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Through Memories
I remember you in memories of running in the rain, of funny children’s stories, and haunted Halloweens. Of how you learned to hold me and simply let me cry, listening to my many fears to heal me of my fright. Of you overcoming phobias so I wouldn’t be alone while camping in the woods or giving talks on Type. Nightmare trips in broken cars and cabins full of scouts, houses filled with strangers and jeep rides in the night. Letters shared in parking lots and rooms filled with flowers, the kaleidoscope of memories that keeps our love alive.
Eileen 2000
Thomas our Twin
Welcome, children of God. And that is what every single soul that ever was or will be is…a beloved child of God.
Welcome, Doubting Thomases, whose logic troubles our faith. And that is also every single one of us.
C.S. Lewis wrote: “We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us. We are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.”
Did you ever notice that the apostle Thomas is called Thomas the twin. But his twin is never mentioned or named. That’s because his twin is in us, whether he is in our conscious or unconscious and whether we admit it or not.
Actually, this is good news, because that logical twin can help us keep from turning faith into superstition. And also, when we do experience or witness miracles, it helps us avoid the delusion that this life is supposed to be heaven and miracles will save us from all suffering.
The apostle Thomas’s logical mind not only paid attention to the miracles he witnessed, but unlike Peter, Thomas also accepted what Jesus said about the suffering ahead. So, when Jesus announced that he was going to Jerusalem, Thomas realized that this was not going to end well. But, Thomas responded, “Jesus, if you are going, I am coming with you.”
That, brothers and sisters, is love.
There are faith, hope, and love. And the greatest of these is love.
Questions for Christians
What is the difference between “saved” and “loved?”
Does being saved mean being finished?
Is the Bible the primary Word of God or is Jesus the Word of God fleshed out for us?
Was Jesus making choices to love more and more people other than his own religion and nationality, even the Roman enemy, and ultimately even his fellow Jews who had him killed, a major part of being the Word of God?
Is the WAY of Jesus’ life and willingness to love even those that killed him supposed to be the WAY of Christian’s lives?
Did Jesus love unconditionally fleshing out the unconditional loved of God for us?
Do we love unconditionally?
What is the difference between need and love?
Could our life journey from the neediness of a baby be a process of becoming able to love unconditionally?
Does loving our neighbor mean only loving others whom we know and who are like us?
Does loving Jesus mean we get to be rich? What did Jesus say about the rich man?
Are our heroes rich? Are they kind? Are they like Jesus?
Is our Spiritual journey more that just following a set of ten rules that allow us to survive as humans living together?
In fact, are the Beatitudes the challenges that Jesus gave us for our adult Spiritual journey to loving both ourselves and others unconditionally, because Jesus fleshed out the unconditional love of God for all?
Do you love all your children even when they don’t live up to your expectations and even hurt and abandon you?
Does God?
Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditations
Week Thirty-Eight: Seeing Through the Eyes of Love
Monday, September 15, 2025
A Choice for Love
My children, I will be with you only a little while longer. I’m giving you a new commandment so you’ll know where I am, and who I am: You must love one another.
—John 13:33–35, paraphrased by Richard Rohr
Father Richard Rohr speaks on Jesus’ command to love one another in John’s Gospel:
Sister and brothers, the energy with which we do things matters. To be in love is to be standing in a different space. Love is not only what we do; it’s how we do it. When we stand in the state of love that Jesus offers, we live inside of a different energy. For those moments, we’re not entirely self-preoccupied. We try to care for the world. We’re able to say, “I have one life and when I leave here, I want to make sure this world is a little better because I was here.” What might happen if we woke up each day with this intention: “How can my existence on this earth increase the quality of life on this planet?”
Jesus says, “I’ll be with you only a little while longer, so I’m going to leave a sign that I’m still here. I’m going to reveal myself in the presence of loving people” (John 13:33–35, Richard’s paraphrase). That’s the only way anyone can know God. If we’ve never let anyone love us, and if we’ve never let love flow through us—gratuitously, generously, undeservedly—toward others, then we can’t possibly know who God is. God is just a theory or abstraction. If “God is love” (1 John 4:8) then those who live in love, live in God, and know God experientially. There’s no other way we can know who God is—or who we truly are—but to love and be loved. Take that as an absolute!
Love is not something we decide to do now and then. Love is who we are! Our basic, foundational existence—created in the image of the Trinity—is love. Remember, Trinity is saying that God is not an isolated divine being. God is a quality of relationship itself, an event of communion, an infinite flow of outpouring. God is an action more than a substance, to put it succinctly.
