Author: DVO

It has been written by many great theologians and mystics that we come into the world already knowing, however dimly, perfect oneness, perfect truth, perfect goodness, and perfect beauty because they already lie inside us like an unerasable brand. Some gave this a mythical expression. They taught that the human soul comes from God and that the last thing that God does before putting a soul into the body is to kiss the soul. The soul then goes through life, always dimly remembering that kiss, a kiss of perfect love, and the soul measures all of life’s loves and kisses against that primordial perfect kiss. The ancient Greek Stoics taught something similar. They taught that souls preexisted inside God and that God, before putting a soul into a body, would blot out the memory of its preexistence. But the soul would then always be unconsciously drawn towards God because, having come from God, it would always dimly remember its real home, God, and ache to return there. On this All Souls Day, when we take time to remember those who have departed, as I do for my aunts, uncles, cousins, in-laws, friends, and most importantly, my sister, mother, and father, I pray that they are experiencing this very day the fulfillment of the longing that St. Augustine spoke about over 1700 years ago: “You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”

My parents and the significant elders in my youth, while not perfect, walked their talk, at least essentially so. They raised my siblings and me to believe in God and in the church, and then, by the way they lived their lives and treated us, gave us reason enough to believe that the trust they asked of us, towards God and church, was well placed. They made God and the church credible. How did they do this? By never essentially betraying us, their children. Their love was neither perfect nor unconditional nor even adequate – nobody, save God, can do that, but neither did they betray us, or themselves, in so deep a way that it cast doubt upon the essential trust they asked of us. Today, I have faith in God and the church largely because of that. My elders didn’t betray me. But what if my life has been one of feeling betrayed? If I have been deeply betrayed as a child, why trust now? If the words of my parents or a significant elder were essentially dishonest, why should I not suspect this is the case with all authority, church or civil? If the religious talk and actions of my elders were more appearance than reality, why shouldn’t I think that all religious talk and action is simple appearance? Why should I not be suspicious of a dark confessional box when I will spend my life trying to get over what happened to me in some other dark place? And why shouldn’t I suspect that all authority, in the end, is self-serving, lying, and exploitative if that has been my primal experience? Why shouldn’t I believe that all human authority is dishonest and untrustworthy? It is essential to know that we come to the church with very different experiences, and we must be sensitive to each other. For some of us, it didn’t hurt to be a child, and the blind trust we gave our parents and the church was a good investment. For others, though, too much of what church and church authority stand for can only seem like a big lie. If our parents or elders were immature, neglectful, self-interested, or, worse yet, positively abusive, that is the way the church and its leaders will also appear to us. Understanding this can help gestate compassion on all sides. [Excerpt from Fr. Ron Rolheiser’s article, “Children Of Our God – And Of Our Elders”]

We are rarely at our best. Too often, what shows forth in our lives is not what’s best in us: love, generosity, and a big heart. More often than not, our lives radiate irritation, pettiness, and a small heart. Too frequently, we find ourselves consumed by petty irritations, conflicts, frustrations, and anger. Each of these might be small in itself, but cumulatively, they take the sunshine and delight out of our lives, like mosquitoes spoiling a picnic. Then, instead of feeling grateful, gracious, and magnanimous, we feel paranoid, fearful, and irritable, and we end up acting out of a cold, irritated, paranoid part of ourselves rather than out of our real selves. As Christians, we believe that what ultimately defines us and gives us our dignity is the image and likeness of God inside us. This is our deepest identity, our real self. Inside each of us, there is a piece of divinity, a god or goddess, a person who carries an inviolable dignity with a heart as big as God’s. Our great dignity, the Imago Dei inside each of us, is meant to be a center from which we can draw vision, grace, and strength to act in a way that, ironically, precisely helps us to swallow our pride. St. John tells us that at the last supper, Jesus got up from the table and began to wash the feet of his disciples, against their protests. That gesture, washing someone else’s feet, has classically been preached on as an act of humility. When Jesus washes his disciples’ feet in John’s Gospel and tells us he is setting an example for us to imitate, he is inviting us to have the strength to bend down in understanding and wash the feet of those whom, for all kinds of reasons, we would rather not have anything to do with. It is akin to having Pro-Life and Pro-Choice, strident conservatives and strident liberals, fundamentalists and atheists wash each others’ feet. Normally we don’t have the strength to do that, there is too much pride and desire for righteousness at stake. When we are in touch with the fact that we have “come from God and are going back to God,” then, and only then, can we swallow enough pride to be genuinely loving. [Excerpt from Fr. Ron Rolheiser’s article, “Finding the Strength to Reach Across Differences”]

