Author: Daniel Scofield, MTS

Most Christians are familiar with a refrain that echoes through our Christian prayers and songs, an antiphon of hope addressed to God:  Grant that we may be one with all the saints in singing your praises! But we have an over-pious notion of what that would look like. We picture ourselves, one day, in heaven, in a choir with Mary, Jesus’ mother, with the great biblical figures of old, with the apostles and all the saints, singing praises to God, all the while feeling lucky to be there, given our moral and spiritual inferiority to these great spiritual figures. We picture ourselves spending eternity feeling grateful for having made a team whose talent level should have excluded us. Fr. Ron Rolheiser says this is nothing but a fantasy, pure and simple, mostly simple. What would it mean to be among the saints singing God’s praises? We are one with the saints in singing God’s praises when we are one with them in the way we live our lives, when, like them, our lives are transparent, honest, grounded in personal integrity, with no skeletons in our closet. Being one with the saints in singing God’s praises is less about singing songs in our churches than about living honest lives outside them. We are one with the saints in singing God’s praises when we radiate God’s wide compassion; We are one with the saints in singing God’s praises when we tend to widows, orphans, and strangers; We are one with the saints in singing God’s praises when we work for peace; We are one with the saints in singing God’s praises whenever we forgive each other; We are one with the saints in singing God’s praises when, like them, we give away our time, talents, and our very lives in self-sacrifice without counting the cost; We are one with the saints in singing God’s praises when we are one with them in prayer; We are one with the saints in singing God’s praises when we live in hope when we ground our vision and our energies in the promise of God and in the power that God revealed in the resurrection of Jesus; We are one with the saints in singing God’s praises only when we live our lives as they lived theirs.

We are drowning in a sea of voices. Different voices tell us different things, and each voice seems to carry its own truth. On the one hand, there’s a powerful voice beckoning us towards self-sacrifice, self-denial, altruism, and heroism, telling us that happiness lies in giving life away, that selfishness will make us unhappy, and that we will only be ourselves when we are big-hearted, generous, and put the needs of others before our own. Deep down, we all know the truth of that; it is Jesus’ voice telling us that there is no greater love nor meaning than to lay down one’s life for others. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that Francis of Assisi was right: we only receive by giving. And so we admire people who radiate that, and we feed our souls and those of our children with stories of heroism, selflessness, and bigness of heart. But that’s not the only voice we hear. We also hear a powerful, persistent voice seemingly calling us in the opposite direction. Superficially, this voice calls us towards pleasure, comfort, and security, the voice that tells us to take care of ourselves, drink in life’s pleasures to the full, and seize the day while it’s still ours to have. More profoundly, this voice challenges us not to be too timid or fearful to be a complete human being. This voice invites us to participate in, contribute to, and enjoy the incredible energy, color, wit, intelligence, and creativity that make the world go round and make life worth living. This is the voice beckoning us towards romance, creativity, art, sex, achievement, and physical health, the voice telling us Jesus’ parable of the talents and holding before us a truth too often neglected in religious circles, namely, that God is also the author of eros, color, physical health, wit, and intelligence. So, which is the real voice? There is no simple truth here or anywhere else. Truth is painfully complex (as are we); truth is always bigger than our capacity to absorb and integrate it. To be open to truth is to be perpetually stretched and perpetually in tension, at least on this side of eternity. And that’s true in terms of the seeming opposition between these voices. At times, they are in real opposition, and we can’t have it both ways but have to choose one to the detriment of the other. Truth has real boundaries, and there’s a danger in letting it mean everything. But there’s an equal danger in allowing it to mean too little, of reducing a full truth to a half-truth—and nowhere, at least in the spiritual life, is this danger more significant than in our tendency to let either of these voices completely blot out the other.

