Author: DV Dan

Fr. John Eaton, commenting on Psalm 51, notes that any announcement posted on a bulletin board in a parish becomes invisible after two or three weeks. The same can be true of our prayers. These verses from Psalm 51 are used so frequently that it is easy for those praying to close their minds to the meaning behind the words.

Besides the prayer for the forgiveness we all need, the psalm begs for three things that I personally need: 1) a clean heart (that is, a heart that is not divided by conflicting interests), 2) a steadfast spirit (a spirit that cannot be weakened by external pressure or internal weakness), and 3) a willing spirit (a spirit that is ready to hear and obey).

“A clean heart create for me, O God”

The word create is striking. It echoes the language of creation in Genesis, suggesting that what is needed is not minor repair but a new act of divine creation. The psalmist recognizes that real change cannot be self-manufactured. A “clean heart” is not just moral behavior on the outside; it is purified desire, restored intention, and re-centered love on the inside.

This line acknowledges that sin is not only about actions—it is about the condition of the heart. Therefore, restoration must begin at the deepest level of identity.

“A steadfast spirit renew within me”

If the first phrase asks for cleansing, this one asks for stability. A “steadfast” (or firm) spirit implies consistency and resilience. The psalmist longs not just to be forgiven, but to become faithful—to be inwardly strengthened so that he does not fall again. Renewal here is ongoing. It suggests that spiritual life is not static; it must be continually refreshed by God.

“A willing spirit sustain in me”

A willing spirit is one that freely chooses obedience. It is not coerced or merely compliant. The prayer recognizes that even willingness is a gift. We often think effort alone sustains faithfulness, but this line confesses dependence: “sustain in me.” The ability to remain faithful requires ongoing divine support.

This prayer is profoundly hopeful. It assumes that no failure is beyond God’s re-creative power. The same God who creates the world can recreate a human heart.

In the past few years, both when teaching and writing, I have frequently been challenged by persons who feel that I am going soft on part of the Christian message. There are a number of variations to the critique, but generally it sounds like this: “You make it too easy! You sound as if it is easy to go to heaven. You talk as it there was no hell, or, at least, as if very few persons end up there. Doesn’t Scripture itself say that the road that leads to life is narrow…and few find it! Aren’t you leading people astray by giving them the impression that almost everyone is going to heaven?”

Not infrequently too have I been quoted the visions of a certain mystic who once saw souls going to hell like snowflakes. To affirm that the majority of persons are being lost in terms of eternity denies the unconditional love of God and the power of that love to ultimately redeem sin and woundedness. Simply put, the love of the God that Jesus called his and our Father would not tolerate a situation within which the millions are going to an eternal hell, like snowflakes, while a mere few are finding the narrow way. This God would redo the incarnation…not to mention creation itself.

It is interesting to note that among the great religions of the world, only Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, do not believe in reincarnation. Why? Because they all believe in the same God, a God who does not demand retribution but who can make everything clean with one embrace. There is no need to keep reliving life until one gets it right. We are loved unconditionally and forever. Salvation, going to heaven, is nothing other than accepting this. Of course, we can, and in this life we often do, reject this.

Few of us are really happy, actually redeemed by love. It is easy to go to hell in this life. It is not so easy, however, to stay there for eternity. Why? Because here, in this life, most often nobody can descend into our private hell – our woundedness, our fundamental alienation, our sin, our paranoia, our fantasy, and our fear – and breathe out there unconditional love, understanding, and acceptance. Hence, in this life, we are often in hell, miserable, biting so as not to be bitten, sinning so as to compensate for being outside of love. 

However, God’s love can, as we see in Christ’s death and resurrection, descend into hell and embrace and bring to peace tortured and paranoid hearts. Our moral choices, in this life, are crucial. We can and frequently do, make choices that make it harder for us to accept unconditional love. Moreover, there is a real danger of not sinning honestly, of rationalizing and of warping ourselves so that a permanent hell becomes a real possibility. But this is, I submit, rare. Few people will, when confronted by an unconditional embrace, resist. That is why most people will go to heaven. In saying that, I am not going soft on the Christian message. I am, I believe, affirming the greatest truth there is. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Living Under A Merciful God” July 1988]

Jesus is our model for prayer, and he shows us what it looks like to pray as a child of God. The Lord’s Prayer has been called the perfect prayer and the summary of the whole Gospel.

