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

09/06/2026

Faith with Doubt

The Dance of Faith and Doubt

Sunday, September 6, 2026
Father Richard Rohr reflects on the place of doubt in a mature life of faith:

Basic religious faith is a vote for some coherence, purpose, benevolence, and direction in the universe. Unfortunately, the notion of faith that emerged in the West was much more a rational assent to the truth of certain mental beliefs rather than a calm and hopeful trust that God is inherent in all things, and that this whole thing is going somewhere good.

I worry about “true believers” who cannot carry any doubt or anxiety at all. People who are so certain always seem, like Hamlet’s queen, to “protest too much” and try too hard. To hold the full mystery of life is always to endure its other half, which is the equal mystery of death and doubt. To know anything fully is always to hold that part of it which is still mysterious and unknowable. [1]

Doubt and faith are actually correlative terms. People of great faith often suffer bouts of great doubt because they continue to grow. Mother Teresa experienced decades of this kind of doubt, as was revealed after her death. In a letter to a trusted spiritual director she wrote, “Darkness is such that I really do not see—neither with my mind nor with my reason.—The place of God in my soul is blank.—There is no God in me.” [2] The very fact that people were scandalized by this demonstrates how limited is our understanding of the nature of biblical faith.

It seems a movement from certitude to doubt and through doubt to acceptance of life’s mystery is necessary in all encounters, intellectual breakthroughs, and relationships, not just with the Divine. Human faith and religious faith are much the same except in their object or goal. What set us on the wrong path was making the object of religious faith “ideas” or doctrines instead of a person. Our faith is not a faith that dogmas or moral opinions are true, but a faith that Ultimate Reality/God/Christ is accessible to us—and even on our side. [3]

Our youthful demand for certainty eliminates most anxiety on the conscious level, so I can see why many are tempted to remain in such a control tower. We do not have enough experience of wholeness to include all its parts yet. First-half-of-life naïveté includes a kind of excitement and happiness that is hard to let go of unless we know there is an even deeper and tested kind of happiness out ahead of us. But we do not know that yet in the early years, which is why those in the second half of life must tell us about it. Without elders, a society perishes socially and spiritually.

It is probably necessary to eliminate most doubt when we are young; doing so is a good survival technique. But such worldviews are not true—and they are not wisdom. Wisdom happily lives with mystery, doubt, and unknowing and, in such living, ironically resolves that very mystery to some degree. [4]

References:
[1]Adapted from Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life (Jossey-Bass, 2024), 70–71.

[2] Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light: The Private Writings of the Saint of Calcutta, ed. Brian Kolodiejchuk (Doubleday, 2007), 210.

[3] Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See (The Crossroad Publishing Company, 2009), 117.

[4] Rohr, Falling Upward, 71.

Image credit and inspiration: Richárd Ecsedi, untitled (detail), 2019, photo. Unsplash. We trust the way forward even as the unexpected appears just beyond the edges of the map.

09/06/2026

Unity

In times of division and turmoil and fear, our common vocation calls us all to a unity that may seem, and frankly may be, impossible in this life. But in our unmitigated praise of God, we can make present now the new creation inaugurated by the death and resurrection of Jesus, when all divisions are erased. We can experience now a foretaste of God’s promised future.

Br. Lain Wilson, SSJE

09/05/2026

Becoming Disciples
Becoming Disciples: Weekly Summary
Saturday, September 5, 2026
Sunday
A spirituality of descent frees us to surrender our often-messy lives to God. It is about honoring the human journey, loving it, and living it in all its wonder and tragedy.
–Richard Rohr

Monday
If God is somehow participating in human suffering, instead of just passively tolerating it and observing it, that changes everything—at least for those who are willing to “gaze” contemplatively.
–Richard Rohr

Tuesday
No matter how painful, when the unhealthy ideas and habits and identities we rely on are taken away from us, it just makes space for that which is actually real and actually holy.
–Nadia Bolz-Weber

Wednesday
To follow Jesus, in other words, is to follow the one who turns the world upside down, even the religious world. Real discipleship is a tipsy arrangement at the very least. People with high need for approval, social status, and public respectability need not apply.
–Joan Chittister

Thursday
The Divine Mind transforms all human suffering by identifying completely with the human predicament and standing in full solidarity with it from beginning to end.
–Richard Rohr

Friday
If we would follow Christ crucified with attention, reverence, and devotion, we would recognize that the tears and blood and moans of the innocent have been absorbed into the air we breathe.
–M. Shawn Copeland

Week Thirty-Five Practice
Led by the Spirit

Activist and author Liza J. Rankow shares a vision of discipleship that includes all those called by the Spirit to act courageously in the service of healing and liberation.

