Author: Daniel Scofield, MTS

Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that humanity struggles to find its uniqueness in a world filled with billions of others seeking the same uniqueness. We try to stand out but generally don’t succeed. We sense that we are extraordinary, precious, and significant, irrespective of our practical fortunes in life. Deep down, we feel uniquely loved and specially called to a life of meaning and significance. We know, too, though more in faith than in feeling, that we are precious not based on what we accomplish but rather based on having been created and loved by God. But this intuition, however deep in our souls, invariably wilts in the face of trying to live a life that’s unique and special in a world in which billions of others are also trying to do the same thing. And so we can be overwhelmed by our own mediocrity, anonymity, and mortality and begin to fear that we’re not precious but are merely another among many, nobody special, one of billions, living among billions. We struggle to be content with ordinary lives of anonymity, hidden in God. We set for ourselves the impossible, frustrating task of assuring ourselves something that only God can give us: significance and immortality. Ordinary life then never seems enough for us, and we live restless, competitive, driven lives. Why isn’t everyday life enough for us? Why do we habitually feel dissatisfied at not being special? The answer: We do all these things to try to set ourselves apart because we are trying to give ourselves something that only God can provide us with significance and immortality. Thomas Merton wrote: “There is no need to make an assertion of my life, especially so about it as mine, though doubtless it is not somebody else’s. I must learn to live to gradually forget program and artifice.” Ordinary life is enough. There isn’t any need to make an assertion with our lives. Our preciousness and meaning lie within the preciousness and purpose of life itself, not in having to accomplish something extraordinary.

And the word was made flesh! Flesh. Fr. Rolheiser writes how that word explodes with connotations. Initially, our flesh is virginal and pure; the naked, unwhipped, unsullied, unwrinkled flesh of a baby, full of innocence, beauty, and dignity. How natural it is to handle a baby gently, to cradle it. But from the beginning, our flesh is complex and needy. It needs desperately to be stroked, to be wanted, to be held in affection, to be singled out for special attention, to be joined to what is beyond itself. Yet our flesh is vulnerable, exposed; naked always, it hurts easily, bruises, burns, cuts. And life, soon enough, brings its whip down on exposed flesh. It begins already when we are in the womb and in the cradle where others around us, living in their own wounds, cannot give us the sense that we are unconditionally loved and wanted. What kind of flesh did God have in mind for the incarnation? Relaxed, joyful flesh; frightened flesh; unstroked tense flesh; smooth young flesh, strutting in pride; aged wrinkled flesh; perfumed flesh; decaying flesh; flesh giving itself in love; flesh holding a gun; restless aching flesh; sexually satiated flesh; drugged flesh; flesh in the groans of childbirth; flesh slashing its own wrists; whipped flesh; flesh raping other flesh; tired flesh; ulcered flesh; flesh full of energy; flesh full of cancer; virgin’s flesh; prostituted flesh; cradled flesh; uncradled frigid flesh? In what flesh can we see the word incarnate today? Can the word ultimately cradle and calm and satiate the complex needs of flesh? Will tension ever leave human flesh? Despite our growth, our hearts are ever closer to choosing despair over hope, resignation to darkness over the light of love, victimization over liberation, and cynicism over childlike happiness. We are a child in need of a mother, a tension aching for consummation, flesh in need of an incarnation. Come, Lord Jesus.

Today’s reading from Matthew’s Gospel has Jesus responding to the Pharisee’s question on “which commandment in the law is the greatest.” It has always fascinated me how God places different views of the story’s meaning in a modern-day commentary. Some see the law as helping us be obedient to God, and therefore, it becomes a question of our discipline to obedience. This obedience can create a behavior of following familiar, predictable routines instead of finding ways to think fearlessly and creatively about ways to express our love for the Lord. Obedience of this kind is good but does not achieve the fullness we have given. Others have noted that this commandment cannot be lived out. We believe this because we struggle with the question, “Have I ever really loved in this way?” It’s not as if God gave us a simple commandment like going to church on Sunday. At some point, we have realized that this gift of love comes from the gift of life God has given us. This understanding lets us know that if we truly love ourselves in a non-egoistic sense, we can freely share this self-love with others for their benefit, not ours. Loving in this imperfect manner keeps us in utter reliance upon the mercy, compassion, and grace of God. We can never fully succeed by ourselves. Lastly, I am drawn to a personal favorite of how we understand this kind of love. The story goes that a famous violinist was being interviewed about a piece of music she would be playing and noted the beauty in its simplicity, yet she said it was a complicated piece to play. The reporter asked her what made something so simple so challenging. The violinist replied, “It’s hard to do what is so simple because simple does not mean it is easy.” The commandment to genuinely love God and also love their neighbor should be easy to comprehend and do. But if that were true, wouldn’t the entire world be different? What makes this simple commandment to “love your neighbor as yourself” difficult? One aspect of the answer is that you can’t give away what you don’t have. In other words, if you don’t love yourself or honestly believe God loves you, then it is not easy to love your neighbor because you don’t love yourself. It takes an openness within us to understand what this “self-love” entails to become the unconscious and unconditional love lived out as easily as we breathe. You no longer “try” to love; you are love, just as the violinist discovered. That spiritual growth leads us into living the commandment awash in accepting a loving God who loves us so that the same sense of oneness of love can be freely given to our neighbor.

