One of the easiest ways to dismiss the Qur’an’s account of Jesus is to pretend Muslims invented it six hundred years after the fact. According to this argument, Christians always knew that Jesus was crucified, died on the cross and rose bodily from the dead. Then Muhammad appeared in seventh-century Arabia and introduced an entirely new story in which Jesus was not actually crucified.

There is a problem with that argument. Christians were telling versions of that story in the second century.

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Meet Basilides

Basilides was a Christian teacher active in Alexandria during approximately the second quarter of the second century. He was one of the earliest known speculative Christian theologians of Alexandria and was sufficiently serious as a Christian intellectual to produce a massive twenty-four-book work of biblical interpretation known as the Exegetica.

Think about the dates. Jesus was crucified, according to the traditional chronology, around 30 CE. Basilides was teaching roughly ninety to one hundred years later. For perspective, that is roughly the distance separating us today from World War I.

Basilides was not a medieval writer speculating about events buried beneath a thousand years of church tradition. He belonged to the turbulent formative period when Christians themselves were still arguing over what Christianity was going to become. And Alexandria was hardly some irrelevant backwater. It became one of the great intellectual centers of Christianity.

Multiple Christian schools and teachers operated there during the second century, representing very different understandings of Jesus, salvation, creation, resurrection and the meaning of his death. That matters.

There Was No New Testament Sitting on Everyone’s Altar

When Basilides was teaching, there was no universally agreed twenty-seven-book New Testament. That does not mean Christians had no scriptures. They had the Jewish scriptures, letters attributed to apostles, sayings of Jesus and numerous Christian writings and gospels circulating among different communities.

What they did not have was the leather-bound New Testament Christians recognize today, handed down from the apostles with a table of contents attached. The first surviving Christian document listing exactly the same twenty-seven New Testament books used today is Athanasius’ Festal Letter of 367 CE. That is more than two centuries after Basilides.

So we need to stop imagining second-century Christianity backward through a modern Bible. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John did not descend from heaven together as a completed collection.

Christian communities possessed different collections of texts and argued about which writings carried authority. Different theological schools interpreted Jesus in dramatically different ways. Some understood Jesus primarily as a human being specially chosen or exalted by God. Others developed extremely high views of his divinity. Some distinguished the earthly Jesus from a heavenly Christ. Some understood his physical suffering in ways radically different from the Christians who would eventually become orthodox.

The movement historians commonly call proto-orthodox Christianity championed the position that Jesus was genuinely human, genuinely divine, genuinely crucified and genuinely raised bodily from the dead. That position eventually became Christianity’s dominant standard. But in Basilides’ lifetime it had competition.

Calling those competitors “heretics” tells us who ultimately won the argument. It does not make them disappear from the second century.

And Then There Is the Crucifixion

Near the end of the second century, Bishop Irenaeus of Lyons wrote Against Heresies, attacking Christian movements whose teachings he believed were false. When discussing Basilides, Irenaeus reports an extraordinary teaching.

According to his account, Jesus was not crucified. Instead, Simon of Cyrene, the man the canonical Gospels say was compelled to carry Jesus’ cross, was transformed so that people mistook him for Jesus. Simon was crucified. Jesus was not.

Irenaeus says that according to this teaching Jesus “did not himself suffer death,” while Simon was crucified through the ignorance and error of those involved.

There is an important historical qualification here. Almost none of Basilides’ writings survive directly, and modern scholars debate how accurately hostile writers such as Irenaeus represented their theological opponents. It is therefore safer to say that Irenaeus attributes this teaching to Basilides than to pretend we possess Basilides’ own written account of it.

But notice what that qualification does not change. Irenaeus was writing in the second century. He was already arguing against Christians who knew a tradition in which someone else was crucified while Jesus escaped death.

That alone demolishes the claim that Muslims dreamed up the idea for the first time six hundred years after Jesus.

This Was Not the Only Alternative Passion Tradition

Other early Christian writings also challenged the straightforward interpretation that Jesus experienced the crucifixion exactly as later orthodox theology maintained.

The Second Treatise of the Great Seth, preserved among the Nag Hammadi writings, presents a Christ figure speaking almost mockingly about people who believe they have successfully killed him. The text distinguishes the true Christ from the suffering figure perceived by his enemies.

It is not identical to the Qur’an. Neither is Basilides. That is important.

The argument is not that we have discovered a second-century copy of Surah 4. The point is that the idea that Jesus’ enemies misunderstood what happened at the crucifixion already existed among Christians centuries before Islam.

That historical fact deserves more attention than it usually receives.

“That’s Just Gnosticism”

At this point the objection usually changes. Fine, someone will say. Muslims did not invent it. They simply revived some crazy Gnostic heresy.

But that answer doesn’t actually solve the historical problem. It gives the earlier Christians a label.

“Gnosticism” was not one alternative church with one pope, one creed and one Bible. The term gets applied to a remarkably diverse collection of movements and teachers, and modern historians continue debating just how useful the category itself is.

More importantly, calling Basilides a Gnostic does absolutely nothing to change his date. The second-century evidence is still sitting there. Christians were already entertaining versions of the idea that the people who thought they had killed Jesus had misunderstood what actually happened.

So go ahead and call it Gnostic. Then answer a more interesting question.

Why does this story keep coming back?

Why does the idea that Jesus’ enemies misunderstood the crucifixion appear among Christians so close to Christianity’s beginnings? Why does it appear in more than one form? Why does it survive long enough for Christian heresiologists to devote energy to attacking it? And why, centuries later, does the Qur’an suddenly make this startling declaration: they did not kill him, they did not crucify him, it was made to appear so to them.

That does not prove Basilides possessed the true historical account. It does not prove there was some secret underground chain carrying Basilidean Christianity from second-century Alexandria directly to Muhammad. And it does not prove revelation simply by pointing to an interesting historical recurrence.

But it does make one popular Christian argument impossible to maintain. Islam did not invent this idea six hundred years later.

The idea was already there. And there is something genuinely fascinating about its persistence.

The Christians Who Won Became “Christianity”

Over the next several centuries, one network of Christian churches became increasingly successful at defining the boundaries of acceptable belief.

This did not happen at one meeting. There was no afternoon when bishops voted and suddenly Christianity changed everywhere. It happened gradually through theology, episcopal organization, control of churches, arguments over apostolic succession, decisions about which writings were authoritative and eventually an increasingly close relationship with imperial power.

The proto-orthodox were also extremely effective institution builders. That matters. A theological movement scattered among individual teachers has a difficult time surviving against a movement capable of creating interconnected churches, recognized bishops, common creeds and an increasingly standardized body of scripture.

Then Constantine entered the picture. In 325 CE he convened the Council of Nicaea in an effort to resolve the enormous Christian controversy surrounding Arius and the relationship between the Father and the Son.

Nicaea did not create the Bible. It did not settle every Christian theological dispute. And it certainly did not make competing Christianities vanish overnight. The decades following Nicaea remained extraordinarily chaotic.

But something fundamental had changed. Christian theological disputes were now entangled with imperial politics.

Over time, the version of Christianity recognized as orthodox acquired something its second-century predecessors had never possessed: the power of the Roman state behind it.

Bishops could be deposed. Teachings could be prohibited. Church buildings could change hands. Books could be condemned. Rival movements could lose the ability to reproduce themselves openly.

What Happened to the Other Gospels?

This is another area where we should resist the Hollywood version of history. There probably wasn’t one enormous bonfire where the Church gathered every competing gospel and destroyed them at once.

The actual process was more effective. Once a religious community disappears, its books stop being copied. And before the printing press, a book that stopped being copied eventually ceased to exist.

Some writings were deliberately condemned or destroyed. Others simply disappeared because the people who valued them lost the institutional battle. Generation after generation, orthodox Christians copied Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. They did not keep making thousands of fresh copies of texts they considered heretical.

That is how literature disappears.

The discovery of the Nag Hammadi library in Egypt in 1945 showed just how much Christian literature had vanished from ordinary Christian memory. Texts that had been virtually unknown for more than a millennium suddenly resurfaced.

And the Christianity revealed in those writings was considerably messier than the tidy story many Christians had inherited.

Then the Qur’an Appears

Centuries later, the Qur’an makes its declaration concerning Jesus: they did not kill him, they did not crucify him, it was made to appear so to them.

A Christian is completely free to reject that claim. A Christian can believe Irenaeus was correct to condemn Basilides. A Christian can believe every alternative passion tradition was theological error. A Christian can believe Islam later encountered some distant descendant of these traditions and repeated it.

Those are arguments worth having.

But there is one argument that history should finally retire: “Muhammad invented the idea six hundred years after Jesus.”

No. Christians were already arguing about something remarkably similar in the second century.

Islam did not introduce the first claim that the people responsible for Jesus’ execution misunderstood what had happened. That possibility was already circulating inside the strange, diverse and highly contested world of early Christianity.

And Then Jesus Breaks the Cross

This is where the Islamic story becomes even more remarkable.

Islam does not say the controversy ends with Muhammad. According to well-known hadith preserved in both Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, Jesus son of Mary will return near the end of history. And among the things Jesus does when he returns is this: he breaks the cross.

Think about the symbolism of that. The Qur’an says humanity misunderstood what happened to Jesus. Christianity makes the cross the central symbol of its interpretation of Jesus. Then Islamic tradition says that at the end of history, the person who finally resolves the argument is not Muhammad. It is Jesus.

Jesus returns and breaks the symbol built around his supposed crucifixion. The controversy begins with Jesus, and according to Islam, it ends with Jesus.

From a Christian perspective, this is obviously false prophecy. Jesus will return and vindicate Christianity. From an Islamic perspective, however, the imagery is almost impossible to miss. The man whom humanity turned into the centerpiece of crucifixion theology returns and dismantles it himself.

And suddenly that strange second-century history becomes even more intriguing.

A claim appears among some of Christianity’s earliest competing movements: Jesus wasn’t actually the one they killed. That interpretation loses. The churches teaching it disappear. Their literature largely disappears with them. Centuries pass.

Then the Qur’an announces: you did not kill him, you did not crucify him.

That message does not disappear. It becomes part of one of the largest religious traditions humanity has ever known.

And Islamic tradition says the story is still not finished. Jesus is coming back, and when he does, he breaks the cross.

Maybe every appearance of this idea can be explained away separately. Maybe Basilides was simply wrong. Maybe the other early Christians were wrong. Maybe Muhammad heard some ancient Christian tradition and repeated it. That is certainly one way to interpret the evidence.

Let me know what you think in the comments and please share this.

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Living Presence: A Sufi Way to Mindfulness & the Essential Self by Kabir Helminski

Dearborn, Michigan, will reportedly be invaded on Tuesday, August 18.

Fortunately, the invaders have posted the time, address, leadership team, theological justification and social media graphics in advance.

They are calling the operation a defense against invasion.

This is the kind of strategic brilliance America has come to expect from men who believe putting a cross next to a skull emoji turns Facebook into the Pentagon.

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The promotional material summons supporters to gather outside the Dearborn Administrative Center at 6 p.m., one hour before the City Council meeting begins. Jake Lang and Pastor Lorenzo Sewell are named in the advertising. A Facebook personality calling himself White Rabbit has proclaimed that “the Crusade begins” and declared Dearborn “Ground Zero.” Other posts call for biker clubs, promise that militia will be present and offer the admirably subtle ultimatum: “CRUSADE OR BE REPLACED.”

Nothing says we are defending Western civilization quite like threatening an American city because too many of its citizens practice the wrong religion.

Ground Zero Has a Public Comment Period

Historically, crusades required armies, supply lines, siege engines and papal authorization. The 2026 version requires a charged phone, a ring light and enough gas money to reach suburban Detroit.

The battlefield is the sidewalk outside a municipal building at 16901 Michigan Avenue. The enemy stronghold contains council chambers, conference rooms and a city clerk. The decisive engagement begins at 7 p.m. and includes public comment.

One imagines the briefing.

“Men, the hour has come. At dawn, we ride.”

“The flyer says six.”

“Then at six, we ride.”

“Do we validate parking?”

This is apparently “Ground Zero” in the struggle to stop the “Islamification of America,” a phrase that in practice seems to mean Muslims have homes, businesses, mosques, elected representatives and the nerve to remain visible without first obtaining permission from a man named White Rabbit.

Dearborn is not occupied territory. It is an American city. Its Muslim residents did not parachute behind enemy lines. They bought homes, opened businesses, raised families, paid taxes, worked in hospitals and factories, voted in elections and sat through zoning meetings like every other citizen sentenced to local democracy.

If that is an Islamic takeover, it is the slowest and most paperwork-intensive conquest in military history.

Enter the Crusaders

White Rabbit’s announcement tells people to join Jake Lang, Pastor Lorenzo and “the rest of the Crusaders.” The phrase suggests there is an established order of Christian knights, although the available evidence points more toward Facebook accounts with wraparound sunglasses.

Lang is not new to Dearborn. In November 2025, he joined another anti-Islam demonstration there. The event produced inflammatory rhetoric, confrontations and, most importantly for the modern political entrepreneur, content. Cameras rolled, clips circulated, outrage traveled and the performers left with their brands intact.

Lang is also a pardoned January 6 participant who served prison time after attacking police at the Capitol. This makes him an inspired choice to lecture Muslim Americans about law, order and respect for the institutions of the United States.

Apparently, striking the police while storming Congress is an unfortunate chapter in one man’s redemption story, but attending a mosque is evidence of a civilizational plot.

On August 2, Lang appeared at Dearborn’s Arbaeen commemoration with a bullhorn and anti-immigration messaging. He was assaulted, chased and struck by members of the crowd before police got him to safety. The people who attacked him should be held responsible. Political provocation does not excuse violence.

It also does not transform an assault into proof that every Muslim in Dearborn is part of an occupying army.

That distinction is terribly inconvenient when your business model requires an entire religion to play the villain.

Crusade or Be Replaced

The slogan “CRUSADE OR BE REPLACED” deserves special attention because it manages to compress a theology of fear, a demographic panic and a marketing funnel into four words.

Replaced by whom? At what job? Under which municipal ordinance?

No answer is provided. Replacement language works best when the threat remains foggy. It allows every frightened reader to pour a private anxiety into the same empty container. The Muslim physician becomes an infiltrator. The hijabi schoolteacher becomes an agent. The city council member becomes a foreign ruler. The family at the bakery becomes a beachhead.

Ordinary neighbors must be transformed into an advancing horde because nobody donates money to help a political influencer defeat a dentist named Ahmed who is currently arguing with Delta Dental.

So the language gets larger. A rally becomes a crusade. A council meeting becomes Ground Zero. Religious pluralism becomes replacement. Muslim citizenship becomes invasion.

Meanwhile, the people using that language are organizing outsiders to descend upon the city.

There is the joke, sitting in the open with a helmet on.

Militia for Jesus

White Rabbit has also spoken of militia involvement, because the Sermon on the Mount apparently needed a tactical supplement.

Jesus said, “Blessed are the peacemakers,” but that was before Facebook engagement collapsed and the algorithm began rewarding men who yell from the driver’s seat of a truck.

One searches the Gospels in vain for the passage where Christ tells his disciples to summon biker presidents, surround a civic meeting and frighten a religious minority into feeling less American. Perhaps it appears in the Gospel According to Merchandise, immediately after “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have matching shirts.”

The organizers may call this a Christian crusade, but attaching the name of Jesus to intimidation does not sanctify it. It only drags Jesus into something he never authorized.

Christianity is not being persecuted when a city refuses to surrender its Muslim citizens to a traveling outrage show. Christians are not being replaced because Muslims exercise the same constitutional rights Christians have long treated as their inheritance. And America is not being conquered when a council chamber contains people named Mohammed, Hussein or Fatima.

That is America working as advertised.

The Real Invasion

Dearborn residents have been urged not to confront or engage the outside groups expected at the council meeting. That is probably wise. Provocation needs reaction the way fire needs oxygen. A peaceful city gives the cameras nothing. An angry crowd gives the influencers another week of clips, fundraising appeals and breathless declarations that they barely escaped Sharia-controlled Michigan.

The entire production depends on a simple trick. Arrive in someone else’s community. Insult the people who live there. Announce that their faith is incompatible with America. Escalate until somebody reacts. Then point the camera at the reaction and erase everything that came before it.

The invader becomes the victim. The neighbor becomes the enemy. The provocateur becomes the missionary.

And Jesus becomes a logo printed across the whole dishonest transaction.

On August 18, Dearborn will still be Dearborn. The council will meet at seven. Residents will speak. Police will manage the crowd. The crusaders will film themselves. White Rabbit will post. Jake Lang will perform. Somebody will almost certainly say Western civilization is facing its final hour while standing across the street from a Tim Hortons.

Then everyone will go home.

The mosques will remain. So will the churches. So will the Constitution, which somehow continues surviving the presence of citizens who pray differently.

The only invasion Dearborn needs to prepare for is the one being advertised by the people claiming they came to stop it.

It appears these self-appointed crusaders have once again confused the Gospel with a territorial threat, it may be time to call in our accidental exorcist. Meet Virgin Monk Boy, Patron Saint Against Christian Nationalism, download the prayer card, and share it wherever flags, fear and political power have been dressed up as Jesus. Undo the spell. Unmake the idol. Let what is not Christ fall away.

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This reflection is inspired by Through Holy Week with Mary Magdalene, guided by the teachings of Cynthia Bourgeault. In this reading of the Easter story, Mary Magdalene’s encounter with the risen Jesus is not simply the happy ending to three days of grief. It is the final transformation of her love. The woman who remained beside the tomb must now learn something even more difficult than remaining faithful through loss: she must love without clinging to the form in which love first came to her.

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There is something almost cruel sounding about the first thing Jesus says to Mary Magdalene after she recognizes him.

“Do not cling to me.”

She has watched him die. She has followed his body to the tomb. She has remained near the place where he was buried. She has returned while it is still dark and discovered that even the body is gone. She stands outside the tomb weeping because the last physical trace of the person she loves has disappeared.

Then suddenly he is standing in front of her.

At first she does not recognize him. She thinks he is the gardener. She is still asking the only question her grief knows how to ask: Where is the body?

“If you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.”

Then Jesus speaks her name.

“Mary.”

And everything changes.

