Author: Daniel Scofield, MTS

Fr. Daniel Berrigan wrote that unless you can drink in strength from a source outside yourself, your natural proclivities for paranoia, bitterness, and hatred will invariably swallow you whole. Fr. Rolheiser writes that the disciples in Luke’s Gospel understood this. They approached Jesus and asked him to teach them how to pray because they saw him doing things they did not see anyone else doing. He was able to meet hatred with love, to genuinely forgive others, to endure misunderstanding and opposition without giving in to self-pity and bitterness, and to retain within himself a center of peace and non-violence. They knew this was as extraordinary as walking on water, and they sensed that he was drawing the strength to do this from a source outside him through prayer. They knew they were incapable of resisting bitterness and hatred and wanted to be as strong as Jesus, so they asked him: Lord, teach us to pray. If prayer is always a form of communication with God, then we are, in some sense, always praying because God is always already present to us. In a sense, it is a form of hubris to think that we can simply turn on or turn off the prayer channel as if we could select when God can receive our missives. In truth, not only what we say or think but how we act, what we prioritize, how we love, how we care for one another, and so on all combine to communicate something to the God who is always nearer to us than we are to ourselves. Prayer is meant to keep us awake, which means it’s meant to keep us connected to a source outside of our natural instincts and proclivities, which can keep us grounded in love, forgiveness, non-retaliation, and non-violence when everything inside of us and around us screams for bitterness, hatred, and retaliation. And if Jesus had to sweat blood in trying to stay connected to that source when he was tested, we can expect that the cost for us would be the same. We will struggle in agony, wanting in every fiber of our being to give in, clinging to love precariously by the skin of our teeth, and then having God’s angel strengthen us only when we’ve been writhing long enough in the struggle so that we can let God’s strength do for us what our own strength cannot do.

In the Gospel of Luke, chapter 11, Jesus had just finished exposing religious critics in front of a crowd, and as he came to the end of this teaching, a woman who had been moved by all she had heard and the blessing she had received burst out and said, “Blessed is the mother who gave you birth and nursed you.” Jesus did not question the truth of the woman’s statement but pointed her to an even greater truth. “Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and obey it.” The true blessing is reserved for those who pay attention to God’s Word and obey it. We demonstrate the truth of our praise and worship through our actions and obedience. Jesus is focusing on the importance of following the word of God. In another part of scripture, someone tells Jesus, “Your mother and brothers are standing outside, wanting to see you.” Jesus replies, “My mother and brothers are those who hear God’s word and put it into practice.” Our goal in life, the very reason we were created, is for union and fellowship with God. If you say you love God, show it by honoring and obeying His word. Let God’s light shine through you so that those who do not know Him may also desire to follow Him to the glory and honor of the Lord God Almighty.

The parable of the Good Samaritan starts with its most important truth: we are to love our God with all of our heart, mind, body, and soul, AND love our neighbor as ourselves. This is the age-old challenge for all of us. Bishop Barron writes that the Good Samaritan is a symbol of Jesus himself in his role as savior of the world. “We spend our lives now looking for those stranded by the road, victimized by sin. We don’t walk by, indifferent to them, but we do what Jesus did. Even those who are our natural enemies, even those who frighten us.” Many read this story and ask God, “What do you expect me to do?” The answer lies in our relationship with God the Father through His Son Jesus. Yet our relationship with Jesus is tied to our relationship with others, especially the least, lost, and forgotten. Who are the least in our lives? We all have our list of the least of these. They are the people who are outside of our circle of compassion and concern. They might be individuals of another socioeconomic group, someone with more or less education, people from another political party, people from another culture or lifestyle, or people who don’t believe or think like us. The Christian life is not primarily a list of things to believe. It is about a relationship with God through Christ that forever changes us. This relationship changes all of our other relationships as its power enables us to begin to see the least of these. Jesus said I am the way and the truth and the life. We were not merely to believe he was the way, but we are to adopt his way of living. As we say in receiving the Holy Communion, “Lord, help me to become that which I receive.”

The French historian and philosopher of social science, Rene Girard, wrote, “What is anthropologically marginal is spiritually central.” Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that this academic expression explains what scripture means when it says that the stone rejected by the builders is the cornerstone for the building. In simple terms, this tells us that those whom the culture marginalizes and sees as unimportant, those whom it deems disposable – the sick, the aged, the severely handicapped, the dying, the homeless, and the unborn – are, in fact, spiritually, the most important people in the world. Leonard Cohen coined the phrase, “There is a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in.” How we value the least, lost and forgotten, is the true measure of our wisdom, compassion, and morality. We are moving as a society and culture ever more towards a mindset that sincerely believes that wisdom, compassion, human dignity, and morality can be served by snuffing out the heartbeat of someone whose life is not deemed worthwhile or who is living in such pain that this is judged to be sufficient cause to warrant death as mercy. Too often, even in our churches, we no longer stand where Jesus stood, where the cross stood, namely with the helpless. We stand instead where vested interest stands, be that the vested interest of the business world, the academic world, or the pop culture. We are becoming blind to one of the deepest truths that Jesus taught us in the crucifixion: that what looks useless and meaningless has a deeper value. Inferiority builds the soul. Those who fall through the cracks of the culture are indeed the crack where the light gets in. If our world has any real soul left, if indeed we still even understand the words wisdom, compassion, and morality, then it is because someone who has no power in the culture, someone who has been marginalized and rejected, has shared a gift with us.