Love, like forgiveness, is a decision. It’s a decision in our minds and in our hearts. And we’d better make it early in the day, because once we’re a few hours into low-level resentment, anger, or disappointment, it’s too late. When we’re not choosing love, we’ll use any excuse to be unhappy or irritated. We’re already unhappy, and then something gives us an excuse to externalize it. The exact object for our unhappiness is actually arbitrary. Unhappiness just needs an object—as do happiness and love. We have to recognize ahead of time when we’re not living in love. This is surely why a morning prayer or practice is so important—to allow us to choose to love each and every day.
Old Age: Walking Humbly with our God
Old age is for walking humbly with our God. It’s when our worldly strengths betray us, and each day brings losses of family, friends, personal strengths, and sometimes even memories.
Often, like Jesus on His cross, we feel abandoned even by God and are called to trust in the emptiness of our loneliness.
It’s the last part of the spiritual journey. It takes clinging to the tiny signs of grace, like a beautiful butterfly outside our window or a smile from a baby in the grocery store. Thank God, we haven’t become invisible to babies. Our biggest challenge each day is getting up to face it. Our gift for each other now is shared laughter at something embarrassing that’s peculiar to age. Shared laughter, particularly at ourselves, is the saving grace of old age. At eighty-eight, I get to laugh a lot even when alone each day, at my comedy of errors.
My favorite LOL (Little Old Lady) story is of the elderly woman with Alzheimer’s in the nursing home when an aide was helping her get into her nightgown. She turned to the aide and said, “What is my name? I can’t remember it.” Before the aide could respond, she said, “Never mind,” pointing to a painting of Jesus on the wall. “He knows my name. That’s all that matters.”
Our Thorn as a Gift
Struggling to overcome her persistent envy of another writer, author Anne Lamott found comfort in St. Paul’s struggle to accept his own imperfection:
Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians, where he talks about the thorn in his side [2 Corinthians 12:7–10], is his spiritual autobiography, his confessing out loud to how shaming life in the flesh was for him. And in his letter to the Christians in Rome, Paul wrote that he hated the things he couldn’t stop doing [Romans 7: 15, 19]…. He had what I have, something awful and broken and stained inside. He was a powerful, learned man, teaching and following the Torah, reaping power’s rewards, yet it all left him desperate….
[Paul] asked God over and over again to remove this thorn, but God said no. God said that grace and mercy had to be enough, that nothing awful or fantastic that Paul did would alter the hugeness of divine love. This love would and will have the last say. The last word will not be our bad thoughts and behavior, but mercy, love, and forgiveness. God suggested, Try to cooperate with that. Okay? Keep your stupid thorn; knock yourself out.
What was the catch? The catch was that Paul had to see the thorn as a gift. He had to want to be put in his place, had to be willing to give God thanks for this glaring new sense of humility, of smallness, the one thing anyone in [their] right mind tries to avoid. Conceit is intoxicating, addictive, the best feeling on earth some days, but Paul chose instead submission and servitude as the way to freedom from the bondage of self.
Lamott explores the challenge of tolerating our imperfect selves and the mercy that saves us anyway:
Our secrets sometimes feel so vile and hopeless that we should all jump off a cliff. Then we might remember something quirky and ephemeral once restored us or a beloved to sanity when we were in a very bad way. We remember that an unlikely invisible agency made up of love, truth, and camaraderie helped with the alcoholism or debt or heartbreak a few years ago. And we practice cooperating with that force for change, because who knows—it might help again now.
Micah says to do justice—follow the rules, do what you’re supposed to do—but to love mercy, love the warmth within us, that flow of generosity. Love mercy—accept the acceptance; receive the forgiveness, whenever we can, for as long as we can. Then pass it on….
Love and mercy are sovereign, if often in disguise as ordinary people…. Over and over, in spite of our awfulness and having squandered our funds, the ticket-taker at the venue waves us on through. Forgiven and included, when we experience this, that we are in this with one another, flailing and starting over in the awful beauty of being humans together, we are saved.
Love and Money
Reflecting this morning on the various people I’ve known up close, from the very affluent to the seriously poor, I recognized decades ago that the rich consider themselves above the law, and at the level of the extremely poor or racially segregated, the law often does not work in their favor.
The middle class has been the lawkeepers. The middle class is systematically being wiped out.
I am a liberal born-again Christian. Yes, we do exist.
I see the life of Jesus as fleshing out the WAY for us. His actions clarify His words. That’s what His being the “WORD” means. And like us, His life was a journey of being challenged to Love. It started with His mother teaching Him, at twelve, to consider others’ feelings, not just show off His brilliance. Then she literally forced him, at thirty, into risking the leap to doing miracles, out of kindness for a family running out of wine for their child’s wedding reception.
