Author: Daniel Scofield, MTS

James Martin in his book, Jesus, A Pilgrimage suggests that taking up our cross daily and giving up life in order to find deeper life means six interpenetrating things:

1. It means accepting that suffering is a part of our lives. Accepting our cross means that, at some point, we have to make peace with the unalterable fact that frustration, disappointment, pain, misfortune, illness, unfairness, sadness, and death are a part of our lives and they must ultimately be accepted without bitterness.
2. We may not, in our suffering, pass on any bitterness to those around us. There is a difference between healthily groaning under the weight of our pain and unhealthily whining in self-pity and bitterness under that weight. The cross gives us permission to do the former, but not the latter.
3. We must accept some other deaths before our physical death, that we are invited to let some parts of ourselves die. Maturity and Christian discipleship are about perennially naming our deaths, claiming our births, mourning our losses, letting go of what’s died, and receiving a new spirit for the new life that we are now living.
4. We must wait for the resurrection, that here in this life all symphonies must remain unfinished. So much of life and discipleship is about waiting, waiting in frustration, inside injustice, inside pain, in longing, battling bitterness, as we wait for something or someone to come and change our situation. Sometimes in the midst of pain the best we can do is put our mouths to the dust and wait.
5. Accepting that God’s gift to us is often not what we expect. God always answers our prayers but, often times, by giving us what we really need rather than what we think we need.
6. Living in a faith that believes that nothing is impossible for God. It’s only possible to accept our cross, to live in trust, and to not grow bitter inside pain if we believe in possibilities beyond what we can imagine, namely, if we believe in the Resurrection. We can take up our cross when we begin to believe in the Resurrection.

In the centuries leading up to the birth of Jesus and among Jesus’ contemporaries there were numerous notions of what the Christ would look like. We don’t know which notion Peter had but obviously it wasn’t the right one because Jesus, in Mark’s gospel, immediately shuts it down. Fr. Rolheiser writes that what Jesus says to Peter is not so much: “Don’t tell anyone that I’m the Christ” but rather “Don’t tell anyone that I am what you think the Christ should be. That’s not who I am.” Like virtually all of his contemporaries and not unlike our own fantasies of what a Savior should look like, Peter no doubt pictured the Savior who was to come as a Superman, a Superstar who would vanquish evil through a worldly triumph within which he would simply overpower everything that’s wrong by miraculous powers. But Jesus was not a Superman or Superstar in this world or a miracle worker who would prove his power through spectacular deeds. So, who is he? The Messiah is a dying and rising Messiah, someone who in his own life and body will demonstrate that evil is not overcome by miracles but by forgiveness, magnanimity, and nobility of soul and that these are attained not through crushing an enemy but through loving him or her more fully. The glory of the Messiah is not demonstrated by overpowering us with spectacular deeds.  Rather it is demonstrated in Jesus letting himself be transformed through accepting with proper love and graciousness the unavoidable passivity, humiliation, diminishment, and dying that eventually found him. That’s the dying part. But when one dies like that or accepts any humiliation or diminishment in this way there’s always a subsequent rising to real glory, that is, to the glory of a heart so stretched and enlarged that it is now able to transform evil into good, hatred into love, bitterness into forgiveness, humiliation into glory. That’s the proper work of a Messiah. How do we imagine the Messiah?  How do we imagine triumph? Imagine Glory?  If Jesus looked us square in the eye and asked, as he asked Peter: “How do you understand me?” Would he laud us for our answer or would he tell us: “Don’t tell anyone about that!”

