Our Interior Castle

Psalm 37:1-9

Excerpts from “The Interior Castle” by Teresa of Avila

October 5, 2025

By Nicole M. Lamarche

Thank you again for being here on this beautiful day. What a gift that you showed up for

each other. Let us now as we are moved to take some deeper breaths with me. We

breathe in peace and breathe out worry and make more space for love…

As you are moved, let us put our hearts and hopes together in a spirit of prayer. God of

light in any darkness, thank you that those who came before us invested in this place

and in these commitments that still hold us, be with us and open us to hear whatever we

need to today. God may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be

acceptable in your sight, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

The place that I came from is so small that it doesn’t have a downtown. The high school

functions as the gathering place, the center of shared life where like much of certain

parts of our country a Friday night football game is not just a football game, but more

like a combination of a town meeting and a night out at the movies. Both transactional

and magical. Pies are sold as passes are thrown. Babysitting arrangements are made

for next weekend as she’s tossed high. Bartering is always an option, swapping good

hay for good wood for the winter. I don’t know if it fully lives up to the cliché of being the

kind of place where the churches outnumber the stop lights, but if not, it’s close. And

like much of the American West, the culture is infused with the myth of rugged

individualism, so-called bootstrap theology, presented as gritty and free, more American

than almost anything, leaning across a gorgeous landscape of lakes of lush forests. The

truth underneath this story of outward ruggedness, is the hard living of farming and

ranching and rural life. And it’s blanketed in the theology of a God who would reward

some and not others, of a faith that seeks to please a Divine presence.

In this faith framework Jesus is a judge and the focus of the Christian life is doing it all

right to appease this God. It’s a paradigm where we arrive here as sinners and then

must spend the rest of our lives making up for it. Sidenote: The Rev. Cindy Pincus will

be with us on Sunday October 19th to preach about Original Sin. I can’t wait!

In this theological paradigm, the dynamic is about the individual needing to

please the deity. Salvation is individual too. A lot of is made about personal salvation. I

now wonder if we need a revolution that is about communal salvation, collective

salvation, the salvation of all creation.

But because of my mom I soaked up a lot about doing good for the whole, the

part about showing up for others, the big group in a spiritual community and for showing

up in the world. She taught me well the part about investing in the spiritual over the

material, but what was almost entirely missing from this secular culture of bootstrap

theology and from the UCC church that I grew up in, was tending to the inner life or as

we heard from the mystic Teresa of Avila spending time in our interior castle.

As many of you know we are doing a fall sermon series on Healing from Toxic

Christianity and today what I would like to speak to is the deep tradition and treasure

trove of spiritual practices we have to also live our faith from the inside out. And part of

why this feels extremely important right now is that some of the pain we are living with,

is a from kind of Christianity that has failed to tame the ego that we humans have. It is

an expression that is angry and wants to dominate and control. It believes that God

wants this too. And this makes sense if God is a deity that desires offerings. But if God

is an energy of love then prayer is a way to tune into this love, hear beyond the noise, to

feel what we need to feel, to notice what needs our attention or where we need to heal

and to basically fall into something expansive and loving?

Father Richard Rohr who founded a center and a whole movement aimed to bringing

contemplation and action back together within Christianity -in my opinion one of the

most important living teachers of this time wrote a book called: Everything Belongs: The

Gift of Contemplative Prayer where he said “The people who know God well—mystics,

hermits, prayerful people, those who risk everything to find God—always meet a lover,

not a dictator.”

It wasn’t until our daughter was little and I was thick into the impossible and gut-

wrenching work of planting a new church that I fell so far down, that the only thing I

could do was just let it happen, and to flop to find the bottom. And to feel that instead

there was something holding me and that something told me to go inside.

That in spite what was being told to me in the grind of so-called Silicon Valley, the

answer what not to do more, but to do less. The answer was to be still long enough to

hear something that can only be heard in the silence. The answer was not to find a way

to pay thousands to go to a retreat to find myself, but to instead make a habit of sitting

in the ugly garage chair for longer than 10 minutes, and that chair helped me to change

everything. That’s the thing. Prayer is a practice that allows us to change with time,

becoming more aligned with love and grace and tenderness.

