Nova Faith Community, 5105 Glendale Avenue, Ste G, Toledo, OH (2026)

06/02/2026

Beyond Binaries

The Spirit Reworks Us

Tuesday, June 2, 2026
The Rt. Rev. Michael Curry considers how God is always leading us beyond what we think we know:

There will be a time when God’s GPS points you in a direction that makes people uncomfortable. It may make you uncomfortable. The evolution of long-held beliefs can be a spiritual earthquake; the ground beneath us shaking, the very fault lines of our identity shifting and seeking to resettle. But if we can make it through, we find the reward: not an easy journey but a share of what the Bible calls “peace that passes all understanding,” the peace of knowing we are living love’s way, without contradiction….

We humans are walking bundles of contradictions. I know that I am, and experience suggests that I’m not alone in that. As people often describe relationships … “It’s complicated.” It is and we are.

In 2000, Curry was elected bishop in the Episcopal Church as the church wrestled with questions about the full inclusion and equality of LGBTQ persons in the church:

Experience and friendships had long taught me that g**s and le****ns were as Christian as anybody else. Still, when it came to the public blessing of unions (marriage wasn’t yet on the table), I was stuck in the unspoken disapproval of my upbringing. Homosexuality happened behind closed doors, not at the altar.

And yet, during that same upbringing, … “love your neighbor” was held up constantly, forcefully, as a core value and commitment. That conviction fueled the civil rights movement that had given me birth. I heard it all the time. But somehow it hadn’t occurred to me that that truth must be true for gay and le***an friends in every respect.

As a bishop, I made a solemn vow to “guard the faith, unity, and discipline of the Church.” I had also vowed to “be merciful to all, show compassion to the poor and strangers, and defend those who have no helper.” I was beginning to see that obedience to the letter and the spirit of both of those vows was leading me to a real contradiction….

I was growing, and my own beliefs had evolved. But another way to say it is that I was becoming more and more open to letting the spirit of God breathe through me and make me new. Therein is the source of real personal change, evolution, and transformation, and it’s never ending….

The late [lay theologian] Verna Dozier … was a real mentor, teacher, and soul friend to me. In her book The Dream of God, she offered this wisdom: “We always see through a glass darkly, and that is what faith is about. I will live by the best I can discern today. Tomorrow I may find out I was wrong. Since I do not live by being right, I am not destroyed by being wrong.”

Reference:
Michael B. Curry with Sarah Grace, Love is the Way: Holding on to Hope in Troubling Times (Avery, 2020), 166, 171, 172–173, 178, 184.

Image credit and inspiration: Beth Macdonald, untitled (detail), 2022, photo, Unsplash. An estuary reveals a world that is more than just land or water, but something beyond them both.

06/02/2026

Conversation

Conversation often helps confirm or distill truth. Imagine the conversation between Elizabeth and Mary, these two related friends who bore witness in wondrous pregnancy. Both bore the weight of a gift and a call with shame and questions. Imagine the stories they told, the questions shared, the listening, tears, encouragement, and loving countenance. They are a model for us.

Br. Luke Ditewig, SSJE

06/01/2026

Beyond Binaries

Loving Beyond the Boxes

Monday, June 1, 2026
Father Richard affirms God’s desire for us to know and welcome all of ourselves and others:

God is clearly more comfortable with diversity than we are, and God’s final goal and objective are much simpler. God and the entire cosmos are about two things: differentiation (people and things becoming themselves) and communion (living in supportive coexistence). Physicists and biologists seem to know this better than theologians and clergy.

Religious people who use the scriptures to condemn or exclude others seem to have different goals and objectives from those of God or Jesus. Their arguments generally have to do with very secular concerns: power and control, fear of the other and the unknown, and idealization of a family unit that Jesus himself neither lived nor idealized. Check the Gospels if you don’t believe me.

Institutional religion tends to think of people as very simple; therefore, the law must be very complex to protect them in every situation. Jesus does the opposite: He treats people as very complex—different in religion, lifestyle, virtue, temperament, and success—and keeps the law very simple in order to bring them to God:

A legal expert put him to the test: “Teacher, which commandment in the Law is the greatest?” He replied to him, “‘You are to love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind.’ This is the first and foremost, and the second is like it: ‘You are to love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hangs everything in the Law and in the Prophets” (Matthew 22:35–40).

