Author: DVO

We, and everything on our planet, live because of the sun’s generosity. The sun reflects the abundance of God, a generosity that invites us also to be generous, to have big hearts, to risk more in giving ourselves away in self-sacrifice, and to witness God’s abundance. But Fr. Rolheiser writes this is challenging. Instinctually, we move more naturally toward self-preservation and security. By nature, we fear, and we horde. Because of this, whether we are poor or not, we tend to work out of a sense of scarcity, fearing always that we don’t have enough, that there isn’t enough, and that we need to be careful in what we give away, that we can’t afford to be too generous. But God belies this, as does nature. God is prodigal, abundant, generous, and wasteful beyond our small fears and imaginations. In the biblical parable of the Sower, the Sower scatters seeds indiscriminately everywhere: on the road, in the bushes, in the rocks, into barren soil, and good soil. It seems he has unlimited seeds, so he works from a generous sense of abundance rather than from a guarded sense of scarcity. God is equally as prodigal and generous in forgiveness, as we see in the gospels. In the parable of the Father, who forgives the prodigal son, we see a person who can forgive out of a richness that dwarfs dignity and calculated cost to self. From everything we can see, God is so rich in love and mercy that he can afford to be wasteful, over-generous, non-calculating, non-discriminating, incredibly risk-taking, and big-hearted beyond our imaginations. And that’s the invitation: to have a sense of God’s abundance and always risk a bigger heart and generosity beyond the instinctual fear. Jesus assures us that the measure we measure out is the measure that we ourselves will receive in return. Essentially, that says that the air we breathe out will be the air we re-inhale. If we breathe out miserliness, we will re-inhale miserliness; if we breathe out pettiness, we will breathe in pettiness; if we breathe out bitterness, then bitterness will be the air that surrounds us; and if we breathe out a sense of scarcity that makes us calculate and be fearful, then calculation and fearfulness will be the air we re-inhale. But, if we are aware of God’s abundance, we breathe out generosity and forgiveness; we will breathe in the air of generosity and forgiveness. We re-inhale what we exhale. To be generous and big-hearted, we must first trust in God’s abundance and generosity.

One of the great iconoclasts of our age, Simone Weil, was fond of pointing out that there are many rooms in the house of idolatry. “One can take as an idol,” she states, “not something made of metal or wood, but a race, a nation, an idea, a philosophy, a religion, something just as earthly. All of these can be essentially inseparable from idolatry.” When Christ states that no one can be a true disciple of his unless he or she first hates his father, mother, wife, husband, children, brothers, sisters, and even his or her own life, the harshness of that statement must be understood precisely in the context of idolatry. Family can be idolatrous if it lets its demands get in the way of the higher dictates of charity and respect. What does this mean? How can family, which is itself a sacred concept (and one which is under siege today and needs all the defense that the churches can give it), be idolatrous? For all its sacredness and importance, the natural family must always be subservient to the higher family, the family of charity. Jesus himself clearly affirms this when he says, “Who are my mother, and brother and sisters? Those who hear the word of God and keep it!” In Jesus’ view, only one kind of family does not, at a point, have to give way to something higher and more important than itself. The family that is constituted by “charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, longsuffering, faith, fidelity, mildness, and chastity” is the only normative family. It’s bonding alone that is nonrelative. All other families are subservient to it. To deny this is to break the first commandment and worship the golden calf.
– Excerpt from Fr. Ron Rolheiser’s “Family as Idolatry”

Fr. James Stephen Behrens writes that something in the human heart dies when it suffers the loss of a loved one. Mary Magdalene loved Jesus. She gave him her heart in life, and a living piece of her heart went with him in his death. Her encounter with the risen Lord speaks to all of us who have known the pain of human loss. Many of us are fortunate to be given love and support from family and friends. There are also those who suffer alone, not being able to share their anguish. But all of us look for some kind of comfort to lessen the pain. In our times of grief, faith leads us to seek the presence of God in those who share our pain and who teach us that no part of the heart can ever die. It can be seemingly broken through death, but in truth, it was given to God, who, through death, transforms the heart. And in our tears, we find what we were looking for.