I see prayer not as petitions to the Higher Power although sometimes we do pray that

way, but rather in the bigger sense it’s making time to go inward, giving commitment to

the interior castle that is our heart, it’s falling into the invisible presence of the great

mystery, and then it’s like building little muscles to see the world with the eyes of our

heart, to see things clearly. It’s a regular occurrence that within that context of deep

contemplative practice that I have been able to have realizations or hear a new

perspective or let go of something I was holding. It is these practices over time that

have led me to be less angry to let go of resentment, to be freed from things I cannot fix,

to be empowered to change the parts that become clear aren’t serving me.

But all of this requires practice, both alone and together in a group, here as a church,

the living body here and now. I interpret the Psalm for today to mean, Be still before the

Universe long enough to hear what we need to… I don’t know about you, but I have

been doing a lot of fretting for the wicked lately. The Psalmist goes on to tells us:

Refrain from anger and forsake wrath. You know I need a lot of prayer to be able to do

that!

And just so you don’t think I am talking anything abstract or hypothetical, I want to tell

you what I mean. I have a most everyday practice of setting the timer on my device and

closing my eyes and sitting there. This is the baseline. Sometimes I build on that with a

fragment of scripture or a poem if my mind is racing and I need an anchor. But you

know after doing this for years now in connection with my doing, I can tell you that it has

guaranteed results. This is actually a way to be able to refrain from anger and to forsake

wrath. I promise. It’s a practice that allows a sacred container to see where we are

being led by our egos, it’s a place to leave our fears behind. I do it for 13 minutes, but

you can start with 3 and work up. It’s an anchor for my activism. It is from that deep

spiritual well that I seek to join God is doing justice in the world. Boulder is one of those

towns that loves to talk about meditation. But the inner life extracted from an ethic of

justice is empty. The activism and the contemplation are a pair. They go together. We

act. We go inside and back out from a place of justice.

My opinion is that part of the reason we are in this painful place is a kind of Christianity

that is hyper focused on a personal salvation that leaves creation to burn and leaving

out the work of internal transformation. But Jesus invites us to hear his words of good

news to the poor, liberation to all in bondage, to see with the eyes of our heart, the

heaven that is here now. He beckons us to come to sit with ourselves in silence. And

here’s why I am talking about this now is that this is a time. This is a moment of rising

consciousness. How shall we evolve?

In essay some months ago Oliver Kornetzke wrote, “This divide isn’t just geographical.

It’s evolutionary. For 95% of our species’ existence, we lived in small, kin-based bands

where survival was contingent on cohesion, predictability, and suspicion of outsiders.

Tribalism wasn’t a flaw—it was a feature. It kept us alive. To be skeptical of the

unfamiliar, to prioritize the known over the unknown, was adaptive. But we don’t live on

the savannah anymore. The threats we face are no longer predators or rival clans, but

climate collapse, income inequality, and information warfare. Still, the reptilian brain

lingers. And it does not care about nuance. It cares about belonging.” (Some parts of

America) “in many ways, remain a living museum of this tribal wiring. In places where

diversity is minimal and ideas circulate slowly, identity calcifies. Community becomes

echo chamber. It’s not that people don’t think critically—it’s that critical thinking is

punished. Conformity is rewarded. Outsiders—literal or ideological—are threats to the

fragile cohesion of a community whose worldview has not been tested by difference but

merely reinforced by repetition.” And brains “wired for tribal survival will always choose

the strong lie over the complicated truth.…people trapped in a feedback loop that

exploits the very instincts evolution gave them to survive.”

Prayer will help us evolve. Knowing not everyone will do it, but if enough of us do,

tending to our inner lives, grounding ourselves in something deeper, it will help us get

unstuck and get through.

I invite you if you don’t already to start today, to claim a contemplative practice of some

kind. It doesn’t need to be complicated. Turn off your screens and turn in. Being still is

one of the most important things we can do right now, especially with all of this noise.

Fall into the Greater Love, the God beyond our naming in silence to hear beyond all that

is spoken from anything we humans have created.

Richard Rohr also wrote that, “Most of us were taught that God would love us if and

when we change. In fact, God loves you so that you can change. What empowers

change, what makes you desirous of change is the experience of love. It is that inherent

experience of love that becomes the engine of change.” Part of how we contain the

raging egos of this hour is for all of us to up our game, tending to our inner lives. I

believe this will help us evolve collectively? What if this will change the whole world?

COMMUNAL REFLECTION

Question(s): How do you spend time in your interior castle? How does that

inform your spiritual journey and how you see the world as well as how you are in

it? What are the fruits of a faith that is rooted in both contemplation and action?

What does a Christianity devoted to a healthy inner and outer like look like?

May you go inside to your interior castle. Amen.