Author: DVO

Doesn’t Scripture itself say that the road that leads to life is narrow…and few find it! So, doesn’t this mean that not everyone is going to heaven? Underneath this fear of many of not going to heaven is the fact that the Lord has told us that we make choices in life, and some of those choices are serious. Sin is real and the passage to eternal life is not easily found. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that we can lose heaven and that hell is a real option. But if God is love, and he is, doesn’t he want all to be one with him for eternity? The drama of the incarnation has as its central point the revelation of the heart of God…a heart of infinite love which can, even given human sin, bring about the salvation of most, perhaps of all, persons. What does this mean? First, it means that God loves us unconditionally and that there is nothing we can do, sin included, that even for one second can change that. Hence we live under the law of mercy, not of justice. There is no great book or great law within which all sins are recorded and where a pound of retribution is demanded for a pound of sin. Salvation, going to heaven, is nothing other than accepting we are loved unconditionally and forever. Of course, we can, and in this life, we often do reject this. That is why here, in this life, most of us have not yet found the road that leads to life. Few of us are really happy, actually redeemed by love. It is easy to go to hell in this life. Hence, in this life, we are often in hell, miserable, biting so as not to be bitten, sinning so as to compensate for being outside of love. However, God’s love can, as we see in Christ’s death and resurrection, descend into hell and embrace and bring to peace tortured and paranoid hearts. Our moral choices in this life are crucial. We can and frequently do make choices that make it harder for us to accept unconditional love. Moreover, there is a real danger of not sinning honestly, of rationalizing, and of warping ourselves so that a permanent hell becomes a real possibility. But this is, I submit, rare. Few people will, when confronted by an unconditional embrace, resist. That is why most people will go to heaven. [Excerpt from Fr. Ron Rolheiser’s “Living Under a Merciful God.”]

A young priest wrote about the students he works at a university and noticed they have a zest for life and an energy and color that he could only envy. He writes: “But inside of all this zest and energy, I notice that they lack hope because they don’t have a meta-narrative. They don’t have a big story or vision that can give them perspective beyond the ups and downs of their everyday lives. When their health, relationships, and lives are going well, they feel happy and full of hope, but the reverse is also true. The bottom falls out of their world when things aren’t going well. They don’t have anything to give them a vision beyond the present moment.” Henri Nouwen wrote that there is a quality of sadness that pervades all the moments of our lives so that even in our most happy moments, there is something missing. In every satisfaction, there is an awareness of limitations. In every success, there is fear of jealousy. In every friendship, there is distance. In every embrace, there is loneliness. There is no such thing as clear-cut, pure joy in this life. Every bit of life is touched by a bit of death. The world can give us peace, except it never does this perfectly. Fr. Ron Rolheiser asks, “What is this peace?” At the last supper, and as he was dying, Jesus offered us his gift of peace. And what is this? It is the absolute assurance that we are connected to the source of life in such a way that nothing, absolutely nothing, can ever sever—not bad health, not betrayal by someone, indeed, not even our own sin. We are unconditionally loved and held by the source of life itself; nothing can change that. Nothing can change God’s unconditional love for us. That’s the meta-narrative we need to keep perspective during the ups and downs of our lives. We are being held unconditionally by God, the source of life itself. If that is true, and it is, then we have an assurance of life, wholeness, and happiness beyond the loss of youth, the loss of health, the loss of reputation, the betrayal of friends, the suicide of a loved one, and even beyond our own sin and betrayals. In the end, as Julian of Norwich says, all will be well, and all will be well, and every manner of being will be well. We need to more deeply appropriate Jesus’ farewell gift to us: “I leave you a peace that no one can take from you: Know that you are loved and held unconditionally.”

People are forever predicting the end of the world. However, as the years moved on and Jesus did not return, their understanding began to evolve so that by the time John’s Gospel was written, probably about seventy years after Jesus’ death, they had started to understand things differently, but that didn’t change their emphasis on vigilance, on staying awake, and on being ready for the end. But now, that invitation to stay awake and live in vigilance was related more to not knowing the hour of one’s death. But Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that our real worry should not be that the world might suddenly end or that we might unexpectedly die, but that we might live and then die asleep, that is, without really loving, without appropriately expressing our love, and without tasting deeply the real joy of living because we are so consumed by the business and busy pressures of living that we never quite get around to fully living. It is a question of having love and reconciliation as our chief concerns, of thanking, appreciating, affirming, forgiving, apologizing, and being more mindful of the joys of living in the human community and within the sure embrace of God. The end of the world shouldn’t concern us, nor should we worry excessively about when we will die. What we should worry about is in what state our dying will find us. As Kathleen Dowling Singh puts in her book, The Grace in Aging: “What a waste it would be to enter the time of dying with the same old petty and weary thoughts and reactions running through our mind.” Still, what about the question of when the world will end? Perhaps, given the infinity of God, it will never end. Because when do infinite creativity and love reach their limit? When do they say: “Enough! That’s all! These are the limits of our creativity and love!” Let us wait gratefully in love as we continue practicing that love as Christ our Lord did.

