We can love others because the “I” in our innermost self has heard the first love – which is God’s unconditional, unlimited love. When we come together in relationships, we recognize that others are also loved with the first love. The first love incarnates in different ways in every person and calls us together to build a new home, a new community, a new dwelling place for God in this world. — Following Jesus: Finding Our Way Home in an Age of Anxiety
Verse of the day
But as for that in the good soil, these are the ones who, when they hear the word, hold it fast in an honest and good heart and bear fruit with endurance.
– Luke 8:15
Voice of the day
I see a danger in insisting that our love of freedom always outweighs whatever force or inertia keeps us from resisting oppression and seeking deliverance.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
Prayer of the day
God who is our solid ground, tear us away from the temptation to ignore repression for our own convenience.
Our many conversations led me to the inner conviction that the words “You are my Beloved” revealed the most intimate truth about all human beings, whether they belong to any particular tradition or not. All I want to say to you is “You are the Beloved,” and all I hope is that you can hear these words as spoken to you with all the tenderness and force that love can hold. My only desire is to make these words reverberate in every corner of your being – “You are the Beloved.” — Life of the Beloved: Spiritual Living in a Secular World
On July 8, 1964 Thomas Merton wrote the below entry into his journal. With the ongoing insanity here in this nation and in the world, his words speak volumes. Change some of the names and places and he is describing what is happening in the Middle East and Central and South America!
I do not at all like President Johnson’s policies in Asia. To make sure of votes in this year’s Presidential election, he has to threaten war and promise “results” against the Communists. There is something very strange about a system where a political power for a party or an individual demands the sacrifice of lives and of poor people thousands of miles away, people who never even heard of Democrats and Republicans. I am not talking about Communist power only, but power of Democrats and Republicans… All the future promises is the possibility of a long, stupid, costly, disastrous and useless war in Asia. It will certainly bring no good whatever to anyone, but because it does not involve a nuclear threat to the U.S., everybody shrugs and think about something else. — A Vow of Conversation: Journals 1964-1965, p. 60
John’s Gospel develops this image, and so we find Jesus saying, “Make your home in me, as I have made my home in you” (see John 15:4). Jesus came to make us into his home and to invite us to dwell in his house. Suddenly all those biblical images of God’s hospitality come together and we realize that weare God’s home and that we are invited to make our home where God has made God’s own home. Our bodies, our hands, our face, our heart are becoming the place where we and God can dwell together in freedom. — A Spirituality of Homecoming
Verse of the day
I turned my mind to know and to search out and to seek wisdom and the sum of things and to know that wickedness is folly and that foolishness is madness.
– Ecclesiastes 7:25
Voice of the day
If we fear something, it is all the more imperative we study it thoroughly.
– Celeste Ng, Our Missing Hearts (2020)
Prayer of the day
Rather than losing ourselves in discomfort or fear, make us conscious of the encompassing richness that seeking to understand can provide.
Verse of the day
You desire truth in the inward being; therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart.
– Psalm 51:6
Voice of the day
In a time when large swaths of the American church have merely mimicked worldly concepts of power, going for bigger, louder, and glitzier, we have to return to the small, the quiet, the uncool, and the ordinary. Obscurity may very well be the spiritual discipline the American church needs to practice the most in the coming century.
-Katelyn Beaty, Celebrities for Jesus: How Personas, Platforms, and Profits Are Hurting the Church (2022)
Prayer of the day
God of the still, small voice, despite the clamor of the world, you speak to us clearly in the quiet. Help us brace ourselves against performative messages and turn us to undeniable truths instead.
Verse of the day
Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer everyone.
– Colossians 4:6
Voice of the day
God doesn’t protect people from knives, sweetheart. That’s why God gave us other people, so we can protect each other.
-Fredrik Backman, Anxious People (2019)
Prayer of the day
God who delights in our wit, may our replies be laden with language that is a tender response to our times.
Verse of the day
The simple believe everything, but the clever consider their steps.
– Proverbs 14:15
Voice of the day
If we don’t wake up / And shake up the nation / We’ll eat the dust / Of the world wondering why…
– Jonathan Larson, “Louder Than Words”
Prayer of the day
God of the land, impress on us a lucidity about our times that pierces through smoke-filled grandeur.
Following Jesus means to live a life in which we start loving one another with God’s original love and not with the needy wounded love that harms others. Original love is a love that has the power to love enemies as well as friends. It is a divine love that makes us “sons and daughters of the Most High, who is kind to the grateful and the wicked…. who causes the sun to rise on bad people as well as the good, and the rain to fall on honest and dishonest people” (Matthew 5:45). — Following Jesus: Finding Our Way Home in an Age of Anxiety
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