Daily Virtue Post

The Word of God

Encountering Jesus is the foundation for all renewal. Knowledge of Scripture is knowledge of Christ. In our daily post, we hope to shine a light on Jesus’ life as written in the Scriptures to hopefully bring you into a deeper relationship through an expanded understanding of His teachings.

“The Word of God is not a word to apply in our daily lives at some later date; it is a word to heal us through, and in, our listening here and now. The questions, therefore, are: How does God come to me as I listen to the word? Where do I discern the healing hand of God touching me through the word? How are my sadness, my grief, and my mourning being transformed at this very moment? Do I sense the fire of God’s love purifying my heart and giving me new life? These questions should lead us to the sacrament of the word, the sacred place of God’s real presence.” – Henri Nouwen

Maybe, for the time being, we have to accept the many fluctuations between knowing and not knowing, seeing and not seeing, feeling and not feeling, between days in which the whole world seems like a rose garden and days in which our hearts seem tied to a millstone, between moments of ecstatic joy and moments of gloomy depression, between the humble confession that the newspaper holds more than our souls can bear and the realization that it is only through facing up to the reality of our world that we can grow into our own responsibility. Maybe we have to be tolerant toward our own avoidances and denial in the conviction that we cannot force ourselves to face what we are not ready to respond to, and in the hope that in one future day we will have the courage and strength to open our eyes fully and see without being destroyed. All this might be the case, as long as we remember that there is no hope in denial or avoidance, neither for ourselves, nor for anyone else, and that new life can only be born out of the seed planted in crushed soil. Indeed God, our Lord, “will not scorn this crushed and broken heart” (Psalm 51:17). - Henri Nouwen

When enslaved Africans were taught the Bible, it was a heavily redacted version. The Exodus was removed, as was most of the Old Testament. References to racial unity disappeared, as did the entire book of Revelation. Scripture was butchered by white supremacy, leaving only what was good news to white people. If we only read, teach, and preach the New Testament, particularly when we heavily center the writings attributed to Paul, we are perpetuating a plantation church ethic of Scripture. If, instead, we center narratives of liberation and survival, refusing to sanitize Jesus and refusing to spiritualize physical freedom, we get closer to the hush harbor. We get closer to the power of the Talking Book. We get closer to what can actually be called gospel—good news. - Center for Action and Contemplation