Bishop Budde was not angry. She confronted anger in a spiritual manner, with grace, humility, honesty, and right-mindedness. Others will take it as a call to become angry or a justification for punishment, but that would miss the point completely. Budde’s discourse is actually summarized in Hosea 6:6 speaking for God, and repeated by Jesus as quoted in Matthew 9:13: “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.”

The immigration policy in question is at root sacrificing innocents for political gain, as the Sanhedrin did 2,000 years ago, as was a literal tradition in the sacrifice of a “perfect lamb,” as Hitler did in demonizing Jews, and as every scapegoating program has done and will continue to do — until human hearts change.

And that is the key. For a monastic and spiritual seeker, importance has shifted from material conditions of the world to spiritual conditions of the mind and heart. Throughout the ages and in every religion, those who sought insight and not doctrine have discovered that truth lies there. It lies with intention, meaning, life and eternal creation. What is made from material is obviously temporary; meaning that time destroys it. But what is made of spirit is eternal, even as its temporary container passes away. Even in quantum physics, the field that most claims to be fundamental in the secular world, the concept of an eternal foundation cannot be eliminated. In Newtonian times it was imagined as fixed laws. But when that broke down over a century ago, even in Wheeler’s “participatory universe,” there was still the necessity of cosmic order for that participation. The new foundation, a cornerstone in modern physics, is that “information is not destroyed.” Information, which is not just specification, but transformation or relation, is eternal. Religions have intuited this since the beginning, philosophy has not escaped it, and now science agrees. Instead of exact instructions, the universe (including us) runs on harmonious information relations.

And that is the crux of the issue we face today: Information integrity. Information may not be destroyed in the universe, but it can be temporarily hidden or corrupted. This means truth can also be hidden (or made strictly relative and misaligned with larger contexts, as pragmatism can do). Information is not a thing. It is not even a set of facts. It is a two-way transformation between the physical and the ideational. What quantum theory and spiritual insight tell us about information is that it is an eternal mind-body relation at the foundation of all that exists, and that truth is the harmony of that relation that allows things to exist.

This is not a moral code. It doesn’t say what to do or what the outcome should be. It is neither a religious dogma nor a scientific prediction: if understood it transcends both. It is a recognition of method, universal and normatively human. In modern AI terms, which seeks human relevance, truth can be properly seen as “alignment” of information relations with reality (not just human goals but how sustainable systems work). Information integrity depends on valid information processing, valid relations between facts and interpretations.

If alignment is the method for establishing truth, then it is not any anticipated or desired end, but how we get there. The end cannot justify the means as Machiavelli supposed for pragmatic leadership, it is ultimately the other way around; why we aspire to honorable and sustainable leadership. And that is what Budde was telling Trump. It is a message we all need to hear and understand if we truly want a good life.

John Jay Kineman, Ph.D., lives in Boulder.