Today, our relationship with truth is fracturing to a degree that we no longer distinguish, morally or practically, between a lie and the truth. A lie, now, is simply another modality of truth. Its effects are everywhere. People no longer relate to reality in the same way. One person’s truth is the other person’s lie. It is becoming impossible to define what constitutes a lie. Fyodor Dostoevsky sums it up succinctly: “People who lie to themselves and listen to their own lie come to such a pass that they cannot distinguish the truth within them, or around them, and so lose all respect for themselves and for others. And having no respect, they cease to love.” Jordan Peterson would add this: If we lie long enough, “after that comes the arrogance and sense of superiority that inevitably accompanies the production of successful lies (hypothetically successful lies – and that is one of the greatest dangers: apparently everyone is fooled, so everyone is stupid, except me. Everyone is stupid and fooled by me – so I can get away with whatever I want). Living in a world that plays fast and easy with reality and truth also plays on our loneliness. George Eliot once asked: “What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?” So true. The loneliest loneliness of all is the loneliness of distrust. Welcome to our not-so-brave new world. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “God Cannot Tell a Lie.”]

No one, be that an individual or an institution controls access to God. Jesus makes this abundantly clear. We see this, for example, in the story of Jesus cleansing the temple by overturning the money tables. The cleansing of the temple needs to be understood in this context: Jesus is replacing a former religious practice with the Christian way of doing things, and he is revealing something very important about God as he does this. To state it metaphorically: Jesus is replacing a former religious coinage with a new religious coinage. It’s important to recognize that those moneychangers performed a needed function. People came to Jerusalem from many different countries to worship at the temple. But they carried the coins of their own countries and, upon arriving at the temple, had to exchange their own currency for Jewish currency so as to be able to buy the animals (doves, sheep, cattle) they needed to offer sacrifice. The moneychangers fulfilled that function, like banking kiosks do today when you step off an airplane in a foreign country and you need to exchange some of your coinage for the coinage of that country. When Jesus says, “take all of this out of here and stop using my Father’s house as a market”, he is teaching something beyond the need to be honest and beyond the need to not be buying and selling on church property.  More deeply, not turning the Father’s house into a market might be translated as: “You don’t need to exchange your own currency for any other currency when it comes to worshipping God. You can worship God in your own currency, with your own coinage. Nobody, no individual, no temple, no church, no institution, ultimately sits between you and God and can say: ‘You need to go through us’!” All religious coinage had to be transferred into their particular coinage, since in their belief, they controlled access to God.  Jesus tries to cleanse us of any attitude or practice that would enshrine that belief. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Religious Coinage.”]

We had received our transfer orders and knew from the housing waiting list at our new duty station that it would be at least six months before something would open up. When we showed up to move into our temporary quarters, we discovered that the prior tenants had kept dogs in the downstairs bathroom, which left a permanent smell and stain on floors all the way through the concrete. Amazingly, the smell and stain were gone after a good dose of bleach. We often see our sins like that smelly stain, believing it could never be made clean. But when we humbly acknowledge our brokenness and turn to God, that’s when his power of forgiveness goes to work, making us as clean as the day we were baptized. This is the true joy of this parable. Luke shows us God’s love and mercy for sinful human beings. Trust that every time you turn to him in repentance, you will come away feeling washed clean from front to back, from top to bottom, and from head to toe.

Our reflection verse today is another statement by Jesus that shocks many at first blush. But our first reaction should not be to react. We should first try and understand a few things related to this verse. First, how was the term “hate” used in other areas of the New Testament? The force of the word is typically Semitic and was used in Matthew’s gospel, where the term means “loves father or mother more,” which would tell us that the meaning of hate in this context means to love less. The second item to note is the context and setting of the saying. At the time of Jesus, social and economic conditions led families to become self-contained. This prevented them from fulfilling the law of ransom or liberation (goel), which called one to help one’s brothers and sisters in the community (clan) who were in danger of losing their land or becoming slaves. When the family of Jesus wanted to take him back to Nazareth, he ignored or hated their petition and chose to expand the definition of his family by saying, “Behold, my mother and my brothers! Anyone who does the will of God is my brother, sister, and mother.” The life of Jesus is about choosing a different way to live. It’s a choice to favor him above all things in life or favor the ways of the world. Only one choice will bring true joy, peace, happiness, and eternal life.

Today’s reflection verse from Luke’s Gospel presents a story about the invitation from God to know him in faith and that we should sacrifice any human interest that gets in the way of replying to God’s call, no matter how lawful and noble it may be. The objections we tend to put forward, the duties we appeal to, are just excuses. Bishop Robert Barron writes that the father (God the Father) is giving a banquet for his son (God the Son), whose bride is the Church. Jesus is the marriage of divinity and humanity, and we, his followers, are invited to join in the joy of this union. The joyful intimacy of the Father and the Son is now offered to us to be shared. Listen to Isaiah to learn the details of this banquet: “On this mountain, the Lord of hosts will provide for all peoples a feast of rich food and choice wines, juicy, rich food and pure, choice wines.” Now, there is an edge to all of this. The king is doing the inviting, and it is a wedding banquet for his son. We can see how terribly important it is to respond to the invitation of the King of kings in Paul’s Letter to the Philippians, “God greatly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus, every knee should bend, of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” We have heard the invitation of God to enter into intimacy with him, to make him the center of our lives, to be married to him in Christ, and often, we find the most pathetic excuses not to respond.