Fr. Rolheiser challenges us to see a God of all and not a God of just “us.” He writes that he believes that we are standing today as Christians, on new borders in terms of relating to other religions, not least to our Islamic brothers and sisters. The single most important agenda item for our churches for the next fifty years will be the issue of relating to other religions, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Indigenous Religions in the Americas and Africa, and various forms, old and new, of Paganism and New Age. Simply stated, if all the violence stemming from religious extremism hasn’t woken us yet then we are dangerously asleep.  We have no choice. The world has become one village, one community, one family, and unless we begin to understand and accept each other more deeply we will never be a world at peace. Our God calls us to recognize and welcome all sincere believers into our hearts as brothers and sisters in faith. Jesus makes this abundantly clear most everywhere in his message, and at times makes it uncomfortably explicit: Who are my brothers and sisters? It is those who hear the word of God and keep it. … It is not necessarily those who say Lord, Lord, who enter the Kingdom of Heaven but those who do the will of God on earth. Who can deny that many non-Christians do the will of God here on earth? But what about the extremism, violence, and perverse expressions of religion we frequently see in other religions? All religions are to be judged, as Huston Smith submits, by their highest expressions and their saints, not by their perversions. This is true too for Christianity. We hope that others will judge us not by our darkest moments or by the worst acts ever done by Christians in the name of religion, but rather by all the good Christians have done in history and by our saints. This may come as a surprise to some but, in fact, the dogmatic teaching of the Roman Catholic Church is that sincere persons in other religions can be saved without becoming Christians, and to teach the contrary is heresy. This is predicated on an understanding of the God whom we worship as Christians.  The God whom Jesus incarnated wills the salvation of all people and is not indifferent to the sincere faith of billions of people throughout thousands of years. We dishonor our faith when we teach anything different. All of us are God’s children. There is in the end only one God and that God is the Father of all of us – and that means all of us, irrespective of religion.

The Transfiguration, which we celebrate today, is an extraordinary moment and memory in Jesus’s life and in the Church’s birthing. We remember Jesus appearing suddenly to Peter, James, and John in a cloud of dazzling light, conversing with Moses and Elijah, and the voice of God naming him beloved Son. We rehearse the command of God, a mantra to guide our lives: “Listen to him.” Yet the Transfiguration is not only about God’s glory shining in Jesus. It is also about us, the hearers of the word, and our full adoption as sons and daughters of God when we look upon Jesus and receive the good news into our hearts. Today’s Communion antiphon proclaims: “When Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.” Think how desperately Peter would have needed to hear this message and take it into his heart. Imagine the regret and self-loathing Peter must have felt under the shadow of the crucifixion. Three times, he had said, “I do not know him.” Forgiven by Christ himself, Peter can now proclaim with confidence and without shame that the good news is not a fantasy or a “cleverly devised myth.” To see Christ “as he is” is at once to see ourselves as we truly are, like him, both broken and lifted up in glory. Because God has entered into our condition without reserve, even unto shame and violence and death, we can say of the good news, “It is reliable. It is a lamp shining in a dark place.” In the shadow of all our shame and moral failures, as crucifixions seem to stretch endlessly across the horizon of our broken world, the light of Christ rekindles our joy and courage for love “until the day dawns” and “the morning star rises” again in our hearts. God is Love. Christ is our way. The Spirit fires our courage and faith in all things. Come, Lord Jesus, come. – Dr. Christopher Pramuk

Today’s reflection verse from the Gospel of Matthew speaks to an action Jesus did frequently: withdrawing to be alone. What lesson can we learn from this? How do we handle our darkest, most depressed, most lonely moments? Do we take time in these situations to bring our concerns to God? In our Lord Jesus’ darkest hour, he withdrew to speak to the Father. In this moment, we see Jesus’ humanity breaking through as he begs the Father to allow him to escape what he knows is coming. Fr. Rolheiser writes that Jesus’ prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane can be a model for how to pray when we’re in crisis. Here are seven aspects to consider when taking a crisis to God:

1. His prayer arises from his loneliness: In our deepest crises, we are always painfully alone, a stone’s throw away from others. Deep prayer should arise from that place.
2. His prayer is one of great familiarity: In our darkest hours, we must be most familiar with God.
3. His prayer is one of complete honesty. Prayer is classically defined as “lifting mind and heart to God.” In our darkest hour, we must be totally open to God.
4. His prayer is one of utter helplessness: Jesus’ prayer contains the petition that if God is to do this through him, God needs to provide the strength for it.
5. His prayer is one of openness, despite personal resistance: Jesus’ prayer opens him to God’s will if that is ultimately being asked of him.
6. His prayer is one of repetition: Jesus repeats the prayer several times, each time more earnestly, sweating blood, not just once, but several times over.
7. His prayer is one of transformation: Strength can only flow into Jesus after he has, through helplessness, let go of his own strength. Only after the desert has done its work on us are we open to allowing God’s strength to flow into us.

When we pray honestly, whatever our pain, an angel of God will always find us.

