a mantra for 2025: "do hopeful things."
and my favorite books of 2024
Almost every day, I visit our online community on the Monasteries of the Heart website to read comments from our community members. Founded over a decade ago as a “monastery without walls,” a global community of seekers beyond borders, there are thousands of members from across the world who share their insights and journeys with one another. Even as strangers, they participate together in study, retreats, and monastic practices, responding to each other’s often vulnerable sharing with a profound resonance.
As I read comment after comment, I find myself learning as much from those who are translating the tradition into their lives as from the tradition itself. While I’m younger and have not yet lived in the tradition very long, these are individuals who have struggled through life and maintained a spiritual core over decades—often outside the supportive environment on the monastery, and in the difficult work of raising families, caretaking spouses, serving their communities, and carrying their values into their professional lives. These monastics-in-the-world have something special to teach us: they’ve had to work at embodying their faith often without a scaffolding of support, and through their stories we have much to learn about how we are all seekers for lives of meaning, purpose, and service.
This past December, over 450 people signed up to join us in our Advent Journey, and in one of our final posts, someone offered a quote from Daniel Berrigan. I think it might be my mantra for 2025:
“If you want to be hopeful, you have to do hopeful things.”
I love that this insight came from Monasteries of the Heart, because they are people choosing to do something hopeful everyday in their lives. Subverting the traditional understanding that monasticism can only be truly lived in a monastery, they live it everywhere and anywhere. They help me to hope, too, that our traditions can be bigger than we imagine—our politics can be more compassionate than they appear to be now—our communities can be more healing and integrating than repressive and exclusionary.
Hope has become a word I’m obsessed with in recent years, because it can feel so elusive… until you know how to see it. Last year I wrote about “living in hope” as my intention for the year, and as expected, it proved difficult. I tend toward the cynical (how can you not in this world?) with a dash of the idealism that sneaks in ever so often. I want a gritty, grounded hope, though—a practical hope, one that is embodied, engaged, and everyday. Berrigan’s quote speaks to that type of hope—one that we do and become through repetition and practice. One of favorite nuns, the pop-artist Corita Kent echoes this too: “Doing and making are acts of hope.”
So, maybe I’ll try to do one thing every day that is an act of hope for the world I hope to live in one day. That is how we make the world, after all, and perhaps it will be easier to live into a bigger hope after every day of practicing the little ones.
What is your mantra for 2025?
Favorite Books of 2024
I can’t turn toward a new year without shouting out my favorite books of 2024! I read just 54 books this year—here are my year-end reviews and recommendations...
Top 3 Overall
Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times by Elizabeth Oldfield
This was such a beautifully written, funny, nuanced book that reframes the “seven deadly sins” as our own contemporary struggles toward fullness today. Elizabeth Oldfield draws from her years of wrestling with her Christian faith and work in religion—including the Theos think-tank and podcast The Sacred. The language is fresh in conversations that can otherwise be filled with clichés or buzz words; she moves us from acedia to attention, and dissects the “G-bomb”—AKA, God. She takes topics that are easily fluffed up or watered down like community, and shows how they are deeply complicated and therefore more potentially transformative. I would recommend this book to many friends—spiritual and skeptical, Christian or just curious about the good life. Also, Elizabeth Oldfield has one of my favorite substacks—Fully Alive.
Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church by Eliza Griswold
I bought this book after I heard the Fresh Air interview with the author: How The Culture Wars Split the Church. The interview piqued my interest because so many of us experienced similar reckonings in our communities and institutions over the last five years: pandemic online culture disconnecting us, disentangling our organizations from white supremacy culture, working to become truly inclusive of LGBTQ folks in faith traditions that are historically repressive. Eliza Griswold, as an investigative journalist with a progressive Christian upbringing, zooms us into the intimate stories surrounding these cultural transformations. The book follows one radical church community, its pastors, and congregants, as they reckon with their faith and one another, until they ultimately close their doors. There is a lot of pain and beauty and honesty in all the messy and faithful love portrayed in this book.
The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center by Rhaina Cohen
This book touches at a core longing that so many of us feel—to be more connected with our friends and communities. In our time of a “loneliness epidemic,” and where so-called success in life tends to direct us away from walkable neighborhoods and into isolated suburbia, toward more fenced in backyards than visiting on front porches, this book gives concrete examples of another way that is possible. It showcases relationships that go beyond heteronormative and nuclear family set-ups, and reveals how many ways our core relationships can look. Back in March 2024, I wrote about the ideas that Rhaina Cohen brought up in her interviews surrounding this book (What if community was the default?), and for a while that was my most popular essay, exactly because Cohen points to something we all deeply desire, whether we know how to build it into our lives or not. This book helps us imagine how we do so.
More Reading Highlights
Spiritual Memoirs on Leaving, Healing, and Reclaiming
- Cloistered: My Years as a Nun by Catherine Coldstream
- Rift: A Memoir of Breaking Away from Christian Patriarchy by Cait West
- Hijab Butch Blues by Lamya H
Monasticism as a living, embodied tradition
- Living with Contradiction: An Introduction to Benedictine Spirituality by Esther de Waal
- Everyday Sacred, Everywhere Beauty: Readings from Old Monk’s Journal by Mary Lou Kownacki
- The Cloister Walk by Kathleen Norris
Political and Liberatory Theologies
- The Path to Hope: Fragments from a Theologian’s Journey by Leonardo Boff
- Creative Disobedience by Dorothee Sölle (read an excerpt from the intro on “Christofascist religion”—it was my favorite thing to read on Nov. 6)
- Blessed Simplicity: The Monk as Universal Archetype by Raimundo Panikkar
Fiction (mostly sci-fi)
- Babel by R.F. Kuang
- The Three-Body Problem (Book 1) by Liu Cixin
- Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
On Writing and Voice
- Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice from Dear Sugar by Cheryl Strayed
- Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative by Melissa Febos
- The Right to Write: An Invitation and Initiation into the Writing Life by Julia Cameron
Contemporary Takes on Classic Mystics
- Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi by Richard Rohr
- Holy Daring: An Outrageous Gift to Modern Spirituality from Saint Teresa, the Grand Wild Woman of Avila by Tessa Bilecki
- Practice of the Presence: A Revolutionary Translation by Carmen Acevedo Butcher
Revisited all-time favs
- Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God by Rainer Maria Rilke translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy
- The Monastery of the Heart: An Invitation to a Meaningful Life by Joan Chittister
- A Psalm for the Wild-Built and A Prayer for the Crown Shy by Becky Chambers
Any favorite books of yours I should check out in 2025?
A gift to meet you this first week of Epiphany…to discover the wisdom you’ve embodied, and each of us may…by doing hopeful things!
The Rule of Benedict: A Spirituality for the 21st Century, by Sister Joan Chittister. I am reading it for the 4th time. It's meant to be read in small sections, one each day. Sister Joan's insights make the ancient rule relevant for today. I have highlighted so many passages that I may as well highlight the entire book.