In times of peril Life calls us into capacities we didn’t even know we had. So often we have no idea about the full measure of what we are being called to … or its consequences. I think that’s how the Spirit works with us—pretty sneaky, really. “Build an ark,” Spirit said to Noah—no mention at first of animals gathered, and months at sea with nothing but a thin hope of ever finding land. Just, “Build an ark.” “Be the spokesperson for the bus boycott,” Spirit told Dr. King when he was a 26-year-old pastor newly arrived in Montgomery, Alabama. “Black lives matter,” Spirit said to and through Alicia Garza. “Water is Life,” Spirit said to the Lakota and Dakota young people who sparked the peaceful resistance at Standing Rock. “Me too,” Spirit told Tarana Burke. “Take a knee,” Spirit directed Colin Kaepernick. “Climb a tree,” Spirit told Julia Butterfly Hill.

We never really know. I think it’s by design, because maybe if we did know what all we were really agreeing to we would never say yes in the first place. But Spirit and the ancestors lead us in little by little. By the time we realize the magnitude of it we are already committed. It can be costly, but how much more costly if we don’t. How tragic to play it safe, to never live into the fullness of our calling.

Healing and liberation are a collective project not an individual one. To meet the challenge will require all of us, and all of our gifts over time. Like the pyramids, the great cathedrals, or the living root bridges of Meghalaya India, this is the work of generations and the work of faith. It was begun by those who came long before us. Each of us is called in turn to lay our stones, to weave our roots, to give our lives toward a purpose larger than we can imagine and whose fruition we may never see. There is no map for these times, and only the compass of our hearts to guide us. Yet there is wisdom in the ancestors’ whispering; there is vision in the dreaming of the coming generations. We stand at the nexus between past and future, praying to be faithful to both in the crucial role entrusted to us. And they are with us, urging us on.

Reference:
Liza J. Rankow, Soul Medicine for a Fractured World: Healing, Justice, and the Path of Wholeness (Orbis Books, 2026), 187–188.

Image credit and inspiration: Jenna Keiper, CAC Environment, 2019-10-09, Photograph, CAC campus, Albuquerque NM. What does it look like to lay down burdens and die to ourselves while still on the path to becoming?

09/05/2026

Earth

The story that “earth is not our true home” and “we are bound for a better place” has left us alienated from the soil beneath our feet. How does this square with our wholehearted belief that God became flesh for our sake, and sends us to the world?

Br. Keith Nelson, SSJE

09/04/2026

From Leonard Sweet....

