Paul and Transforming Love

Paul’s Transforming Vision: Weekly Summary

Paul’s Transforming Vision: Weekly Summary

Saturday, September 19, 2026

Sunday

Paul is just like us in never knowing Jesus in the flesh. Like him, we only know the Christ through observing and honoring the depth of our human experience and gaining new eyes.

—Richard Rohr

Monday

Paul’s declaration of the good news found special resonance among people of lower classes, and with slaves, widows, and women. In fact, women proved to be a vital force in the ministry of Paul, serving as apostles, teachers, benefactors, and friends.

—Rachel Held Evans

Tuesday

Paul teaches through contrast, comparison, and the overcoming of seeming contradictions. Those who read him superficially have almost always heard one of the sides as bad and the other good, but this is largely to miss his genius as a teacher.

—Richard Rohr

Wednesday

Paul’s preaching about the incongruity of grace was social dynamite, blowing to smithereens every attempt to rank­ human persons on a scale of value and worth. In the hands of Paul, grace became a tool of social leveling.

—Richard Beck

Thursday

To engage Paul’s work with honesty and care is to resist the urge to reduce him to either a revolutionary or a mere enforcer of empire, recognizing instead a man shaped by both revelation and limitation.

—Kat Armas

Friday

Paul gives us a basis for loving all others as Christ has loved us. Paul offers a theological and solid foundation for human dignity and human flourishing that is inherent, universal, and indestructible by any evaluation. —Richard Rohr

Week Thirty-Seven Practice: The Law of Love

Father Richard invites us to pray with Paul who trusts in God’s love over any law.

Paul was a perfect law-abiding Pharisee. “As far as the Law can make you perfect, I was faultless,” he says (Philippians 3:5–6).

He seems to be wondering, “How could such perfect religious observance still create hateful and violent men like me?” That was Paul’s utterly honest question, and he had the humility to answer it honestly. (Many folks today would be wise to ask the same question of themselves.)

What is the law really for?

It’s not to make God love us. God already loves us, and we cannot make God love us any more or any less by any technique whatsoever.

The purpose of spiritual law is to sharpen our own awareness about who we really are and who God is. Then we will recognize our own radical insufficiency and, in that same movement, find God’s fullness.

God not only allows us to make mistakes but even uses our mistakes in our favor! That is the brilliant gospel economy of grace, and it is the only thing worthy of being called “good news and a joy for all the people” (Luke 2:10).

As Paul experienced, “When I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Corinthians 12:10). When we come out of the boxing ring of the creative tension of law and grace, we will have finally won the match; but ironically, we will have won it by losing!

When we have experienced our own weakness and, at the same time, been filled with the Spirit of Love, then we will know the truth of that beautiful Pauline prayer:

I bow my knees before the Father,

from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name.

I pray that, according to the riches of God’s glory,

God may grant that you may be strengthened

in your inner being with power through the Spirit,

and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith,

as you are being rooted and grounded in love.

I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length \

and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge,

so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. (Ephesians 3:14–19).