She knows him. You can almost feel what happens next without the Gospel having to describe it. The entire movement of her heart must be toward him. The person she believed was gone is standing before her. Everything in her wants to close the distance.

And Jesus says, “Do not cling to me.”

It sounds like rejection only if we stop reading there, because he immediately tells her what to do instead.

Go.

She Was Still Looking for the Body

There is a strange detail in John’s resurrection story that is easy to miss. Jesus is standing directly in front of Mary and she cannot see him.

She sees a man. She hears him speak. She carries on a conversation with him. Yet she continues asking where Jesus has been taken. Her problem is not that Jesus is absent. Her problem is that she is looking for him in the only form she knows how to recognize.

She is looking for the body.

That does not make Mary spiritually deficient. It makes her human. This is what grief does. Love has been organized around a particular face, a particular voice, a particular body moving through the world. When that body disappears, the heart instinctively searches for it. Where have you laid him? Give him back. Let me find what I have lost.

There is tenderness in that desperation, but there is also a limitation. Mary is searching for the object of her love while the living presence of that love is already standing before her. The resurrection requires her perception to change.

Jesus does not accomplish that by explaining resurrection theology. He does not give her a lecture about eternal life. He says her name.

Recognition happens at the level of relationship.

She turns toward him and suddenly knows. But almost immediately she must learn to know him differently.

Love Has to Change Shape

“Do not cling to me” is not Jesus saying, “Do not love me.”

It is almost the opposite. He is asking Mary to allow love to become larger than the form in which she has known it.

Something has changed between them. Whatever resurrection means, it does not simply restore Friday morning. Jesus has not returned so that everyone can pick up exactly where they left off. Mary cannot return to the previous arrangement.

She cannot hold Jesus within the familiar boundaries of physical presence. She cannot secure him again as the beloved standing outside her, someone she can find in a particular place, reach toward, touch, and keep close. The old form of the relationship has reached its limit.

That is what makes this moment so difficult.

We often imagine spiritual transformation as acquiring something new: new understanding, new peace, new wisdom. But some of the deepest transformations occur when something precious must change form and we are asked not to close our hearts while it happens.

That is the challenge Jesus gives Mary. She must release the form while keeping the love. Clinging says that if I cannot have you as I had you before, then I have lost you. Love says that if the form changes, I will learn how to meet you there.

From the Object of Her Affection to the Subject of Her Truth

A remarkable way of describing what happens to Mary comes through the poem First Apostle by Robert Penn. The transformation is captured in one extraordinary movement: the beloved is no longer merely the object of affection but has become the subject of truth.

That is the heart of what happens on Easter morning.

Before the crucifixion, Jesus stands before Mary as another person. She sees him. She listens to him. She follows him. Love moves outward toward the beloved. He is there and she is here. Even the deepest intimacy still appears to have two sides.

But death shatters that arrangement.

Mary can no longer organize her love around an external object. The body is gone. The familiar relationship cannot simply be restarted. Something deeper must happen. The one she loves must cease to exist merely as someone standing before her and become a living source within her.

This does not mean Mary absorbs Jesus into herself or that his personhood disappears into some vague mystical oneness. It means that what she received through relationship with him has moved deeper than imitation or memory. She no longer needs merely to ask what Jesus would say. She is being transformed into someone capable of seeing from within the truth he awakened in her.

The beloved becomes a source. The relationship becomes vocation. Love becomes generative.

And that is precisely why Jesus cannot simply allow her to grab hold of him and remain there. There is somewhere else this love now needs to go.

The Turn

John’s account of the resurrection is filled with turning. Mary looks into the tomb. She turns and sees Jesus but does not recognize him. Then he speaks her name, and she turns toward him again. Something is happening here beyond physical movement. Mary’s entire orientation is changing. She has been facing the tomb, looking toward what has been lost. Then she recognizes the beloved she thought was gone. But even that recognition is not the end of the movement. She will have to turn once more, away from the desire to recover what she had and toward something she does not yet understand.

The ancient Christian word metanoia is usually translated as repentance, but it carries the much larger sense of a fundamental reorientation. It is a change in the way we see, and therefore a change in the direction we move. Mary’s encounter in the garden is a metanoia of love. At first her whole attention is directed toward the tomb. Then it rushes toward the recovered beloved. Finally, Jesus redirects that love outward toward the world.

Each movement contains what came before without simply erasing it. Mary does not stop grieving because she recognizes Jesus. She does not stop loving him because she is told not to cling to him. Nor does leaving the garden mean abandoning the intimacy that has brought her there. Something subtler happens. The relationship that once drew her continually toward Jesus now becomes the source from which she can move away from him physically without becoming separated from him inwardly.

This is the deeper meaning of the turn. She can leave the garden precisely because she no longer has to possess the beloved in order to remain united with him.

“Do Not Cling” Is Followed by “Go”

This is why it is so important not to separate “Do not cling to me” from what Jesus says next. The command is not simply a prohibition. He redirects Mary immediately: “Go to my brothers and say to them...” The movement of love changes direction. Until this moment, nearly everything Mary has done has carried her toward Jesus. She followed him through the crucifixion. She remained near the burial place. She returned to the tomb while it was still dark. Even when she believed the body had been taken, her instinct was to search for it and bring it back.

Now Jesus turns the current around.

The love that drew Mary toward him must begin flowing through her toward others. She cannot remain in the garden attempting to preserve the moment of reunion because resurrection is not a private consolation given to her alone. The encounter itself contains a commission. What she has seen must become something she carries.

Mary therefore leaves the garden with words nobody else yet possesses: “I have seen the Lord.” Before Peter preaches at Pentecost, before Paul carries the Gospel throughout the Mediterranean world, before creeds and councils begin explaining what resurrection means, Mary Magdalene walks away from the tomb carrying the first proclamation of Easter.

Christian tradition would eventually call her apostola apostolorum, the Apostle to the Apostles. The title fits the movement of the story perfectly. Her authority begins not with an office but with encounter. She has remained when others fled. She has searched when others hid. She has recognized the risen Christ, and now she has been sent.

Love Must Become Larger Than Possession

There is something in Mary’s experience that reaches far beyond the resurrection story because nearly every human relationship eventually confronts us with some version of the same demand. The people we love change. Children grow up. Partners become different people from the ones we first met. Bodies age. Illness alters what a relationship can look like. Distance changes the forms of intimacy available to us. Eventually death takes every embodied relationship to its outer boundary.

We suffer when we confuse the form love has taken with love itself. Because we first encountered the beloved through a particular face, voice, body, personality, and history, we naturally want those things to remain. When they begin changing or disappearing, the instinct is to hold more tightly. Yet clinging cannot preserve what time is already transforming. Often it simply turns love into fear.

What Jesus asks of Mary is something much harder than detachment. Detachment can simply become another way of closing the heart. Mary is asked to remain completely open while surrendering her claim on the form through which she first knew him. She must allow love to become larger than possession.

This is why “Do not cling to me” should never be heard as “Do not love me.” Jesus is not reducing the intimacy between them. He is asking Mary to enter more deeply into it. The relationship can no longer depend upon proximity in the old sense. Its center has moved. What was once encountered primarily outside her has begun to live within her as a source of perception, courage, and action.

The beloved has become, in Robert Penn’s beautiful language, not merely the object of her affection but the subject of her truth.

The First Apostle

Mary enters the garden wanting Jesus back. That desire is completely understandable. She has lost the person she loves, and then even the body through which she could mourn him has disappeared. Her first instinct when she recognizes him is therefore restoration. She wants the relationship returned to the form she knew before the cross.

But Easter does not restore Friday morning.

Resurrection does not undo everything that has happened and place the pieces back where they were. It carries the relationship through death into another form. Mary cannot return to being simply the disciple who follows Jesus from place to place. She is being asked to carry something of his presence herself.

This may be the deepest meaning of her apostleship. The intimacy between Mary and Jesus does not disappear when she leaves the garden. It becomes generative. What has passed between them now moves outward through her. The love that once had Jesus as its destination becomes a current flowing from the encounter into the world.

There is an enormous spiritual difference between trying to preserve an experience and allowing ourselves to be changed by it. We can spend our lives trying to return to some earlier moment when God seemed near, when love felt certain, when a relationship seemed whole, or when our spiritual life carried an intensity that has since disappeared. We can stand beside the tomb asking where someone has taken what we used to have.

Mary is asked to do something else. She is asked to trust that what seems lost has not simply vanished, but has changed its mode of presence. She cannot recover the old relationship by grasping backward. She can discover the new relationship only by moving forward.

That is why the resurrection encounter ends with a departure. Mary must leave the place where she found Jesus in order to discover what it now means to remain united with him.

She came to the garden searching for the body of the one she loved. She leaves carrying his living presence into the world.

And perhaps this is why Mary Magdalene becomes the first apostle. She is the first to discover that resurrection does not give us back what we had before. It transforms love until the beloved no longer needs to be possessed in order to be present.

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For months, every time Texas Republicans started beating the drum about Sharia, we were told not to overreact. Nobody wanted to ban Islam. Nobody wanted to stop Muslims from practicing their religion. This was simply about protecting the Constitution from some shadowy competing legal system that was supposedly creeping across Texas like kudzu.

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Then the Dallas Morning News ran a headline that made the game considerably harder to hide:

Ban hijabs and halal foods? Texas Republicans offer early blueprint of plan to ‘stop Islam’

The accompanying report says some Texas Republicans are considering a legislative agenda targeting the hundreds of thousands of Muslims living in this state, with proposals that critics say could make practicing Islam essentially impossible.

Well, there goes the “we’re only worried about a parallel legal system” defense.

Hijabs are not a legal system. Halal chicken is not a legal system. Ramadan is not a legal system. A mosque is not a courthouse. A Muslim declining a pork chop is not overthrowing the Republic.

At some point we should probably stop pretending this argument is about law.

The Fine Print Finally Became the Headline

The Republican Party of Texas has already adopted a 2026–2028 legislative priority called “Don’t Sharia Our Texas.” The language is remarkable. It calls Sharia an “incompatible, seditious, subversive, competing enemy system” and says its “advocacy or implementation” should be treated as a seditious criminal act deserving criminal punishment, disqualification from public, military and law-enforcement service, and potentially denaturalization and deportation.

Read that phrase again: advocacy or implementation.

That creates a rather enormous problem because Sharia does not mean what these politicians keep telling frightened audiences it means.

For most Muslims living in Texas, Sharia is not a secret criminal code waiting to replace the Texas Penal Code. It is the religious and ethical framework through which Muslims try to live. It tells us how to pray, fast, give charity, conduct business honestly, care for our families, avoid intoxicants, eat permissible food and cultivate a life oriented toward God.

I live in Texas. I am Muslim. When I get up to pray Fajr, I am practicing Islam according to Sharia. When another Muslim fasts during Ramadan, she is practicing according to Sharia. When someone looks for halal meat, avoids interest for religious reasons or gives zakat, Sharia is involved.

None of that competes with the Constitution any more than a Catholic following canon law, an Orthodox Christian observing a fasting rule or an observant Jew keeping kosher and following halakha is attempting to overthrow Texas.

American law already settles the issue these politicians claim keeps them awake at night. Texas law is Texas law. Religious rules cannot override criminal law, suspend constitutional rights or give a mosque governmental authority over unwilling citizens. If somebody commits assault and says his religion permitted it, he still gets arrested. This is not complicated.

So once you have established that American civil law is supreme, what exactly is left to ban?

Apparently, hijabs and dinner.

“Sharia” Was the Doorway, Not the Destination

The Sharia-Free Texas Caucus was founded by Republican state Rep. Brent Money. Money has said the organization exists to counter the rise of Sharia, but his rhetoric has repeatedly wandered well beyond courtroom procedure. In announcing the caucus, he warned that Texas would not stand by while “Islamic influences” transformed the state into “another conquered territory.” At the Texas GOP convention, he said the country has been governed best by Christian men.

That convention offered an illuminating preview of where this rhetoric leads. Muslim Republicans attended as duly registered delegates. One Muslim woman wearing a hijab was told to leave the country. Party members tried to remove Muslim delegates over alleged associations with CAIR. The party’s own rules prevented them from doing it.

Think about how far the argument traveled. We began with “foreign law cannot supersede the Constitution” and somehow arrived at American Muslim Republicans being told they do not belong in their own political party or their own country.

That is not mission creep. That is the mission revealing itself.

And now hijabs, halal food and other ordinary expressions of Muslim life are being discussed as evidence of the very “Islamization” Texas politicians say they must stop.

This is the part where every Christian who actually cares about religious liberty should become extremely uncomfortable.

The First Amendment Is Not a Christian Loyalty Program

The First Amendment does not say Congress shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise of Christianity. It says religion.

The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that government cannot single out a particular religion for hostile treatment. In Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah, the Court struck down ordinances designed to suppress Santeria religious practices. Government does not get to decide that an unpopular minority faith receives a smaller First Amendment than everybody else.

A law deliberately banning Muslim religious clothing while allowing Christian religious clothing would not become constitutional because somebody shouted “Sharia” during the committee hearing. A law aimed at halal food while leaving kosher food alone does not magically become neutral because legislators say “security” often enough.

And Texas cannot denaturalize an American citizen because he believes Islamic religious law should guide his personal life. Naturalization and denaturalization are federal matters in the first place, and the First Amendment protects religious belief and advocacy from precisely this kind of government punishment.

The irony is almost too rich. Politicians claiming to defend the Constitution are proposing that government investigate religious belief, privilege Christianity, punish religious advocacy and potentially strip citizenship from people whose theology they dislike.

If that is their plan to save constitutional government, I would hate to see what they consider unconstitutional.

Today the Word Is Sharia

There are legitimate conversations to have about religion and civil law. I do not want an imam overruling the Constitution. I also do not want a pastor overruling it. I do not want Catholic canon law imposed on non-Catholics, Jewish halakha imposed on non-Jews or Islamic jurisprudence imposed on non-Muslims.

That is the beauty of the American arrangement. We have one civil legal system and an enormous amount of freedom inside it to live according to conscience.

You can keep kosher. I can eat halal. A Catholic can abstain from meat on Friday. A Sikh can wear a turban. A Muslim woman can wear a hijab. A Christian can wear a cross. We can build churches, mosques, synagogues and temples. We can argue with one another about theology until everyone is exhausted, then go home under the protection of the same Constitution.

That is religious liberty.

What Texas Republicans are now flirting with is something fundamentally different. They are taking ordinary practices of one religion and recasting their very visibility as evidence of political conquest. A halal grocery becomes “Sharia.” A mosque becomes a “military outpost.” A woman covering her hair becomes evidence of Islamization. Muslims simply becoming numerous enough to be noticed becomes the emergency.

I have spent enough of my life around Christianity to recognize what is happening here. This is not confidence in the Christian faith. Confidence does not require the state to make competing religions disappear from the landscape.

This is fear dressed up as religious conviction and constitutional patriotism.

And the Dallas Morning News headline is important because it finally says aloud where that fear is taking us. The debate is no longer merely about whether some imaginary Sharia court might replace Texas law someday.

The question is becoming whether your Muslim neighbor is allowed to be visibly, publicly and unapologetically Muslim today.

If your answer to that question is no, you are not defending religious freedom from Sharia.

You are defending Christian privilege from religious freedom.

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Recently, we came across a meme claiming that three startling sayings of Jesus had been preserved in an ancient Ethiopian text. I went looking for the source, honestly expecting to uncover a scandal. Instead, the scandal I thought I had found turned out to be fake news. The three sayings were not in the text at all.

I was a little disappointed. It had all the makings of a wonderful religious conspiracy: hidden teachings of Jesus, an ancient manuscript and centuries of institutional silence. But then I stopped looking at where the sayings supposedly came from and started looking at what they actually said:

1. Do not build temples of stone, for the stone will crumble. Build the temple of the heart, for it is eternal.

2. The kingdom of heaven is within the human body, hidden in the space between thoughts.

3. The darkness will come, and it will wear my face.

These are not verbatim quotations found together in any surviving Gospel. But each saying condenses something Jesus taught. Read together, they trace the path he placed before his disciples: cleanse the heart, awaken to the divine kingdom already present, and beware of religious power that uses his image while betraying his spirit.

It is also the outline of the path that would later be called Sufism.

Jesus was a first-century Jewish teacher, prophet and mystic. Sufism, as an identifiable Islamic tradition, developed centuries later. But if Sufi describes someone wholly surrendered to God who teaches purification of the heart, remembrance, detachment from the ego and direct awareness of the Divine, then Jesus taught like a Sufi master.

Build the Temple of the Heart

Jesus did not devote his ministry to designing religious buildings or constructing an ecclesiastical bureaucracy. He repeatedly moved attention away from external displays of holiness and toward the condition of the heart.

When his disciples admired the magnificent stones of the Jerusalem Temple, Jesus told them that the entire structure would fall: “Not one stone will be left here upon another” (Mark 13:2). In John’s Gospel he goes further, taking the language of the Temple and relocating it into the living body: “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” The narrator explains that he was speaking about the temple of his body (John 2:19–21).

The sacred was not safely confined inside a building controlled by religious authorities. God was encountered in the living person, and the real work of religion took place within.

Jesus told his disciples to enter a private room, shut the door and pray to the Father “who is in secret” (Matthew 6:6). He condemned those who polished the outside of the cup while leaving the inside filled with greed. “First clean the inside,” he said (Matthew 23:25–26). His beatitude was not “Blessed are those who construct the grandest sanctuary.” It was “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God” (Matthew 5:8).

The Sufis call this tazkiyat al-nafs, purification of the self, and tasfiyat al-qalb, cleansing of the heart. The heart is not merely the home of passing emotions. It is the spiritual center where illusion is stripped away and the presence of God is reflected.

A stone sanctuary can be conquered, corrupted or reduced to ruins. A heart awakened to God becomes a sanctuary that can travel through the world.

The Kingdom Hidden Between Thoughts

The earliest summary of Jesus’ message is simple: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near” (Mark 1:15). The kingdom was not merely a destination after death. It was already pressing into the present moment.

When the Pharisees asked when this kingdom would come, Jesus told them it would not arrive in a way that could be observed and mapped. People would not be able to point and say, “Look, here it is,” or “There it is.” He then said, depending on the translation, “The kingdom of God is within you,” “among you,” or “in your midst” (Luke 17:20–21).