The resurrection of Jesus promises that things can always be new again. It’s never too late to start over. Nothing is irrevocable. No betrayal is final. No sin is unforgivable. Every form of death can be overcome. There isn’t any loss that can’t be redeemed. Every day is virgin. There is no such thing as old age. In the resurrection we are assured that there are no doors that are eternally closed, every time we close a door or one is closed on us, God opens another for us. The resurrection assures us that God never gives up on us, even if we give up on ourselves, that God writes straight with the crooked lines of our lives, that we can forever re-virginize, regain lost innocence, become post-sophisticated, and move beyond bitterness. In a scheme of things where Jesus breathes out forgiveness on those who betray him, and God raises dead bodies from the dead, we can begin to believe that in the end, all will be well and every manner of being will be well and everything, including our own lives, will eventually end sunny side up. However, the challenge of living this out is not just that of believing that Jesus rose physically from the grave, but also, and perhaps even more importantly, to believe that – no matter our age, mistakes, betrayals, wounds, and deaths – we can begin each day afresh, virgin, innocent again, a child, a moral infant, stunned at the newness of it all. No matter what we’ve done, our future is forever pregnant with wonderful new possibility. Resurrection is not just a question of one day, after death, rising from the dead, but it is also about daily rising from the many mini-graves within which we so often find ourselves. G.K. Chesterton wrote: “Learn to look at things familiar until they look unfamiliar again. Familiarity is the greatest of all illusions.” In essence, that captures one of the real challenges of believing in the resurrection. If the resurrection is to have power in our lives, we must give up the illusion of familiarity. We think we know, we think we understand, we think we have things figured-out, and we end up psyching-out life and each other, leaving them no room for newness, for surprise, for the unfamiliar, for the resurrection. Familiarity breeds contempt. Nothing robs us of joy more than that and nothing destroys our marriages, families, communities, and friendships more than a contemptuousness that is born of familiarity. The resurrection invites us to look at things familiar until they look unfamiliar again because, in the end, a startling, delightful surprise is hidden in all that is familiar. [Excerpt from Fr. Ron Rolheiser’s article, “Daily Resurrection”]

We have previously spoken of how difficult it is to be the love of God to ourselves and to others. But Fr. Ron Rolheiser notes that the first part of the commandment, our reflection verse today,  is the most difficult to keep. He goes on to write that we are forever worshipping strange gods. Idolatry, more so even than atheism, is what is natural to us. The idolatry that afflicts us has little to do with worshipping icons, misguided devotions, and other such things. It is subtler. It has to do with the false images of God to which we give obeisance. Allow me to name ten such false gods whom we habitually substitute for the real God, Yahweh, the Father of Jesus Christ.
– The arbitrary god of fear.
– The insecure, defensive, threatened god.
– The dumb, non-understanding god.
– The exotic god of special places.
– The ascetic god whose Christ does not proclaim feast.
– The emasculated god of unbalanced piety.
– The orthodox god of strict theological formulation.
– The unholy god our own image and likeness.
– The overly intense, wired, god of our own neuroses.
– The anti-erotic god, anti-enjoyment, god of our guilt.
Space does not allow for a commentary on each of these but allows me a few more general reflections. By and large, we still believe that God is petty, defensive, and threatened by us. We feel God likes us better when we are uncreative and docile and don’t steal his fire. It is no accident that many creative persons leave the church and that the church has so often been defensive about progress, evolution, and human creativity. The God we believe in is too threatened and defensive. We also habitually worship a god whom, unconsciously, we consider rather dumb and lacking in understanding the complexity of the human being. I once officiated at a funeral for a young man from a very religious family who, while away from the church and living rather dissolutely, was killed accidentally while drunk. One woman remarked: “He was a good soul underneath it all. I knew him. If I were opening the gates of heaven, I would certainly let him in despite his irresponsibility.” She was an understanding woman, but she was not giving God credit for the same thing. All of us tend to mirror that attitude. We do not give God credit for being as bright as we are.  We commit idolatry, too, when we make God more monastic than domestic and when we limit God’s presence to churches and holy places and do not notice God in our kitchens. When I cannot see the wounds of Christ in the pained face of the person across the table from myself, then my crucifix is more gold calf than icon. Finally, we break the first commandment when we make the worship of God more a question of proper orthodoxy and correct doctrine than letting the life of the Trinity and its love flow through us. God, I suspect, prefers a loving, gracious heretic to a person who is theologically correct but bitter and unloving. Whenever we conceive of God as somehow being defensive, anti-enjoyment, less compassionate and intelligent than ourselves, and preferring orthodoxy to compassion, we are breaking the first commandment. Such is idolatry.