Author: DVO

We are entering the month of August. The year is more than half over. How are your New Year’s resolutions going? I bring this thought up, hoping your resolutions have been going well. But if that is not the case, today’s reading from Matthews Gospel gives us something to reflect on that could lead to some amazing resolutions in your life. The things we resolve to do are not necessarily goals we have set. They are things in our life that we won’t allow other things to interfere with. They are real-life regulators of how we spend our time. In today’s reading, the merchant searches for pearls finding a great pearl, and sells all he has to buy it. Earlier in the reading, we see a person finding a buried treasure and selling all he has to buy the field the treasure is located in. Jesus tells us that the kingdom of heaven is greater than all the found treasures. Is your faith journey reflective of this joy in your life, that the kingdom of heaven is the “one thing” in your life that is the treasure above all treasures? If you’re unsure about your answer, seek to add to your resolutions this year by making the kingdom of God the treasure of your heart, mind, and soul – your life’s “one thing” daily regulator.

The responsorial verse from Psalm 103 reminds us: “The Lord is kind and merciful.” It seems at times in this faith journey I have been blessed to walk that the Church and I can tend to restrict God’s infinite, unbounded, unconditional, undeserved mercy of God to flow freely to others. Like many others, I can find myself conflicted in guarding the truth of the Lord’s teachings and our responsibility as followers of the Lord to protect the deposit of faith with God’s merciful nature. The conflict comes in understanding the depth of mercy that God continues to show us through stories like The Prodigal Son, how, from our human viewpoint of what is “fair,” – why did the sinful actions of the son not result in God’s wrath – but instead he received God’s indiscriminate mercy. Why do we find it so hard to connect to this reality? I feel it’s partly because, as Fr. Rolheiser writes, “We have a legitimate concern over some important things: truth, justice, orthodoxy, morality, proper public form, proper sacramental preparation, fear of scandal, and concern for the ecclesial community that needs to absorb and carry the effects of sin.” But Fr. Rolheiser states, “Love always needs to be tempered by truth, even as truth must be moderated by love. However, sometimes our motives are less noble, and our hesitancy arises out of timidity, fear, jealousy, and legalism – the self-righteousness of the Pharisees or the hidden jealousy of the older brother of the prodigal son…we must risk proclaiming the prodigal character of God’s mercy. We must not spend God’s mercy as if it were ours to spend, dole out God’s forgiveness as if it were a limited commodity, put conditions on God’s love as if God were a narrow tyrant or a political ideology, or cut off cut access to God as if we were the keepers of the heavenly gates. We are not!” Jesus wanted every kind of person to come to him then, and he wants them to come to him now. God wants everyone to come to the unlimited waters of divine mercy regardless of morality, orthodoxy, lack of preparation, age, or culture.

A parable is an extended metaphor or simile frequently becoming a brief narrative, generally used in biblical times for didactic purposes. We are in the Gospel of Matthew and continue reading Jesus’ parables. Today is the parable of the mustard seed. In these verses, the man is Jesus Christ and the field, the world. The grain of mustard seed is the preaching of the Gospel and the Church, which will spread throughout the world from very small beginnings. The parable refers to the universal scope and spread of the Kingdom of God: The Church, which embraces all humanity of every kind and condition, in every latitude and all ages, is forever developing despite obstacles, thanks to God’s promise and aid. The comparison of leaven is taken from everyday experience. Just as leaven gradually ferments all the dough, the Church spreads to convert all nations. The leaven is also a symbol of the individual Christian. Living in the middle of the world and retaining his Christian quality, he wins souls for Christ by his word and example: Our calling to be children of God amid the world requires us not only to seek our own personal holiness but also to go out onto all the ways of the earth, to convert them into roadways that will carry souls over all obstacles and lead them to the Lord. As we participate in all temporal activities as ordinary citizens, we are to become leaven acting on the mass.