Those translations do not have to compete. The kingdom is among us because it arises within and transforms how we encounter one another. It is inward without being private, communal without being reduced to an institution.

The Gospel of Thomas makes the contemplative dimension explicit: “The kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you” (Thomas 3). Later it says that the Father’s kingdom is spread across the earth, but people do not see it (Thomas 113). God is not absent. We are usually absent.

“Hidden in the space between thoughts” is modern language, but it points toward this same experience. We live inside a nearly uninterrupted commentary produced by the mind: judging, rehearsing, defending and imagining. We mistake this commentary for reality and its frightened narrator for the self.

When the noise settles, we do not manufacture the kingdom. We become available to what was already here. Contemplative prayer, silence and remembrance are not escapes from Jesus’ proclamation. They make us receptive to it.

The Sufi practices dhikr, remembrance of God, until remembrance descends from the tongue into the heart. It does not make God arrive from somewhere else. The Qur’an says God is nearer than the jugular vein (50:16). Remembrance clears away the forgetfulness that hides that nearness.

Jesus called it the kingdom. The Sufis speak of presence, remembrance and the awakened heart. Different vocabularies can point toward the same interior opening.

The Darkness Will Wear My Face

The third saying may be the most urgent: “The darkness will come, and it will wear my face.” Jesus never speaks that exact line in the surviving Gospels, but he repeatedly gives that warning.

“Beware that no one leads you astray,” he says, “for many will come in my name” (Matthew 24:4–5). He warns of false prophets capable of producing persuasive signs (Matthew 24:24). He describes predators in sheep’s clothing and religious performers who call him “Lord, Lord,” yet remain unknown to him (Matthew 7:15–23).

Jesus understood that evil rarely succeeds by introducing itself as evil. It borrows sacred language. It carries a Bible, mounts a cross on the wall and learns to say his name with confidence. It can defend cruelty as righteousness, domination as divine order and exclusion as faithfulness. The darkness does not always attack Christianity from outside. Sometimes it wears the face of Christ and asks to be obeyed.

For Sufis, this is the danger of the nafs, the grasping and self-deceiving ego. It can turn religion into a disguise. It can fast to feel superior, pray to be admired, acquire knowledge to dominate and defend God as an excuse for hating God’s creatures. The more certain it becomes of its holiness, the less able it is to see what it has become.

Jesus applied the test at the level of fruit: “You will know them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:16). Not by their titles, doctrinal slogans, political influence or public performances. If a teaching produces cruelty, fear, arrogance and contempt, placing Jesus’ name over it does not transform it into light.

The Path Beneath the Label

Calling Jesus a Sufi teacher will trouble people who treat religions as sealed containers. The comparison does not turn Jesus into a medieval Muslim or deny that he was Jewish. It asks us to notice the kind of transformation he taught.

Jesus called people away from spiritual sleep. He told them to purify the heart, loosen their attachment to wealth and status, remember God, enter the secrecy of prayer, become simple, die to the false self and live from divine love. He gathered disciples around a lived path rather than offering them an abstract theory about God. Most importantly, he warned that religion could become the hiding place of the very ego it claimed to overcome.

That is the path the Sufi recognizes.

The three sayings function as a modern meditation on teachings already visible in the Gospels. Their authority does not depend on pretending they were placed word for word on Jesus’ lips. Their power comes from how clearly they illuminate the direction of his life and message.

Build the temple of the heart. Awaken to the kingdom already present. And when someone comes carrying the name of Jesus, look beneath the costume and examine the fruit.

The path to God does not end with believing the right things about Jesus. It begins when the heart is transformed into the kind of place where his teaching can live.

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Living Presence: A Sufi Way to Mindfulness & the Essential Self by Kabir Helminski

This reflection continues my series inspired by Cynthia Bourgeault’s course Discovering the Mind of Christ, Part 2, especially her commentary on Kabir Helminski’s Living Presence. In the last essay, I followed the watcher to the point where even the watcher begins to disappear. This time Cynthia brought the discussion back down to earth. Feet on the floor. Breath in the body. Shoulders released. Spine awake.

Helminski writes that the simplest form of meditation requires a body that is “still and relaxed.” Cynthia immediately objects. A body can be still and relaxed in a Barcalounger in front of the television, she says, snoring loudly, while whatever meditation takes place is purely coincidental.

What meditation requires is a body that is relaxed but alert.

I laughed because the correction seems obvious. Of course we should not fall asleep. But she was not merely adjusting Helminski’s posture instructions. She was describing the quality of attention contemplation is trying to awaken in us.

Relaxed without alertness becomes drifting. Alert without relaxation becomes control. Most of us know both.

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Stillness Can Be Full of Noise

I used to assume that if I sat quietly for twenty or thirty minutes, I had meditated. Maybe not well, but at least technically. I had remained in the chair. I had not checked my phone. Surely some spiritual credit had been earned.

The problem is that the body can be perfectly still while the mind performs an entire stage production. I have replayed arguments, planned articles, rehearsed conversations that were never going to happen, and solved problems no one had asked me to solve. All without moving anything but my eyelids.

Stillness is useful because it removes some distractions, but it does not create presence. Sometimes it merely gives the imagination a quieter theater.

Cynthia’s Barcalounger is funny because it exposes the mistake. Relaxation is not the same thing as awareness. We can float through a meditation period in a pleasant fog and mistake the absence of tension for the presence of God.

Relaxation matters. A tense body keeps announcing that something must be defended, controlled, or accomplished. But relaxation has to remain awake. Otherwise meditation becomes a respectable form of daydreaming.

Alertness Has Its Own Ego Problem

The opposite mistake is familiar to anyone who can turn almost anything into a performance review.

Sit upright. Follow the breath. Do not wander. Catch every thought. Return immediately. Try harder.

I know this posture too. The body may appear composed, but internally there is a supervisor with a clipboard. Every distraction is noted. Every return is evaluated. The ego serves as both employee and management.

Cynthia warns against holding attention entirely through the mind and will. Attention can become another faculty we try to dominate. We may become good at concentrating while also becoming more controlling and more impressed with ourselves as people who know how to concentrate.

The body tells on us. The jaw tightens. The breathing becomes shallow. The spine is no longer upright but braced. We are not present. We are trying to force presence to happen.

Relaxed but alert means neither drifting nor gripping. We are here, but we are not clutching the moment.

The Body Knows Where Now Is

The most practical part of Cynthia’s teaching was also the part I most needed to hear. When identification takes over, begin with sensation.

Feel the feet on the ground. Sense the volume of the head. Notice the breath moving in the lower abdomen. Become aware of the hands, the base of the spine, or whatever place in the body most quickly returns you to yourself.

This sounds almost insultingly simple. The ego would prefer a more impressive assignment. It wants hidden knowledge, a rare technique, perhaps a diagram with several levels and a password.

Cynthia says: feel your feet.

There is a reason for that simplicity. Sensation can only happen now.

We can remember a sensation from yesterday, but the remembering is happening now. We can anticipate pain tomorrow, but the anticipation is happening now. The pressure of the floor beneath the feet, the weight of the hands, the breath entering the body, the tightness in the throat—those are present-tense realities.

Thought can live almost anywhere. Sensation refuses to leave the room.

That is why the body interrupts identification. It does not argue with the story in the mind. It simply introduces something more immediate than the story. The feet are here. The breath is here. For one moment, so am I.

Finding the Posture That Wakes You Up

There is no single posture that works for every body. Some people sit on cushions. Some sit in chairs. Some need back support. Some of us have knees, necks, or hips that have already submitted formal complaints about the standard meditation photographs.

The goal is not to imitate a statue. It is to find a position in which the body can be at ease without becoming dull.

Let the spine rise naturally. Release the shoulders. Unclench the hands. Soften the face. Allow the feet or knees to make clear contact with the ground. The posture should have dignity, but not strain. It should feel awake without feeling guarded.

Then find the sensation that serves as your deepest reminder. For one person it may be the soles of the feet. For another, the movement of breath low in the abdomen. Someone else may respond to the hands or the interior space of the head.

The right place is not the most dramatic one. It is the place that brings you back. Once you find it, touch it lightly with attention. Remember the body. The body remembers the present.

The Posture Leaves the Chair

What Cynthia is teaching does not remain inside formal meditation.

Relaxed but alert is also a way of listening. It is a way of entering a difficult conversation without collapsing into passivity or tightening into combat. It is a way of driving through traffic, answering an email, or noticing that an old reaction has already started winding itself around the nervous system.

The body often knows before the mind admits anything is happening. The jaw has tightened. The shoulders have risen. The breath has shortened. We are already halfway into the boat before we realize it has left the shore.

Then comes the simplest intervention: feel the feet, notice the breath, sense the body from within.

Nothing dramatic may happen. The difficult person may still be difficult. We may still need to speak, decide, refuse, apologize, or leave. But there is now a little more space around the reaction. We are no longer entirely inside it.

I had thought posture was mostly about keeping the body from becoming a distraction during meditation. Cynthia turns that around. The body is not merely something to arrange so the real spiritual work can happen elsewhere. The body is one of the instruments through which we wake up.

Relaxed enough to stop controlling, alert enough not to disappear, still enough to notice, present enough to respond.

Perhaps that is the posture of transformation: not a perfect position held for thirty minutes, but a human being learning how to remain here.

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Living Presence: A Sufi Way to Mindfulness & the Essential Self by Kabir Helminski

I was inspired to write this after watching Christian nationalists repeatedly complain that Muslims refuse to assimilate, warn of an Islamic takeover, and insist that Islam destroyed Christianity in the Holy Land. The history tells a very different story. Indigenous Christianity survived there for more than a thousand years under Muslim rule. What truly weakened and displaced it was the arrival of Western missionaries, colonial powers, and political projects that treated the Holy Land as something to reclaim rather than a living society already inhabited by Christians and Muslims.

When Western Protestant missionaries began arriving in the Holy Land during the nineteenth century, they spoke as though they were bringing Christianity back to its birthplace.

They arrived carrying Bibles, tracts, schoolbooks and the enormous confidence of people who had never considered that the Christians already living there might understand their own faith perfectly well.

Christianity had not disappeared from Palestine. It had survived Roman persecution, Byzantine politics, the Persian invasion, the Islamic conquest, the Crusades, the Mamluks and centuries of Ottoman rule. Palestinian Christians had guarded churches, preserved liturgies, maintained monasteries and continued worshipping in the places associated with the life of Jesus.

Then Europeans arrived to explain Christianity to them.

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They Did Not Discover an Empty Biblical Stage

The first organized American Protestant mission to Palestine was commissioned in 1819, when Levi Parsons and Pliny Fisk were sent by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. Parsons entered Jerusalem in 1821. British missionary organizations followed, and their presence became substantially more powerful during the 1840s and 1850s.

The Anglo-Prussian Protestant bishopric was created in Jerusalem in 1841. Samuel Gobat became its second bishop in 1846. Christ Church was consecrated in 1849, and the Ottoman government formally recognized Protestants as a separate religious community in 1850. So 1850 was not the beginning, but it was roughly when scattered missionary efforts became an organized institutional presence backed by European influence.

The missionaries looked at Palestine and saw a biblical landscape waiting to be reclaimed. They rarely saw the living society in front of them on its own terms.

The Holy Land became a kind of theological theme park in the Western imagination. Its Arab inhabitants were reduced to background scenery. The land mattered because Abraham had walked there, David had ruled there and Jesus had taught there. The people actually living there were treated as custodians who had somehow misplaced the instruction manual.

Their Main Target Was Not Muslims

One of the most revealing facts about the early Protestant missions is that they did not concentrate primarily on converting Palestine’s Muslim majority.

The London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews naturally concentrated on Jews. The Church Missionary Society was consumed by its rivalry with Catholicism and what it considered the corrupt practices of the ancient Eastern churches. Its reports spoke of awakening the supposedly sleeping Syrian and Greek churches. Islam received surprisingly little attention.

Historian Laura Robson found that these early Protestant organizations drew their converts and local connections almost exclusively from Christian and Jewish communities. They presented themselves not primarily as an alternative to Islam, but as an alternative to Catholicism, Orthodoxy and the ancient liturgical Christianity of the region.

Under Bishop Gobat, the mission deliberately focused on local Orthodox and Catholic Christians. During his tenure, forty-two Anglican schools opened. Ottoman restrictions made direct evangelism among Muslims difficult, but that was not the only reason for this strategy. European evangelical Protestantism defined itself through opposition to Catholic sacraments, Orthodox traditions, icons, priests, monasteries and liturgical worship.

The missionaries had come to the land of the apostles and somehow concluded that the churches descended from the apostolic age were practicing Christianity incorrectly.

“Saving” Christians From Christianity

Western missionaries were often openly disgusted by indigenous Christian worship.

They described the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Christianity’s most important sacred site, as a nest of superstition, filth and ritual excess. The incense, icons, chanting, vestments, processions and ancient ceremonies that connected Palestinian Christians to generations before them looked foreign to Protestants accustomed to white walls, wooden pews and sermons.

This was more than a disagreement about worship style. The missionaries believed they possessed a purer Christianity than the people whose families had been Christian for centuries.

Schools became one of their most effective tools. Education was offered free or at heavily subsidized rates. Mission institutions provided language instruction, medical care, employment and connections to European consulates. For poor families, these could be powerful incentives.

By the late nineteenth century, even Anglican leaders were admitting what had happened. The Archbishop of Canterbury criticized earlier tactics that had made conversion economically attractive to poor Christians and drawn children away from their parents’ churches.

The issue was not that schools, hospitals or printing presses were bad. Many improved people’s lives, expanded literacy and produced important Arab intellectuals.

The problem was that help often arrived wrapped in contempt. Education came with the suggestion that your grandparents’ faith was backward. Medical assistance came from institutions competing for your religious loyalty. Foreign protection could elevate one Christian community over another. Material survival and spiritual allegiance became entangled.

Missionary Competition Became Communal Conflict

The result was not a great wave of Muslim conversions. It was increased rivalry among Christians.

Gobat’s attempts to recruit Orthodox and Catholic children provoked furious resistance. In 1852, a Catholic crowd attacked a Protestant school in Nazareth, damaging the building and injuring a missionary. The following year, Orthodox protesters attacked the Protestant mission house in Nablus during worship, forcing the congregation to flee.

Catholics opened schools opposite Protestant schools. Missionaries accused Catholic clergy of intimidating families. Protestant Bibles were publicly burned. Orthodox authorities threatened sanctions against members who associated with Anglican institutions.

The Western missionaries had not created every disagreement among Christians, but they industrialized those disagreements.

Ancient religious identities that had existed within a shared local culture became connected to competing foreign powers. France claimed Catholic interests. Russia claimed Orthodox interests. Britain and Prussia promoted Protestant institutions. Churches were no longer merely churches. They became extensions of consulates, imperial rivalries and European political strategy.

A Palestinian Christian’s denominational identity could now affect where his children attended school, where he received medical treatment, which foreign government might protect him and what economic opportunities were available.

That is how theological difference becomes sectarian infrastructure.

Christianity Arrived With a Flag Behind It

Missionary Christianity also helped change how Muslims perceived their Christian neighbors.

For centuries, Palestinian Christians had been Arabic-speaking members of the same towns, villages, markets and extended social world as Muslims. They were not European foreigners. They were Palestinians who happened to be Christian.

But Western intervention began attaching Christianity to European privilege and political intrusion.

The British consulate’s protection of mission institutions was understood as a way to expand British influence against France, Russia and the Ottoman government. The Protestant bishopric itself was discussed in geopolitical terms. British leaders did not simply want a church in Jerusalem. They wanted a British religious foothold in the eastern Mediterranean.

The fusion of religion and empire became unmistakable with the Palestine Exploration Fund, founded in 1865. Presented as an archaeological and scholarly organization, it was deeply shaped by evangelical assumptions. Its projects concentrated heavily on ancient Israel, while Ottoman and Arab history was treated as an irrelevant interruption.

At the Fund’s opening meeting, the Archbishop of York announced, “This country of Palestine belongs to you and to me. It is essentially ours.”

The Fund’s surveys supported biblical research, but its maps were also supplied to British intelligence. Scripture, archaeology and military strategy were becoming parts of the same project.

The message to the indigenous population was difficult to miss: Europeans considered Palestine theirs because they had read about it in the Bible.

The Land Became More Important Than Its Christians

This Western Christian imagination adored the Holy Land while remaining strangely indifferent to Holy Land Christians.

It loved ancient Christians, preferably dead ones. Apostles, martyrs and Church Fathers were wonderful. Living Arab Christians were inconvenient. They spoke Arabic, shared customs with Muslims and practiced forms of Christianity that Protestants had spent centuries condemning.

The indigenous Christian was therefore rewritten as either an ignorant victim awaiting Protestant rescue or an obstacle standing between Western Christians and the biblical landscape they believed belonged to them.

That mindset did not preserve Palestinian Christianity. It weakened its institutions, divided its communities and connected its public image to foreign political power.

When resentment toward European intervention grew, local Christians could be treated as representatives of the West even when they had never asked Europeans to represent them. The missionary could eventually return to London, Boston or Berlin. The Palestinian Christian remained behind to live with the suspicion the missionary had helped create.

Christianity Survived Muslim Rule. Its Destruction Is a Modern Western Story

There is one historical fact that modern Christian Islamophobes never seem prepared to explain.

Christianity survived in the Holy Land continuously for nearly two thousand years. For roughly thirteen of those centuries, Palestinian Christians lived under successive Muslim governments.

They did not disappear.

The Greek Orthodox Patriarchate remained. Armenian, Syriac, Coptic, Ethiopian and Catholic communities remained. Monasteries continued operating. Pilgrims continued arriving. Bells continued ringing. Liturgies continued being celebrated in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Nazareth and villages throughout Palestine.

When British troops entered Jerusalem in 1917, they did not discover a land where Christianity had been outlawed or driven underground. They found ancient Christian communities that had remained rooted there through centuries of Arab, Mamluk and Ottoman Muslim rule.

Ottoman records from 1878 counted more than 43,000 Christians in the districts that would later form Mandatory Palestine. These were not recently arrived European missionaries. They were indigenous Arabic-speaking Christians belonging largely to churches that had existed in the region since antiquity.

