Community, Ritual, and Resistance

By the Daily Meditation Team

3/08/2026

This is a summary of the previous week’s daily meditations. You can click on any title to view the DM in its entirety….

March 2, 2026: Kaira Jewel: The Role of Community in Practicing Resistance & Compassion

Today we feature, with her permission, excerpts from Kaira Jewel’s Substack.* Kaira lived for 16 years as a nun in Thich Nhat Hanh’s Plum Village. Now, she and Father Adam Bucko are married and are spiritual leaders.

She is author of We Were Made for These Times: 10 Lessons for Moving Through Change, Loss, and Disruption. One question she is often asked is: How do we practice compassion toward those who cause harm, especially when that harm is directed at us or our communities?

She replies: This is not a philosophical question. It is lived, embodied, and raw….In the Plum Village tradition, we are taught that compassion is the best protection. This teaching does not ask us to be passive, naïve, or self-sacrificing. It asks us to be wise, embodied, and rooted in reality….

When we begin to return to our bodies and allow ourselves to feel what has been unfelt, something shifts. We become more present. More human. Less reactive.

Kaira Jewel Talks about her book, “We Were Made for These Times.” Video by Kaira Jewel Lingo.

March 3, 2026: The Black Madonna, Icon of Resistance, Mother of Chaos

Matthew received an invitation from Christena Cleveland, author of God Is a Black Woman, to offer a blurb about her new book that comes out this fall, called The Black Madonna: Icon of Resistance & Nourisher of Souls.

Here is an excerpt of what Matthew wrote: I count this among the most important, substantive, and insightful books ever written on the Black Madonna. It represents a new stage in Marian theology, and appropriately, it comes from the pen of a Black woman who is eager to move beyond a stale, flat, exclusively white and patriarchal version of God.…

The Black Madonna, in choosing Christena to relay her story, has chosen wisely and astutely. Christena is a first-class storyteller, and the Black Madonna has many powerful stories to tell.

March 4, 2026: Dorothy Day: An Incarnated Icon of Resistance

In a recent gathering headed by Kaira Jewel and Adam Bucko, they interviewed Orbis editor Robert Ellsberg about Catholic activist, Dorothy Day.

Robert lived with Dorothy for the last five years of her life when she was slowing down physically. He cites a phrase he heard frequently from Dorothy that “all my life I was haunted by God.” In his Substack HERE, Adam Bucko offers a powerful summary of Dorothy’s life, He says: For Dorothy, feeding the hungry and sheltering the unhoused were not charitable expressions added onto faith. They were its measure.

She believed we are responsible for one another, that no one is outside the circle of concern. Holiness, in her world, meant shared life with those on the margins and a refusal to cooperate with systems that degrade human dignity or sanctify violence.

“Revolution of the Heart: The Dorothy Day Story.” National Programs – Maryland Public Television.

March 5, 2026: Dorothy Day on Love & Action as a Harsh & Dreadful Thing

Dorothy Day was often arrested and imprisoned for her protesting and civil disobedience. She wrote this about her time in solitary confinement: Solitude and hunger and weariness of spirit—these sharpened my perceptions so that I suffered not only my own sorrow but the sorrows of those about me.…

I was the oppressed…the drug addict…the shoplifter…. The blackness of hell was all about me. The sorrows of the world encompassed me. I was like one gone down into the pit. Hope had forsaken me.

Says she: We are not expecting utopia here on this earth. But God meant things to be much easier than we have made them. A man has a natural right to food, clothing, and shelter.

March 6, 2026: Dorothy Day & Thomas Merton on Indigenous Wisdom

Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day were good friends. Merton frequently contributed articles to Dorothy’s newspaper The Catholic Worker. And Dorothy Day wrote the Foreword to Merton’s book Ishi Means Man which is a meditation on the Native American plight at the hands of European Americans.

Merton writes: Genocide is a new word. Perhaps the word is new because technology has now got into the game of destroying whole races at once.

The destruction of races is not new—just easier. Merton praises indigenous ritual for accomplishing a full integration into a cosmic system which was at once perfectly sacred and perfectly worldly….One fell in step with the dance of the universe, the liturgy of the stars.

Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day. Photos combined by Felton Davis on Flickr.

March 7, 2026: Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton and the Power of Ritual

Merton criticized missionaries for failing to grasp the beauty of Mayan rituals. He understands that ceremony or ritual should connect the human to the cosmos and how it helps us move from an ego consciousness to a larger awareness, one might say from self to Self.

Matthew notes that a sense of belonging seems hard to come by in our time when so much time is spent on computers and so little time in community or community celebration.

Also, we have been slow to ritualize and celebrate the new creation story of cosmogenesis and our connection to the vast and amazing universe being discovered in our time.