Author: DVO

The gospels tell us that, next to Jesus, there isn’t anyone more important than John the Baptist. Herod knew well of John’s criticism of his behavior. But, like John, criticism is only a half-job, a half-prophecy: It can denounce a king by showing what’s wrong, and it can wash the soul in sand by blasting off layers of accumulated rust and dirt, but ultimately it can’t empower us to correct anything. Something else is needed. Grace. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that the gospels speak of two kinds of baptisms: the baptism of John and the baptism of Jesus, adding that John’s baptism is only a preparation for Jesus’ baptism. What’s John’s baptism? It’s a baptism of repentance, a realization of our wrongdoings, and a clear resolution to correct our bad behavior. What’s Jesus’ baptism? It’s an entry into grace and community in such a way that it empowers us internally to do what is impossible for us to do by our willpower alone. But how does this work? Is grace a kind of magic? No. It’s not magic. All psychic, emotional, and spiritual energy is, by definition, beyond a simple phenomenological understanding. Simply put, we can’t lay out its inner plumbing. There’s a mystery to all energy. But we can empirically lay out its effect: spiritual energy works. Grace works. This has been proven inside the experience of thousands of people (many of them atheists) who have been able to find an energy inside them that clearly does not come from them and yet empowers them beyond their willpower alone. Ask any addict in recovery about this. Sadly, many of us who are solid believers still haven’t grasped the lesson. We’re still trying to live out our lives by John’s baptism alone, that is, by our own willpower. That makes us excellent critics but leaves us powerless to change our own lives. What we are looking for and desperately need is a deeper immersion into the baptism of Jesus, that is, into community and grace.

Jesus is confronted today by the people of his own town who question how he became so wise since they only knew him as the carpenter’s son. This begs the question, what does it mean to be wise? There’s a vast difference between being bright and being wise, between brilliance and wisdom. We can be brilliant but not very wise. Ideally, we should strive to be both, but that is only sometimes the case, particularly today. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that we’re living in a culture that rewards brilliance above wisdom and within which we pride ourselves, first of all, in being brighter than each other. Who has the highest degree? Who went to the most elite university? Who’s the most entrepreneurial? Who’s the most popular? Who’s the cleverest scientist, researcher, writer, journalist, television personality, or wit at the office or family table? Who’s the most brilliant? We never ask: Who’s the wisest? Today, intelligence is valued far above wisdom, and that’s not always good. We’re a highly informed and intelligent people, but our compassion is not nearly on par with our brilliance. We’re bright but not wise. What’s the difference between intelligence and wisdom? Wisdom is intelligence that’s colored by understanding (which, parsed to its root, means infused with empathy). In the end, what makes for wisdom is intelligence informed by empathy, intelligence that grasps with sympathy the complexity of others and the world. Empathy is not to be confused with sentimentality or naiveté, as is sometimes the case. Sentimentality and naiveté see a fault within intellectuality itself, seeing learning itself as the problem. But learning is never the problem. One-sided learning is the problem, namely, learning that isn’t sufficiently informed by empathy, which seeks knowledge without understanding. It’s not good merely to be smart; we must also be compassionate.

Why does God not act in the face of suffering? Why do bad things happen with seemingly no response from God? Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that there have been countless attempts to answer this question, not least inside the tortured experience of those suffering. Jesus died in silence, inside God’s silence and the world’s incomprehension. And we can let ourselves be scandalized by that silence, just as we can be scandalized by the seeming triumph of evil, pain, and suffering in our world. God’s seeming silence in the face of evil and death can forever scandalize us. In Christian theology, we believe that what is ultimately at stake is human freedom and God’s respect for it. God gives us freedom and refuses to violate it, even when it would seem beneficial to do so. That leaves us in a lot of pain at times, but, as Jesus reveals, God is not so much a rescuing God as a redeeming one. God’s seeming indifference to suffering is not so much a mystery that leaves the mind befuddled but a mystery that makes sense only if you give yourself over in a certain level of trust. Forgiveness and faith work the same. You have to roll the dice in trust. Nothing else can give you an answer. Despite every appearance to the contrary at times, in the end, love does triumph over hatred. Peace does triumph over chaos. Forgiveness does triumph over bitterness. Hope does triumph over cynicism. Fidelity does triumph over despair. Virtue does triumph over sin. Conscience does triumph over callousness. Life triumphs over death, and good always triumphs over evil. Our faith begins at the very point where it seems it should end, in God’s seeming silence in the face of evil. And what does this ask of us? We must trust in the truth of the resurrection. Those who live in trust will find love. God’s silence can be trusted, even when we die inside of it. We must remain faithful in love, forgiveness, and conscience despite everything suggesting they are naive. They will bring us to what is deepest inside of life. Ultimately, God vindicates virtue. God vindicates love. God vindicates conscience. God vindicates forgiveness. God vindicates fidelity. Ultimately, God vindicated Jesus and will vindicate us, too, if we remain faithful.

Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that every choice in life is a renunciation. Thomas Aquinas said that, and it helps explain why we struggle so painfully to make clear choices. We want the right things, but we want other things too. Every choice is a series of renunciations: If I marry one person, I cannot marry anyone else; if I live in one place, I cannot live anywhere else; if I choose a certain career, that excludes many other careers; if I have this, then I cannot have that. The list could go on indefinitely. To choose one thing is to renounce others. That’s the nature of choice. We are fired into this world with a madness that comes from the gods and has us believe that we are destined to embrace the cosmos itself. We don’t want something, we want everything. That’s a simple way, though a good one, of saying something that Christianity has always said, namely, that in body and soul we are meant to embrace everyone and we already hunger for that. Perhaps we experience it most clearly in our sexuality, but the hunger is everywhere present in us. Our yearning is wide, our longing is infinite, our urge to embrace is promiscuous. We are infinite in yearning, but, in this life, only get to meet the finite. Life and love, beyond the abstract and beyond the grandiosity of our own daydreams, involve hard, painful renunciation. But it is precisely that very renunciation that helps us grow up and makes our lives real in a way that our daydreams don’t. In trying to explain some of the deeper secrets of life, Jesus gives us this parable: The Kingdom of God is like a merchant in search of fine pearls, when he finds a single one of great value, he goes and sells all that he owns and buys that pearl. That, the pearl of great price, the value of love and its cost, is in essence the challenge that young husband put to his wife when he told her to sort out the question: “Are you a married woman or are you something else?” For what are you willing to renounce other things? What is our own pearl of great price? Are we willing to give up everything in exchange for it? Are we willing to live with its limits? Thoreau once said: “The youth gets together materials to build a bridge to the moon or perhaps a palace or a temple…at length the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them.” So too in love and life: The child sets out make love to the whole world and the adult eventually concludes to marry a single person, in essence, to build a woodshed. But it’s only in that woodshed where life and love are real in this world.

God is ineffable because God’s energy is ineffable. What, indeed, is energy? Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that we rarely ask this question because we take energy as something so primal that it cannot be defined but only taken as a given, as self-evident. We see energy as the primal force that lies at the heart of everything that exists, animate and inanimate. Moreover, we feel energy powerfully within ourselves. We know energy and feel energy but can rarely recognize its origins, its prodigiousness, its joy, its goodness, its effervescence, and its exuberance. We rarely recognize what it tells us about God. What does it tell us? The first quality of energy is its prodigiousness. It is prodigal beyond our imagination, and this speaks something about God. What kind of creator makes billions of throwaway universes?  What kind of creator makes trillions upon trillions of species of life, millions of them never to be seen by the human eye? What kind of father or mother has billions of children? And what does the exuberance in the energy of young children say about our creator? What does their playfulness suggest about what must also lie inside of sacred energy? What does the energy of a young puppy tell us about what’s sacred? What do laughter, wit, and irony tell us about God? No doubt the energy we see around us and feel irrepressibly within us tells us that, underneath, before and below everything else, there flows a sacred force, both physical and spiritual, which is at its root, joyous, happy, playful, exuberant, effervescent, and deeply personal and loving.  That energy is God. That energy speaks of God, and that energy tells us why God made us and what kind of permissions God is giving us for living out our lives. Moreover, that energy, at its sacred root, is not just creative, intelligent, personal, and loving, it’s also joyous, colorful, witty, playful, humorous, erotic, and exuberant at it very core. To feel it is an invitation to gratitude. The challenge of our lives is to live inside that energy in a way that honors it and its origins. That means keeping our shoes off before the burning bush as we respect its sacredness, even as we take from it permission to be more robust, free, joyous, humorous, and playful – and especially more grateful.

