Author: DVO

In our reading today from the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus calls us to go beyond external conformity to the requirements of the law and imitate the perfect love of the heavenly Father, who is love himself. The preeminent teaching was the commandment to love God. This is what the Jewish people often highlight as the foundation for their faith.  Under the leadership of Moses, the people of ancient Israel left the oppression of slavery in Egypt. Moses led them through their long time in the wilderness to help shape them into the values of the kingdom of God; values of justice, peace, and love. Deuteronomy speaks to the freedom that is central to the identity of the people of God. This included the external freedom from the Egyptians’ tyranny and also their internal state of freedom. We can relate to that. We can be free on the outside, but our internal state could be enslaving us to thoughts, feelings, and actions that harm us. The key to the Israelite’s freedom was focusing on their deep desire for God. If other things got in the way, they would lose their freedom. If they placed their focus on power, possessions, or esteem, they would be enslaved by these false idols. Freedom is not about chaos and doing whatever comes to one’s mind. Freedom is about learning to live through an inner sense of peace, that place of deep love within the heart. As we discussed in some of the earlier posts this past week, when Jesus was asked about the most important commandment, he highlighted the command to love God and to love neighbors. All the other commandments about not stealing, killing, or cheating are rooted in one’s love for God. I want to share this fantastic quote about loving God by Fr. Pedro Arupe, the Spanish Jesuit priest who served as the twenty-eighth Superior General of the Society of Jesus. “Nothing is more practical than finding God, than falling in Love in a quite absolute, final way. What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything. It will decide what will get you out of bed in the morning, what you do with your evenings, how you spend your weekends, what you read, whom you know, what breaks your heart, and what amazes you with joy and gratitude. Fall in Love, stay in love, and it will decide everything.”

One of the most powerful things we can experience in our lives is to give or to receive forgiveness. It’s also for many the hardest thing to do. It is not our Lord’s intention here to give love of neighbor priority over love of God. There is an order in charity: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your strength. This is the great and first commandment”. Love of one’s neighbor, which is the second commandment in order of importance, derives its meaning from the first. An offence against love is, above all, an offence against God. When we fail to forgive, we trap ourselves in the negative power of unforgiveness. Richard Rohr says that “In forgiveness, we live up to our true and deepest dignity. We then operate by a power and a logic that is not our own. We live out of the true self and not just the tiny self that is always offended and complaining.” Without forgiveness nothing new happens, and we remain frozen in our small past. We need to ask the Lord for the grace to let go of those grudges and hurts we hold on to. How else will we ever be free?

Jesus declares that he would not undermine the Law and the Prophets but fulfill them. Bishop Barron writes that Jesus himself was an observant Jew, and the themes and images of the Holy Scriptures were elemental for him. But what is going to fulfill? Protestant theologian N.T. Wright has pointed out that the Old Testament is essentially an unfinished symphony, a drama without a climax. It is the articulation of a hope, a dream, a longing—but without a realization of that hope, without a satisfaction of that longing. Israel knew itself to be the people with the definite mission to become holy and thereby to render the world holy. But instead, Israel fell into greater and greater sins, and instead of being the catalyst for the conversion of the world, the world was continually overwhelming and enslaving Israel. When someone asked Jesus, “Which commandment in the Law is the greatest?” Jesus replies: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the Law and the prophets.” The Old Testament law must be interpreted in light of this twofold yet single commandment of love, which is the fullness of the Law: “You shall not commit adultery, You shall not kill, You shall not steal, You shall not covet,” and any other commandment, are summed up in this sentence: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law. Jesus’ life was the preeminent example of this love, a love we are asked to emulate in our life.

We’re called to live in the light, but we tend to have an overly romantic idea of what that should mean. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that we tend to think that to live in the light means that there should be a kind of special sunshine inside of us, a divine glow in our conscience, a sunny joy inside us that makes us constantly want to praise God; an ambience of sacredness surrounding our attitude.  But that’s unreal.  What does it mean to live in the light? To live in the light means to live in honesty, pure and simple, to be transparent, to not have part of us hidden as a dark secret. All conversion and recovery programs worthy of the name are based on bringing us to this type of honesty. We move towards spiritual health precisely by flushing out our sickest secrets and bringing them into the light. Sobriety is more about living in honesty and transparency than it is about living without a certain chemical, gambling, or sexual habit. It’s the hiding of something, the lying, the dishonesty, the deception, the resentment we harbor towards those who stand between us and our addiction, that does the real damage to us and to those we love. Spiritual health lies in honesty and transparency and so we live in the light when we are willing to lay every part of our lives open to examination by those who need to trust us.