That alone dismantles the popular claim that Christianity simply cannot survive in a Muslim-majority society.

It survived there for more than a millennium.

What it could not survive was the modern political order imposed by Western powers.

The demographic destruction of Palestinian Christianity did not occur during the early Islamic conquest. It did not occur during the centuries of Ottoman government. It occurred after European empires began treating Palestine as their religious inheritance and its indigenous population as an obstacle.

British rule brought the Balfour Declaration, the machinery of the Mandate and official support for establishing a “Jewish national home” in a country whose existing population was overwhelmingly Palestinian Arab. Christian and Muslim Palestinians recognized that they faced the same political threat. That is why they formed Muslim-Christian Associations together across Palestine after the British occupation.

Then came 1948.

The Nakba did not distinguish between Muslim and Christian Palestinians. Towns were emptied, villages were destroyed, property was seized and families were scattered into refugee communities throughout the region.

Historian Bernard Sabella estimated that approximately 50,000 Palestinian Christians were displaced during the 1948 war. That represented roughly 35 percent of the entire Christian population of Palestine. In other words, more than a third of Palestine’s indigenous Christians were uprooted in a single modern catastrophe.

The Greek Orthodox Patriarchate reported afterward that it was facing a severe financial crisis because of the events following the end of the British Mandate, while simultaneously attempting to care for refugees driven from areas controlled by the new Israeli state.

The decline continued through occupation, land confiscation, economic strangulation, walls, checkpoints, residency restrictions and the steady pressure placed upon Palestinian life.

Bethlehem was approximately 85 percent Christian in 1948. By the time a United Nations special rapporteur examined the situation six decades later, Christians represented only around 15 percent of the city. The same report identified Israeli permits, checkpoints and the separation barrier as restrictions affecting Palestinian Christians’ ability to travel and reach their places of worship.

This does not mean Western missionaries single-handedly caused the Nakba or every later act of displacement. It means they participated in the larger process that transformed Palestine from a living Arab society into a Western religious project.

They taught Europeans to imagine the Holy Land without its actual inhabitants. They portrayed Muslim rule as an interruption in a story that properly belonged to Western Christians and biblical Israel. They helped transform Christianity from the indigenous faith of Palestinian families into an ideological claim made by foreign governments.

The missionaries arrived first with schools, Bibles and archaeological surveys. The empire followed with maps, declarations and soldiers.

Then the indigenous Christians began disappearing.

This is the part omitted whenever Western Christians claim that Muslims are inherently incapable of tolerating Christianity. The Christians of Palestine survived caliphates, sultanates and nearly four centuries of Ottoman Muslim government. Their churches, monasteries and communities remained embedded in the land.

Their catastrophic displacement began under a British Christian empire and accelerated under a modern nationalist project born largely in Europe, enabled by Britain and protected by Western power.

The indigenous Christian presence was not destroyed because Palestinian Muslims suddenly decided that Christians could no longer live beside them. Muslims and Christians were displaced together. They became refugees together. They resisted colonial rule together. To this day, Palestinian Christians describe the occupation, loss of land, economic pressure and restrictions upon movement as central threats to their continued existence.

So the next time someone announces that Christians cannot survive under Muslim rule, point them toward the birthplace of Christianity.

Christianity survived there under Muslim rule for approximately thirteen centuries.

It was the arrival of the modern West that nearly finished it off.

Christianity Did Not Need to Be Brought Back

Western Protestant missionaries did not single-handedly destroy Christianity in the Holy Land. Christianity survives there today because indigenous Christians continue refusing to disappear.

But the missionaries helped damage the social world in which that Christianity had survived.

They arrived claiming to revive the church, then competed against its oldest communities. They claimed to bring unity, then built rival schools and institutions around denominational allegiance. They claimed to preach a spiritual gospel, then traveled beneath the protection of expanding empires. They claimed the Holy Land belonged to the Bible, then behaved as though the people living upon it were trespassers.

The deepest irony is that Christianity had survived in Palestine precisely because it had become indigenous. It spoke the language of the people. It belonged to families, villages, local saints, ancient sanctuaries and patterns of coexistence developed over generations.

Western missionaries did not find Christianity dying in the Holy Land.

They found a Christianity they did not recognize, mistook their unfamiliarity for its corruption, and began dismantling the very thing they claimed to save.

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Christians routinely invoke “taqiyya” as if Islam invented religious deception and every Muslim is secretly authorized to lie. But Christian Scripture, saints, and Church Fathers repeatedly praise deception when it protects the faithful, defeats an enemy, advances what they consider true doctrine, or serves a supposedly holy purpose. The issue is not whether every story happened exactly as told. The issue is the moral being taught: deception becomes clever, righteous, and even saintly when Christians believe the cause justifies it. Here are several examples from the very tradition now accusing Muslims of uniquely sanctifying dishonesty.

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1. St. John Chrysostom: deception can be admirable

In On the Priesthood, Chrysostom admits that he deliberately deceived his friend Basil. They were both expected to accept ordination, but Chrysostom concealed his intention to escape while allowing Basil to believe they would face it together.

He then gives an extended defense of what he did:

“A well-timed deception, undertaken with an upright intention,” can be beneficial.

He says deception may be appropriate not only against enemies but between husbands and wives, parents and children, and even “our dearest friends.” He compares it to a physician tricking a patient for the patient’s benefit and concludes:

“Often it is necessary to deceive.”

He even argues that such conduct should not really be called deceit but “good management, cleverness and skill.”

This is St. John Chrysostom, whose Divine Liturgy is the normal Sunday liturgy of the Orthodox Church. This is not some obscure fringe writer. It is a foundational Orthodox saint openly constructing a moral defense of beneficial deception.

2. St. John Cassian: a person can be “justified by a lie”

Cassian’s Conference 17 contains a chapter actually titled:

“How the saints have profitably employed a lie like hellebore.”

Cassian says holy people approved by God used lies and thereby attained “the greatest goodness.” He teaches that when grave danger makes truth-telling destructive, “we must take to lying as a refuge.”

He goes much further:

“One man may be justified by means of a lie, while another may be guilty of everlasting death by telling the truth.”

Cassian praises Jacob’s deception of Isaac, saying Jacob “to his credit” followed his mother’s plan to lie. He describes Hushai’s deception of Absalom as a “pious fraud” and a “holy dissimulation.”

That is practically the Christian equivalent of the argument Muslims actually make about taqiyya: truthfulness is the norm, but deception can become permissible under danger or when necessary to protect innocent life.

3. St. Jerome: falsehood can be used as medicine

Jerome writes:

“A man on whom necessity imposes the responsibility of lying” must use falsehood carefully, “as he would a stimulant or a medicine.”

His positive biblical example is Judith, who defeated Holofernes by disguising her intentions and manipulating him through deceptive speech.

Again, this is not merely a saint behaving badly. It is a major Church Father articulating a moral rule permitting lies under necessity.

4. Judith prays for God to empower her deception

The Book of Judith is considered fully part of the Orthodox Old Testament.

Before entering the enemy camp, Judith prays:

“By the deceit of my lips, strike down slave together with ruler.”

She later asks God to make her “deceitful words” wound those threatening Israel.

She then pretends to desert her people, promises Holofernes secret information that will let him conquer them, gains access to him, encourages his sexual confidence, waits until he is drunk and cuts off his head.

The story does not present this as an unfortunate moral compromise. Judith becomes the divinely assisted savior of Israel. St. Ambrose praises her courage, wisdom, sobriety, chastity and prudence.

So here Christian Scripture presents deception, infiltration and assassination as righteous instruments of deliverance.

5. St. Athanasius deceives the authorities pursuing him

When imperial agents pursued Athanasius by boat, he ordered his own boat turned around so that he would pass his pursuers going in the opposite direction.

When they asked where Athanasius was, his party answered that he was “not a great way off” and that they could catch him by hurrying onward. The authorities were “deluded” and raced away while Athanasius escaped.

This one is especially devastating to the taqiyya accusation because Athanasius used deliberate verbal misdirection to conceal himself during religious persecution.

And Athanasius is the fourth-century bishop whose Thirty-Ninth Festal Letter contains the earliest surviving list of exactly the same twenty-seven New Testament books used by Christians today. An Orthodox educational source specifically credits him with first listing that exact New Testament collection in 367.

So the same ancient ecclesiastical tradition that helped establish the Christian Gospel canon also celebrates its great defender escaping persecution through deception.

6. Rahab lies and becomes a Christian model of faith

Rahab hides Israelite spies, tells the authorities they have already left and sends the search party in the wrong direction.

Later Christian Scripture includes Rahab among the heroes of faith and praises her for receiving and protecting the messengers. Cassian makes the moral completely explicit: he says Rahab received everlasting blessing “simply for the lie” by which she protected the spies.

That removes the usual apologetic escape hatch that “the Bible records the lie but does not approve of it.” An influential Christian Father explicitly says the lie itself contributed to her righteousness.

7. The Hebrew midwives deceive Pharaoh and are rewarded

Pharaoh orders the Hebrew midwives to murder newborn boys. They refuse and tell him that Hebrew women give birth before the midwives can arrive.

Immediately afterward, the text says God was good to the midwives and gave them families because they feared him.

The moral is clear: deceiving a murderous ruler to protect innocent people is righteous. Which is perfectly defensible morality, but Christians cannot praise that and then claim Islam is uniquely dishonest for allowing believers to conceal the truth from persecutors.

8. Jael offers sanctuary and then kills her guest

Jael invites the fleeing Sisera into her tent, tells him not to be afraid, covers him, gives him milk instead of water and allows him to believe he is safe. Once he sleeps, she drives a tent peg through his skull.

The Song of Deborah then calls her:

“Most blessed among women.”

The song specifically praises the hospitality that lowered Sisera’s defenses immediately before describing his skull being crushed.

9. Ehud obtains a private audience through a false pretext

Ehud conceals a sword beneath his clothing, presents tribute to King Eglon and claims to have a private message from God. Once the king dismisses his attendants and approaches, Ehud stabs him and locks the room behind him. Yet the text introduces Ehud as the deliverer whom God raised up for Israel.

Again: concealment, manipulation, false confidence and assassination are presented as instruments of divine liberation.

The real conclusion

None of this proves that Christianity commands Christians to lie casually. It proves something far more relevant:

Christian tradition has repeatedly distinguished malicious dishonesty from deception used for protection, warfare, medicine, religious objectives or what it considers a holy purpose.

Chrysostom calls it good management.

Cassian calls it pious fraud and holy dissimulation.

Jerome calls it medicine.

Judith prays for God to make her deceit effective.

Athanasius uses it to escape persecution.

So Christians who reduce taqiyya to “Muslims are religiously permitted to lie to everyone” are not merely misrepresenting Islam. They are condemning Islam for making moral distinctions that their own Scriptures, saints and Church Fathers have made for centuries.

The most brutal one-sentence version would be:

Christianity does not object to religious deception. It objects to Muslims being granted the same moral exceptions its own saints used, praised and formally defended.

St. Ephrem and the Heretic Too Dangerous to Debate

Apollinarius was not some obscure crank muttering theology in a corner. He was a gifted, prolific, and persuasive Christian theologian whose speaking and writing attracted a substantial following. Even writers hostile to his theology acknowledged his intellectual abilities and influence. That context matters because the story of St. Ephrem is presented as the solution to a dangerous opponent whom ordinary argument had failed to silence. Ephrem’s celebrated “victory,” however, did not come from answering Apollinarius’s ideas. It came from making certain those ideas could not be presented.

According to the Christian account, Apollinarius had written his teachings in two books and entrusted them to a woman associated with his movement. But the hagiographer cannot simply describe her as a follower or custodian of the books. He adds the rumor that she “ministered to his pleasures,” effectively branding her as Apollinarius’s mistress. Ephrem then approached this woman while pretending to agree with Apollinarius, claimed he needed the books to defend their shared beliefs against the Orthodox, and persuaded her to lend them to him. He coated the pages with fish glue, pressed them together until each volume became a solid mass, and returned them with the damage concealed.

The story praises Ephrem’s deception and sabotage as holy zeal. At the same time, it strips his opponents of dignity: Apollinarius becomes not a respected Christian thinker with an argument to answer but an irrational heretic deserving humiliation, while the woman who trusted Ephrem is reduced to a sexual insinuation. This is how religious dehumanization works. First, declare your opponents morally corrupt. Then their ideas no longer need to be answered, and whatever you do to silence them can be celebrated as righteousness. The moral being preserved is unmistakable: lying about your identity, deceiving someone into surrendering another person’s property, secretly destroying that property, and sabotaging a fair public debate can all become virtuous when done in defense of the “true faith.” Christianity did not merely record Ephrem’s conduct. It turned religious deception and vandalism into the actions of a saint.

Sources

1. Pseudo-Gregory of Nyssa. “On Saint Ephraim,” Patrologia Graeca 46, cols. 840B–841A. The account describes Ephrem assuming the guise of an Apollinarian, obtaining the books through deception, gluing their pages together with fish glue, returning them, and arranging the public confrontation. English translation.

2. John Chrysostom. On the Priesthood, Books I–II. Translated by W. R. W. Stephens, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. 9. Book I; Book II. Chrysostom argues that deception may be admirable when undertaken with a beneficial intention and says it is sometimes necessary even between friends.

3. John Cassian. Conferences, Conference 17, especially chapters 17, 19 and 20. Translated by Edgar C. S. Gibson, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 11. Complete Conference 17. Cassian discusses saints being “justified by means of a lie,” calls Hushai’s deception a “pious fraud” and “holy dissimulation,” and describes apostolic conduct as “good and salutary hypocrisy.”

4. Origen, quoted by Jerome. Jerome, Apology Against Rufinus, Book I, chapter 18. Translated by W. H. Fremantle, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 3. Online text. The preserved passage compares necessary falsehood to a stimulant or medicine and cites Judith, Esther and Jacob.

5. The Book of Judith. Judith 9:9–10; 10:1–13:10, especially Judith’s prayer that God act through “the deceit of my lips.” Judith 9.

6. Ambrose of Milan. Concerning Widows, chapter 7, sections 37–42. Online text. Ambrose praises Judith’s stratagem, wisdom, courage and victory over Holofernes.

7. Ambrose of Milan. On the Duties of the Clergy, Book III, chapter 13, sections 82–85. Online text. Ambrose says Judith entrapped Holofernes through her speech and presents her conduct as virtuous and worthy of admiration.

8. Socrates Scholasticus. Church History, Book III, chapter 14, “Flight of Athanasius.” Online text. Athanasius and his companions deliberately misdirect his pursuers, who are described as being “deluded.”

9. Athanasius of Alexandria. Thirty-Ninth Festal Letter (367), sections 5–7. Online text. This is the relevant primary text for Athanasius’s list of the four Gospels and the twenty-seven books of the New Testament.

10. Rahab and the spies. Joshua 2:1–21; 6:22–25; Hebrews 11:31; James 2:25. Joshua 2; Joshua 6; Hebrews 11; James 2. Rahab hides the spies, gives their pursuers false information and is later praised for receiving and protecting them.

11. The Hebrew midwives. Exodus 1:15–21. Online text. The midwives deceive Pharaoh concerning the Hebrew births, after which the text says God dealt well with them.

12. Jael and Sisera. Judges 4:17–22; 5:24–27. Judges 4; Judges 5. Jael invites Sisera into apparent safety, conceals him, gives him milk and kills him while he sleeps; the following victory song calls her “most blessed among women.”

13. Ehud and King Eglon. Judges 3:15–23. Online text. Ehud conceals his weapon, obtains a private audience by claiming to possess a secret message and then kills Eglon.

A Baptist church in Richardson has been purchased by a Muslim educational organization, which means certain Texans must now decide whether private property rights and religious liberty were sincere principles or merely privileges reserved for Christians.

Salahuddin Future Academy purchased the campus of Korean World Mission Baptist Church and plans to use it for a K–12 Islamic school, a mosque, a food pantry, and what Authentic Ilm Mission describes as America’s first national residential daʿwah seminary.

This sounds considerably less terrifying when translated out of culture-war language.

A religious organization sold a building to another religious organization. The buyer plans to educate children, train religious leaders, feed people, hold worship services, and teach its faith.

In other words, Muslims are doing almost exactly what Baptists have been doing in Texas since Baptists discovered Texas.

But Texas Scorecard did not publish a four-minute story about a property transaction. It published a warning about “Islam’s influence in Texas,” complete with an image of the Texas flag altered to include an Islamic crescent. The article highlights an “Islamization of Knowledge” curriculum, mentions Sharia, invokes apostasy killings in Iran, and reminds readers that Islam is growing.

The church was not conquered. Richardson did not fall. Nobody arrived on horseback.

Someone signed a sales contract.

The Terrifying Discovery That Muslim Schools Teach Islam

Salahuddin Future Academy says it intends to connect academic subjects to Islamic principles by integrating the Qur’an and Hadith into its curriculum. Its stated goals include cultivating critical thinking, social responsibility, compassion, moral development, and the ability to function constructively in a diverse society while maintaining a Muslim identity.

The phrase it uses for this approach is “Islamization of Knowledge.”

I will grant Texas Scorecard this much: the phrase sounds ominous to an American audience already trained to hear every word beginning with “Islam” as the soundtrack to a ticking bomb.

But remove the unfamiliar vocabulary and the approach becomes extremely familiar.

Prestonwood Christian Academy, with campuses in Plano and Prosper, says every subject is taught through the lens of Scripture. Its Biblical Worldview Faith Integration Planner is designed to ensure that biblical truth is intentionally woven into “every subject, lesson, and assessment.” The school describes its classrooms as places of discipleship where education shapes students to see all truth through Christianity.

That is the Christianization of knowledge.

There is nothing inherently sinister about saying so. Christian parents send their children to Christian schools because they want Christianity integrated into their education. Muslim parents choose Islamic schools for the same reason. Jewish schools interpret learning within Jewish life and tradition. Secular schools also transmit assumptions about morality, knowledge, history, identity, and the purpose of education.

Nobody teaches from nowhere.

The difference is that “biblical worldview education” has been domesticated by familiarity. It receives brochures showing smiling children in polo shirts. “Islamization of Knowledge” receives a Texas flag with a crescent pasted over it.

