Author: Daniel Scofield, MTS

We can see many things in this lesson from Jesus in the Parable of the Dishonest Steward, and one of the most powerful deals with three great spiritual truths exemplified in the steward’s actions. The dishonest steward is in serious trouble, and he knows it. This crisis he is facing is forcing him to make a decision. We can also see this awakening to a choice in the life of Jesus. His mission on earth created a crisis of choice for humankind, “Are you with me or against me?” Jesus demands that we make a choice; there is no grey area. This is the first great spiritual lesson. The second spiritual lesson is seen through the quick assessment that the dishonest steward makes of his situation. He realizes he is too weak to do manual labor and too proud to beg, so he knows he will have no actual capability to support himself. He has looked into the mirror of his life and seen the makings of the crisis – his selfish actions. Jesus knows our pains, failures, and lies. He knows the spiritual turmoil our life has become with our distance from him and his church. The third spiritual lesson is seen in the quick assessment by the dishonest steward and then his decision to act. Jesus does not commend his immoral actions, only his awakening to the crisis and firmly working on a plan to change his life. This is what Jesus asks all of us when we know we’re trapped in a spiritual wasteland. We must be resolute in changing our spiritual life by attending church, focusing on daily prayer, reconciling with the Lord through confession, and practicing an everyday life of being his light and love to all.

The incarnation brought forth the reality that “God became flesh” – a physical and earthly event. Fr. Rolheiser writes that this shows us that everything physical is potentially a sacrament. But we struggle with this. Our daily lives are often so distracted and fixated upon things that seem unholy that the idea that everything is a sacrament can appear more like wishful thinking than theology. Christian belief is that the universe shows forth God’s glory, that each of us is made in God’s image, that our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, that the food we eat is sacramental, and that in our work and in our sexual embrace we are co-creators with God. There are many reasons, mostly rooted in the fact that we are human, that life is long, and that it isn’t easy to sustain high symbols, high language, and high ideals in the muck and grime of everyday life. Eating, working, and making love should be holy, but too often, we do them more for survival than for any sacramentality, and “getting by” is about as a high symbol as we can muster on a weekday. I say this with sympathy. It isn’t easy, day by day, hour by hour, to experience sacrament in the ordinary actions of our lives. But there’s another reason we have lost the sense of sacramentality in our lives: we have too little prayer and ritual around our ordinary actions. We seldom use prayer or ritual to connect our actions – eating, drinking, working, socializing, making love, giving birth to things – to their sacred origins. I’m not sure where we should go with all of this. Unless we find prayer and rituals to connect our eating, working, and making love to their sacred origins, ordinary life will remain just that, ordinary life, nothing special, just the muck and grime of slugging along.

In typical Semitic fashion, Jesus makes a stark exaggeration of “hating” your mother and father, etc. How was the term “hate” used in other areas of the New Testament? The force of the word is typically Semitic and was used in Matthew’s gospel, where the term means “loves father or mother more,” which would tell us that the meaning of hate in this context means to love less. Bishop Robert Barron writes that a great spiritual principle undergirds today’s reflection verse: detachment. The heart of the spiritual life is to love God and then to love everything else for the sake of God. But we sinners, as St. Augustine said, fall into the trap of loving the creature and forgetting the Creator. When we treat something less than God as God, that’s when we get off the rails, and trouble ensues. And therefore, Jesus tells his fair-weather fans that they have a very stark choice to make. Jesus must be loved first and last—everything else in their lives has to find its meaning in relation to him. The life of Jesus is about choosing a different way to live. It’s a choice to favor him above all things in life or favor the ways of the world. Only one choice will bring true joy, peace, happiness, and eternal life.

At the end of the day, all of us, believers and non-believers, pious and impious, share one common humanity and all end up on the same road. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that this has many implications. It’s no secret that today religious practice is plummeting radically everywhere in the secular world.Those who are opting out don’t all look the same, nor go by the same name. Some are atheists, explicitly denying the existence God. Others are agnostics, open to the accepting the existence of God but remaining undecided. Others self-define as nones;asked what faith they belong to they respond by saying none. There are those who define themselves as dones, done with religion and done with church. Then there are the procrastinators, persons who know that someday they will have to deal with the religious question, but, like Saint Augustine, keep saying, eventually I need to do this, but not yet!Finally, there’s that huge group who define themselves as spiritual-but-not-religious, saying they believe in God but not in institutionalized religion. I suspect that God doesn’t much share our anxiety here, not that God sees this as perfectly healthy (humans are human!), but rather that God has a larger perspective on it, is infinitely loving, and is long suffering in patience while tolerating our choices. Gabriel Marcel once famously stated, To say to someone ‘I love you’ is to say, ‘you will never be lost’.As Christians, we understand this in terms of our unity inside the Body of Christ. Our love for someone links him or her to us, and since we are part of the Body of Christ, he or she too is linked to the Body of Christ, and to touch Christ is to touch grace. We need to recognize that God loves these persons more than we do and is more solicitous for their happiness and salvation than we are. God loves everyone individually and passionately and works in ways to ensure that nobody gets lost. Ultimately, God is the only game in town, in that no matter how many false roads we take and how many good roads we ignore, we all end up on the one, same, last, final road. All of us: atheists, agnostics, nones, dones, searchers, procrastinators, those who don’t believe in institutionalized religion, the indifferent, the belligerent, the angry, the bitter, and the wounded, end up on the same road heading towards the same destination – death. However, the good news is that this last road, for all of us, the pious and the impious alike, leads to God.

