invitation

All that is asked of us is this: open our eyes to the world as it is, full of grace and of pain. Make room for what needs to die in us. Let what is new and alive in us grow. Then pour it out, freely, for the healing of the world.

This is the Way of the Risen Christ.

The Four Paths

Enter the joy of the risen Christ through delight in this world. This is the first path, the Via Positiva. Savor life and all the wonders it has to offer. Seek awe because the cosmos is full of wonder. Live in love and compassion so our lives may be full.

Dare the dark and mysteries it holds. This is the second path, the Via Negativa. Grieve, heal, open to the possibilities living beyond where words can reach. Never hold only to anything tightly. Living with an open hand is the way of Christ.

Create and live in compassion. This is the third path, the Via Creativa. Everything we do in this life is a creative act, from our conversations to our food to the stories we tell and the art we make. Creativity lives Christ into the world.

Change, transform the world, and celebrate. This is the fourth path, the Via Transformativa. Interfere with injustice and make the world a better place. This is the way of the Kin-dom.

Through the four paths, we enter into this life, dancing with the Wild Christ through the world.

Awake and Live

Awake! Christ is risen. Awaken to the inner light and follow the way to life. Just sit and quiet the mind. Do not grasp at the thoughts, but let them pass. Christ is in the mindfulness, the compassion, the equanimity.

Live in love, because compassionate love is how we live the way of Jesus. Christ does not act in anger and has no hatred. Christ is life and holds all the diversity of the cosmos together.

Be at peace. Christ is life not judge. Through the law of love and liberation he separates the sheep from the goats. We are not called to be judges or to be judgemental, but to love and bring liberation and healing to the world.

Awake! Live the risen Christ in the world.

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The Tomb Is Sealed

Christ is dead, the empire killed him in the worst possible way. Earlier in the week they shouted Hosanna, save us, as he entered into the city, and now he was dead.

Matthew 27:59-61
59. Joseph took the body, and wrapped it in a clean linen cloth,
60. and laid it in his own new tomb, which he had cut out in the rock, and he rolled a great stone against the door of the tomb, and departed.
61. Mary Magdalene was there, and the other Mary, sitting opposite the tomb.

Joseph of Arimathea cared for Jesus’ body and buried him. According to Eusebius, Arimathea is Ramah, the birthplace of the prophet Samuel. As Samuel anointed David to be king, Joseph is preparing Jesus for the grave.

Luke 23:55-56
55. The women, who had come with him out of Galilee, followed after, and saw the tomb, and how his body was laid.
56. They returned, and prepared spices and ointments. On the Sabbath they rested according to the commandment.

The Stillness of Hesychia

On the Sabbath they rested. The word used there is the root of the word hesychia, which is a powerful form of meditation. Hesychasm is a form of prayer in the Eastern Orthodox Church that focuses on inner stillness and repeating a short prayer, usually “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.” Practitioners sit quietly, breathe slowly, and gently bring their attention inward, letting distracting thoughts pass without engaging them. Over time, the prayer becomes constant within them, leading to a deep sense of peace and awareness of God’s presence. Hesychasm is important because it teaches that anyone can experience God directly through simple, focused prayer, not just through study or ritual.

While these women were not Hesychasts, the still, quiet reflection of Sabbath is the root of this practice, and one can only imagine the fear, pain, and terror they struggled with on that day.

God Is Dead, and We Have Killed Him

In our own day, we can say that God is dead, and we have killed him. As we have allowed the vital Presence of God to be transformed into the other, beyond us, granting his approval and blessing to every evil empire could conceive, the presence of God was lost and the idea of God is tarnished in the minds of so many.

On this day, we mourn not only the death of Christ, but the death of God in the world today. We pray with the Psalmist:

Psalms 88:3-6
3. For my soul is full of troubles. My life draws near to Sheol.
4. I am counted among those who go down into the pit. I am like a man who has no help,
5. set apart among the dead, like the slain who lie in the grave, whom you remember no more. They are cut off from your hand.
6. You have laid me in the lowest pit, in the darkest depths.

When everything collapses, there is time before the restoration starts. The way has to be cleared so the old can be removed so there is space for the new to be built. In that time, we feel lost, abandoned. If we do not surround ourselves with our community, we feel alone. Dread, the poison empire injects into us, seeps into our souls. At our best, we enter a time of grounded presence to prepare ourselves for the work ahead.

Cheap Grace and the Crucifixion We Repeat

God is not actually absent. The God who is only out there is dead. Trust in the message we have about God is dead. The cheap grace offered by the evangelical movement that offers membership in a club without asking people to live the transformed life we are called to that changes the world has killed God to many who believe they are faithful. To much of the world, the God proclaimed by empire is not only dead, but indistinguishable from the God we live.

As the Evangelicals make their God’s not dead movies, they continue to drive nails into the body of Christ by ignoring his message and the way he taught us to live in this world.

We have to sit like those disciples in hesychia, resting in the presence of God so we can live the love of God into the world so others will want to know the source of our strength, joy, and compassion. If we do not embrace the peace of the Sabbath and keep ourselves strong for the work, we are no good to ourselves and others and the grace of God will trickle into the world instead of being the flood we can make it.

It is in the silence of the Via Negativa that we make space for the new to grow in us and in the world. We cannot ignore the power of this path in our lives.

The Great Sabbath: Resistance and Renewal

Holy Saturday is the great Sabbath. It is a time to join in community, resisting dread through joy and celebration. Take time to sit in stillness and recharge in the ever-present Light of God. This is how we prepare ourselves to take action in the world, spreading joy, release, grace, and celebration in the world.

Even though we know how this story ends, this is a time for us to contemplate how God and Christ continue to be killed in the minds and hearts of others. It is a day to see the spirit of Antichrist that refuses to feed the hungry, give water to the thirsty, clothe the naked, take in the homeless, those who continue to oppress, crush, and divide others for their own power and wealth’s sake. We don’t need to pretend; we only have to read the headlines and see these things happening all around us.

Do Not Be Deceived, Do Not Be Divided, Do Not Despair

Don’t be deceived into believing imagined slights. Immigrants are not taking our jobs; the wealthy are extracting our wealth for themselves. No matter how many charities they start, they are performing benevolence to cover their sins.

Don’t be divided because people live or believe differently. Unity cannot exist in a group that is all the same. That is conformity, not unity. Real unity arises from bringing our diversity together in common cause to work together without requiring everyone to be the same.

Don’t fall victim to the dread they sow among us like so many weeds. Dread allows them to frack our souls so they can extract our labor, wealth, and compliance. Defeat despair with joy that remembers that when we are together, we can take care of one another.

The Sabbath Is for Us

We live life like a mutually interactive verb. We learn this from the Sabbath. If we take care of the Sabbath, the Sabbath will take care of us. The Sabbath is for us. It is a day dedicated to rest, renewal, and reconnection. We come together around the table to share our lives, one with another, so we can experience the wholeness we are called to live in the world.

The Sabbath is our heaven on earth where we welcome in the Shekhinah, the presence of God, to share our tables and lives so we don’t forget to do this every other day of the week. On Sabbath, we enact the kin-dom we spread through our thoughts, words, and deeds.

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The Weight of the Cross

A beaten man walks through the city streets carrying the weight of his own death on his shoulders. The cross drags on the ground behind him. Splinters from the wood dig into his whipped back. His followers dot the street, weeping at the sight of their messiah walking toward his death. Others gawk at the sight of another of their countrymen who has been tortured by the empire that oppressed them all.

The man Jesus falls under the weight of abuse, torment, and exhaustion. Three times he falls, until Simon of Cyrene, a man from modern-day Libya in Jerusalem for the Passover, takes up his cross and carries it the rest of the way to the place of the skull where Jesus will be crucified.

Jesus is nailed to the cross, and hung like a banner on the hill. A plaque is nailed over his head stating his crime in three languages, “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.”

The Full Rage and Power of Empire

At the crucifixion, the full rage and power of the empire rained down on Jesus. The three powers of empire are clear in this moment:

• the force of the military,

• the economic power of wealth and exploitation to give and take life, and

• the tools of propaganda to name truth as it sees fit.

Roman soldiers drove the nails through Jesus’ flesh, declaring that a message of love and mutual aid was not free from the empire’s extraction of life from the people, and the sign over his head provided the propagandistic lie that those who want to be free from empire will be deprived of life.

Empire needs people to believe these lies for it to exist. Without the fear of the military, they have nothing. The problem is there is a limit to how many people they can kill. The threat of violence instills compliance and collaboration with them. If they kill too many, there will not be enough people to exploit and extract wealth from. If enough of us reject this fear and refuse to comply and collaborate with empire, they cannot control us. We see this in the Roman Empire with the Germanic Tribes, the Parthian and Sassanian Persians, the Caledonians (Scotland), the Jews, and the Nubians.

When we reject the economic power of empire, we don’t participate in the alienation, exploitation, and extraction their system requires. Mutual care, support, and aid are at the heart of the Gospel and set people free from the power of the empire.

Once we accept the truth that everything was created in original blessing, grace is available to everyone at anytime, and that truth arises from living in right relationship with ourselves and the world, we immunize ourselves from their propaganda.

At the cross we see all three of these powers broken. Jesus lays down his life, the military cannot take it from him. He forgives them and doesn’t mine his own suffering to extract vengeance and reprisal from his followers. He defies their propaganda through his humility and grace on the cross which is the opposite of the self-righteousness and wielding of power of a king. He takes the evil Rome poured down on him and transmutes it into forgiveness, grace, and life.

Father, Forgive Them

As he hangs from the cross asphyxiating, his mother and two disciples holding vigil, he says many things. The most powerful is this:

Luke 23:34
34. Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing.” Dividing his garments among them, they cast lots.

“Father, release them from this, because they do not truly understand what they are in the process of doing.” They know what they have done, but they don’t grasp the true meaning and weight of the action. These soldiers and the others subject to the whims of the empire have been blinded to the reality of their actions. They are just serving the machinery of empire.

This phrase is the culmination of the non-violent message of the Gospel of the Kin-dom: pour out grace and healing from your life without repaying evil for evil so everyone can enter into the restorative power of God to restore this world to the wholeness of the great banquet on the holy mountain through the true fast of liberating the oppressed, healing the sick, and giving to the poor.

The sacrifice at the cross is not a sacrifice made to appease an angry God. This is not a human sacrifice to pay a cost. Jesus receives hatred and gives back love. He receives condemnation and gives back pardon. He receives death and gives life. This is not substitution; it is transmutation.

The cross is the transmuting forge that consumes sin and releases grace. The power of the cross is that it would release grace even if there was no sin.

The Edict of Divine Love

On that day, Christ was nailed to the cross as an edict of Divine Love proclaiming the grace and the Kin-dom of Heaven.

The proclamation begins with forgiveness (Luke 23:34). Radical mercy is released onto the world in the midst of suffering. Spiritual and material blindness prevents people from seeing the ramifications of our actions. They have fallen for the lie of empire the prophet decried: “Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil; who put darkness for light, and light for darkness; who put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter (Isaiah 5:20)!” Those raised in this upside-down world have an upside-down view of the world that needs to be turned right-side up.

Jesus then reveals the immediacy of grace (Luke 23:43). Grace wells up instantly when we turn from the wrong way back toward life. There is no delay for the individual, even if the community must take time to discern the transformation. The person who honestly changes receives grace in that very moment.

Christ entrusts his mother to the faithful because she is our mother as well since we are the body of Christ (John 19:26–27). Mary as the mother of Christ is the font of all grace, the heavenly Jerusalem who is free (Galatians 4:26). In our devotion to our Mother Mary, we learn the ways of grace and are formed into the image of Christ.

Jesus doesn’t deny the anguish of suffering and how it can make us feel forsaken by God (Matthew 27:46 cf Mark 15:34). This is a quote from the twenty second Psalm, a plea for the end of suffering and hostility, the tools of empire.

When Christ says, “I thirst (John 19:28),” he continues to acknowledge the suffering of his body and the identification of the Divine with our pain. The work of the Gospel is to give water to those who thirst, but the empire gives him vinegar. The empire will not slake thirst, only exacerbate it.

Then Jesus says, “It is finished (John 19:30).” The edict of the Living Word has been brought to its goal. All that Jesus had to do is complete, the work is accomplished. His whole life lead to this moment, now his work on earth is done.

Finally, he says, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit (Luke 23:46).” Again, he quotes the Psalms (Psalm 31:5). He surrenders his life unto death, trusting that God will catch him. This final act of surrender is in so many ways the simplest statement of the Gospel. We surrender our spirit to God trusting the Holy One will add to us all we require in life.

Take Up the Cross

Christ said:

Luke 9:21-23
21. But he warned them, and commanded them to tell this to no one,
22. saying, “The Son of Man must suffer many things, and be rejected by the elders, chief priests, and scribes, and be killed, and the third day be raised up.”
23. He said to all, “If anyone desires to come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.

If we are going to follow the way of Jesus, we have to set aside the lie of alienated and isolated individualism and become living channels of grace, pouring joy, release, healing, and restoration into the world. Like Jesus on the cross, we return good for evil, and do not participate in the tyranny of empire.

We are called by the cross to transform our lives and our communities to be built on love. This is not a call to lose ourselves in this work but to grow more fully into our true selves, liberated from the control and harm of the empire.

As the body of Christ our suffering is united to the cross so the old may die for the new to be born, and our joy is yoked to Christ so we may live life abundantly.

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The Table Where We Gather

On Thursday, Jesus and the disciples gather in the upper room to share a meal. He blesses the bread calling it his body broken to be sharable, like tearing many pieces from one loaf. He then blesses the cup and says, “This is my blood of the covenant, poured out on behalf of many, so that sins may be released and let go (Matthew 26:26–29; Mark 14:22–25; Luke 22:14–20).”

This is not an offer to eat the flesh and drink the blood of Jesus, it is a call to participation. We are called into the Divine life wear we are all one body with one blood flowing through us. This is the blood of the new covenant that makes us all kin.

The bread began as many grains worked together to become one loaf. That loaf is broken to share among the people. Those people through this partaking of the Eucharist become one body, consciously united in Christ.

The Presence That Forms Us

The Cosmic Christ is present in all things, but in the Eucharist, something special happens:

Matthew 18:20
20. For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am in the middle of them.”

This is Christ as a mutually interactive verb. When we act in alignment with Jesus aligned with his character and mission, we are Christ-ing. We are living Christ together. When we partake of the Eucharist together, we are living Christ for the sake of Christ. This is our communal point of pure interaction with Christ alone in community together. The real presence of Christ is within and among us, circulating through us as one body.

