📿 Monday Meditation
“God Suffers in the Rubble: Sanctuary as Resistance”
Dear Substack Community: We have arrived at Monday, and because I sit down to write each Meditation before I publish them, I am learning, again, that I need spaciousness to think and dream of the work I long for. Today, in the aftermath of the US bombing nuclear sites in Iran, I’ve turned to Dorothee Sölle for inspiration. I hope you enjoy this meditation and are able to feel your imagination as your read my words. May we nurture another possible world, together.
Thank you for being here, for leaning in, for reading. Remember, the personal is political and every theological statement is a political statement. People are drawing the line; where are you standing?
Paz, —RCE+
📿 Monday Meditation: “God Suffers in the Rubble: Sanctuary as Resistance”
This morning, the world wakes trembling.
Recently, the United States bombed Iranian nuclear sites. The tremors are not only geological but spiritual. They reverberate through our bones, through our communities, through the dreams we carry of another possible world. I do not know what to pray today—only that I must. That we must.
Dorothee Sölle taught us that “every theological statement must be a political statement.” That the God who suffers does not dwell in the White House or behind Pentagon podiums. God is not the architect of shock and awe. God is the child whose sleep is shattered. God is the mother whose hands quake as she gathers the broken glass.
We live in the empire’s shadow. And still—we persist.
This is what I mean by sanctuary imagination:
A reorientation of the spirit, of the church, of the community—toward embodied solidarity, holy risk, and the refusal of abstraction.
To say: not in our name, not with our silence, not under the guise of peace.
We must become sanctuary.
Not a place to hide, but a people who witness.
A people who hold grief like liturgy.
A people who compost rage into resistance.
A people who know that hope is a muscle, a rhythm, a rebellion.
Sölle called it political mysticism—
a mysticism that doesn’t escape the world, but digs its roots deeper into it.
A mysticism that cries out, “God is in the ruins. God is with the disinherited.”
And if God is there, then so must we be.
In our prayers. In our protest. In our unyielding tenderness.
This is the work of Our Collective Becoming—
To gather, even when scattered.
To tend, even when terrified.
To remain faithful in the small things.
To love like our lives depend on it—because they do.
✨ A Small Ritual
Take a moment today to light a candle—not to dispel the darkness, but to honor it. As you do, whisper a name or a place in Iran, or in your own heart, that trembles with fear or grief. Sit with that name. Let the silence speak.
💭 A Reflection Question
What does it mean for you, today, to be sanctuary? Not metaphorically—but materially. What gesture, however small, could open space for another to breathe?