Author: DVO

There has always been confusion about the gifts of the Spirit and its association exclusively with the ordained, not the laity. These gifts are historically the most underutilized and misunderstood gifts given to the Church and the Body of Christ by God; “And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him because he abides with you, and he will be in you…But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything and remind you of all that I have said to you (John 14:16-17, 26). Many of the ordained teach that the “laying on of hands” is exclusively the clergy’s domain. Yet the Church has never taught this. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, the collection of the Church’s official teaching, says, “The Holy Spirit is the principle of every vital and truly saving action in each part of the Body. He works in many ways to build up the Body in charity by the many special graces (called ‘charisms’), by which he makes the faithful ‘fit and ready to undertake various tasks and offices for the renewal and building up of the Church.’ Whether extraordinary or simple and humble, charisms are graces of the Holy Spirit which directly or indirectly benefit the Church, ordered as they are to her building up, to the good of men, and to the needs of the world” (CCC 798-799). The laying on of hands is the charism of healing. The laity is the Body of Christ and, as such, are provided, as God graces, various gifts, and charisms, not for their gratification but for the greater glory of God in service to others.

Jesus Christ is the source of our sustenance. Today’s reading tells the story of the multiplication of the fishes and loaves. This story appears six times in the four Gospels and suggests to each of us the importance of how God sustains us. Thomas Aquinas wrote that the Eucharist is our daily “food for the journey” of life. Archbishop George Niederauer writes that the crowd in today’s reading sees the bread and fish only as a short-term feeding, with more to come soon. Their gratitude to Jesus fits the cynical maxim that they have “a lively sense of favors still to come.” They want a God they can harness and use for their desires rather than a God they can surrender to in love. So afterward, Jesus moves away from them quickly. By contrast, in the first reading, we hear about the apostles joyfully witnessing to Jesus as the risen Savior and their willingness to share in his sufferings on the Cross. Early teachers of our faith loved this comparison that just as many grains of wheat go to make up one loaf of bread, and many grapes go to make up one cup of wine, many different Catholics also go to make up the one body of those who believe in Christ. The Lord strengthens us to live out our faith together through the breaking of bread we partake in through the Eucharistic celebration.    

People struggle with the idea of believing in Jesus but also having to “obey” him. They feel this infringes on their freedom. So, what exactly does it mean to obey Christ? Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that the main thrust of this verse is woven in the two commandments Jesus spoke: “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” Obedience to Christ is simply making an effort to submit one’s ego (with all its wounds, desires, lusts, private ambitions, and envies) to these commandments of love. It means putting Jesus and how he asked us to live our life higher than ourselves. It requires living what we believe. It’s not easy, but we have other examples of a life lived within this objective to encourage us: Teilhard de Chardin, Simone Weil, Mother Teresa, Daniel Berrigan…the list could go on. In each person mentioned above, we see a life predicated on a genuflecting of their will to something higher than themselves. By their own admission, they were not perfect, but they did consistently make an effort, with the grace of God, to live in obedience to Christ. That is all He asks of each of us, to be His light and love to the world.

It can be tough to accept the truth and beauty that “God loves us” when surrounded by war, death, tragedy, and the difficulty of life. I know from what God has revealed in my life that a balance occurs after these periods of darkness. Dark periods where you lose a sibling and, just weeks later, lose your only remaining parent, but then recall the miraculous cure of your only daughter; her battle with a rare disease that caused many miscarriages until, through answered prayer, she met a young doctor who found the cause of her miscarriages which led to the birth of her beautiful son and daughter. Balance. It’s certainly not an answer many can accept to the mystery of pain, darkness, and difficulty in life. It is, however, the hope of faith. The God who created everything, whose ways are so far beyond our understanding, chooses to grace us if we are open to receiving it, wisps of wisdom to know how much he loves us. I grieve for those who are trapped in the darkness of tragedy. But with the assurance of His unconditional love, which I witnessed during my difficult times, I lift up all those enduring dark times and pray the Lord will provide the understanding needed to see and embrace the light of His love that illuminates the pathway to a new hope.

