Where to Begin

Agape et Shalom is a place for looking at life whole.

Not religious life over here, ordinary life over there. Not sorrow kept in one room and pleasure in another. Not faith reduced to a private opinion, or love reduced to a feeling we use until it no longer serves us. We have one life. One breath given and received. One gift to offer back.

So we begin where we are: with headlines that trouble us, songs that steady us, films that uncover something true, meals shared at a table, work that wearies us, children at play, grief that does not ask permission, joy that arrives unannounced. None of these things are outside the reach of God. Each can become a place of attention, repentance, gratitude, and hope.

This site is about learning to see that way.

To see sorrow, pleasure, joy, and pain not as random interruptions, but as gifts that can form us if we receive them truthfully. To ask what is being revealed. To seek truth without cynicism, comfort without escape, peace without pretending, and love without possession.

Agape is not sentiment. Shalom is not mere calm. Love has a meaning deeper than preference, appetite, or approval. It is placed in creation by the Creator, and we cannot finally escape it. We can resist it, misunderstand it, cheapen it, or mock it. Some will call it folly. We call it undeniable but with purpose.

We all know something of love because it is infused into our spirit at creation. The Greeks gave names to its natural forms: Eros, the love of desire and the body; Philia, the love of friendship; and Storge, the love of family and belonging. These are real gifts, but they are not the end of love. Agape is the supernatural love that gives itself for the good of the other, the love revealed in Christ and commanded by Him.

I am an old man, and this is my quest too. I have been staring at it for a lifetime, and the one thing I have learned is that agape is true. Yet it seems to require more than a lifetime to discover.

Join me. Every day, we begin again with the life we have been given, asking to become more faithful, more whole, and more able to give that life back in love. More than two thousand years of Christian history bear witness to this. It begins with faith in the commandment Jesus gave His disciples in John 13:34.