Author: DVO

It is hard to measure up. In our lucid moments, we admit this. Anna Blaman, the pseudonym of Johanna Petronella Vrugt, was a Dutch writer and poet who echoes these thoughts. I realized it was impossible for a human being to be and remain good or pure. If, for instance, I wanted to be attentive in one direction, it could only be at the cost of neglecting another. If I gave my heart to one thing, it left another in the cold. No day and no hour go by without my being guilty of inadequacy. We never do enough, and what we do is never well enough done, except being inadequate, which we are good at because that is the way we are made. This is true of me and of everyone else. Every day and every hour brings with it its weight of moral guilt as regards my work and my relations with others. I am constantly catching myself out in my human failings, and despite their being implied in my imperfection, I am conscious of a sort of check. And this means that my human shortcomings are also my human guilt. We have a conviction of our own shortcomings and of consensual guilt, a guilt which shows itself all too clearly in the consequences of what we have done or left undone. Fr. Rolheiser writes that by definition, to be human is to be inadequate. Only God is adequate, and the rest of us can safely say: Fear not, you are inadequate! We can take consolation from the gospel parable of the ten bridesmaids who all fell asleep while waiting for the bridegroom, the wise and the foolish. Even the wise were too human and too weak to stay awake the whole time. Nobody does it perfectly, and accepting this, our congenital inadequacy can bring us to a healthy humility and perhaps even a healthy humor about it. The older I get, the less confident, in some ways, I am becoming. I don’t always know whether I’m following Christ properly or even know precisely what it means to follow Christ. So I stake my faith on an invitation that Jesus left us on the night before he died to break bread and drink wine in his memory and to trust that this if all else is uncertain, is what we should be doing while we wait for him to return.

The assumption in today’s reflection verse hinges on why the apostles ask for increased faith. What do they think is missing? Fr. Rolheiser suggests that we, like the apostles, live inside an anxious peace. They are failing to see the “big picture” of life. When speaking of peace, there are two narratives. The peace that the world can give to us is not a negative or a bad peace. It is real and good, but it is fragile and inadequate. It is fragile because it can easily be taken away from us. As we experience it ordinarily in our lives, peace is generally predicated on feeling healthy, loved, and secure. But all of these are fragile and things that affected the disciples. This type of peace can change radically with one visit to the doctor, an unexpected dizzy spell, sudden chest pains, the loss of a job, the rupture of a relationship, the suicide of a loved one, or multiple kinds of betrayal that can blindside us. We try mightily to take measures to guarantee the health, security, and trustworthiness of our relationships, but we live with a lot of anxiety, knowing these are always fragile. Jesus offers a peace that is not fragile and already beyond fear and anxiety and does not depend on feeling healthy, secure, and loved in this world. His peace is the absolute assurance that we are connected to the source of life in such a way that nothing, absolutely nothing, can ever be removed: not bad health, not betrayal by someone, indeed, not even our own sin. We are unconditionally loved and held by the source of life itself, and nothing can change that. Nothing can change God’s unconditional love for us. That’s the meta-narrative, the “big picture” of life that the disciples and us are missing. We need this picture of life to keep our perspective during the ups and downs of our lives. We need this assurance. We live with constant anxiety because we sense that our health, security, and relationships are fragile and that our peace can quickly disappear. Let us leave this time together knowing that we need to more deeply appropriate Jesus’ farewell gift to us: I leave you a peace that no one can take from you: Know that you are loved and held unconditionally.

Individuals who have undertaken graduate and post-graduate studies would acknowledge that these pathways to knowledge and wisdom affect who they are and what and how they do things in life. Fr. Ron Rolheiser, a trained academic, has worked at various universities, teaching within university circles and having university professors as close friends and colleagues. He writes that for academics who follow the pathway of Faith, the challenge is remembering Christ’s teaching that the deep secrets of life and faith are hidden from the learned and the clever and revealed instead to children. He goes on to say that 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. 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 in history that the church has let popular piety, however sincere, trump sound theology, it has paid a high price, as The Reformation attests. The fault is not with intelligence and learning, both good things in themselves, but in what they can inadvertently do to us. Intelligence and learning often have the unintended effect of undermining what’s childlike in us. When we are “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 does a child. It’s easier for us to isolate ourselves. The very strength that intelligence and learning bring into our lives can instill in us a false sense of self-sufficiency that can make us want to separate ourselves from others in unhealthy ways and understand ourselves as superior in some way. And superiority never enters the room alone but always brings along several of her children: arrogance, disdain, boredom, cynicism. All of these are occupational hazards for the “learned and the clever,” and none of these help unlock any of life’s deep secrets. It is never bad 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 the mindset of a child.