One is presented as parents passing their values to their children. The other is presented as a civilization advancing across Collin and Dallas counties.

Missionaries Shocked to Discover Another Missionary Religion

Texas Scorecard also quotes the former Baptist church’s mission of transforming people into “God’s children and Jesus’ disciples.”

Fair enough. It was a church.

The article then describes AIM’s plans to train imams, teachers, religious leaders, and Muslims capable of explaining and defending their faith. The seminary advertises programs in Qur’anic studies, Arabic, theology, Islamic character, public speaking, debate, and daʿwah, the Islamic practice of inviting people to understand Islam.

This is presented as another suspicious development.

Apparently, Christianity may evangelize because it possesses truth, while Islam may only evangelize because it seeks power.

Christian seminaries can train missionaries to carry the Gospel into every part of society. Christian schools can prepare students to “stand firm” in a culture of shifting values. Churches can plant new congregations, purchase campuses, operate radio stations, build universities, send missionaries overseas, lobby legislators, and announce their intention to transform the nation.

All of this is called ministry.

When Muslims train people to explain Islam, it becomes influence.

When Christians want their children to interpret every subject through Scripture, it becomes worldview education.

When Muslims connect learning to the Qur’an, the Texas flag requires immediate medical attention.

Yes, the Victory Lap Was Stupid

Authentic Ilm Mission did provide its critics with an unnecessarily useful video.

A speaker celebrated the fact that the property had previously been used to train Christian missionaries who sought to convert Muslims. During the clip, the words “Muslim Haters!!” appeared on screen. AIM later said the video was intended for Muslim supporters and was subsequently circulated more widely, where it attracted hostile anti-Muslim comments.

Calling the former occupants “Muslim haters” was childish. Christians trying to convert Muslims are not necessarily motivated by hatred any more than Muslims inviting Christians to Islam are necessarily motivated by hatred. Both traditions make truth claims. Both contain people who believe sharing those claims is an act of love.

The triumphalism was also unnecessary. A building changed owners. Nobody defeated Christianity. Nobody liberated Richardson from the Baptists.

But a smug Facebook edit is not a constitutional crisis.

It does not transform a legal property purchase into a religious invasion. It certainly does not justify dragging apostasy laws in Iran into a story about a private school in Richardson.

AIM can deserve criticism for its rhetoric without every Muslim family in North Texas being placed on trial.

And Then Iran Arrived in Plano

The most revealing moment in the Texas Scorecard story comes when it leaves the property entirely.

After describing the school and seminary, the article announces that “concerns continue to rise over Islam’s influence in Texas.” It then points readers toward a Plano mosque open house where someone said “Sharia is already here,” followed by a warning from a former Iranian about apostasy laws.

This is not context. It is a jump scare.

Sharia is a broad religious and moral tradition governing matters such as prayer, fasting, charity, marriage, business ethics, diet, inheritance, and personal conduct. A Muslim saying Sharia is already here may mean that Muslims are already practicing their religion under American law, just as Catholics follow canon law and Orthodox Jews follow halakha.

But Texas Scorecard knows many readers hear only “Iran.”

So a school in Richardson becomes connected to executions in another country without any evidence that the school advocates executing anyone. The rhetorical method is simple: mention Muslims, mention Sharia, mention Iran, then allow fear to complete the sentence.

Imagine applying this method consistently.

A Baptist school opens in Texas. The reporter quotes its biblical curriculum, then reminds readers that Uganda has used Christian rhetoric to support brutal anti-LGBTQ laws. A Catholic seminary purchases property, so the article pivots to clerical abuse in Ireland. An Orthodox church expands, followed by a paragraph about Vladimir Putin.

Christians would immediately recognize the dishonesty.

Muslims are expected to call it journalism.

Religious Liberty Is Not a Christian Subscription Service

The sale itself followed a genuine legal dispute. SAFA alleged that the church signed a contract in October 2025 to sell the property for $3.8 million and later tried to withdraw by claiming the pastor misunderstood the document. The church denied the allegations. SAFA dismissed the suit in April without a ruling, and AIM later confirmed that the purchase had ultimately been completed. Court records do not establish whether the final sale used the original terms.

That is a legitimate local story.

What turns it into propaganda is the suggestion that Muslims acquiring property, teaching children, training clergy, feeding families, and building institutions represents something more threatening than Christians doing the same things.

Religious liberty cannot mean Christians may shape the culture while Muslims must remain culturally invisible. It cannot mean Baptists may make disciples, but Muslims may not train daʿwah leaders. It cannot mean Christian parents may choose a faith-integrated education, while Muslim parents doing so are accused of “Islamizing” Texas.

The building in Richardson will still stand. Children will study mathematics and language arts. People will pray. Religious teachers will teach religion. A pantry will distribute food. Muslims will attempt to raise children who understand their faith and can live within American society without surrendering their identity.

The great Islamic takeover of Texas has apparently reached its most devious stage yet:

Buying property, opening a school, and obeying the law.

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This reflection is inspired by Through Holy Week with Mary Magdalene, guided by the teachings of Cynthia Bourgeault. In this series, Holy Week is not treated as a courtroom drama about guilt and acquittal, but as an initiation into conscious love. Mary Magdalene is not a background character waiting for the men to understand what happened. She stands at the center of the mystery.

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Holy Saturday is the quietest day in Christianity.

Good Friday gives us the cross, the cries from the crowd, the darkness, the torn curtain, and the body taken down from the wood. Easter morning gives us angels, an empty tomb, astonished disciples, and the impossible announcement that death has not won.

But Saturday gives us almost nothing.

The stone has been rolled into place. Jesus has disappeared into the silence of the earth. His followers have scattered. The movement appears to be over. There is no teaching, no miracle, and no public drama.

Only absence.

And sitting opposite the tomb is Mary Magdalene.

The Gospel does not tell us exactly how long she remained there. It leaves us only with the image of Mary Magdalene and the other Mary sitting across from the place where Jesus had been buried. But sitting carries a different feeling than passing through. It suggests waiting. It suggests that although everyone else has gone home, love has not yet found a reason to leave.

Jesus is descending into what the Christian tradition calls the heart of the earth, while Mary remains above, holding vigil beside the tomb.

What if these are not two unrelated actions?

What if Holy Saturday is held between them?

The Last Possible Place

When someone we love dies, we follow them as far as the body will allow.

We sit beside the hospital bed after the machines have been turned off. We remain in the funeral home when there is nothing left to say. We stand beside the grave after the prayers have ended and everyone else has begun walking back toward the cars.

The mind knows the person is gone, but the heart moves toward the last place where the beloved can still be located. It goes to the point of departure and waits there.

Mary has reached that point.

The body that carried the voice she knew, the eyes that recognized her, and the hands that blessed and healed has been placed behind a stone. Everything that gave their relationship its familiar shape has disappeared. She cannot speak to him. She cannot touch him. She cannot help him. She cannot even see the body.

Yet she remains.

This is not necessarily the dramatic grief so often projected onto Mary Magdalene. Something quieter and more powerful may be happening. She is not collapsing into helplessness. She is holding her place.

Jesus has left behind an extraordinary amount of unfinished human pain. His disciples abandoned him. The people who welcomed him into Jerusalem turned against him. His teaching was misunderstood, his movement was shattered, and his life ended beneath the accusation that everything he had attempted had failed.

Whatever was happening in the hidden depths, there was still an earthly burden to be carried.

Mary holds what has been left unresolved. She holds the betrayal, the humiliation, the abandoned mission, and the broken hearts of those who could not remain. She carries the pain of watching someone she loved give everything and appear to lose everything.

She cannot undo any of it.

She does not have to.

Her task is to witness that love is still present inside it.

The Fixed Foot of the Compass

John Donne offers one of the most beautiful images for this kind of love in his poem “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.” He compares two lovers to the two legs of a drawing compass.

One foot is planted at the center. The other travels outward, tracing the circumference of a circle. They appear to move separately, but they remain joined. The fixed foot is not rigid or indifferent. It leans toward the traveling foot as it moves and rises again as the traveler comes home.

“Thy firmness draws my circle just,” Donne writes.

The shape of the journey depends upon the steadiness of the center.

This is not codependency. The foot at the center does not prevent the other from moving. It does not shorten the journey, demand constant reassurance, or treat distance as abandonment. Its love allows movement while preserving unity.

This may be the image we need for Holy Saturday.

Jesus is the traveling foot, moving into the hidden depths, into the boundary region between death and life, presence and absence, history and eternity. Mary is the fixed foot, planted upon the earth, remaining beside the tomb.

She cannot travel his path for him. She does not attempt to drag him back into the form he has left behind. She remains rooted in the love they share, holding the earthly end of the connection while he enters the heart of the mystery.

The two realms remain joined through love.

The cosmic and the personal are not separated. The descent into the heart of the earth is connected to a woman sitting in grief beside a stone. The transformation of creation is tethered to the intimate faithfulness of one human heart.

This does not mean Mary somehow causes the resurrection, as though Jesus requires her emotional energy to escape the grave. It means resurrection is not portrayed as an isolated demonstration of spiritual power.

It emerges within relationship.

The Christ who returns on Easter morning does not first appear before a throne, a temple, or a council of religious authorities.

He comes to Mary.

The Tether That Does Not Break

We usually imagine love as something that happens through proximity. We know another person through their voice, face, touch, habits, and physical presence. When those things disappear, it seems obvious that the relationship must also be disappearing.

Holy Saturday asks whether love may be capable of another movement.

Perhaps the bond between two people can stretch beyond visible contact without breaking. Perhaps separation is not always a rupture. It may become what Donne called an expansion, love drawn “to airy thinness” but still joined at its source.

Anyone who has loved someone through illness, distance, estrangement, dementia, or death knows something about this stretching. The familiar forms of relationship fall away one after another. Conversation changes. Touch becomes impossible. Memory begins to fail. The person we love seems to be traveling into a country we cannot enter.

The temptation is either to cling desperately to the old form or to protect ourselves by declaring the relationship finished.

Conscious love does neither.

It remains present without grasping. It allows the beloved to travel while keeping the heart open. It becomes a tether rather than a leash.

A leash says, “You may go only as far as I permit.”

A tether of love says, “Go where you must. The connection between us is deeper than distance.”

Mary’s vigil becomes an icon of that faithfulness. She stays near the last place where Jesus can be found, not because she understands resurrection, but because love has not released her from presence.

She keeps the center.

The Hidden Work of Remaining

Our culture does not have much respect for waiting when waiting produces nothing visible.

We want action, closure, answers, and forward movement. We want the stone rolled away before the sun has even gone down on Friday. We want grief to complete its work on a schedule. We want loss to offer us a lesson that can be turned into something useful.

Holy Saturday refuses all of that.

Mary does not know she is waiting for a resurrection. From where she sits, there is no reason to expect one. She is not performing optimism. She is not using positive thinking to deny what happened.

Jesus is dead.

The tomb is sealed.

The future they imagined has ended.

Her faithfulness consists in remaining inside that reality without allowing it to destroy her capacity to love.

This is the hidden work of the vigil.

To stay without demanding an answer.

To grieve without turning grief into bitterness.

To face the apparent ending without pretending it is something else.

To allow love to remain alive when there is no longer anything it can possess.

This is not passivity. It is an intense form of spiritual labor. Most of us escape the tension of loss by reacting. We explain it, spiritualize it, numb it, bargain with it, or rush toward whatever comes next.

Mary sits.

She neither changes the conditions nor abandons them. She holds the contradiction that the one she loves is gone and that her love for him is still fully alive.

She keeps vigil at the place where those two truths meet.

Love Calls Us Home

What if this is one of the hidden movements inside the Easter story?

Jesus descends into the heart of the earth, into the depth where human sorrow, contradiction, violence, and death have their roots. Mary remains at the surface, holding the human story they shared. One moves into the depths. The other remains at the center.

Between them stretches a current of love.

The image cannot be proved, and it should not be hardened into another doctrine. It is a contemplative possibility, a way of seeing the story that restores relationship to the center of redemption.

Perhaps Mary is the fixed foot whose faithfulness holds the earthly realm while Christ traces the great circle through the boundary regions and returns on Easter morning.

Perhaps love calls us to the things of this world. Perhaps the one who travels into eternity is still drawn toward the unfinished work of mercy, healing, and reconciliation. Perhaps the risen Christ returns not because he has been dragged backward into physical existence, but because love completes its circle through service.

He returns to send Mary forward.

The fixed foot will soon move. The woman who sat beside the tomb will become the apostle who runs from it. Her faithfulness during the silence prepares her for the announcement that follows.

“I have seen the Lord.”

Holy Saturday teaches us that love is not inactive merely because nothing appears to be happening. Remaining can be a form of spiritual labor. Keeping vigil can hold together realities we do not yet understand. Sitting beside what seems irretrievably lost may be the place where a new beginning is already taking shape.

Mary does not know that Easter is coming.

She only knows where love has asked her to remain.

Perhaps that is enough.

Perhaps the circle is drawn by the one who travels, but it is made true by the one who keeps the center. Perhaps beneath every resurrection is a hidden vigil, and beneath every return is a love that remained present long after hope had fallen silent.

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This reflection continues my series inspired by Cynthia Bourgeault’s course Discovering the Mind of Christ, Part 2, especially her commentaries on Kabir Helminski’s Living Presence. The first articles explored the Essential Self beneath personality, the ego’s attempt to manage its own enlightenment, and meditation as freedom from identification. Most recently, we looked at compassion without attachment and the possibility that right action can arise from presence rather than emotional compulsion. This reflection follows meditation to its strangest conclusion: we begin by learning to observe ourselves, only to discover that even the observer cannot be the final destination.

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At first, the watcher feels like a breakthrough. A thought appears, but instead of immediately becoming the thought, something in us notices it. Anger rises, and we recognize anger before it becomes the whole room. An old fantasy begins gathering momentum, and for once we can see the machinery starting up before it carries us away. That tiny separation between awareness and experience is where contemplative freedom begins.

Then one of Cynthia’s students asks the question that inevitably arrives: do we eventually have to give up the watcher?

The answer is yes, although almost everything about that answer can be misunderstood.

The Watcher Is a Useful Beginning

In ordinary life, we are usually fused with whatever happens to be moving through consciousness. We do not experience a thought as something passing through us. We experience it as reality. If resentment appears, the mind immediately begins collecting evidence for the prosecution. If anxiety appears, it starts writing tomorrow’s weather report. If someone praises us, the ego quietly updates its résumé.

Meditation creates a little distance from this automatic process. In awareness practice, we observe thoughts arising and dissolving. In Centering Prayer, we notice that attention has wandered and gently return to the sacred word. In concentrative meditation, we return again and again to the breath or another simple anchor. The methods differ, but each one teaches the same elementary lesson: a thought can be present without becoming our identity.

This is the watcher in its most useful form. It is not a new personality supervising the old one. It is awareness recognizing that it has been asleep inside its own contents. For a person who has spent decades being dragged around by every passing emotion, this discovery can feel almost miraculous.

The trouble begins when the ego notices the miracle.

The Spiritual Hall Monitor

The ego has a remarkable ability to survive every stage of the journey by changing jobs. When worldly success becomes embarrassing, it becomes interested in spiritual success. When control is exposed as a problem, it tries controlling attention instead. When we discover the watcher, the ego applies for the position.

Before long, there is a new character sitting inside us, monitoring the meditation and taking notes. It watches the thoughts, evaluates the silence, measures the depth of the experience, and occasionally congratulates itself for being the one who is watching. The ordinary ego may have wanted praise, money, influence, or control. The spiritual ego wants pure awareness and preferably wants to know how well it is doing compared with everyone else.

Cynthia calls this “watching the watcher,” and it becomes another form of self-reflection. Instead of being lost in the original thought, we become fascinated by ourselves as the person who is observing the thought. The boat is still carrying us downstream. It has simply been renamed Advanced Meditation Practice.

This does not mean the watcher was a mistake. It means the watcher was never meant to become another permanent identity.

Who Notices?

Cynthia points to a quiet mystery hidden inside the basic instructions for Centering Prayer. When you notice that you are engaged with a thought, return gently to the sacred word.

The instruction sounds simple enough, but it contains an unanswered question.

Who notices?

You may have been completely lost in a fantasy, a memory, or tomorrow’s grocery list. Then something inside you remembers the original intention and quietly interrupts. You were not consciously supervising the process. In fact, you had forgotten the meditation entirely. Yet something recognized the identification and brought you back.

Cynthia treats this as more than a mental technique. Something deeper has registered the intention of the heart. Something in us is already aligned with awakening before the surface mind manages to catch up. She describes these moments as hidden streams of mercy rising from within our own depths.

The watcher, then, is not something we manufacture from scratch. We do not build a superior self and position it above the personality. What we call developing the watcher may really be the gradual removal of everything that obstructs our natural capacity for awareness.

Helminski uses the image of polishing a mirror. The mirror does not create the light. It becomes transparent to what was already there.

When the Observer Becomes the Obstruction

Eventually the watcher itself becomes too much.

As long as there is a distinct observer proudly standing apart from experience, a subtle duality remains. There is someone here who is watching something over there. The observer may be quieter than the ordinary ego, but there is still a structure of separation: I am observing my thoughts. I am surrendering my distractions. I am entering the divine presence.

Cynthia suggests that at a certain point, this entire arrangement begins to soften. The technique is not rejected; it simply becomes unnecessary for a moment. The observer, the observed, and the act of observing no longer feel like three separate things. There is only awareness, or presence, without anyone standing outside it to claim possession.

This is where spiritual language becomes slippery. The moment we hear about awareness without an observer, the mind wants to visualize it, analyze it, and achieve it. The ego immediately adds “dissolve the watcher” to its project-management software.

But the watcher cannot dissolve the watcher.

The self cannot empty itself while remaining in charge of the emptying.

What disappears is precisely the sense that there is a spiritual manager accomplishing the surrender.

Leaning Back into Presence

Cynthia offers a beautiful image from Beatrice Bruteau’s reflection on the Gospel of John. At the Last Supper, the beloved disciple does not turn around and stare directly at the one holding him. He simply leans back into the beloved.

That becomes an image for contemplative life.

