Author: DVO

Nobody gets to heaven without a letter of reference from the poor! That’s a quote attributed to James Forbes, an interdenominational pastor in New York City, and it wonderfully captures something that the ancient prophets of Israel underlined many centuries ago. The great prophets of Israel had coined this mantra: The quality of your faith will be judged by the quality of justice in the land. And the quality of justice in the land will always be judged by how “widows, orphans, and strangers” are faring while you are alive. That phrase, “widows, orphans, and strangers”, was code for the three weakest, most vulnerable groups in society at the time. For the great prophets of Israel, ultimately, we will be judged religiously and morally on the basis of how the poorest of the poor fared while we were alive. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that this is a scary thought, but it becomes more frightening when we see how Jesus strongly endorsed that view. While this needs to be contextualized within Jesus’ message as a whole, we have in Matthew’s Gospel the famous text about the Last Judgment where Jesus tells us that, at the end of the day, when we stand before the great King on the day of judgment, we will be asked only one set of questions and they all will have to do with how we treated the poor: Did you feed the hungry? Give drink to the thirsty? Welcome the stranger? Clothe the naked? Visit the sick? Visit prisoners? I doubt that any of us would have the raw courage to preach this, just as it is written in the gospels, from any pulpit today. And yet Jesus meant it. Nobody gets to heaven without a letter of reference from the poor. God has a preferential love for the poor, the suffering, the sick, and the weak, and so must we. Our faith assures us that the poor enter the Kingdom more easily than the rich and the strong. What can one person do in the face of all the global issues of injustice that beset us? Gustavo Gutierrez is a Peruvian philosopher, Catholic theologian, and Dominican priest. He acknowledged the complexity of the question and suggested the following: “Minimally, make sure that you always have at least one concrete poor person in your life to who you are especially attending. This will ensure that your commitment will always at least have some concrete flesh!” A single letter of reference from the poor is better than no letter at all.

It’s common, particularly among religious commentators, to describe the human heart as small, narrow, and petty: How small-hearted and petty we are! But God did not put us on earth with small, narrow, and petty hearts. The opposite is true. God puts us into this world with huge hearts as deep as the Grand Canyon. When not closed off by fear, wound, and paranoia, the human heart is the antithesis of pettiness. As Augustine describes it, the human heart is not fulfilled by anything less than infinity itself. There’s nothing small about the human heart. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that the problem that Jesus speaks of today regarding the heart is not its size or natural dynamics but what the heart tends to do when it is wounded, fearful, disrespected, paranoid, or self-deluded by greed and selfishness.  The early Church Fathers taught that the heart has two souls. Each person has a small, petty heart, a pusilla anima. We operate out of this heart when we are not at our best. This is the heart within which we feel our wounds and our distance from others. This is the heart within which we are chronically irritated and angry, the heart within which we feel the unfairness of life. This is the heart most often described by religious thinkers when they represent human nature as small and petty. But the Church Fathers taught that inside us was another heart, a magna anima, a huge, deep, big, generous, and noble heart. This is the heart we operate out of when we are at our best. This is the heart within which we feel empathy and compassion. This is the heart within which we are enflamed with noble ideals. This is the heart where we inchoately feel God’s presence in faith and hope and can move out to others in charity and forgiveness. Inside each of us, sadly often buried under suffocating wounds that keep us far from the surface, lies the heart of a saint, bursting to get out. Thus, on any given day and at any given moment, we can feel like Mother Teresa or a bitter terrorist. We can feel ready to give our lives in martyrdom, or we can feel ready to welcome the sensation of sin. We can feel like the noble Don Quixote, enflamed with idealism, or like a despairing cynic, content to settle for whatever short-range compensation and pleasure life can give rather than believing in deeper, more life-giving possibilities for ourselves and others. Everything depends upon which heart we are connected to at a given moment. When fanned to full flame, our virtues leave no room inside us for pettiness and small-heartedness. Fanning what’s highest in us eventually moves us more and more towards living out of our big hearts rather than petty hearts. Nowhere is this more important than in how we name both the size and the struggles of the human heart. We are not petty souls who occasionally do noble things. We are rather noble souls who, sadly, occasionally do petty things.

