Author: DV Dan

The question above, taken from the Gospel of Luke is not necessarily a pessimistic prophecy but a sobering challenge to persist in faithfulness. Fr. Ron Rolheiser defines faithfulness as acting with respect and staying committed to your beliefs and relationships, even when emotional fervor is absent. It is a choice to persevere through difficulties, “staying with” people and principles rather than betraying them. For Rolheiser, faithfulness is less about consistent emotional passion and more about the steadfast practice of remaining morally aligned with your commitments, which he considers a profound gift to others. 

Faith and love are too easily identified with emotional feelings, passion, fervor, affectivity, and romantic fire. And those feelings are part of love’s mystery, a part we are meant to embrace and enjoy. But, wonderful as these feelings can be, they are, as experience shows, fragile and ephemeral. Our world can change in fifteen seconds because we can fall in or out of love in that time. Passionate and romantic feelings are part of love and faith, though not the deepest part, and not a part over which we have much emotional control.

Some of us might have to settle for a faith that says to God, to others, and to ourselves: I can’t guarantee how I will feel on any given day. I can’t promise I will always have emotional passion about my faith, but I can promise I’ll always be faithful, I’ll always act with respect, and I will always do everything in my power, as far as my human weakness allows, to help others and God.

Love and faith are shown more in fidelity than in feelings. We can’t guarantee how we will always feel, but we can live in the firm resolve to never betray what we believe in! [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Love and Faith as Fidelity” February 2025]

Why do we no longer get along with each other? Why is there such bitter polarization inside of our countries, our neighborhoods, our churches, and even in our families? In the Hebrew scriptures, the prophet Malachi offers us this insight on the origins of polarization, division, and hatred. Echoing the voice of God, he writes: “Therefore, I have made you contemptible and base before all the people, since you do not keep my ways, but show partiality in your decisions. Have we not all the one Father? Has not the one God created us? Why do we break faith with one another?” 

Isn’t this particularly apropos for us today, given all the polarization and hatred in our houses of government, our churches, our communities, and our families, where for the most part we no longer respect each other and struggle even to be civil with each other? We have broken faith with each other. Civility has left the building.

Someone once said, not everything can be fixed or cured, but it should be named properly. That’s the case here. We need to name this. We need to say out loud, this is wrong. We need to say out loud that none of this can be done in the name of love. And we need to say out loud that we may never rationalize hatred and disrespect in the name of God, the Bible, truth, moral cause, freedom, enlightenment, or anything else.

We are pathologically complex as human persons, and the quest for sincerity is the quest of a lifetime. The biblical prophet Malachi names one of them: “Do not show partiality in your decisions and do not break faith with each other”. When we parse that out, what is it saying? Among other things, this: You have a right to struggle, to disagree with others, to be passionate for truth, to be angry sometimes, and (yes) even to feel hateful occasionally (since hate is not the opposite of love, indifference is).

But you may never preach hatred and division or advocate for them in the name of goodness; instead, in that place inside you where sincerity resides, you need to nurse a congenital distrust of anyone who does proactively advocate for hatred and division. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Civility Has Left the Building” April 2024]

We are forever searching for God, though mostly without knowing it. What do we naturally search for in life? By nature, we search for meaning, love, a soulmate, friendship, emotional connection, sexual fulfillment, significance, recognition, knowledge, creativity, play, humor, and pleasure. However, we tend not to see these pursuits as searching for God. 

In pursuing these things, we rarely, if ever, see them in any conscious way as our way of searching for God. In our minds, we are simply looking for happiness, meaning, fulfillment, and pleasure, and our search for God is something we need to do in another way, more consciously through some explicit religious practices.

St. Augustine struggled with exactly this, until one day he realized something. Augustine spent the first thirty-four years of his life pursuing the things of this world: learning, meaning, love, sex, and a prestigious career. Before his conversion, there was a desire in him for God and the spiritual. However, like us, he saw that as a separate desire from what he was yearning for in the world. Only after his conversion did he realize something. Here is how he famously expressed it:

“Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you! You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you. In my unloveliness I plunged into the lovely things which you created. You were with me, but I was not with you. … You called, you shouted, and you broke through my deafness. You flashed, you shone, and you dispelled my blindness.”