We then hear him questioning whether he should heal the child of the Roman enemy’s soldier, but he chooses to love. He worked through pretty much every kind of person being a challenge to love until on the cross he could pray, “Father, forgive them. They know not what they do” for those that got Him tortured and killed. Then, even when he felt abandoned by God, he trusted and said, “Into your hands I trust my spirit.”
This opening up to loving those close to Him, until He could love the worst of those putting law over love, is the pattern of growing from need to Love for all of us.
So how do we learn to love like Jesus? Understanding why they are like they are and recognizing that if we had lived their life, we too might be like them. Understanding frees us to forgive even the oppressors, and forgiving frees us to Love, though we still work for the oppressed, the poor, the prisoner, the leper, the sinner.
If we follow the history of famous achievers, we recognize that very few of their children were achievers.
Achievers, whether Presidents, Generals, Scientists, and those who become ridiculously rich, are usually men whose time and lives were spent achieving, not loving…..even their family. And their children inherited their money, but not necessarily their brains, ability, or even their perseverance.
What their children have then is money, and money gives both pleasure and power, but not a sense of either responsibility or achievement. They either spend their lives on one or both pleasure or fighting to gain power.
Look at Trump. He literally acts like a spoiled child. Because that is what he is. Likely, he did not receive a father’s love, affirmation, motivational challenges to do good, or any sense of self-worth other than through his money. His journey from need to love never even began. He is, literally, a lost child in a scary world filled with other rich people and governments with power. He does not see the BIG picture, and he has probably never even had much chance to know, nevertheless care, about people with different kinds of lives.
This doesn’t mean we don’t work hard to stop his short-sighted and destructive choices. All it means is we don’t hate him any more than we would a child with misunderstood ways of coping in the world.
Hating him, attacking him personally, alienates him further from the people he doesn’t understand. Attack the choices he makes. But let’s get over our self-righteousness. I am eighty-eight, and I spend nights recognizing the mistakes I made in being there for others, even those I loved, both in what I did or said and in what I didn’t do or say because they were different from me. I did not understand their strengths, weaknesses, vulnerabilities, life experiences, or wounds.
That’s what old age is about. Learning to walk humbly with our God, by knowing we are loved, no matter what, because our heavenly Father has the knowledge, understanding, and the freedom to love that our parents didn’t and we also don’t.
Sex as Grace for the Spiritual Journey
My spiritual journey through disillusionment with my Christian denomination eventually took me through a study of World Religions, reading the whole bible, visiting various Christian denominations, and finally at 30, being challenged to say this prayer: Jesus, IF you are who you claimed to be, I accept you as my Savior and Lord. Take my life and make me into the person God created me to become. The result of that was being suddenly overwhelmed with joy from the sense of being loved tenderly, totally, just as I was “without one plea.” It gave me openness to grace that has not only brought unquestionable miracles, but also strength to deal with the extremely heartbreaking parts of my life that come without miracles.
Now, at the age of 88, I have become convinced that life is a spiritual school for learning to love our imperfect selves, then not only those who love us, but those who frighten and even hurt us, and ultimately God, when we are suffering and feel abandoned, just as Jesus did.
I can look back on my journey and see Micah 6:8 playing out. What God has taught me slowly is to “seek justice, love mercy,” and now in my old age to learn to “walk humbly with my God.”
My main activity now in sleepless nights is reviewing both my outer and inner life over all those years. I have gone from denial, to cringing, to trying to do something better than my younger self has managed to do, to finally accepting that we all are unfinished, imperfect human beings, even at the moment of death. And we were not all dealt the same hand, so we can’t judge anyone, even ourselves.
I was married to my husband for almost sixty years. We were total opposites in personality, upbringing, and even what we valued in life. It was not an easy journey to unconditional love for either of us. And though as humans, we never reached perfection, we grew in love and in understanding. I think for most people, marriage is the best school for learning to love like Jesus did.
God made sex pleasurable so that early humans, who did not know how we made babies, would procreate and increase. Early humans lived short lives and married early. The world, cultures, people, and the needs involved in spiritual evolution have changed.
Sex as pleasure is still part of the journey, but the need to populate the earth isn’t.
However, I have discovered that part of the spiritual journey is experiencing a oneness with all people, with nature, with the universe, through the Spirit of God in all of it.
Three times I have experienced this life-changing understanding.