This beautiful line of inclusion was addressed to the Gentile Christians, assuring them they were not excluded because they were not Jews. I love these verses from Ephesians as it speaks to the communal nature of the Church and of life that we have all experienced in some manner. For some, “family” has a very rich and deeply connective image that is founded at its core in love. For others, family brings back unpleasant and dark images of a period in life often devoid of the love we all desire. The beauty of being members of God’s household is that the Lord knows the disordered nature of lives affected by choices, many of which we never made but unfortunately must live in and through. In God’s house, St. Paul tells us that Christ himself holds it all together through a love that unconditionally welcomes us. In one small way, our family discovered the power of welcoming in our travels throughout the world as we moved to the next duty station in my Naval career. This sojourn taught us that the many moves across the states and in foreign countries never diminished the joy we felt being welcomed into our new home. We took comfort in the words from John’s gospel: “Remain in me, as I remain in you.” In God’s house, we are truly one family, living in the love of the Lord. I pray that Paul’s words today will transform everyone into realizing that we are all sojourners on this earth, journeying toward our eternal home. For our hearts are restless until they rest in you, Lord. Our home is with you.

In his Letter to the Romans, Paul brings to light the ever-challenging conflict humanity has to deal with: knowing the right thing to do but failing to do it. Fr. Ron Rolheiser asks, “How do we fight for the good we seek to do and conquer the sin that dwells within us? Aristotle wrote that two contraries cannot co-exist inside the same subject; something can’t be light and dark simultaneously. Yet inside our souls, contraries can indeed co-exist – light and darkness, sincerity and hypocrisy, selflessness and selfishness, virtue and vice, grace and sin, saint and sinner. Our souls are a battleground where selflessness and selfishness, virtue and sin, vie for dominance. St. John of the Cross teaches that purity of heart and purity of intention in our lives comes through disciplined prayer. Contraries cannot co-exist in us if we sustain genuine prayer in our lives. Eventually, sincerity will weed out insincerity, selflessness will weed out selfishness, and grace will weed out sin. In The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis, protagonist Screwtape, advises his student Wormwood to keep the patients from faithful and genuine prayer: “You will find that anything or nothing is sufficient to attract his wandering attention. You no longer need a good book, which he really likes, to keep him from his prayers…a column of advertisements in yesterday’s paper will do.” Our task is to be disciplined and focused in our lives to establish prayer as a daily habit. Since two contraries cannot co-exist inside the same subject, eventually, we will stop praying or sinning and rationalizing. The greatest moral danger in our lives is that we stop praying.”

Our reflection verse today is a misunderstood teaching of Jesus. He did not come to create division among people as the world would think. The fire that Jesus passionately longs to bring to this earth is the fire of the Holy Spirit, the fire of Pentecost, namely, charity, joy, peace, goodness, understanding, and forgiveness. Fr. Rolheiser writes that this fire unites rather than divides. Moreover, in answer to his question: “Do you think that I have come to establish peace on earth?” the answer is absolutely, without doubt. Jesus came precisely to bring peace to this earth, as the angels proclaimed at his birth. If Jesus’s fire to this earth is meant to unite us, why does it divide us so often? It is not Jesus’ message that divides; how we react to that message divides. Jesus is born; some respond with understanding and joy, while others react with misunderstanding and hatred. That dynamic has continued down through the centuries to this very day when Jesus is not only misunderstood and seen as a threat by many non-Christians but primarily when his person and message are used to justify bitter and hate-filled divisions among Christians and to justify the bitterness that invariably characterizes our public debates on religious and moral issues. From his birth until today, we have perennially used Jesus’ to rationalize our anger and fears. We all do it, and the effects of this are seen everywhere: from the bitter polarization within our politics to the bitter misunderstandings between our churches, to the hate-filled rhetoric of our radio and television talk shows, to the editorials and blogs that demonize everyone who disagrees with them, to the judgmental way we talk about each other inside our coffee circles. We must grant that there is a fire that divides. Yet, we must focus on the real intent of Jesus’ saying being that of love. This all-consuming fire of love brings about inclusiveness founded on respect, charity, and understanding that is part of the heaven on earth he speaks about. Jesus’ words should never be used to justify our bitterness or political message.

