Author: DVO

The American Declaration of Independence says we have an unalienable right to the pursuit of happiness. Fr. Richard Rohr writes that God created us to be happy and joyful in this world and the next, and Jesus says the same several times in the Gospel of John. The only difference between the two is that any happiness that is demanded from life never becomes happiness because it is too narcissistically and self-consciously pursued. The “joy that the world cannot give” always comes as a gift to those who wait for it, expect it, and make room for it inside themselves. The first is self-assertion, the second is self-surrender. The first is taking; the second is receiving. Those are two entirely different human dynamics. You do not catch a butterfly by chasing it: you sit still, and it alights on your shoulder. Then it chooses you. That is true happiness. When we set out to seek our private happiness, we often create an idol that is sure to topple. Any attempts to protect any full and private happiness amid so much public suffering must be based on an illusion about the nature of our world. We can only do that if we block ourselves from a certain degree of reality and refuse solidarity with “the other side” of everything, even the other side of ourselves. Both sides of life are good and necessary teachers; in fact, failure and mistakes teach us much more than our successes. Failure and success were often called “the two hands of God.” It takes struggle with both our darkness and our light to form us into full children of God, but of course, we especially resist “the left hand of God,” which is usually some form of suffering or loss of control. As in our Gospel reading today, the same suffering of the centurion’s servant brought the centurion out of his comfortable house and invited Jesus into that house! Suffering and solidarity with the suffering of others have an immense capacity to “make room” inside of us. It is probably our primary spiritual teacher.

Fr. Brian Maher, OMI, asks, “Do we wonder why this reading, which comes at the end of Luke’s Gospel, has been chosen to lead us into Advent and the start of another Church year?” If we see it as promising the coming of a God who will judge and punish us, it would be a very ill-chosen reading. If we see it as promising the coming of a God of destruction, a distant, impersonal God to be feared and avoided, if possible, then using it to begin a ‘new’ year would be encouraging people to leave the Church rather than to “return with all your heart.” But if we read this Gospel as the first Christian communities read it, then we truly can “…Stand erect and raise your heads” because the tiny child who will be born into our world in just four weeks is indeed ‘our God,’ coming in love, to reveal to us a God of love and to say to us, “I do not call you servants but friends…”; I wash your feet because you are ‘created in my image and likeness,’ and underneath the dirt and grime of everyday living there is a person of unique dignity; my son, my daughter, my friend and an heir to God’s Kingdom. What a wonderful Gospel with which to begin Advent.

Throughout its 2000-year history, Christian theology has never backed away from the truth and exclusivity of the claim that Christ is the (only) way, truth, and life and that nobody can come to God except through him. Fr. Ron Rolheiser asks, “How can we view the truth of other religions in the light of Christ’s claim that he is the only way to the Father?” He writes that Christian theology (certainly Roman Catholic theology) has always accepted and proactively taught that the Mystery of Christ is much larger than what can be observed in the visible, historical enfolding of Christianity and the Christian churches in history. Christ is larger than our churches and operates too outside of our churches. He is still telling the church what Jesus once told his mother: “I must be about my Father’s business.” This may come as a surprise to some. Still, the dogmatic teaching of the Roman Catholic Church is that sincere persons in other religions can be saved without becoming Christians, and to teach the contrary is heresy. This is predicated on understanding the God we worship as Christians. The God whom Jesus incarnated wills the salvation of all people and is not indifferent to the sincere faith of billions of people throughout thousands of years. We dishonor our faith when we teach anything different. All of us are God’s children. There is, in the end, only one God, and that God is the Father of all of us – and that means all of us, irrespective of religion.

The day after Thanksgiving, looking out our window, we see the tree branches bare and anticipate the smell of snow in the air. Jesus speaks a parable to his disciples about the fig tree and the coming of the Kingdom of God. He points out that signs will be given and tells them that these will indicate the time is near. Evelyn Underhill writes that Christ never seems to be delivering pure truth at first, yet in the end, he feeds the souls of the learned and the simple. He seems so often content to prepare souls by one great revealing truth and then leave grace to act, fertilize, bring forth, and give light to the mystery. As Christians, we are called to be beacons of hope. We will very shortly enter into the season of Advent, the season of hope in the birth of the Messiah. Our lives get busier as we prepare for Christmas. In our scurrying around, let us pray that we do not get too busy to look around and meet our brothers and sisters’ needs who could require our help. The reality is that they were not planned; life’s interruptions usually come at the most inopportune time. But Henri Nouwen famously said: “As Christians, the interruptions ARE our work.” As we prepare for the coming of the King, what will others see when they look at us? Let us pray that we are open to recognizing and reacting to the interruptions Christ sends us. May we leave those needing help with the hope of trees budding and summer being just around the corner.

