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January 2 - January 2, 2025
They are more committed to the Word of God than they are to acceptance by those who claim to be the guardians of the Word of God but betray its meaning. They are more committed to commitment than they are to social approval. They are more given to faith in God than they are to fidelity to the system.
They are people of their times who prefer to stand, if necessary, alone with God.
The prophetic tradition is clear: We are not here simply to succeed today. The prophet will persist for as long as it takes to make the present what God intends it to be as well as to prepare the future to maintain it. We are here to seed the present with godliness so that others may someday reap the best of what we sowed.
living for God that will enflame your heart to change the world. For all our sakes. The country, the world, needs you.
What exactly does it mean to live—actually live—a spiritual life? To follow Jesus in a world on the brink of disaster—nuclearism, world hunger, egregious greed, civil breakdown, racial slavery, sexism, and planetary ruin, I began to understand—is surely about something greater than the development of regular spiritual routines or even the lay mandate to be “good Christians.”
What will you do? is at the core of spiritual maturity, of spiritual commitment. To follow Jesus means that we, too, must each do something to redeem our battered, beaten world from the greed that smothers it.
We must confront the sexism that demeans half the human race. We must redeem it from the anthropology of false human superiority that consumes its resources and diminishes its peoples at the cost of everything on the planet except humankind. And then, as a result, most of humankind, as well.
Our task is to be obedient all our lives to the Will of God for the world. And therein lies the difference between being good for nothing
Between religion for show and religion for real. Between personal spirituality that dedicates itself to achieving private sanctification and prophetic spirituality, the other half of the Christian dispensation.
but personal goodness requires that we be more than pious, more than faithful to the system, more than mere card-carrying ...
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prophetic presence that our corner of the world becomes a better place beca...
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It is to be a prophet’s witness in a prophetless place.
No, we are not all prophets—in the classic or original sense of the word—but we are all meant to be carriers of that same prophetic message to our own time.
Indeed, the question rings across the ages: And you? What will you do?
While we keep our heads down, our mouths closed, our public reputations unblotted, thanks to the silence we keep in the face of great public issues of the day, the pillars of society erode in front of us.
We must not fear the darkness; we must simply resolve to carry light into wherever we are.
“People reject their prophets and slay them but they love their martyrs.”
We like our religions served calm. We call quiet “unity.” We avoid discussions about issues that have two sides to them, both defensible, both with a valorous history. Like soldiering and conscientious objection as Christian concepts. Like the role of women in the home and the place of women in the public arena as fully human behaviors. Like ministering to heterosexuals or to the LGBTQ community, for instance. Dorothy Day’s answer is itself prophetic: she did both.
She is also out to feed and clothe and shelter people—“the worthy and the unworthy poor.”
charity without prophecy can serve only to make the world safe for exploitation. As long as the poor are being fed, why raise the wages it would take to enable them to feed themselves?
It enables employers to go on underpaying and overworking the very people who have made them their wealth.
the purpose of the spiritual life is to enable people to flee the sullying secularism of the world for the sake of personal sanctification.
What we do and say, see and respond to, in our own day is the real seed of our own sanctification.
The purpose of prophecy is to leaven the world, to bring it closer to the Reign of God one small step at a time.
The quality of life we create around us as “followers of Jesus” is meant to seed new life, new hope, new dynamism, the very essence of a new world community.
To be spiritually mature, we must each be about something greater than ourselves.
the watchman of which Isaiah speaks when he repeats his call to prophesy: “I have made you a watchman for the house of Israel;
She cries from the housetops about it as did the prophets of old.
Most important, the Christian who recognizes
the fullness of prophetic spirituality enlarges his own life, at least in small ways. He recycles materials. She wears hand-me-down clothes. He refuses to use chemicals to grow things. She rations her own uses of water. They hold book discussions in their own home. They change their diets in solidarity with native peoples who are losing their
It has been said that every community needs at least one prophet.
“Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”
Clearly, prophetic spirituality teaches the Word that is above all other words. Those who hear it begin to look differently at life than other people do,
The prophet believes that justice is achievable, that despite all our differences, we can become community again.
Prophets come in every age announcing the Good
News again: peace on earth, good will to all.
We shy away from subjects that invite social derision, like guns and militarism and health insurance for everyone. We avoid discussion about
We become both the victim and the victimizer. The silence is deafening as the world waits for those on the edge of the crowd
bring Holy Madness to life—for all our sakes?
“You cannot swim for new horizons until you
have courage to lose sight of the shore.” —WILLIAM FAULKNER
“Proclaim the truth and do not be silent through fear.”
Dorothy Day said in our own time, “Don’t worry about being effective. Just concentrate on being faithful.”
Today’s prophets prepare for the reconstruction of society by imagining the achievable and drawing others to see it as well. Vision is the first step toward change.
To speak nuclear disarmament in a region whose industries depend on it, to argue for the rights of women at the Old Boys’ clubhouse, can separate a person for life from those who prefer old ways of thinking.
some of us are bogged down in destructive ideas.
Finally, they do not despair. They know that God’s time is not our time.
Saint Paul is a realist. Some of us plant, he says. Then, the next generation waters. All of us h...
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to justify the distance of spiritually defined groups from social issues. As if what happens in the world around us is no concern of spiritual leaders. Or we hide behind a false humility:
No biblical prophets ever said such things, even when they doubted their own ability to articulate the issues as well as others might.