It is interesting to me that in St. Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus gives us the Lord’s Prayer near the end of his Sermon on the Mount.

The Sermon, beginning with the Beatitudes, gives us the picture of what it means to be a Christian, and how we should live as a child of God. So it is fitting that here he teaches us to pray — because prayer is the language of our relationship with our Father.

In a way, we could say that this prayer gives us the “spirituality” of Jesus at prayer. When we pray the Our Father, we are praying as Jesus did — as a child of God, with love and confidence; with the desire to be obedient and to serve our Father’s will.

Jesus gives us his own words to pray with — but far more than that. He gives us the gift of his own intimate prayer to God. When we pray these words we are praying with Jesus. We are standing alongside him as his brothers and sisters, sharing in his own personal prayer of self-offering to the Father. We need to remember that when we pray. [Excerpt from the Archbishop José H. Gomez “Praying the Our Father” April 2016]

I have pagan friends who, from a strict Christian point of view, most everything’s wrong with them, except themselves. They aren’t professed agnostics or atheists, but they don’t exactly fit the description of a practicing Christian either. They rarely go to church, mostly disregard the church’s teaching on sex, pray only when in crisis, and are basically too immersed in life here and now to think much about God, church, and eternity.

But, even so, they radiate life, sometimes in ways that shame me. There’s something about them that’s very right, inspiring, even life-giving. They may be practical agnostics and ecclesial atheists, but their presence mostly brings positive energy, goodness, love, intelligence, humor, and sunshine into a room.

Don’t get this wrong: this is not to imply (as does the oversimplistic, rationalizing notion that’s so popular today) that those who do go to church and try to follow the church’s rules are hypocrites and immature, while those who don’t go to church and make their own rules are the real Christians. No. There’s nothing enlightened about people drifting away from the church, thinking they are beyond church, living outside its rules, or believing that a passionate focus on this life justifies a neglect of the other world. That’s a fault in religiosity, and also a fault in wisdom and maturity.

The wonderful energy that we see, and should bless, in the many good persons we know who no longer go to church with us is precisely that, wonderful energy, not depth.

It’s a wonderful thing to make people dance, to bring sunshine into a room, to lift human hearts so that they can love a little more, but it’s not the full menu, the deepest part of the menu, or something that suggests that the other part of the menu is all wrong. It is what it is, and it is only what it is. But it’s on the right side of things, on the side of life. It’s wonderful, it helps bring God into a room, and it should be blessed.

God also made their sunshine and their warmth. They don’t go to church, and that isn’t good, but they’re on the side of life, and that implicit faith is a challenge for me to in remaining on the right side of things.

As Christians, we need to both bless our good pagan friends and let ourselves be blessed by them. God is the ultimate author of all that’s good, whether that goodness, sunlight, energy, color, and warmth is seen inside a church building or outside of it. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Being Blessed by Pagan Friends” October 2023]

The ancients believed that there was a soul in everything and that soul, which was God’s breath, held everything together and gave it meaning. They did not understand, as we do today, the workings of the infra-atomic world, how the tiniest particles and energy waves themselves possess erotic, electrical charges, how hydrogen seeks out oxygen, and how at its most elemental level physical reality is bursting with energies that attract and repulse each other just as people do. They could not explain these things scientifically the way we can, but they recognized, just as we do, that there is already some form of love inside all things, however inanimate. They attributed all of this to God’s breath, the wind that comes from God’s mouth and ultimately animates rocks, water, animals, and human beings. 

But they also understood that this same breath that animates and orders physical creation is also the source of all wisdom, harmony, peace, creativity, morality , and fidelity . God’s breath,  was understood to be as moral as it is physical , as harmonious as it is creative, and as wise as it is fertile. For them, the breath of God was one force and it did not contradict itself. The physical and the spiritual world were not set against each other. One spirit was understood to be the source of both. We need to understand things in that same way. We need to let the Holy Spirit, in all his and her fullness, animate our lives. What this means concretely is that we must not let ourselves be energized and driven too much by one part of the Spirit to the detriment of other parts of that same Spirit. 