Christ is really present in that process, not just the object. The Real Presence is not only that Christ is in the bread, but that Christ is forming us into that same presence for the life of the world. Christ is present in the bread, in us, and between us. The Eucharist reveals and enacts that unity.

The Breaking That Reveals Life

This is not a breaking for sacrifice, so we can offer holy pain to an angry god. God is clear that such sacrifices are unpleasing. This breaking is the sacred offering that pours out the infinite life of God for the healing of the world.

The cross is not the hunger of God for blood, but the collision between divine love and a world shaped by fear. When the Word became flesh and walked among us, it did not mirror the violence of empire or the cold calculations of power. It healed, it fed, it restored, it told the truth. And for that, it was rejected.

On the cross, Christ does not retreat from the violence of the world but enters it fully. His life is poured out as an act of holy presence, not as payment. He will shine the light on the worst the empire can do without returning it. In that pouring out, he reveals and releases the lie that power is stronger than love. The grip of sin, of fear, of domination loosens.

In the Eucharist, we seek the real presence of Christ which is broken in the bread so the Light can shine brighter in us all. The bread is the Living Word that we chew over to find meaning. The cup is the Unbreakable Light that drives out the darkness. They are shared to remind us and to restore in us the Word and Light so we can grow into the Living Christ.

The Bread of Life We Become

This is why Jesus said:

John 6:35
35. Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will not be hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty.

Jesus said of himself: “I am the bread that came down from heaven (John 6:41, 51).” “I am the bread of life (John 6:48).” He is not just the bread we meet at the Holy Table, but the very bread of life. We meet him in all things at all times.

Therefore, we become what we receive. “I am the Bread” is not ego, it is participation.

When we join in this sacred union in the Eucharist, we live Christ, and say within, “I am the bread, shared so all may have life, liberation, and hope.”

Given for the Life of the World

We don’t participate in the Eucharist for a feeling, though we may have one. We are called to live this Eucharistic power into the world. The word Eucharist means “good grace” or “thanksgiving.” We could say that it means, “giving thanks for grace received.” It should be a font of joy and grace for our lives so we can live as fonts of joy and grace in the world.

In the Eucharist, we intentionally and directly participate in the graces offered by God in Christ. We can experience as the grace of nature in the community, the power of the ritual and the flavor of the bread. It may be the grace of illumination where we experience a revelation of the Divine Presence. Sometimes we receive the grace of forgiveness for some act we have done that we are repenting of.

Grace is not received to be hoarded. It is not spent in a single use. It is healing water that flows out. Now that we have received this grace, we act through, in, with, and by it in our daily lives.

In the Eucharist, Christ is really present not only in the bread, but in the body that gathers, in the breaking that transforms, and in the sharing that gives life. We do not merely receive Christ. We are drawn into him, formed into one body, until we can say with him, not as individuals but as a people, “I am the Bread,” given for the life of the world.

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The Woman Who Understood

In Bethany, at the home of Simon the leper, Jesus sits with the disciples. A woman enters. John identifies her as Mary of Bethany, the sister of Lazarus, but we don’t know her name. She clutches in her hands a jar of expensive and luxurious ointment. Did she look into Jesus’ eyes and hint at what she was going to do, or did she just do it? I like to think she smiled at Jesus as she walked around him, before breaking open the jar, and pouring it on his hair, anointing him and messaging it into his hair and scalp.

The disciples are outraged. The ointment could have been sold and the money given to the poor. “But Jesus said, ‘Leave her alone. Why do you trouble her? She has done a good work for me (Mark 14:6).’” He then explains that she understands what is happening in a way they don’t.

This story is found in Matthew 26:6-13 (cf Mark 14:3–9; John 12:1–8). Mary of Bethany is the disciple who sat at Jesus’ feet, listening and learning (Luke 10:38–42). Unlike the others, she understands Jesus has come to Jerusalem to die, and in this moment she is refusing to stay her action, but provides a moment of relief and joy for Jesus in the midst of the hardest week of his life.

This Mary brings celebration and joy into this very serious moment in a way the other disciples don’t understand. Joy is toxic to the imperial power of Babylon, and celebration while interfering with injustice confuses them. She is walking the way of Jesus, celebrating his life and anointing him, proclaiming him king, priest, and messiah through an embodied act of devotion and joy.

The Anointing and the Kin-dom

When the woman with the alabaster jar anoints Jesus’ head it shows vital principles of the kin-dom. In that one act, the woman’s anointing holds multiple meanings at once, she is proclaiming him:

• King: anointed on the head (1 Samuel 16),

• Priest: consecrated for sacrifice (Exodus 29),

• Sacrifice: prepared for burial,

• Guest: honored in love, and

• Messiah: revealed through action.

Matthew and Mark place it right before the Passion to make this clear: Jesus is being “anointed” not for a throne, but for a cross.

It reminds us that self-care, joy, and celebration break the power of Babylon and fuel the resistance.

Also, the anointing is the empowering presence of the Holy Spirit given to believers for ministry, witness, and holy living, often associated with a distinct experience called the baptism in the Holy Spirit.

The Anointing Promised to Us

This same anointing is promised to those who follow the way of Jesus. Jesus promises that the power of the Holy Spirit will come upon us (Acts 1:8), and we will witnesses in Christ to the whole world.

Acts 1:8
8. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you. You will be witnesses to me in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the uttermost parts of the earth.”

John explains to us how:

1 John 2:20, 27
20. You have an anointing from the Holy One, and you all have knowledge.

27. As for you, the anointing which you received from him remains in you, and you don’t need for anyone to teach you. But as his anointing teaches you concerning all things, and is true, and is no lie, and even as it taught you, you will remain in him.

Through this anointing, we will sit in the temple of our hearts like Mary of Bethany at the feet of Jesus, the Living Word within us. We learn from this inner Light. Just as God is a mutually interactive verb. God is not a force acting upon us from above or a presence we receive. God is a nature we participate in, a flow that moves in both directions at once, two subjects each becoming object for the other. This is the same relationship between Christ, the Anointed One and the Anointing. So the anointing is not just something done to Jesus. It is the same reality shared with those who follow him. It is presence, empowerment, indwelling.

Just as Mary of Bethany sat at the feet of Jesus, listening and learning so she understood the peace and ease he needed in the midst of this final act, we through meditation, prayer, and embodied action listen to the voice of the Living Word within us, never forgetting to bring joy, delight, and celebration to everything we do.

Joy as Sacred Protest

When we bring joy and celebration into moments of suffering and resistance, empire quakes. Imperial powers need people to be tired and filled with despair so they do not have the energy to rise up against them.

Joy breaks this power. Joy is a deep, steady sense of well-being and meaning that isn’t dependent on circumstances, but arises from connection, purpose, or love. Psychologically, it stabilizes us, broadens our thinking, and builds resilience, helping us recover from stress and stay open to life even in difficulty. This manner of healing is free to everyone and it erodes the power of empire over us.

Outrage cannot do this. Outrage is an intense emotional reaction of anger and shock in response to something perceived as deeply unjust, offensive, or wrong. That shock wears us down. Joy build us up.

Duty cannot do this. Duty is a sense of moral or social obligation to act in a certain way, regardless of personal preference. It has no connection and drives us forward even when we don’t have the energy to do go on. Joy connects us with our community and grows our sense of meaning and purpose.

Compassion alone cannot do this. Compassion is the awareness of another’s suffering paired with a genuine desire to help relieve it. If we don’t check compassion with something, it can fatigue us, because there is alway more suffering to discover. We cannot do everything all the time, and that can lead to a sense of helplessness. Joy relieves the pressure on us and allows ourselves a respite to recover and focus for the days to come.

Mary of Bethany gave Jesus just a moment of joy, and after he corrected the other disciples, he was able to recharge to continue the work ahead.

The Strength to Carry On

The work we are called to can be all consuming, and if we allow that to happen, we will burn out and not be able to continue in the work. Only when we take the time for joy, delight, and celebration even in the midst of the most important things we are doing, will we have the strength to carry on.

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The Eight Woes and Systemic Failure

Jesus declares the eight woes against the religious system of the day:

1. First Woe: They prevent others from entering the kingdom of heaven and don’t enter themselves (Matthew 23:13).

2. Second Woe: They take advantage of widows while pretending to be righteous through long prayers (Matthew 23:14).

3. Third Woe: They zealously make converts, but those converts become “twice as much a child of hell” (Matthew 23:15).

4. Fourth Woe: They create misleading distinctions about oaths, valuing gold over the temple itself (Matthew 23:16–22).

5. Fifth Woe: They tithe small herbs but neglect justice, mercy, and faithfulness (Matthew 23:23–24).

6. Sixth Woe: They appear righteous outwardly but are full of greed and self-indulgence within (Matthew 23:25–26).

7. Seventh Woe: They look beautiful outwardly but are inwardly full of death and impurity (Matthew 23:27–28).

8. Eighth Woe: They honor past prophets but are complicit in the same violence against God’s messengers (Matthew 23:29–36).

This is a stark litany of systemic failure. These systems, like everything in this cosmos, should operate in nature to cooperate to bring about a better world, sustaining the life within it.

Structural neglect is a tool of such systems to keep people compliant and subservient to them. Such systems, under the control of the fearful, the greedy, and the power hungry, extract wealth and the illusion of power from those within them so the few at the top can live in luxury.

The Judgment of Nations

Jesus revealed what his entire ministry has been about and the salvation he offers:

Matthew 25:31–33, 35–36, 40
31. “But when the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory.
32. Before him all the nations will be gathered, and he will separate them one from another, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.
33. He will set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left.

35. for I was hungry, and you gave me food to eat. I was thirsty, and you gave me drink. I was a stranger, and you took me in.

36. I was naked, and you clothed me. I was sick, and you visited me. I was in prison, and you came to me.’

40. “The King will answer them, ‘Most certainly I tell you, because you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’

In this vision of the Judgment in the last days, Jesus calls the nations, peoples, systems, cultures, and empires to him to be judged. Why are they called and not individuals?

Acts 10:34-35 (cf Deuteronomy 10:17; 2 Chronicles 19:7; Romans 2:11; Ephesians 6:9; Colossians 3:25; 1 Peter 1:17)
34. Peter opened his mouth and said, “Truly I perceive that God doesn’t show favoritism;
35. but in every nation he who fears him and works righteousness is acceptable to him.

Righteousness is right relationship, and it cannot be judged in isolation. When Peter says, “in every nation he who fears him and works righteousness is acceptable to him,” he is saying that those who take care of others are one of the sheep in a nation of goats. The judgement is on those who are not taking care of one another.

When we look at the deeds these nations are supposed to do, and see them lacking, or even their opposite, we have seen the face of Babylon. They are the enemy of life, and the bane of the earth. This is why they are cast out. Hell, as Jesus taught it, is the world created by these nations that punish and persecuted the people within them instead of taking care of them and liberating them.

The Least of These

When Jesus says, “least of these,” he is talking about not only the vulnerable, but the marginalized. We are to live in right relationship with those who have been pushed to the margins to where they are unseen by the majority. The sheep take care of everyone; the goats do not.

Jesus takes this one step further. When he says, “You did it to me,” this means these vulnerable and marginalized are Jesus. The Greek is clear, he says this is something real in itself, not just an idea, belief, or opinion about it. They are Jesus, and how we treat them is how we treat him.

For Jesus, his practice of right relationship, righteousness, is to identify with the vulnerable and the marginalized that there is no distinction between him and them. They are one and the same.

This is the nature of the world. The image of God is present in everyone, and the Cosmic Christ sustains and holds us all together, so our piety, true piety, is taking care of the poor, liberating the oppressed, healing the sick, and setting the captives free. To mistreat any of them is to mistreat Christ and God.

Instead the nations forge divisions so they can excuse harsh treatment and neglect of certain marginalized and vulnerable groups. If they can keep the eyes of the people focused on how much better they are treated compared to the ostracized, they can pretend to be benevolent. As a bonus they create a target for peoples anger and rage other than themselves.

Once we see through the benevolent mask of these systems, we escape the lies that sustain them. We can do the work of the kin-dom to bring them into the blessed life that should be available here and now.

The Salvation of the Kin-dom

Salvation is the liberating of people from hunger, thirst, illness, and oppression. It is not a personal salvation, because God does not show favoritism. It is our collective salvation from the systems that prevent the free flow of life in this world.

This is the interconnectedness we find through these actions, as well as our own healing through the mindfulness, compassion, and interbeing we cultivate within ourselves. We see Christ’s face in the faces of the vulnerable and the marginalized. The Oneness offered to us by Christ becomes real in our lives.

If we all did the work of the kin-dom, we would bring the glorious life of God here as it is in heaven.

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A Curious Story on the Road

There is a curious story about Jesus and the disciples that reveals something profound about life in the kin-dom:

Mark 11:12-14, 20-21
12. The next day, when they had come out from Bethany, he was hungry.
13. Seeing a fig tree afar off having leaves, he came to see if perhaps he might find anything on it. When he came to it, he found nothing but leaves, for it was not the season for figs.
14. Jesus told it, “May no one ever eat fruit from you again!” and his disciples heard it.

20. As they passed by in the morning, they saw the fig tree withered away from the roots.

21. Peter, remembering, said to him, “Rabbi, look! The fig tree which you cursed has withered away.”

Jesus was hungry, and he saw a fig tree. This fig tree had leaves, signaling that it had early figs growing on it. As a result, he expected to find figs, even though they were not in season. The tree bore no fruit, just leaves. It was all appearance, no substance. So Jesus curses the tree, “May no one ever eat fruit from you again!” When they passed by the tree again, it had withered from the roots.

This story bookends the cleansing of the temple when Jesus drove out the money changers, then taught the children and teaches the same lesson.

Leaves Without Fruit

So why did Jesus curse the fig tree?

For Jesus, life in the cosmos and the kin-dom is about living with integrity and taking care of others. It is a life rooted in love. The fig tree giving the appearance of having fruit when it does not is a powerful symbol of hypocrisy and deception.

Just like the temple he is about to enter, the appearance is good, but the right relationship, or righteousness, is not found within it. The fig tree and the temple bear no fruit. This deception pushed Jesus to reveal them for what they really are, dead wood offering no fruit.

If we are not taking the name of the Lord in vain, we are called to live the way of Christ, “that you may walk worthily of the Lord, to please him in all respects, bearing fruit in every good work, and increasing in the knowledge of God (Colossians 1:10);” which the moneychangers in the temple were not doing. Like the fig tree, they appeared to be fruitful, but bore no fruit.