The first was when cooking out with the young boys in my husband’s and son’s Indian Guides group’s campout. All the fathers went to sleep before the kids, so instead of going back to my in-laws’ nearby country house, I stayed there, sitting in a lawn chair all night, keeping the fire going and pulling the sleeping boys back when they wiggled close to it. Just before dawn, the night sounds stopped. It was like the earth was holding its breath. Then, as a pale light tinted the edge of the world, the chorus of the day sounds began. I suddenly experienced a sense of total oneness with it ALL. It was not only joyous, but mind-blowing. I am one with everyone and everything. Hating them is hating myself. It was the beginning of a long process of learning to not judge or hate, even when I must fight to stop actions I consider destructive. Our universe and everything in it are one because we have the Spirit of God within us.
The second time was when I walked alone at midnight in a freshly fallen snow to the top of the hill behind our house in our “Winnie the Pooh Hundred Acre Wood.” The silence was profound, and the sky was thick with stars, more than I had ever seen. At first, the magnitude of it all made me feel tiny and insignificant. But then I realized that even though smaller than a pinpoint in eternity, I was like a tiny spot in a beautiful painting. A spot that would have left an empty white space if I wasn’t there. Again, I was transformed by that feeling of oneness with all that glory!
The third and last time I have felt this oneness was when my wonderfully kind husband came home late from work wanting to make love. I usually was delighted to make love, but this night I just didn’t feel like it. As I hesitated in responding, the thought hit me that he may have had a terrible day and needed not only the pleasure, but the affirmation of being loved that way. So, I chose to be responsive and affirming. When I did, I experienced a sense of total oneness with him, which after a few moments morphed into that sense of oneness with everything and everyone, including God.
Sex is part of having an intimate, life-changing relationship. Like other things, it can become an addictive escape from loneliness or a need for affirmation. Using others, even for mutual pleasure, is not love. But it’s human. We all do it, even in marriage. But as part of a commitment to loving a partner, it can be spiritually life-changing.
There are many ways of experiencing sexual pleasure. The difference isn’t in the “how”, it’s in the “why.” And that goes for all genders and combinations.
Sexual pleasure started as practical. Our choice now is between using it just for pleasure, like eating pie, or as part of our journey to becoming able to love someone more than ourselves. And that can connect us to the Spirit of God within and all around us.
A Possible Beginning for my Memoir
A Journey from Need to Love.
“Lord, thank you that my baby made it safely. If you want me to come now, I trust you know best. But do I have to die in a scene from the Three Stooges?”
At the age of thirty-three, I had just had my fifth Caesarian Section when my uterus tore. Spouting blood was hiding the source of the hemorrhaging. I felt like life was draining out of me. Hearing the crunch of hurrying feet on broken glass, I realized that someone had knocked the IV pole over in the panic. I could see the frightened looks on the observing medical students as my normally soft-spoken doctor shouted for milk to show where the blood was coming from. Then the heavy metal bar holding the sheet that blocked my view of the surgery got knocked over onto my nose.
I remember thinking “Oh well, according to Mom my birth was a Three Stooges act too.” The Doctor had still been on his way as the top of my head came into view, as the intern tried to stop me from coming out. Mom kicked him solidly in his face. As he grabbed his nose, Mom pushed, and I popped out as one nurse caught me while another staunched the blood spouting from the intern’s nose.
Obviously, I didn’t die either time. However, the Three Stooges act has been a recurring theme throughout my eighty-eight years. Fortunately, the Love of God expressed in Jesus exploded into my life when I was thirty.
I had gotten my first clue that nobody had a monopoly on God when I was a first grader in a Catholic school and worriedly told my Methodist mother that Sister Rose said that only Catholics got to go to heaven. My mother bent down to eye level with me and informed me emphatically, “You and your dad are going to get into heaven on my Methodist prayers.”
Methodist or not, Mom was our very involved room mother and became good friends with Sister Rose. So, when Sister Rose laughingly told her that when she had scolded some of the boys for fighting, telling them that she knew all our parents and none of them would fight, I had piped up, “Mine do. I saw my mother throw her shoe at my father.” Mom just laughed and said, “Yes, I did, but it was my soft silk bedroom slipper and not nearly as hard as those chalkboard erasers she says you throw at the boys when they misbehave.” I think they called it a draw.
Though she didn’t go to church with us, Mom was very supportive of our Catholicism in every way except one. Back when it was supposed to be a mortal sin to eat meat on Fridays, she served us bacon for breakfast every Friday morning. When dad demurred, she insisted emphatically that it was a worse sin to waste food than to eat meat on Fridays. I don’t know about Dad, but I happily bought into her logic.