The Lazarus story begs a lot of questions. Lazarus and his sisters, Martha and Mary, were very close friends of Jesus. Martha and Mary sent word to Jesus that “the man you love is ill.” That man was Lazarus. So their request came with an implied reaction that Jesus should come and heal him. Hence, we are understandably taken aback by Jesus’ seeming lack of response to Lazarus’ illness and the request to come and heal him. As Jesus approaches the village where Lazarus has died, he is met by Martha and then, later, by Mary. Each, in turn, asks him the question: “Why?”  Why, since you loved this man, did you not come to save him from death? Jesus doesn’t offer any theoretical apologia in response. Instead, he asks where they have laid the body, lets them take him there, sees the burial site, weeps in sorrow, and then raises his dead friend back to life.  So why did he let him die in the first place? Why didn’t Jesus rush down to save Lazarus since he loved him? The answer to that question teaches a very important lesson about Jesus, God, and faith, namely, that God is not a God who ordinarily rescues us but is rather a God who redeems us. God doesn’t ordinarily intervene to save us from humiliation, pain, and death; rather, he redeems humiliation, pain, and death after the fact. This is one of the key revelations inside the resurrection: We have a redeeming, not a rescuing, God. Jesus never promised us rescue, exemptions, immunity from cancer, or escape from death. He promised rather that, in the end, there will be redemption, vindication, immunity from suffering, and eternal life. But that’s in the end; meantime, in the early and intermediate chapters of our lives, there will be the same kinds of humiliation, pain, and death that everyone else suffers. The death and resurrection of Jesus reveal a redeeming, not a rescuing, God.

At the end of the day, all of us, believers and non-believers, pious and impious, share one common humanity and all end up on the same road. This has many implications. It’s no secret that today religious practice is plummeting radically everywhere in the secular world. Those who are opting out don’t all look the same, nor go by the same name. Some are atheists, explicitly denying the existence of God. Others are agnostics, open to accepting the existence of God but remaining undecided. Others self-define as nones; asked what faith they belong to they respond by saying none. There are those who define themselves as dones, done with religion and done with church. Then there are the procrastinators, persons who know that someday they will have to deal with the religious question, but, like Saint Augustine, keep saying, eventually I need to do this, but not yet! Finally, there’s that huge group who define themselves as spiritual but not religious, saying they believe in God but not in institutionalized religion. I suspect that God doesn’t much share our anxiety here, not that God sees this as perfectly healthy (humans are human!), but rather that God has a larger perspective on it, is infinitely loving, and is longsuffering in patience while tolerating our choices. Gabriel Marcel once famously stated, To say to someone ‘I love you’ is to say, ‘you will never be lost’. As Christians, we understand this in terms of our unity inside the Body of Christ. God loves everyone individually and passionately and works in ways that ensure that nobody gets lost. God is infinitely patient. We have an intended destination, and God gives us constant instructions along the way.  Religion and the church are an excellent GPS. However, they can be ignored and frequently are. But God’s response is never one of anger nor of a final impatience. Like a trusted GPS, God is forever saying ‘recalculating’ and giving us new instructions predicated on our failure to accept the previous instruction. Eventually, no matter our number of wrong turns and dead ends, God will get us home. Ultimately, God is the only game in town, in that no matter how many false roads we take and how many good roads we ignore, we all end up on the one, same, last, final road. 

This Gospel is not only highly insightful, but it’s also very realistic and compassionate. With injustices and crises in every part of the world, many ask ultimate questions about good and evil. “Where do the weeds come from? Where does evil originate? Why do people do such harmful things?” Fr. Richard Rohr writes that he asks this question a dozen times daily. This world doesn’t make sense. How can people be so malicious, so unkind, so uncaring? It’s like we don’t know how to care anymore, as though we don’t know how to access our hearts, souls, and spirits. Those of us who grew up as Christians may have heard this parable when we were younger. We may have been told to pull out the imperfect weeds and eliminate our faults. But since we really couldn’t get rid of them, we covered them up and pretended we didn’t have them. And that doesn’t work. Yet Jesus shows us absolute realism. He said something never said to me when I was young: “Let the weeds and the wheat both grow together.” Wow! That’s risky. I can’t pretend to logically understand it, although I know it allows me to be compassionate with myself. After all, I’m also a field of weeds and wheat, just like you and everything else. Everything is a mixed bag, a combination of good and bad. We are not all weeds, but we are not all wheat, either. We have to learn, even now, to accept and forgive this mixed bag of reality in ourselves and everybody else. If we don’t, we usually become very angry people. Our world is filled with a lot of angry people because they cannot accept their own weeds. To accept this teaching doesn’t mean we can say, “It’s okay to be selfish, violent, and evil.” It means that we have some realism about ourselves and each other. We have to name the weed as a weed. We can’t just pretend it’s all wheat, all good, because it isn’t. We’re not perfect. Our countries are not perfect. The Church is not perfect. The project of learning how to love—which is our only life project—is quite simply learning to accept this. If you really love anybody, and I hope you all do, then you have learned to accept a person despite, and sometimes even because of, their faults. Love means saying, “I know your faults, I see your weeds, and I care for you anyway.” Only God’s heart, only the mind of Christ in us, really and fully knows how to do that.