To live “worthy” is to have those two sides correspond, match, or fit together. We are called to live in a way that fits the Lord, that reflects His weight, and alignment with who He is. We take care of the vulnerable, raise up the poor and oppressed, and reject the thrones of kings. If we do not do this, we will be revealed as dead fig trees with roots that never tap into the grace flowing through the cosmos.

The Anger of Love

The fig tree signaled fruitfulness when it was not in season and it had no fruit to bear. This is the kind of hypocrisy that fills the world. People make themselves appealing to look fruitful when they are empty.

Those who do this rush to perform rather than do the work. They believe the only thing that matters is appearance. Connecting to the deeper rhythms of life and grace is harder than seeking approval by pretending to do these things.

The person who does this is often the one who seeks an advantage over others because pretending they are more enlightened, have more access to God, and know things others don’t allows them to exercise an unjust authority over others.

As Jesus says elsewhere:

Matthew 23:27-28
27. “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitened tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but inwardly are full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness.
28. Even so you also outwardly appear righteous to men, but inwardly you are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.

Anger at this hypocrisy is the anger rooted in love. It drives out the falsehood, but does not engage in violence. We can see this in the aftermath of the cleansing of the temple:

Matthew 21:14-16
14. The blind and the lame came to him in the temple, and he healed them.
15. But when the chief priests and the scribes saw the wonderful things that he did, and the children who were crying in the temple and saying, “Hosanna to the son of David!” they were indignant,
16. and said to him, “Do you hear what these are saying?” Jesus said to them, “Yes. Did you never read, ‘Out of the mouth of babes and nursing babies you have perfected praise?’”

When Jesus cast out the moneychangers, those who needed healing did not flee, and the children were not afraid. He turned over tables and ran off those taking advantage of the people, he did not attack them. Immediately, he started healing, restoring the work of the temple.

When he “cursed” the fig tree, he unmasked it so everyone could see it for what it was. That revelation is powerful. It is how the anger of love restores sight, it does not break or divide.

The Withering of Illusion

Jesus reveals that the fig tree was already dead, while pretending to bear early fruit. This is the living death we live disconnected from the graces of nature, illumination, and forgiveness. The tree had roots, but they did not draw in the water from these sources.

This is the life that does not seek the rhythms of nature, the clear vision of the world as it is, and to live in right relationship with the cosmos. For a person, all they have to do is ask forgiveness and enter right relationship with life, no longer pretending they are something other than what they are. Like the fig tree, they are not corrupt by nature, but deceptive and hypocritical in action. Actions can change. Lives can change.

The fig tree is not a story about moral failing, but pretense and illusion. When someone realizes they are living cut off from life, isolated and alienated from the relationships that could bring them fully to life, they can see the path back to life.

Restore what was damaged. Make amends for the lies that were told. Enter into right relationship with God, neighbor, and each other. That right relationship is the love that cares for and takes care of one another called compassion.

The Return to Fruitfulness

It is important for us to seek out those places in our lives where we are all leaves and no fruit. Where are we pretending to be something other than ourselves. Right relationship requires honesty on all sides. We have to be honest with ourselves and with others. That honesty might be costly, but living a life with integrity is worth it.

Through teshuvah we turn and walk back to the path we are called to walk, not the path others put before us. Our path may be parallel to others, but it is our path not theirs. Do not pretend to be something other than you are to have favor in the sight of others. Our diversity is our strength. Refusal to accept it is our weakness.

Grace can always find a way. Hope is always ours to pick up. It is the harder path to bear fruit, but it is the path worth taking.

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The Cry for Salvation and the Kin-dom Within

The Procession into Jerusalem

The plans were made. The disciples returned from Jerusalem with everything Jesus asked for. Everything was in place.

Jesus rode on a donkey toward the gates of the city. His followers lined the way.

Matthew 21:9
9. The multitudes who went in front of him, and those who followed, kept shouting, “Hosanna to the son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!”

Palm fronds waved through the air, preparing his way into the Holy City. His time had come. Only a few days remained to prepare his disciples for what would come next.

“Hosanna,” they cried out. “Hoshi‘a na,” they pleaded. “Hoshi‘ah na ba-meromim,” which means, “Save us from the highest places.”

Their hearts pleaded for salvation.

What They Hoped For

They prayed for an end to Roman occupation and the end of days when God’s judgment would make everything right. They saw their king returning to Jerusalem to reclaim the throne of David.

They were wrong.

Jesus had not come to usurp power, but to reveal the kin-dom. Unfortunately for his followers, they were expecting something different. Even to this day, many who call on the name of Jesus are still waiting for an imperial savior who would never come.

The Tragedy of Misplaced Hope

When we put our hope in a conquering God or an earthly kingdom, we wait for that divine savior and do nothing to prevent the harm, stop the violence, or end the suffering of everyday life.

This misunderstanding does not just breed complacency and compliance, but enables those who have personal ambitions for power, since they can claim they are ushering in the conquest of God.

Awaiting conquest instead of seeking transformation keeps us caged in the circumstances we find ourselves in. We have to deny the Divine power to transform our hearts, our lives, our communities, and our world to bring hope, peace, and life to the here and now.

We rattle our chains, pretending they are trembles playing the sacred music of salvation instead of breaking them to free ourselves and others.

Apocalypse is an unveiling, not a cataclysm. A true apocalypse is learning to see the systems, the powers in high places that control the world and the means for breaking their control. Believing it is a literal end of days keeps us from waking up and seeing the world clearly, which allows those powers unopposed reign over us.

To seek a throne instead of a way is to seek a seat of collaboration with the systems that control the world rather than a way to find freedom and liberty for ourselves and for the world.

Salvation is liberation, “not (from) flesh and blood, but (from) the principalities, (from) the powers, (from) the world’s rulers of the darkness of this age, and (from) the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places (Ephesians 6:12).”

When we misplace our hope, we point our faith in the wrong direction, and we capitulate to the powers that seek to devour and destroy us.

The King Who Rides on a Donkey

Jesus enters into Jerusalem riding a donkey to fulfill prophecy:

Zechariah 9:9
9. Rejoice greatly, daughter of Zion! Shout, daughter of Jerusalem! Behold, your King comes to you! He is righteous, and having salvation; lowly, and riding on a donkey, even on a colt, the foal of a donkey.

This is an image of righteousness, victory, and humility.

His time has come to reveal himself as the Messiah, the Anointed One, the Son of Man. He does this intentionally, not by accident. He wants people to understand the role he is claiming.

Jesus is knowingly starting the countdown to his own death.

All he has left to do is to cleanse the temple (Isaiah 56:7; Jeremiah 7:11; Daniel 8:13–14; Malachi 3:1–3), after which there is only one thing left: to die.

The people see Jesus riding on a donkey proclaiming himself the Messiah as he enters into the city of Jerusalem. He knows he is carrying his cross into the city to deliver the last teachings he would give in the flesh.

Hosanna Reclaimed

Today, when we call out “Hoshi‘ah na ba-meromim,” we yearn for the visitation of Christ within us, and the guidance of the Living Word which guides us to salvation, leading us to The Way and offering us healing.

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The Fear of the Breaking Seed

It’s terrifying to lose control. So we build systems and little white lies and really big lies to give ourselves a constant sense of being in control of our lives. We don’t want to admit that they are all an illusion, even though deep down inside we know that’s exactly what they are. On any random day, the storm might come and take us. That’s a terrifying thought. If we’re not careful, we will give in to that fear and allow it to control us. Then we will pretend that its power over us is our power over the world itself. Its lies will blind us to the truth.

We are afraid of change. We are afraid of death. At the heart of it all, we are afraid of losing control. When we look at nature, we see that life emerges from these moments where control vanishes, when it ruptures and breaks open. Seeds die. Decay fertilizes the soil. Fires renew the land. The cosmos is wild. And we want to tame it.

A dog is our friend. A wolf is our predator. So we set out to domesticate the cosmos, believing that we are somehow able to control the infinite number of factors out there that lead to an infinite number of changes. It’s maddening, if we’re not careful.

We are afraid of emptiness because we believe that it means our own annihilation. Narcissists deny its very existence. Nihilists long to have it consume everything in the great nothingness they imagine. We are called to different paths.

Nothing stays the same forever. It sounds like a platitude to say that the only permanent thing in life is its impermanence. If I were to say that change is the only constant in our lives, many will say that I’m just spouting clichés. That doesn’t make it any less true.

If we could look past the foggy mirror and behold ourselves in reality as it really is, and see our true identity, it would be a marvelous and wonderful thing. Instead, we cover up our true appearance because we believe if this facade cracks, we will disappear forever.

In all these ways, we try to control reality, not understanding that we have to participate in it. Reality is what is, and we are only a part of it. That’s terrifying, to lose control of our lives and to understand how much of it is governed by random chance and circumstances that we have no ability to predict. But when we remember that our goal is to enter the flow of life and to dance with it, not to control it, not to govern it, but to enter that divine interrelationship with it, the nature of the world changes.

All things must pass away for the new to arise. That is the way of things. The way of nature. To fear change is to fear existence itself. That fear that haunts us so deep in our hearts arises from a misunderstanding of the cosmos and its most intimate functions. Once we learn to see things as they are, all of those things that once frightened us, we realize are our strengths. All of those ideas that struck terror inside us are the most beautiful facets of reality.

When our eyes are opened and we see clearly, we behold the endless forms most beautiful, ever spreading out through this cosmos, to an infinite web of change, growth, and evolution.

The Seed That Must Die

What is a seed? Seriously, stop and think for a minute. What is a seed? It grows on a plant. So is it part of the plant it grew on, or is it something separate and distinct? What happens when you plant the seed? It germinates, and a plant grows. But what happened to the seed? Where is that seed in the new plant? When did the seed stop being part of the plant it grew on? And when did the plant that grew from it stop being the seed?

While you’re contemplating that, think for a minute that Jesus compared us to seeds:

John 12:24-25
24. Most certainly I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains by itself alone. But if it dies, it bears much fruit.
25. He who loves his life will lose it. He who hates his life in this world will keep it to eternal life.

If a grain of wheat remains itself alone, it cannot bear fruit. It has to fall into the earth and die to bear fruit. It cannot hold on to its identity and pretend that it will always be a seed because if it does so, it is denying its life and its part that it plays in the unfolding of the cosmos. It has to open up. It has to give in and surrender to the purpose for which it was born. It has to trust that new life within it so much that it will sacrifice itself for that life to spring forth.

Then Jesus says: “Whoever clings to their life will lose it. Whoever releases their grip on life in this age will preserve it for life of the age to come.” When we, like that seed, let go of that identity of calling ourselves the seed and allow what is in us to flow forth into this world and surrender to that divine urge to bring about what is new and that needs to grow, we preserve our lives to eternal life. We weave ourselves into the infinite chain of cause and effect that is the nature of this cosmos.

The seed is an effect of the plant. The plant is an effect of the seed. The plant is the cause of the seed, and the seed is the cause of the plant. Where does one stop, and the other begin? At exactly what point in germination does the seed stop being the seed? When it breaks open, when the shoot comes out, when the roots go down?

If we do not let go of our illusion of separateness and engage in the dynamic interrelationships all around us, we are not engaging in life. If we are not participating in it, we cannot be surprised that we feel isolated and alone. The only way to be alive is to live. That might sound overly simplistic, but we tend to believe that just breathing, eating, sleeping, and going through every day is living. That’s just surviving. We erect walls and controls that prevent us from losing our illusion of control and deny ourselves participation in the vast weave of life. Then we go on to wonder why that life feels unsatisfying and hollow.

We cling so tightly to what is now that we deny ourselves what could be. Fear of change, of risk, of pain prevents us from actually engaging and participating in the world. When we do that, we die while we still walk the earth. We are shells of who we could be. Whitewashed tombs filled with old, dry bones. Just waiting to return to the soil.

We have to touch the earth, enter into its infinite processes, and become one with them, living our life and becoming truly alive.

Losing Life to Find It

This is why Jesus said:

Matthew 16:24-25
24. Then Jesus said to his disciples, “If anyone desires to come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.
25. For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, and whoever will lose his life for my sake will find it.

To say that more clearly: “If someone wants to walk the way behind me, let them renounce their old self, pick up the execution beam, and keep following me. Because the one who tries to preserve their life will lose it, but the one who loses their life because of me will discover it.”

Jesus is not teaching us to hate ourselves, but to renounce the allegiance many have to themselves first, before anyone else. When we center on ourselves we pretend that we are the center of the world, but we aren’t. There is no center to the world. The cosmos expands from every point within itself. We feel like we are the center because our minds are the core of how we perceive the world beyond our skin. We do not know what others are thinking or feeling, only what we are.

When we renounce ownership of ourselves, and enter right relationship with the world, we don’t disappear, we open ourselves up to how we affect others and become mindful of how we affect others. It isn’t an erasure of self, it is acknowledging the way life works.

Why do we take up the cross? Because the seeds who are still locked in their shells will see us opening up and fear their own opening. Fear reacts and makes us vulnerable because we have chosen to live rather than remain fossilized in our shell.

Those who seek to save their lives, remaining in their shells without roots and branches that connect them to the wider world, lose their lives because they embraced the illusion of separate self. None of us are separate. We are all interconnected. An unknowable number of causes brought us into this world, and our lives have an unknowable number of effects on the world. This is true whether we choose to acknowledge it or not.

When we embrace this understanding of life, we accept the nature of the cosmos as it is. Like the Buddha, we can see the interdependence of all things and how they are empty of separate self.

We have no separate self. To pretend otherwise is to suffocate the life within us. It is like imagining we can survive if we stop breathing, eating, and drinking. We have to enter the flow of life and learn how to live in right relationship, allow God to move through us, because none of this belongs to us. We are all a part of a seamless whole.

The Narrow Way

Matthew 7:13-14
13. “Enter in by the narrow gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and many are those who enter in by it.
14. How narrow is the gate, and restricted is the way that leads to life! Few are those who find it.

Enter now, decisively, through the narrow gate. Do not drift past it. Because the other gate is wide, and the road attached to it is spacious and easy to move along. It feels open, unconfined, and natural. That road is already carrying people along toward ruin, toward a wasted end, and there is a steady stream of people continually choosing to go in that way.

But the gate that leads to life is strikingly narrow, and the road beyond it is not merely tight but pressed in, shaped by pressure, hemmed in on all sides. It is a way that forms you as you walk it. And only a few are the ones who actually perceive it, who recognize it for what it is, and so find it at all.

The road that leads to destruction feels easy and broad, because all it asks from us is to stop questioning the way things are. It provides targets for our rage, and focuses for hate. It doesn’t ask for change, just obedience. It offers answers so no one has to work out the hard answers of life, they just keep moving, doing what they do, changing nothing. The wide road prevents growth by trampling the seedlings underfoot.

