Author: DVO

Humility is an attitude of lowliness and obedience grounded in recognizing one’s status before God. Humility is not something we can fake. God sees into the depths of our souls and knows the true intentions of our hearts. Sometimes, in this journey through life, we can become proud and arrogant for what we have accomplished, or we can become self-absorbed with the messages the world keeps feeding us about our importance. That creates behaviors of dismissiveness and hardness of heart that distance us from others and God. But in God’s compassion, he will often break us of this self-made pride so we may come to repentance and restoration with him and our fellow man in our humility and brokenness. In today’s culture, we can struggle mightily with humility, which is often associated with weakness, and the world keeps telling us we need to be “strong.” But we must accept the reality that this idea of humility is simply a mask for our need to control life. It takes more strength to acknowledge our need for God and others than it does to remain self-absorbed with ourselves. Remember, the most authentic expression of obedience was the submission of Jesus Christ to the Father. Christ was willing to become human for humanity’s sake. He gave up his freedom of self so that he could serve others. In a world run amok of narcissistic behavior, Jesus shows us what real strength is all about.

The fourth commandment says: “Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy…the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord God; in it, you shall not do any work…the Lord blessed the sabbath day and hallowed it.” Yet we see Jesus healing the man who had been ill for a long time on the sabbath. Was Jesus disrespecting the commandment? He knew the commandments – so why did he do this? One of the wonderful things Jesus is teaching us is the bigness of God. Your image of God creates you or defeats you. There is an absolute connection between how you see God and how you see yourself and the whole world. The religious leaders in Jesus’ time on earth had a God who looked to judge people for their sins if they didn’t obey his commands. But Jesus taught that God isn’t looking for every opportunity to judge us for our sins or to prescribe punishment. In reality, Jesus taught that the Father is just trying to describe what happens if we keep living the way we do. Maybe we can go on for a while, but something will happen. We will end up hurting ourselves, the people we love, our community, and the world we share with so many others. The story of Jesus healing a man suffering from dropsy had many people mad at him for doing it on the Sabbath. Their God was vengeful, and they expected Jesus to “pay” for his transgression. Jesus’ actions were to show everyone that God seeks to nurture and care for them and that he desires to be in communion with them. Who we understand God to be will shape everything we do in our lives. What is your image of God?

Why pray for the dead? Does this make any sense? What possible difference can our prayers make to a person once they have died? Fr. Rolheiser writes that we pray for the dead for the same reason we pray for anything; we feel the need, which is reason enough. Moreover, the objections raised against praying for the dead are just as quickly raised against all prayers of petition. God already knows every one of our desires, every one of our sins, and all of our goodwill. So why remind God of these? Because prayer builds us up and changes us, not God. We pray for the dead to comfort ourselves, to stir and celebrate our own faith, and to assuage our own guilt about our less-than-perfect relationship with the one who has died. In praying for the dead, we do two things: We highlight our faith in the power of God, and we hold up the life of the person who has died so as to let God take care of things and wash things clean. That is one of the purposes of a funeral liturgy: to clearly put the dead person and our relationship with them into God’s hands. Most importantly, we pray for the dead because we believe that we are still in vital communion with them. There is, death notwithstanding, still a vital flow of life between them and us. Love, presence, and communication reach even through death. We and they can still feel each other, know each other, love each other, console each other, and influence each other. Our lives are still joined. Hence, we pray for the dead to remain in contact with them. Just as we can hold someone’s hand as they are dying, and this can be an immense consolation to them and us, so too, figuratively but really, we can hold that person’s hand through and beyond death. Within Roman Catholic theology, we have believed that our prayers help release this person from purgatory. Purgatory, properly understood, is not a punishment for any imperfection nor indeed a place distinct from heaven. The pains of purgatory are the pains of adjusting to a new life (which includes the pain of letting go of this one) and the pains of being embraced by perfect love when we ourselves are far from perfect. By praying for the dead, we support them in their pain of adjustment, adjustment to a new life, and to living in full light. Purgation eventually leads to ecstasy, but the birth that produces that ecstasy requires first a series of painful deaths. Thus, just as we tried to hold their hands as they died, so now, in praying for loved ones who have died, we continue to hold their hands, and they ours, beyond the chasm of death itself.

