The problem is that the Chicken-Soup-for-the-Soul stuff may feel good, but none of that typical stuff helps when somebody in your neighborhood is murdered.
We’ve heard from people all around the world, telling us that this is their reality. People need a way to connect the sometimes really hard reality in which they wake up each morning with the movement of the Spirit.
In the Bible, God uses brothel owners, pagan kings, murderers and mercenaries as instruments of good; at one point God even speaks to a guy named Balaam through his donkey.
It’s always a good idea to have a nun next to you when you get arrested!
When we were starting our community a bunch of older Benedictine nuns said to us, “If you have any questions or want to pick our brains, please do – we’ve been doing community for about 1,500 years together so we’ve learned a few things.”
The monastic folks have the spirit of being in the world but not of the world, sort of peculiar people who have gone to the desert to live on the margins of the empire.
I think of the Catholic worker movement and Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin and others.
We have been mentored from the very beginning by Catholic folks who are invigorating the best of the monastic spirit.
When I think of some of the great renewals in the church I think of folks like St. Francis and Clare of Assisi who, through their lifestyle, were challenging the patterns of materialism and militarism and it affected the Christianity of their age.
Tony Campolo and I both speak a lot, and we began to notice that there were some crowds of old folks that desperately needed some youthful energy, and there were other crowds of young folks that desperately needed some aged wisdom.
Whenever folks say radical Christianity is “a phase” of youth, I tell them they need to meet our 80-year-old nun or my friend Tony Campolo.
Faith is being idealistic, because we have made an idol out of the status quo.
Sometimes people call folks here at the Simple Way saints. Usually they either want to applaud our lives and live vicariously through us, or they want to write us off as superhuman and create a safe distance. One of my favorite quotes, written on my wall here in bold black marker, is from Dorothy Day: “Don’t call us saints; we don’t want to be dismissed that easily.
But what had lasting significance were not the miracles themselves but Jesus’ love. Jesus raised his friend Lazarus from the dead, and a few years later, Lazarus died again. Jesus healed the sick, but eventually caught some other disease. He fed the ten thousands, and the next day they were hungry again. But we remember his love. It wasn’t that Jesus healed a leper but that he touched a leper, because no one touched lepers.
So even as we see the horror of death, may we be reminded that in the end, love wins. Mercy triumphs. Life is more powerful than death. And even those who have committed great violence can have the image of God come to life again within them as they hear the whisper of love. May the whisper of love grow louder than the thunder of violence. May we love loudly.
Jesus was Jewish. He went to synagogue “as was his tradition” and celebrated holy days such as Passover. But Jesus also healed on the Sabbath. Jesus points us to a God who is able to work within institutions and order, a God who is too big to be confined. God is constantly coloring outside the lines. Jesus challenges the structures that oppress and exclude, and busts through any traditions that put limitations on love. Love cannot be harnessed.
Lord, keep us from following the gods of pride, stubbornness, vanity, sloth, greed, and comfort that beckon for our allegiance every day. You brought us through the night watches, you who neither slumber nor sleep. We pray to follow you along the path of generosity, humility, and love throughout this day. Amen.
It’s not that the law has no meaning; it’s just that grace has the last word.
Lord, in our work for justice, let us not seek after martyrdom for its own sake, but neither let us turn away from your truth because we fear suffering. Give us grace to live faithfully whatever the cost. Amen.
Dom Helder Camara, a twentieth-century bishop in Brazil, said, “When I feed the poor, they call me a saint, but when I ask why the poor are hungry, they call me a Communist.