In scripture, God’s promise, revelation, and new truth are often brought not through what’s familiar or through those we know and who are like us but through a stranger. As Jews, Jesus and his disciples would have been immersed in the divisions within the Jewish and Samaritan cultures. The parable of the Good Samaritan and the Samaritan woman at the well demonstrates the existing cultural tension. Today, our reading from Luke’s gospel tells the story of the ten lepers and the only one to return to thank Jesus for his healing; he was the Samaritan. In these instances, the players in the story deal with individuals who are “strange” to them. In Parker Palmer’s work, The Company of Strangers, he writes: “The role of the stranger in our lives is vital in the context of the Christian faith, for the God of faith is one who continually speaks truth afresh, who continually makes all things new. God persistently challenges conventional truth and regularly upsets the world’s way of looking at things. It is no accident that this God is so often represented by the stranger, for the truth that God speaks in our lives is very strange indeed. Where the world sees impossibility, God sees potential. Where the world sees comfort, God sees idolatry. Where the world sees insecurity, God sees occasions for faith. Where the world sees death, God proclaims life. God uses the stranger to shake us from our conventional points of view, to remove the scales of worldly assumptions from our eyes.” Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that the challenge Palmer presents concerns racism, sexism, provincialism, and sectarianism. Invariably, we are afraid of and un-welcoming to strangers – be they different vis-a-vis race, color, creed, gender, or sexual orientation.  We fear what is different from ourselves. We are comfortable only with our own. However, within our own circles, much of the otherness of God cannot be revealed. Within familiar circles, good as these might be, there is too little in the way of promise, of newness. God can speak only a limited word here. Nothing is impossible with God, but that is only true when we move outside of our own circles. Like Jacob, we must wrestle in the dust with the stranger. In welcoming the stranger and showing genuine hospitality to those who seem foreign to us, whom we do not understand, we are given the opportunity to hear new promises and a fuller revelation of God.

We live in a time of pain and division. Daily, in the world and in the church, hatred, anger, and bitterness are growing. It is even harder to live at peace with each other, to be calm, and to not alienate someone just by being. There is so much wound and division around. But the hatred Jesus speaks about today is the denial of love. It is even more than the denial of love; it is active anti-love. Very often, the one who hates wants to be hated himself. If you hate anyone, you are thereby throwing in the slogan to build a world without God. Because God is love, it happens to us that someone hates us, and our first impulse should be to check whether we are giving any reason for this hatred. Understudying someone else’s point of view, fixing what should be fixed, and yielding where it is allowed to yield, sometimes it dries up the sources of hatred. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that our call today is to reconcile by feeling the pain of all sides and by letting our pain and helplessness be a buffer that heals, the blood that helps wash the wound. As a simple start, we can test how open-minded we are on all of these issues by seeing how much pain we are in. Not to be in pain is not to be open-minded. It is a time of pain for the church, a time when we will all feel some hatred, a time when, above all, we must keep our peace of mind, our inner calm of spirit, and our outer charity.

“There’s so much evil in the world, and so many people are suffering from other people’s sins that there must be retribution, some justice. Don’t tell me that the people who are doing these things – from molesting children to ignoring all morality – are going to be in heaven when we get there! What would that say about God’s justice?” That is something almost all of us have reiterated at some point in life, especially after witnessing the senseless loss of life by mankind’s own hands. At least, Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes, we’re in good company; as was the case for the prophet Isaiah, this was no different. For him it was not enough that the Messiah should usher in heaven for good people. Along with rewards for the good, he felt, there also needed to be a “day of vengeance” on the bad. Interestingly, in a curious omission, when Jesus quotes this text to define his own ministry, he leaves out the part about vengeance. All that worry that somebody might be getting away with something and all that anxiety that God might not be an exacting judge suggest that we, like the older brother of the prodigal son, might be doing many things right but are missing something important inside of ourselves. We are dutiful and moral but bitter underneath and are unable to enter the circle of celebration and the dance. Too often, for too many of us, far from basking in gratitude in the beautiful symphony of relaxed, measureless love and infinite forgiveness that makeup heaven, we feel instead the bitterness, self-pity, anger, and incapacity to let go and dance that was felt by the older brother of the prodigal son. Like the older brother of the prodigal son, we protest our right to despair and to be unhappy and demand that a reckoning justice one day give us our due by punishing the bad. In the end, it’s mostly because we are wounded and bitter that we worry about God’s justice, that it might be too lenient, that the bad will not be fully punished. But we should worry less about that and more about our own incapacity to forgive, to let go of our hurts, to take delight in life, to give others the gaze of admiration, to celebrate, and to join in the dance. To be fit for heaven, we must let go of bitterness and embrace the love of others, which is so very hard to do for so many of us.

