Month: December 2025

Posted on

Idols and Isaiah

As Advent comes to a close and we welcome the Messiah, I offer some reflections from the prophet Isaiah. He’s been a close companion of mine these past four months.

Isaiah invites Israel to repent of its idolatry, and return to the living God (see Isaiah 44). On the one hand, he names idol worship as empty and fruitless, ultimately leading both idol-crafter and idolater to be put to shame. Yet his lengthy descriptions of the crafting and worship of idols have a certain warmth and tenderness to them. There is a felt beauty and hopefulness in the process that leads, ultimately, to so much emptiness, enslavement, and misery.

Idols are not always ugly. They’re often appealing and alluring. They bring beauty and soothing and comfort. They promise security and protection. There is a certain satisfaction in idols because they are the work of our own hands. We can see them and touch them. They offer a transactional relationship. We know what we are dealing with.

And idols ruin us. They leave us miserably alone and exhausted, languishing in increasing fruitlessness. The work of our hands can never save us. Idols ultimately enslave and torment us.

I have some obvious idols in my life – addictive pleasure that leave me unhealthy, exhausted, depleted, and ashamed. But much more frequently, I feel the pressure to produce or perform, the relentless “I have to, or else…” I can be pulled back-and-forth between those two poles in an endless tug-of-war – only to feel more powerless and ashamed.

As I prepared this summer for the public launch of the Rebuild My Church Initiative in our diocese, I was amped up with anxiety and fear and pressure, which sometimes became paralyzing. In truth, the challenging situations our churches are facing (as well as the amazing opportunities that are in front of us) are beyond any merely human stratagem. The deeper invitation is for me and for all of us to be renewed in our secure relationship with the Father and with each other. Mission is a way of being.

If I’ve learned anything in my personal recovery journey, it’s that most of us have far more shame and fear and insecurity than we care to recognize. Shame and fear, when unnoticed and untended, become a hotbed for the weeds of idolatry to take root and take over.

During many moments of overwhelm this past spring and summer, I felt a gentle invitation from Jesus to keep embracing the interior integration he is inviting me to. Any “successful” institutional renewal only flow from my interior renewal.

So, at the end of the summer, I began journaling and reflecting on forgiveness, slowly making my way through Robert Enright’s new book on that topic. I shared back in October how that reflection unexpectedly brought me to Robert Frost’s poem “Nothing Gold Can Stay.”

The Lord had more to show me that day. I suddenly remembered the words of Isaiah – “All flesh is grass.” And I found my way to Isaiah 40.

“A voice says, ‘Cry out!’ And I said, ‘What shall I cry out?’”

“All flesh is grass, and all its beauty is like the flower of the field … The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand for ever” (Isaiah 40:6-8)

And I kept reading. Chapter after chapter, the words pierced my heart. I felt encouraged and emboldened by the invitation to be a herald, about to cry out to thousands during the fall listening sessions. It’s easy for me to see the ways that our Catholic parishes are clinging to a familiar institutional culture that offers a false security and comfort while choking off new life. The Lord was showing me the same struggle in my own day-to-day discipleship. How can I invite institutions to repent of their idols if I don’t look at my own?

The Lord also spoke promises and assurances (Isaiah 41:8-10). They seeped into a deeper layer in my heart than ever before:

  Friend

  I have chosen you

  I am with you

  I am your God

  I will strengthen you

  I will help you

  I will uphold you with my victorious right hand

For many days, I kept returning to these words in prayer. Meanwhile, I was finishing reading a book about families raising securely attached kids. I was stunned when the author discussed the prospect of grooming and sexual abuse of one’s own children. After many valuable practical instructions on crucial conversations, she calmly and matter-of-factly named the truth that parents cannot stop bad things from happening. Security comes not from the prevention of tragedy, but from knowing that there is an abundance of secure love and connection before, during, and after any bad things that happen.

Here God was answering some painful cries of my heart in the preceding months. Occasionally, I write my own psalms of lament to God (not easy to do, but worth it!). More than once I have written, “How can I trust you?” – along with a list of complaints to God of the ways he did not stop bad things from happening in my life. Where’s the “protection” in that?

Can you see the appeal of idols here? They twist the promises of God in Isaiah 41:

  The LORD – “I am your God”

     Idols –  “Craft your own god”

  The LORD – “I will strengthen you”

     Idols – “You can be strong on your own”

  The LORD – I will help you”

     Idols – “you won’t need to depend”

  The LORD – “I will uphold you”

     Idols – “You can uphold yourself”

  The LORD – “my victorious right hand”

     Idols – “Bad things happen in this world. You need to protect yourself!”

Idols seduce us by appealing to our fear and shame, and distracting us away from our deeper longings of Faith, Hope, and Love. Idols promise protection against those desires getting betrayed, crushed, rejected, abandoned, or disappointed.