On this day when we celebrate the Solemnity of All Saints, Fr. Rolheiser writes that we used to pray for a happy death as part of our family prayer. I pictured that this way: you died cradled in the loving arms of family, friends, and church, fully at peace with God and everyone around you. That’s a good picture, the ideal, but not everyone gets to die that way. Randomness, contingency, and accidents too often have us die in broken, compromised, and cold situations: bitter, unforgiving, unforgiven, not fully reconciled, alienated from someone, not going to church, angry, drunk, dead by drug overdose, a victim of suicide. Death, not infrequently, catches some of us before we’ve had time to say what we should have said or do what we should have done. Too often, we die with unfinished business, too much of it. As the old Confiteor says, we need forgiveness for what we’ve done and left undone. Who among us doesn’t have unfinished business with someone whom death has taken away? Perhaps we had hurt that person, or he or she had hurt us, and it was never fully reconciled. Worse still, perhaps someone has died for whom we had felt hatred, and we should have made some gesture of reconciliation, but we never did. Now it’s too late! Death has separated us, and some painful bitterness now lies irrevocably unresolved, and we live with the guilt, wishing we had done something before it was too late. But it’s not too late. It’s never too late if we take seriously the Christian doctrine of the communion of saints. To believe in the communion of saints is to believe that those who have died are still alive and are linked to us in such a way that we can continue to talk with them, that our relationship with them can continue to grow, and that the reconciliation that wasn’t possible before their deaths can now occur. Why can this happen now? It happens because, as Luke’s account of Jesus on the cross teaches, death washes things clean. “Today, you will be with me in paradise!” Jesus speaks those words to the good thief on the cross, and they’re meant for everyone who dies without yet fully being a saint and without having had the time and opportunity to make all the amends and speak all the apologies that we owe to others. There is still time, after death, on both sides, for reconciliation and healing to happen because inside the communion of saints, we have privileged access to each other. There, we can finally speak all those words we couldn’t before. We can reach across death’s divide.

Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that humanity struggles to find its uniqueness in a world filled with billions of others seeking the same uniqueness. We try to stand out but generally don’t succeed. We sense that we are extraordinary, precious, and significant, irrespective of our practical fortunes in life. Deep down, we feel uniquely loved and specially called to a life of meaning and significance. We know, too, though more in faith than in feeling, that we are precious not based on what we accomplish but rather based on having been created and loved by God. But this intuition, however deep in our souls, invariably wilts in the face of trying to live a life that’s unique and special in a world in which billions of others are also trying to do the same thing. And so we can be overwhelmed by our own mediocrity, anonymity, and mortality and begin to fear that we’re not precious but are merely another among many, nobody special, one of billions, living among billions. We struggle to be content with ordinary lives of anonymity, hidden in God. We set for ourselves the impossible, frustrating task of assuring ourselves something that only God can give us: significance and immortality. Ordinary life then never seems enough for us, and we live restless, competitive, driven lives. Why isn’t everyday life enough for us? Why do we habitually feel dissatisfied at not being special? The answer: We do all these things to try to set ourselves apart because we are trying to give ourselves something that only God can provide us with significance and immortality. Thomas Merton wrote: “There is no need to make an assertion of my life, especially so about it as mine, though doubtless it is not somebody else’s. I must learn to live to gradually forget program and artifice.” Ordinary life is enough. There isn’t any need to make an assertion with our lives. Our preciousness and meaning lie within the preciousness and purpose of life itself, not in having to accomplish something extraordinary.