Robert Barron writes that in the Middle Ages, prudence was called “the queen of the virtues” because it was the virtue that enabled one to do the right thing in a particular situation. Prudence is a feel for the moral situation. Justice is a wonderful virtue, but without prudence, it is blind and finally useless. One can be as just as possible, but without a feel for the present situation, his justice will do him no good. Wisdom, unlike prudence, is a sense of the big picture. It is the view from the hilltop. Most of us look at our lives from the standpoint of our own self-interest. But wisdom is the capacity to survey reality from the vantage point of God. Even the most prudent judgment will be erroneous, short-sighted, and inadequate without wisdom. The combination, therefore, of prudence and wisdom is especially powerful. Someone wise and prudent will have a sense of the bigger picture and a feel for the particular situation. Living faith is the vantage point for a believing Christian. It opens our eyes to see all of life differently because of who Jesus is and who we are invited to become in Him, through Him, and with Him, by the power of the Holy Spirit. God has withheld nothing from us. In Jesus Christ, and in his Body, the Church, we have been given everything we could ever ask for or imagine. We are the ones to whom much has been given. We are the ones who have been given much. It has been entrusted to us. Now, much more is required.

Most of us have had the experience of being left out at one time or another. Somebody did not choose us for a sports team or accept us in a group we wanted to join. Some of us have experienced the pain of exclusion because of race, religion, nationality, socio-economic status, or gender. Some of us may have had the good fortune of being accepted and included where we previously were not. It is this kind of remarkable reversal that Paul now recounts. He reminds Gentile believers that at one point in time, they were the consummate outsiders, separated from God and his chosen people, Israel. He explains that the Messiah’s sacrificial death on the cross has brought them in, reconciling Jews and Gentiles to one another and God in a re-created human race. The upshot is that Gentile believers now enjoy an astonishingly close relationship with God as members of his household and as part of his temple on earth. Fr. Anthony Schueller writes that some became complacent and comfortable in worldly ways as the years passed. Luke included the parable of the Vigilant Stewards in our reading today to awaken them and us from complacency and a false sense of security. In prosperous times especially, it is tempting to think that this life is all we have to look forward to, that there is nothing more that God intends for us or creation. Jesus praises those servants who don’t succumb to such thinking but remain alert and watchful, preparing to welcome him. For each of us, there is that intensely personal coming of Christ at life’s end. There is his promised second coming for humankind at the end of time. Jesus warns us to be ready for both!

The Tibetan word for attachment, do chag, translates as “sticky desire.” Author Joshua Becker writes about this sticky desire that drives our insidious behavior for accumulation. “We have been told since our birth that possessions equal joy. And because we have heard that message so many times and from so many angles, we have begun to believe it. As a result, we spend our lives working long hours to make good money to buy nice stuff. People who live their lives in pursuit of possessions are never content. They always desire newer, faster, or bigger because material possessions can never satisfy our deepest heart desires.” The Book of Job begins with an introduction of Job as he is described as a blessed man who lives righteously. He is suddenly beset with horrendous disasters that take away all he holds dear, something that Jesus speaks to today. We can lose everything we have accumulated in the blink of an eye. We must learn from Job and realize our greatest treasure is faith in God. God will always remain faithful to those who put their trust in him: “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there; the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord” (Job 1:21). We can’t take our possessions with us when we die. Life teaches us that possessions can only offer temporary and empty happiness. They can never provide the true joy and happiness our hearts seek. Strive for the better path – the one that matters to God – our holiness. Life on earth is far too short and valuable to waste on accumulating material possessions. Seek first the treasures of heaven.

In today’s gospel reading, Jesus faces questions from the religious authorities trying to trap him in some violation to persecute him. Amid this effort, Jesus shows them a third way to answer the dilemma they present, which they never thought of. A core teaching today revolves around giving God what he is due. How is this accomplished daily when so many things in life trap us? It begins by peeling away the things that are trapping us. The main snarl we face is unloading life’s baggage of actions, thoughts, and sinful ways that separate us from his presence. How do we meet those actions and thoughts in blinding honesty before God? I would suggest a third way most of us have never explored: contemplative prayer. Most of us go through our daily lives carefully, consigning these sinful actions and thoughts that separate us from God into a neat little box we hide away until the fateful day we face them in front of our maker. But what are we waiting for? Why do we consign God to the afterlife and not our daily life? The searing judgment that awaits all at the end of life is something Fr. Rolheiser notes should be a daily occurrence. We are meant to bring ourselves, with all our complexities and weaknesses, into God’s full light daily. Genuine prayer brings us into that searing light. And, in the great prayer traditions, one particular form of prayer, contemplative prayer, is singled out as most helpful. That is prayer without words, without images, the prayer of quiet, centering prayer. Contemplative prayer is where you set off to pray, find a quiet place, sit or kneel, and consciously place yourself in God’s presence without protection, with no possibility of hiding anything. The silence and absence of prayerful conversation leaves you naked and exposed, like a plant sitting in the sun, silently drinking in its rays. Each day, we should set aside some time to put ourselves into God’s presence without words and images, where, naked, stripped of everything, silent, exposed, hiding nothing, completely vulnerable, we simply sit, full face, allowing this baggage to come forth before God’s judgment, trusting in his grace and mercy.