Through the broad gate, empire catalogues and extracts wealth, power, and agency from the people, and exercises its dominance over people by convincing them that their way is natural and easy. “This is just the way things are, there is no changing it.”

That way feels easy, because it allows people to go with the flow and not have to think for themselves. Self-actualization is hard, and requires people to work on themselves. It shows us parts of ourselves and our lives that we want and need to change. Change takes work, and the systems of Babylon that control the broad path keep people so busy they don’t have the time or the energy to do the work. When the need to survive is all we have, everything else feels like a burden. It is easier to go with the flow and stay within the crowd.

The narrow path is different. It asks us to help others, even when we are worried we don’t have enough. Together we have more than we need. Isolated, we are trapped in the struggle. The narrow path shows us that nonviolence is the only way to break their machines, which constricts our desire to strike and lash out. Compassion shows us that everyone is a victim of the system, even those who build it. We don’t want to have compassion for our oppressors. We want to hate them, but hate serves their interests, not ours. The narrow path calls us to the hard work of healing, when it feels so much easier to ignore the pain.

The wide gate is built on a worldview of extraction, alienation, and isolation. It says: “Take what you want. You are all that matters. No one understands you like you do. No one cares like you do. People just want to use you, so use them first.” It makes up lies about the “laws of the jungle” and “survival of the fittest.” It doesn’t know that cooperation is a basic component of nature and evolution. They want to define nature as struggle and war so they can justify the struggle and war they press into the world.

As they convince people to think this way, their systems of domination allow them to extract what they want from us. Driven by fear, greed, and lust for power, they spin their lies into the world to bend it to their will.

By comparison, the path of compassion is narrow because it asks us to set aside the lies of empire, and to heal ourselves and others. It presses on us to do the inner work before we reach out and do the work for others.

The Pruned Vine

Jesus said:

John 15:1-2

1. “I am the true vine, and my Father is the farmer.

2. Every branch in me that doesn’t bear fruit, he takes away. Every branch that bears fruit, he prunes, that it may bear more fruit.

The divine will not be contained in our tidy categories, will not be fixed like a stone or named like a possession. The Holy moves. It breathes. It cannot be held like a noun. God asks instead to be understood as be-ing, as verb, a living current flowing through and between all things.

Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi named the divine as a mutually interactive verb. Not a force acting upon us from above or a presence we receive. God is more like a sacred conversation, a current that moves in both directions at once, two subjects each becoming object for the other, each changed by the encounter.

When Jesus says, “I am the vine,” he reveals the nature of the sacred conversation itself. Christ is the living current through which the divine moves into the world, the green and growing edge where the Holy becomes touchable, nameable, and present among us.

God is the Gardener, who is not distant, but actively tending, bending close, with hands in the soil, removing what is drawing energy from the vine and not bearing fruit.

This is the mutually interactive verb as a garden. The vine does not grow apart from the Gardener’s attention, and the Gardener’s work has no meaning without the living vine. The pruning is not punishment. It is participation. It is the sacred conversation continuing, the co-arising pressing deeper into fruitfulness.

The vine grows the fruit of the Spirit:

Galatians 5:22-23
22. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faith,
23. gentleness, and self-control. Against such things there is no law.

The fruit of the Spirit are the qualities that grow in a person who is living in the Spirit: real love that seeks the good of others, a deep joy that is not easily shaken, a steady sense of peace, patience that holds through frustration, kindness in how we treat people, a commitment to doing what is right, loyalty we can be counted on, a gentle strength in how we act, and the ability to guide our own actions instead of being ruled by impulse.

When a branch distracts or works against the development of these fruit, it is pruned so the fruit can grow strong and good. If a branch does not bear fruit, it is cut away.

Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control sustain and maintain life. They are the antidote to the extraction, alienation, and isolation of the empire that infects the pruned branches. Those sustained by the fruit of the Spirit cannot participate in these things.

It can feel like loss to let go of the false levers of power and wealth the imperial systems offer. We can imagine we are giving up everything, even when we are not. We are walking a different path to the good life which is different from the path of servitude offered by empire.

The Labor of Birth

John 16:21
21. A woman, when she gives birth, has sorrow, because her time has come. But when she has delivered the child, she doesn’t remember the anguish any more, for the joy that a human being is born into the world.

When a woman is giving birth, she feels deep pain because the time has come. But once the child is born, she no longer holds on to that suffering, because her joy is so great that a new life has come into the world. It isn’t that she didn’t suffer, but the new life and her connection to her child overwhelm the moment.

Childbirth is the most powerful image for the dark night of the soul, because it shows us why that night feels so dark and painful. New life is struggling to be born. This is a dangerous time. Many things could go wrong, but that is why we do not enter the dark alone. We go as a community, with our friends, the saints, the angels, the spirits, the ancestors, and God.

The pain is real and remembered. The dark night of the soul is a spiritual passage where a person feels lost, empty, or cut off from meaning and connection, even from the divine. It is not a punishment but a deep process of transformation, where old comforts, identities, and illusions fall away. In this darkness, the soul is being refined and prepared for a more authentic and profound union with truth, love, and presence, even though it may not feel that way at the time. New life is being born.

In this time, we are not lost, empty, or cut off from meaning and connection, but we are unable to continue in the way we have been going, and have to change into something new.

What used to comfort us rings hollow. Our identity doesn’t fit anymore. We can see the world more clearly. We have to see ourselves as this new being, seek out what it finds comfort in, and dare to go out into the world as this new creature.

The seed must die for the vine to grow. Our old self is nailed to the cross with Jesus so our new self can live. The old ways that didn’t support us are pruned away. It can feel like death, because the caterpillar has to die for the butterfly to take wing.

While we will remember the pain, when the new life is born, joy washes over us, and we are made anew.

The Cosmic Rhythm of Transformation

The seed, the cross, the narrow gate, the pruned vine, and birth are all images of the Path of Release, path two, the Via Negativa. This is the place in the spiritual journey where we don’t just let go and let be, but we heal and recuperate.

Life is a repeated pattern of surrender, rupture, and transformation, because as we grow, our skin gets tight, and we need to enter the cocoon to change. This surrender is not obedience, but participation with the flow of life which is living God.

I use that phrase a lot, but don’t often stop to talk about it. I said we live God. I am not talking about a living God outside of us, but the God that is in all things, and all things are in God. This rooted participation with the Divine teaches us to live God into the world. When we look for God out there, we ignore the God within us and within all things. We buy into the imperial lie of separation that tells us that God is beyond us. No! God is here, now.

The cosmos itself is unfolding as the One Life, that is God, flows through all things. This is the way of nature; the way we are called to. This is the way of Jesus, to live in the flow of God to make the world an increasingly better place.

The Fear That Keeps the Seed Intact

It is fear that keeps us from growing, changing, and healing the world so everyone and everything is taken care of.

Fear of not having enough leads to greed. Fear of not being enough leads to lust for power. Fear of emptiness makes us hoard the flow and not share it as we should. Fear of impermanence causes us to hold everything so tightly we choke the life out of it. Fear of losing ourselves leads us to push people away and leads us into isolation and alienation.

Fear strangles life, while convincing people it is giving them an ordered life.

These things are frightening. Life is frightening, but if we are too afraid to live, we never will.

While we are in the shell, the seed feels safe. It can weather the storms, the floods, and the droughts. It locks us in with all we will need if we ever actually grow. Within the seed is all it needs to grow.

If we identify as the seed and believe it is who and what we are, all our possibility and potential stays locked within us. Babylon loves this. Seeds are easy to shuffle around and trade.

When we let the seed germinate, we have to break that hard exterior shell and free our tender shoots out into the world. If we stay a seed, we can stay safe and avoid that risk. If we never grow, we avoid danger until the day we die, and never reveal our gifts to the world.

Liberation Through the Breaking Seed

When the shell breaks, all that remains is us as we are. We reveal ourselves to the world as not the seed, but the life contained within it. While the shell may have made us feel safe, it constrains what is within the seed longing to sprout and grow in the world.

The shell walls us off from interconnection. When we break out, and send our roots deep down in the soil and reach our branches high, we participate in the great interconnectedness of the cosmos.

Life wants to flow, to participate with everything else in the great dance of life. When we let that life flow through us, we crack the shell. Participation in life brings love and love casts out fear.

As we grow in love, moving past fear, we unveil the world as it is. The cosmos is an interconnected web of life growing through mutual aid and support. Together we are stronger than anything that can stand against us.

Living in love teaches us to stop walling ourselves off, quaking with fear of what might happen to us in the world. In this cosmos, vigilance is important, but vigilance is not fear. It is mindfulness and watchfulness that learns to see clearly.

Instead, we reach out to one another and build community for the benefit of all within them and not just for a few. We live our lives honestly, growing into the work we are called to do in our hearts, healing one another, interfering with injustice, releasing what does not help us, creating joy and celebration to the best of our ability.

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The Myth of Holy Suffering

The Christian faith was forged in the fires of profound trauma. It began with the shock of the Crucifixion, a catastrophe Jesus’ followers could not initially comprehend, and matured under the iron heel of a Roman Empire that extracted life and wealth to feed its own prosperity. As the Empire eventually collapsed, leaving a void filled by greed, fear, and chaos. Many centuries later, the Black Death baptized the faith in terror again, as terror roamed the streets, sometimes killing off entire villages. After centuries of enduring such unrelenting agony, it is little wonder the religion that emerged became one obsessed with the holiness of suffering.

As the faith transitioned from the religion of Jesus to the religion about Jesus, many versions of the myth of holy suffering arose. In an attempt to follow Jesus, people chose a path of suffering, believing that they had to suffer like He did. Some embraced the path of martyrdom, turning themselves into monsters so that they would be killed by the Roman Empire like their Lord. Some mutilated and mortified their flesh so that they would be perceived by others as righteous. They stopped listening to the words of Jesus.

“Then John’s disciples came to him, saying, ‘Why do we and the Pharisees fast often, but your disciples don’t fast?’

Jesus said to them, ‘Can the friends of the bridegroom mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them? But the days will come when the bridegroom will be taken away from them, and then they will fast (Matthew 9:14–15; cf Mark 2:18–20; Luke 5:33–35).’”

Jesus was gone from them for three days, and then he returned. It is like the followers who came afterward forgot that: “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am in the middle of them (Matthew 18:20).”

They taught people that to suffer was to be like Jesus and was proof of their righteousness. Others said that suffering was God’s punishment for sin. Eventually, this would evolve into the idea that suffering is necessary for us to achieve spiritual growth. None of this is a part of the way of Jesus.

When we misunderstand what Paul said, “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and fill up on my part that which is lacking of the afflictions of Christ in my flesh for his body’s sake, which is the assembly (Colossians 1:24),” we are united in Christ as his body. Our suffering is his suffering, but we should not seek to inflict more wounds in Jesus.

If Jesus is the bridegroom and we are his companions, we should not suffer while he is with us, and he has promised that he will always be with us so long as two or more are gathered in his name. This is the awe that we discover in the world, living with the One who is in it, holding it all together.

The spiritual life that we are called to is to savor this world, to taste and see that the Lord is good (Psalm 34:8), and to celebrate what we have here and to create new reasons to celebrate by relieving injustice and alleviating suffering.

Jesus calls us into a shared life, a life of companionship where we work together, holding each other up and helping each other through our burdens. This is the way we are to live. It is why the yoke that he offers us is light, and why we must lose our lives to find it, because we are living for all of us to make all of our lives better.

That is not a life of self-denial. It is a life of mutual support. The way of Jesus is a path of liberation and freedom. Alone we can only do a little, but together we can do great and wondrous things. Together we can liberate not just ourselves, but those around us, and make this world a better place.

The early church had to misunderstand this so that it could support the Roman Empire that was supporting it. Over time, as it bowed the knee to empire after empire after empire, eventually creating its own empires, it had to maintain that power structure so it could be great and wealthy. In all that work and all that time, it denied the very calling that Jesus had placed upon us. It blinded itself so that it could not see the work it was called to do.

The Brokenness Not Yet Healed by Compassion

The Buddha teaches us that suffering arises from attachment and aversion. We either hold on to something so tightly that we cause ourselves misery, or we try to run from something so hard that we burn ourselves out and cause suffering. Suffering, he taught, is the basic dissatisfaction of the world because nothing is permanent. That impermanence is the heart of all suffering.

The greedy, the power-hungry, and the fearful create empires for themselves and inflict injustice and suffering onto people because their cravings can never be satisfied. Whatever it is the greedy wish to hoard, they will never have enough to satisfy themselves. They will always want more and will go to stronger and more violent ends to gain that which they crave.

When someone is hungry for power, it is rooted in a sense of their own inadequacy. They feel like hoarding power over others, holding other people’s lives in their hands will prove to themselves that they are worthy of living. No amount of suffering inflicted on the world, no amount of control, will ever satisfy the power hungry. There is nothing that the fearful can do to make themselves feel safe other than to relinquish their fear and to find ways to cope with it. No wall can be too thick or too high. No weapon will mollify their terror.

Whatever we seek to have to end our suffering may work for a short time, but it will never last if the root causes of those hungers are not dealt with. This is why suffering spreads throughout the world as people commit injustice upon injustice, to build empires for themselves so that they can consume endlessly in an attempt to satiate a craving that can never be satisfied. Much of the suffering that Jesus sought to heal came from this source.

Others suffer because of illness or disability, and Jesus sought to heal them too. The deep suffering that arises from these places is still associated with attachment and aversion as people want to flee their illness or disability or attach themselves to it and claim it as an identity.

No matter the cause of the suffering, at its root, it all has one true cause. It is a brokenness not yet healed by compassion. In time, medicine will find a cure for what ails us, but it requires money and time. The greedy hoard that money and keep it from going to the works of compassion that could bring healing. The fearful blame those who are afflicted and prevent that money from flowing, and thus compassion is again blocked. The power-hungry cannot conceive of themselves suffering like those that they deem wretched, and so they block that compassion as well.

Suffering is to be healed, and compassion is the tool that will heal it as we learn how to relieve and prevent all the causes of suffering. Until that day comes disease and disability will bring suffering to many. This persists because the greedy, the fearful, and the power-hungry have dammed the wellsprings of compassion. They manipulate the systems of this world to ensure that the riches meant for collective healing are instead hoarded by a few, leaving the many to languish in avoidable pain.

Jesus came to relieve suffering and to bring compassion into this world so that we could be free. He did not come so that we would mortify ourselves through fasting and suffering to become more righteous.

