Author: DVO

Fr. George Smiga offers a beautiful reflection on the Parable of the Wedding Feast that we read today in the Gospel of Matthew, which portrays a God of invitation. Underlying this parable is a fundamental theological belief that the invitation of God is supreme. It is really the only thing that matters. Our worthiness, successes, and failures do not count as much as God’s call. Therefore, worthiness does not result from all the good things that we have done but simply from our willingness to say “yes” to the invitation. Unworthiness is not determined by the mistakes and sins that we have committed but simply by our stubbornness in refusing to come to the wedding banquet. The parable is very clear on this. There are many misperceptions we can have about the Christian faith. At times, we may think that faith is about us being good. But it is really about God being good. Sometimes, we may think faith is about choosing to love God. But faith is really about God choosing to love us. All the good things we do and the wonderful qualities we have do not make us worthy of that love. All the mistakes we have made, all the sins that we have committed, do not disqualify us from the invitation that God is offering. God invites us, and our worthiness depends upon whether we say “yes” or “no” to that invitation. To say this in another way, God does not love us because we are good; we are good because God loves us. We are good because we have said “yes” to God’s invitation, and despite any of our successes or shortcomings, we have chosen to come to the feast. Never think that God loves you because you are good; you come to church and give to charity because you are a good parent, spouse, or friend. All of these things are commendable. But God’s love for you is prior to, and greater than, any of your achievements. Our God is a God of invitation. God invites us all into a relationship, into the divine life. Forget all of your successes and failures, all of your virtues and vices. Simply say “yes” to God’s love. The wedding banquet has been prepared. Come to the feast.

There is, too often, an equation, in the church and the world in general, between depth and heaviness, joy and superficiality. Christian spiritualities have tended to focus on the incompleteness of life. We live “mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.” There was a great strength and some real wisdom in that. But from saying that life will always be incomplete and full of inevitable pain, it is an easy, though false, step to affirm that depth and maturity lie in being heavy, grim, and stoic. Unfortunately, that has often happened, and Christian asceticism has too often lost its link to joy. Fr. Rolheiser notes that newer spiritualities, generally, have fared no better. Superficial affirmations that we are a resurrection people and should always be bouncy, upbeat, enthusiastic, and never down help reinforce the false equation that joy means superficiality because the components are impossible to live. As Christians, we must be reminded that real asceticism lies in joy. It is far easier, and it takes infinitely less discipline to be heavy than light. Heaviness, resentment, anger, grudges, moroseness, and lack of joy come naturally; light-heartedness, forgiveness, long-suffering, humor, and joy must be worked at. They require discipline and asceticism. God is love, scripture tells us, but God is also joy. Joy and pain are not incompatible. Neither are happiness and sadness. Instead, they are frequently felt together. We can be in great pain and still be happy, just as we can be pain-free, experiencing pleasure and unhappiness. Joy and happiness are predicated on something that abides through pain, namely, meaning. Knowing this still does not make it easy for us to accept that God is joy and that joy is a sure sign of the life of God in the soul. However, knowing it is an important start, we can build upon it. Our distance from God is our distance from joy. In light of these realities, it’s interesting to ask, “Is crabby contentiousness here to stay?” It is so long as we confuse joy with superficiality and depth with heaviness of spirit. “Rejoice in the LORD.”

Jesus seems to be saying in the reflection verse today (paraphrased a bit by me), “Hey everyone, are you with me or not?” It begs the question: What does it mean to “be with” or “for Jesus”? Is there a checklist or litmus test to show you are in Jesus’ camp? Fr. Rolheiser writes that there isn’t any one specific defining criteria that makes one uniquely Christian. He suggests there are four things that Jesus asks of anyone who would be his disciple. First, we must “keep the commandments,” both the larger commandment of the heart, “to love God and neighbor,” and the Ten Commandments. “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word.” An essential component of Christian discipleship is having a private relationship with Jesus and being faithful in the area of private morality. Second, in Christian discipleship, Jesus mandates social justice as non-negotiable. It’s not optional. Third, discipleship demands involvement within a concrete community of faith. Christian discipleship is not something we do alone. We are asked to journey to God with each other as part of an ecclesial community, as part of a church. Finally, what Jesus asks of us as an essential component of discipleship is a mellow, warm, grateful heart. Discipleship isn’t just about what we do; it’s also about the spirit within which we do it. So, is there anything in Jesus’ teaching and his challenge to us that might serve as a litmus test? There is. A mature disciple finds the answer in the gospels. A true disciple can love an enemy, bless those who curse them, and forgive everyone, even a murderer.