Having lived in Japan for almost six years, we learned how a different culture views friendship. In Western culture, we tend to freely and easily imply that we have a relationship with someone when we have just met. You have probably experienced this at work or school. A person is introduced to you. You chat, depart, and go about your life. Before you know it, this acquaintance refers to you as “best of friends.” Our Japanese hosts found this behavior both humorous and challenging. Friendship, in their eyes, required a lengthier time together so that you truly got to know who this person was and that their words and actions were meaningful, consistent, and dependable because they matched how they lived their life. Friendship was viewed as a steadfast commitment to each other and was not something given away lightly. Friendship demanded a trust that only came from spending intimate time together. This is what Jesus is telling us today. We cannot simply view our relationship with him like some adoring fan of a popular public figure. If that is how we base our relationship with people, knowing only the public picture and nothing of who they are personally, how can we ever get to see the person in such a way that they, or we, would lay our lives down for each other? Christ wants us to know and trust him with our entire life. This takes a real commitment on our part to give ourselves totally to him, investing time in prayer, reading of scripture, and living our lives in every way possible to honor his commandment to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and love your neighbor as yourself.” Only in this way can we establish the intimate relationship he genuinely desires for each of us.

This passage from St. Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians has always seemed to draw a “side eye” look from couples sitting in the pews and for what many see as a very good reason – the thought that wives are to be submissive to a “dominate” husband who is “head of his wife.” Fr. Ron Rolheiser wonders if the growing sensitivity to gender language and the Christian “discipleship of equals” has suddenly rendered invalid and irrelevant the teaching of Ephesians on the sacrament of matrimony?” He goes on to say that it shouldn’t. Why? Because it requires us to read this passage in the context of the overall letter and understand that this phrasing comes from the honest effort of the English translators to break up a long Greek sentence to make for easier reading. In their attempt to break the sentence into smaller units, the translators chose to repeat the verb from verse 21 of “be submissive” or “be subordinate,” causing many readers to be distracted from the fact that this clause is simply beginning to unfold the mandate of mutual subordination that governs the whole passage. Whatever we want to make of the author’s assumptions about the distinctive roles of the spouses in their relationship, the overriding message is that, in the body of Christ, the marital relationship is utterly transformed into the life of mutual subordination demanded of all baptized disciples. In the end, this passage from Ephesians on marriage simply spelled out the teaching of Jesus that his followers are to be characterized by service to one another and the laying down of life for one another. All disciples are called to seek the highest form of love, “agape love,” which is all about loving “other” simply as other – no strings attached. It is the bedrock of mutual love and is at the heart of the two great commandments that all disciples are bound to. While this saying is difficult, the difficulty has to do mainly with not understanding mutual subordination. And that mutual subordination takes its life from the subordination of each person to Christ. Whatever the role expectations of spouses in a particular culture, baptism into the Christian covenant transmutes them absolutely into this mutual unconditional love commitment.

Eternal life. Where is it? When is it? For a long time, I have thought about eternal life as a life after all my birthdays have run out. For most of my years, I have spoken about eternal life as the “afterlife” or “life after death.” But the older I become, the less interest my “afterlife” holds for me. Worrying not only about tomorrow, next year, and the next decade but even about the next life seems a false preoccupation. Wondering how things will be for me after I die seems, for the most part, a distraction. When my clear goal is the eternal life, that life must be reachable right now, where I am, because eternal life is life in and with God, and God is where I am here and now. The great mystery of the spiritual life—the life in God—is that we don’t have to wait for it as something that will happen later. Jesus says: “Dwell in me as I dwell in you.” It is this divine in-dwelling that is eternal life. It is the active presence of God at the center of my living—the movement of God’s Spirit within us—that gives us the eternal life. The Spirit of Jesus comes to dwell within us so that we can become living Christs [Christians] here and now.      – Henri Nouwen

The Gospel reading for this Sunday hinges on a single phrase: “Son of David.” For the Jews, this title was pregnant with Messianic significance: David’s heir, the one to usher in the everlasting kingdom, the fulfillment of all their longings, was the son of David promised in the Scriptures. But to the Jewish crowd, this was blasphemous, as only the Messiah could be referred to in this way. Imagine you were the blind beggar Bartimaeus, living in the shadows of life, deep in his darkness but with piercingly attuned ears to hear the stories of Jesus’ redemptive power. For him, this is a moment he has been seeking, and he will not be denied. So, he continues to call out, “Son of David, have pity on me.” Jesus hears him and calls to the blind man, “What do you want me to do for you?” Bartimaeus’ clear and simple reply was, “Master, I want to see.” Jesus immediately responds to this request by saying, “Go your way; your faith has saved you.”  How does this story affect each of us today, especially those of us who have felt that our prayers often go unanswered? Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that our prayers aren’t always answered as swiftly and directly as we see in today’s reading, but they are always answered, as Jesus assures us, because God does not withhold the Holy Spirit from those who ask for it. If we pray for guidance and support, it will be given us. All of us, at different times in our lives, find ourselves alone, lost, confused, and tempted towards a road that will not lead to life. At such times we need to approach God with a prayer that is shamelessly honest, direct, and humble. Then, we need to wait, in patience and belief that God will place His answer to our prayers before us. We must remember that God responds in ways that align with His will for our lives, not our will. And that is often the rub – testing our ability to wait and to listen for “God’s still small voice” that can come from anyone or anywhere in His creative landscape.