From Text to Song: Why I No Longer Call the Bible a “Text”
Caveat Emptor: This is a leftover thought that didn’t make it into the newly expanded second edition of A Tale of Two Swords: In the Beginning was the Song (salishsea.press). Space ran out, but my musings on a "sonic spirituality" clearly haven't. I feel like I am endlessly dancing in circles (perichoresis?) around a Great Mystery and always stumbling and fumbling to find the right words to convey the heart of that mystery.
So here’s another try.
Not too long ago I watched a video of one of my former seminary students doing what I taught him not to do. He had six translations fanned out, Greek open, highlighters uncapped. He was dissecting Mark as though the gospel were a frog in a lab, or as I put it in an earlier essay, “like a bird in a pan not a bird in the bush.”
And I thought: When did we learn to perform autopsies on something that claims to be alive? When did the Bible become a specimen?
That is why I no longer call the Bible a “text.” I used to fo**le that word. Text. It sounded serious, scholarly, academic. Most of all, controllable. A text sits still. A text stays where you put it. A text can be parsed, highlighted, footnoted, mastered. A text can be chopped into proof-texts and life-verses small enough to fit on a coffee mug or sharp enough to win an argument.
A text is something you manage. But I have become convinced that Scripture refuses to be managed.
Don’t misunderstand me. Of course the Bible is a text. But it is never merely a text. Calling Scripture a text is like calling the ocean water or a cathedral stone. True enough. But hardly enough.
The Bible is not a manual of rules. It is an unfolding Emmanuel drama, a symphony swelling, a story singing itself into the world.
What we call “verses” are not data points. They are movements. Melodic themes. Living voices in a larger score.
You can memorize every note and never hear the Music.
Jesus knew exactly what that looked like. In Matthew 5:18, he reaches right onto the scribe’s desk: “Not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished.” Or, in the unforgettable music of the King James: “One jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.”
A jot. A tittle.
The jot was the yod, the smallest letter of the Hebrew alphabet—a breath of ink hanging in midair.
The tittle was the keraia, literally a “little horn”—that tiny flick of the pen by which one letter distinguishes itself from another. Miss the horn and a letter changes. Change the letter and a word changes. Change the word and a world can turn.
The scribes guarded every stroke. They counted letters. They treasured the words of Torah with a devotion modern readers can scarcely imagine.
And yet Jesus says to those who knew the scrolls best, in John’s gospel (4:39):
You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life.
There is the tragedy.
They knew the signs but missed what the signs were signing and singing.
They loved the signpost and refused the journey.
They could transcribe the score note by note—and were deaf to the Music when the Music walked into the room.
That is bibliolatry. Not loving the Bible too much. Stopping at the Bible too soon.
It is mistaking the witness for the One to whom the witness witnesses. It is embracing the sign while missing the Signified. It is knowing every word of the score without ever joining the song.
Jesus did not come to abolish one jot or one tittle. He came to fulfill them. He is Embodied Torah and Incarnate Song--the Cantor who stepped into the sanctuary of the world to teach our tone-deaf hearts how to sing again.
Every jot, every horn, every stroke and stanza of Law and Prophets was a tuning fork, tuning the human heart to recognize the Voice when the Word became flesh and fresh.
The Scriptures were never meant to become forensic exhibits under fluorescent lights. They are alive with a Resonant Voice.
The Bible is not a text to be mastered. Not a weapon to be wielded. Not a cadaver to be dissected.
It is a story to live. A score to inhabit. A song to sing.
And perhaps that is the greatest mistake we make with Scripture: We keep trying to read a song that was given to teach the world how to sing . . . in perfect harmony.
The Music has already begun.
Will we join the choir?

09/04/2026

Becoming Disciples

Following Christ Crucified

Friday, September 4, 2026
Theologian M. Shawn Copeland laments the many people and places that suffer ongoing crucifixion:

To know and to follow Christ crucified is to know and love those children, women, and men who are poor, excluded, and despised, made different and unwelcome, lynched and crucified in our world….

If we would follow Christ crucified, we would hear the echoes of ululation and bitter weeping in Gaza and in Rafah, in Baghdad and in Beirut, in Cairo and in Kigali….

If we would follow Christ crucified, we would hold in memory the tears that fell on the rude and bloodied floors of the holding forts of Cape Coast, Elmina, and Christiansborg….

If we would follow Christ crucified, we would press to our hearts the tears that flowed from the eyes of Cherokee, Seminole, and Choctaw children and women and men who limped through the cold and hunger from Oklahoma to Arkansas and Alabama and Mississippi….

If we would follow Christ crucified, we would recover the tears that fell on the floors of the camps at Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Sobibór….

If we would follow Christ crucified, we would retrieve the tears that flowed from the eyes of children and women and men who crowded into flimsy boats and old trucks and shipping containers to suffocate and die in front of fences strung across the desert, at abandoned check points on the outer edge of rural towns, and at heavily guarded borders near rivers and waterways….

If we would follow Christ crucified with attention, reverence, and devotion, we would recognize that the tears and blood and moans of the innocent have been absorbed into the air we breathe, have seeped into our streams and … oceans, into the earth in which we plant and from which we harvest and eat.

If we follow with attention, reverence, and devotion the moans and tears of the brutalized and burned, r***d and mutilated, enslaved and captive across the centuries, we are led to the ground beneath the cross of the crucified Jewish Jesus of Nazareth. [1]

Copeland points to the compassion that grows in disciples who follow Christ into the world’s suffering.

The crucified Jesus enfleshes for all and for us the very meaning of being human, of being a person who embraces and lives out God’s gracious gift of love and freedom.

“If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” (Mark 8:34–36)…. We who would be his disciples discover our humanity, our personhood in imitation of him—in taking up our cross in order to transform evil into good, for the cross belongs not only to Christ but to all humanity. “He chose it because of us, and we choose it because of him.” [2] We who would be his disciples incarnate the meaning in our own lives by following the moans and tears … into a crucified world, taking up an active, compassionate, solidaristic mission. [3]

References:
[1] M. Shawn Copeland, Knowing Christ Crucified: The Witness of African American Religious Experience (Orbis Books, 2018), 133, 134–135.