Jesus is asked by people following him, who many scholars believe are the same ones that received the bread and fish from the multiplication Jesus performed for them, to perform a sign so that they may believe in him. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that Jesus tells us to discern the finger of God by reading the signs of the times. What’s meant by that? The idea isn’t so much that we look to every social, political, and religious analysis to try to understand what’s going on in the world, but rather that we look at every event in our lives, personal or global, and ask ourselves: What’s God saying to me this event? What’s God saying to us in this event? An older generation understood this as trying to attune itself to “divine providence.” That practice goes back to biblical times. For example, if a nation was to lose a war, it wasn’t because the other side had superior soldiers, but rather that God had somehow engineered this to teach them a lesson. Or if they were hit by drought, it was because God had actively stopped the heavens from raining, again to teach them a lesson. Scripture does not intend to teach us that God causes wars or stops the heavens from raining; it accepts that they result from natural contingency. The lesson is only that God speaks through them. James Mackey teaches that divine providence is a conspiracy of accidents through which God speaks. Frederick Buechner teases this out a little further by saying: “This does not mean that God makes events happen to us which move us in certain directions like chessmen. Instead, events happen under their own steam as random as rain, which means that God is present in them not as their cause but as the one who, even in the hardest and most hair-raising of them, offers us the possibility of that new life and healing which I believe is what salvation is.” God doesn’t cause AIDS, global warming, the refugee situation in the world, a cancer diagnosis, world hunger, hurricanes, tornadoes, or any other such thing to teach us a lesson, but something in all of these invites us to try to discern what God is saying through them. Likewise, God doesn’t cause your favorite sports team to win a championship; that also results from a conspiracy of accidents. But God speaks through all of these things – even your favorite team’s championship win!

The gospels tell us that, next to Jesus, there isn’t anyone more important than John the Baptist. Herod knew well of John’s criticism of his behavior. But, like John, criticism is only a half-job, a half-prophecy: It can denounce a king by showing what’s wrong, and it can wash the soul in sand by blasting off layers of accumulated rust and dirt, but ultimately it can’t empower us to correct anything. Something else is needed. Grace. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that the gospels speak of two kinds of baptisms: the baptism of John and the baptism of Jesus, adding that John’s baptism is only a preparation for Jesus’ baptism. What’s John’s baptism? It’s a baptism of repentance, a realization of our wrongdoings, and a clear resolution to correct our bad behavior. What’s Jesus’ baptism? It’s an entry into grace and community in such a way that it empowers us internally to do what is impossible for us to do by our willpower alone. But how does this work? Is grace a kind of magic? No. It’s not magic. All psychic, emotional, and spiritual energy is, by definition, beyond a simple phenomenological understanding. Simply put, we can’t lay out its inner plumbing. There’s a mystery to all energy. But we can empirically lay out its effect: spiritual energy works. Grace works. This has been proven inside the experience of thousands of people (many of them atheists) who have been able to find an energy inside them that clearly does not come from them and yet empowers them beyond their willpower alone. Ask any addict in recovery about this. Sadly, many of us who are solid believers still haven’t grasped the lesson. We’re still trying to live out our lives by John’s baptism alone, that is, by our own willpower. That makes us excellent critics but leaves us powerless to change our own lives. What we are looking for and desperately need is a deeper immersion into the baptism of Jesus, that is, into community and grace.

Jesus is confronted today by the people of his own town who question how he became so wise since they only knew him as the carpenter’s son. This begs the question, what does it mean to be wise? There’s a vast difference between being bright and being wise, between brilliance and wisdom. We can be brilliant but not very wise. Ideally, we should strive to be both, but that is only sometimes the case, particularly today. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that we’re living in a culture that rewards brilliance above wisdom and within which we pride ourselves, first of all, in being brighter than each other. Who has the highest degree? Who went to the most elite university? Who’s the most entrepreneurial? Who’s the most popular? Who’s the cleverest scientist, researcher, writer, journalist, television personality, or wit at the office or family table? Who’s the most brilliant? We never ask: Who’s the wisest? Today, intelligence is valued far above wisdom, and that’s not always good. We’re a highly informed and intelligent people, but our compassion is not nearly on par with our brilliance. We’re bright but not wise. What’s the difference between intelligence and wisdom? Wisdom is intelligence that’s colored by understanding (which, parsed to its root, means infused with empathy). In the end, what makes for wisdom is intelligence informed by empathy, intelligence that grasps with sympathy the complexity of others and the world. Empathy is not to be confused with sentimentality or naiveté, as is sometimes the case. Sentimentality and naiveté see a fault within intellectuality itself, seeing learning itself as the problem. But learning is never the problem. One-sided learning is the problem, namely, learning that isn’t sufficiently informed by empathy, which seeks knowledge without understanding. It’s not good merely to be smart; we must also be compassionate.