• To live in the light is to be able always to tell our loved ones where we are and what we are doing.
• To live in the light is not to have to worry if someone traces what websites we have visited.
• To live in the light is to not be anxious if someone in the family finds our files unlocked.
• To live in the light is to be able to let those we live with listen to what’s inside our cellphones, see what’s inside our emails, and know who’s on our speed dial.
• To live in the light is to have a confessor and to be able to tell that person what we struggle with, without having to hide anything.
• To live in the light is to live in such a way that, for those who know us, our lives are an open book.

The Greek word (makarios) that can be rendered as “happy” or “blessed” denotes blessedness or happiness not in the sense of an emotional state but in terms of being in a fortunate situation. Jesus’ opening statements in the Sermon on the Mount echoes a standard literary form found in ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Jewish literature known as the beatitude. In the Old Testament, the beatitude typically includes an introductory phrase such as “Blessed is the one …” that is followed by a statement about the fortunate situation or condition in which the person finds himself. Sometimes the beatitude is linked with a promise of reward for that person. The beatitudes announce that the blessings of the New Covenant will be fully realized in heaven. Some of them do promise blessings that are partly enjoyed in this life, but all of them look beyond the struggles and hardships of this life to the eternal blessedness of the life to come. Jesus’ beatitudes represent a reversal of values, turning the world’s standards for happiness upside down. It is a teaching of the path of perfection we seek to walk on earth, knowing that we are being formed by chiseling away worldly attachments to uncover the beauty of what has been placed in our hearts. An excellent way to view the beatitudes is presented by Bishop Robert Barron’s turn of a phrase that brings these saying into an application methodology we can apply to our own lives: “Blessed are the poor in spirit…”How lucky you are if you’re not addicted  to material things so that your deepest desire is for God; “Blessed are they who mourn…” How lucky are you if you are not addicted to good feelings as doing the will of God sometimes involves the acceptance of enormous pain; “Blessed are the meek…” One of the greatest seductions the world holds out to us is power. How lucky you are if you eschew worldly power so that the power of the will of God might reign in you. Jesus thus challenges his followers to see life from God’s viewpoint, not the world’s. When followers of Christ live by God’s standards, they are truly in a fortunate state in life, no matter what their circumstances may be, for they bring a glimmer of the joy and hope of the heavenly kingdom into the afflictions of the present-day world.

For all its sacredness and importance, a natural family must always be subservient to a 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. Its bonding alone is nonrelative. All other families are subservient to it. To deny this is to break the first commandment and worship the golden calf. We all belong to many families. Many kinds of things naturally bond us to certain people and separate us from others. Blood, ethnic origins, language, gender, country, city, religion, political affiliation, ideology, a shared cause, a shared enemy, a shared neighborhood, a shared history, or even shared wounds divide us from some persons and form us into a certain natural family with others. Nature, temperament, and circumstance spontaneously form us into various cliques. One of these, our blood family, has a certain inherent sacredness and demands, just of itself, a primal loyalty and duty. All groups must ultimately be subservient to the family of humanity and to the non-negotiable demands of charity and respect. When membership in any group blocks that it becomes, at that moment, idolatrous. This is, today, hard to admit in both liberal and conservative circles. In more pious circles, blood and religious family easily becomes idolatrous. (“My family, my country, my church – I am for them, right or wrong – love’em or leave’em!”) In more liberal circles, like-mindedness, shared cause, and shared gender easily become idolatrous. (“How can I respect or work with those who are so unenlightened?”) In both circles, there is the tendency to rationalize lack of respect and charity by appealing to family, namely, to some group loyalty (party affiliation, ethnic or language group, gender, cause, or shared wound) which justifies a certain smallness of mind and heart. But that is idolatry. Family is sacred, but, unless it itself submits to the higher call to charity and respect, it becomes the golden calf. – Excerpt from “Family as Idolatry” by Fr. Ron Rolheiser

Here, as in other places, Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that we have to be careful to understand what Jesus is telling us about his mother. We see places in the gospels where he seemingly does not speak highly of her when in fact the reverse is true. For example, the instance when he is approached and told: “Your mother is here, trying to see you,” and he answers, “Who is my mother?” Then, pointing to the people sitting around him, he says, “Those who hear the word of God and keep it are mother and brother and sister to me.” Is Jesus distancing himself from his mother here? No. He’s pointing out the real link between them, namely, among all the people in the gospels, Mary is the pre-eminent example of the one who hears the word of God and keeps it. For this reason, more than because of biological motherhood, Jesus claims her as his mother. Giving birth to Christ is something more than biological. Faith, like biology, also relies on a process that has distinct, organic moments. What are these moments? What is the process by which we give birth to faith in the world? First, like Mary, we need to get pregnant by the Holy Spirit. We need to let the word take such root in us that it begins to become part of our actual flesh. Birth, however, is only the beginning of motherhood. Mary gave birth to a baby, but she had to spend years nurturing, coaxing, and cajoling that infant into adulthood. The infant in the crib at Bethlehem is not yet the Christ who preaches, heals, and dies for us. Every mother needs to give birth twice, once biologically and once in faith, once to an infant and once to an adult. As her child grows, matures, and takes on a personality and destiny of its own. the mother, at a point, must ponder (as Mary did). She must let herself be painfully stretched in understanding, in not knowing, in carrying tension, in letting go. She must set free to be itself something that was once so fiercely hers. The pains of childbirth are often gentle compared to this second wrenching. Mary wants imitation, not admiration: Our task too is to give birth to Christ. Let the word of God take root and make you pregnant; gestate that by giving it the nourishing sustenance of your own life; submit to the pain that is demanded for it to be born to the outside; then spend years coaxing it from infancy to adulthood; and finally, during and after all of this, do some pondering, accept the pain of not understanding and of letting go.