Our gospel today speaks of the shepherd and why one is needed in our lives. There is the story of a young woman who grew up in a pious and religious home and, after attending college, had moved away from church attendance or any aspect of a prayer life. On a trip to visit her sister in Colorado to spend time skiing, her sister invited her to go with her to mass on the Sunday she arrived, but she politely refused and went skiing instead. She hit a tree on her first run down the slopes and broke her leg. After being released from the hospital for rest at her sister’s residence, her sister once again asked her to come to mass with her the following Sunday. With “nothing better to do,” she said yes. It was Good Shepherd Sunday, and the presiding priest was visiting from Israel. In his homily, he spoke of the custom among shepherds in Israel that existed in the time of Jesus and is still practiced today. “Sometimes very early on in the life of a lamb, a shepherd senses that it will be a congenital stray, that it will forever be drifting away from the herd. What that shepherd does then is deliberately break its leg so that he must carry it until its leg is healed. By then, the lamb has become so attached to the shepherd that it never strays again.” That providential story woke her from the fifteen years of distance from God. John of the Cross once wrote that the language of God is the experience God writes into our lives. James Mackey once said that divine providence is a conspiracy of accidents. What this woman experienced that Sunday was precisely the language of God, divine providence, God’s finger in her life through a conspiracy of accidents. Now, God does not start fires, floods, wars, AIDS, or anything else of this nature. Nature, chance, human freedom, and human sin bring these things to pass. However, saying that God does not initiate or cause these things is not the same as saying that God does not speak through them. God speaks through chance events, both disastrous and advantageous ones. In the conspiracy of accidents that make up what looks like ordinary secular life, the finger of God is writing. We are children of Israel and Christ (and of our mothers and fathers in the faith) when we look at every event in our lives and ask ourselves: “What is God saying to us in all of this?”

Even with the best intentions and no malice inside us, even when we are faithful, we sometimes cannot avoid hurting each other. Our human situation is simply too complex at times for us not to wound each other. Fr. Rolheiser opens up his writing on inadequacy, hurt, and reconciliation with this thought-provoking statement. We hurt each other; sometimes through selfishness, sometimes through carelessness, sometimes through infidelity, sometimes through cruel intention, but sometimes too when there is no selfishness, no carelessness, no betrayal, no cruelty of intention – but only the cruelty of circumstance, inadequacy, and human limit. We sometimes hurt each other as deeply through being faithful as through being unfaithful, albeit in a different way. But irrespective of whether there’s a moral fault, betrayal, or intended cruelty, there’s still deep hurt, sometimes so deep that no healing will take place on this side of eternity. It would be ideal if each of us could explain ourselves so fully that we would always be understood and forgiven and that all of our lives could end like a warm-hearted movie where, before the closing credits, everything is understood and reconciled. Jesus died being looked at as a criminal, as a religious blasphemer, as someone who had done wrong. His offer of reconciliation was like a letter returned unopened, accompanied by a bitter note. I once visited a young man who was dying of cancer at age 56. Already bedridden and in hospice care, but with his mind still clear, he shared this: “I am dying with this consolation: If I have an enemy in this world, I don’t know who it is. I can’t think of a single person I need to be reconciled with.” Few of us are that lucky. Most of us are still looking at some envelopes that have been returned unopened.

Bishop Barron writes that in declaring himself “Lord of the Sabbath,” it is hard for us today to understand how breathtaking this claim would be for a first-century Jew to make. Yahweh alone could be assigned the title “Lord of the Sabbath,” so what is Jesus implying? He is claiming that he is above their rituals, even perhaps the defining practice of pious Jews, because he is the Lord. Thus, the rules must be placed in subordination to the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom that the Lord Jesus is ushering in, even here and now. Jesus longs for us to move beyond the idea of sacrifice, this feeling that we feel obligated to give up things to be perceived as religious. The Lord wants us to lead with a heart full of mercy by being involved with other peoples tangled up lives. He wants us to be so focused on others that the word sacrifice drops out of our vocabulary so that all we know is the passion to love others as he loves us.

The quietness, openness, vulnerability, and gentleness of meekness are lovely and painful. The gentle and meek are sustained because they are willing to let go. Having come to the end of striving, grasping, demanding, needing, craving, and longing, they have learned to trust and live in response to God’s Spirit’s inner prompting. They know God is the only force capable of bringing true goodness into this world. We know that inheritance is given as a gift, something we do not build or receive through our own merit. It is provided merely by virtue of our relationship. The gentle and meek know they are related to God as children to a parent. They are open to receiving the inheritance of life, which is why they can afford to be meek and gentle. Moving quietly through life, they may appear to make less impact, but their power comes from being inwardly transformed. Having given up fighting for things they then have to protect, they are courageous because they know that the inner Christ is their protection. The gentle and meek are free and have freedom that can only come from Christ, who lives within us. As disciples of Jesus Christ, we commit our way of life to patiently waiting on God, for in this patience, he begins to help us learn what it is to embrace meekness and gentleness. In this quiet confidence, we are slow to speak and quick to listen. We become reasonable and open to correction. That is what St. James refers to as “the wisdom in meekness.” That is why our Lord taught that the gentle and meek would inherit the earth. It is part of the perfection of love.

