Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship

What if we ceased to pledge our allegiance to the bottom line and stood, instead, with those who line the bottom?

Human beings are settlers, but not in the pioneer sense. It is our human occupational hazard to settle for little. We settle for purity and piety when we are being invited to an exquisite holiness. We settle for the fear-driven when love longs to be our engine. We settle for a puny, vindictive God when we are being nudged always closer to this wildly inclusive, larger-than-any-life God. We allow our sense of God to atrophy. We settle for the illusion of separation when we are endlessly asked to enter into kinship with all.

believe that God protects me from nothing but sustains me in everything.

See how they love one another.” Not a bad gauge of health. “There was no needy person among them.” A better metric would be hard to find. There is one line that stopped me in my tracks: “And awe came upon everyone.” It would seem that, quite possibly, the ultimate measure of health in any community might well reside in our ability to stand in awe at what folks have to carry rather than in judgment at how they carry it.

But I know, with all the certainty of my being, that Jesus has no interest in my doing this. To just say, "Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, I'm your biggest fan," causes him to stare at his watch, tap his feet, and order a double Glenlivet on the rocks with a twist. Fandom is of no interest to Jesus. What matters to him is the authentic following of a disciple. We all settle for saying, "Jesus," but Jesus wants us to be in the world who he is.

Our culture is hostile only to the inauthentic living of the gospel. It sniffs out hypocrisy everywhere and knows when Christians aren’t taking seriously, what Jesus took seriously. It is, by and large, hostile to the right things. It actually longs to embrace the gospel of inclusion and nonviolence, of compassionate love and acceptance. Even atheists cherish such a prospect.

How can someone take my advantage when I’m giving it?

For unless love becomes tenderness—the connective tissue of love—it never becomes transformational. The tender doesn’t happen tomorrow . . . only now.

Moral outrage is the opposite of God; it only divides and separates what God wants for us, which is to be united in kinship. Moral outrage doesn't lead us to solutions - it keeps us from them. It keeps us from moving forward toward a fuller, more compassionate response to members of our community who belong to us, no matter what they've done.

Homeboy receives people; it doesn’t rescue them. In being received rather than rescued, gang members come to find themselves at home in their own skin.

The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.

Paradise is not a place that awaits our arrival but a present we arrive at.

Living the gospel, then, is less about “thinking outside the box” than about choosing to live in this ever-widening circle of inclusion.

The discovery that awaits us is that paradise is contained in the here and now.

God was—and is—in the heartbreak and in the insight born of sadness, and in the arms that wrap around our grief.

Humility returns the center of gravity to the center. It addresses the ego clinging, which supplies oxygen to our suffering. It calls for a light grasp. For the opposite of clinging is not letting go but cherishing. This is the goal of the practice of humility. That having a “light grasp” on life prepares the way for cherishing what is right in front of us.

Generosity in Buddhism is to be relieved of the “stain of stinginess.

Thomas Wolfe, in You Can’t Go Home Again, writes, “To lose the earth you know, for greater knowing; to lose the life you have for greater life; to leave the friends you loved, for greater loving; to find a land more kind than home, more large than earth.

Hafez wrote: Slipping on my shoes, boiling water, toasting bread, buttering the sky, That should be enough contact With God in one day To make everyone “crazy.

Oscar Romero wrote: “A church that doesn’t provoke any crises, a gospel that doesn’t unsettle, a word of God that doesn’t get under anyone’s skin, a word that doesn’t touch the real sin of the society in which it is being proclaimed—what gospel is that?

But the work one does seeks to align our lives with God’s longing for us—that we be happy, joyful, and liberated from all that prevents us from seeing ourselves as God does.

Personally, I don’t think he wants so much for us to wave palm fronds at his authority, but rather to locate our own—to be not so astonished at Jesus’s authority but to live astonishingly, inhabiting our own power to live as he would.

It would seem that God created an “otherness” so that we could find our way in mutuality to kinship. Margins manufactured by God, perhaps, so that we’d dedicate our lives to their erasure. We are charged not with obliterating our diversity and difference but instead with heightening our connection to each other. As it says in the Qur’an: “I create diverse tribes, so that you might come to know each other.” And, to come running.

seek to “save” and “contribute” and “give back” and “rescue” folks and EVEN “make a difference,” then it is all about you . . . and the world stays stuck. The homies are not waiting to be saved. They already are. The

[...] But then he adds quickly, "You know what I do when I'm low on faith?" I shake my head and lean in. My faith's gas tank has been known to hover at "E", so I wanted to know. "I stand right here and I look at them mountains," he says. "I stare at the blue sky and white clouds. I breathe in this clean air." He demonstrates all of this. "Then I say to myself, 'God did this.'" He turns to me, with some emotion and a surfeit of peace. "And I know everything will be all right.

After all, nothing depends on how things turn out—only on how you see them when they happen.

Moral outrage is the opposite of God;

The opposite of clinging is not letting go but cherishing.

I believe that God protects me from nothing but sustains me in everything.