Fr. Ron Rolheiser offers some guidelines to those who serve. He begins by noting that we should try to serve others and not be caught up in the many tensions, some that beset from without and others that beset from within. How can we remain energized, effective, and true in service to others?
(1) Refuse to be pre-defined by any ideology of the left or the right. Like Jesus, transcend boundaries, constantly surprise, refuse to be classified.
(2) Don’t be afraid to be nothing and don’t be afraid to be everything! Jesus was both the Christ of silent, anonymous witness and the Christ of chanting, public processions. Honor both.
(3) Take your stand with the marginalized, even as you are known for your sanity and capacity to relate warmly and deeply to every kind of person and group.
(4) Be led by the artist but listen to the street! Be a leader, a creative person trying to lead others forward. Be a leader with empathy, without disdaining others’ culture, sentiment, or piety.
(5) Don’t be afraid to smash idols and don’t be afraid to bow in reverence! Great hearts hold near contradictory principles, lesser ones do not. Help smash the false gods that need to be smashed, even as you are unafraid to kneel often in reverence.
(6) Learn to be comfortable leading both a peace march and devotional prayer! Do not choose between justice and Jesus, between committing yourselves to the poor and fostering private intimacy with Jesus.
(7) Be thoroughly in the world, even as you are rooted elsewhere. Live in a tortured complexity! Love the world, love its pagan beauty, let it take your breath away, even as you root your heart in something deeper so that the realities of faith also take your breath away.
(8) Eat the tension around you! Mary pondered, not by thinking deep intellectual thoughts but by holding, carrying, and transforming tension so as not to give it back in kind.
(9) Go into dark places, but don’t sin! Stand up for the God-given freedom we enjoy, even as you model and show others how that freedom can be carried in a way that never abuses it.
(10) Forget about yourself and how others react to you! A bad singer on stage makes love to himself; a more mature singer makes love to his audience; a really mature singer makes love to the song. Forget your image, your need to prove yourself, and eventually forget about your audience too so that you and your song are not about yourself or about your people, but about God.

Wake up! Wake up before death wakes you up. In a less dramatic expression, that’s a virtual leitmotif in the Gospels. Jesus always tells us to wake up, stay awake, be vigilant, and be more alert to a deeper reality. What is meant by that? How are we asleep to depth? How are we to wake up and stay awake? How are we asleep? Fr. Rolheiser writes that we all know how difficult it is for us to be inside the present moment, to not be asleep to the real riches inside our own lives. The distractions and worries of daily life tend to so consume us that we habitually take for granted what’s most precious to us, our health, the miracle of our senses, the love and friendships that surround us, and the gift of life itself. We go through our daily lives not only with a lack of reflectiveness and lack of gratitude but with a habitual touch of resentment as well, a chronic, grey depression, Robert Moore calls it. We are very much asleep, both to God and to our own lives. How do we wake up? Having an awareness of our mortality does wake us up, as does a stroke, a heart attack, or cancer, but that heightened awareness is easier to sustain for a short season of our lives than it is for twenty, thirty, forty, or fifty years. Nobody can sustain that kind of awareness all the time. None of us can live seventy or eighty years as if each day was their last day. Or can we? Spiritual wisdom offers a nuanced answer: We can and can’t! On the one hand, the distractions, cares, and pressures of everyday life will invariably have their way with us, and we will, in effect, fall asleep to what’s deeper and more important inside of life. But it’s for this reason that every major spiritual tradition has daily rituals designed precisely to wake us from spiritual sleep, akin an alarm clock waking us from physical sleep. It’s for this reason we need to begin each day with prayer. What happens if we don’t pray on a given morning is not that we incur God’s wrath, but rather that we tend to miss the morning, spending the hours until noon trapped inside a certain dullness of heart. The same can be said about praying before meals. We don’t displease God by not centering ourselves in gratitude before eating, but we miss out on the richness of our actions. Liturgical prayer and the Eucharist have the same intent among their other intentions. They’re meant to regularly call us out of a certain sleep. None of us live each day of our lives as if it were their last day. So we should ensure that we have regular spiritual rituals and spiritual alarm clocks to jolt us back awake—so that it doesn’t take a heart attack, a stroke, cancer, or death to wake us up.