As we grow in our faith, we develop eyes to see and ears to hear, and we know the fast that we are called to and the true meaning of suffering.

Eyes to See and Ears to Hear

If we are going to follow Jesus in the way that he opened for us, we have to clarify our vision so that we can see. Jesus puts a lot of emphasis on sight and the eyes because this is how we perceive the world. If we do not see the world as it is and as it could be, we are living in a distortion that will cause both us and others harm.

In Luke 11:34, Jesus tells us that when our eyes are good, our whole body is full of light. When we perceive the world correctly as it is, we see the wonder and awe present in all things. We perceive the Spirit of God moving, animating all within it. We take in this awe and we savor it. And the light within us grows stronger, and we become beacons shining out to the world, reminding it of its own goodness and original blessing.

As this light shines within us, it feeds the tree of life growing within us that breaks up the hard soil of our hearts so that the waters of grace can flow from us. In this way, we restore the world and bring healing first to ourselves and then to others.

But if our eyes are evil, and they see the world filtered through our fear, greed, and lust for power, then we only see the world as danger and things that we can exploit and extract for our own benefit. That distortion in our vision brings much suffering and pain to ourselves and to the world because we are trying to fill a craving that cannot be satisfied by collecting, hoarding, and consuming.

Some have called this a God-shaped vacuum within us, that is not exactly the right way to perceive it. It is a life-shaped vacuum, and while yes, God is life, in fact, God is the One Life flowing through all things, what we are sensing is our own alienation from that life: that we are not living life abundantly. In our separation, one from another, under the cruel and extractive empires that rule over us, we blind ourselves to the world as it is and engage in the systems of empire to give ourselves strength and means to survive. We fill ourselves full of darkness because darkness is all around us, but we are called to be light, to shine into that darkness knowing that darkness cannot overcome the light.

When Jesus said, “Having eyes, don’t you see? Having ears, don’t you hear (Mark 8:18)?” this is what he is talking about: the spiritual eyes of our soul that allow us to perceive the glory of God in all things. We lose our ability to see and perceive the awe in the sunrise and sunset, and the glory of the stars at night. We stop savoring our food, putting rules in place that define what good food should be, and punishing ourselves if it doesn’t live up to those standards, even when we do not find any bodily pleasure in them.

When we deny the body, we are committing the sins of the spirit. The Spirit is not more holy or more pure, for all that was created was made in original blessing and is good. When we have eyes that don’t see and ears that do not hear, we are blocking ourselves from perceiving and engaging in the joys of this world that bring healing, hope, love, and community to us all.

The great joy of this life is learning to perceive all that there is to savor, and learning to live in right relationship with everything so that we are not hoarding, extracting, or exploiting those things for our own personal gain. True joy should never harm the self or another, it is not joy but a form of cruelty that does this. As we learn to clear our sight, we begin to perceive the world as it is, full of wonders graciously calling us to participate with them.

Matthew 7:3-5

3. Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but don’t consider the beam that is in your own eye?

4. Or how will you tell your brother, ‘Let me remove the speck from your eye;’ and behold, the beam is in your own eye?

5. You hypocrite! First remove the beam out of your own eye, and then you can see clearly to remove the speck out of your brother’s eye.

Jesus warns us against the zealotry of calling out other people’s imperfections and sins before we deal with our own. We often project our insecurities, fears, and inadequacies on others so that we can blame them and distract others from what we ourselves are doing, thinking, or longing for. We cannot restore the sight of others so long as our own sight is impaired. When we cannot see clearly, we will poke their eyes out so that they will be as blind as we are.

This is the truest of all hypocrisies: calling out the sins of others while participating in them ourselves. Oh, how easy it is to see others having walked off the path when we are there amongst them in the same place, so far away from the path.

True righteousness is living in right relationship with ourselves, with God, with each other, and with the world. Casting judgment on others breaks that relationship and prevents us from doing the work that we are called to do.

Our job is to learn how to see clearly, and to see what is causing the suffering and pain in ourselves and deal with the systems that are causing those pains and suffering. As Paul said, “For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against rulers, against authorities, against the powers of this dark world, and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.(Ephesians 6:12)” These are the systems of cruelty, injustice, and suffering that keep us from experiencing life abundantly.

Once we learn this lesson, we will hear Jesus say, “But blessed are your eyes, for they see; and your ears, for they hear (Matthew 13:16).”

The Prophetic Vision of Healing

It is popular in the traditions I grew up in to invoke the wrath of God without looking to see what that wrath looks like. In Isaiah 35:4–6, God sends a message to those with a hurried heart. He tells them to be strong and not afraid, God is coming “with Justice, God’s repayment (Isaiah 35:4).” What is this justice and repayment?

“Then the eyes of the blind will be opened, and the ears of the deaf will be unstopped. Then the lame man will leap like a deer, and the tongue of the mute will sing; for waters will break out in the wilderness, and streams in the desert (Isaiah 35:5-6).”

Oh! It is healing. God’s justice is the healing and restoration of people and nature. Jeremiah 30:17 also promises this healing. The judgment of God is on the brokenness of the world and those who insist on breaking it. God does not break the world further. God heals and restores it.

This misunderstanding of the wrath of God comes from a rejection of one of the strongest messages that God ever gave us: that He does not want the sacrifices of the temple. We do not have to cause suffering or suffer ourselves to appease God. Jesus did not have to suffer and die to appease God.

“For I desire mercy, and not sacrifice; and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings (Hosea 6:6).”

The sacrifice of Christ is that He laid down His life because no one could take it from Him. He suffered as we suffer. He participated directly as an agent of the divine in the suffering that humanity faces under empire.

When the Church willfully rejects the words in Hebrews 9:22-26 to mean that blood is the cost for remission of sins, it shrouds the true meaning of the text. It tells us that in the Law, blood sacrifices are listed for every kind of sin, but in the heavenly temple, Jesus must offer something better, because if blood were required he would have to return to the earth and repeatedly die to continue to pay for the sins of the world.

Instead, he offers something greater, mercy, as it is revealed in Hosea 6:6. “For judgment is without mercy to the one who has shown no mercy. Mercy triumphs over judgment (James 2:13).” Jesus brings mercy, not judgement, which is what God wants more than sacrifice. At the cross, Christ offered mercy: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing (Luke 23:34).”

In this way, Jesus lives what God demands from us:

“He has shown you, O man, what is good. What does Yahweh require of you, but to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God (Micah 6:8)?”

God does not seek or revel in suffering. God desires mercy, justice, and healing.

The True Fast

Isaiah 58:6-7

6. “Isn’t this the fast that I have chosen: to release the bonds of wickedness, to undo the straps of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and that you break every yoke?

7. Isn’t it to distribute your bread to the hungry, and that you bring the poor who are cast out to your house? When you see the naked, that you cover him; and that you not hide yourself from your own flesh?

God reveals what it means to truly fast. And if our eyes are open and our ears can hear even a little bit, we can see the mercy that fasting is called to be. Fasting is not the denial of food and water to the body. It is the release of the bonds of wickedness, breaking the bands that tie people down, freeing the oppressed, and breaking every yoke of bondage to distribute food to the hungry and to bring the poor home.

This is the mission that Christ said he came into this world to fulfill. It is how Jesus himself defines the gospel. The gospel itself is the true and great fast. Every Lent, when we enter the Great Lenten Fast, this is the work we are supposed to remind ourselves to do.

Are we practicing Teshuvah and Tikkun to release the bonds of wickedness? Have we interfered with injustice to undo the bands of the yoke and to let the oppressed go free? What are we doing to break every chain that holds people down so that liberty and freedom can flow freely in the world? Have we ensured that the hungry are fed and that the poor are taken care of? This is the work that we are called to. The greatest Lenten fast, the true fast that God requires of us.

Why is it a fast? Because it may require us to have just a little bit less or for the wealthy to have a lot less. The prosperity and abundance of the world has to be shared amongst all its inhabitants. As Jesus said to the rich young man, he needed to sell all that he had and give it to the poor if he wanted to enter the kin-dom of heaven. This is the fast we are called to.

“Everyone to whom much was given, of him much will be required, and from the one to whom much was entrusted, even more will be demanded (Luke 12:48).”

This is why we need to have eyes to see and ears to hear. Because when our eyes are clouded and our ears are clogged with the desire for wealth, power, or security, we cannot hear the cries of the vulnerable, the chained, and those who need to be freed. The hungry cannot be seen by the one who has too much.

This is the fast. We are called to commemorate each Lent, to remember and to ask ourselves where we have done well and what more needs to be done to keep us focused on the true work of the gospel.

Once we realize the work that we are actually called to, we learn why fasting has been mistaught for centuries. When the church bowed the knee to empire, as it does continuously, it cannot now speak out against the injustices done by empire: the colonization, the extraction, the exploitation of others. It has to sanctify these actions and make them holy. And so it transforms the true fast that we are called to into a false fast where we colonize ourselves and put false and foreign ideas into our body, extracting pain and suffering and exploiting that suffering for holiness and righteousness.

Compassion is the truest spiritual discipline and the heart of everything that we are called to do. The more we see that, the more we realize that dismantling systems of injustice is in and of itself a form of worship. It is the Great Fast we are called to by the Divine, by the prophets, and by the teachings of Jesus himself.

True acts of devotion relieve suffering. It could be suffering for ourselves or for others, but it always has to have an eye outward, even when we ourselves require that healing. Healing is never for ourselves alone, but for the body of Christ itself, so that all of its faculties may be strong, so that the healing and restoration in this world are possible.

Jesus Rejects Punitive Theology

But those who do not know God, because God is love, will say, “but God sends judgment down on people so that they are punished for their sins.” Jesus rejected these arguments, and we should too.

In John 9:1–3, When Jesus and his disciples encountered a man who was blind from birth, the disciples asked him, “whose sin caused the blindness: this man’s or his parents?” We will ignore for now how this question carries an understanding that this man had a previous life before he was born and just look at how Jesus answered the question.

Jesus said it was not the fault of the man who was born blind nor his parents, but that these things just happen. They just happen. They just happen. Some people are born with an affliction. It is not because of their sin or their parents’ sin or the sins of their lineage. Suffering is not brought unto children because of the wrath of God.

We have already established and seen how God does not want suffering. God wants mercy. So, Jesus says that this particular man was born blind so that Jesus could heal him. To me, this is simply applying causality to the works of compassion. This man was not born without sight simply so a miracle could happen but as an agent in this world of healing and restoration. When Jesus met someone who had no sight, Jesus healed them to bring about that full restoration.

This is the work that we are called to do, to bring healing wherever we go, and whenever we see suffering, to heal it.

In Luke 13:1–5, Jesus is asked about the victims of the Tower of Siloam, which collapsed and crushed many under its weight. Why did it fall? Was it because they were sinful? Again, Jesus rejects this idea that suffering and pain are brought about because of the sins of the people.

God causes the rain to fall on the wicked and the just alike. He does not pick those who should suffer and have pain because it is the desire of God that everyone should be restored and brought back into true relationship with themselves, with God, and with everyone else.

This idea that bad things happen to bad people is an instinctive response to tragedy and suffering, but it has no root in the tradition. It is the distorting lens that grows over our eyes to try to understand why bad things happen, because we find it very hard to accept that sometimes random chance can bring about disastrous outcomes.

We want to believe in a God that controls everything in the cosmos, thus giving everything that happens meaning and purpose. But if God controlled everything that happens, then we do not have free will. We are merely puppets. All of our bad actions are not our own; they were directed by God. Therefore, no one could be blamed for doing something wrong, harmful, or wicked. That is not the world we live in. We live in a world of free will where we can choose what happens. And the result of that free will is that some things just happen by random chance.

It is a wicked heart that would wish the cosmos to be enslaved to the will of another so that suffering would disappear because a new suffering would be born. That bondage would strip people of their ability to feel joy, because everything would be scripted for them. Their lives would be hollow, unable to bring meaning or purpose to them. That emptiness is a hell I do not want to live in.

In Ezekiel 18:23, God asks this question:

“Have I any pleasure in the death of the wicked?”

A few verses later, in Ezekiel 18:32, he answers it: “I have no pleasure in the death of him who dies.” It always boggles my mind how those who believe that Scripture is inerrant and contains all truth would deny the very words of God, saying that He takes no pleasure in the death of anyone who dies.

Well, I don’t see the scriptures as inerrant, and I do not believe that all truth is contained within them. They are the voice of the tradition of those who encountered God before us, that help us to walk this path with them. No. The divine does not revel in the suffering and death of others. I don’t know how that could be stated more clearly.

When a follower of Christ sees suffering, they should see their Lord on the cross. Their immediate instinct should be to bring Him down, to free Him, to heal Him. Suffering is not divine judgment. Suffering is the summons to compassion. It is the role of those who walk the way of the cosmic Christ to bring healing and restoration wherever they go, and through whatever means they have available to them, whether that is financing it, studying, creating new medicines, creating new technologies, organizing the community, or just bringing therapy and guidance.

The goal of our spiritual work is to bring life more abundantly. We do that through liberating people from the chains that bind them, the suffering that holds them down, and the lies that imprison them in their own minds. This is the work of the cross. Our work in this world

Compassion, Dignity, and What Makes Us Human

When Jesus heals people in the Gospels, He is restoring to them their place in the community and their personal dignity. When we see someone suffering, often we think we are offering them compassion, but what we are offering them is pity. Pity is the evil twin of compassion. It is a sorrow and a looking down on those who suffer. “Oh, poor you, to suffer like this.” Compassion, on the other hand, jumps down into the trenches with them and helps to lift them up. Compassion literally means to work, to sojourn, to suffer together.

Jesus always begins by restoring dignity to the person and welcoming them back into the beloved community. His healing is a revelation that compassion is the deepest law of reality. As John says, “God is love, and those who do not know love do not know God.” All three commandments that Jesus gave are laws about love, about compassion, that we are to take care of one another and to have the same devotion one to another that we have to the Divine.

The vulnerable will always be with us, and impermanence will always be a mark of life. But we are not to give in to cruelty, abandoning those who suffer and creating systems of injustice that do them further harm. We are called to heal, to do compassion. That work is essential; it is the proof that we are followers of Christ and that we are part of living God.

One of the markers of our genus is that we take care of one another. We have found Neanderthal skeletons and human skeletons that show so much damage and healing, meaning that the community around them kept them alive and nursed them back to health. Our care and compassion for one another are one of the marks that make us human. We don’t limit this care and compassion just to our own species. Ancient dogs have been found that suffered terrible diseases that they would not have survived if they had not been cared for by the humans they lived with. That care and concern for one another have helped our species to survive so many natural calamities and changes in this world. When we reject it, we are rejecting something very basic about what makes us human.