Thus, there should not be in our lives creativity in the absence of morality, education in the absence of wisdom, sex in the absence of commitment, pleasure in the absence of conscience, and artistic or professional achievement in the absence of personal fidelity. Especially there should not be a good life for us in the absence of justice for everyone. Conversely though we should be suspicious of ourselves when we have morality without creativity, when our wisdom spurns education, when our commitments are sterile, when our conscience has a problem with pleasure, and when our personal fidelity is defensive in the face of art and achievement. One Spirit is the author of all of these. Hence there must be equal attention paid to each of them. 

Someone once said that a heresy is something that is nine-tenths true. That is also our problem with the Holy Spirit. We tend to be heretics, living out some truths to the detriment of others. [Except from Ron Rolheiser’s “One Spirit – One Source of All” September 1998]

It was Henri Nouwen who first commented with sadness that many of the bitter and ideologically driven people he knew, he had met inside of church circles and places of ministry. Within church circles, it sometimes seems, almost everyone is angry about something. Moreover, within church circles, it is all too easy to rationalize that in the name of prophecy, as a righteous passion for truth and morals.

The algebra works this way: Because I am sincerely concerned about an important moral, ecclesial, or justice issue, I can excuse a certain amount of anger, elitism, and negative judgment, because I can rationalize that my cause, dogmatic or moral, is so important that it justifies my mean spirit, that is, I have a right to be cold and harsh because this is such an important truth.

And so we justify a mean spirit by giving it a prophetic cloak, believing that we are warriors for God, truth, and morals when, in fact, we are struggling equally with our own wounds, insecurities, and fears. We seldom look at what this kind of judgment is saying about us, about our own health of soul and our own following of Jesus.

Don’t get me wrong: Truth is not relative, moral issues are important, and right truth and proper morals, like all kingdoms, are under perpetual siege and need to be defended. Not all moral judgments are created equal, and neither are all churches. But the truth of that doesn’t override everything else and give us an excuse to rationalize a mean spirit.

T.S. Eliot once said: “The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason.” Our anger and harsh judgments toward those who don’t share our truth and morals may well have us standing outside the Father’s house, like the older brother of the prodigal son, bitter both at God’s mercy and at those who are seemingly receiving it without merit. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Getting mean-spirited when we defend our morals,” May 2024]

In his book, The Return of the Prodigal Son, Henri Nouwen suggests that one of the main things that has to happen in order for us to come to conversion and purity of heart is that we must move from being judge to being repentant sinner.

From judge to repentant sinner, what is being suggested here? Psalm 50 haunts the heart with the refrain: “A humbled and contrite heart you (God) will not spurn.” Our problem is that, despite considerable sincerity, our hearts are rarely humble and contrite. The norm is judgment of others, anger at them, and a certain moral smugness and self-righteousness.

Rarely are we on our knees with our heads against the breast of a forgiving God, contrite about what we’ve done and left undone—our betrayals, our sins, our inadequacies. Most of the time our posture is that of the judge. Our own faults are rarely at issue as we adjudicate others’ need for contrition and pronounce judgment on their faults.

Our own judgmental attitude and self-righteousness is, most of the time, hidden from us. In our own eyes we are never the hypocrite, the one sitting in judgment on somebody else’s life. No. We are the honest ones, the compassionate ones, the humble ones.

Strange how each of us so clearly sees the judgmental attitude in the other and yet is so unaware of how brutally judgmental we ourselves are. One man’s prophet is another man’s fanatic; one woman’s freedom fighter is another woman’s terrorist; and one person’s pro-life struggle is, for another person, the dealing of death!

What is true here in terms of the self-righteousness and self-blindness that exists within our ideological circles is perhaps even more true within the ordinary give and take of our daily lives. We are invariably judge, never repentant sinner.

Conversion begins when we stop standing as judge in order to kneel as sinner. When we are humble and contrite of heart we will not be spurned by God—nor by each other. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “A Humbled Heart” November 1993]

There can be no spiritual health without social justice. To be a healthy Christian means to pray, to live a good moral life, and to be involved with the poor. All three of these are non-negotiable. But this is not so easily conceded by all, as recent tensions within the church show. 

Too many people who both pray and do social justice are angry, bitter, lacking in gratitude and joy, and full of hate. What is lacking? In a word, friendship. A healthy spiritual life is anchored on three pillars, prayer, social justice, and friendship. The latter is as critical and non-negotiable as the former. Without the warming and mellowing that good friendship brings into life, we invariably lose gratitude and joy.