Scripture tells us that as John the Baptist grew up he became strong in spirit. My growing up was somewhat different. The virtue of courage is not contingent upon birth, temperament, or mental toughness, though these can be helpful. Courage is a gift from the Holy Spirit and that’s why one’s temperament and background may only serve as an explanation and not as an excuse for a lack of courage. Fr. Rolheiser writes that he highlights the above because our situation today demands courage from us, the courage for prophecy. We desperately need prophets today, but they are in short supply and too many of us are not particularly eager to volunteer for the task. Bryan Massingale, a strong prophetic voice on the issue of racism, submits that the reason we see so little real progress in dealing with racial injustice is the absence of prophetic voices where they are most needed, in this case, among the many good white people who see racial injustice, sympathize with those suffering from it, but don’t do anything about it. Several years ago, a visiting professor at our school, an Afro-American man, was sharing with our faculty some of the near daily injustices he experiences simply because of the color of his skin. At one point I asked him: “If I, as a white man, came to you like Nicodemus came to Jesus at night and asked you what I should do, what would you tell me?” His answer: Jesus didn’t let Nicodemus off easily just because he confessed his fears. Nicodemus had to do a public act to bring his faith into the light, he had to claim Jesus’ dead body. Hence, his challenge to me: you need to do a public act. He’s right; but I’m still praying for the prophetic courage to do that. And aren’t we all?

We long for peace but fail to understand why we cannot find it. When watching the news at night, most of what we see reflects what is inside of us. There is an intrinsic, never-to-be-neglected connection between what seems radically private and what’s political and social. Thus, there can be no peace on the big stage when there is greed, jealousy, unwillingness to forgive, and unwillingness to compromise within our private hearts. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that when the outer body gets sick, it nearly always signals a breakdown in the internal immune system. Hence, given the state of our world today, one can be pretty sure that there is not much in the way of antibodies (charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, long-suffering, faith, mildness, gentleness, and chastity) within the body of humanity, namely, within our private lives. When we cannot get along with each other within our own marriages and families, we should not be surprised that countries do not get along with each other. When we cannot move beyond past hurts in our own lives, we should not expect the issues causing violence in Northern Ireland, Israel, Bosnia, Iran, and Africa to be resolved simply by better politics. When we spend billions of dollars a year on cosmetics and clothing that serve to build up our appearance and make us less vulnerable, we have no right to self-righteously demand that governments cut their budgets for defense. When nearly all of us have borrowed money to have, right now, the things we cannot yet afford but want, then we should have some understanding of why our countries have all overspent and are hopelessly in debt. Waging peace requires more than simply confronting the powers that be. What must be confronted is our own greed, hurt, jealousy, inability to forgive, compromise, and respect. Peace is the opposite of internal discord or longing for something we lack. When we are not at peace, it is because we are experiencing chaos or sensing some unfinished business inside us. To be at peace, something has to have an inner consistency so that all of its movements are in harmony with each other, and it must also have a completeness so that it is not still aching for something it is missing.

The heart has its reasons, says Pascal, and sometimes those reasons have a long history. Personal contact, friendship, and theological dialogue with other denominations and faiths help open our minds and hearts. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that we are still dealing with the fruit of centuries of bitter misunderstanding, which doesn’t disappear so easily, especially when it’s institutionally entrenched and nurtured as a prophetic protection of God and truth. We have suffered through five hundred years of misunderstanding. The effects of the historical break within Christianity and its reaction are present today. They are still seen everywhere, from high church offices to debates within the academy of theology to suspicions inside the popular mind. It is sad how we’ve focused so much on our differences when at the center, at the heart, we share the same essential faith, the same essential beliefs, the same basic moral codes, the same Scriptures, the same belief in an afterlife and the same fundamental tenet that intimacy with Jesus Christ is the aim of our faith. Granted, there are some real differences among us, mainly in terms of how we understand certain aspects of the church and certain issues within morality rather than how we understand the deeper truths about the nature of God, the divinity of Christ, the gift of God’s Word, the gift of the Eucharist, and the inalienable dignity and destiny of all human beings. Within the hierarchy of truth, this essential core is what’s most important, and on this essential core, we agree. That’s the real basis of our common discipleship. The issues that divide us focus primarily on church authority, ordination to ministry, whether to emphasize word or sacrament, how to understand the presence of Christ in the Eucharist, the number of sacraments, the place of sacramentals and devotions within discipleship, and how scripture and tradition interplay with each other. The earliest Christian Creed had but a single line: Jesus is Lord! All Christians still agree on that, and so we remain brothers and sisters, separated only by five hundred years of misunderstanding.

