Author: DVO

Today’s Gospel reveals an essential fact about Mary as she deals with the greatest of all sorrows: her son’s horrific torture and ultimate death. As Jesus was dying, Mary stood under the Cross. What is she doing standing under the Cross? At first glance, it appears she is doing nothing. She does not speak, does not try to stop the crucifixion, does not protest its unfairness, or plead Jesus’ innocence. She is mute – seemingly passive, not doing anything at all. But, as Fr. Ron Rolheiser suggests, at a deeper level, she is doing two important things. First, in the Gospels, “standing” is a position of strength. Mary stood under the Cross. She was silent, but she was strong and fearless there. She was not one of those who fled. Second, she refused to give back what she was receiving. Mary seems to say, “I can’t stop the crucifixion, but I can stop some of this hatred.” “I can’t stop this crucifixion, but I will not give back this bitterness.” “I can’t stop this crucifixion, but I will not add a single drop to this negative, destructive energy swirling around me.” “I can’t stop this crucifixion, but I can give the opposite of this crucifixion: gentleness, understanding, forgiveness, peace, and light.” Why does any of this matter? In the Gospels, Mary is the first person to hear and keep the Word of God. Thus, she is the first true disciple. She knows what a true disciple should be and should do. She provides an example of discipleship that we can imitate. Today’s celebration invites us to follow her example in two areas of our lives. First, when pain, sorrow, suffering, and grief come, Mary inspires us to stand in strength and courage and to take heart. Second, Mary encourages us to refuse to give back darkness when darkness comes. When confronted by negativity and blackness, Mary inspires us to transform negativity and blackness rather than retransmit them.

What does God look like? German priest and theologian Karl Rahner wrote that to ask a question like this is tantamount to looking at the most beautiful day in June, seeing all the trees and flowers in full blossom, and asking a friend, “Where is summer?” To see certain things is to see summer. To see certain things is to see God. Rahner used to ask people when they asked him this question about God:

• Have you ever kept silent, despite the urge to defend yourself, when you were unfairly treated?
• Have you ever forgiven another, although you gained nothing by it, and your forgiveness was accepted as quite natural?
• Have you ever made a sacrifice without receiving any thanks or acknowledgment or feeling any inward satisfaction?
• Have you ever decided to do a thing simply for the sake of conscience, knowing that you must bear sole responsibility for your decision without being able to explain it to anyone?
• Have you ever tried to act purely for the love of God when no warmth sustained you when your act seemed a leap in the dark, simply nonsensical?
• Have you ever been good to someone without expecting a trace of gratitude and without the comfortable feeling of having been “unselfish”?

Rahner asserts that if you have had such experiences, you have experienced God, perhaps without realizing it. A little girl, drawing a picture, was asked by her mother: “What are you drawing?” She replied: “A picture of God!” “But we don’t know what God looks like,” her mother objected. “Well,” replied the child, “when I am finished with this, then you will know what God looks like!” If we do what Rahner suggests, we will also draw a picture of God.¹

¹ Adapted from Ron Rolheiser, “What Does God Look Like,” September 1994.

In his article, “Turning Our Eyes Toward Heaven,” Fr. Rolheiser writes that it’s not easy for the faithful to be centered, rooted, secure in who we are, and able to give our very best to the world each day. Why? The honest answer can be found in our prayer life or lack thereof. How can we manage the daily churning of the sea that so much of life appears to be when the ship of life we travel in does not have an anchor? Unless we are anchored in something beyond the here and now, there is a good chance that we will drown in the present moment. Jesus models the kind of prayer we need to cope with a world that goes mad at times and with a heart prone to drink in that madness. The gospels describe Jesus praying in different ways, but sometimes they simply say: “He turned his eyes towards heaven!” The phrase hasn’t been lost on artists. Virtually every painting of someone being martyred has this motif: the martyr has his or her eyes lifted up towards heaven, in contrast to the eyes of the executioners and onlookers, which are cast downwards in hatred, envy, and groupthink or in the blank stare of mindlessness. What made Jesus different was a prayer praxis that sought union with the Father. Each of us must find our own way of doing this if we are to cope with the forces that threaten to drown us. Only in seeking to be one with His will can we ever hope to be grounded, be ourselves, have a clear direction in life, be free of compulsions, and live out more of our dignity, goodness, and creativity. Without prayer, we haven’t a prayer. – Gil Bailie