Reading his confession we tend to focus on the first part of it, namely, on his realization that God was inside of him all the while, but that he was not inside of himself. This is a perennial struggle for us too. Less obvious in this confession and something that is also a perennial struggle for us, is his recognition that for all those years while he was searching for life in the world, a search he generally understood as having nothing to do with God, he was actually searching for God. What he was looking for in all those worldly things and pleasures was in fact the person of God. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Our Unconscious Search for God” February 2021]

We all nurse a secret dream of glory. We daydream that in some way we will stand out and be recognized. And so, we fantasize about great achievements that will set us apart from others and make us famous. What we are chasing in all this is notice, appreciation, uniqueness, and adulation so that we can be duly recognized and loved. We want the light to be shining on us.

But, as we see from the Gospels, real glory doesn’t consist in outmuscling the bad, or anyone else. When Jesus was being crucified, he was offered precisely the challenge to prove that he was special by doing some spectacular gesture that would leave all of his detractors stunned and helpless: “If you are the Son of God, prove it, come down off the cross! Save yourself!”

The Gospels teach a very different lesson: On the cross, Jesus proves that he is powerful beyond measure, not by doing some spectacular physical act that leaves everyone around him helpless to make any protest, but in a spectacular act of the heart wherein he forgives those who are mocking and killing him. Divine kingship is manifest in forgiveness, not in muscle.

What Jesus is saying, in effect, is this: You will taste suffering, everyone will, and that suffering will make you deep. But it won’t necessarily make you deep in the right way. Suffering can make you deep in compassion and forgiveness, but it can also make you deep in bitterness and anger. However, only compassion and forgiveness bring glory into your lives.

Jesus defines glory very differently than we do. Real glory, for him, is not the glory of winning a gold medal, of being a champion, of winning an Oscar, or of being an object of envy because of our looks or our achievements. Glory consists in being deep in compassion, forgiveness, and graciousness – and these are not often spawned by worldly success, by being better-looking, brighter, richer, or better muscled than those around us.

We all nurse the secret dream of glory. Partly this is healthy, a sign that we are emotionally well. However, this is something that needs to grow and mature inside of us. Our secret dream of glory is meant to mature so that eventually we will begin, more and more, to envision ourselves as standing out, not by talent, looks, muscles, and speed, but by the depth of our compassion and the quality of our forgiveness. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Different Kinds of Glory” November 2007]

What would Jesus do? For some Christians, that’s the easy answer to every question.  In every situation all we need to ask is: What would Jesus do? At a deep level, that’s actually true. Jesus is the ultimate criterion. He is the way, the truth, and the life and anything that contradicts him is not a way to God. But Jesus’ life presented complexities. We see that sometimes he did things one way, sometimes another way, and sometimes he started out doing something one way and ended up changing his mind and doing it in a different way, as we see in his interaction with the Syro-Phoenician woman.

That’s why, I suspect, within Christianity there are so many different denominations, spiritualities, and ways of worship, each with its own interpretation of Jesus. Jesus is complex. So where does this leave us?

Well, the way of most Christian denominations, is where we submit our private interpretation to the canonical (“dogmatic”) tradition of our particular church and accept, though not in blind, uncritical, obedience, the interpretation of that larger community, its longer history, and its wider experience, humbly accepting that it can be naïve (and arrogant) to bracket 2000 years of Christian experience so as to believe that our insight into Jesus is a needed corrective to a vision that has inspired so many millions of people through so many centuries.

Still, we’re not meant to park the dictates of our private conscience, our critical questions, our unease with certain things, and the wounds we carry, at our church door either. What would Jesus do? We need to answer that for ourselves by faithfully holding and carrying within us the tension between being obedient to our churches and not betraying the critical voices within our own conscience. If we do that honestly, one thing will eventually constellate inside us as an absolute: God is good!  Everything Jesus taught and incarnated was predicated on that truth. Anything that jeopardizes or belies that, be it a church, a theology, a liturgical practice, or a spirituality is wrong.

