Author: DV Dan

You look at a whole lot of things differently and sense that others are looking at you differently when you unexpectedly become sick. You find those around you wondering, “Is he really sick? Is he a hypochondriac? Does he want to be sick? He was always so intense, I knew that this would happen! He is unhappy in his state in life! He is simply looking for attention and sympathy! There is something he cannot face!”

You pick up the reactions, and soon you begin to ask yourself the same things. It all gets frightening because you do not know the answers and, deep down, you sense that any or all of those things could be true. We are pretty complex critters! The physical illness is not all that serious, but you get pretty serious.

Initially, the symptoms are all bad: self-pity, anger at friends, impatience with everything. Your old confidence and strength is gone. At this stage, you are genuinely ill, though the physical illness has been mostly lost in the new emotional lesions. But things slowly change, the scars disappear; first the physical ones, and, later, much more slowly, the emotional ones. You feel strength again, and old friends and old circles begin to open up again.

Health returns, but it is different. Some of the old self-confidence is gone, replaced by a new sense of vulnerability and relativity that is immensely freeing. You realize more clearly what is a gift and what is earned. You know that you, on your own, cannot guarantee your own health, nor your attractiveness and desirability in love and friendship.

You begin to beg for conversion because you would want to transvaluate all your values and prioritize your whole self and life anew. Even so, you know you are still a long way from home. There is still a lot of turf between you and the promised land. But, like Moses and Abraham, you have been given a “glimpse from afar.”  When one is wandering in a wilderness, it is helpful to know in what direction the milk and honey lie. You will still spend most of your life wandering, wondering how to enter the promised land. But with an anonymous poet from the past, you realize that God is finally taking you in hand:

I asked for strength that I might achieve;
I was made weak, that I might learn humbly to obey.

I asked for health, that I might do greater things;
I was given infirmity, that I might do better things.

I asked for riches, that I might be happy;
I was given poverty, that I might be free…

I asked for power, that I might have praise from men;
I was given weakness, that I might feel the need for God.

I asked for all things that I might enjoy life;
I was given life that I might enjoy all things.

I got nothing I asked for, but everything that I had hoped for.

[Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Weakness Leads to Strength,” July 1983]

Be compassionate as your heavenly Father is compassionate. Jesus challenged us with those words, and there is more in them than meets the eye at first. How is God compassionate?

Jesus defines this for us: God, he says, lets his sun shine on the bad as well as the good. God’s love doesn’t discriminate; it simply embraces everything. Like the sun, it doesn’t shine selectively, shedding its warmth on the vegetables because they are good and refusing its warmth to the weeds because they are bad. It just shines and everything, irrespective of its condition, receives its warmth.

That’s a stunning truth: God loves us when we are good, and God loves us when we are bad. God loves the saints in heaven and God loves the devils in hell equally. They just respond differently. The father of the prodigal son and the older brother loves both, one in his weakness and the other in his bitterness, and his embrace is not contingent upon their conversion. He loves them even inside their distance from him.

And we are asked to love in the same way.

“At a certain age our lives simplify and we need have only three phrases left in our spiritual vocabulary: Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!” –Morris West

Gratitude is the ultimate virtue, undergirding everything else, even love. It is synonymous with holiness.

Gratitude not only defines sanctity; it also defines maturity. We are mature to the degree that we are grateful. But what brings us there? What makes for a deeper human maturity? I would like to suggest ten major demands that reside inside both human and Christian maturity:

• Be willing to carry more and more of life’s complexities with empathy: Maturity invites us to see, understand, and accept this complexity with empathy.
• Transform jealousy, anger, bitterness, and hatred rather than give them back in kind: Any pain or tension that we do not transform we will retransmit.
• Let suffering soften rather than harden our souls: Suffering and humiliation find us all, in full measure, but how we respond to them, with forgiveness or bitterness, will determine the level of our maturity and the color of our person.
• Forgive: In the end there is only one condition for entering heaven (and living inside human community), namely, forgiveness.
• Live in gratitude: To be a saint is to be fueled by gratitude, nothing more and nothing less.
• Bless more and curse less: The capacity to praise more than to criticize defines maturity.
• Live in an ever-greater transparency and honesty: We are as sick as our sickest secret, but we are also as healthy as we are honest.
• Pray both affectively and liturgically: We are mature to the degree that we open our own helplessness and invite in God’s strength, and to the degree that we pray with others that the whole world will do the same thing.
• Become ever-wider in your embrace: We are mature only when we are compassionate as God is compassionate, namely, when our sun too shines on those we like and those we do not.
• Stand where you stand and let God protect you: We can only do our best, whatever our place in life, wherever we stand, whatever our limits, whatever our shortcoming, and trust that this is enough, that if we die at our post, honest, doing our duty, God will do the rest.

God is a prodigiously-loving, fully-understanding, completely-empathic parent. We are mature and free of false anxiety to the degree that we grasp that and trust that truth. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “The Major Imperatives Within Mature Discipleship”]

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]