Poverty is what can make us grateful for everything we have. One new blouse does not get lost among all the other hangers in the cupboard. One new book becomes a treasure, not just one more kind of recreation. No new toys, clothes, or furniture makes us treasure what little of each of them we have. Sister Joan Chittister writes about a young mother who found the pair of new shoes she had just bought her daughter that week in a trash bin in front of the house, awaiting the city trash collectors. “What are these doing here?” she asked her daughter. “I just got them for you two days ago.” “I don’t like them,” the teen said back. “None of the other kids wear anything like this.” Only poverty, perhaps, can give us a sense of what it is to be grateful for what you have and even more thankful for what you get for nothing. In poverty, God is not a question. The God who hears the cry of the poor is all the poor can be sure of because it can only be the goodness of God that supplies their daily needs. To learn the lesson of generosity from the widow in today’s Gospel, we first must notice the widow, which may be the more significant challenge Jesus puts before us. In Jesus’ time on earth, the crowd of rich, powerful, and privileged persons overshadowed those on the margins of society: the poor, the sick, the stranger, and the woman in today’s reading, who were quickly lost in the crowd. But Jesus notices the widow and sees what she is doing, tossing her precious coins. In his typical way of overturning expectations and disrupting convention, Jesus makes the widow the center of attention. The one on the margin is brought to the center. Jesus creates a new way of looking at the world, religion, and one another. So, the alleluia that arises out of poverty is not about having nothing; the alleluia is in gratitude for the kind of poverty that wants for nothing that does not add to a sense of the presence of God and the liberating grace of knowing we have enough if we have him. May we all be so lucky to have that much.

Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that the mystery of Christ is wider, deeper, and more encompassing than what can be seen simply within the visible life of Jesus and the visible history of the Christian churches. Granted, what we see visibly in the life of Jesus and the history of the Christian churches is something very precious and very privileged. The Christian churches are (like Mary, the Mother of Jesus) the place where God visibly, concretely, tangibly, and historically enters this world. But, as scripture and Christian theology affirm, the mystery of Christ is more encompassing than what we can see visibly and historically. It also includes what the Epistle to the Colossians teaches, namely, that physical creation itself was somehow created through Christ, that Christ is what holds it together, and that Christ is what gives it an eternal future. The mystery of Christ is not just about saving us, the people on this planet, it is also about saving the planet itself. Incorporating this into our understanding has huge consequences for how we understand our planet, Earth, and other religions. This has huge implications for how we view other religions. As Christians, we must take seriously Jesus’ teaching that Christ is the (only) way to salvation and that nobody goes to the Father except through Christ. So where does that leave non-Christians and other sincere people, given that at any given time, two-thirds of the world does not relate to the historical Jesus or Christian churches? Unless we understand the mystery of Christ as deeper and wider than what we can see visibly and historically, this quandary will invariably lead us to either abandon Jesus’ teaching about being normative or lead us into an exclusivity that goes against God’s universal will for salvation. If, by the mystery of Christ, we mean only the visible Jesus and the visible church, then we are caught in a dilemma with no answer. If, however, by the mystery of Christ, we also mean the mystery of God becoming incarnate inside of physical creation, beginning already in the original creation, continuing there as the soul that binds the whole of physical creation together, and being there as both the energy that lures creation towards its Creator and the consummation of that creation, then all things have to do with Christ, whether they realize it or not, and all authentic worship leads to the Father, whether we can see this or not.

Recently, a man I knew was in church with his family, including his seven-year-old son, Michael, his mother, and grandmother. At one point, Michael, seated beside his grandmother, whispered aloud: “I’m so bored!” His grandmother pinched and scolded him: “You are not bored!” as if the sacred ambiance of church and an authoritative command could change human nature. They can’t. When we’re bored, we’re bored! And sometimes, we need to be given divine permission to feel what we’re spontaneously feeling. My parents, and for the most part their whole generation, would, daily, in their prayers, utter these words: To You do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears. Our own generation tends to view this as morbid, as somehow denigrating both the beauty and joy of life and the perspective that faith is meant to give us. But there’s a hidden richness in that prayer. In praying in that way, they gave themselves sacred permission to accept the limits of their lives. That prayer carries the symbolic tools to handle frustration, something, I submit, we have failed to give to our own children sufficiently. Too many young people today have never been given the symbolic tools to handle frustration nor sacred permission to feel what they are feeling. Sometimes, all good intentions aside, we have handed our children more of Walt Disney than Gospel. The poet Rainer Marie Rilke once wrote these words to a friend who, in the face of the death of a loved one, wondered how or where he could ever find consolation. What do I do with all this grief?  Rilke’s reply: “Do not be afraid to suffer, give that heaviness back to the weight of the earth; mountains are heavy, seas are heavy.”  They are, and so is life sometimes, and we need to be given God’s permission to feel that heaviness. [Excerpt from Fr. Ron Rolheiser’s “Sacred Permission to be Human and the Tools to Handle Frustration”]