In our more reflective moments, we sense the importance of prayer, yet we struggle to pray. Sustained, deep prayer doesn’t come easy for us. Why? Fr. Rolheiser writes that we struggle to make time for prayer. Prayer doesn’t accomplish anything practical for us, and it’s a waste of time in tending to the pressures and tasks of daily life, so we hesitate to go there. Coupled with this, we find it hard to trust that prayer works and brings about something real. Beyond that, we struggle to concentrate when we try to pray. Once we settle in to pray, we soon feel overwhelmed by daydreams, unfinished conversations, half-forgotten melodies, heartaches, agendas, and the impending tasks that face us as soon as we get up from our place of prayer. Finally, we struggle to pray because we really don’t know how to pray. We might be familiar with various forms of prayer, from devotional prayers to different kinds of meditation, but we generally lack the confidence to believe that our particular way of praying, with all its distractions and missteps, is prayer in the deep sense. One of the places we can turn to for help is the Gospel of Luke. More so than any of the other Gospels, his is the Gospel of prayer. In Luke’s Gospel, there are more descriptions of Jesus in prayer than in all the other Gospels combined. In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus prays a lot. Ultimately, we also want Jesus’ depth and graciousness in our lives. Like Jesus’ disciples, we also know that we can only attain this through prayer, through accessing a power that lies inside the deepest depth of our souls and beyond our souls. We know too that the route to that depth lies in journeying inward, in silence, through both the pain and the quiet, the chaos and the peace, that come to us when we still ourselves to pray: “Lord teach me.”

In one of his dialogues with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in Rome, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was once asked: “What are you trying to do?” His answer was something to this effect: I’m trying to write a Christology that is large enough to include the full Christ because Christ isn’t just a divine savior sent to save people; Christ is also a structure within the physical universe, a path of salvation for the Earth itself: “He is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation, for in him all things were created in heaven and on Earth; everything visible and everything invisible … all things were created through him and for him. He exists before all things and in him all things hold together ” (Col 1:15-18). Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that physical creation itself was somehow created through Christ, that Christ holds it together, and that Christ gives it an eternal future. The mystery of Christ is not just about saving us, the people on this planet, but also about saving the planet itself. Incorporating this into our understanding has enormous consequences for understanding our planet, Earth, and other religions. If all things were created through Christ and for Christ, then our planet, Earth, and all physical creation have value in themselves and not just in relation to us. Unless we understand the mystery of Christ as deeper and wider than what we can see visibly and historically, this quandary will invariably lead us to either abandon Jesus’ teaching about being normative or lead us into an exclusivity that goes against God’s universal will for salvation. All things have to do with Christ, whether we realize it or not, and all authentic worship leads to the Father, whether we can see this or not.

Fr. Ron Rolheiser, in his piercingly awakening article, “When Sinners Rationalize,” speaks to how we rationalize sin due to our failure to be honest with ourselves and an inability to admit our weaknesses. He says that much within and around us invites us to rationalize, make excuses, and demand that standards be changed or re-integrated because we cannot live up to them. Less and less, even in prayer and confession, do we find searing honesty and contrition. This propensity to rationalize and not admit weakness and sin is the most deadly temptation facing each of us. Failure to admit weaknesses and acknowledge our sin as sin is infinitely more damaging than weakness and sin themselves. Failure in self-honesty is the start of the sin against the Holy Spirit. The only sin that can never be forgiven is the sin of lying to oneself until one becomes so warped that one believes one’s own lie. Falsehood becomes truth. The reason this sin cannot be forgiven is not that God does not want to forgive it but rather that the person no longer sees the need for forgiveness. Living in darkness is seen by them as living in light; sin is seen as grace; perversion is seen as virtue. The person living in this state feels a certain disdain for what is genuinely virtuous, innocent, and happy. They would not accept forgiveness were it offered. This sin always begins with rationalization, with the failure to admit sinning. Much within our world and ourselves feeds this temptation to rationalize, take ourselves off the hook, and make ourselves look good by denying our weakness and sin. The rest of us must live and die in searing contrition, sinners asking God and others to forgive us for a life of weakness. In such honesty lies redemption. Anything less honest produces the seeds and, if allowed to grow, leads one to believe that sin isn’t sin.

A comedian recently quipped that today’s information technologies have effectively rendered several things obsolete, most notably phone books and human courtesy. That’s also true for human rest. Fr. Rolheiser writes that “as we get wrapped up more and more in mobile phones, texting, email, Facebook, and the internet in general, we are beginning to live with the expectation that we must be attentive all the time to everything that’s happening in the world and within the lives of our families and friends.” The spoken and unspoken expectation is that we are always available, as are others. We are becoming more enslaved and more compulsive in using mobile phones and the internet. For many of us, it is now existentially impossible to take off a day, let alone several weeks off, and be on a genuine holiday or vacation. The rhythm of time, as God designed it, is meant to give us regular, weekly time off the wheel, some “Sabbath-time” when ordinary life, ordinary pressures, ordinary work, and ordinary expectations are bracketed, and we permit ourselves to stop, to shut things down, and to rest. This is the intention of “Sabbath rest.” For most people over sixty, we grew up when our churches and our culture still took the concept of the Sabbath (for Christians, especially the idea of not working on Sunday) more seriously. I still remember my great Dodger hero, Sandy Kofax, refusing to pitch a World Series game that was being held on the Sabbath. The critical question is: Can we step off the treadmill of phones and computers on Sundays and be genuinely available to celebrate the Sabbath? Author Wayne Muller wrote in his wonderful book, “Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in Our Busy Lives,” tells us that time off the wheel, the time when we take our hand from the plow and let God and the earth care of things, while we drink in, if only for a few moments, from the fountain of rest and delight that God intended for the Sabbath. It’s a great read if you, like me, too often fail to “rest” on the Sabbath, having trapped yourself in the need to respond to any and everything in this 24×7 world we live in. Take a breath, and take time to rest in the Lord.