And the word was made flesh! Flesh. Fr. Rolheiser writes how that word explodes with connotations. Initially, our flesh is virginal and pure; the naked, unwhipped, unsullied, unwrinkled flesh of a baby, full of innocence, beauty, and dignity. How natural it is to handle a baby gently, to cradle it. But from the beginning, our flesh is complex and needy. It needs desperately to be stroked, to be wanted, to be held in affection, to be singled out for special attention, to be joined to what is beyond itself. Yet our flesh is vulnerable, exposed; naked always, it hurts easily, bruises, burns, cuts. And life, soon enough, brings its whip down on exposed flesh. It begins already when we are in the womb and in the cradle where others around us, living in their own wounds, cannot give us the sense that we are unconditionally loved and wanted. What kind of flesh did God have in mind for the incarnation? Relaxed, joyful flesh; frightened flesh; unstroked tense flesh; smooth young flesh, strutting in pride; aged wrinkled flesh; perfumed flesh; decaying flesh; flesh giving itself in love; flesh holding a gun; restless aching flesh; sexually satiated flesh; drugged flesh; flesh in the groans of childbirth; flesh slashing its own wrists; whipped flesh; flesh raping other flesh; tired flesh; ulcered flesh; flesh full of energy; flesh full of cancer; virgin’s flesh; prostituted flesh; cradled flesh; uncradled frigid flesh? In what flesh can we see the word incarnate today? Can the word ultimately cradle and calm and satiate the complex needs of flesh? Will tension ever leave human flesh? Despite our growth, our hearts are ever closer to choosing despair over hope, resignation to darkness over the light of love, victimization over liberation, and cynicism over childlike happiness. We are a child in need of a mother, a tension aching for consummation, flesh in need of an incarnation. Come, Lord Jesus.

Today’s reading from Matthew’s Gospel has Jesus responding to the Pharisee’s question on “which commandment in the law is the greatest.” It has always fascinated me how God places different views of the story’s meaning in a modern-day commentary. Some see the law as helping us be obedient to God, and therefore, it becomes a question of our discipline to obedience. This obedience can create a behavior of following familiar, predictable routines instead of finding ways to think fearlessly and creatively about ways to express our love for the Lord. Obedience of this kind is good but does not achieve the fullness we have given. Others have noted that this commandment cannot be lived out. We believe this because we struggle with the question, “Have I ever really loved in this way?” It’s not as if God gave us a simple commandment like going to church on Sunday. At some point, we have realized that this gift of love comes from the gift of life God has given us. This understanding lets us know that if we truly love ourselves in a non-egoistic sense, we can freely share this self-love with others for their benefit, not ours. Loving in this imperfect manner keeps us in utter reliance upon the mercy, compassion, and grace of God. We can never fully succeed by ourselves. Lastly, I am drawn to a personal favorite of how we understand this kind of love. The story goes that a famous violinist was being interviewed about a piece of music she would be playing and noted the beauty in its simplicity, yet she said it was a complicated piece to play. The reporter asked her what made something so simple so challenging. The violinist replied, “It’s hard to do what is so simple because simple does not mean it is easy.” The commandment to genuinely love God and also love their neighbor should be easy to comprehend and do. But if that were true, wouldn’t the entire world be different? What makes this simple commandment to “love your neighbor as yourself” difficult? One aspect of the answer is that you can’t give away what you don’t have. In other words, if you don’t love yourself or honestly believe God loves you, then it is not easy to love your neighbor because you don’t love yourself. It takes an openness within us to understand what this “self-love” entails to become the unconscious and unconditional love lived out as easily as we breathe. You no longer “try” to love; you are love, just as the violinist discovered. That spiritual growth leads us into living the commandment awash in accepting a loving God who loves us so that the same sense of oneness of love can be freely given to our neighbor.