Jesus takes the risk of allowing people the freedom to be themselves and to love God according to the shape of their own heart, soul, body, and mind! Religion developed for the sake of social control, but Jesus doesn’t give us much grist for the social control mill. Jesus is asking a different set of questions, ones that take away our private agendas and remind us of the ways we have not yet begun to love. For Jesus, it is all about union—union with God, others, and what is, however it presents itself. We cannot let labels trip us up. We all belong, but how cleverly our moral pretenses prevent us from struggling with what is right in front of us! How ingeniously our ego protects itself from compassion and understanding. [1]

Author Jen Austin considers how God invites us to move beyond neat categories:

It is part of the human tendency to put everything into a neat little category…. However, categories also allow us to include and exclude people based on characteristics that are unfamiliar to us or that we don’t understand. Black or white, gay or straight, we spend a lot of time and waste a lot of energy creating and adhering to labels in our culture, quite often at the expense of basic human dignity and common sense…. God is bigger than all our little boxes. God’s love transcends the lines we draw on earth. [2]

References:
[1] Adapted from Richard Rohr, “Where the Gospel Leads Us,” in Homosexuality and Christian Faith: Questions of Conscience for the Churches, ed. Walter Wink (Fortress Press, 1999), 86, 87, 88.

[2] Jen Austin, Coming Out Christian: Finding Wholeness in Faith and Sexuality (Sources of Hope Publications, 2006), 223.

Image credit and inspiration: Beth Macdonald, untitled (detail), 2022, photo, Unsplash. An estuary reveals a world that is more than just land or water, but something beyond them both.

05/31/2026

Beyond Binaries

Moving Beyond Our Binary Minds

Sunday, May 31, 2026
Father Richard Rohr highlights the importance of developing an open, “beginner’s mind”:

The dualistic mind is the one we’re all educated into. It’s the one that gets us through the day, helping us make important distinctions and necessary judgments, pointing us to the left or right. It’s essential for the advent of the scientific, industrial, and now technological revolutions, so we’re all grateful for it. It’s good and necessary as far as it goes, but let me be clear, it doesn’t go far enough! The dualistic mind cannot deal with the biggies: love, death, suffering, God, infinity, and the very notion of grace.

To balance what I see as our overreliance on dualistic thinking, we have to find ways to practice thinking in a different way, where we can receive the moment as an open field. I call it the nondual or contemplative mind. In that space, we don’t have to divide the field or reject anything we don’t yet understand as wrong. We don’t have to eliminate everything that’s mysterious, negative, painful, or problematic. With the contemplative mind, we can leave the field open.

This is a major exercise in letting go because we have to let go of our fear, defensiveness, and expectations. I think that’s why so many people don’t persevere in meditation practice, daily contemplation, or periods of silence. I do a twenty-minute sit in the morning and again later in the day, and to be honest, it usually feels like twenty minutes of dying, twenty minutes of boredom, twenty minutes of not getting my own way. All these compulsive, obsessive, and negative thoughts come into my mind and try to grab my attention.

In the beginning contemplation is simply a practice of living with and looking out from our stable foundation in God, what we might call the Inner Witness. We have to be willing to see how attracted we are to negative, paranoid, oppositional, and even violent thinking. We start to wonder, Where did this come from? Why am I doing this?

We must be willing to question, “How could this little flimsy mind ever know God? How could it understand or even hold space for the great love or great suffering that enter every human life?” It will simply jump to the next thing because the dualistic mind is always moving toward resolution. It loves closure and rushes toward judgment. That’s why all great spiritual teachers said, “Do not judge.”

To well-educated, dualistic thinkers, that just feels irresponsible. We have to make judgments, don’t we? Of course we do, especially when it comes to issues of justice and solidarity. But the first lens through which we receive a moment, a person, or a situation has to be nondual. I have to accept all parts of reality—that which I think I understand (and call good), and that which I don’t understand (and assume is bad). Sadly, most never go beyond that. Anything that they don’t yet understand is presumed to be wrong, dangerous, sinful, heretical, or even to be destroyed.

Reference:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Art of Letting Go: Living the Wisdom of Saint Francis (MacMillan Audio, 2010).

Image credit and inspiration: Beth Macdonald, untitled (detail), 2022, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. An estuary reveals a world that is more than just land or water, but something beyond them both.

05/31/2026

Perspective

If the mystery of the Trinity elicits in us praise and celebration, the mystery of our own salvation by that same Trinity can only – should only – elicit in us a response of humble thanks and determination to adopt a fresh perspective: to see all our neighbors with the eyes of the Trinity as beloved siblings who share in the same hope of God’s future when all will be one.

