Trusting The Unknown Path

Week Thirty-Five 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.