[2] Bernard Lonergan, “The Mediation of Christ in Prayer,” in Philosophical and Theological Papers, 1958–1964, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 6 (University of Toronto Press, 1986), 181.

[3] Copeland, Knowing Christ, 142.

Image credit and inspiration: Jenna Keiper, CAC Environment, 2019-10-09, Photograph, CAC campus, Albuquerque NM. What does it look like to lay down burdens and die to ourselves while still on the path to becoming?

09/04/2026

Ambition

Competition can be helpful for creating and improving, but in trying to be great and greatest, we often abuse power. We hurt and kill one another, both humans and non-human neighbors. “Where there is envy and selfish ambition, there will also be disorder and wickedness of every kind.” Our fragile mother earth bears the wounds of our ambition.

Br. Luke Ditewig, SSJE

09/03/2026

Becoming Disciples

Full of Suffering, Full of Love

Thursday, September 3, 2026
Father Richard considers the cross as the center of Jesus’s life—fully human, fully divine—and expressing total solidarity with the pain of the world:

The Divine Mind transforms all human suffering by identifying completely with the human predicament and standing in full solidarity with it from beginning to end. This is the real meaning of the crucifixion. The cross is not just a singular event. It’s a statement from God that reality has a cruciform pattern. Jesus was killed in a collision of conflicting interests and half-truths, caught between the demands of an empire and the religious establishment of his day. The cross was the price Jesus paid for living in a “mixed” world, which is both human and divine, simultaneously broken and utterly whole.

In so doing, Jesus demonstrated that Reality is not meaningless and absurd, even if it isn’t always perfectly logical or consistent. Reality is filled with contradictions, what St. Bonaventure and others (such as Alan of Lille and Nicholas of Cusa) called the “coincidence of opposites.”

Jesus the Christ, in his crucifixion and resurrection, “recapitulated all things in himself, everything in heaven and everything on earth” (Ephesians 1:10). This one verse is the summary of Franciscan Christology. Jesus agreed to carry the mystery of universal suffering. He allowed it to change him (resurrection) and—it is to be hoped—us, too. Christ frees us from the endless cycle of projecting our pain elsewhere or remaining trapped inside of it.

This is the fully resurrected life, the only way to be happy, free, loving, and therefore “saved.” In effect, Jesus was saying, “If I can trust it, you can too.” We are indeed saved by the cross—more than we realize. The people who hold the contradictions and resolve them in themselves are the saviors of the world. They are the only real agents of transformation, reconciliation, and newness. Christians are called to be the visible compassion of God on earth.

These “saviors,” who are inevitably also disciples, exist in every period of time and in every faith tradition. At times they exist even with no “faith” at all, beyond a consciously held belief that solidarity with all of life is, in fact, the meaning of life. For whatever reason, such people agree to share the fate of God for the life of the world now. These people feel called and agree to not hide from the shadow side of things or the rejected group, but in fact draw close to the pain of the world and allow it to radically change their perspective. They agree to embrace the imperfection and even the injustices of our world, allowing these situations to change them from the inside out, which is the only way things are changed anyway.

The gospel is simply the wisdom of those who agree to carry their part of the infinite suffering of God. It must be recognized that many non-Christians fully accept this vocation with greater freedom than many Christians.

Reference:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope for, and Believe (Convergent Books, 2021), 147–148.

Image credit and inspiration: Jenna Keiper, CAC Environment, 2019-10-09, Photograph, CAC campus, Albuquerque NM. What does it look like to lay down burdens and die to ourselves while still on the path to becoming?

09/03/2026

Creation

As the dignity of creation is renewed and restored at the altar Sunday by Sunday, we have the opportunity once again to choose life, that we may live. In choosing life, our fellowship with creation is restored. It no longer is a thing to be exploited. We discover it to be a revelation of God’s love, and a means of God’s grace.

Br. James Koester, SSJE

09/02/2026

Infinitude

The galaxies remind us of the infinitude of God’s light, and life, and love which is beyond us, around us, and also within us. We ground that awareness in our own work of righteousness, for the love of God. Our life’s mission is to be agents of the majesty and mercy of God, who is the beginning, the way, and the end of all life.

Br. Curtis Almquist, SSJE

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