What made Jesus’ sacrifice, his handing himself over, so special? Fr. Rolheiser writes that we have focused too much on the physical aspects of the crucifixion to the detriment of what was happening more deeply, underneath. None of the gospels emphasize the physical sufferings, nor indeed, in the fears he expresses in conversations before his death, does Jesus. What the gospels and Jesus emphasize is his moral loneliness, the fact that he was alone, betrayed, humiliated, misunderstood, the object of jealousy and crowd hysteria, that he was a stone’s throw away from everyone, that those who loved him were asleep to what was really happening, that he was unanimity-minus-one. What made his death so special is that, inside of all the aloneness, darkness, jealousy, misunderstanding, sick crowd hysteria, coldness, and murder, he held out, he gave himself over, without bitterness, without self-pity, holding his ideals intact, gracious, respectful, forgiving, without losing his balance, his meaning, or his message. That’s the ultimate test and we face it daily in many areas of our lives. Jesus’ sacrifice was so special because, long after the clock had run out on everything and there seemed no reason left to wait for anything, he still held on, to his ideals, his balance, his gracious, his forgiveness, and his love.

The struggle to do that, to remain faithful, is the real drama inside the death of Jesus and in the end it is a struggle of the heart, not the body.

God calls all Christians to be saints – not plastic statues of saints, but real people who make time for prayer and who show loving care for others in the simplest gestures. Pope Francis reminds us to not be afraid of holiness. It will take away none of your energy, vitality, or joy. We are frequently tempted to think that holiness is only for those who can withdraw from ordinary affairs to spend much time in prayer,” he wrote. But that is not the case. We are all called to be holy by living our lives with love and by bearing witness in everything we do, wherever we find ourselves. How is this done? We see it in those parents who raise their children with immense love, in those men and women who work hard to support their families, in the sick, in elderly religious who never lose their smile. The path to holiness is almost always gradual, made up of small steps in prayer, sacrifice, and service to others. Being part of a parish community and receiving the sacraments, especially the Eucharist and reconciliation, are essential supports for living a holy life. And so is finding time for silent prayer. The holiness to which the Lord calls you will grow through small gestures, like the woman who refuses to gossip with a neighbor, returns home and listens patiently to her child even though she is tired, prays the rosary and later meets a poor person and offers him a kind word. Thanks be to God, throughout the history of the church it has always been clear that a person’s perfection is measured not by the information or knowledge they possess, but by the depth of their charity, bearing all for the sake of others.

Why should we pray for the dead? Fr. Rolheiser writes that we need to pray because it does us good. We pray for the dead because that prayer helps us, the living. Prayer for the dead is meant to console the living. We pray for our dead loved ones to help heal our relationship with them. When someone close to us dies, it is natural, always, to feel a certain amount of guilt, not just because that person died and we go on living, but because, being human, we have had a less-than-perfect relationship with him or her. There is unfinished business between us. In praying for that person, among other things, we help wash clean those things that remain painful between us. We pray for the dead because we believe in the communion of saints, an essential Christian doctrine that asks us to believe that a vital flow of life continues to exist between ourselves and our loved ones, even beyond death. Love, presence, and communication reach through death. We pray for the dead to remain in communication with them. Just as we can hold someone’s hand as he or she is dying, and this can be an immense comfort to both of us, so too we can hold another’s hand beyond death. Communication with our loved ones after death is privileged, undercutting much of what kept us apart in this life. Praying for the dead, our faith assures us, not only consoles us but also offers real strength and encouragement to the loved one who has died. From my own experience of having loved ones die, as well as from what others have shared with me, I have found that usually, after a time, we sense that our deceased loved ones no longer need us to pray for them. Now they just want us to connect with them. Prayer for the dead does that and even though our prayers might still be formulated as if we are praying for them we are now simply connecting with them and what was formerly a cold, cutting absence now becomes a warm, comforting presence.