What would Jesus do? Admittedly the question is complex. However we know we have the wrong answer whenever we make God anything less than fully good, whenever we set conditions for unconditional love, and whenever, however subtly, we block access to God and God’s mercy. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Anchoring Ourselves Within God’s Goodness” December 2019]

We all fear judgment. We fear being seen with all that’s inside us, some of which we don’t want exposed to the light. Conversely, we fear being misunderstood, of not being seen in the full light, of not being seen for who we are. And what we fear most perhaps is final judgment, the ultimate revelation of ourselves. Whether we are religious or not, most of us fear having to one day face our Maker, judgment day. We fear standing naked in complete light where nothing’s hidden and all that’s in the dark inside us is brought to light.
What’s curious about these fears is that we fear both being known for who we are, even as we fear not being known for who we really are. We fear judgment, even as we long for it. Perhaps that’s because we already intuit what our final judgement will be and how it will take place. Perhaps we already intuit that when we finally stand naked in God’s light we will also finally be understood and that revealing light will not just expose our shortcomings but also make visible our virtues.
Wendell Berry in his writing, It is Hell until it is Heaven, says, “I might imagine the dead waking, dazed into a shadowless light in which they know themselves altogether for the first time. It is a light that is merciless until they accept its mercy; by it, they are at once condemned and redeemed. Seeing themselves in that light, if they are willing, they see how far they have failed the only justice of loving one another. And yet, in suffering the light’s awful clarity, in seeing themselves within it, they see its forgiveness and its beauty and are consoled.”
For those of us who are Roman Catholics, this notion of judgment is also, I believe, what we mean by our concept of purgatory. Purgatory is not a place that’s separate from heaven where one goes for a time to do penance for one’s sins and to purify one’s heart. Our hearts are purified by being embraced by God, not by being separated from God for a time so as to be made worthy of that embrace. As well, as Therese of Lisieux implies, the punishment for our sin is in the embrace itself. Final judgment takes place by being unconditionally embraced by Love. When that happens to the extent that we’re sinful and selfish that embrace of pure goodness and love will make us painfully aware of our own sin and that will be hell until it is heaven. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Judgement Day” March 2020]

St. John of the Cross once proposed this axiom” “Learn to understand more by not understanding than by understanding.” Now imagine that someone who has known you deeply for a long time comes up to you and says: “You are a mystery to me. I’ve known you for most of my life and I still can’t figure you out. Sometimes I think I understand you, but you constantly surprise me. “There’s a depth and a complexity to you, something beyond me, that I’ve never fully grasped and I feel good about that. It adds to your mystique! All these years – and I am still just getting to know you!”

Wouldn’t you fell more understood, in this case, by not being understood? Wouldn’t you feel freer to be yourself and more valued as a person? When Scripture says “fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” essentially this is what it has in mind, namely, the kind of reverence and respect that backs off and lets others be fully who they are. To properly fear someone is to be afraid of violating them, of not respecting them properly.

Fear is almost never seen as positive. Fear connotes repression, timidity, oppressions, lack of nerve and immaturity, all of which are bad. There is in our culture a neurosis and a paranoia about fear of God…A certain fear is not only healthy, it’s necessary for love, peace and happiness. A healthy fear is not a fear of punishment or of experiencing guilt. God is not threatened by human creativity. God is trying to set us on fire.

Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. It is also the secret to love, harmony and respect…If we each had the wisdom that comes from fear of the Lord, the face of the earth would be renewed because our marriages, families, churches and places of work would explode with new meaning as we began to understand more by not understanding and began to see things familiar as unfamiliar again. [Adapted from Ron Rolheiser’s “Gifts of the Holy Spirit – Fear of the Lord” March 1998]

Among all the people in the gospels, Mary is the pre-eminent example of the one who hears the word of God and keeps it. For this reason, more than because of biological motherhood, Jesus claims her as his mother. Giving birth to Christ is something more than biological. Looking at how Mary gave birth to Christ, we see that it’s not something that’s done in an instant. Faith, like biology, also relies on a process that has a number of distinct, organic moments. What are these moments? What is the process by which we give birth to faith in the world?

First, like Mary, we need to get pregnant by the Holy Spirit. We need to let the word take such root in us that it begins to become part of our actual flesh. Then, like any woman who’s pregnant, we have to lovingly gestate, nurture, and protect what is growing inside us until it’s sufficiently strong so that it can live on its own, outside us. This process, gestation, as we know, is often accompanied by nausea, morning sickness, and a stretching of the flesh that permanently scars the body.