William James wrote: “I am done with great things and big plans, great institutions and big success. I am for those tiny, invisible loving human forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, which, if given time, will rend the hardest monument of pride.” Fr. Rolheiser writes that this wisdom speaks to the deep, important things that most affect us are usually not big and showy, but tiny, perhaps even imperceptible. Every community or society has a certain visible life that can be seen and whose overt interconnections, to an extent, can be grasped, charted, and written up into textbooks. But, just as with the human body, most of the deep things in a community are under the surface, invisible, silent, available only through another kind of instrument, the intuitive gaze of the mystic, novelist, poet, or artist. And all of this is even more true of the body of Christ, the community of the baptized, the sincere. Most of the important processes there are also invisible. Like any other body, partly this body is visible – physical, historical, something that can be observed from the outside. Historical Christianity, the churches, in their concrete history, are the visible body of Christ – people, institutions, buildings, virtue, and sin enfleshed in history. But the body of Christ is more than meets the physical eye, a billion times more. As in every body, countless, silent, invisible processes are going on beneath. Inside the body of Christ, as in all bodies, there are deadly viruses, an immune system, cancer-cells, and health-carrying enzymes. What’s deepest inside of life is not visible to the naked eye. The union among ourselves in the “communion of saints” is also a presence to each other beyond distance. Inside the body of Christ, we are present to each other and carry each other across the miles. Everything we do, good or bad, affects all the others. To believe this is to be both consoled and challenged. Consoled in knowing that we carry each other in love and union across all distances, even through death. But challenged too in knowing that everything we do, be it ever so private, is either a bad virus or healthy enzyme affecting the overall health of the body of Christ and the family of humanity.

Language is a tremendous feature of our human being and allows us to interpret things, especially as words create a word picture of what we see. A reporter once asked two men at the construction site where a church was being built what each did for a living. The first man replied: “I’m a bricklayer.” The second said: “I’m building a cathedral!”  How we interpret and name an experience largely determines its meaning to us. Philip Rieff writes that we live our lives under a certain “symbolic hedge” within a language and set of concepts by which we interpret our experience. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that we can understand our experience within a language and set of concepts that have us believe that things are very meaningful or that they are quite shallow and not very meaningful at all. Experience is rich or shallow, depending upon the language within which we interpret it. For example, we see the language of soul, among other places, in some of our great myths and fairy tales, many of them centuries old. Their seeming simplicity masks a disarming depth. To offer just one example, take the story of Cinderella: The first thing to notice is that the name Cinderella is not an actual name but a composite of two words: Cinder, meaning ashes, and Puella, meaning young girl. This is not a simple fairy tale about a lonely, beaten-down young girl. It’s a myth that highlights a universal, paradoxical, paschal dynamic that we experience in our lives, where, before you are ready to wear the glass slipper, be the belle of the ball, marry the prince, and live happily ever after, you must first spend some prerequisite time sitting in the ashes, suffering humiliation, and being purified by that time in the dust. Thus, there are two ways of understanding ourselves: we can have a job or we can have a vocation; we can be lost or we can be spending our 40 days in the desert; we can be bitterly frustrated or we can be pondering with Mary; or we can be slaving away for a pay check or we can be building a cathedral. Meaning depends a lot on language.

Jesus, at times, makes us sit back and wonder, “What did he just say?” Today, in Luke’s Gospel, the Lord says, “I have come to cast a fire upon the earth; how I wish it were already kindled.” Hmmm, I thought the angels on Christmas morning said that he had come as the Prince of Peace? Jesus is the Incarnation of the God who is nothing but love, but this enfleshment, as Bishop Robert Barron notes, takes place in the midst of a fallen, sinful world. Christ was a sign of contradiction. Our Lord is forewarning his disciples about the contention and division which will accompany the spread of the Gospel. As His disciples, to live a life as Christ taught is to be branded as radical in the eyes of a world obsessed with the material self. Our Baptism is a submersion in Christ’s death, in which we die to sin and are reborn to the new life of grace. Through this new life, we Christians should become set on fire in the same way as Jesus set his disciples on fire. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that Christianity is the only religion that worships the scapegoat, the one who is hated, excluded, spat upon, blamed for everything, ridiculed, shamed, and made expendable. Christianity is the only religion that focuses on imitating the victim and sees God in the one who is surrounded by the halo of hatred. We must be “set on fire” in the same way Jesus set his disciples on fire, with hearts ablaze in love of the marginalized, the sick, the poor, the handicapped, the unborn, the unattractive, the non-productive, and the aged. This is the cross we must lovingly bear in suffering with Christ through the grace of God.