Recalling the interactions of Jesus and the disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane, we know that Jesus goes off to pray and asks the disciples to stay near him while he prays. After an hour of intense prayer, Jesus returns to find his disciples asleep. Did they fall asleep because it was dark or late, or had they just eaten food and wine from the Passover meal, or was it the emotional stress of dealing with Jesus’ impending prediction of his death? What caused them to be weary? Weariness can come in many forms and with many intentions. In this lesson, Jesus warns the disciples to remain firm in their faith, as faith and prayer go hand in hand. St Augustine comments, “In order to pray, let us believe; and for our faith not to weaken, let us pray. Faith causes prayer to grow, and when prayer grows, our faith is strengthened.” Our Lord has promised his Church that this reality will remain true to its mission until the end of time. The Church, therefore, cannot go off the path of true faith. But not everyone will remain faithful, and some will turn their backs on the faith of their own accord. In this way, our Lord warns us to help us stay watchful and persevere in faith and prayer even though people around us may fall away.

Our lives are a search for meaning, fulfillment, and even for pleasure, and this in fact is our search for God. Fr. Rolheiser writes that 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. Reading his confession, we tend to focus on the first part of it, namely, his realization that God was inside of him all the while but that he was not inside himself. This is a perennial struggle for us, too. Less evident 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 searching for God. What he was looking for in all those worldly things and pleasures was, in fact, the person of God. Given this reality, his confession might be recast this way: Late, late, have I loved you because I was outside of myself while all the while you were inside me, but I wasn’t home, and I had no idea it was you I was looking for in the world. I never connected that search to you. In my mind, I was not looking for you; I was looking for what would bring me meaning, love, significance, sexual fulfillment, knowledge, pleasure, and a prestigious career. I never connected my longing for these things with my longing for you. I had no idea that everything I was chasing, all those things I was lonely for, were already inside me, in you. Late, late, have I understood that. Late, late, have I learned that what I am so deeply hungry and lonely for is inside you. Everything I am lonely for is inside you, and you are inside me. Late, late, have I realized this. Our whole life is simply a search to respond to that divine madness inside us, a madness Christians identify with the infinite yearnings of the soul, a yearning for our God.

“Dear Hiring Manager, Thank you for your letter of November 1. After careful consideration, I regret to inform you that I cannot accept your refusal to offer me a position in your department. This year, I have been particularly fortunate in receiving an unusually large number of rejection letters. With such a varied and promising field of candidates, it is impossible for me to accept all refusals. Despite your company’s outstanding qualifications and previous experience in rejecting applicants, your rejection does not meet my current needs. Therefore, I will assume the position in your department this August. I look forward to seeing you then. Best of luck in rejecting future applicants.” The above letter was penned by a recent graduate who was frustrated with their inability to land a job despite attending dozens of interviews. Rejection is a fact of life. Rejection can leave us with dashed hopes and broken dreams, or it could leave us frustrated, angry, or bitter. In 1858, Abraham Lincoln received more votes than Stephen A. Douglas in the Illinois US Senate seat race. Still, the Illinois legislature used questionable legal maneuvering to send Douglas to Washington instead. Someone asked Lincoln how he felt, and he reportedly replied, “Like the boy who stubbed his toe: I am too big to cry and too badly hurt to laugh.” The fear of rejection sometimes chains us in a prison of fear, preventing us from taking risks that could lead to a new and brighter future. We all know the humiliation of being rejected, overlooked, ignored, and left for another. We also know what it feels like to be unable to actualize our persons, talents, and dreams in the way we would like. But we need to hold fast to the hope of Christ that the kingdom of God is among us, and ultimately, we are all joyously accepted if we turn to our suffering Savior.