Desire is a dangerous thing. It feels dangerous to us. But it is first dangerous to the devil and his kingdom of darkness. He is a liar and a murderer from the beginning, envying what God placed in us and the lofty destiny he has for us. So he assaults and disrupts our secure relationships with God and with each other. He invites us to turn away from our desires, and instead to live controlled, curated, and comfortable lives. He seduces us individually, but especially loves it when entire church institutions can begin living this way. That way, even when some individuals (like the prophet Isaiah) have abundant desire and lively imagination for more, there is an inertia in place to resist institutional change. Prophets tend to be persecuted.

In a fallen world, in which bad things happen (and all flesh is grass that will wither), it is not an easy thing to abide in Faith, Hope, and Love. Holding desire and imagination for abundance means weeping over what is no longer and waiting for the not-yet. It means trusting in the promises of a God who is truly good.

God actually does NOT promise us that no bad thing will ever happen to us. As human beings, we find ourselves in the middle of a story in which terrible tragedy has already struck. Things are not as they should be, and more bad things will happen. Through the prophet Isaiah, the LORD promises to be our friend, to be with us, to be our God, to help us, and to uphold us as He works out the victory that is already assured.

The birth of Jesus at Christmas brings the assurance of Emmanuel, God-with-us. He enters our world, enemy-occupied territory, on a stealth rescue mission. Precious few people realized that the God-man was in their midst – certainly not the rich or the powerful of this world. They only felt threatened and attempted to murder him. Baby Jesus barely escapes.

I love imagining that flight into Egypt. Baby Jesus, even in his frail humanity, felt calm and secure, not because Joseph and Mary were preventing bad things from happening, but because they were connecting again and again to God, to each other, and to him. They had no idea how this all was going to be okay, except that they were being assured by God’s promises.

Jesus brings true salvation and security. Genuine security is not found in managing or controlling. It’s not found in five-year strategic planning or by setting measurable goals and objectives (even when there is a time and place for those). Genuine security doesn’t even mean that you and I won’t experience fear or failure. We will, and often.

The true security that Jesus brings is the one-flesh union of the heavenly wedding feast, already anticipated on the Holy Night that we are about to celebrate. The gap between heaven and earth is now bridged. Humanity and divinity are now one, in the tiny body of the babe of Bethlehem. What God has joined together, no human being can separate.

Come, let us adore Him.

Posted on

“Watch!”

Advent is a season of watchfulness. Near the end of Mark’s Gospel, Jesus admonishes his disciples with a simple and strong commandment, “What I say to you, I say to all: watch!” (Mark 13:37).

What does Jesus mean by “watch”?

His one-word command (grēgoreîte) is a dramatic conclusion of extensive apocalyptic prophecies about the destruction of the Temple, the darkening of the sun and moon, the falling of the stars from heaven, and the coming of the Son of Man. You know not the day nor the hour, so watch.

Jesus is not fearmongering – even though many Christians today imagine the apocalypse that way. The coming of the Son of Man is not something we dread, but something we eagerly await, and daily pray for: “Thy Kingdom Come!” “Come, Lord Jesus!”

To be sure, overindulgence, carousing, or spiritual lethargy will hinder us from being watchful and ready at the coming of Jesus. But so will fear! There is an important difference between vigilance and hypervigilance. The former is a sober-minded awareness that is willing and ready to receive and respond. The latter is a fear-based reactivity, a trauma response doing what trauma responses do – ensuring survival at all costs. Jesus is not inviting us to mere survival, but into abundant life.

This fall, I appreciated a prayerful reading of Erik Varden’s The Shattering of Loneliness. Near the end of the book, he suggests a twofold meaning of the word “aware” – 1) to notice; and 2) to take care of or protect. He suggests that the best of the monastic traditions, including the desert fathers, embraced both dimensions of watchfulness. If we exclusively focus on one or the other, we will fail to fulfill Jesus’ command.

I find that, amidst the ruins of Christendom, many of the remnant Christians are so hyper-focused on “taking care of” that they no longer know how to notice with curiosity and kindness. It’s not hard to find hypervigilant and overprotective Christian parents, Christian families, or entire Christian communities. Fear dominates their consciousness and imagination as they try to control their lives and their environments, feeling immensely threatened by “those people.” These attitudes cause grave harm.

When fear predominates, it becomes impossible to live in trust, receptivity, and mutual relationships. I’ve worked with many adults who survived these home and church environments. Beneath all their tendencies of people-pleasing, anxiety, resentment, and control, there is a vast well of grief over never really being noticed, loved, and delighted in for who they are. They had to reshape their identity into cookie-cutter roles in order for the family to feel well-managed and in control.

