Faithfulness

 [published in Muddy Riverr News, February 16, 2026]

    The first part of an operational definition of love is respect. The second is faithfulness.

    Faithfulness means that involvement is open-ended—you don’t know how your relationship with another person will look in the future, and you don’t close it off right now.

    This makes human life delightful. Any time two human beings are open to each other, the relationship might continue on into the future. When we do something to other people that shuts down that possibility, our lives are impoverished.

    When Jesus said we should become like little children, he was talking about how a child who has experienced love by another person knows that it is fun to repeat that experience. We are created to enjoy being involved with one another.

    Faithfulness is most important in the kind of relationship that we call marriage. But faithfulness is not limited to that kind of relationship.

    Faithfulness can be a low key behavior based on the tiny delight that can come from just another person’s smile—the smile of someone we meet on the street. When we know that we could, even if the possibility is hugely remote, meet that person again and have the same delight, we behave accordingly.

    We know that many of our contacts with other people are not so delightful—we sin—all of us. We damage each other, sometimes deliberately. We do things or say things that can shut down a relationship, even with someone we have loved.

    It doesn’t take much familiarity with the online world to know that online can be a sewer of unfaithfulness. It seems to be easier to say things online that you could not say face to face, which means that we shouldn’t say it online either. Every person who reads what I write online could be a person I might come to enjoy talking with some time in the future. I have a friend I disagreed with very much, but we learned to listen to each other and we changed.

    I owe my ideas about respect and faithfulness to Fr. John Joe Lakers, my Franciscan colleague and friend, whose 1996 book, Christian Ethics: An Ethics of Intimacy, says that intimacy should be the basis of all our moral judgments. As I read the book, I got the idea that what he calls intimacy can be the basis of an operational definition of love. Respect and faithfulness are two of the four behaviors that make intimacy.

 

Disciplecy

    Democracy, autocracy, bureaucracy, meritocracy. All of these words end in the letters “c-r-a-c-y,” which are based on the Greek word “kratos,” which means “rule.” Democracy is rule by the people. Autocracy is rule by oneself (the person on top). Bureaucracy is rule by a committee. Meritocracy is rule by the deserving.

    The problem is the word “rule.” To rule means to tell other people what to do.  Democracy means that the people can tell you what to do. Eventually, in a democracy, what the people tell you to do can feel pretty much the same as what the monarch would tell you to do.

    Pardon my christianity, but Jesus said “You have only one teacher. All of you are learners.” The word “disciple” comes from the Latin word “to learn.” To learn is to change your mind. Jesus’s last words in the gospel of Matthew were “Go and make disciples of all nations.” He didn’t say “Go and rule all nations.”  He said, “Go and make learners of all nations.” Make learners of all people. Make all people open to changing their minds. Don’t rule them.

    So, I suggest the word “disciplecy,” pronounced di-si-ple-see. Take away the word “rule.” Disciplecy means learning how to live with other people. Learning how to live with other people means being ready to change your mind. The purpose of a disciplecy is not to tell people who should rule over them. It is to help people live together without killing each other.

The Roman Catholic Church

    I was born into a Roman Catholic family, so the story of the Roman Catholic Church has been a lifelong interest for me. Roman Catholic traditions have been too much shaped by Roman Empire traditions—canon law has the last word about everything. Popes down through the years have looked more like emperors than learners.

    The Catholic Church under the recently deceased Pope Francis engaged in a group process labeled “synodality.” The word “synod” is an ancient term for a gathering of church people to discuss things. The purpose of synodality is to get church people to learn from one another, starting with the pope. It is to get people to change their minds about what God wants, starting with the pope.

    The most recent synod was a three-year process beginning with getting people’s opinions on the grass-root level, letting the opinions migrate toward some kind of consensus, and ending with month-long meetings of representatives from all over the world. They met in a hall with round tables at which all the participants sat as equals, listening to each other, with electronic devices to deal with the variety of languages. Even Pope Francis sat at one of the round tables. They were there to learn from one another.

    When democracy really works, it is more like a disciplecy, people meeting to figure out how to live together in some kind of peace. They make rules, but the rules are hammered out by people changing their minds about what is a good way to get something done.  

    One problem we have is that our democratic gatherings tend to evolve into techniques for telling other people what they should do. They become “cratic,” focused on rule, rather than on how to live together. They get involved in collecting and distributing money taken from other people, which can be used to tell those people what to do. They become empires focused on amassing power rather than tools for living together.