Eventually, of course, we must give birth. What we have nurtured and grown inside of us must, when it is ready, be given birth outside. This will always be excruciatingly painful. There is no painless way to give birth. Birth, however, is only the beginnings of motherhood. Mary gave birth to a baby, but she had to spend years nurturing, coaxing, and cajoling that infant into adulthood. Finally, motherhood has still one more phase. As her child grows, matures, and takes on a personality and destiny of its own, the mother, at a point, must ponder (as Mary did). She must let herself be painfully stretched in understanding, in not knowing, in carrying tension, in letting go.

And in this, Mary wants imitation, not admiration: Our task too is to give birth to Christ. Mary is the paradigm for doing that. From her we get the pattern: Let the word of God take root and make you pregnant; gestate that by giving it the nourishing sustenance of your own life; submit to the pain that is demanded for it to be born to the outside; then spend years coaxing it from infancy to adulthood; and finally, during and after all of this, do some pondering, accept the pain of not understanding and of letting go. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Mary as a Model of Faith” December 2003]

Nikos Kazantzakis. Reflecting on the double pull of Christ and the world, he once wrote: “Every person partakes of the divine nature in both spirit and flesh. That is why the mystery of Christ is not simply a mystery for a particular creed: it is universal. The struggle between God and human nature breaks out in everyone, together with the longing for reconciliation. Most often The stronger the soul and the flesh, the more fruitful the struggle and the richer the final harmony. The Spirit wants to have to wrestle with flesh that is strong and full of resistance. It is a carnivorous bird which is incessantly hungry; it eats flesh and, by assimilating it, makes it disappear. Struggle between flesh and spirit, rebellion and resistance, reconciliation and submission, and finally the supreme purpose of the struggle/union with God: this was the ascent taken by Christ, the ascent which he invites us to take as well, following in his bloody tracks.”

The tension, as Kazantzakis, writes it up here, reflects the language and concepts of his Greek background. Hence, there is more than a little classical dualism (body versus soul) in his expression. But the struggle he describes, despite the limits of his Greek dualism, stills capture the heart of the issue. All sensitive persons should expect a life and death struggle within their souls and the harmony that needs to be established there between world and God, flesh and soul, earth and transcendence, will be long, painful, full of competing voices, and will often times, seemingly, pit life against life.

What is said too is that, just because it is natural to feel that the world and God (flesh and soul, full life and church) are opposed to each other and seemingly demand that we choose one over the other, does not mean that they are, in fact, irreconcilable. The point is not to choose between them, but to hold them both in a way that fully respects their respective values. That will not be easy, nor quick, but God wants to wrestle with resistance  – and the more bitter the struggle, the richer the final harmony. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Wrestling with God” December 1997]

“The person who will not have a softening of the heart will eventually have a softening of the brain!” That warning, issued by G.K. Chesterton more than a half century ago, is particularly relevant for today, a time when virtually everything conspires against tenderness and softness.

Everywhere, today, the atmosphere is one of professionalism, efficiency, toughness, competitiveness, and lean strength. Workplaces, and at times even our homes and church circles, leave little room for softness, be it inefficiency, sentiment, or fat.  Even to insert a call for any tenderness and softness to somehow tone this down is to endanger one’s status and respect. Our world has a very restricted place for what is unprofessional, sentimental, inefficient, fat, soft and fragile. Toughness and achievement are what get respect.

For this reason, we often experience our places of work and even our homes as being cold and somewhat brutal. But when we feel this coldness, what we are actually experiencing is our own intimidation. Our fear of being seen as soft, fat, childish, and as unable to handle pressure and meet certain standards of toughness and efficiency pushes us to make every kind of sacrifice rather than let ourselves be so judged.  This shouldn’t be so, but, in fact, most often is. Ideally, we shouldn’t allow ourselves to be thus intimidated, but, most often, we do. The fact is that we generally do live and work within an atmosphere that is cold and unfeeling.

Given this, perhaps the most important prayer moments we can have each day are those moments which soften the heart, moments which bring us back to eagerness of spirit, hospitality, compassion, and childlike joy. To have a tender moment is to pray.  Praying is more than just saying prayers. We are asked to “pray always.” This implies that we need to be praying even when we aren’t formally saying prayers. We share a common heart and a common struggle. To become aware of that is to soften the heart.  The world can be hard and, if we aren’t careful, if we do not massage the tender moment as prayer, we will harden too, becoming as untender, cold, and inhospitable as the world itself. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Fear of Tenderness Stifles the Soul” June 1989]