When we try to look directly at pure awareness, we immediately divide reality into subject and object. There is the person looking, and there is being itself, now turned into the most elusive object imaginable. We may catch a glimpse of something spacious and luminous, but the mind quickly begins asking who is seeing what, and who is watching the one who sees. Before long, we are trapped in a hall of mirrors.

Leaning back is different. We stop trying to grasp presence and allow ourselves to be held within it. Instead of turning divine reality into something we inspect, we consent to rest inside what has always been carrying us.

Cynthia admits that she finds this easier than trying to watch being itself. She speaks of coinciding with presence rather than examining it. That distinction feels important. Meditation is not an expedition in which the heroic little self finally captures God. It is the gradual relaxation of everything in us that insists on remaining separate.

Self-Emptying, Not Self-Improvement

This is why meditation cannot finally be reduced to self-improvement. Self-improvement leaves the basic structure untouched. There is still a person in charge, evaluating weaknesses, adding strengths, monitoring progress, and hoping to become a more impressive version of the same familiar character.

Contemplative practice begins by giving that character useful work. Sit still. Return to the breath. Notice the thought. Release the identification. These disciplines matter because they interrupt the automatic patterns that usually govern us.

But the practices slowly reveal something the ego never expected. The one performing the work is not the deepest center of the work.

The watcher was helpful because it created space around the personality. Eventually, however, even that space loses its owner. Awareness remains, but the person claiming to be aware becomes less solid. Presence remains, but no one needs to stand beside it holding a certificate of achievement.

Thomas Merton once wrote that we have to experience duality for a long time before discovering it is not there. Cynthia’s advice is not to force that discovery. Work with the duality you actually have. Develop the watcher. Notice identification. Return to sensation. Use the sacred word. Let the practice teach you what comes next.

Then, when the observer begins to soften, do not rebuild it out of fear.

Sitting in the Divine

Perhaps this is what Helminski means by going beyond the identification of consciousness with experience. At first, we discover that awareness is larger than any particular thought. Later, we discover that awareness does not belong to the separate self we imagined was observing everything.

Meditation begins with a person trying to become present.

It deepens as the effort relaxes.

Eventually, there may be only presence itself.

Not permanently. Not on demand. Probably not without the mind returning five seconds later to ask how well it went. But even a brief taste changes our understanding of the path.

We are not manufacturing the Divine Presence.

We are not earning access to it.

We are not standing outside it, trying to find the correct entrance.

We are learning to stop leaving.

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Living Presence: A Sufi Way to Mindfulness & the Essential Self by Kabir Helminski

Evan Hunt has issued a simple challenge to Congressman Keith Self: stop hiding and debate him in front of the people of Texas’ 3rd Congressional District.

Hunt is not some random internet heckler. He is a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, a combat aviator and a decorated twenty-year veteran now running against Self as the Democratic nominee. While Hunt has been holding public town halls and inviting questions, he says Self has dodged a debate for more than a year.

This is strange because Keith Self is usually not shy.

He is not shy when the subject is Muslims. He is not shy when immigrants can be described as an “invasion.” He was certainly not shy when he deliberately called Representative Sarah McBride “Mr. McBride” during a congressional hearing, repeated it after being challenged, and then slammed the gavel and adjourned the meeting.

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A retired Green Beret defeated by a pronoun.

Self also co-founded the “Sharia-Free America Caucus,” because apparently Congress had finished dealing with health care, housing prices, infrastructure, veterans’ benefits and everything else.

The caucus has grown to sixty-eight members. Self says “Christian values form the foundation of our nation” and portrays Sharia as a growing threat to the Constitution. His earlier announcement described the caucus as a mission to “save Western Civilization.”

Save it from what, exactly?

Muslims praying five times a day? Giving to charity? Avoiding interest? Eating halal chicken with alarming constitutional intent?

Sharia is the broad religious and moral path Muslims use to guide prayer, fasting, charity, family life, business ethics and personal conduct. American law remains American law. Reuters found no evidence that any mainstream Muslim organization is trying to replace the Constitution with Islamic law.

Keith Self is defending America from Muslims obeying the Constitution.

It is like forming a Kosher-Free America Caucus because someone saw a rabbi checking the ingredients on a hot dog and assumed the Talmud was about to annex Plano.

Self’s latest contribution to limited government was demanding that the IRS and Justice Department investigate the East Plano Islamic Center based on allegations contained in an Oversight Project report. This comes after the Justice Department already closed an earlier civil-rights investigation of the development associated with EPIC without filing charges or a lawsuit. Developers have repeatedly said the community will welcome people of every faith and comply with state and federal law.

Nothing says “religious freedom” like asking federal agencies to crawl through a mosque’s records until somebody finds a suspicious falafel receipt.

Then there is Keith Self’s unusual relationship with Joseph Goebbels quotations.

To be fair, Self was not praising Goebbels when he quoted the Nazi propaganda minister during a 2025 congressional hearing. He was using the quote to accuse someone else of authoritarian thinking. Context matters.

Unfortunately, it was not his first Goebbels recital.

Back in 2010, while campaigning as Collin County judge, Self also opened a political message with a quotation attributed to Goebbels and defended the decision when criticized.

Most politicians manage to complete their entire careers without developing a recurring Joseph Goebbels citation habit.

At this point, Self’s staff should install a warning on his computer:

You appear to be quoting a Nazi again. Would you like to reconsider?

This is the deeper problem with Keith Self’s politics. Fear is easy to sell. The frightened ego loves an enemy because an enemy allows it to feel righteous without becoming just. Muslims become a threat. Immigrants become an invading army. A transgender colleague becomes a target for humiliation. Every human difference becomes another emergency requiring Keith Self to appear on television and save Western civilization before lunch.

But put him on a stage with another veteran, give the audience access to both microphones and allow constituents to ask follow-up questions?

Suddenly General Courage has entered witness protection.

Texas’ 3rd District has been held by Republicans since 1968. That history should make a public debate more important, not less. No congressional seat belongs permanently to one party, one politician or one frightened religious faction.

Hunt has asked for a venue holding more than 250 people so Self can hear how loudly the crowd responds. I suggest 500 seats, two lecterns, independent fact-checking and no emergency gavel within Keith’s reach.

Congressman Self, you found time to establish a national caucus against your Muslim neighbors. You found time to summon the IRS and Justice Department against their mosque. You found time to insult a colleague and quote Joseph Goebbels twice.

Surely you can find ninety minutes to defend your record before the people paying your salary.

Debate Evan Hunt.

Or rename the campaign Keith Self-Preservation.

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The White House has identified a new threat to the American homeland.

Canadian smoke.

For years, radical environmentalists have claimed that air moves freely across national borders because of something called “wind.” The Trump administration now believes this is merely another globalist loophole designed to undermine American atmospheric sovereignty.

President Trump recently blamed Canada for wildfire smoke drifting into the United States and suggested that Canada may need to compensate America through additional tariffs.

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This is a historic development.

Previous presidents foolishly believed that tariffs could only be placed on physical goods. Trump understands that anything can be taxed if you are angry enough while explaining it.

Steel. Cheese. Lumber. Smoke. Clouds. Possibly moonlight.

The Department of Homeland Security is reportedly preparing to deploy agents along the northern border with industrial fans. Their mission will be to identify suspicious air currents and redirect them back toward Ontario.

Any cloud entering the United States without proper documentation will be detained.

Fog will be required to remove all face coverings.

The administration has also proposed an Atmospheric Citizenship Test. Foreign air masses will be asked to name three Founding Fathers, recite the Pledge of Allegiance, and explain why Canadian healthcare is communism.

Those unable to answer will be deported by leaf blower.

White House officials stressed that legal air has nothing to fear.

“We welcome oxygen that enters the country through the proper channels,” one imaginary official explained. “But this smoke cut the line. It entered through Wisconsin without checking in with Customs, took American visibility, and refused to speak English.”

The administration is reportedly considering a 50 percent tariff on Canadian smoke, although economists have warned that the smoke itself is unlikely to pay it.

The cost will therefore be passed along to American consumers who purchase Canadian furniture, clothing, wine, cheese, and hockey equipment.

This is how America wins.

Canada sends us smoke, so we make a refrigerator in Ohio more expensive.

Experts once believed that wildfire smoke was connected to rising temperatures, drought, and increasingly severe fire seasons. But that explanation contains the phrase “climate change,” which has been removed from federal vocabulary and replaced with “weather doing woke stuff.”

The new official position is that forests burn because Canada lacks strong leadership.

American forests, by contrast, burn patriotically.

They do not spread foreign smoke. They release freedom vapor.

Evangelical leaders have praised the president’s atmospheric border policy, noting that God divided the nations and therefore probably intended weather to respect the same boundaries.

The Book of Genesis does not specifically mention tariffs. However, this has never stopped anyone from finding Republican economic policy in Scripture.

Some pastors are already calling for prayer against illegal clouds.

“Lord, build a hedge of protection around our airspace,” they will pray from churches cooled by electricity generated from fuels that helped create the conditions they are praying against.

Meanwhile, Canada continues fighting hundreds of wildfires, evacuating communities, and deploying thousands of firefighters.

This may sound like the actual emergency.

It is not.

The real emergency is that Americans briefly had to smell another country.

Trump has promised to defend us.

Today, Canadian smoke.

Tomorrow, Mexican humidity.

By next spring, the administration may impose tariffs on pollen, migratory birds, and any rainstorm unable to provide proof of citizenship.

Unfortunately, creation remains poorly governed.

Rivers cross borders. Birds ignore checkpoints. Seeds travel without passports. The wind goes wherever it pleases, carrying smoke, rain, dust, prayers, and the occasional red hat that was not secured properly.

The wind has never applied for a visa.

It has never pledged allegiance to a flag.

And despite our best efforts, it still refuses to recognize Donald Trump as president of the atmosphere.

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This reflection is inspired by Through Holy Week with Mary Magdalene, guided by the teachings of Cynthia Bourgeault. In this series, Holy Week is not treated as a courtroom drama about guilt and acquittal, but as an initiation into conscious love. And one of the strangest things conscious love reveals is that most of our spiritual effort begins from the wrong place. We keep acting as if God is somewhere else and the spiritual life is our heroic attempt to get there. But what if that whole picture is upside down?

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The Exhaustion of Trying To Get There

Most spiritual effort is exhausting because it begins with the assumption that we are late.

Late to holiness. Late to healing. Late to union. Late to whatever imaginary level of spiritual adulthood everyone else seems to have reached while we were still in the kitchen losing an argument with our own nervous system. So we get busy. We read another book. Try another practice. Fix another flaw. Track another mood. Add another sacred thing to the pile and hope that eventually the pile becomes a ladder.

This is how the spiritual life turns into a religious steeplechase. There is always one more obstacle to clear. Dissolve the false self. Heal the wound. Improve the relationship. Pray better. Meditate deeper. Stop reacting. Become present. Become less attached. Become more surrendered. Become the kind of person who says “just be” without secretly wanting to slap someone.

It is not that these things are bad. Many of them are necessary. But when they are driven by the belief that God is far away and we have to earn our way back, even practice becomes another form of anxiety. The soul is no longer resting in God. It is trying to impress God’s admissions committee.

No wonder we are tired.

The Upside-Down Picture

Bourgeault names the distortion with brutal simplicity. We imagine ourselves out on the periphery, trying to swim back to God. We assume we are outside trying to get inside, below trying to get above, separated trying to become reunited.

That is how it feels, of course. Nobody needs to be scolded for feeling separate. The human condition is very persuasive. Bodies feel separate. Personalities feel separate. Grief feels separate. Shame absolutely loves separation and has apparently accepted a lifetime appointment as chair of the committee.

But the feeling is not the deepest truth.

The deeper truth is that we start from the center and flow outward into form. We do not enter this world as exiles from God, scrambling to reverse the damage. We enter as expressions of divine yearning taking shape in flesh, time, limitation, relationship, weather, laundry, heartbreak, and whatever strange assignment it is to have a human body that needs both prayer and fiber.

That changes everything.

The spiritual life is not a frantic swim back to shore. It is learning to recognize the current we are already in.

The Illusion of Separation

The illusion of separation is not stupid. It is convincing because our lives constantly seem to confirm it. We bump into one another as separate bodies. We misunderstand each other with Olympic consistency. We carry wounds that make the world feel unsafe. We look at God, if we look at all, as though God were a distant authority figure waiting for us to submit the correct paperwork.

So we build spiritual systems around the problem we think we have. We try to close the gap. We try to become worthy. We try to improve ourselves into divine proximity. The ego loves this, because it gets to remain in charge of the project. It can set goals, measure progress, compare results, and occasionally announce that it is becoming very humble, which is always a dangerous moment.

But if separation is not ultimate, then the project changes. We are not trying to manufacture union. We are learning to stop obscuring it. We are not trying to drag God into our lives from somewhere else. We are learning to notice the presence already bearing us, already breathing us, already holding the whole ridiculous and luminous human operation together.

That does not make practice unnecessary.

It makes practice sane.

Why Self-Improvement Spirituality Fails

Self-improvement spirituality fails because it turns the false self into the project manager of its own disappearance.

This is a terrible idea, but it keeps the publishing industry alive.

The false self loves a spiritual program because it can turn even surrender into achievement. It can become proud of simplicity, competitive about humility, and weirdly attached to non-attachment. It can take the most beautiful teaching in the world and turn it into homework assigned by an inner schoolteacher who really needs a sabbatical.

Bourgeault’s point is not that psychological work is useless. It can help us see where we are getting blindsided. It can expose defenses, patterns, wounds, and all the little basement creatures that keep chewing through the wires. That work matters. But it is not where the deepest action is happening.

The deepest action is much simpler and much harder to trust.

Relax.

Not collapse. Not quit. Not become passive, vague, or spiritually decorative. Relax the clenched assumption that you are outside of God trying to earn your way in. Relax the project of turning yourself into someone God can finally tolerate. Relax into the fact that you and the whole world are already held in God, already flowing from source, already being carried by a love deeper than your ability to manage it.

Presence Instead of Striving

This is where presence becomes the real practice.

There is a line Bourgeault draws from the Sufi tradition: if you can make all cares into one care, the care for simply being present, you will be cared for by that presence, which is creative love. That is not a bumper sticker. That is a complete dismantling of the ego’s spiritual business plan.

Because the ego thinks it has many responsibilities. It has to fix the false self, secure enlightenment, improve the journey, manage the future, unite with God, polish the soul, supervise the emotions, and make sure everyone sees how thoughtfully it is doing all of this. Presence asks for something quieter. Be here. Yield. Be willing. Be curious. Stop spending this moment trying to improve some future moment in which you imagine you will finally be acceptable.

This is why contemplative practice matters. The Jesus Prayer, centering prayer, the simple returning to God with the breath, none of these are ladders to a distant deity. They are ways of softening the grip. The prayer is not a rope thrown up to heaven so we can climb out of being human. It is a way of letting the heart remember the source from which it is already flowing.

Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy.

Not because God is absent until the words summon him.

Because the words bring us back to the mercy already carrying us.

Flowing From What Already Is

The upside-down truth is that God is not the destination of the spiritual life.

God is the source.

That sounds obvious until we notice how rarely we live as if it were true. We keep trying to get somewhere we are already rooted. We keep striving for a union that is deeper than our striving. We keep treating practice as a way to become connected, when practice is really a way to notice that the connection has never been broken.

This does not mean everything is fine. It does not mean the false self is imaginary, wounds do not matter, or human beings should stop doing the hard work of growing up. Please. Virgin Monk Boy is not recommending mystical laziness with a scented candle. The work remains. But the ground of the work changes. We are not working our way toward God from exile. We are letting God’s life become more visible through the form we already are.

That is the relaxation Bourgeault is pointing toward. Not a relaxation of indifference, but a relaxation of panic. The soul stops trying to storm heaven and begins to inhabit the center from which it has always been sent.

You are not trying to reach God.

You are flowing from God.

Spiritual practice begins when you finally stop swimming long enough to feel the current.

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Dearly beloved, reluctantly gathered, and spiritually exhausted survivors of the Lindsey Graham era,

We are here today to remember Senator Lindsey Graham, not as the incense-clouded obituary writers would like him remembered, but as history will eventually remember him once the choir stops humming and the receipts are passed around.

Lindsey Graham is gone.

And with him passes one of the great moral weather vanes of American politics. A man who did not so much hold convictions as briefly rent them until a stronger wind came through town. A man who could identify danger with perfect clarity, name it into a microphone, warn the nation that Donald Trump was a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot, and then, after a little proximity to power, return to the scene wearing knee pads and a Senate pin.

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Let us not say he was confused.

That would be too kind.

Lindsey Graham knew.

He knew what Trump was. He said it. He knew what Trump would do. He warned us. He saw the poison in the bottle, read the label aloud, pointed out the skull and crossbones, then walked behind the counter and started selling shots.

That was his first great crime: not ignorance, but betrayal of his own discernment.

He was not fooled by the carnival barker. He became the carnival barker’s courtroom usher, war-room chaplain, and emotional support senator. He taught us that some men do not lose their souls in one dramatic lightning strike. They lose them by subscription plan. A little silence here. A little compromise there. A little “I’m trying to be relevant” whispered over the corpse of whatever integrity once wandered through the room looking for a chair.

And relevance, in the end, was his god.

Not country.

Not Constitution.

Not the unborn.

Not marriage.

Not law and order.

Not democracy.

Relevance.

The small, hungry god of people who cannot stand being outside the room where the damage is done.

So let us list the crimes.

He helped normalize Donald Trump after correctly diagnosing him as unfit. He saw the danger, then chose usefulness over courage.

He defended Trump through impeachment with the subtle constitutional philosophy of a man holding a lighter over the rule book. He said he was not trying to pretend to be a fair juror, which is a hell of a thing to say before swearing an oath to do impartial justice. Somewhere, the Founders paused in the afterlife and asked if there was still time to add a footnote.

He helped run Trump’s judicial machine, including the defense of Brett Kavanaugh, and then watched the court built by that movement strip women of constitutional protection over their own bodies.

He introduced a national abortion ban after Republicans spent years chanting “states’ rights” like a sacred mantra. Apparently the issue belonged to the states right up until federal power could be used to control women more efficiently. Behold the miracle of conservative federalism: it disappears the moment a uterus enters the room.