We are sometimes quick to label others as “foreigners.” Perhaps they dress “funny,” speak with a heavy accent, have darker or lighter skin, or practice “odd” customs. Fr. Rolheiser writes that God breaks into our lives in important ways, mainly through “the stranger,” through what’s foreign, through what’s other, and through what sabotages our thinking and blows apart our calculated expectations. Revelation normally comes to us in a surprise, in a form that turns our thinking upside down. Take, for example, the incarnation itself. For centuries, people looked forward to the coming of a messiah, a god in human flesh, who would overpower and humiliate all their enemies and offer them, those faithfully praying for this, honor and glory. They prayed for and anticipated a superman, and what did they get? A helpless baby lying in the straw. Revelation works like that. Therefore, St. Paul tells us always to welcome a stranger because it could, in fact, be an angel in disguise. All of us, I am sure, at some point in our lives, have personally had that experience of meeting an angel in disguise inside a stranger whom we perhaps welcomed only with some reluctance and fear. I know in my own life, there have been times when I didn’t want to welcome a certain person or situation into my life. I live in a religious community where you do not get to choose who you will live with. You are assigned your “immediate family,” and (but for a few exceptions when there is clinical dysfunction) like-mindedness is not a criterion for who is assigned to live with each other in our religious houses. Not infrequently, I have had to live in a community with someone who I would not, by choice, have taken for a friend, colleague, neighbor, or family member. To my surprise, it has often been the person whom I would have least chosen to live with who has been a vehicle of grace and transformation in my life. What’s foreign and other can be upsetting and painful for a long time before grace and revelation are recognized, but it’s what carries grace. God is in the stranger, so we are cutting ourselves off from a major avenue of grace whenever we will not let the foreign into our lives.

It is hard to measure up. In our lucid moments, we admit this. Anna Blaman, the pseudonym of Johanna Petronella Vrugt, was a Dutch writer and poet who echoes these thoughts. I realized it was impossible for a human being to be and remain good or pure. If, for instance, I wanted to be attentive in one direction, it could only be at the cost of neglecting another. If I gave my heart to one thing, it left another in the cold. No day and no hour go by without my being guilty of inadequacy. We never do enough, and what we do is never well enough done, except being inadequate, which we are good at because that is the way we are made. This is true of me and of everyone else. Every day and every hour brings with it its weight of moral guilt as regards my work and my relations with others. I am constantly catching myself out in my human failings, and despite their being implied in my imperfection, I am conscious of a sort of check. And this means that my human shortcomings are also my human guilt. We have a conviction of our own shortcomings and of consensual guilt, a guilt which shows itself all too clearly in the consequences of what we have done or left undone. Fr. Rolheiser writes that by definition, to be human is to be inadequate. Only God is adequate, and the rest of us can safely say: Fear not, you are inadequate! We can take consolation from the gospel parable of the ten bridesmaids who all fell asleep while waiting for the bridegroom, the wise and the foolish. Even the wise were too human and too weak to stay awake the whole time. Nobody does it perfectly, and accepting this, our congenital inadequacy can bring us to a healthy humility and perhaps even a healthy humor about it. The older I get, the less confident, in some ways, I am becoming. I don’t always know whether I’m following Christ properly or even know precisely what it means to follow Christ. So I stake my faith on an invitation that Jesus left us on the night before he died to break bread and drink wine in his memory and to trust that this if all else is uncertain, is what we should be doing while we wait for him to return.

The assumption in today’s reflection verse hinges on why the apostles ask for increased faith. What do they think is missing? Fr. Rolheiser suggests that we, like the apostles, live inside an anxious peace. They are failing to see the “big picture” of life. When speaking of peace, there are two narratives. The peace that the world can give to us is not a negative or a bad peace. It is real and good, but it is fragile and inadequate. It is fragile because it can easily be taken away from us. As we experience it ordinarily in our lives, peace is generally predicated on feeling healthy, loved, and secure. But all of these are fragile and things that affected the disciples. This type of peace can change radically with one visit to the doctor, an unexpected dizzy spell, sudden chest pains, the loss of a job, the rupture of a relationship, the suicide of a loved one, or multiple kinds of betrayal that can blindside us. We try mightily to take measures to guarantee the health, security, and trustworthiness of our relationships, but we live with a lot of anxiety, knowing these are always fragile. Jesus offers a peace that is not fragile and already beyond fear and anxiety and does not depend on feeling healthy, secure, and loved in this world. His peace is the absolute assurance that we are connected to the source of life in such a way that nothing, absolutely nothing, can ever be removed: not bad health, not betrayal by someone, indeed, not even our own sin. We are unconditionally loved and held by the source of life itself, and nothing can change that. Nothing can change God’s unconditional love for us. That’s the meta-narrative, the “big picture” of life that the disciples and us are missing. We need this picture of life to keep our perspective during the ups and downs of our lives. We need this assurance. We live with constant anxiety because we sense that our health, security, and relationships are fragile and that our peace can quickly disappear. Let us leave this time together knowing that we need to more deeply appropriate Jesus’ farewell gift to us: I leave you a peace that no one can take from you: Know that you are loved and held unconditionally.