Persistence and prayer are inexorably linked to a disciple’s life. Fr. Jan Walgrave was a teacher, scholar, monk, priest, theologian, linguist, writer, poet, friend of many, enjoyer of life, and, as Fr. Rolheiser attests, a gentleman always. He once commented that our present culture constitutes a virtual conspiracy against the interior life. He wasn’t suggesting that somewhere, there is a deliberate force that is consciously scheming to keep us from interiority and prayer, but rather that an accidental flowing of forces and circumstances in history makes it difficult for us to live the examined life. The first problem we have with prayer is that we’re too busy and too- preoccupied to make time for it. There’s never, it seems, a good time for prayer. But we’re not just too busy to pray, but we are also too restless. There’s a congenital disquiet inside us. It’s hard to pray when we are restless, and mostly, we are. Henri Nouwen puts this well: “I want to pray,” he says, “but I also don’t want to miss out on anything – television, movies, socializing with friends, drinking in the world.” Finally, beyond the headaches and restlessness is the ambiguity of prayer itself. Simply put, prayer isn’t easy because we don’t understand it, don’t know how to do it, and don’t understand how the experience should feel. Relating to God demands something else, and it’s easy to find ourselves bored, doubting, distracted, and anxious to get on to something else when we try to pray. Because prayer can seem unreal, we often stop doing it, but it will only seem real if we persevere in it long enough and do it deeply enough. We often give up too soon. Prayer isn’t easy. Fr. Walgrave was right – there’s a certain conspiracy against the interior life today. But prayer beckons us beyond, asking us to lift even this up to God.

Fr. Daniel Berrigan wrote that unless you can drink in strength from a source outside yourself, your natural proclivities for paranoia, bitterness, and hatred will invariably swallow you whole. Fr. Rolheiser writes that the disciples in Luke’s Gospel understood this. They approached Jesus and asked him to teach them how to pray because they saw him doing things they did not see anyone else doing. He was able to meet hatred with love, to genuinely forgive others, to endure misunderstanding and opposition without giving in to self-pity and bitterness, and to retain within himself a center of peace and non-violence. They knew this was as extraordinary as walking on water, and they sensed that he was drawing the strength to do this from a source outside him through prayer. They knew they were incapable of resisting bitterness and hatred and wanted to be as strong as Jesus, so they asked him: Lord, teach us to pray. If prayer is always a form of communication with God, then we are, in some sense, always praying because God is always already present to us. In a sense, it is a form of hubris to think that we can simply turn on or turn off the prayer channel as if we could select when God can receive our missives. In truth, not only what we say or think but how we act, what we prioritize, how we love, how we care for one another, and so on all combine to communicate something to the God who is always nearer to us than we are to ourselves. Prayer is meant to keep us awake, which means it’s meant to keep us connected to a source outside of our natural instincts and proclivities, which can keep us grounded in love, forgiveness, non-retaliation, and non-violence when everything inside of us and around us screams for bitterness, hatred, and retaliation. And if Jesus had to sweat blood in trying to stay connected to that source when he was tested, we can expect that the cost for us would be the same. We will struggle in agony, wanting in every fiber of our being to give in, clinging to love precariously by the skin of our teeth, and then having God’s angel strengthen us only when we’ve been writhing long enough in the struggle so that we can let God’s strength do for us what our own strength cannot do.

In the Gospel of Luke, chapter 11, Jesus had just finished exposing religious critics in front of a crowd, and as he came to the end of this teaching, a woman who had been moved by all she had heard and the blessing she had received burst out and said, “Blessed is the mother who gave you birth and nursed you.” Jesus did not question the truth of the woman’s statement but pointed her to an even greater truth. “Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and obey it.” The true blessing is reserved for those who pay attention to God’s Word and obey it. We demonstrate the truth of our praise and worship through our actions and obedience. Jesus is focusing on the importance of following the word of God. In another part of scripture, someone tells Jesus, “Your mother and brothers are standing outside, wanting to see you.” Jesus replies, “My mother and brothers are those who hear God’s word and put it into practice.” Our goal in life, the very reason we were created, is for union and fellowship with God. If you say you love God, show it by honoring and obeying His word. Let God’s light shine through you so that those who do not know Him may also desire to follow Him to the glory and honor of the Lord God Almighty.

The parable of the Good Samaritan starts with its most important truth: we are to love our God with all of our heart, mind, body, and soul, AND love our neighbor as ourselves. This is the age-old challenge for all of us. Bishop Barron writes that the Good Samaritan is a symbol of Jesus himself in his role as savior of the world. “We spend our lives now looking for those stranded by the road, victimized by sin. We don’t walk by, indifferent to them, but we do what Jesus did. Even those who are our natural enemies, even those who frighten us.” Many read this story and ask God, “What do you expect me to do?” The answer lies in our relationship with God the Father through His Son Jesus. Yet our relationship with Jesus is tied to our relationship with others, especially the least, lost, and forgotten. Who are the least in our lives? We all have our list of the least of these. They are the people who are outside of our circle of compassion and concern. They might be individuals of another socioeconomic group, someone with more or less education, people from another political party, people from another culture or lifestyle, or people who don’t believe or think like us. The Christian life is not primarily a list of things to believe. It is about a relationship with God through Christ that forever changes us. This relationship changes all of our other relationships as its power enables us to begin to see the least of these. Jesus said I am the way and the truth and the life. We were not merely to believe he was the way, but we are to adopt his way of living. As we say in receiving the Holy Communion, “Lord, help me to become that which I receive.”