Our hearts are complicated and fascinating, and we’d all be gentler with ourselves and find our lives more interesting if we listened more regularly to their beat. That’s also the secret of our relationship with Christ. Fr. Rolheiser writes that we must put a stethoscope to Christ’s heart and listen to its complex and fascinating rhythms. How do we do this? The Gospel of John gives us a mystical image of this. In John’s account of the Last Supper, he has a disciple, whom he describes as “the one whom Jesus loved,” reclining on the breast of Jesus. Obviously, this connotes a deep intimacy, but it’s also meant to convey something else. If you lean your ear on someone’s chest, you can hear that person’s heartbeat, which eventually begins to reverberate gently throughout your body. This is the image of perfect discipleship for John: We are “the one whom Jesus loves,” and we need to have our heads on Jesus’ breast to hear his heartbeat and, from there, look out at the world. Being attuned to Christ’s heartbeat and reclining in solace and intimacy on his breast will give us both the vision and the sustenance we need to live as we should. As we know, “the one whom Jesus loved” (historically referred to as John) refers to everyone. For John, this constitutes the very heart of discipleship and dwarfs everything else (charism, church office, even prophecy) regarding what’s essential. Intimacy with Jesus is more important than any charism or leadership role. And that’s our call, to have the kind of intimacy with Christ that has us reclining on his breast, hearing his heartbeat, and looking out at the world from that perspective. But how do we do that practically? We do this by imaging our heads on Christ’s breast, feeling that intimacy, hearing his heartbeat, and being filled with the comfort of that; we do this in visioning by listening to Christ’s heartbeat and looking out at the world to see what it means to love purely, beyond ideology, beyond being liberal or conservative, beyond different schools of thought, and our opinions and those of others. We do this by taking in his sustenance that allows us to find the strength to keep our hearts soft when everything beckons us to be hard, our tongues gentle when everything is gossip and slander, and ourselves aware of others’ gifts when all around there is jealousy. Our sensitivity must be a stethoscope that hears the beat of Christ’s complex and fascinating heart.  

We can see many things in this lesson from Jesus in the Parable of the Dishonest Steward, and one of the most powerful deals with three great spiritual truths exemplified in the steward’s actions. The dishonest steward is in serious trouble, and he knows it. This crisis he is facing is forcing him to make a decision. We can also see this awakening to a choice in the life of Jesus. His mission on earth created a crisis of choice for humankind, “Are you with me or against me?” Jesus demands that we make a choice; there is no grey area. This is the first great spiritual lesson. The second spiritual lesson is seen through the quick assessment that the dishonest steward makes of his situation. He realizes he is too weak to do manual labor and too proud to beg, so he knows he will have no actual capability to support himself. He has looked into the mirror of his life and seen the makings of the crisis – his selfish actions. Jesus knows our pains, failures, and lies. He knows the spiritual turmoil our life has become with our distance from him and his church. The third spiritual lesson is seen in the quick assessment by the dishonest steward and then his decision to act. Jesus does not commend his immoral actions, only his awakening to the crisis and firmly working on a plan to change his life. This is what Jesus asks all of us when we know we’re trapped in a spiritual wasteland. We must be resolute in changing our spiritual life by attending church, focusing on daily prayer, reconciling with the Lord through confession, and practicing an everyday life of being his light and love to all.

The incarnation brought forth the reality that “God became flesh” – a physical and earthly event. Fr. Rolheiser writes that this shows us that everything physical is potentially a sacrament. But we struggle with this. Our daily lives are often so distracted and fixated upon things that seem unholy that the idea that everything is a sacrament can appear more like wishful thinking than theology. Christian belief is that the universe shows forth God’s glory, that each of us is made in God’s image, that our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, that the food we eat is sacramental, and that in our work and in our sexual embrace we are co-creators with God. There are many reasons, mostly rooted in the fact that we are human, that life is long, and that it isn’t easy to sustain high symbols, high language, and high ideals in the muck and grime of everyday life. Eating, working, and making love should be holy, but too often, we do them more for survival than for any sacramentality, and “getting by” is about as a high symbol as we can muster on a weekday. I say this with sympathy. It isn’t easy, day by day, hour by hour, to experience sacrament in the ordinary actions of our lives. But there’s another reason we have lost the sense of sacramentality in our lives: we have too little prayer and ritual around our ordinary actions. We seldom use prayer or ritual to connect our actions – eating, drinking, working, socializing, making love, giving birth to things – to their sacred origins. I’m not sure where we should go with all of this. Unless we find prayer and rituals to connect our eating, working, and making love to their sacred origins, ordinary life will remain just that, ordinary life, nothing special, just the muck and grime of slugging along.