    The same thing happens with our business organizations. In the capitalist dream, an entrepreneur comes up with a new way of doing something, struggles competitively with other people trying to do the same thing, and the result benefits everybody. In our world, the entrepreneur gets bought out by a bigger competitor, who gets bought out by a still bigger competitor, until we have a capitalist empire where the emperor tells everybody else what to do.

    Our country has become an empire ruled by emperors, both political and economic. Some emperors are not bad, like Caesar Augustus. Others, like Nero, are not so good.

    Democracy is not the best word for what we want, both in religion and in politics. We would do better to call it disciplecy.

 

 

Respect

    In sociology, which I used to teach, you need operational definitions. You need to be able to observe things, and even to put a number on what you are observing. If you want to study poverty, you have to have an operational definition of poverty, something you can measure.

    For years I looked for an operational definition of love. We really need that. How can men and women who call themselves followers of Jesus treat other men and women with disrespect and violence? They say, “Any talk about love is just romantic dreaming.”

    I finally found an operational definition of love. It has three or four terms, but I will just focus on one: respect. The first part of love is respect.

    Respect is observable. With a little work you could measure it.  

    Roy Webb, in his recently published book “How to Lead a School District through a Pandemic,” was describing how he did his job as superintendent of Quincy Public Schools. On page 140 he writes: “Respect is key. In the military we salute when we see others in the military out of respect. Respect is 360 degrees. You respect your boss, your peers, and your subordinates.”

    Dennis Williams, one of the founders of Bella Ease, used to tell young people not to use the N-word. When a white person uses the word addressing a black person, you have disrespect, and he did not want young people to use the word on anybody, white or black. Using it can make it easier to treat people with disrespect.  

    The F-word is a word of disrespect. The fact that it has become so common is a sign that we are getting used to treating each other disrespectfully.

    Without respect we cannot even begin to love.

    Every single human being, young, old, male, female, criminal or innocent, deserves respect, needs respect, because every single human being has dignity and needs love.

    Any form of violence is disrespectful. We cannot show love by intentionally hurting someone else. There are times when we have to cause pain—for example, when we have to struggle with someone dear to us over behavior that could destroy our relationship. But the pain is not the purpose. When you start out wanting to hurt, you diminish the dignity of the other person.

    We christians often hear the gospel admonition that we should love one another. We should love one another as Jesus loved us. Jesus never used violence against another person. Even when he was driving money changers out of the temple, he was not hitting the money changers.

    We can measure the extent to which we are a christian society by measuring the extent to which we treat every one of our neighbors with respect.

 [published in Muddy River News, January 18, 2026]

Influence versus Power

 [published in Muddy River News, December 15, 2025]

    There are two ways we can get other people to do what we want them to do. One way is to persuade them to do it. We call that “influence.” The other is to cause them pain if they do not do what we want. We call that “power.”

    Physical harm is an extreme kind of power. We allow police to carry guns. The gun is a symbol of power. If we do not do what police want us to do, they can hurt us. We do not want everybody threatening to hurt us, so the police are the only people we authorize to do it. It seems we can’t live together peacefully any other way. But we advise even the police to use power as little as possible. Some police live their whole lives as police without using their guns.

    Physical harm is not the only way for us to use power.  We can hurt with our words. Words can kill.

    We are moving away from power in many areas of our lives. We no longer allow teachers in our schools to punish students physically. We advise parents not to use physical punishments on their children. We think it is better to use influence rather than power to get children to do what we want. Why shouldn’t we treat adults the same way?

    I cannot recall one instance in the four gospels where Jesus deliberately caused or threatened pain to someone in order to get them to do something. Threatening or causing pain shows a lack of respect for the other person’s dignity. Jesus always showed respect, even to sinners.

    We say that Jesus is God. That means that God, just like Jesus, always shows respect, even to sinners. God does not use power, God does not punish. Jesus said “Let the weeds grow until the harvest.” That’s what we should do.

Counsellors and therapists are worth it

 

published in Muddy River News Oct. 14, 2025

One of my friends in the Franciscan Order recently celebrated 47 years of sobriety. It has been 47 years since he left a facility that helped religious and priests suffering from alcoholism to achieve sobriety.

Treatment like that was and still is expensive. It took my friend three months in that residential facility before its staff judged that it would be okay for him to return to a normal life. But the treatment was successful. The staff knew what it was doing.

There are many people who work in the mental health services who know what they are doing. Our problem is that we do not want to pay such people in proportion to the benefit that we receive from their services. When a recovering addict returns to society and is able to live as part of a family or church, and is working productively, we do not measure what we have all gained from their recovery.