Individuals who have undertaken graduate and post-graduate studies would acknowledge that these pathways to knowledge and wisdom affect who they are and what and how they do things in life. Fr. Ron Rolheiser, a trained academic, has worked at various universities, teaching within university circles and having university professors as close friends and colleagues. He writes that for academics who follow the pathway of Faith, the challenge is remembering Christ’s teaching that the deep secrets of life and faith are hidden from the learned and the clever and revealed instead to children. He goes on to say that intelligence and learning are good things. Intelligence is the gift from God that sets us apart from animals, and access to learning is a precious right God gives us. Ignorance and lack of education are things every healthy society and every healthy individual strives to overcome. Scripture praises both wisdom and intelligence, and the health of any church is partly predicated on having a vigorous intellectual stream within it. Every time in history that the church has let popular piety, however sincere, trump sound theology, it has paid a high price, as The Reformation attests. The fault is not with intelligence and learning, both good things in themselves, but in what they can inadvertently do to us. Intelligence and learning often have the unintended effect of undermining what’s childlike in us. When we are “learned and the clever,” we can more easily forget that we need others and consequently don’t as naturally reach for another’s hand as does a child. It’s easier for us to isolate ourselves. The very strength that intelligence and learning bring into our lives can instill in us a false sense of self-sufficiency that can make us want to separate ourselves from others in unhealthy ways and understand ourselves as superior in some way. And superiority never enters the room alone but always brings along several of her children: arrogance, disdain, boredom, cynicism. All of these are occupational hazards for the “learned and the clever,” and none of these help unlock any of life’s deep secrets. It is never bad to become learned and sophisticated; it’s only bad if we remain there. The task is to become post-sophisticated, that is, to remain full of intelligence and learning even as we put on the mindset of a child.

Our hearts are complicated and fascinating, and we’d all be gentler with ourselves and find our lives more interesting if we listened more regularly to their beat. That’s also the secret of our relationship with Christ. Fr. Rolheiser writes that we must put a stethoscope to Christ’s heart and listen to its complex and fascinating rhythms. How do we do this? The Gospel of John gives us a mystical image of this. In John’s account of the Last Supper, he has a disciple, whom he describes as “the one whom Jesus loved,” reclining on the breast of Jesus. Obviously, this connotes a deep intimacy, but it’s also meant to convey something else. If you lean your ear on someone’s chest, you can hear that person’s heartbeat, which eventually begins to reverberate gently throughout your body. This is the image of perfect discipleship for John: We are “the one whom Jesus loves,” and we need to have our heads on Jesus’ breast to hear his heartbeat and, from there, look out at the world. Being attuned to Christ’s heartbeat and reclining in solace and intimacy on his breast will give us both the vision and the sustenance we need to live as we should. As we know, “the one whom Jesus loved” (historically referred to as John) refers to everyone. For John, this constitutes the very heart of discipleship and dwarfs everything else (charism, church office, even prophecy) regarding what’s essential. Intimacy with Jesus is more important than any charism or leadership role. And that’s our call, to have the kind of intimacy with Christ that has us reclining on his breast, hearing his heartbeat, and looking out at the world from that perspective. But how do we do that practically? We do this by imaging our heads on Christ’s breast, feeling that intimacy, hearing his heartbeat, and being filled with the comfort of that; we do this in visioning by listening to Christ’s heartbeat and looking out at the world to see what it means to love purely, beyond ideology, beyond being liberal or conservative, beyond different schools of thought, and our opinions and those of others. We do this by taking in his sustenance that allows us to find the strength to keep our hearts soft when everything beckons us to be hard, our tongues gentle when everything is gossip and slander, and ourselves aware of others’ gifts when all around there is jealousy. Our sensitivity must be a stethoscope that hears the beat of Christ’s complex and fascinating heart.