We can be very reactive people when things are not going our way. One question in many faith circles is why we no longer preach hellfire and brimstone. Studies have shown that threats work. But preaching fear makes it hard to see a God that is love, and that fundamentally makes this wrong. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that you don’t enter a love relationship because you feel afraid or threatened. You enter a love relationship because you feel drawn there by love. More importantly, preaching divine threats dishonors the God in whom we believe. The God whom Jesus incarnates and reveals is not a God who puts sincere, good-hearted people into hell against their will based on some human or moral lapse, which, in our moral or religious categories, we deem to be a mortal sin. What kind of God would underwrite this kind of belief? What kind of God would not give sincere people a second chance, a third one, and seventy-seven times seven more chances if they remain sincere? A healthy theology of God demands that we stop teaching that hell can be a nasty surprise waiting for an essentially good person. The God we believe in as Christians is infinite understanding, compassion, and forgiveness. God’s love surpasses our own, and if we, in our better moments, can see the goodness of a human heart despite its lapses and weaknesses, how much more so will God do this? Scripture tells us that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. How does that square with not being afraid of God? There is a healthy fear innate within the dynamics of love itself. When we genuinely love someone, we fear being selfish, boorish, and disrespectful in that relationship. We will fear violating the sacred space within which intimacy occurs. Metaphorically, we will sense we’re standing on holy ground and that we’d best have our shoes off before that sacred fire. We honor God not by living in fear lest we offend him but by spending the incredible energy God gives us to help life flourish. God is a joyous energy within which to generatively spend ourselves.

To be a saint is to be motivated by gratitude, nothing more and nothing less. Scripture, everywhere and always, makes this point. Fr. Ron Rolheiser points us toward the example of Adam and Eve’s sin. It was, first and foremost, a failure in receptivity and gratitude. God gives them life, each other, and the garden and asks them only to receive it properly, in gratitude and thanks. Only after doing this do we go on to “break and share.” Before all else, we first give thanks. To receive something in gratitude and be suitably grateful is the primary foundation of all religious attitudes. Proper gratitude is the ultimate virtue. It defines sanctity. Saints, holy persons, are thankful people who see and receive everything as a gift. The converse is also true. Anyone who takes life and love for granted should never be confused with a saint. Fr. Rolheiser speaks of a patient brought into the hospital ward he was in for a knee injury from the emergency room. His pain was so severe that his groans kept us awake. The doctors had just worked on him, and it was then left to a single nurse to attend to him. Several times that night, she entered the room to minister to him: changing bandages, giving medication, and so on. Each time, as she walked away from his bed, he would, despite his extreme pain, thank her. Finally, after this had happened several times, she said to him: “Sir, you don’t need to thank me. That is my job!” “Ma’am!” he replied, “It’s nobody’s job to take care of me! Nobody owes me that. I want to thank you! He genuinely appreciated what this nurse was doing for him, and he was right; it isn’t anybody’s job to take care of us! Our propensity to forget this gets us into trouble. The failure to be appropriately grateful, to take as owed what’s offered as a gift, lies at the root of many of our deepest resentments towards others and their resentments towards us. Invariably, when we are angry at someone, especially at those closest to us, it is precisely because we are not being appreciated (that is, thanked) properly. Conversely, I suspect more than a few people harbor resentment towards us because we consciously or unconsciously think it is their job to care for us. Like Adam and Eve, we take what can only be received gratefully as a gift as if it is ours by right. That goes against the very contours of love. It is the original sin.

Humility is an attitude of lowliness and obedience grounded in recognizing one’s status before God. Humility is not something we can fake. God sees into the depths of our souls and knows the true intentions of our hearts. Sometimes, in this journey through life, we can become proud and arrogant for what we have accomplished, or we can become self-absorbed with the messages the world keeps feeding us about our importance. That creates behaviors of dismissiveness and hardness of heart that distance us from others and God. But in God’s compassion, he will often break us of this self-made pride so we may come to repentance and restoration with him and our fellow man in our humility and brokenness. In today’s culture, we can struggle mightily with humility, which is often associated with weakness, and the world keeps telling us we need to be “strong.” But we must accept the reality that this idea of humility is simply a mask for our need to control life. It takes more strength to acknowledge our need for God and others than it does to remain self-absorbed with ourselves. Remember, the most authentic expression of obedience was the submission of Jesus Christ to the Father. Christ was willing to become human for humanity’s sake. He gave up his freedom of self so that he could serve others. In a world run amok of narcissistic behavior, Jesus shows us what real strength is all about.