The French historian and philosopher of social science, Rene Girard, wrote, “What is anthropologically marginal is spiritually central.” Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that this academic expression explains what scripture means when it says that the stone rejected by the builders is the cornerstone for the building. In simple terms, this tells us that those whom the culture marginalizes and sees as unimportant, those whom it deems disposable – the sick, the aged, the severely handicapped, the dying, the homeless, and the unborn – are, in fact, spiritually, the most important people in the world. Leonard Cohen coined the phrase, “There is a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in.” How we value the least, lost and forgotten, is the true measure of our wisdom, compassion, and morality. We are moving as a society and culture ever more towards a mindset that sincerely believes that wisdom, compassion, human dignity, and morality can be served by snuffing out the heartbeat of someone whose life is not deemed worthwhile or who is living in such pain that this is judged to be sufficient cause to warrant death as mercy. Too often, even in our churches, we no longer stand where Jesus stood, where the cross stood, namely with the helpless. We stand instead where vested interest stands, be that the vested interest of the business world, the academic world, or the pop culture. We are becoming blind to one of the deepest truths that Jesus taught us in the crucifixion: that what looks useless and meaningless has a deeper value. Inferiority builds the soul. Those who fall through the cracks of the culture are indeed the crack where the light gets in. If our world has any real soul left, if indeed we still even understand the words wisdom, compassion, and morality, then it is because someone who has no power in the culture, someone who has been marginalized and rejected, has shared a gift with us.

Jesus challenged the disciples to look past the immediate circumstances of what had happened so that they could grasp a bigger vision. Jesus says his disciples are “childlike,” and Bishop Robert Barron notes that this is because children don’t know how to dissemble, how to be one way and act another. In this, they are like stars or flowers or animals, unambiguously things that are what they are. Children haven’t yet learned how to look at themselves. Why can a child immerse himself so eagerly and thoroughly in what he is doing? He can lose himself precisely because he is not looking at himself, not being conscious of the reactions, expectations, and approval of those around him. The best moments in life occur when we lose the ego, lose ourselves in the world, and just are as God wants us to be. It is this childlike lens in life that allows us to expand our vision of life to “see” the blessings all around us:

– Blessed are your eyes because you have seen me in the quiet place of prayer.
– Blessed are your eyes because you have seen me work in the lives of people you love.
– Blessed are your eyes because you have seen me in the faces of those in need.
– Blessed are your eyes because you have seen the impossible.

Jesus wants to expand our vision so that we can look past our immediate circumstances and see how much more he is doing in our lives and the world around us. Take a moment right now to quiet your heart. Imagine that Jesus is speaking to you, and allow the Spirit to bring the blessings of your life into your view.

“Why do I feel this way?” “Why am I so restless just now?” “Why am I angry at this person when I should feel love?” “Why am I so tense at this meeting?” “Why do I feel this jealousy, coldness, bitterness, or obsession?” Fr. Rolheiser writes that these questions emanate from the heart. The heart has its reasons, and we’re not always privy to them. We feel a little threatened, and doors that were once wide open inside of us begin to close. We feel the need to protect ourselves, to reclaim ourselves from someone, to be calm, aloof, disinterested, and seemingly given over to more important things. Where just minutes before, there was warmth, vulnerability, softness, trust, and the desire to share, there is now a chill, a hardness, a distrust, and a reluctance to share anything beyond the surface. There’s a biblical name for this, “hardness of heart.” Jesus teaches in his comments on divorce how this hardness profoundly affects our lives. The bitter realities of our world and how those realities harden our hearts and render it impossible at times for us not to have our relationships unravel. What Jesus does in this teaching is invite us to go back, back to the beginning, back to pre-fallen times, back to that time before our hearts began to harden, back to when we were still childlike, and, from there, to try to answer for ourselves how God feels about the fracturing of any relationship. Not an easy thing. And therein lies one of the biggest moral struggles within our lives: To keep a mellow, warm, trusting heart. For the most part, as we know, we’re not there, none of us. We’re still too often defensive, cool, self-protecting, and prone to all the subtle negative behaviors this triggers. But it’s good to recognize that this is a broken place, a humble place, and a place from which we are invited, each day, to make a new beginning.