When we fail to see suffering as it is, we blind ourselves to the many systems that we create that are unjust to those who are suffering. We blind ourselves to our ableism and perpetuate harm, even when that is not our intent. Every person deserves dignity because they exist. Not because they suffer, not because they have done something that culturally we have deemed makes them great. There are no great people, there are only people.

The lie that people must be worthy or deserving of dignity is a foul system that benefits only a few. Those who create the rules by which dignity and worth are doled out define themselves as the ones who should be the center of our worship and devotion, so that they can hoard power and wealth to themselves and comfort themselves that they are not the ones that are unworthy or lacking in dignity. The fear at the heart of their existence brings pain and suffering to the masses who follow them.

Anytime we hear someone say they deserve what they got, we need to ask ourselves who benefits from those people’s suffering. All too often, you will find someone who is benefiting financially. They’re benefiting in their status rising, or they are stealing something from those people to aggrandize themselves and increase their own wealth.

We must be careful not to fall prey to these false lenses that distort reality and prevent us from doing the work that makes us truly human, either to our fellow humans or to anything in nature. such actions are a betrayal not only of the divine, but of the very earthiness that makes us who we are.

For followers of Jesus, compassion means doing the work necessary to bring about healing. We build systems of mercy to combat the systems of injustice in this world. We organize our communities, we heal those that we can heal. We take care of the vulnerable and through doing all of that, we combat injustice. It is our prophetic work to interfere with injustice wherever we see it.

The Great Fast of Lent

So, my siblings, sisters and brothers, let us take on the great fast, the true fast, the one that God called us to in Isaiah, not just in Lent, but all year round. May it be our lives, work, and the glory of our souls. Amen.

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The Three Thirsts

In the Lenten season, we are called to Teshuvah and Tikkun, to return back to ourselves and to prepare for Holy Week. It is a time for us to look inward and to ask what needs to change. Where have we stepped off the path and how can we return to it?

The answer, as always, is grace. It is the grace offered by the Cosmic Christ at each moment, as He reveals Himself through nature. As He opens our eyes to see our true selves and the true nature of the world, and as He offers a continual wellspring of forgiveness and mercy, because mercy triumphs over judgment.

The world is thirsty. Humanity suffers from three kinds of thirst: our thirst for the Spirit, our thirst for water, and our thirst for justice. These three thirsts appear again and again in the story of Scripture and in the lives of human beings. They are the spiritual thirst of humanity longing for God, the earthly thirst of bodies and ecosystems needing water, and the justice thirst that arises whenever systems hoard life instead of letting it flow.

In the Gospel of John we encounter these three thirsts in the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well.

The Land of Joseph

In John 4:5–30, Jesus is in Samaria, in a land that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Joseph is the patriarch who helped not only his family survive a great famine, but the entire nation of Egypt. It is not a coincidence that his name appears here. Joseph exhibited the three thirsts that are common to all of us: our thirst for the Spirit, our thirst for water, and our thirst for justice.

Joseph’s thirst for the spirit led him into the life of a prophet, where he could interpret the dreams of kings, foresee calamities, and how to get through them. His thirst for water helped him to understand how to prepare for the great famine that was coming on the land so that the people could survive. His thirst for justice arises again and again through the trials and tribulations: with Potiphar’s wife, the challenge of him interpreting the Pharaoh’s dream, and how he would deal with his brothers who sold him into slavery.

The invocation of Joseph’s name sets the scene for what we are about to see unfold.

We are also told that there is a well that Jacob built here. It is noon and Jesus is tired from his journey, and so he sits down by the well.

The Woman at the Well

A Samaritan woman comes to the well to draw water. The Samaritans were the most hated people in the region. They had broken away from Judah after the return from exile. They worshipped their god on Mount Gerizim instead of in Jerusalem. They even had their own Torah and laws of Moses. Nehemiah erected walls to separate them from the rest of the people, and that enmity survived centuries down to that day.

The disciples had left to go get food in the city, and Jesus sees this Samaritan woman drawing water and asks her to give him a drink. She was shocked that he even talked to her because Jews did not have dealings with Samaritans. They ignored them as unclean. Yet here was Jesus asking her to give Him water.

“Jesus answered her, ‘If you knew the gift of God, and who it is who says to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.’” (John 4:10)

Jesus is revealing his ministry to her in a way he hasn’t to many others. He reveals this to a Samaritan woman: he is the source of living water, which is grace.

She doesn’t understand. Her life is mired in the struggles of day-to-day life. When she notices that he has nothing to draw water from this deep well, she asks him where this living water is from and if he is greater than father Jacob.

Jesus responds that just drinking water leads to thirst. Imbibing grace satisfies thirst and causes a well to flow within the soul. These waters of grace lead to eternal life.

She asks for this water, and Jesus tells her to get her husband. He reveals that he knows she has been married five times, and now is just living with a man she is not married to.

At this point she realizes he is a prophet, and Jesus reveals that the day is coming when people will not worship on Gerizim or Jerusalem. True worshipers of the Father will worship in spirit and truth.

“God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth (John 4:24).”

The woman realizes that he is the messiah, the disciples return, and the woman brings people to hear Jesus teach.

Jesus gives the Living Word to those with eyes to see and ears to hear so the well of the three graces can spring forth in the soul.

The Wells of Scripture

It is vital that we understand the meaning of the well.

Isaac met Rebekah at a well (Genesis 24). The relationship between Isaac and Rebekah in Genesis shows the power of grace and the gospel because their union begins not with achievement or worthiness but with generous hospitality and divine initiative. Rebekah’s freely given kindness at the well reveals a heart open to grace, while Isaac receives her as a gift that brings comfort and new life after loss. Their meeting shows that the covenant continues through compassion rather than power or status, reflecting the same pattern in the gospel proclaimed by Jesus Christ, where God’s life flows toward humanity through generosity, welcome, and relationship rather than through merit or control.

Jacob meets Rachel at a well (Genesis 29). Rachel is a symbol of the grief and compassion that stand at the heart of the gospel. Remembered from Genesis as the beloved matriarch who died giving life to her son, she later appears in the prophetic image of a mother weeping for her children, a passage echoed in Matthew when the infants of Bethlehem are killed under Herod the Great. In this way Rachel represents all who suffer under violence, exile, and empire, refusing shallow comfort so that the pain of the world is not ignored. Her voice prepares the ground for the ministry of Jesus Christ, whose message centers on God’s presence among the grieving, the oppressed, and the forgotten. Rachel symbolizes the compassionate heart that the gospel calls people to embody: a refusal to deny suffering, a willingness to mourn with those who mourn, and a persistent hope that God remains with humanity even in its darkest moments.

Moses meets Zipporah at a well (Exodus 2). The relationship between Moses and Zipporah in the Exodus reveals grace and the gospel because it begins when Moses is a fugitive who has fled violence and failure, yet he is received with hospitality after defending Zipporah and her sisters at the well. Zipporah, a Midianite outsider to Israel, becomes the partner who shelters and sustains Moses during the years when his calling quietly grows, showing that God’s life and purpose emerge through unexpected relationships and beyond ethnic or religious boundaries. Their union reflects the gospel pattern where grace meets people in exile, welcomes the outsider, and forms new community not through status or purity but through compassion, refuge, and shared life.

In our story we see Jesus meeting an unnamed Samaritan woman at the well. In the pattern of Scripture, meeting at a well invokes the memory of Rebekah, Rachel, and Zipporah. She symbolizes the Bride of Christ, the Church, that has broken many covenants and now lives an unsheltered life until she receives the living word and the grace of God at the well.

She came to the well at noon because she had to wait until those who would judge her had collected their water for the day so she could go to the well without judgment. What she finds is grace.

The Thirst of Christ

In the Gospel, Jesus is the first to say he is thirsty, because he hungers and thirsts for righteousness. This is dryness we feel when we enter the parched land of Mitzrayim, the narrow place: the desire to heal the dry land. Under the heat of the noontime sun of judgment, the pressure of the dry air and the dry land draws the moisture out. The graces of nature, illumination, and forgiveness have been dammed. Christ can sense this and wants to bring healing to the land.

Jesus asks her for water because he hungers and thirsts for righteousness, which is right relationship, and by the nature of their births they did not live in right relationship. He has to heal the divide between them before he can offer her the living word.

Jesus thirsts for reconciliation. The woman thirsts for grace.

It is not until they find common ground in the truth that God is worshipped in spirit and truth, not in temples made by human hands, that he can offer her the living waters.

Grace as Living Water

Grace appears as water because it is as essential to the soul as water is for the body. It is said we can live for three minutes without air, three days without water, and three weeks without food. While it is an oversimplification, it drives the point home. We have to be alive or none of this matters. That is the air. We have to be ensouled and embodied. Next we need grace, or we cannot live.

Without the grace of nature, our bodies and souls grow weak. We find the grace of nature in the sun, the moon, and the stars. It is in the food we eat and the relationships we have. This is the grace that arises from living life: laughter among friends, singing, dancing, pondering the deep things of life, and all the simple joys of life.

Without the grace of illumination, our heart and soul grows cold. We find the grace of illumination in moments of epiphany, the revelation of love between friends and intimates. It is the grace that shows us our true face and the deep relationships that underpin the world.

Without the grace of forgiveness, our hearts and actions become hardened and harsh. We find the grace of forgiveness by learning to first forgive ourselves, then others, and to accept the forgiveness of others and God. Forgiveness is releasing the burden of holding the actions of others in a way that cuts us off from living our own lives.

At the well, as Jesus offers the three graces to the Samaritan woman, the ground breaks within her so the waters of life can flow. This river flows from the roots of the tree of life which breaks up the soil and clears the way. As she accepts the three graces, the seed of the tree of life, which is the seed of the image of God in all things, germinates, grows, and opens the soil so the spring can rise up and flow.

As Jesus said:

“The water that I will give him will become in him a well of water springing up to eternal life.” (John 4:14)

The grace we receive waters the land and restores the tree to life. Now the rivers of the water of life flow from us and through us. Grace, freely given, restores and replicates it in the recipient. It is the great underground river seeking passage to the surface to heal the land and the people there.

This is why the Christian faith begins with an understanding that God is love and whoever does not know love does not know God. God overflows with grace, so we can know the rejection of God by the rejection of grace. God does not and cannot abandon any of us.

As the prophets remind us:

“For my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the spring of living waters, and cut out cisterns for themselves: broken cisterns that can’t hold water (Jeremiah 2:13).”

“Hear, heavens, and listen, earth; for Yahweh has spoken: ‘I have nourished and brought up children and they have rebelled against me. The ox knows his owner, and the donkey his master’s crib; but Israel doesn’t know. My people don’t consider.’ Ah sinful nation, a people loaded with iniquity, offspring of evildoers, children who deal corruptly! They have forsaken Yahweh. They have despised the Holy One of Israel. They are estranged and backward (Isaiah 1:2-4).”

We can turn away and enter Mitzrayim and Babylon, yet God is always there with us.

Living in the Three Graces

If we learn to live in grace, the living waters will heal the dry land. It will change everything about how we live in the world. Grace changes us and helps us to see the world clearly.

As we learn to live the Grace of Nature, we will heal our relationships with one another. We stop seeing people, creatures, plants, and the world itself as objects required to yield economic value to matter. Real value rises from the relationships they sustain. We need clean water and healthy land to live. This is where our water and food come from. This is value that cannot be extracted; it must be cultivated. If we do not enter into right relationships with the land and the watersheds, we kill them and ourselves.

The Grace of Nature has no room for hierarchy and toxicity. If we favor one person or group above another, we poison the well and life cannot thrive there. Nature teaches us the intricate webs of relationships that maintain and sustain the world and the parts that we must play in them. This grace erases the sins of separateness and original sin, revealing that we are created in original blessing and united in the One Life.

Through the Grace of Illumination, we learn to see ourselves and the world as they truly are. We are created in the image of the Living God (zel Elohim) and live in a world that is in and of itself the image of the Almighty (zel Shaddai). God is revealed in everything and everyone if we choose to see it. It opens our eyes to the glory of the Holy One shining through all things.

Once we embrace the Grace of Forgiveness, we know that all of us can wander away from our true nature, but we can return at any time. The Good Shepherd seeks the one lost sheep from among the ninety-nine. No one should be left in the wilderness, lost and alone. We are stronger together and meant to live in right relationship one with another.

The Grace of Forgiveness releases us from the tyranny of judgment.

“For judgment is without mercy to him who has shown no mercy. Mercy triumphs over judgment (James 2:13).”

Mercy is the heart of forgiveness and the wellspring of justice.

The Waters of Justice

Once we learn to live in the three graces, we heal the land as the prophet says:

“Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream (Amos 5:24).”

In grace, the waters of life flow through the world and bring with them justice and right relationship.

The Imperial Church has always tried to wall off mercy and to keep it to itself, making it the only place where we can receive grace. Without judgment, their hierarchy cannot control us. They lied to us and told us that we were born in original sin so that they could continually bring judgment down on us for everything in our lives.

That judgment is abrogated by the power of Christ, whose mercy is available to all, for all. All that we have to do is return to our true selves and follow him.

Preparing for Holy Week

The way of Jesus is not about bowing or bending a knee to any person, place, or thing. The way of Jesus is about how we live in right relationship, one to another.

Like those invited to the wedding feast, we make sure that we have brought the oil that we need so that our lamps may glow throughout the night until it is time to enter (Matthew 25:1-13). Like the faithful servant, we take our talents and invest them in the growth of the kin-dom, in healing the sick, restoring sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, healing the crushed, visiting the imprisoned, and proclaiming the acceptable day of the Lord (Matthew 25:14-30; Luke 19:11-27).

The way of Christ is the way of mercy and the way of grace.

If we are not exhibiting the three graces in our lives, then we are not bearing the fruit of the Tree of Life. This is how we can see where Christ is and where Christ is moving. Where there is judgment, there is no grace.

Grace is revealed at a great cost to ourselves. We have to forgive. We have to live in right relationship. We have to exhibit mercy to ourselves and others. But this work is made easy because we do not do it alone.

As we make our way to Holy Week, we are preparing ourselves to take on the mantle of Christ as his body so that we may continue his work in this world.

A Word About Coherence

My friend and teacher Penny Andrews introduced me to one of the most powerful images for the spiritual life. We are all building, living in, and seeking islands of coherence. Coherence is the quality of elements fitting together in a clear, logical, and consistent way so that the whole makes sense rather than feeling scattered or contradictory. We seek coherence without even knowing we are doing it. When we feel like the world makes little sense, we are feeling a lack of coherence.