It’s easy to miss the deeper meanings of many texts in John’s Gospel if we’re unaware of the multiple meanings of keywords and phrases. So much of what Jesus says has both an earthly and a heavenly level of interpretation. When Jesus speaks, the Gospel characters often first misinterpret his words by assuming an ordinary/physical sense, while Jesus is trying to convey a more profound truth on a religious and spiritual level. When Jesus says, “You must be born from above,” Nicodemus initially thinks Jesus means being “born again” (physical rebirth), while Jesus really means being “born anew” (reborn spiritually). We may think this refers to the sacrament of baptism, and indeed it does. But it means more. To be “born from above” means to accept the grace of baptism as the source of a whole new way of living in the world. Indeed, it isn’t a one-time event but an ongoing, lifelong process of embracing a way of life that both loves the world and everyone in it and rejects all that is at odds with the Spirit of Christ. So we are being born from above daily, day in and day out, for as long as we live. The words of Jesus throughout this Easter season will continue to prod us to look beyond our physical lives on this earth and recognize our spiritual destiny, our eternal life with God, as the source of our eternal joy and gladness.

In many ways, we, individually and collectively as a society, struggle with doubt about God. Why does God always seem so hidden? Why doesn’t He reveal Himself in concrete ways we can see so that there can be no doubt about His existence? Jesuit priest and theologian Karl Rahner wrote that “We just don’t have the eyes to see God because our eyes aren’t attuned to that kind of reality.” Fr. Rolheiser writes that we struggle with doubt because we can’t picture God’s existence, imagine God’s reality, or feel God’s presence in our normal ways. At a certain point, our minds, imaginations, and hearts simply run out of gas, out of room, out of feeling, and leave us dry, unable to nail down the reality of God the way we’re used to nailing down most everything else. The reality of God is elusive to our conscious minds and hearts because we can’t picture, imagine, or feel God in the usual way we do these things. The world is not God and we can’t walk around the landscape of spirit in the same way as we stroll around in this world. God and the other world are spirit and we are being invited into a reality whose hugeness is beyond conception, whose silence is beyond language, and whose reality is beyond the physical and all that we can see, touch, taste, smell, and feel in the normal way. God is life, light, love, energy, vastness, and simplicity beyond our categories. God has a different metaphysics. In a world where the physical defines everything, it can be difficult to believe in anything else. But even as our thoughts and feelings about God can seem empty, we are as people of faith, in our more important decisions and values, riveting ourselves ever more firmly to God and the other world. Such are the dynamics of faith. Sometimes what feels like doubt and atheism is the beginning of real belief and real growth.

Today’s Gospel verse from Mark brings us back to our discussion on the Resurrection of Jesus. Mark reminds us that his followers saw the first appearances of Jesus as being unbelievable by those who reported he had risen. Fr. Rolheiser also reminds us that his crucifixion led to Jesus rising from death. He goes on to say that everything good eventually gets scapegoated and crucified. This perverse dictate, somehow innate within human life, assures that there’s always someone or something that cannot leave well enough alone but must hunt down and lash out at what’s good. What’s good, what’s of God, will always at some point be misunderstood, envied, hated, pursued, falsely accused, and eventually nailed to some cross. All who are in Christ inevitably suffer the same fate as Jesus: death through misunderstanding, ignorance, and jealousy. But there’s a flip side. Resurrection always eventually trumps crucifixion. What’s good ultimately triumphs. Thus, while nothing of God will avoid crucifixion, no one’s body in Christ stays in the tomb for long. God always rolls back the stone, and soon enough, new life bursts forth, and we see why that original life had to be crucified. Resurrection invariably follows crucifixion. Every crucified body will rise again. Our hope takes its root in that, as Bishop Robert Barron notes: “Jesus went all the way down, journeying into pain, despair, alienation, even godforsakenness. Why? In order to reach all of those who had wandered from God. Then, in light of the Resurrection, the first Christians came to know that, even as we run as fast as we can away from the Father, all the way to godforsakenness, we are running into the arms of the Son. The Resurrection shows that Christ can gather back to the Father everyone whom he has embraced through his suffering love.”