To pray and to do social justice is to be prophetic. But that’s a lonely and hard business. Prophets are persecuted, are powerless and are rejected. Because of this, it is all too easy to get angry, to feel self-righteous, to fill with bitterness, to become selective in our prophecy and to hate the very people we are trying to save. When this happens, gratitude and joy disappear from our lives and we are unable to live without the need to be angry. Invariably, then, both our prayer and social action become perverse. We become recognized not for our joy and love, but for our anger and bitterness. Our prophetic words are spoken not out of love and grief, but out of indignation. We turn poverty into an ideology by losing sight of the end of the struggle – namely, celebration, joy, play, embrace, and forgiveness.

Only friendship can save us. Loving, challenging friends who can melt our bitterness and free us from the need to be angry are as critical within the spiritual life as are prayer and social justice. To neglect friendship is to court bitterness and perversion.

There are three key questions to ask ourselves when we are evaluating spiritual health:

– Do I pray every day?

– Am I involved with the struggle of the poor?

– Do I have the kinds of friendships in my life that move me beyond bitterness and anger?

[Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Friendship Is Liberating, Too” July 1986]

To be an ambassador for Christ involves embodying compassionate, transformative love that transcends oneself to reach others. Key themes regarding this perspective include:

Compassion as Core Identity: Compassion is the ultimate goal of Christian life—a way of being in the world that mirrors God’s love, moving beyond simple charity to active, empathetic engagement.

Vulnerability and Power: The cross signifies God’s nonviolent, vulnerable love. Being an ambassador means accepting that true power is found in this vulnerability, rather than in coercion or worldly success.

Passivity as Action: In moments of helplessness, individuals can still give profoundly through their “passivity” and surrender, which acts as a powerful witness to faith.

Idealism and Joy: We must remain idealistic, not get caught up in superficial definitions of success, and maintain a good sense of humor.

Active Presence: Christianity is a “marathon relationship” with God, requiring followers to act with justice, kindness, and unwavering faith.

So living as an Ambassador for Christ defines one as living with compassion. This means mirroring God’s unconditional, non-discriminating love by embracing everyone, even enemies, rather than just those we like or who are deemed worthy. It requires moving past personal bitterness, exercising vulnerability, and making compassion the ultimate goal of discipleship.

Faith tells us that what ultimately defines us and gives us our identity and energy is the image and likeness of God in us. We are God’s blessed ones, masters of creation, special to God and special within creation.

And we know this long before religion tells it. Deep down, whether we admit it or not, we each nurse the secret of being special. And this is not just ego or narcissism but a congenital imprint inside our very souls. Imprinted in the core of our being is the sense that we are not just an accidental, anonymous chips of dust, almost invisible on the evolutionary conveyer-belt, destined to flicker for an instant and then disappear forever. We know we are more. We, literally, feel timelessness, eternity, and immortal meaning inside of ourselves.

In our daily lives that often causes more heartaches than it solves. It is not easy to live out our blessed, special status when, most of the time, everything around us belies that we are special. As much as we experience ourselves as special, we also experience emptiness, anonymity, and dour ordinariness. And so it can be easy, in the end, to believe that we aren’t special at all, but are precisely small, petty spirits, haunted by over-inflated egos.

But, while over-inflated egos do cause their share of heartaches, it is a still an unhealthy temptation to believe that we are not blessed simply because life finds us one-among-six-billion-others, struggling, and seemingly not special in any way. Faith tells the true story: We are, all of us, made in God’s image and likeness, blessed, and our private secret that we are special is in fact the deepest truth.

However, that isn’t always easy to believe. Life and circumstance often tire us in ways that tempt us to believe its opposite. During his baptism, he had heard his Father say: “You are my blessed son, in whom I take delight!” Those words then formed and defined his self-consciousness. Knowing that he was blessed, Jesus could then look out at the world and say: “Blessed are you when you are poor… and meek … and persecuted.”

But throughout his life Jesus struggled to always believe that. For instance, immediately after his baptism, we are told, the spirit drove him into the desert where he fasted for forty days and forty nights – and afterwards “he was hungry”. Obviously what scripture is describing here is not simply physical hunger.

It is good to remember, namely, that we are God’s special, blessed sons and daughters, even when we lives seem empty, anonymous, and devoid of any special privileges because then we won’t forever be putting God and our restless hearts to the test, demanding more than ordinary life can give us. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Our Three Temptations” July 2007]