Today, unless we speak of corporate or systematic evil, there is a general hesitancy to use the word sin. We rarely hear someone simply and humbly say, without reference to circumstances or excuse: “I’ve sinned.” Fr. Rolheiser writes that we are poorer for being unable to say that because our sense of sin relates to our love. To sin is to betray in love. To have lost a sense of personal sin is to have lost a sense of being personally and deeply loved. Lovers know that their immaturity, woundedness, and neuroses are part of their struggles. They also know that, ultimately, there is something called betrayal, sin. Admitting that we sin gives us the space to be honest and a place to receive forgiveness. When we refuse to acknowledge that we sin, we are forced to be dishonest because, in the end, no one can honestly stand before God and others and not have to say: “I am weak; I do things I shouldn’t. The good I want to do, I cannot. The evil I want to avoid, I end up doing. I need forgiveness.” Not to say this is to lie. Not admitting sin forces us to rationalize, give excuses, project blame, and over-emphasize psychological and sociological influences on our behavior. A lady who has been coming to me for the sacrament of reconciliation for some time always begins her confession with the beautiful phrase: “I am a loved sinner.” In that expression, she correctly balances the most essential truths of humanity: We are sinners, and we are loved despite it. To admit sin sets us free to receive love under the only condition it can be genuinely offered. Acknowledging that we are loved, despite sin, sets us free from false guilt and self-hatred.

In the Gospels, we see Jesus perform several healings. He heals lame people, deaf people, mute people, people with leprosy, and two women who, for different reasons, cannot become pregnant. What’s important to see in these various miracles is that, almost always, there’s more at issue than mere physical healing. Jesus is healing people in a deeper way. We see this most clearly at those times when Jesus heals people who are blind. He’s giving them more than just physical sight; he’s opening their eyes so they can see more deeply. But that’s only an image. How might it be unpackaged? How can the grace and teachings of Jesus help us see more deeply? Fr. Rolheiser offers these suggestions:

• By shifting our eyes from seeing through familiarity to seeing through wonder.
• By shifting our eyes from seeing through paranoia and self-protection to seeing through metanoia and nurture.
• By shifting our eyes from seeing through jealousy to seeing through admiration.
• By shifting our eyes from seeing through bitterness to seeing through eyes purified and softened by grief.
• By shifting our eyes from seeing through fantasy and auto-eroticism to seeing through appreciation and prayer.
• By shifting our eyes from seeing through relevance to seeing through contemplation.
• By shifting our eyes from seeing through anger to seeing through forgiveness.
• By shifting our eyes from seeing through longing and hunger to seeing through gratitude.

Longing and hunger distort our vision. Gratitude restores it. It enables insight. The most grateful person you know has the best eyesight of all the people you know.

Our verse today from Paul’s Letter to the Thessalonians reminds me of the principle in psychology that says I can only educe love out of others if I, myself, have first experienced it. The same is true for liturgy and spirituality. I can only help effect a personal relationship with God in someone else if I first have experienced this myself. While gathering in liturgy is central to all that is Catholic, Jesus must also touch each of us deeply and personally. We are, after all, a faith that embraces a both-and praxis. Fr. Rolheiser speaks to what renowned scripture scholar Fr. Raymond Brown said about those of us who are “High Church,” either by temperament or denomination: “It’s too easy to look at the devotional stream of having a relational nature to Christ as simply as ‘Jesus and I’ spirituality that is excessively privatized, as seeking the wrong kind of security, as spiritually immature, as theological and liturgical immature, and as missing the real center, worship in liturgy. According to the Apostle John, we are dangerously wrong in making such an assessment. In John’s gospel, ecclesiology and liturgy are subservient to the person of Jesus and a personal relationship to him. To teach this, John presents the image of ‘the beloved disciple,’ one who has a special intimacy with Jesus. For John, this intimacy outweighs everything else, including special service in the church. Thus, at the Last Supper, Peter, the head of the apostles, may not even talk directly to Jesus but must channel his questions through the one who has this special intimacy with Jesus. In John, everything is second to this particular relationship. If this is true, and it is, then we who are ‘high church’ have something to learn from our ‘low church’ and more devotionally-oriented siblings: Jesus is our personal savior!”