Jesus’ disciples experienced a lot of doubt, even on the original Easter Sunday. Fr. Rolheiser writes that they, like us, were mourning crucified dreams. What reversed this? What moved them from despair to new hope? It was not just the fact of the resurrection that changed them, for they doubted, huddled in fear, locked doors, despaired, and tried to go back to their old ways of life even after they had seen the empty tomb. What brought resurrection faith was the in-the-flesh appearance of the resurrected Christ. Through these appearances, Christ built up their faith slowly and gently until they no longer needed these appearances. Where does the resurrected Christ have flesh in our life? The resurrected Christ appears to us in the flesh in those persons who are arsonists of the heart and make our hearts burn within us. What kind of person burns messianic holes within us? Those who speak of mustard seeds, who tell us about the value of what’s hidden, small, and insignificant; those who tell us that pain can bring deep meaning and redemption; those who tell us that, despite all, that reality is gracious, and we can trust and love. These words stir what’s best within us, burn holes in us, stir faith, roll stones back from tombs, and show us the resurrected Christ in the flesh. And that flesh always looks ordinary. The arsonist of the heart invariably looks like someone we know, a familiar somebody, like the resurrected Christ in his appearances from a gardener, to a cook, to a stranger. It is interesting to speculate why the disciples often didn’t recognize Christ after the resurrection. Yet Mary Magdalene, who surely knew him well, took him for a gardener. Later, on the road and the shore, his disciples took him to be a stranger, then a cook. They only recognized him as the Christ in the breaking of the bread. That is why as we journey together, mourning so many of our crucified dreams, we would do well to be attentive to what causes arson in the heart. We should learn to look more closely at each other’s faces during the breaking of the bread.

Jesus is the lamb of God who takes the sin of the world! Fr. Rolheiser writes that Jesus, as the lamb of God, does not take away the world’s sin by somehow carrying it off so that it is no longer present inside the community. He takes it away by transforming it, by changing it, by taking it inside of himself and transmuting it. We see examples of this throughout his entire life, although it is most manifest in the love and forgiveness he shows at the time of his death. In simple language, Jesus took away the sin of the community by taking in hatred and giving back love; by taking in anger and giving out graciousness; by taking in envy and giving back blessing; by taking in bitterness and giving out warmth; by taking in pettiness and giving back compassion; by taking in chaos and giving back peace; and by taking in sin and giving back forgiveness. This is what constitutes the sacrificial part of his love, namely, the excruciatingly pain (ex cruce, from the cross) that he had to undergo in order to take in hatred and give back love. That is our task too, to help take away the sin of the world. We do this whenever we take in hatred, anger, envy, pettiness, and bitterness, hold them, transmute them, and eventually give them back as love, graciousness, blessing, compassion, warmth, and forgiveness.

We are told that on the day of the resurrection, two disciples were walking away from Jerusalem towards Emmaus, their faces downcast. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that every body of Christ inevitably suffers the same fate as Jesus: death through misunderstanding, ignorance, and jealousy. Everything good eventually gets scapegoated and crucified. While nothing that’s of God will avoid crucifixion, no body of Christ stays in the tomb for long. God always rolls back the stone, and soon enough, new life bursts forth, and we see why that original life had to be crucified. Resurrection invariably follows crucifixion. Every crucified body will rise again. Our hope takes its root in that. Jerusalem was the dream, the hope, and the religious center from which all is to begin and where ultimately, all is to culminate. And the disciples are “walking away” from this place, away from their dream, towards Emmaus (Emmaus was a Roman Spa), a place of human comfort. They never get to Emmaus. Jesus appears to them on the road, reshapes their hope in the light of their disillusionment, and turns them back towards Jerusalem. That is one of the essential messages of Easter: Whenever we are discouraged in our faith, whenever our hopes seem to be crucified, we need to go back to Jerusalem, that is, back to the dream and the road of discipleship that we had embarked upon before things went wrong.