What I have learned is that most acts of spirituality are acts of coherence. When we take action in a way that helps the elements of our lives fit together, either by making cosmology visibly present in our lives, bringing more integrity to how we think, act, and engage with each other or society, or engage with Spirit honestly, we are performing acts of coherence. Whether it is a water communion, a healing circle, meditating and praying together, marching together, processing, or making ritual, pilgrimage, or vigil, we are grounding our actions in coherence.

When Jesus takes the apostles to Mount Tabor, he, as Living Word and Light, reveals the nature of reality in an act of coherence that repairs the world. Since we are called to be salt and light, and to speak the Living Words of Wisdom and Knowledge, it is important for us to develop this kind of tikkun in our lives.

The Mountain of Revelation

In the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus takes Peter, James, and John up Mount Tabor to pray. There Moses and Elijah appear, and a voice makes a proclamation about Jesus. The details in these three accounts differ in interesting ways. This event is called the Transfiguration because in this moment, the disciples see Jesus transfigured in his glory. While there are many ways to read these stories, I want to look at them through the lens of tikkun, holy sparks are being raised, and fractures are being repaired.

The Transfiguration on Mount Tabor is a revelation of the Kin-dom in a visual and visceral way. Three disciples are gathered. Jesus is literally with them. The veil is pulled back, the disciples experience an apocalyptic moment of revelation. They behold the Glory of God and the cloud of concealment. The great reparation of this moment is the revelation of the unseen kin-dom.

Each of the Gospel writers use this story to repair the fractures they are facing in their communities. The power is that the unseen glory is holding all of these tensions together and showing how they are false from the perspective of the revelation. They are healed when our eyes are cleansed to see the world as it is.

As we are going through Lent, this story reminds us of our unity in the One Life. The same light from Mount Tabor is the light in us now, and we can still learn from this inward light.

Raising Holy Sparks and the Work of Tikkun

In the teachings of the Ari, Isaac Luria, the world is not broken because matter is evil, but because divine light became scattered and hidden within creation. He described this through the image of shattered vessels, fragments of holy light trapped in ordinary things, in human struggle, even in our mistakes. To “raise the holy sparks” means to live in a way that frees that hidden light. Every act of justice, compassion, creativity, and mindful presence becomes a repair of the world. This resonates deeply. Creation is original blessing, yet it is unfinished. We participate with the Holy not by escaping the world, but by engaging in it. Every loving action reveals the sacred already shimmering within matter. When I read the stories of the Transfiguration, I see many fractures being healed and sparks being raised.

The Fracture Between Law and Prophets

The easiest fracture to see in these stories is between the law and the prophets. There are a lot of contradictions between the Law and the prophets, but in the ministry of Jesus, this is highlighted for all of his followers. He softens some laws, reinterprets others, reorders how his followers understood their obligations under the law. Jesus declares himself Lord of the Sabbath (Matthew 12:8; Mark 2:28; Luke 6:5). All three stories show us Jesus at the heart of the movement with Moses and Elijah on either side of him. It shows the heart of the Way, Jesus is at the center and the law and prophets are interpreted through him.

The Fracture Between Matter and Glory

The next fracture we see restored is between matter and glory. In Mark 9:2-8, he focuses on the materiality of the moment. Jesus’ clothing glistens white like snow, brighter than any launderer could whiten them. No bleach could make them so white. For Mark, the glory is revealed through the cloth. Matter contains holiness. His story ends in a powerful, clear way:

“A cloud came, overshadowing them, and a voice came out of the cloud, ‘This is my beloved Son. Listen to him (Mark 9:7).’” Once they hear the voice they see nothing but Jesus. The glory is in the fabric, our attention is oriented to Jesus, and he is all that remains.

Here, matter and glory are rejoined to each other in the teachings of Jesus. We heal this fracture by listening to him.

The Fracture Between Fear and Trust

The fracture between fear and trust is the constant struggle for authority. In Matthew 17:1-8, the writer spotlights this problem. On the mountain, the clothes do more than glisten. Jesus’ face shines like the sun and his clothes like light. Jesus is the source of this glory, and the disciples are afraid they are going to do something wrong. Peter, takes the lead and starts babbling in hopes of receiving clarity about what to do. In Matthew’s version, the voice from the cloud interrupts Peter, and the disciples fall on their faces afraid. Jesus has to get up and tell them not to be afraid. At that moment, the vision ends.

Fear is embraced by trust through the living word of Jesus. The moment is healed. Don’t be afraid, worrying what should and should not be done. This is not a time for ceremony, pomp and circumstance. The point was to be in the moment and live in the light and cloud. Fear can only get in the way.

The Fracture Between Human and Divine

The early way also struggled with the fracture between human and divine. In Luke 9:28-36, Jesus, Moses, and Elijah appear in glory. A cloud overshadows them. Only Luke tells us what they are talking about. Their conversing about the Exodus of Jesus. This puts Jesus in the life of Moses through the means of Elijah. As Moses lead the Hebrews out of bondage in Egypt, Jesus is leading people out of the world into the kin-dom of God which is not of this world. Importantly, Luke is the only gospel that tells us the disciples entered the cloud. They partook of the glory because they participated in the kin-dom. This restored the fracture between the human and the divine.

All three versions show the fracture within the disciples’ own psyches. They are afraid, in awe, and nervous, but in all three stories they were invited into the holy moment. These stories show us how we participate in the divine and are whole in ourselves and in our groups. We are one in the kin-dom.

The Cloud of Concealment and the Glory of Mystery

The dark cloud is where God dwells. “Yahweh has said that he would dwell in the thick darkness (1 Kings 8:12; 2 Chronicles 6:1).” The people marveled at the thick cloud when it descended on Mount Sinai (Exodus 20:21), so we see it again here on Mount Tabor. “Clouds and darkness are around him. Righteousness and justice are the foundation of his throne (Psalm 97:2).”

This is why we enter into mystery to seek the light. “It is the glory of God to conceal a thing, but the glory of kings is to search out a matter (Proverbs 25:2).” The Glory reveals, but the cloud conceals the mystery and allures us to seek out answers for ourselves so we grow in the spirit.

The Inward Light

We commune with and learn from the inward light by turning our attention toward the presence of God within, trusting that Christ enlightens every person from the inside out (John 1:9). As we quiet ourselves and listen, the Spirit teaches and reminds us of what is true (John 14:26), guiding us into deeper truth over time (John 16:13).

This inward witness is not self-generated wisdom but God’s Spirit testifying within our own spirit (Romans 8:16). We test what we receive against love, since walking in the light is inseparable from loving one another (1 John 1:7), so that the light within forms us into people who reflect the Light of the world (John 8:12).

Love as the Core Action of the Way

Love is the core action of the Way. When we say that God is a verb, the primary verb we use to understand the life of God is love. Love takes no object. Only two subjects can love one another.

“The closest we can come to thinking about God is as a process rather than a being. We can think of it as ‘be-ing,’ as verb rather than noun…Most of our verbs are considered transitive, which require a direct object, or intransitive, which do not. (Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi) suggests that God-ing is a mutually interactive verb, one which entails an interdependency between two subjects, each being the object for the other (Rabbi David A. Cooper, God is a Verb, 69).”

Love seeks coherence, because it seeks to build and perfect the understanding of the interdependency between these two subjects. Love helps us to name the subjects and the mutual interactivity between them.

Revelation, Vocation, and Descent

We cannot determine whether the Transfiguration changed the world or unveiled it. We cannot step outside the story to inspect its inner workings. What we can do is descend the mountain and live as if what was revealed there is the truest thing about reality. Whether the world was healed in that moment or our vision was healed, the vocation is the same: act as though glory, not fracture, is fundamental.

Jesus and the disciples climbed Mount Tabor where the Kin-dom of Heaven was revealed, only to descend to continue the walk to the cross. The endless work of love is to pour out our love and life through creativity into the world to keep it green, healthy, and growing. We do not march to our death. Jesus did not march to his death, but he knew it was an inevitability. Rome killed anyone they found who was truly alive. Life does not bow to empire and refuses to live in cages and chains. At some point, Rome would come for him, and he knew that.

Once we experience the inward light, we are no longer conformed to the whims and will of empire, and are prepared for a life in the kin-dom. This is how we learn to perceive the hidden coherence already present in the world.

Let Your Light Shine

Jesus said:

“You are the light of the world. A city located on a hill can’t be hidden. Neither do you light a lamp and put it under a measuring basket, but on a stand; and it shines to all who are in the house. Even so, let your light shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father who is in heaven (Matthew 5:14-16).”

We commune with the inner light to keep our light strong. We raise holy sparks to keep the light shining in the world. We tend our sanctuaries and refuges so we bring the kin-dom on earth.

Jacob’s Ladder and the Holy Mountain

The Transfiguration is a revelation of hidden coherence in matter calling us together as bearers of that coherence so we can learn to ascend and descend the holy mountain like the angels on Jacob’s ladder.

So remember that we are all called into the cloud to behold the glory where our clothes will shimmer like the snow and our faces will shine like the sun. We are luminous beings like Jesus, because we are one in Christ and God. In silence, meditation, and prayer, we enter the inner cloud and seek the light, so our light might shine into the world to bring healing and restoration.

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A Praise Psalm of the Wild Christ

Behold the wild Christ no wall can hold, no throne oppress, no crown control.  
In him is freedom, the hope that cannot be chained or burdened.  
See the Christ as he dances in the wind.  
He plays in the branches of the trees and runs free through the streets.  
The wild Christ twirls through the borders, refusing to be contained.  
Hear his laughter in the sunrise and his joy in the flowers.  
Delight in his wonder in the field and celebrate his glory in the stars.  
He is the beating heart of all creation, who holds all in his eternal embrace.  
Run with him, arm in arm, through shadow and light, into glory of life everlasting.

He is the flicker of the candle struggling against the wind to burn.  
Christ falls to his knees in the bloody snow as hate pours out on the earth.  
He cries out with the wounded, and flips the tables in the temple, but doesn’t frighten the children.  
He is the stone that breaks the wave.  
He is the cave that shelters and the storm that rages.  
The rain of Christ nourishes the earth and fosters life.  
Christ’s breath is the wind that blows away the dead limbs and topples the overgrowth.  
His flames renew the land and free the seeds from their captivity.  
The wild Christ lives with the world, in the breath of all living.

The wild Christ is the flame that enlivens the heart, burning away fear, shame, and guilt.  
The ember of this flame is always with us, longing for the tinder to ignite.  
Once lit, this sacred heart scorches despair and devours cruelty to ashes.  
This is the heat of the sun on the sand and the rush of the waves on the shore.  
He grounds us in the life of the world and opens us to the blessings of all creation.  
His grace steadies us and loosens the ties that bind so we fly with the wings of the wind.  
Christ awakens us to the rhythm of Earth and calls us to the dance of life.  
In him, we recognize the image of God in everything we meet.  
He empowers us to stand with each other, in patience to restore life to the dry land.  
In Christ, we grow like a branch of the vine in the green wisdom and power, truly alive.

Let us courageously dance with the wild Christ, who guides like a cloud by day and a star by night.  
He shelters all under his cloud of unknowing, and shows the way through gentle encouragement.  
Together we dip our hands into the soils of life, tending the wounds, the land, and the fragile hopes of ourselves and others.  
We share our bread at the great banquet on the Holy Mountain with all.  
We wander with the wild Christ the world tending to the needs of all.  
In him, we protect this world and all within it with the waters of grace available everywhere at all times.  
Together, we graft ourselves into the vine of life.  
We all grow together, ever greening, into a healthy world, ever improving without end.

Blessed be the wild Christ, breathing through the soul of the world.  
In you, we find stillness and the courage to dance with life.  
As your great sun dawns over the world, life flourishes.  
We sing your praises with the stars and birds above and the earth with all her wonders.  
In your embrace, we rest in your glory, revive in your strength, and restore in your grace.  
Teach us to live with your wild freedom, so the world may be renewed and joy fill life.

Lent and the Discomfort of the Wasteland

Lent is an uncomfortable season for those of us who practice Creation Spirituality. It should not be, because it is the season of the Via Negativa and the Via Transformativa, where these two great paths join together to help us find our way in this world. That does not mean that the other paths are absent, but they play a smaller role here, as we learn to release and let go, to transform and to celebrate in this time of deep meditation.

Many of us want to stop practicing Lent. The world is full of so much suffering. Why should we take a period of every year to focus on it and to meditate on death and letting go? Because so many in the past have turned this into a season of guilt and shame, we have lost our way in the wasteland and no longer see the glory of God within it.

The world is full of suffering. In Creation Spirituality, we learn to let go, let be, and to let pain be pain. That does not mean that we accept that the pains of the world are necessary or that they need to be. Some can be changed, transformed, or prevented altogether. This is the great interplay between Path 2 and Path 4. In Path 2, we accept what is, and learn to accept what we cannot change. In Path 4, we take action to prevent harm and to bring the change that needs to be made. We cannot learn this powerful art if we keep ourselves out of the wasteland.

The Sacred Wasteland and the Driven-Back Greening

The wasteland is dry and has lost its greenness. It has been constricted and brought into the narrow place. Brambles cover the paths. Detritus clogs the rivers and the streams. The land is choked by what has not been let go and what has not been transformed. It cannot be renewed and refreshed until we enter into those dark places and find what needs to be changed.

We want the wasteland to be holy, it is already holy, but its holiness is unseen. This sacred wasteland is the land of the soul, the community, the culture, and the land when it is dominated by Mitzrayim and the greening Viriditas has been driven back. Driven back is a key phrase. It is still there, but has moved underground in the unseen places, waiting to blossom forth with new growth. Even in the narrow place of Mitzrayim, the wasteland is sacred, because life, truth, justice, and love abandon no one and no thing.

Only when we enter the wasteland and realize that the wild Christ is dancing even here can we find the courage and the strength to do what must be done to restore life to the land. Because it is not gone. It lies sleeping, deep underground, waiting to be reawaken.

How the Green Land Became Mitzrayim

How did the lush green field become this dry, parched wasteland? Colonizers came and planted trees that drank too much water. They were not native to the land. They did not understand that they were taking too much. The colonizers did not care. They wanted their own comfort, their own ease. They wanted to increase their power and glory and show how much they could change the world on their own without cooperating with it. They denied the grace flowing in the rivers and carried on the winds, and built walls to keep others out. After all, they colonized this land, and anyone else who entered would surely colonize them as well. That fear bred mistrust, and so they hardened their hold on the land.