Why does God not act in the face of suffering? Why do bad things happen with seemingly no response from God? Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that there have been countless attempts to answer this question, not least inside the tortured experience of those suffering. Jesus died in silence, inside God’s silence and the world’s incomprehension. And we can let ourselves be scandalized by that silence, just as we can be scandalized by the seeming triumph of evil, pain, and suffering in our world. God’s seeming silence in the face of evil and death can forever scandalize us. In Christian theology, we believe that what is ultimately at stake is human freedom and God’s respect for it. God gives us freedom and refuses to violate it, even when it would seem beneficial to do so. That leaves us in a lot of pain at times, but, as Jesus reveals, God is not so much a rescuing God as a redeeming one. God’s seeming indifference to suffering is not so much a mystery that leaves the mind befuddled but a mystery that makes sense only if you give yourself over in a certain level of trust. Forgiveness and faith work the same. You have to roll the dice in trust. Nothing else can give you an answer. Despite every appearance to the contrary at times, in the end, love does triumph over hatred. Peace does triumph over chaos. Forgiveness does triumph over bitterness. Hope does triumph over cynicism. Fidelity does triumph over despair. Virtue does triumph over sin. Conscience does triumph over callousness. Life triumphs over death, and good always triumphs over evil. Our faith begins at the very point where it seems it should end, in God’s seeming silence in the face of evil. And what does this ask of us? We must trust in the truth of the resurrection. Those who live in trust will find love. God’s silence can be trusted, even when we die inside of it. We must remain faithful in love, forgiveness, and conscience despite everything suggesting they are naive. They will bring us to what is deepest inside of life. Ultimately, God vindicates virtue. God vindicates love. God vindicates conscience. God vindicates forgiveness. God vindicates fidelity. Ultimately, God vindicated Jesus and will vindicate us, too, if we remain faithful.

Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that every choice in life is a renunciation. Thomas Aquinas said that, and it helps explain why we struggle so painfully to make clear choices. We want the right things, but we want other things too. Every choice is a series of renunciations: If I marry one person, I cannot marry anyone else; if I live in one place, I cannot live anywhere else; if I choose a certain career, that excludes many other careers; if I have this, then I cannot have that. The list could go on indefinitely. To choose one thing is to renounce others. That’s the nature of choice. We are fired into this world with a madness that comes from the gods and has us believe that we are destined to embrace the cosmos itself. We don’t want something, we want everything. That’s a simple way, though a good one, of saying something that Christianity has always said, namely, that in body and soul we are meant to embrace everyone and we already hunger for that. Perhaps we experience it most clearly in our sexuality, but the hunger is everywhere present in us. Our yearning is wide, our longing is infinite, our urge to embrace is promiscuous. We are infinite in yearning, but, in this life, only get to meet the finite. Life and love, beyond the abstract and beyond the grandiosity of our own daydreams, involve hard, painful renunciation. But it is precisely that very renunciation that helps us grow up and makes our lives real in a way that our daydreams don’t. In trying to explain some of the deeper secrets of life, Jesus gives us this parable: The Kingdom of God is like a merchant in search of fine pearls, when he finds a single one of great value, he goes and sells all that he owns and buys that pearl. That, the pearl of great price, the value of love and its cost, is in essence the challenge that young husband put to his wife when he told her to sort out the question: “Are you a married woman or are you something else?” For what are you willing to renounce other things? What is our own pearl of great price? Are we willing to give up everything in exchange for it? Are we willing to live with its limits? Thoreau once said: “The youth gets together materials to build a bridge to the moon or perhaps a palace or a temple…at length the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them.” So too in love and life: The child sets out make love to the whole world and the adult eventually concludes to marry a single person, in essence, to build a woodshed. But it’s only in that woodshed where life and love are real in this world.