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January 10
Gregory of Nyssa, Robinson Jeffers, Lyman Beecher, and José "Cha Cha" Jiménez
David Barnhart
January 10, 2026
Tomato starts, 2006. Photo by Angela Barnhart.
Today is the Feast Day, in the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic Church, of Gregory of Nyssa, who died in 394. Like Basil the Great, he was one of the Cappadocian Fathers who shaped early Christian theology.
Today is the birthday, in 1887, of Robinson Jeffers, poet and creator of Tor House, which he built by hand with a deep sense of reverence for place. Jeffers articulated a philosophy he called “inhumanism,” which rejected anthropocentric religion and spirituality.
Today marks the death, in 1863, of Lyman Beecher, a Presbyterian minister, abolitionist, and popular preacher on temperance. He was also the father of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher, among many other progeny.
Today marks the death, in 2025, of José Jiménez, a former Puerto-Rican gang leader from Chicago who, after reading Thomas Merton and confessing his sins while he was in jail, became a community and neighborhood organizer. He turned his former gang into a human rights organization.
Reflection:
Gregory of Nyssa, like Origen, believed in universal salvation; that God would get what God wants, which is the saving of everyone and every good thing. He wrote:
“Evil will come to nought and will be completely destroyed. The divine, pure goodness will contain in itself every nature endowed with reason; nothing made by God is excluded from his kingdom once everything mixed with some elements of base material has been consumed by refinement in fire.”
Gregory also wrote:
“God's name is not known; it is wondered at.”
Lyman Beecher wrote:
“Education is the guardian angel of democracy, and the key to liberty.”
and
“The true test of a person’s character is how they treat those who can do nothing for them.”
and
“I have some desire to be weaned from the world and swallowed up in God.”
Robinson Jeffers wrote:
I believe that the Universe is one being, all its parts are different expressions of the same energy, and they are all in communication with each other, therefore parts of one organic whole. (This is physics, I believe, as well as religion.) The parts change and pass, or die, people and races and rocks and stars, none of them seems to me important in itself, but only the whole. This whole is in all its parts so beautiful, and is felt by me to be so intensely in earnest, that I am compelled to love it and to think of it as divine. It seems to me that this whole alone is worthy of the deeper sort of love and there is peace, freedom, I might say a kind of salvation, in turning one's affections outward toward this one God, rather than inwards on one's self, or on humanity, or on human imaginations and abstractions — the world of spirits.
I think it is our privilege and felicity to love God for his beauty, without claiming or expecting love from him. We are not important to him, but he to us.
I resonate with Jeffers’ thoughts here, although I think his notion of “importance” is still anthropocentric. I believe every miniscule particle and vibration of the universe is important to God, that the tiniest part is a reflection of the whole.
Prayer: God, let us be swallowed up in you. Amen.