John Patrick Gillese, a Canadian writer, tells the story of going home to the small town in Alberta where he had grown up for a funeral of an older woman. Among the many messages of condolence sent to her family was a note from a family who now lived in British Columbia and had left that small Alberta district some 30 years before. The note expressed sympathy to the family on the loss of their grandmother and added: “We will never forget how kind she was to us back in the 1930s.” Here was a family who remembered a small act of kindness, whatever it was, fifty years later. Small acts of cruelty or kindness leave their effect long after the impact of events of seemingly much greater importance has passed away. Fr, Ron Rolheiser believes there is a profound lesson in this. The Kingdom of God, as Jesus assures us, is about mustard seeds, about small, seemingly unimportant things, but which, in the long run, are the big things. Not much in our world today helps us to believe that. Most everything urges us to think big and to be careless about small things. The impression is given to us that what is private in our lives is little and unimportant. Private morality, private grudges, the little insults that we hand out, our many angers and resentments, the small infidelities within our sexual lives, the many little acts of selfishness, and, conversely, the small acts of sacrifice and selflessness that we do and the little compliments that we hand out, these are not valued much in our culture. As a song suggests: “Our little lives don’t count at all!” Fr. Rolheiser emphatically states that God does care and cares a great deal because, in the end, we care, and small things affect a great deal. We tend to forget quickly who won such or such an award or who starred in such and such a movie or play. But we remember, and remember vividly, with all the healing and grace it brought, who was nice to us all those years ago on the playground at school. We remember who encouraged us when we felt insecure. Conversely, we also remember, and remember vividly, with all the scars it brought, who laughed at us on the playground, made fun of our clothes, or called us stupid. Falls come, winters come, springs come, summers come and go, and sometimes the only thing we can remember from a given year is some tiny mustard seed of cruelty or kindness. That is one aspect of God’s treasure he imparts to us.

This story of Martha and Mary is often seen as a choice between an active life or a contemplative life. We see Martha, who was arranging and preparing the Lord’s meal, busy doing many things, whereas Mary preferred to listen to what the Lord was saying. Some will say that Mary, in a way, deserted her very busy sister, sat herself down at Jesus’ feet, and just listened to his words, obedient to what the Psalm said: “Be still, and know that I am God.” Yet our challenge as disciples is to see beyond the either-or nature of this story. An active life forgetful of union with God is useless and barren. Still, an apparent life of prayer that shows no concern for serving and evangelizing the world through our daily, ordinary actions also fails to please God. The key to engaged discipleship is combining these two lives without harming the other. St Josemaría Escrivá says, “God is calling us to serve him in and from the ordinary, material, and secular activities of human life. He waits for us every day, in the laboratory, in the operating room, in the army barracks, in the university chair, in the factory, in the workshop, in the fields, in the home, and all the immense panorama of work. There is something holy, something divine, hidden in the most ordinary situations, and it is up to each one of you to discover it. Either we learn to find our Lord in ordinary, everyday life, or we shall never find him.”

During their time with Jesus, the disciples struggled with issues of meaning. Despite their struggles and because of their faith in Jesus, “knowledge of the mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven was granted to them.” The knowledge was offered to them and to all who would come to believe in Jesus through their testimony. For more than two thousand years, the Christian community has enjoyed the privilege of knowing that Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah, the Christ, the Savior of the world. This undeserved, generous gift from God requires intentional acceptance by each community member. Through an assent of faith, both as individuals and as a community of believers, we become engaged in a progressive, deepening knowledge of God. These mysteries of God will not likely manifest themselves as they did in the theophany on Mount Sinai: in thunder, cloud, and fire. Instead, the wondrous display of the power of God comes when we recognize the presence of Christ in each other. Do we accept how profound that reality is? Do we grasp the implications of what it means to be heirs to this ever-deepening understanding of the mysteries of God? The more we are open to encountering God in each other, the more we will know the mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven. Blessed are the eyes that see, the ears that hear—and the tongue that will proclaim. A spiritual inheritance of this magnitude obliges us to share the Good News of God in Christ.

In today’s verse from Exodus, Moses speaks of the “bread from heaven” God provides his people. This manna is a central point in our Eucharistic celebration as John’s Gospel tells us that the Eucharist is the new manna, the new bread from heaven, the new way God gives us daily sustenance. Fr. Rolheiser writes that the Roman Catholic practice of daily Eucharist takes its root here. That is why too, in Roman Catholic spirituality, unlike much of Protestantism, the Eucharist has not been called “the Lord’s Supper” since it was understood not as an extraordinary ritual to commemorate the last supper, but as an ordinary, ideally daily, practice to give us sustenance from God. How does the Eucharist give us daily sustenance? As we saw in the earlier columns in this series, the Eucharist nurtures us by providing us God’s physical embrace (“the real presence”) and, like a Quaker-silence, it gives us a oneness with each other that we cannot give to ourselves. However, it nurtures us in yet a further way. It provides us with a life-sustaining ritual, a regular meeting around the word and person of Christ that can become the daily bread of our lives and our communities. How? Monks have secrets worth knowing. One of these is that a community sustains itself not primarily through novelty, titillation, and high emotion but through rhythm and routine, namely, through simple, predictable ritual processes. For example, a wise family will say to itself: “We will all be home at regular times, we will all eat together twice a day, and we will all be together in the living room at least once a day – even if it isn’t exciting, even if real feelings aren’t shared, even if some are bored, and even if some are protesting that this isn’t worthwhile. We will do this because, if we don’t, we will soon fall apart as a family. To stay together, we need regular, straightforward, predictable daily rituals. We need the manna of daily presence to each other. Otherwise, we’ll die.” In the Eucharist, God sustains us in just this way.