The fourth commandment says: “Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy…the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord God; in it, you shall not do any work…the Lord blessed the sabbath day and hallowed it.” Yet we see Jesus healing the man who had been ill for a long time on the sabbath. Was Jesus disrespecting the commandment? He knew the commandments – so why did he do this? One of the wonderful things Jesus is teaching us is the bigness of God. Your image of God creates you or defeats you. There is an absolute connection between how you see God and how you see yourself and the whole world. The religious leaders in Jesus’ time on earth had a God who looked to judge people for their sins if they didn’t obey his commands. But Jesus taught that God isn’t looking for every opportunity to judge us for our sins or to prescribe punishment. In reality, Jesus taught that the Father is just trying to describe what happens if we keep living the way we do. Maybe we can go on for a while, but something will happen. We will end up hurting ourselves, the people we love, our community, and the world we share with so many others. The story of Jesus healing a man suffering from dropsy had many people mad at him for doing it on the Sabbath. Their God was vengeful, and they expected Jesus to “pay” for his transgression. Jesus’ actions were to show everyone that God seeks to nurture and care for them and that he desires to be in communion with them. Who we understand God to be will shape everything we do in our lives. What is your image of God?

Why pray for the dead? Does this make any sense? What possible difference can our prayers make to a person once they have died? Fr. Rolheiser writes that we pray for the dead for the same reason we pray for anything; we feel the need, which is reason enough. Moreover, the objections raised against praying for the dead are just as quickly raised against all prayers of petition. God already knows every one of our desires, every one of our sins, and all of our goodwill. So why remind God of these? Because prayer builds us up and changes us, not God. We pray for the dead to comfort ourselves, to stir and celebrate our own faith, and to assuage our own guilt about our less-than-perfect relationship with the one who has died. In praying for the dead, we do two things: We highlight our faith in the power of God, and we hold up the life of the person who has died so as to let God take care of things and wash things clean. That is one of the purposes of a funeral liturgy: to clearly put the dead person and our relationship with them into God’s hands. Most importantly, we pray for the dead because we believe that we are still in vital communion with them. There is, death notwithstanding, still a vital flow of life between them and us. Love, presence, and communication reach even through death. We and they can still feel each other, know each other, love each other, console each other, and influence each other. Our lives are still joined. Hence, we pray for the dead to remain in contact with them. Just as we can hold someone’s hand as they are dying, and this can be an immense consolation to them and us, so too, figuratively but really, we can hold that person’s hand through and beyond death. Within Roman Catholic theology, we have believed that our prayers help release this person from purgatory. Purgatory, properly understood, is not a punishment for any imperfection nor indeed a place distinct from heaven. The pains of purgatory are the pains of adjusting to a new life (which includes the pain of letting go of this one) and the pains of being embraced by perfect love when we ourselves are far from perfect. By praying for the dead, we support them in their pain of adjustment, adjustment to a new life, and to living in full light. Purgation eventually leads to ecstasy, but the birth that produces that ecstasy requires first a series of painful deaths. Thus, just as we tried to hold their hands as they died, so now, in praying for loved ones who have died, we continue to hold their hands, and they ours, beyond the chasm of death itself.

On this day when we celebrate the Solemnity of All Saints, Fr. Rolheiser writes that we used to pray for a happy death as part of our family prayer. I pictured that this way: you died cradled in the loving arms of family, friends, and church, fully at peace with God and everyone around you. That’s a good picture, the ideal, but not everyone gets to die that way. Randomness, contingency, and accidents too often have us die in broken, compromised, and cold situations: bitter, unforgiving, unforgiven, not fully reconciled, alienated from someone, not going to church, angry, drunk, dead by drug overdose, a victim of suicide. Death, not infrequently, catches some of us before we’ve had time to say what we should have said or do what we should have done. Too often, we die with unfinished business, too much of it. As the old Confiteor says, we need forgiveness for what we’ve done and left undone. Who among us doesn’t have unfinished business with someone whom death has taken away? Perhaps we had hurt that person, or he or she had hurt us, and it was never fully reconciled. Worse still, perhaps someone has died for whom we had felt hatred, and we should have made some gesture of reconciliation, but we never did. Now it’s too late! Death has separated us, and some painful bitterness now lies irrevocably unresolved, and we live with the guilt, wishing we had done something before it was too late. But it’s not too late. It’s never too late if we take seriously the Christian doctrine of the communion of saints. To believe in the communion of saints is to believe that those who have died are still alive and are linked to us in such a way that we can continue to talk with them, that our relationship with them can continue to grow, and that the reconciliation that wasn’t possible before their deaths can now occur. Why can this happen now? It happens because, as Luke’s account of Jesus on the cross teaches, death washes things clean. “Today, you will be with me in paradise!” Jesus speaks those words to the good thief on the cross, and they’re meant for everyone who dies without yet fully being a saint and without having had the time and opportunity to make all the amends and speak all the apologies that we owe to others. There is still time, after death, on both sides, for reconciliation and healing to happen because inside the communion of saints, we have privileged access to each other. There, we can finally speak all those words we couldn’t before. We can reach across death’s divide.