Megan McKenna has long been part of our Living Spiritual Teachers Project. She’s been writing essential books for spiritual practice for thirty years and leading retreats and workshops around the world that focus on the practices of peace, devotion, and justice.
She writes and teaches with a distinctively Catholic Christian voice that is expansive and encompassing of spiritual desires and practices beyond her tradition. This entire book points the reader toward making an impact on the world. For instance, when reflecting on one of the most essential tent-pole doctrines of her faith, McKenna turns it toward the reader as an imperative. She writes that “the meaning of the word ‘resurrection’ is ‘to stand up’,” and then points to moral and ethical ways that every person must “stand up” for the weak and the vulnerable, with one’s body and resources; and sometimes it also means to “stand down,” by which McKenna intends “always forgiving, everyone, all the time.”
Forgiveness is, in fact, her passion here. As she says in the opening chapter, “Forgiveness is a way of relating that relates to and develops into other ways of living with God and one another on earth.” In other words, forgiveness is everything. Without forgiveness, there is no justice, no peace.
McKenna has been inspired by teachers from Black Elk to Daniel Berrigan, Helen Prejean to Dorothee Soelle, Joy Harjo and Greg Boyle.