In typical Semitic fashion, Jesus makes a stark exaggeration of “hating” your mother and father, etc. How was the term “hate” used in other areas of the New Testament? The force of the word is typically Semitic and was used in Matthew’s gospel, where the term means “loves father or mother more,” which would tell us that the meaning of hate in this context means to love less. Bishop Robert Barron writes that a great spiritual principle undergirds today’s reflection verse: detachment. The heart of the spiritual life is to love God and then to love everything else for the sake of God. But we sinners, as St. Augustine said, fall into the trap of loving the creature and forgetting the Creator. When we treat something less than God as God, that’s when we get off the rails, and trouble ensues. And therefore, Jesus tells his fair-weather fans that they have a very stark choice to make. Jesus must be loved first and last—everything else in their lives has to find its meaning in relation to him. The life of Jesus is about choosing a different way to live. It’s a choice to favor him above all things in life or favor the ways of the world. Only one choice will bring true joy, peace, happiness, and eternal life.

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. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that 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 God. Others are agnostics, open to the 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 long suffering 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. Our love for someone links him or her to us, and since we are part of the Body of Christ, he or she too is linked to the Body of Christ, and to touch Christ is to touch grace. We need to recognize that God loves these persons more than we do and is more solicitous for their happiness and salvation than we are. God loves everyone individually and passionately and works in ways to ensure that nobody gets lost. 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. All of us: atheists, agnostics, nones, dones, searchers, procrastinators, those who don’t believe in institutionalized religion, the indifferent, the belligerent, the angry, the bitter, and the wounded, end up on the same road heading towards the same destination – death. However, the good news is that this last road, for all of us, the pious and the impious alike, leads to God.

We can be very reactive people when things are not going our way. One question in many faith circles is why we no longer preach hellfire and brimstone. Studies have shown that threats work. But preaching fear makes it hard to see a God that is love, and that fundamentally makes this wrong. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that you don’t enter a love relationship because you feel afraid or threatened. You enter a love relationship because you feel drawn there by love. More importantly, preaching divine threats dishonors the God in whom we believe. The God whom Jesus incarnates and reveals is not a God who puts sincere, good-hearted people into hell against their will based on some human or moral lapse, which, in our moral or religious categories, we deem to be a mortal sin. What kind of God would underwrite this kind of belief? What kind of God would not give sincere people a second chance, a third one, and seventy-seven times seven more chances if they remain sincere? A healthy theology of God demands that we stop teaching that hell can be a nasty surprise waiting for an essentially good person. The God we believe in as Christians is infinite understanding, compassion, and forgiveness. God’s love surpasses our own, and if we, in our better moments, can see the goodness of a human heart despite its lapses and weaknesses, how much more so will God do this? Scripture tells us that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. How does that square with not being afraid of God? There is a healthy fear innate within the dynamics of love itself. When we genuinely love someone, we fear being selfish, boorish, and disrespectful in that relationship. We will fear violating the sacred space within which intimacy occurs. Metaphorically, we will sense we’re standing on holy ground and that we’d best have our shoes off before that sacred fire. We honor God not by living in fear lest we offend him but by spending the incredible energy God gives us to help life flourish. God is a joyous energy within which to generatively spend ourselves.

To be a saint is to be motivated by gratitude, nothing more and nothing less. Scripture, everywhere and always, makes this point. Fr. Ron Rolheiser points us toward the example of Adam and Eve’s sin. It was, first and foremost, a failure in receptivity and gratitude. God gives them life, each other, and the garden and asks them only to receive it properly, in gratitude and thanks. Only after doing this do we go on to “break and share.” Before all else, we first give thanks. To receive something in gratitude and be suitably grateful is the primary foundation of all religious attitudes. Proper gratitude is the ultimate virtue. It defines sanctity. Saints, holy persons, are thankful people who see and receive everything as a gift. The converse is also true. Anyone who takes life and love for granted should never be confused with a saint. Fr. Rolheiser speaks of a patient brought into the hospital ward he was in for a knee injury from the emergency room. His pain was so severe that his groans kept us awake. The doctors had just worked on him, and it was then left to a single nurse to attend to him. Several times that night, she entered the room to minister to him: changing bandages, giving medication, and so on. Each time, as she walked away from his bed, he would, despite his extreme pain, thank her. Finally, after this had happened several times, she said to him: “Sir, you don’t need to thank me. That is my job!” “Ma’am!” he replied, “It’s nobody’s job to take care of me! Nobody owes me that. I want to thank you! He genuinely appreciated what this nurse was doing for him, and he was right; it isn’t anybody’s job to take care of us! Our propensity to forget this gets us into trouble. The failure to be appropriately grateful, to take as owed what’s offered as a gift, lies at the root of many of our deepest resentments towards others and their resentments towards us. Invariably, when we are angry at someone, especially at those closest to us, it is precisely because we are not being appreciated (that is, thanked) properly. Conversely, I suspect more than a few people harbor resentment towards us because we consciously or unconsciously think it is their job to care for us. Like Adam and Eve, we take what can only be received gratefully as a gift as if it is ours by right. That goes against the very contours of love. It is the original sin.