Fr. Ron Rolheiser, who has spent the better part of his adult life in academic endeavors, writes that today’s verse has long bothered him because Jesus is saying that the deep secrets of life and faith are hidden from the learned and the clever and revealed instead to children, to those of a less-complex mind. I don’t doubt the truth of this; I wonder why. Intelligence and learning are good things. Intelligence is the gift from God that sets us apart from animals, and access to learning is a precious right God gives us. Indeed, ignorance and lack of education are things every healthy society and every healthy individual strives to overcome. Scripture praises both wisdom and intelligence, and the health of any church is partly predicated on having a vigorous intellectual stream within it. Every time the church has let popular piety, however sincere, trump sound theology it has paid a high price. God did not give us intelligence to ask us not to use it. Naiveté is not a virtue and should never be confused with innocence. So why is being “intelligent and clever” something that can work against our understanding of the deeper secrets within life and faith? The fault is not with intelligence and learning, both good things in themselves, but they often have the unintended effect of undermining what’s childlike in us; that is, the very strength that they bring into our lives that can allow us to unconsciously claim superiority and have us believe that, given our intelligence, we have both the need and the right to isolate ourselves from others in ways that the natural neediness of children does not permit them to do. Children are not self-sufficient even though they fiercely want to be. They need others, and they know it. Consequently, they more naturally reach out and take someone’s hand. When we are the “learned and the clever,” we can more easily forget that we need others and consequently don’t as naturally reach for another’s hand as a child. It’s easier for us to isolate ourselves and more easily lose sight of the things to which God and life are inviting us. The very strength that intelligence and learning can bring into our lives is a superiority that never enters a room alone but always brings along a number of her children: arrogance, disdain, boredom, and cynicism. These are occupational hazards for the “learned and the clever,” and none help unlock life’s deep secrets. Faith doesn’t ask us not to stretch our minds. It not only doesn’t fear the hard questions, it invites us to ask them. And so it’s never wrong to become learned and sophisticated; it’s only bad if we remain there. The task is to become post-sophisticated, that is, to remain full of intelligence and learning even as we put on again the mindset of a child.

In today’s reading from the Gospel of Matthew, we have Jesus issuing a passionate call to repentance, using all the rhetorical hyperbole of the prophets, his truth and love are speaking to those on a self-destructive path. These verses are directly relevant to the lives of God’s people today. The lesson to be learned are quite simple: with great privilege comes great responsibility. Jesus has entrusted the Church with the fullness of Christian truth and grace. Christians of all confessions hold that salvation in Christ is ours for the taking and that Scripture is the living Word of God. Have we responded to these privileges with faith and zeal proportionate to their greatness? If we are honest with ourselves, we will surely find areas in our lives that are not fully surrendered to the lordship of Jesus. What triggers our response to honestly try and apply scripture lessons to our lives? Can we take the stories of Chorazin and Bethsaida as motivation to repent of whatever is hindering our pursuit of holiness? Or will we allow the drumbeat of procrastination to derail this opportunity once again? So much has been given, so it’s no surprise that much will be required.

In every person, there remains alive an essential need for stability, of an open door, of someone with whom to plan and share the story of life, a story to which one belongs. The family continues to be the school of humanity without equal, indispensable contribution to a just and solidaristic society. — Pope Francis, Vigil of Prayer

Nick Wagner of Team RCIA writes that these words from Pope Francis came to mind when he read Jesus’ warning to the apostles that he intends to set family members against each other. It has always been a difficult passage, but even more so after the pope’s insistence during the Extraordinary Synod on the Family that even the weakest and most dysfunctional families can be privileged encounters of God’s mercy and grace. Jesus is not dismissing the importance of the family. Instead, he prioritizes commitment to discipleship. Those who refuse to take up the Cross and who refuse to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the kingdom will not find peace. Pope Francis’s vision of the family has the same priority. No matter how broken, every family can be “an open door.” But it takes sacrifice, and we can begin “by saying ‘Can I? May I?’ ‘Thank you’ and ‘I’m sorry’ and never allowing the sun to set on a quarrel or misunderstanding, without having the humility to ask forgiveness”. What is common to both exhortations is the call to radical discipleship. Pope Francis challenges families to see beyond their woundedness to a mission of reconciliation. Jesus warns that without sacrificial love at its core, a family isn’t really a family in the first place. Most of us have broken relationships in our families. We don’t need to go to faraway lands to proclaim the Gospel. We can start with a phone call to the family member we haven’t talked to in years. Jesus and Pope Francis call us to this radical discipleship, a call to take up the Cross and follow.