He put his name on Graham-Cassidy, a health care repeal scheme that would have gutted protections, restructured Medicaid, and endangered coverage for millions. Because nothing says public service like looking at sick people, poor people, disabled people, pregnant people, elderly people, and children and asking, “But what if we made this harder?”

He fought against LGBTQ equality under the perfume of “traditional marriage,” as though love needed Lindsey Graham’s permission slip before becoming real. He helped write the rules of exclusion, then expected polite applause from the people he helped push outside the door.

He praised civil rights heroes when they were safely dead, then failed to wield power with the same urgency for voting rights when it mattered. This is one of Washington’s oldest sacraments: quote the prophet, bury the prophecy.

He wrapped militarism in moral language until bombing other countries sounded, in his mouth, like a Rotary Club fundraiser with missiles. Iraq, Iran, Gaza, Cuba, wherever the map had a border, Lindsey seemed ready to hold a hearing on why it might need a crater.

He treated Palestinian life as negotiable collateral in someone else’s holy war. He spoke of Gaza with the tenderness of a man ordering demolition from a recliner. “Level the place” is not statesmanship. It is empire having a tantrum in a suit.

He sneered at due process when fear made cruelty politically useful. Lawyers, rights, hearings, all those delicate little obstacles between the state and the human being, he treated them like optional decorations when the accused was someone the public had been trained to fear.

He helped teach a generation of Republicans that hypocrisy is not a scandal if performed loudly enough. That you can condemn Trump, serve Trump, abandon Trump, crawl back to Trump, and still be invited on Sunday shows as if your spine were not somewhere in the lost-and-found bin at Mar-a-Lago.

And this, beloved, was the true Lindsey Graham legacy: he made cowardice conversational.

He gave it jokes.

He gave it a drawl.

He gave it committee assignments.

He made the surrender of moral judgment look like political savvy. He called it relevance, but the older monks had another word for it: bondage.

Because power does not always conquer people by threatening them. Sometimes it conquers them by inviting them to golf.

And oh, how he golfed.

Some will say we should speak gently because he is dead.

Fine.

Let us speak gently, like a surgeon speaking over a body that still requires examination.

Death does not erase the harm a person caused. It does not launder a voting record. It does not bleach the quotes. It does not turn cruelty into complexity simply because the casket has flowers on it.

A family may grieve him. Let them.

A friend may miss him. Let them.

A colleague may remember his humor, his charm, his loyalty when loyalty suited him. Let them.

But the harmed are not required to kneel at the altar of the powerful just because the powerful finally ran out of pulse. Grief for the family and truth for the public can sit in the same room. If that makes people uncomfortable, good. Comfort has done enough damage already.

We do not celebrate death here.

We examine legacy.

And Lindsey Graham’s legacy is a warning carved into the Senate floor:

Do not live as though power is your soul.

Do not sell your discernment for access.

Do not call a man dangerous, then become his shield.

Do not spend your life harming the vulnerable and expect the wounded to provide your funeral music.

Do not mistake being invited into the room for having a purpose once you get there.

Because in the end, the record remains.

The speeches remain.

The votes remain.

The hypocrisies remain.

The children in bombed places remain.

The women forced into danger by abortion bans remain.

The sick people threatened by health care repeal remain.

The queer couples told their love was a threat remain.

The immigrants, detainees, defendants, voters, dissidents, and ordinary human beings crushed beneath the machinery of men like Lindsey Graham, they remain.

And they are allowed to speak.

So rest in peace, Senator Graham, if peace is available where truth is finally unavoidable.

May the angels be more merciful than your policies.

May the heavenly court provide the due process you were so willing to deny others.

May your next life include enough humility to recognize a spine before you misplace it again.

And may the rest of us learn the lesson your life so generously, so tragically, so grotesquely provided:

A man can spend decades near power and still die having never become great.

He can be famous.

He can be feared.

He can be quoted.

He can be mourned by presidents, praised by war hawks, and polished by obituary writers with industrial-strength disinfectant.

But if he used his life to make the world crueler, smaller, meaner, and more afraid, then history owes him no halo.

Only a mirror.

Amen, and someone please check the collection plate for defense contractors.

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This reflection continues my series inspired by Cynthia Bourgeault’s course Discovering the Mind of Christ, Part 2, especially her commentaries on Kabir Helminski’s Living Presence. The first article looked at the Essential Self beneath personality. The second looked at the ego and its hilarious attempt to enlighten itself while still keeping the corner office. The third explored meditation through Thomas Keating’s image of boats floating down the river of consciousness. The fourth reflected on why every genuine moment of seeing is already the beginning of transformation. This one begins with a question from Cynthia’s class that exposed an assumption I had never really examined.

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A student asked what would happen if attachment actually began to fall away. If we became less identified with our emotions, our opinions, our personal agendas, and even our need to be right, what would keep us from becoming indifferent? If attachment is what makes us care, then detachment sounds like a polite spiritual word for not giving a damn. I remember hearing the question and thinking it was perfectly reasonable. In fact, I thought the answer was obvious.

The Assumption Hiding Inside the Question

Most of us were taught, directly or indirectly, that attachment is what motivates love. Parents protect their children because they are attached to them. Friends show up because they are attached to one another. People fight injustice because they are attached to justice. Christians serve because they are attached to loving their neighbor. Remove the attachment and, at least in our imagination, the whole moral structure collapses.

Cynthia did not accept that premise. She pointed out that the question assumes attachment is the only possible source of action. We may try to refine the attachment by making it noble, religious, or selfless, but we rarely question whether attachment itself is necessary. We move from selfish attachments to respectable ones and call that spiritual growth. The ego gives up wanting a yacht and becomes deeply attached to saving the world, which is admittedly better for the planet but still very convenient for the ego.

Helminski’s teaching presses harder. What if attachment is not the source of compassion? What if attachment is often the static mixed into it? That does not mean the caring is false. It means our motives are rarely as pure and simple as we imagine. We may genuinely want to help another person while also wanting to feel useful, wise, necessary, or morally superior.

The Ego Looks Excellent in an Apron

Cynthia makes the deliberately sharp observation that much of what Christians call compassion is actually sentimentality and busy work. She is not mocking hospitals, meal trains, food pantries, or the countless ordinary ways people care for one another. She is asking what happens inside us while we are helping. That is a much more uncomfortable question because the ego does not mind service at all. Service gives it excellent wardrobe options.

Someone tells us about a painful situation, and before they have finished speaking, we are already building a solution. We know the book they should read, the boundary they should set, the prayer they should pray, and the conversation they should have by Thursday. We call this compassion because we are trying to help. But sometimes our urgency has less to do with their pain than with our inability to sit quietly in the presence of it.

I have done this often enough to recognize the pattern. Listening lasts about thirty seconds before the internal consulting firm opens for business. Suggestions begin lining up. Strategies are drafted. The other person may still be speaking, but I have already left the room and started redesigning their life. The strange part is that this can feel almost identical to love.

Cynthia’s point is not that advice is wrong or that action is unnecessary. The question is whether the action arises from clear attention or from our need to relieve our own discomfort. We may rush in because watching another person struggle makes us anxious. We may insist on helping because their refusal threatens our identity as the one who knows what to do. The hidden agenda only becomes visible when the person ignores our advice and our compassion suddenly develops an attitude.

Compassion Absolute

To answer the student’s question, Cynthia quotes Gerald May, who quotes a Buddhist teacher saying that as attachment ceases to be our motivation, our actions become reflections of “compassion absolute.” I kept returning to that phrase because it does not sound like the compassion most of us know. We usually think of compassion as a strong emotional investment. Compassion absolute suggests something less tangled.

It does not mean caring less. It means the caring is no longer required to support an identity. The action is not secretly asking to be recognized, appreciated, obeyed, or confirmed as good. The ego is not standing behind the act with a clipboard, tracking results and waiting for applause. There is simply a need, a clear perception of that need, and a response.

That response may still be demanding. It may require sacrifice, courage, money, time, or a willingness to enter conflict. Non-attachment does not turn us into decorative houseplants. It simply removes some of the inner bargaining that makes action so exhausting. We are less occupied with what the action says about us and more available to what the situation actually requires.

This also means compassion may not always look compassionate. Sometimes the right response is to help immediately. Sometimes it is to wait. Sometimes it is to speak plainly. Sometimes it is to stop rescuing someone from the consequences they need to face. Attachment wants a guaranteed role. Compassion absolute is willing to lose the role if that is what love requires.

When Being Does More Than Doing

The discussion then moves into the part that challenged me most. Cynthia says that what is truly accomplished in the world often happens at the level of being before it appears at the level of doing. That sounds suspicious in a culture that measures everything by output. Doing can be listed, counted, photographed, and placed in the annual report. Being is much harder to market.

She recalls Frère Roger simply looking at her and asking her name. He did not diagnose her, repair her past, or offer a seven-step path to wholeness. He was fully present, and that presence carried more healing than a pile of correct advice. She also refers to Solomon Dede moving through an airport and affecting people without any obvious act of instruction. Something in the quality of his being changed the space around him.

These stories can sound exaggerated until we remember people we have actually known. Some people enter a difficult room and add more tension without saying a word. Others have a way of making the room feel larger. They do not hurry us, manage us, or make our pain about their expertise. We feel seen rather than handled.

That is not passivity. Presence is not sitting there with a peaceful expression while avoiding responsibility. It is the capacity to remain open enough that another person’s suffering does not immediately become raw material for our own fear, guilt, or self-importance. From that place, action can become more accurate because it is not being rushed through the machinery of the false self.

Try It Before You Believe It

Cynthia does not ask the class to accept this because it sounds profound. She asks them to test it. The next time someone comes to you with a problem, notice what rises before you respond. Notice the pressure to fix, advise, reassure, rescue, or prove useful. None of that needs to be condemned. It only needs to be seen.

Then remain present a little longer than usual. Listen past the point where your mind normally begins writing its answer. Feel the discomfort of not immediately becoming useful. The eventual response may be exactly what you would have said before, but the source may be different. It may come from attention rather than anxiety.

That seems to be the real challenge in compassion without attachment. It is not learning how to care from a safe distance. It is learning how to care without constantly inserting ourselves into the center of the story. Being becomes healing because another person is finally allowed to exist in our presence without being turned into a problem we need to solve.

The ego will still prefer something more impressive. It likes visible results, clear roles, and the warm satisfaction of being indispensable. Compassion absolute is quieter. It responds, serves, waits, speaks, or steps back without needing the act to announce who we are.

Perhaps that is the revolution Cynthia is pointing toward. Attachment says, “I care because this is mine.” Compassion absolute says, “I care because I see.”

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Living Presence: A Sufi Way to Mindfulness & the Essential Self by Kabir Helminski

This reflection is inspired by Through Holy Week with Mary Magdalene, guided by the teachings of Cynthia Bourgeault. In this series, Holy Week is not treated as a courtroom drama about guilt and acquittal, but as an initiation into conscious love. When Mary Magdalene is restored to her rightful place at the foot of the cross, the meaning of crucifixion shifts. What had long been framed as cosmic bookkeeping begins to look like something far more dangerous and beautiful: love carrying what love did not cause.

When Love Steps In

Most of us have seen substituted love before, even if we never called it that.

A parent takes the night shift beside a hospital bed so someone else can sleep. A friend sits with the person everyone else is tired of hearing from. A spouse absorbs the weight of a diagnosis, not by fixing it, because nobody can fix it, but by refusing to let the beloved carry it alone. Someone takes the blame that will cost them less than it would cost the fragile person beside them. Someone quietly pays the bill, makes the call, takes the hit, holds the room, shields the child, stays awake.

None of this is glamorous while it is happening. It usually looks like exhaustion, bad coffee, uncomfortable chairs, and the very unromantic smell of institutional carpet. But something holy is happening there. One person is stepping into the weight another person cannot bear alone.

That is the beginning of substituted love.

Not sentiment. Not pity. Not “thoughts and prayers” tossed across the room like stale dinner rolls. Substituted love means I will carry this with you, and if necessary, I will carry some of it for you.

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The Burden Is Real

This is where the idea gets serious.

Substituted love does not pretend the burden disappears. That would be religious magic, and religious magic is usually just denial wearing nicer shoes. Bourgeault is very clear that there is still something to be carried. Pain is real. Heaviness is real. The conditions of this world are real. Bodies break. People leave. Time takes things. Love gets asked to live in a realm where everything precious is vulnerable to loss.

That is the part a lot of theology has handled badly. It keeps trying to explain the burden by finding someone to blame. Adam did it. Humanity sinned. God was offended. A payment was required. Somebody broke the cosmic furniture, and now the divine landlord is angry about the deposit.

But that whole framework starts to feel too small when you have actually lived a little.

The burden is deeper than bad behavior. Sin matters, but underneath sin there is heartbreak, fear, sorrow, shame, exhaustion, and the terrible density of being human in a world that keeps asking more of the heart than the heart knows how to hold. We are not just guilty creatures trying to get our record cleared. We are breakable creatures trying not to collapse.

Substituted love begins there.

Voluntary Or It Is Not Love

The key word is voluntary.

The moment substituted love is demanded, coerced, guilted, manipulated, or assigned by someone with a Bible and a control issue, it stops being love and becomes extraction. Christianity has produced plenty of that too. People told to suffer silently. Women told to carry everybody’s emotional furniture. Children told to honor abuse. The vulnerable told that their endurance is holy while everyone else benefits from their silence.

That is not substituted love.

That is religiously decorated harm.

Real substituted love cannot be forced because love cannot be forced. It rises freely from the heart’s recognition that the other is not finally separate from oneself. It says yes because love has become large enough to share the weight. Not because someone demanded sacrifice as proof of loyalty. Not because suffering is good in itself. Not because God enjoys watching people get crushed in slow motion.

Love steps in because the burden is there, and because the beloved matters.

That distinction changes everything.

Can We Actually Carry Each Other?

The modern mind does not like this idea very much because modern individualism has trained us to imagine the self as a sealed container. Your pain is your pain. My pain is my pain. Your healing is your healing. My boundary is my boundary. Some of that language is necessary, especially for people who were raised to confuse love with self-erasure. Boundaries can be mercy. Boundaries can be sanity. Boundaries can be the first honest thing a person has done in years.

But taken too far, the sealed-self model becomes another prison.

We know, in actual life, that we affect one another far more deeply than our theories admit. Someone’s calm can steady a room. Someone’s panic can infect it. A beloved’s courage can give us courage we did not have alone. A friend’s faithfulness can hold us together when our own faith has packed a suitcase and left no forwarding address. We are not isolated marbles clacking around in a jar. We interpenetrate.

That is why another person’s love can help us bear what we could not bear alone.

Not because they magically remove our suffering, but because love changes the field in which suffering is held.

The Interpenetration Of Souls

Bourgeault’s language around the abler soul helps here. In deep conscious love, two souls do not simply stand across from each other exchanging emotional goods and services. They create a third reality, a shared field, something neither person owns and both can surrender into.

This is not codependency. Codependency shrinks people. The abler soul enlarges them. Codependency says, “I need you to be okay so I can be okay.” Conscious love says, “I will hold the image of your deepest becoming even when you cannot see it.” That is a completely different universe.

Substituted love grows out of that kind of interpenetration. When souls are joined deeply enough in love, one person’s strength can become available to another. One person’s steadiness can shelter another. One person’s willingness can make room for another person to survive the hour they could not survive alone.

This is why Mary Magdalene matters at the cross. She is not merely watching an execution. She is participating in a field of conscious love that does not collapse when the body collapses. She remains present in the place where love is being stretched to its furthest edge.

The Shape Of Christ’s Love

Seen this way, Christ’s work is not divine bookkeeping. It is substituted love in its most complete form.

Jesus enters the burden from the inside. He does not wave at human heartbreak from a safe heavenly balcony. He takes on flesh, density, limitation, grief, betrayal, pain, and death. He steps into the place where the burden is heaviest and lines it with love from within.

That does not mean suffering suddenly becomes pleasant or that death is now adorable. Please. The cross is not a decorative wall hanging for people with excellent lighting. It is what happens when love refuses to abandon the human condition, even at the point where the human condition becomes unbearable.

This is why the idea is radical. Not because God needed someone to bleed before mercy could function. That is not mercy. That is a payment processor with incense. The radical idea is that love can enter the burden so completely that the burden itself becomes permeated with love.

Not erased.

Carried.

The Highest Form Of Love

Substituted love is the highest form of love because it costs the self without annihilating the self. It does not collapse into martyrdom theater. It does not perform suffering for applause. It does not rush around rescuing people in order to feel needed. It simply becomes willing to bear reality with another person.

That kind of love is rare because it requires freedom. You cannot offer yourself if you do not belong to yourself. You cannot carry another’s burden if you are secretly trying to purchase affection, avoid abandonment, or prove your holiness to the invisible committee in your head.

But when love is free, it can do astonishing things.

It can stand near the cross. It can sit across from the tomb. It can enter the ache without turning bitter. It can hold the beloved’s becoming when the beloved has forgotten it. It can say, “This is too much for you alone, so it will not be yours alone.”

That is not weakness.

That is the inner logic of Christ.

Love does not merely feel compassion from a distance. Love crosses the distance. Love enters the weight. Love carries what it did not cause because the beloved is worth the carrying.

And maybe that is the most radical idea in Christianity: not that God demands suffering, but that God enters it, bears it, and teaches the human heart how to do the same without losing its tenderness.

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This reflection continues my series inspired by Cynthia Bourgeault’s course Discovering the Mind of Christ, Part 2, especially her commentaries on Kabir Helminski’s Living Presence. The first article looked at the Essential Self beneath personality. The second looked at the ego and its hilarious attempt to enlighten itself while still keeping the corner office. The third explored meditation through Thomas Keating’s image of boats floating down the river of consciousness. This reflection stays with that same river, but turns our attention to what happens after we’ve already climbed aboard one of those boats.

Most of us assume that is where we have failed.

Cynthia Bourgeault says it may be the moment when the deepest work has actually begun.

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The Ego’s Definition of Progress

One of the students in Cynthia’s class describes an experience every contemplative eventually has. She realizes that she has been completely identified with her ego. She reacted unconsciously, became caught up in the situation, and only afterward recognized what had happened. Her conclusion is immediate and familiar.

