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One is a personal maxim he tries to live by (pardon the salty language):

Do good.
Don’t be a dick.
Take no shit.

“All three parts are important,” he said. I appreciate the elegance of holding “Don’t be a dick” and “Take no shit” together, because they’re often seen as a zero-sum game. In other words, to be a person who takes no shit, you have to be a dick. Likewise, it’s often thought that if you commit to not being a dick, you’re going to have to take a lot of shit. “Not necessarily,” this maxim says. You can do both.

He also said, “It’s possible to clearly name the harm a person or group is doing without scapegoating them. The refusal to scapegoat someone actually sharpens your critique, rather than diminishing it.”

Again, I noticed a commitment to doing two things that are often thought to be incompatible. In clearly naming injustice, we often resort to scapegoating; likewise the refusal to scapegoat is often conflated with an obfuscation of injustice. Not necessarily, and in fact the refusal to scapegoat strengthens the naming of injustice.

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Do you think I eat the flesh of bulls,
or drink the blood of goats?

Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving
and make good your vows to the Most High.

Whoever offers me the sacrifice of thanksgiving honors me;
but to those who keep in my way will I show the salvation of God.

Do you think I actually eat the goats and bulls you offer? How about offering me a sacrifice of thanksgiving? And how about doing what you say you’re going to do?

Your sacrifices all by themselves don’t honor me, but gratitude does. And honor is good as far as it goes, but if you walk in my ways, you’ll see salvation.

Salvation is a way, not a possession. And salvation is a gift to be thankful for, not a reward for correct and comprehensive sacrifices.

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1. God was truly at work in the stories told in the Scriptures, and God was truly at work in the inspiration of the Scriptures, and God is truly at work through the Scriptures to speak to us today everything we need for life and salvation, and
2. Ancient peoples could only describe how God was at work among them from within their metaphysical assumptions about God and the world.

Thus, we need not assume that their specific descriptions of how God was working are “objectively true,” just as we don’t necessarily assume their metaphysical assumptions about God and the world are true.

For example, today we don’t assume that mixing a little wine with one’s drinking water will help people with their stomach ailments, but this is clearly what Paul assumed when he wrote to Timothy to do this very thing. Likewise, we need not assume that Naomi’s best explanation for her tragic situation – “The Lord’s hand has gone out against me” (Ruth 1:13b) – is the absolute truth of the situation.

Ascribing the cause of the events in one’s life and in the world to God was a typical semitic way of giving honor to God. Just because the Book of Ruth records that Naomi described her situation this way doesn’t mean we must do so also. That kind of “flat” reading of the Scriptures isn’t a way of taking them seriously. It actually doesn’t take them seriously enough.

God worked and spoke through humans, and thus through the language they spoke, and the worldview they held. And God speaks to us today through the Scriptures, but we have very different assumptions about the universe and about divinity than they did, and thus we must learn to interpret. We must learn how to hear the voice of God’s Spirit for us, today, in a fresh way that speaks from within our metaphysical assumptions in the same way God spoke to them from within their metaphysical assumptions.

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And [Jesus]… comes into his native country… and when the Sabbath came he began to teach in the synagogue; and many who heard were astonished… and they were scandalized by him. And Jesus said to them: “A prophet is not dishonored except in his native country and among his own kin and in his household.” And he could not perform any feat of power there… and he was amazed at their lack of faith.

It’s hard to avoid the connection between the dishonor and lack of faith displayed by Jesus’s hometown and Jesus’s inability to perform any “feat of power” there. In other places, Jesus blesses those he has healed by saying “Your faith has made you well.” Clearly there is some kind of alchemy between God’s power and human faith.

This makes people nervous, because it’s rife with potential for harmful misinterpretation. The connection between healing and faith has been used by some to blame people for their own maladies, which is so deeply crippling for the soul. But if, in our efforts to move away from this kind of harm, we disconnect our faith from God’s power, we’re left with no one to blame for suffering and evil except God. And this is truly toxic for our faith.

Better to learn to live in the uncomfortable subtleties and tensions and mysteries of this connection than to dismiss it out of hand, I think.

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Once you’ve heard a child cry out to heaven for help,
and go unanswered,
nothing’s ever the same again.
Nothing.
Even God changes.

But there is a healing hand at work
that cannot be deflected from its purpose.
I just can’t make sense of it, other than to cry.
Those tears are part of what it is to be a monk.

Out there, in the world, it can be very cold.
It seems to be about luck, good and bad,
and the distribution is absurd.

We have to be candles, burning between hope and despair,
faith and doubt, life and death,
all the opposites.

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Now the Lord said to Abram, “Get yourself from your country… to the country that I shall enable you to see.”

Abram doesn’t know what he’s looking for when he sets out, but God will enable him to see it as he journeys.

It’s the same with us: when God calls us, we never know the end from the beginning. We don’t see the destination before we set out on the path. It’s not like punching in coordinates in a GPS system. We discern as we go, and we learn to discern as we go. We are steadily enabled to see the country as we begin the journey toward it.

There is something transformative about the journey itself that doesn’t happen ahead of time, that cannot happen ahead of time, because it’s only in beginning the journey that we begin to learn to see the country we’re headed toward.

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Because Christ has come in the flesh and reconciled all things to God, any old time is a perfect time for salvation, for repentance, for change, for reconciliation. Any and every moment is the very best time to turn and be transformed by grace, to be comforted by the Spirit, to be illuminated by Christ. Now is a day of salvation!

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I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.

How many big, complex issues would be quickly untangled and sorted out if we just took “love one another” seriously in our most mundane encounters and relationships? What if we allowed the radical concreteness of “love one another” to cut through the de-personalizing effect of ideologies that allow us to exercise injustice without guilt or cognitive dissonance?

Love really is the commandment, the lodestar of our life in Christ, a wellspring of limitless luminosity for the soul, a worthy subject for contemplation on the Feast of St. John the Evangelist.

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