And so the once verdant field became the dry land, the narrow place, Mitzrayim. As the trees and the cities died because they could not sustain themselves in the land, they did not tear them down, they did not pull them out. They planted more, and they collected what they had. It was theirs and they would not let it go. Since the water found it hard to pass under their wall, they used these dead logs to dam the river so that what little trickle could get through, they could collect and save for themselves and deny to those on the other side of their walls.

They extracted all they could from the once living soil. When others saw the meagerness of the crops brought in, they pointed to them and said, “This is your shame. You are responsible for this. You did not tend this land as well as you could. We brought you shelter and protection and guarded you from all that would break in to steal, kill, and destroy.”

They cast their guilt on others, and in time they accepted it and claimed it as their own. They did not live in the palaces because they did not deserve to. They did not work hard enough, long enough. They did not give of their blood, sweat, and tears enough to earn, to be worthy of the glory of those who lived in the great houses.

All the while, the ground grew drier, the air staler. The masters of the house said, “Some have snuck in amongst you and they have robbed you of your glory. Hate them, despise them, tear them down, and you will have all that your heart desires.”

They turned the minds of the people from the basic needs of life, away from what they had taken from the land and those who live upon it. They stoked hatred and fear, and the hearts of the people grew cold.

This is how the verdant earth became the dry land of Mitzrayim, the narrow place that forgot how to live.

The wasteland is our holy land driven into dryness and brittleness by the colonizing powers of the power hungry, fearful, and greedy. This is our land. It has always been holy. It will always be sacred. It is time to drive out the colonizers so the land will grow green again.

The Wild Christ in the Wasteland

Throughout all of the anger, extraction, and rage, the wild Christ never stopped dancing through the land. Every sacrilege to the earth is a lash across his back. Every indignity is a slap across his face. He does not abandon his people, and everyone is his people.

As Paul says, “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and fill up on my part that which is lacking of the afflictions of Christ in my flesh for his body’s sake, which is the assembly” (Colossians 1:24), or to say that more clearly, “I am taking my turn in the sufferings that still remain, the sufferings experienced by Christ’s people because they are his.” These sufferings are the continuation of the passion of Christ. He suffers with the suffering. As Jesus says of the King of Glory on the Day of Judgment, “The King will answer them, ‘Most certainly I tell you, because you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me’” (Matthew 25:40).

Since the wild Christ is not contained by their walls, but is present in everyone and everything, whatever harm or blessing is done to anyone is done to Christ. Woe to those who abuse Christ in the world in the name of their own power, greed, and fear, and lamentations for those who do these things in Christ’s name.

“For judgment is without mercy to him who has shown no mercy. Mercy triumphs over judgment” (James 2:13).

Solidarity and the One Life

When we notice the presence of Christ dancing and suffering with us, a fresh solidarity arises in us. Solidarity is the shared commitment to stand with others, especially in times of struggle, and act together for their good as if their wellbeing were your own. Christ unifies us. “He is before all things, and in him all things are held together” (Colossians 1:17).

We are not talking about the Christ the church attempted to cage, but the Wild Christ who says, “I have other sheep which are not of this fold. I must bring them also, and they will hear my voice. They will become one flock with one shepherd” (John 10:16). This Wild Christ is the voice of Wisdom speaking in every tradition throughout the world.

The Wild Christ is the shepherd of the cosmos. All life is in his flock, and we are called to live in solidarity. This unison is the recognition of the One Life everywhere, the call to turn from our solitary lives into solidarity with all living. When we stand up together and aid one another, so much suffering will be relieved from the world.

Teshuvah, Viriditas, and Verdure

Once we realize this solidarity with the One Life through the Wild Christ, we realize we are in the wasteland. We may have been driven into the narrow place of Mitzrayim or we may have wandered off the green path. It can be healing to understand how we got here, but it is so much more important for us to find our way home.

This is true repentance, recognizing we have left the greening path of life and returning to it. Teshuvah is turning around and returning to the path. There is no room for guilt or shame. Those are fetters that hold us in the narrow place and keep us from walking back to the green lands of the soul.

Hildegard of Bingen called this viriditas: the divine greening power that makes life flourish. It is the spiritual vitality of God at work in creation, the Wild Christ in action. Viriditas is the force that brings growth, healing, and fresh energy to both the soul and the natural world.

For her, sin was dryness and brittleness, while viriditas was lushness and living sap. She saw the soul as a garden and that existence itself is green with God. The moment we see this viriditas, and begin to think of our wellness, we are gauging the Verdure of the soul.

Verdure is the wellness of the soul and the world. It shows us how well viriditas flows through the person, place, or thing. It is cultivated through right relationship, mindfulness, joy, and peace. It is the wellbeing, the greenness, of being alive.

We cannot earn Verdure or explain it into existence. It is within everything. Once we recognize that we are in the narrow place of Mitzrayim, even when we have not wandered off the path, it is because we need to tend the garden of our soul so it can grow back verdurous and whole.

Verdure is our garden that grows alongside the river of viriditas. Viriditas is the green power, energy, wisdom of the universe that flows through and in all things. Verdure is our green wellness that we cultivate within our being.

The first step to restoring the land within us and around us is to clear the streams so they can flow freely.

Sin, Dead Faith, and Living Faith

The streams and rivers of viriditas are too often clogged with the dead logs of false beliefs and the detritus of guilt, shame, and mistaken actions that block the flow of this greening energy into our lives. As the waters dry up, the soul becomes narrow and brittle. Sometimes, our jobs and lives distract us from the things that nurture and rejuvenate us.

When we are distracted by the idea that sin is moral failure, we lose sight of what it actually is. Sin is missing the mark, wandering from the path, or clogging the flow. Sin is not just about morality, it is about robbing life of what it needs to live well. We do not like the word sin anymore because it has been corrupted by systems of false belief, domination, greed, and fear, but we need to call those things what they are, sin, and reclaim this word so it can do the work it needs to do.

Sin is whatever robs us of our verdurous state. When talking about eating food offered to idols, Paul reveals the true nature of sin: “But he who doubts is condemned if he eats, because it is not of faith; and whatever is not of faith is sin” (Romans 14:23).

“Now faith is assurance of things hoped for, proof of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1). “Even so faith, if it has no works, is dead in itself. For as the body apart from the spirit is dead, even so faith apart from works is dead” (James 2:17, 26).

Whatever is not of faith, which is the assurance of things hoped for, and the proof of things not seen through our works, or else faith is dead, is sin, because dead faith is sin.

Dead faith is not deconstruction or changing our mind, it is saying that God is love and not acting in a loving way toward everyone and everything. It is saying that we return to God through repentance while building and cooperating with systems that say that people do not and cannot change.

Living faith is enacted and embodied. It builds right relationship through mindfulness, compassion, and equity, and then the soul and the world grow verdurous.

Tikkun and the Struggle for the World

Healing ourselves is the first step in restoring the world. This is tikkun. Tikkun is the Jewish idea of repairing and restoring the world through actions that heal what is broken and bring it closer to justice and wholeness.

As we heal ourselves, we see the false beliefs and harmful practices in our lives and where they came from in our culture and society. Teshuvah heals the self; tikkun heals the world. Many, if not most, of these false and harmful ideas and practices are also operating in society, culture, and government. We have to heal the world through the removal of them from our society.

This starts with us, acting with integrity as living agents in the world. As we build solidarity and community with one another, we target the laws, institutions, and ideas that are doing harm to society and the people in it. We have to change our culture and government to foster health, healing, and viriditas in all its actions.

The work is hard, and there will be push back, but “For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world’s rulers of the darkness of this age, and against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12).

Those spiritual forces of wickedness in heavenly places are not just demons, they are unclean spirits, which are the trauma that clouds thoughts and actions, and the ideas themselves. This is a war of ideas and cultures. One seeks life more abundantly, and the other seeks control, dominance, and the power of the few.

Until we stand up and push this wickedness back, it will continue to choke us and the world to keep us in the Mitzrayim, the narrow place.

Mustard Seed Faith, Coalition, and Patience

We cannot work this change on our own, but through collective action. This is why we need the solidarity we find in the Wild Christ, whether our allies use that language or not. Jesus said, “Because of your unbelief. For most certainly I tell you, if you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you will tell this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you” (Matthew 17:20).

If the faith of a person can move mountains, the faith of the people can move continents. We have to accept that we cannot do this work alone. We have to do it together.

Now, more than ever, people have recognized the evils of colonialism, authoritarianism, and the inflicting of trauma to get one’s way. This is the time to unite, build solidarity, and overthrow the powers of wickedness.

This work is slower than we want or need it to be, but it has to be. Rushing to action before we have built our coalitions will keep us from succeeding. Right now, we have to be patient, rooting ourselves in our solidarity and the viriditas of the Wild Christ so we will be so alive that people are drawn into the cause to bring liberation to everyone.

Waters from the Altar of the Heart and the Checkerboard Greening

Our bodies are the temples of the Living God. It is from the altars of our hearts that the waters of life will flow into the world to heal and restore the land. As we live in viriditas and cultivate this verdurous growth within us, the stronger the flow of the waters of life from each and every one of us. The deserts will rejoice at the return of the water, and the world will be healed.

Look up from the dry soil and dance with the Wild Christ through this wasteland so healing can flow. Heal yourself and where you stand, and return the flow to your wasteland. Connect to others so you can restore the land between you.

As we start this work, a checkerboard of verdurous land will spring back to life, and over time they will connect and bring life back to the land. The first buds of spring arise through the cold and the drought. The gentle rains of redemption will follow.

The more we practice our living faith, the more the world will sprout with new life.

When I hear the phrase, “you are dust and to dust you shall return,” I am amazed, because I know that the dust that is mentioned here is stardust. It is the remnant of supernovae that exploded billions of years ago and gave the elements that made our star, our planets, our bones, our blood, and our flesh. Those stars lived and died in the fathomless depths of deep time that I have no way to understand or grasp. The hydrogen in the water in me was forged in the Big Bang. The iron, the calcium, the carbon in me came from the supernovae. That dust is stardust. I feel connected to everything that ever was, is, or shall be.

Humility and Belonging

Humility is knowing the proper place of things. That something should not take up too much space or too little, that it finds the space that it needs to inhabit. Sometimes that is grand and vast, sometimes it is ever so small, and it can change depending on the circumstances.

When I think about how we are all connected physically through the stardust that makes up our world, our cosmos, our bodies, I feel a sweet tenderness toward the stars that gave their life. I feel a responsibility to them as my ancestors and to the world from which I arose. I am grateful for all that has transpired in time and space to conspire for me to be here now, living this life. But I know that that does not make me special. It makes me loved, just like everyone and everything else is loved.

Repentance as Return

Ash Wednesday is the beginning of the Lenten season. It is a time for repentance, and over the centuries, that repentance has turned into shame and guilt. This is indeed a time for repentance, but a true and proper repentance.

Repentance, teshuvah, as it is known in Hebrew, is returning to the way. Sin is not a moral stain on our soul or a corruption that wells up within us. It is simply missing the mark. It is walking off of the path and getting lost in the wilderness. We all do that from time to time.

It is easy to get distracted by shiny things that attract us to them, and by terrible things that cause us to want to run away. And so we wander off the path. Sometimes we lose our mindfulness and we just meander one way or another until we realize we can no longer see the path beneath our feet, or that the path is over there, not where we currently are.

teshuvah, like its Greek counterpart metanoia, means that we open ourselves up, we change our mind, we turn, and we walk a different path. We move back to the path that we want to be on. That is the path that leads to love, to compassion, to justice-making, to celebration. It is built on wonder and awe and delight, creativity, and spaciousness. It is the life that gives us, as Jesus said, life more abundantly. It is the path that Jesus says where we take his burdens upon ourselves and give ours up to him, for his burdens are light and easy to bear. It is the work of the law of liberation that reminds us to love God with all of our heart, soul, and spirit, and to love our neighbor as ourselves.

What the Ash Proclaims

When we mark ourselves with ashes and enter this time of repentance, we are reminding ourselves of the great love of God, who is love. From dust we came, and to dust we will return. And so it is with everything. The stars accreted from dust, and they burned so bright. The earth accreted from dust and now is filled with life abundantly.

We walk this path like John before us, to make way for the acceptable day of the Lord. We walk this path like Jesus before us, pouring ourselves out knowing that we are not actually pouring ourselves out but allowing the great river of God’s compassion to flow through us. The ashes remind us that we, like the phoenix, rise. That through the fire, the earth is renewed. Nutrients are returned to the soil so fresh growth can rise up.

It is the sign of renewal that we bear upon our soul, upon our body, reminding us of the great work that we are called to do.

Marked and Sent

The prophets speak of God sending out angels to mark those who have ears to hear and eyes to see (Ezekiel 9:4). They marked them on the forehead. Isaiah had the living coal touch his tongue. Jeremiah was called from before birth into life and life-giving ministry. Ezekiel sees the great panoply of the divine spread out before him. We are called to the same calling. We are marked with the same mark. The angels have come. The question is, will we hear them? Will we see them, and will we respond?

To don the ashes is not to go through a simple ritual in obedience to some liturgical duty. To don the ashes is to accept this call to change the world, to bring the kin-dom of God here, present among us and within us. It is to do the work that Jesus called us to do:

• to feed the hungry,

• to give water to the thirsty,

• to visit the sick and those in prison,

• to bring relief and blessing,

• to call all people to the great heavenly banquet on the holy mountain.

We go forth as a people changed and changing, ever becoming renewed, focused in this Lenten season on the work of transformation, first of ourselves and then our communities and society and the world.

What needs to be changed? Where have we missed the mark? Where have we gone off the path? Now is the time to look, to search, to seek, and to find, and to turn around and to walk back to the path, to get on the way toward that great and shining path to the world to come.

We leave not cowered by shame or guilt or fear, but standing tall and alert, mindful of what is around us. If we are not mindful, if we are not looking at the path, if we are not looking where we are in the path, if we are not engaging with the world around us and with what is happening, we will miss the power of this season.

The Lie the Ash Breaks

The ash breaks the lie of sin and death. It points out to us that we are not inferior to others, but we are all equal in our sojourn through this world. From ash we came, to ash we will return. From stardust we came, and to stardust we will return.

We are interconnected and interwoven in ways that many in the past refused to see because it challenged their power and their wealth and caused fear in them that they were not as special as they wanted to be. The ash reminds us that we are all one people. One people with the rest of humanity and with the rest of nature, with the worlds that flow through the galaxy and the stars they orbit around. One with all that is, was, and ever shall be in this galaxy, in this life, in this cosmos.

Amen.