“In Hebrew, the word shabbat (from which we get Sabbath) means ‘to cease.’ The meaning of Sabbath is to celebrate the holiness of time, to release the tyranny of space and the objects that demand our attention. It is a day to taste the eternal quality of life.”
–Christine Valters Paintner, PhD, Sacred Time: Embracing an Intentional Way of Life
When do you experience tyranny of space and demand on your attention? What helps you celebrate the holiness of time?
To register for the self-study companion retreat to the book with extra resources and guidance click here. Use code SACREDTIME20 to take 20% off through March 31st.
In an article that was published in Blackfriars (Oxford, England), June 1962, Thomas Merton wrote about the struggle against the madness of the cold war and nuclear war. These words of Merton are, as always, timeless and prophetic, speaking to what we are living through and responding to on the national and world stage.
The awful problem of our time is not so much the dreams, the monsters, which may take shape and consume us, but the moral paralysis in our own souls which leaves us immobile, inert, passive, tongue tied, ready and even willing to succumb. The real tragedy is in the cold, silent waters of moral death which climb imperceptibly within us, blinding conscience, drowning compassion, suffocating faith, and extinguishing the Spirit. A progressive deadening of conscience, of judgment, and of compassion is the inexorable work of the cold war. — Passion For Peace: The Social Essays, p. 81
As we continue this descent into the madness that this Administration calls “Operation Epic Fury” I find myself feeling worn out and frustrated. Perhaps my exhaustion finds its deeper roots in all of the chaos that this Administration has created since January 20, 2025.
Are you feeling that same sense of exhaustion and frustration within your own spirit, dear reader? Do you feel like your voice is just one tiny little spark in the cacophony that is the 24-hour news cycle or Social Media? Does your heart sometimes grow weary? When I find myself asking these questions in the middle of a dark night within my own heart and soul, I try to seek out light and hope.
Sometimes that light and hope is found in the purr of our cat Stella as she “makes biscuits” on my chest and shoulder. At other times it is found when I sit on our back patio as the squirrels and the birds go about their day. Often it is found in the loving eyes and embrace of Denise, my beloved partner in life, love, and ministry.
When he found himself pondering issues and concerns in the world or in his life, Merton often found himself reflecting as he listened to the birds and frogs outside of his hermitage in the very early hours of the day. This journal entry from June 5, 1960 (The Feast of Pentecost) speaks to this experience.
At 2:30–no sounds except sometimes a bullfrog. Some mornings, he says Om–some days he is silent. The sounds are not every day the same. The whippoorwill who begins his mysterious whoop about 3 o’clock is not always near. Sometimes, like today, he is very far away in Linton’s woods or beyond. Sometimes he is close, on Mount Olivet. Yesterday there were two, but both in the distance. The first chirps of the waking birds–“le point vierge [the virgin point]” of the dawn, a moment of awe and inexpressible innocence, when the Father in silence opens their eyes and they speak to Him, wondering if it is time to “be”? And He tells them “Yes.” Then they one by one wake and begin to sing. First the catbirds and cardinals and some others I do not recognize. Later, song sparrows, wrens, etc. Last of all doves, crows,… — Turning Towards the World: The Journals of Thomas Merton, Volume Four 1960-1963
I wish there were easy answers… but there aren’t any easy answers. I wish there was a magic wand we could wave and make all of this chaos and disaster disappear… but I don’t have a wand. In the end, the only thing that we can do is, as Merton wrote in the concluding line of this journal entry—…to ask mercy, and to trust mercy. Perhaps that step is the first step towards finding the light of hope and then becoming that light of hope in this world of chaos.
From my lips to God’s ear, that is my prayer…
On the back of the Veterans For Peace hoodie that I wear is a quote from Dwight D. Eisenhower, the 34th President of the United States. He was the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe during WW2. The quote is: I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.
Eisenhower had indeed seen the horrors of war from the cost in lives of the D-Day operations to take back Europe from Nazi Germany and the Axis Powers to the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps after Allied forces liberated them. He truly knew the cost of war.
The reason that I am sharing this with you today comes from the inspiration to dig deeper into today’s Substack Post from Dr. Heather Cox Richardson’s “Letters From An American.” In her analysis of the events of March 10, 2026, she made reference to a speech President Eisenhower gave shortly after the death of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. Below is part of the text of that speech (source).
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.
It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.
It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.
We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.
We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.
This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
This is one of those times in the affairs of nations when the gravest choices must be made, if there is to be a turning toward a just and lasting peace.
It is a moment that calls upon the governments of the world to speak their intentions with simplicity and with honesty.