Br. Lain Wilson, SSJE

05/30/2026

Spirit of Aliveness

Spirit of Aliveness: Weekly Summary

Saturday, May 30, 2026
Sunday
Even though we pray, “Come, Holy Spirit,” I hope you know that the gift of the Spirit is already given. The Holy Spirit has already come. We all are temples of the Holy Spirit—equally, objectively, and forever!
—Richard Rohr

Monday
This is the beginning of the miracle of Pentecost, the revolution of the intimate. This is the beginning of a community broken open by the sheer act of God.
—Willie James Jennings

Tuesday
Wholehearted spirituality in the freedom of the Spirit gives us courage, courage to bear witness to God’s grace against all odds, courage to speak despite efforts to silence us, courage to act authentically and in ways that encourage and empower the weak and the vulnerable.
—Rebecca Button Pritchard

Wednesday
There is an Inner Reminder, an Inner Rememberer, who holds together all the disparate and fragmented parts of our lives, fills in all the gaps, owns all the mistakes, forgives all the failures, and loves us into an ever-deeper life. This is the job description of the Holy Spirit.
—Richard Rohr

Thursday
They were all kneeling around the high altar of St. Anthony’s Church (where I had been a novice), still singing in tongues. They never left the church the whole night. That was the birth of the New Jerusalem Community.
—Richard Rohr

Friday
When we open up space for the Spirit and let the Spirit fill that space within us, we begin to change, and we become agents of change.
—Brian McLaren

Week Twenty-One Practice
Born of the Spirit

The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.
—John 3:8

Spiritual teacher Christine Valters Paintner offers this prayer to the Spirit of creation and new life:

Spirit of Creation,
in the beginning you blew over the waters,
coaxing the earth up from the depths of the sea,
and inviting all creatures to rise up on their own wings.

Spirit of Renewing Life,
you breathed into me in my very first moment,
invigorate me with your gift of energy and newness.
Continue to breathe expansively in me,
inviting me to a vision for what is possible in my life.

Spirit of Restlessness,
stir me from my longing for comfort that so often stifles me,
help me to release from the places that keep me stuck,
and guide me in the direction you would have me go.

Spirit of the Great Winds,
help me to hear your voice in the midst of the whirlwind of my life.
Grant me the trust to hold on while I am being buffeted by life’s storms.

Blessings of wind be upon me.
May my sails billow wide,
May I breathe deeply the gift of inspiration,
May I be carried to the place of my resurrection,
May I be fully free.

Reference:
Excerpted from Water, Wind, Earth, and Fire: The Christian Practice of Praying with the Elements, 42–43, copyright © 2010 by Christine Valters Paintner. Used with permission of the publisher, Sorin Books®, an imprint of Ave Maria Press®, Inc., P.O. Box 428, Notre Dame, IN 46556. www.avemariapress.com.

Image credit and inspiration: Arman Khadangan, untitled (detail), 2019, photo, Unsplash.
The Holy Spirit kindles our inner fires: enlivening, inspiring, and sustaining all throughout time.

05/30/2026

Presence

God is always coming to us. Pay attention to now. God’s presence is always in the present. There will be “thin places” where God breaks through to you, often mysteriously, in the here-and-now. Pay attention to now.

Br. Curtis Almquist, SSJE

05/29/2026

Spirit of Aliveness

The Spirit of Christ Within Us

Friday, May 29, 2026
Brian McLaren describes how the Holy Spirit empowers us to carry on Jesus’s work:

“It’s better that I go away so that the Spirit can come,” Jesus said. If he were physically present and visible, our focus would be on Christ over there, right here, out there … but because of his absence, we discover the Spirit of Christ right here, in here, within.

Jesus describes the Spirit as another comforter, another teacher, another guide—just like him, but available to everyone, everywhere, always. The same Spirit who had descended like a dove upon him will descend upon us, he promises. The same Spirit who filled him will fill all who open their hearts….

The Bible describes the Spirit with beautiful and vivid imagery: Wind. Breath. Fire. Cloud. Water. Wine. A dove. These dynamic word pictures contrast starkly with the heavy, fixed imagery provided by, say, stone idols, imposing temples, or thick theological tomes. Through this vivid imagery, the biblical writers tell us that the Spirit invigorates, animates, purifies, holds mystery, moves and flows, foments joy, and spreads peace….

At the core of Jesus’ life and message, then, was this good news: the Spirit of God, the Spirit of aliveness, the Wind-breath-fire-cloud-water-wine-dove Spirit who filled Jesus is on the move in our world. And that gives us a choice: do we dig in our heels, clench our fists, and live for our own agenda, or do we let go, let be, and let come … and so be taken up into the Spirit’s movement?…

In the millennia since Christ walked with us on this Earth, we’ve often tried to box up the “wind” in manageable doctrines. We’ve exchanged the fire of the Spirit for the ice of religious pride. We’ve turned the wine back into water, and then let the water go stagnant and lukewarm. We’ve traded the gentle dove of peace for the predatory hawk or eagle of empire….