This beautiful line of inclusion was addressed to the Gentile Christians, assuring them they were not excluded because they were not Jews. I love these verses from Ephesians as it speaks to the communal nature of the Church and of life that we have all experienced in some manner. For some, “family” has a very rich and deeply connective image that is founded at its core in love. For others, family brings back unpleasant and dark images of a period in life often devoid of the love we all desire. The beauty of being members of God’s household is that the Lord knows the disordered nature of lives affected by choices, many of which we never made but unfortunately must live in and through. In God’s house, St. Paul tells us that Christ himself holds it all together through a love that unconditionally welcomes us. In one small way, our family discovered the power of welcoming in our travels throughout the world as we moved to the next duty station in my Naval career. This sojourn taught us that the many moves across the states and in foreign countries never diminished the joy we felt being welcomed into our new home. We took comfort in the words from John’s gospel: “Remain in me, as I remain in you.” In God’s house, we are truly one family, living in the love of the Lord. I pray that Paul’s words today will transform everyone into realizing that we are all sojourners on this earth, journeying toward our eternal home. For our hearts are restless until they rest in you, Lord. Our home is with you.

In his Letter to the Romans, Paul brings to light the ever-challenging conflict humanity has to deal with: knowing the right thing to do but failing to do it. Fr. Ron Rolheiser asks, “How do we fight for the good we seek to do and conquer the sin that dwells within us? Aristotle wrote that two contraries cannot co-exist inside the same subject; something can’t be light and dark simultaneously. Yet inside our souls, contraries can indeed co-exist – light and darkness, sincerity and hypocrisy, selflessness and selfishness, virtue and vice, grace and sin, saint and sinner. Our souls are a battleground where selflessness and selfishness, virtue and sin, vie for dominance. St. John of the Cross teaches that purity of heart and purity of intention in our lives comes through disciplined prayer. Contraries cannot co-exist in us if we sustain genuine prayer in our lives. Eventually, sincerity will weed out insincerity, selflessness will weed out selfishness, and grace will weed out sin. In The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis, protagonist Screwtape, advises his student Wormwood to keep the patients from faithful and genuine prayer: “You will find that anything or nothing is sufficient to attract his wandering attention. You no longer need a good book, which he really likes, to keep him from his prayers…a column of advertisements in yesterday’s paper will do.” Our task is to be disciplined and focused in our lives to establish prayer as a daily habit. Since two contraries cannot co-exist inside the same subject, eventually, we will stop praying or sinning and rationalizing. The greatest moral danger in our lives is that we stop praying.”

Our reflection verse today is a misunderstood teaching of Jesus. He did not come to create division among people as the world would think. The fire that Jesus passionately longs to bring to this earth is the fire of the Holy Spirit, the fire of Pentecost, namely, charity, joy, peace, goodness, understanding, and forgiveness. Fr. Rolheiser writes that this fire unites rather than divides. Moreover, in answer to his question: “Do you think that I have come to establish peace on earth?” the answer is absolutely, without doubt. Jesus came precisely to bring peace to this earth, as the angels proclaimed at his birth. If Jesus’s fire to this earth is meant to unite us, why does it divide us so often? It is not Jesus’ message that divides; how we react to that message divides. Jesus is born; some respond with understanding and joy, while others react with misunderstanding and hatred. That dynamic has continued down through the centuries to this very day when Jesus is not only misunderstood and seen as a threat by many non-Christians but primarily when his person and message are used to justify bitter and hate-filled divisions among Christians and to justify the bitterness that invariably characterizes our public debates on religious and moral issues. From his birth until today, we have perennially used Jesus’ to rationalize our anger and fears. We all do it, and the effects of this are seen everywhere: from the bitter polarization within our politics to the bitter misunderstandings between our churches, to the hate-filled rhetoric of our radio and television talk shows, to the editorials and blogs that demonize everyone who disagrees with them, to the judgmental way we talk about each other inside our coffee circles. We must grant that there is a fire that divides. Yet, we must focus on the real intent of Jesus’ saying being that of love. This all-consuming fire of love brings about inclusiveness founded on respect, charity, and understanding that is part of the heaven on earth he speaks about. Jesus’ words should never be used to justify our bitterness or political message.