At that time, we were renting the third floor of a private home in St. Louis, Missouri. It had a wonderful yard with good climbing trees and even sidewalks for roller skating. There was a washing machine in the basement. I helped to carry the wash up and down the three flights sometimes. But, the basement was dark with yard tools and furniture stored there, so I was strictly forbidden to go into it alone. Then one day, after school I had been having so much fun climbing trees and chasing butterflies outside that I waited too long to climb all the stairs to our bathroom. I was desperate enough to brave the dark, forbidden basement to pee in the drain there. To my great relief, I managed it undetected. Unfortunately, that night, as I was saying my prayers, I remembered that I was scheduled to make my first confession early the next morning. I panicked. It would be humiliating to confess what I had done. I considered just saying, “I went in the basement.” The nice young priest might settle for that, but would God?
After a sleepless night, I nervously waited for my turn. When I got inside the dark confessional, I blurted out, “Bless me, father, for I have sinned. I peed down the drain in the basement.” There was no response. Finally, after what sounded like a coughing fit, he said in a strangled voice, “Say three Hail Marys and don’t do it again.” I got out as fast as I could, but as I rattled off my three Hail Marys, I couldn’t help wondering, if there was a book with all the sins and their appropriate penances, would peeing down a drain in the basement be in it?
Years later, I was pretty sure that my first confession had become a story to be passed down to new priests.
My story is about my journey from making religion my God and throwing God and Jesus out when my religion, totally controlled by men who didn’t marry or have children, told me I had to die having Caesarians. After years of ignoring the issue of God, then several years of searching, Christian friends helped me begin a relationship with Him through His Love fleshed out in Jesus.
Mine is also a story of a personality made vulnerable by responding to life from emotion first rather than logic, and also having a mind that questioned a world full of many rules that made no practical sense.
It is also about the journey through the self-centeredness that comes from feeling inadequate, but with grace from a loving God, visibly active in amazing ways, which includes healing and spiritual growth.
The Treasures of Old Age are its Many Diverse Challenges that at Least Keep it from Being Boring, But Only If You Have a Sense of Humor.
It’s been ten years since my back surgery. In spite of what I’m about to recount, I promise you that I had been off all pain meds, except Tylenol, for two weeks. I am highly motivated because pain medicine makes my coffee taste terrible for a couple of months after I quit taking it and I am definitely addicted to my coffee. But as usual for someone who loves wondering about conundrums or wonderful possibilities, instead of paying attention to the actual world around her, peculiarities happen.
I got to my doctors for my follow up appointment and as the nurse was taking my blood pressure, I realized I had my blouse on inside out. Of course, me being me, I didn’t keep quiet and just take my first chance alone to turn it right side out. The nurse swore she hadn’t even noticed. Which worried me a bit, because I like my medical support people to be aware of what’s in front of them, particularly when I am it.
Then a few nights afterward when I was still wearing my back brace at night, I awoke to make one of my usual trips to check out the plumbing. But I couldn’t get up because I was unable to move my arms. As I was starting to panic that my arms were paralyzed, my attempts to move my arms made that noise peculiar to Velcro being tugged loose. It happens that the Velcro on the two wrist braces I wear for Carpal Tunnel Syndrome is the same as that on my back brace. Somehow, I had Velcroed my arms to my body. I finally managed to get my arms free after laughing helplessly for several minutes.
I admit that the down side is a major challenge because getting old is sort of like being born again. As your physical strength dwindles and remembering words becomes like a game of Whack a Mole, you struggle to keep on being who you’ve been all your life. Slowly you have to face that the self of all your years is gone. At the same time, you realize that best friends of many years have either “left the building” or no longer are able to share memories or even to make new ones.
Parents, spouses, often even siblings are gone. Past accomplishments don’t play a part in who you are to younger people. And everyone around you now is younger. Lonely days and nights stretch out before you, as you try to find a purpose for whatever years remain. The tiny minutia of life devours days broken only by trivial pursuits of fleeting pleasures or paradoxical efforts to stay healthy.
However, in the scheme of things, Old Age is for letting go of ego, pride, pretense, and delusions about both ourselves and others. If as Micah says, we have sought justice and loved mercy, we now begin to learn to walk humbly with our God and the least painful way is humor. If you can laugh at yourself, you will have plenty to laugh about.
My favorite old person story is about a woman at a nursing home who had dementia. The aide who was helping her into her nightgown was still struggling with her own mother’s dementia diagnosis the day before. The woman turned to her and said, “Can you tell me my name. I can’t remember it.” As the aide started to reply, the woman pointed to a picture of Jesus on the wall and said, “Never mind, He knows who I am. That’s all that matters.”