“I saw it... but it was too late.”

That sentence contains almost everything the ego believes about the spiritual life.

The ego assumes progress means never becoming identified in the first place. It imagines that if we meditate long enough, pray hard enough, or become sufficiently enlightened, we will eventually eliminate all pride, fear, defensiveness, jealousy, and anger. Spiritual maturity becomes a kind of perfect emotional performance.

Helminski offers a very different picture. The work is not to become a person who never slips into identification. The work is to become someone who recognizes identification more quickly, more honestly, and with less self-deception.

That sounds like a small distinction.

It changes the entire journey.

“The Seeing Was the Doing”

Cynthia’s response to the student is one of the most striking moments in the course.

She simply says,

“The seeing was the doing.”

At first I resisted that statement. Surely seeing is only the beginning. Surely the real work is changing the behavior. If I become angry and only realize it afterward, haven’t I already failed?

But the longer I have sat with her words, the more profound they become.

A few moments earlier, the student was completely identified. The ego was driving the conversation, interpreting reality, and justifying every reaction. There was no space between awareness and experience.

Then something changed.

She saw.

That moment of seeing is not merely another thought floating through consciousness. It is consciousness waking up to itself. It is the moment awareness steps outside the machinery of identification and recognizes what has been happening.

The argument may already have occurred. The words cannot be taken back. But something infinitely more important has happened than simply winning the argument.

Awareness has appeared.

The False Self Cannot Expose Itself

One of Helminski’s central themes is that identification keeps us asleep. We become so fused with our thoughts, emotions, opinions, and roles that we no longer recognize them as passing experiences. We assume they are simply who we are.

Meditation begins loosening that fusion, not because thoughts disappear, but because awareness gradually stops disappearing into them.

This is why Cynthia places such importance on the moment of recognition.

If you suddenly notice that pride has taken over, who is doing the noticing?

If you become aware that resentment has been running your inner life for the past hour, what is it that has become aware?

The false self cannot expose itself in this way because, while it is operating, it is completely convinced that it is reality. It does not step outside itself to make objective observations. Something deeper has entered the picture.

The seeing itself is evidence that another center of consciousness has become active.

Why Shame Misses the Point

Unfortunately, the ego is remarkably adaptable.

The moment awareness appears, it often recruits that awareness into another story.

“I can’t believe I did that.”

“I’ve been meditating for years.”

“I should be beyond this by now.”

“I’ve failed again.”

Notice what has happened.

The original identification has dissolved, only to be replaced by identification with failure. Instead of becoming the angry person, we become the disappointed spiritual person. The costume changes, but the actor remains the same.

This is why shame has so little transforming power. Shame keeps our attention fixed on the ego. It asks us to evaluate our performance, measure our progress, and compare ourselves to some imaginary ideal. Even our disappointment becomes another form of self-occupation.

Awareness moves in the opposite direction. It is interested in seeing clearly, not in protecting an image of who we think we should be.

Thank You

This is why Cynthia recommends a response that initially sounds almost absurd.

Whenever you see another layer of identification...

Say, “Thank you.”

Not because the ego deserves congratulations.

Not because the behavior was healthy.

Not because we enjoy discovering our blind spots.

We say thank you because something that was previously hidden has just been revealed.

Imagine cleaning out an old attic. You pull away one dusty box and discover another corner of the room that has not seen daylight in decades. Your first response is not despair that the room was dirty. Your first response is gratitude that now you can finally see what was always there.

The contemplative life works in much the same way.

Every act of seeing enlarges the territory of freedom.

Every hidden attachment that comes into awareness loses some of its ability to control us unconsciously.

Every illusion exposed is one less illusion governing our lives from the shadows.

Measuring the Right Thing

Perhaps we have been measuring spiritual growth by the wrong standard.

We ask whether we became angry.

Whether we judged someone.

Whether we lost our patience.

Whether we managed to stay peaceful all day.

Those questions have their place, but Helminski’s teaching suggests another measure.

How quickly did awareness return?

Did you spend three days inside resentment before recognizing it?

Three hours?

Thirty minutes?

Thirty seconds?

Did you notice the tightening in your body before the words left your mouth?

Did you recognize the familiar pattern while it was still unfolding?

This is not a minor improvement in behavior. It is the gradual weakening of identification itself. Awareness becomes quicker than habit. Presence begins interrupting reactions that once operated entirely on their own.

That is real transformation.

Every Moment of Seeing Is Grace

The ego imagines the spiritual path as a long climb toward perfection.

The contemplative tradition describes something much humbler.

Again and again we fall asleep.

Again and again awareness returns.

Again and again another hidden attachment comes into the light.

If we meet those moments with shame, the ego simply finds another story to inhabit.

If we meet them with gratitude, awareness deepens.

Perhaps that is why Cynthia insists that the right response to every genuine moment of seeing is so wonderfully simple.

Thank you.

Not because the journey is finished.

But because, for one more moment, we were awake enough to see.

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Living Presence: A Sufi Way to Mindfulness & the Essential Self by Kabir Helminski

There are moments when modern capitalism looks at human suffering and says, “Could this be an app?” And because apparently no one in the boardroom owns a functioning conscience, the answer keeps coming back yes.

The latest holy innovation from the temple of number-go-up is wildfire prediction betting. Not wildfire forecasting in the serious, public-safety sense. Not climate modeling. Not resource planning. Not the painstaking work of firefighters, meteorologists, emergency managers, and people with actual boots on actual burning ground. I mean prediction markets where users can wager on wildfire outcomes: how far a fire spreads, when it gets contained, whether it reaches a city, how much destruction it causes.

Yes, beloveds. We have entered the “bet on your neighbor’s ashes” phase of civilization. Very advanced. Very disruptive. Very “the serpent has a Series B funding round.”

For anyone new to this, prediction markets are basically betting platforms where people buy and sell contracts tied to future events. A market might ask, “Will X happen by Friday?” Users buy “yes” or “no” positions, and the price moves as people bet. A 50-cent “yes” contract roughly means the betting crowd thinks the event has a 50 percent chance of happening. These markets already exist around elections, sports, oil prices, disease outbreaks, international incidents, and weather events. The argument from supporters is that when people put money behind their predictions, markets can reveal useful information faster than pundits or institutions. Sometimes that argument has merit. Sometimes the crowd sees something early. Sometimes the crowd is just a bunch of caffeine goblins trying to turn human misery into lunch money. Discernment, as the monks say, is useful. Also, maybe try having a soul.

Kylie Mohr’s reporting for High Country News, republished by Wired, looked at this exact problem after the devastating January 2025 Eaton and Palisades fires in Southern California. Those fires destroyed more than 16,000 structures and killed 31 people. While families were evacuating, grieving, and watching entire neighborhoods disappear, users on Polymarket were betting on how the fires would grow, how long they would last, and how much they would destroy. Polymarket reportedly listed almost 20 wildfire-related questions, and people spent about $1.2 million betting on those queries.

This is where the argument stops being abstract. We are not talking about a clean little thought experiment in an economics seminar where everyone has a blazer, a graph, and no emotional relationship to reality. We are talking about people losing homes, family histories, pets, medication, photos, heirlooms, neighborhoods, and sometimes lives. Then, while the smoke is still in the air, strangers are refreshing odds like they are checking fantasy football.

Capitalism has always had a talent for arriving at the scene of suffering with a folding table and a payment processor. Disaster capitalism is not new. People have made money off war, famine, debt, housing collapse, medical desperation, climate crisis, and every other wound humans can inflict or endure. But this is a special little goblin because it does not merely profit after the disaster. It creates a financial interest in the disaster’s outcome while it is still unfolding.

That matters.

Betting on rain is one thing. Betting on whether a hurricane forms is one thing. Still weird, perhaps, but you cannot walk outside with a lighter and personally encourage a hurricane. Wildfire is different. A fire can be started or worsened by one person in minutes. That is why wildfire survivors and ethicists are worried about arson incentives. A U.S. Forest Service spokesperson told High Country News that systems tying financial gain to wildfire outcomes risk misuse, including arson, and are not compatible with the agency’s mission.

And let’s sit with that for a moment, because the whole tech-bro defense of these markets is usually wrapped in incense labeled “public good.” The claim is that the crowd can help generate better forecasts. Very noble. Very Prometheus bringing fire to humanity, except this time Prometheus also has a crypto wallet and a Discord server called BurnAlpha.

A new wildfire-focused platform called Wyldfyre reportedly framed itself as a tool for collective intelligence and wildfire forecasting. Its tagline, according to the reporting, was: “You can’t predict wildfire. But you can trade on it.” At the time of the reporting, users could only simulate trades, but the site said real-money betting was “coming soon.”

That tagline deserves to be preserved in a museum of cursed human sentences. “You can’t predict wildfire. But you can trade on it.” Translation: “We may not be able to save your town, but have we considered monetizing the odds of its destruction?” Truly, the Buddha left the palace for less.

And here is the funniest part, by which I mean funniest in the “laugh so you don’t scream into a damp towel” sense: the actual agencies responsible for wildfire forecasting are not asking Chad from Polymarket to reveal the hidden wisdom of the flame. The Forest Service said it does not use prediction-market information for wildfire forecasting and does not rely on any system that treats wildfire as speculation. CAL FIRE said it does not use prediction-market-derived data either. CAL FIRE’s intelligence program described its modeling as science-based, using weather observations, forecast data, fuel and vegetation conditions, topography, location data, and available resources. In other words: physics, not vibes with a betting slip.

This is the moral distinction that matters. Forecasting is not the problem. Forecasting wildfires is sacred work. It saves lives. It helps communities prepare. It helps firefighters deploy resources. It helps people know when to leave before the road turns into a death trap. The problem is not prediction. The problem is turning another person’s peril into an asset class.

There is a difference between studying suffering to reduce it and studying suffering to profit from it. One is compassion with tools. The other is the ego wearing a data-science hoodie.

Some defenders will say, “But markets reveal information.” Fine. Sometimes they do. But markets also reveal desire. They reveal what a society is willing to normalize. They reveal what we are willing to reduce to price. And when the market says a family’s home, a neighborhood’s survival, or a person’s evacuation nightmare is just another contract, the market is not revealing wisdom. It is revealing spiritual rot with a user interface.

A society has to decide that some things should not be markets. A home is not liquidity. A burned neighborhood is not alpha. A fleeing family is not a contract. A firefighter’s tactical decision is not insider edge. Grief is not a derivative.

This is where the old spiritual traditions are inconvenient to the modern casino. They keep insisting that the human person is not an instrument. The neighbor is not a price signal. The world is not merely raw material for appetite. The soul is shaped by what it consents to enjoy. And if someone can watch a fire consume a town and think, “I wonder if I can make money if this gets worse,” then the problem is not only legal or regulatory. The problem is formation. The heart has been trained badly.

The Gospel of Mary says the soul is harassed by powers like desire, ignorance, and wrath. Modern people hear that and imagine ancient superstition. But honestly, look around. Desire says, “You belong to me.” Ignorance says, “This is just data.” Wrath says, “Who cares? Someone always profits.” Then the soul, if it remembers itself, says: No. I am not required to become smaller just because the market found a clever way to monetize cruelty.

That is the real spiritual practice here. Not escaping the world. Seeing it clearly. Seeing the moment when “innovation” becomes desecration. Seeing when “forecasting” becomes gambling on harm. Seeing when “collective intelligence” becomes a mob of hungry ghosts tapping yes or no while someone else is praying the wind changes.

And yes, there should be regulation. Some lawmakers have started proposing limits on prediction-market contracts tied to things like terrorism, assassination, war, illegal activity, gaming, and individual death, though wildfire was not explicitly included in those proposed restrictions as of the High Country News reporting. But regulation alone will not save a culture that has forgotten shame. Law can draw a boundary. It cannot, by itself, resurrect reverence.

So maybe the first boundary is this: we refuse to call everything “innovation” just because someone found a way to charge fees on it. We refuse to confuse gambling with wisdom. We refuse to let the suffering of the vulnerable become entertainment for the financially bored.

If someone wants to help predict wildfires, great. Fund science. Support public agencies. Build tools firefighters can actually use. Donate to survivors. Help your town prepare. Clear brush. Check on elderly neighbors. Learn evacuation routes. Do literally any useful thing.

But betting on whether someone’s town burns down?

No, beloved. That is not prophecy. That is not intelligence. That is not the future.

That is just the old demon of greed discovering push notifications.

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A funny thing happened after I posted my video about Ken Paxton’s investigation into a Dallas-based Islamic Tribunal.

Well, “funny” in the way a raccoon hissing inside a church air vent is funny.

The video started getting views. Then the comment section filled up with people raging about Islam, Sharia, Muslims, “foreign law,” and every other recycled panic phrase that gets pulled from the same old fear factory..

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And honestly?

That was the point they accidentally proved.

Because the video was not complicated. The question was simple:

Three months later, where is the evidence?

Back in April, Ken Paxton made a very public show out of investigating a Dallas-based Islamic Tribunal. The framing was obvious. Texas was supposedly under attack from some secret Sharia court. Muslims were apparently one community mediation room away from overthrowing the judiciary.

Scary music. Flashing lights. Captain Christian Nationalism rides again.

But three months later, the central question still stands:

Where is the proof that Texas law was replaced?

Where is the proof that a mosque was running the court system?

Where is the proof that Muslims were pretending to operate an official Texas court?

What we actually have, at least from what has been publicly shown, is a religious group saying its guidance is voluntary, spiritual, non-binding, and not a replacement for civil courts.

That matters.

Because religious communities handle internal guidance all the time.

Catholics have church tribunals. Jewish communities have Beth Din panels. Churches do pastoral counseling, marriage guidance, discipline processes, conflict resolution, and internal mediation. Some Christian communities even encourage believers to avoid suing one another and resolve disputes inside the church when possible.

Nobody screams “foreign law” when Christians do it.

Nobody demands a press conference when a pastor counsels a couple through a marriage dispute.

Nobody accuses Jewish communities of “replacing American law” because they have religious panels that help observant Jews navigate religious obligations.

But when Muslims do the same basic thing?

Suddenly people act like the Constitution has been dragged into a basement and waterboarded with halal soup.

That double standard is the story.

And the comment section under my video made it painfully obvious.

A lot of people were not asking for evidence. They were not asking, “Was there coercion?” They were not asking, “Did anyone pretend this was a state court?” They were not asking, “Was civil law actually violated?”

They were just mad that Muslims were doing Muslim things.

That is the part we need to stop pretending is sophisticated political concern.

This was never really about protecting Texas law. Texas law was not in danger because a group of Muslims offered voluntary religious guidance to other Muslims.

If Paxton has evidence of fraud, coercion, threats, or someone pretending to be an official court of the State of Texas, then he should produce it. That would be a real issue.

But if all he has is “Muslims gathered under their own religious tradition to help other Muslims navigate disputes,” then this is exactly the kind of government overreach the First Amendment is supposed to stop.

The state does not get to treat one religion as suspicious just because demonizing that religion plays well with the base.

And yes, I know what the comments will say.

“But Sharia!”

Right. And Catholics have canon law. Jews have halakha. Churches have doctrinal standards, internal discipline, marriage rules, counseling processes, and whole denominations with their own procedures for handling disputes.

The question is not whether a religious community has religious rules.

The question is whether those rules are being forced on people through state power or fraudulently presented as civil law.

That is the line.

Voluntary religious guidance is protected religious practice.

Coercion, fraud, or impersonating a court would be a legal problem.

Those are not the same thing.

But anti-Muslim politics depends on making them sound the same. It needs people to hear the word “Sharia” and immediately stop thinking. It needs panic to replace evidence. It needs the public to believe that Muslims are always one prayer rug away from conquest.

That is how authoritarian politics works.

First, you create a threat.

Then you inflate it.

Then you tell people only your strongman can protect them.

Then suddenly religious liberty only applies to the religions approved by the people in power.

That is not freedom. That is Christian nationalism with a badge and a press release.

And let’s be honest about the spiritual rot underneath this.

A lot of the people screaming about Islam are not protecting Christianity. They are protecting a political identity that uses Christianity as decoration.

Because if they actually cared about religious liberty, they would defend it when it is inconvenient.

If they actually cared about the Constitution, they would care when Muslims are targeted too.

If they actually cared about truth, they would ask for evidence before joining the mob.

But that is not what happened.

Instead, the comment section became a little public confessional booth where people admitted the real issue was not law, evidence, courts, or civil procedure.

The real issue was that Muslims were visible.

Muslims were organized.

Muslims were practicing their religion in public.

And for some people, that alone feels like an attack.

That is why this matters.

Not because every religious tribunal is automatically good. Not because religious communities should be above scrutiny. Not because anyone should be allowed to coerce vulnerable people behind religious language.

Scrutiny is fine.

Evidence is required.

But selective panic is something else.

When the government treats Muslim religious life as inherently suspicious while giving Christian and Jewish communities the benefit of the doubt, that is not neutral law enforcement.

That is political theater.

That is religious targeting.

That is state power being used to scare people about Muslims so MAGA voters can feel like they are fighting a holy war from their recliners.

And yes, that is authoritarian as hell.

So thank you to the angry commenters, I guess.

You helped prove the point.

You showed that this was never just about one Dallas Islamic Tribunal. It was about whether America’s promise of religious liberty means anything when the religion in question is unpopular with the loudest people in the room.

Because religious freedom is not tested when everyone likes the religion.

It is tested when people are afraid of it.

It is tested when politicians can score cheap points by demonizing it.

It is tested when the crowd is yelling, “Not them.”

That is when the Constitution either means something, or it becomes a bumper sticker for people who only want freedom for themselves.

Virgin Monk Boy is reader-supported. If this work helps you stay clear-headed while the algorithm rewards fear, panic, and cheap religious scapegoating, you can support it with a tip, a free subscription, or a paid subscription.

The comment section here is for paid supporters because I am not building another drive-by dumpster fire. Facebook can host the yelling. This space is for people who still believe truth deserves a room where it can breathe.

Become a Supporting Member

Paid members unlock the Virgin Monk Boy Book Of Hours, Whispers from the Silence, and the ability to start threads and share their own Substacks in the private chat.

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Tip with a coffee

A one time gift of holy caffeine that fuels both the monk and the Magdalene movement. ☕🔥