Bishop Richard Sklba writes that people usually expect a sign of cooperation from their colleagues at work, a sign of regret from someone who gave offense, even accidentally. Parents expect signs of willingness to share household chores from children according to their age level. Spouses expect signs of respect and affection from each other, at least occasionally. Teachers have a right to expect signs of effort from their students when a new area of study is part of the curriculum. Society expects signs of sorrow when a loved one dies. We all look for a sign of credibility before we commit ourselves to an idea or a project, especially if it requires our time or a financial contribution. So what’s the problem in the Gospel? Why does Jesus become so irritated when pressed by the religious authorities of his day? Why does he call them “evil and unfaithful”? Bishop Robert Barron cites the example of Jonah, who God called to preach conversion to Nineveh, described as an enormously large city. I can’t help but think of Nineveh as one of our large, modern cities, a center of worldly activity and preoccupation. What would its conversion look like? A turning back to God as the only enduring good. After hearing the word of Jonah, the Ninevites “proclaimed a fast, and all of them, great and small, put on sackcloth.” What is the purpose of these ascetic practices? The practices intend to wean people away from an attachment to worldly pleasures. Repent. Live as though nothing in this world finally matters. And you will be living in the Kingdom of God!  

French philosopher Leon Bloy once stated: “There is only one real sadness in life, that of not being a saint!” Fr. Rolheiser writes that this is not a statement of piety but a deep insight into the heart of life itself. Sin makes us sad. Life would be better if we understood that. We’ve always associated sin with badness more than sadness, but we lose something in that equation. Sin makes us more sad than it makes us bad. Adam and Eve’s sin was one of disobedience. But afterward, they tried to hide and cover themselves with clothes and excuses, and that is what ultimately put them outside the garden of joy. We have the same impulse every time we sin: to try to cover and excuse ourselves. We try to make sin all right by denying how it affects us. The problem with sin is not that it makes us bad or puts us outside God’s love; it’s that it makes us sad, here and now. And this, as we know from experience, is not an abstract thing. To the exact degree that we sin, we begin to lose our capacity for simple joy, delight, and freshness and become bored, angry, jealous, and incapable of appreciating anything or praising anyone. Sin robs us of our innocence by wounding and killing the child inside. To be innocent, as we know, means to be “un-wounded,” our capacity to experience joy, as we can see from experience and scripture, is very much linked to innocence, to what’s still childlike inside us. When the rich young man in the gospels walks away from Jesus’ invitation to radical discipleship, it doesn’t say that he walked away bad, only that he walked away sad. A couple of years ago, a group of young priests would come together to support each other in their resolution to try to live out their priesthood in a more honest, transparent, non-compensatory, and saintly way. So, each week, they met and, with searing honesty, confessed their most private sins and weaknesses to each other. This made them better priests, but what surprised them, as a delightful by-product, was that it also made them much happier with their lives. Their joy (and their lack of anger, lack of self-pity, and lack of complaint) was palpable. The action of actively and deliberately addressing sin freed them to embrace the joy and happiness of life that God desires for us all to have.

Karl Rahner made the statement that there would soon come a time when each of us will either be a mystic or a non-believer. At one level, this statement refers to anyone who wants to have faith today, as they will need to be much more inner-directed than in previous generations. Fr. Rolheiser asks, “Why?” Because up until our present generation in the secularized world, by and large, the culture helped carry the faith. We lived in cultures (often immigrant and ethnic subcultures) within which faith and religion were part of the very fabric of life. Faith and church were embedded in sociology. It took a strong, deviant action not to go to church on Sunday. Today, as we know, the opposite is true. It takes a strong, inner-anchored act to go to church on Sunday. We live in a moral and ecclesial diaspora and experience a special loneliness that comes with that. We have few outside supports for our faith. The culture no longer carries the faith and the church. Simply put, we knew how to be believers and churchgoers when we were inside communities that helped carry that for us, communities within which most everyone seemed to believe, went to church, and had the same set of moral values. Many of us now live in situations where to believe in God and church is to find ourselves without the support of the majority and, at times, without the support even of those closest to us, spouse, family, friends, and colleagues. That’s one thing that Rahner refers to when he says we will be either mystics or non-believers. On Easter Sunday morning, Mary Magdala goes out searching for Jesus. She finds him in a garden, but she doesn’t recognize him. Jesus turns to her and asks her: “What are you looking for?” Mary replies that she is looking for the dead Jesus’s body and that if he could give her any information as to where that body is, she needed to know. And Jesus simply says: “Mary.” He pronounces her name in love. She falls at his feet. In essence, that is the whole gospel: What are we ultimately looking for? What is the end of all desire? What drives us out into gardens to search for love? The desire to hear God pronounce our names in love.