Our gospel reading today continues our discussion on the “Sower.” We have previously noted that God’s generosity is beyond our human understanding as He sows seed everywhere. Fr. Ron Rolheiser looks at God’s abundance from a perspective of how we embrace God’s generosity in a world becoming increasingly divided and separated. He asks us, “What does it mean to be inclusive?” He writes that it begins with the word “Catholic.” The opposite of being “Catholic” is not being “Protestant”. The opposite of “Catholic” is being narrow, exclusive, and overly selective in our embrace. The opposite of being “Catholic” is to define our faith-family too narrowly. “Catholic” means to be wide and universal. It means incarnating the embrace of an abundant and prodigal God whose sun shines on all indiscriminately, the bad and the good. Jesus once defined this by saying, “In my father’s house, there are many rooms.” God’s heart is wide, abundant, prodigal, and universally embracing. His heart takes care to pray for those “other sheep who are not of this fold.” To be “Catholic” is to imitate that. The God that Jesus reveals to us is a God of infinite abundance. Inside God, there is no scarcity, no stinginess, no sparing of mercy. As the parable of the Sower makes clear, this God scatters his seed indiscriminately on every kind of soil – bad soil, mediocre soil, good soil, excellent soil. God can do this because God’s love and mercy are limitless. It seems God never worries about someone receiving cheap, undeserved grace. Jesus also assures us that God is prodigal, like the father of the prodigal son and his older brother. God embraces both the missteps of our immaturity and the bitterness and resentment within our maturity. Good religion needs to honor that. Today, on both sides of the ideological divide, conservative or liberal alike, we must remind ourselves what living under an abundant, prodigal, universally embracing, and “Catholic” God means. What it means, among other things, is a constant stretching of the heart to an ever-wider inclusivity. How wide are our hearts? Exclusivity can mask itself as depth and passion for truth. Still, it invariably reveals itself in its inability to handle ambiguity and otherness, as rigidity and fear, as if God and Jesus needed our protection. More importantly, it often, too, reveals itself as lacking genuine empathy for those outside its own circle, and in that, it fails to honor its own abundant and prodigal God.

July 25th, is the Feast of St. James the Greater, one of the twelve apostles and the first of the apostles to be martyred. Acts of the Apostles records that he was killed at the command of Herod Agrippa, a descendent of the tyrant king, Herod, who is named in Matthew’s Gospel as the sociopath that orchestrated the massacre of the children of Bethlehem. The scriptures provide us with a few details about St. James, but where they fall silent, popular piety has many tales to tell. St. James is reputed to have been the first Christian missionary to Spain, and after his execution, his remains were brought from Jerusalem to Galicia for safekeeping. A shrine was built to honor his memory, which was destroyed by the Romans during a persecution of the Church. St. James’ relics were lost until they were rediscovered under miraculous circumstances in the year 814 AD. These relics quickly became a focal point of pilgrimage, and in the year 1075 AD, the construction of the grand cathedral of Santiago de Compostela was begun. The shrine was consecrated in the year 1128, though the building that we see today is the result of architectural and artistic embellishment that took place over many centuries. The edifice rises like a great ornate mountain of granite over the city that bears its name. The magnitude of the cathedral is testimony to not only the esteem in which the Galicians hold their Saint, but also serves as a reminder that for hundreds of years, the cultural and economic life of European civilization was powered by a vast network of shrines and pilgrimage destinations. Pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela has been a constant since the Middle Ages, and thousands have walked the sacred way to the cathedral, which stretches about 500 miles from Biarritz in France all the way to Compostela. Upon arriving in the church, pilgrims complete their journey by climbing a staircase behind the main altar of the cathedral, where a gilded and bejeweled image of St. James is displayed. Pilgrims embrace the statue as if they are meeting a friend, placing their arms around the saint’s shoulders and delivering prayers that during their long pilgrimage were held as treasures in their hearts. – Fr. Steve Grunow