When fear is intense, our field of vision literally narrows. There is little space for childlike curiosity to notice and discover and grow. I wrote long ago about the difference between Smoke Alarms and Watchtowers. More recently, I explained how virtue is impossible when emotions are eliminated or subjugated.

Christians have understandably felt threatened in the last few centuries. It’s tempting to get stuck in a collective trauma response, bound up in fear, and fail to remember that the victory is already won! Yes, Jesus spends all of Mark 13 offering apocalyptic prophecy. But these teachings immediately precede his entry into Jerusalem and his willing engagement of his Passion. As a victor very much in charge, Jesus overthrows the powers of darkness and brings his Kingdom definitively and victoriously into the midst of a world that is indeed passing away. It is our calm noticing of his presence and activity that will allow us an eager response and a joyful readiness to enter the heavenly wedding feast.

One extreme of “watch,” then, is a fear-based hypervigilance, which is not hard to find in our church communities. In our culture today, you can increasingly find the opposite extreme – an individualistic “mindfulness” that sometimes gets stuck in navel-gazing, or an untethered empathy that leaves no space for truth-telling.

As we see in Jesus, “the kindness of God that leads to repentance” (Romans 2:4) allows compassion and truth-telling to go together. He describes himself and our heavenly Father as “moved with compassion” (Luke 10:33; 15:20), using the Greek word splangna (“guts”). Compassion is an embodied response. We allow ourselves to feel what the other is feeling – especially when it is painful. Rather than backing away, bypassing, or fixing, we stand with as witnesses. Such “being with” is not at all incompatible with telling uncomfortable truths. Once the toxic shaming of “shoulds” is set aside, there is a time and a place for naming honestly and kindly the harm that is being caused by destructive behaviors. Jesus frequently speaks uncomfortable truths with kindness.

What about mindful noticing? During all these years of healing and recovery in my own life, I’ve come to appreciate being aware, here and now, in the present moment. I’ve come to appreciate noticing what is happening, without launching into contempt or judgment. I discover much more truth that way! Much of my former “discipline” was more about self-shaming, drivenness, and perfectionism. From a place of insecurity and fear, I was desperately striving to be good enough to be lovable. That is not virtue.

Of course, overindulgence is not virtue either. As I read Erik Varden’s words this fall, I felt a gentle invitation from the Lord to take the next step from a calm noticing into a healthy “taking care of.” I can be mindful of what is really happening here and now, and then freely engage in a “yes” or “no.” My desires are still unruly and disordered, in need of guidance and direction. They do not need shaming or fixing or subjugation, but they do need to be brought over to the Kingdom of God. So long as my desires belong only to this fallen world, they will indeed pull me downward, in a way that steadily ruins me. As I learn to receive them, accept them, and allow Jesus to love me there, I discover that I can be free in Christ; I can say “no” and be okay.

Jesus is the Word made flesh. He humbles himself to share in the clay of our humanity so that we can be exalted to share in his divinity. Mindfulness has enormous value, but is not an end in itself. It opens us to the transcendence that Jesus brings. It opens us to the fullness of Truth. He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Jesus entered this world precisely so that we can be wedded to him and thereby transcend this world – because this world and all the things in it are passing away.

Without the Incarnation, there is no Hope. There is no “taking care of” possible in a world that is under the dominion of its seducer, Satan. Jesus undoes that betrayal, not by eliminating its consequences, but by forging a path through suffering and death into eternal life. Genuine mindfulness allows us to see and follow that path, without being dismayed or distracted by the immensity of suffering that we would prefer to ignore, and definitely without being seduced by the allurements of this world.

Genuine mindfulness allows us to follow the path (not just “me”). The command of Jesus to “watch” is plural (grēgoreîte). He is not inviting an isolated and individualistic mindfulness, but a shared path of noticing and responding. We were never meant to exist as isolated individuals. It is not good for man to be alone.

Pope John Paul II articulated this balance in his Law of Gift: “Man cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself.” But we cannot give ourselves without much diligent labor of human integration. We must first become more of a whole person, self-aware and self-possessed – thereby allowing us to make a free, wholehearted, and fruitful gift of ourselves. Each person is a unique and unrepeatable mystery, worthy indeed of being loved and cherished in that uniqueness. But that unique giftedness is for the sake of bringing life and healing and goodness to the rest of the Body of Christ. It’s a gift to be given away.

We desperately need healthy Christian community – community which allows us (in the words of Curt Thompson) to be seen, soothed, safe, and secure. It is through a shared and communal “noticing” that each of us can discover more fully who we really are. It is also in that shared and communal noticing that each of us can emerge in lives of discipleship and truly “take care of,” truly become the steward of our story. It is then that self-awareness and self-possession can become self-gift. It is then that we can be one with Jesus in laying down our lives that others may live.

Come, Lord Jesus!

en_USEnglish
en_USEnglish