In a world full of big challenges, in a time like ours, … we need to experience the mighty rushing wind of Pentecost. We need our hearts to be made incandescent by the Spirit’s fire. We need the living water and new wine Jesus promised, so our hearts can become the home of dovelike peace….

When we open up space for the Spirit and let the Spirit fill that space within us, we begin to change, and we become agents of change…. So let us open our hearts. Let us dare believe that the Spirit that we read about in the Scriptures can move among us today, empowering us in our times so we can become agents in a global spiritual movement of justice, peace, and joy.

Reference:
Brian D. McLaren, We Make the Road by Walking: A Year-Long Quest for Spiritual Formation, Reorientation, and Activation (Jericho Books, 2014), 203, 204, 205–206.

Image credit and inspiration: Arman Khadangan, untitled (detail), 2019, photo, Unsplash. The Holy Spirit kindles our inner fires: enlivening, inspiring, and sustaining all throughout time.

05/29/2026

Pressure

Unlike the day-to-day economic or social pressures that bear down upon us from the world, or even the internal pressures of our own psyche, the pressure exerted upon us by the Holy Spirit is always creative, generative, and life-giving beyond what we can anticipate or imagine.

Br. Keith Nelson, SSJE

05/28/2026

Spirit of Aliveness

The Birth of a New Community

Thursday, May 28, 2026
The Spirit cannot withhold itself from any heart that longs to know the presence of God.
—Richard Rohr, The Good News According to Luke

In 1971, Father Richard was placed in charge of the youth retreat program for the Archdiocese of Cincinnati, Ohio. For most of the very first retreat, Richard says that he thought all the boys—“a bunch of jocks”—were just tolerating him. But as Richard finished preaching on the story of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11–32), “a perfect story of how Jesus saw God,” the boys began to cry and embrace each other. Richard recounts being rather afraid of this unexpected appearance of the Holy Spirit:

I moved back; I didn’t know what to do with this. You’d think I’d be grateful that one of my sermons worked! And then they began singing in tongues. I’d never heard someone speaking in tongues before. My mouth fell open. What did this mean? I’d never heard anything so beautiful, and no one was orchestrating it!

I endured it for about ten or fifteen minutes. Although I was delighting in it, I was also scared. I didn’t know what to do; I didn’t know how to join in, so I just watched. Finally, I broke in and said, “Guys, I’ll put the pizzas in the oven next door. Come over in twenty-five minutes.” No one paid a bit of attention to me. I put those pizzas in the oven. Twenty-five minutes later, I took them out and there were no boys. I couldn’t understand why they were not on time!

I’ll never forget walking back across the parking lot into the chapel and opening the doors. Now they were all kneeling around the high altar of St. Anthony’s Church (where I had been a novice), still singing in tongues. They never left the church the whole night.

That was the birth of the New Jerusalem Community. The next Friday, many of these boys brought their girlfriends and it grew quickly by word of mouth. Soon the girls were singing in tongues, too. The next month they brought their parents and grandparents. [1]

Friends of Richard’s, Andreas Ebert and Patricia C. Brockman, summarized how the Spirit was at work during this period of Richard’s ministry:

The young people he taught and led on retreats were overwhelmed with the gospel message. They gathered around this enthusiastic young priest, hungry for Scripture, increasingly eager for the shared life described there. Their weekly prayer gatherings began with fervent charismatic prayer and expanded from a group of teenagers to, at times, more than a thousand persons of many ages and diverse backgrounds. All the signs and wonders of the early church flourished among the prayers. It eventually became clear that enthusiasm was not enough, and among those followers some desired to live in a closer bond and within the discipleship of Christian community. Thus, New Jerusalem came into being, a laboratory-church where many came to commit themselves to the dream of a church that follows and trusts Jesus. [2]

References:
[1] Richard Rohr, Essential Teachings on Love, selected by Joelle Chase and Judy Traeger (Orbis Books, 2018), 92–93.

[2] Richard Rohr: Illuminations of His Life and Work, eds. Andreas Ebert and Patricia C. Brockman, (Crossroad Publishing, 1993), xiii.

Image credit and inspiration: Arman Khadangan, untitled (detail), 2019, photo, Unsplash. The Holy Spirit kindles our inner fires: enlivening, inspiring, and sustaining all throughout time.

Nova Faith Community

06/02/2026

06/02/2026

06/01/2026

05/31/2026

05/31/2026

05/30/2026

05/30/2026

05/29/2026

05/29/2026

05/28/2026

Address

Opening Hours

Website

Alerts

Shortcuts

Share

Category