I came across this post from a doctoral student in systematic theology at the University of Notre Dame, Justin Bartkus. I am sharing today a critical thing to remember of challenges we can face in passing on the faith. “Several years ago, I found myself at a coffee shop, seated across from a proud and energetic father of three young kids. I was interviewing him as part of a research study on how parents view the importance of religion in raising their children. I asked him, one of the stauncher Catholics we interviewed, whether it would bother him if his children eventually did not remain Catholic. His response was firm and passionate: ‘I would hope they do, yes, but my children are not outcomes.’ In their zeal to assert their correctness in the ‘whats’ of religion, namely the ritual observances and adherence to formulae, the Pharisees are forgetful of the how required of them by God’s grace: to act always in tenderness, vulnerability, and gentleness. And so it is for us. Absent these virtues of grace, we will inevitably immolate people into an ash heap of outcomes, locking doors before them and making them subservient to our expectations rather than to God’s wise and timely providence. It is much more challenging to be humble than correct, infinitely more sanctifying to preach the truth in patience than condemn in wrath. Even if the ‘whats’ of religion is necessary for holiness, its entire work lies in the “how” of the catechetical method.

Today we continue to follow Jesus’ teaching on what we celebrate today as the Eucharist. Jesus previously said in chapter 6 of John’s Gospel to his followers, “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you.” Bishop Robert Barron writes that today, we have the final outcome of the story. We hear that “many of Jesus’ disciples who were listening said, ‘This saying is hard; who can accept it?’” Notice that we are talking about Jesus’ followers. And yet they find this teaching impossible to take. If Jesus’ words were meant in a symbolic sense, they wouldn’t have had this shocking effect. If what he meant was simply, This bread is a symbol of my body, why would there be such a strong reaction? The Jewish Scriptures deal in poetic metaphor all the time. The point is that they had understood him in this context only too well. Given every opportunity to explain himself better, Jesus does nothing of the kind. Instead, he upbraids them for their lack of faith. This is why the Catholic tradition has insisted, against all attempts to soften these words of Jesus, that he should be taken straightforwardly. Jesus then asks his disciples a troubling question: “Do you also want to leave?” Father Patrick van der Vorst writes that this question comes after many of his followers had abandoned him. Today’s reading serves as a reminder that we all have a choice to make every day. Jesus doesn’t want us to stay with him against our will. However, if we do decide to stay, like the Twelve, he has plenty of work for us to do. Jesus didn’t force them into doing anything; he simply asked, and they responded. Christ will indeed take us to incredible places if we remain with him. He doesn’t force us to lead catechism classes, become eucharistic ministers, arrange flowers for the church, attend a seminary, or pray with our families. It is all our free choice. As summer slowly draws to a close, maybe today is a good day to think of what we want to say “yes” to when work and schools start again in September. If we continue to say yes to what he proposes to us, we embark on an exciting and adventurous path towards the greatness he has in store for each of us. Our faith is indeed a rich, wonderful adventure, one to which we are asked to say yes to every day, and not walk away.

Today, we celebrate the Apostle Saint Bartholomew. He is mentioned only in the lists of the apostles. Some scholars identify him with Nathanael, a man of Cana in Galilee who was summoned to Jesus by Philip. So, is it Bartholomew or Nathanael? We are confronted again with the fact that we know almost nothing about most of the apostles. John writes that when Nathanael asked how Jesus knew him, Jesus said, “I saw you under the fig tree.” Whatever amazing revelation this involved, it brought Nathanael to exclaim, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God; you are the King of Israel.” Jesus countered, “Do you believe because I told you that I saw you under the fig tree? You will see greater things than this.” Nathanael did see greater things. He was one of those to whom Jesus appeared on the shore of the Sea of Tiberias after his resurrection. Little is known about the life stories of most of the apostles. However, the unknown ones were also foundation stones, the 12 pillars of the new Israel, whose 12 tribes now encompass the whole earth. Their personalities were secondary to their great office of bearing tradition from their firsthand experience, speaking in the name of Jesus, and putting the Word Made Flesh into human words for the enlightenment of the world. Their holiness was not an introverted contemplation of their status before God. It was a gift that they had to share with others. The Good News was that all are called to the holiness of being Christ’s members by the gracious gift of God. The simple fact is that humanity is meaningless unless God is its total concern. Then humanity, made holy with God’s holiness, becomes the most precious creation of God.