We do not grumble about the cost of guns and fighter jets and submarines. In recent years we have spent hundreds of  billions of our hard-earned dollars to upgrade our nuclear capabilities, even though we know that if we were ever to use those capabilities, we would destroy the world for human habitation.   

We need to put our dollars where they will really do some good.  We need to use them to pay therapists and case workers and personal assistants. And not just people who help us with our aging bodies. We need to pay the people more who clean our houses or landscape our yards. The people who help us when we are ill or old contribute more to our well-being than material stuff that we buy. Too much stuff goes into storage before it goes to the landfill. We should forget stuff and think people. We need to put our money into helping each other live more fully and more abundantly.

 

 

Changing your mind

 

[published in Muddy River News on November 5, 2025.]

Learning means you change your mind.

Some people never learn. They keep making the same mistakes over and over. We say, “Will they never learn?”

Our two major political parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, are dedicated to keeping us from changing our minds. Nothing the other side says is worth listening to. To a dedicated partisan, changing your mind shows weakness and lack of dedication to the cause.

Our social media are the perfect tools to keep us from changing our minds. The media reward eyeballs on the screen. They make their money by following the crowd.  

Face-to-face contact with other human beings is the best way to get us to change our minds. The most valuable thing that a school can do for students is to help the students get used to listening to living human beings who challenge what the students think.

My father quit school after seventh grade. He realized that he needed to learn things, so he took correspondence courses. After I started getting more education I had trouble talking with him. He seemed to think that if I said something he didn’t like, I was rejecting him. He never had teachers who could have given him the most important benefit of schooling: living teachers who can help you to welcome people who disagree with you.

Good coaches help players to change their minds. You think this is the way to do it, and the coach says, no, you are wrong. I still love you, but THIS is the way to do it.

We religious people experienced a movement in the last century called “ecumenism.” The movement was fueled by the idea that when Christian churches fight each other, they keep other people from accepting any church. The movement gave me a set of rules for talking with people who have different ideas about religion: 1) Keep quiet and listen while the other person states what he or she believes as clearly and forcefully as they can; 2) State your own ideas as clearly and forcefully as you can, and trust the other person to keep quiet and listen while you do that. 3) Let God determine what happens next.

When you let God determine what happens, you may have to change your mind. And we did. We Catholics learned from the Protestants that it is good to read the Bible. I think the Protestants may have learned a thing or two from us Catholics, but you will have to ask them.

The last thing Jesus said in the gospel of Matthew is “Go and make disciples of all nations.” A disciple is a learner. A learner is someone who changes his mind. To be a disciple in religion means to change your mind about what God is like and what God wants.

All of us who do religion are learners. So are all of us who do politics. We all have to get used to changing our minds, and the best way to do that is to communicate with people who don’t think like us. It’s uncomfortable, but didn’t Jesus say that the road to the kingdom is narrow?

My reaction to Bishop Paprocki's statement

Our bishop, Thomas John Paprocki, has publicly objected to the Chicago Archdiocese’s rewarding Senator Dick Durbin for his years of service in government because Senator Durbin has publicly advocated a “pro-choice” position regarding abortion.

Catholic belief that abortion is evil goes back centuries and continues today. Prolife defenders say that opposition to abortion is “natural law.” That means that everyone, regardless of religious belief, should be able to see the evil of the action. People who do not see it are unreasonable, and must be acting in bad faith.

There is a difference between believing that abortion is evil and believing that the government should make “procuring” an abortion a crime, punishable by law. Catholic canon law uses the unusual term “procure,” probably because the decision in favor of abortion is not exclusively the woman’s decision. Men can be equally guilty.

Canon law excommunicates anyone who procures an abortion. It does not excommunicate anyone who murders. People who oppose murder are considered reasonable. People who oppose making the government punish abortion are not unreasonable. I can only speculate that the reason for the special punishment must be that the lawyers believe that more stringent punishment will discourage it.

Something like eighty percent of the population, including eighty percent of Catholics, think that abortion should be legal under some circumstances. That is evidence that allowing abortion legally is not against natural law.

Believing that abortion must be punished by law is a denominational belief, and the Second Vatican Council said that Catholics should respect other people’s denominational beliefs and not require the government to impose those beliefs by law.

I respect Senator Durbin’s statement that he is personally opposed to abortion. That does not make him a hypocrite. As a professional politician, he must believe that making it punishable by law goes beyond what natural law requires and that as a Catholic he is not required to make it a crime.  

People who equate procuring any abortion with killing a child late in pregnancy poison political discourse. Contentious issues should be approached with respect and sensitivity to others’ feelings. That is what it means to love one’s neighbor as oneself.

 

Brother Joe Zimmerman, OFM