It calls upon them to answer the question that stirs the hearts of all sane men: is there no other way the world may live?
We are watching the unfolding of an immoral and illegal war that has no budget, no guardrails, and which greedily gobbles up funds which should be used for , as President Eisenhower stated, “bread, butter, clothes, homes, hospitals, schools.” This madness must stop!
The perfect love about which St. John speaks, embraces and transcends all feelings, emotions, and passions. The perfect love that drives out all fear is the divine love in which we are invited to participate. The home, the intimate place, the place of true belonging, is therefore not a place made by human hands. It is fashioned for us by God, who came to pitch his tent among us, invite us to his place, and prepare a room for us in his own house. — Lifesigns: Intimacy, Fecundity, and Ecstasy in Christian Perspective
Verse of the day
Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.
– Ephesians 4:31-32
Voice of the day
Nothing erases the past. There is repentance, there is atonement, and there is forgiveness. That is all, but that is enough.
– Fuwaad ibn Abbas, in Ted Chiang’s The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate (2007)
Prayer of the day
Compassionate God, help us recall the depth of your mercy to humankind when we flounder in the face of personal forgiveness.
Denise, my beloved sweet wife and partner in life, love, and ministry is doing some studying as she prepares for the sermon she will preach next Sunday. During her studying she told me that she had found a poem written by Thomas Merton, titled “Paper Cranes.” I was not familiar with the poem and she chuckled and said that she was surprised that she found something that Merton had written that I wasn’t familiar with!
As she read the poem it struck me how it spoke to what is going on in the Middle East today. For 26 years as a USAF Chaplain, I watched metal warbirds take off around the world with their payloads of death and destruction.
A retired USAF B-52 pilot once told me that when he flew a mission he prayed that he would never have to drop the bombs. He knew that the nuclear payload in his B-52 would rain down death and destruction and that his family would be killed in a retaliatory strike.
Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD as it was known, would not leave any winners. It would only leave destruction on a regional if not global scale. I imagine Merton would often reflect on the bizarre fact that as he prayed for peace in his Hermitage, he would hear and often see the B-52’s as they flew over the Abbey on their nighttime training missions with their payloads of death and destruction. The irony could not have been lost on him.
I have been thinking about Merton a lot as the events unfold over in the Middle East and the rhetoric of the politicians escalates. He often said that the root of all war is fear. He felt as though this focus on war and destruction was destroying society and even the church. And now, here is the poem.
Paper Cranes: (The Hibakusha Come to Gethsemani)
How can we tell a paper bird
Is stronger than a hawk
When it has no metal for talons?
It needs no power to kill
Because it is not hungry.
Wilder and wiser than eagles
It ranges round the world
Without enemies
And free of cravings.
The child’s hand
Folding these wings
Wins no wars and ends them all.
Thoughts of a child’s heart
Without care, without weapons!
So the child’s eye
Gives life to what it loves
Kind as the innocent sun
And lovelier than all dragons!
In the Darkness Before Dawn: New Selected Poems of Thomas Merton, p. 119
In these difficult times, my prayer is that the Paper Bird of Peace will indeed fly and that minds focused on destruction and hatred will instead seek the path of peace. From our lips to God’s ear, may we pray…
Verse of the day
Speak out for those who cannot speak, for the rights of all the destitute.
– Proverbs 31:8
Voice of the day
I raise up my voice – not so I can shout, but so those without a voice can be heard…we cannot succeed when half of us are held back.
– Malala Yousafzai
Prayer of the day
Voice of Hope, your words resonate throughout generations. If our mouths should open, let them be declarations of affirmation that leave no one behind.
The first love says: “You are loved long before other people can love you or you can love others. You are accepted long before you can accept others or receive their acceptance. You are safe long before you can offer or receive safety.” Home is the place where that first love dwells and speaks gently to us. — Lifesigns: Intimacy, Fecundity, and Ecstasy in Christian Perspective
“The moon has much wisdom to offer us with her witness to the necessity of both waxing and waning, both brilliant fullness and utter darkness. At every turn it seems that nature calls us to embrace both the expansion and the contraction as necessary to the very way we were created.”
–Christine Valters Paintner, PhD, Sacred Time: Embracing an Intentional Way of Life — A Self-Study Online Retreat. Use code SACREDTIME20 to take 20% off through March 31st.
When have you felt the gifts of expansion? Of contraction?
A war is always—always!—the defeat of humanity, always. We, the educated, who work in education, are defeated by this war, because [it is] “elsewhere”; we are responsible. There is no such thing as a just war: they do not exist! — Against War: Building a Culture of Peace, p. 17
Pastor Michael Moore's Blog 