Jesus challenged the disciples to look past the immediate circumstances of what had happened so that they could grasp a bigger vision. Jesus says his disciples are “childlike,” and Bishop Robert Barron notes that this is because children don’t know how to dissemble, how to be one way and act another. In this, they are like stars or flowers or animals, unambiguously things that are what they are. Children haven’t yet learned how to look at themselves. Why can a child immerse himself so eagerly and thoroughly in what he is doing? He can lose himself precisely because he is not looking at himself, not being conscious of the reactions, expectations, and approval of those around him. The best moments in life occur when we lose the ego, lose ourselves in the world, and just are as God wants us to be. It is this childlike lens in life that allows us to expand our vision of life to “see” the blessings all around us:

– Blessed are your eyes because you have seen me in the quiet place of prayer.
– Blessed are your eyes because you have seen me work in the lives of people you love.
– Blessed are your eyes because you have seen me in the faces of those in need.
– Blessed are your eyes because you have seen the impossible.

Jesus wants to expand our vision so that we can look past our immediate circumstances and see how much more he is doing in our lives and the world around us. Take a moment right now to quiet your heart. Imagine that Jesus is speaking to you, and allow the Spirit to bring the blessings of your life into your view.

“Why do I feel this way?” “Why am I so restless just now?” “Why am I angry at this person when I should feel love?” “Why am I so tense at this meeting?” “Why do I feel this jealousy, coldness, bitterness, or obsession?” Fr. Rolheiser writes that these questions emanate from the heart. The heart has its reasons, and we’re not always privy to them. We feel a little threatened, and doors that were once wide open inside of us begin to close. We feel the need to protect ourselves, to reclaim ourselves from someone, to be calm, aloof, disinterested, and seemingly given over to more important things. Where just minutes before, there was warmth, vulnerability, softness, trust, and the desire to share, there is now a chill, a hardness, a distrust, and a reluctance to share anything beyond the surface. There’s a biblical name for this, “hardness of heart.” Jesus teaches in his comments on divorce how this hardness profoundly affects our lives. The bitter realities of our world and how those realities harden our hearts and render it impossible at times for us not to have our relationships unravel. What Jesus does in this teaching is invite us to go back, back to the beginning, back to pre-fallen times, back to that time before our hearts began to harden, back to when we were still childlike, and, from there, to try to answer for ourselves how God feels about the fracturing of any relationship. Not an easy thing. And therein lies one of the biggest moral struggles within our lives: To keep a mellow, warm, trusting heart. For the most part, as we know, we’re not there, none of us. We’re still too often defensive, cool, self-protecting, and prone to all the subtle negative behaviors this triggers. But it’s good to recognize that this is a broken place, a humble place, and a place from which we are invited, each day, to make a new beginning.

Bishop Robert Barron writes that we are a missionary church. “The Lord sends us to spread his word and do his work. The Christian Gospel is not something we are meant to cling to for our own benefit. Rather, it is like a seed that we are meant to give away. He sends them two by two. We do this work together with others in the community. Ministers need people to support, pray for, talk to, and challenge them.” The most demanding missionary territory in the world today is secular culture. It’s here where our churches are emptying and greying, our seminaries and religious houses no longer receive a regular flow of new life, and our preaching is often ineffective. Fr. Rolheiser asks if we can embrace the verse, “Sing to the Lord a new song! How might we do that in terms of trying to make Christ credible today inside the secular world? What’s our old song? What’s missing in what we are presently doing? What can we do that’s new? Haven’t we already tried almost everything imaginable? There are, after all, only so many ways of doing ministry, of trying to preach, of reaching out to those who do not come to church with us. What more can we do? What more are you willing to do? Witnessing Christ today requires precisely that we build communities wide enough to hold our differences. What we need is not a new technique, but a new sanctity; not a cooler dress, but a more inclusive embrace; not some updating of the gospel to make it more acceptable to the world, but a more courageous radiating of its wide compassion; not some new secret that catches peoples’ curiosity, but a way of following Christ that can hold more of the tensions of our world in proper balance so that everyone, irrespective of temperament and ideology, will find themselves better understood and embraced by what we hold most dear, the truth that God loves them and the knowledge that this love changes lives and the world.”

Today, the Church celebrates the Memorial of St. Francis of Assisi. Fr. Rolheiser writes in his article called, Kissing the Leper, of a story told about St. Francis, perhaps more mythical than factual, which illustrates how touching the poor is the cure for a mediocre and dying faith. Francis was a rich and pampered young man. Riding down a narrow road, he found his path blocked by a leper. He was particularly repulsed by lepers; their deformities and smell revolted him, and so he tried to steer his horse around the leper, but the path was too narrow. Frustrated and angry, but with his path clearly blocked before him, Francis eventually had no other choice but to get down off his horse and try to move the leper out of his path. When he put out his hand to take the leper’s arm, as he touched the leper, something inside of him snapped. Suddenly, irrational, unashamed, and undeterred by the smell of rotting flesh, he kissed that leper. His life was never the same again. In that kiss, Francis found the reality of God and of love in a way that would change his life forever. Today, many of us struggle with the same issues as did the pre-converted Francis: a pampered life and a mediocre and dying faith. We know that our faith calls us to work for social justice and that this demand is non-negotiable. Simply put, if we touch the poor, we will touch Christ. “Whatsoever you do to the least of my people, that you do unto to me,” Christ assures us. In the poor, God is ever-present in our world, waiting to be met. In the powerless, one can find the power of God; in the voiceless, one can hear the voice of God; in the economically poor, one can find God’s treasures; in the weak, one can find God’s strength; and in the unattractive, one can find God’s beauty. Like Francis, we must get off our horses and kiss the leper. If we do, something will snap, we will see our pampered lives for what they are, and God and love will break into our lives in such a way that we will never be the same again.

We know from the history of Israel that God’s chosen people betrayed their faith and were consequently humiliated and thrown into a crisis about God’s love and concern for them. But in the midst of our failures, we are given the opportunity to grow. Fr. Raymond Brown points out that this seeming disaster for Israel ended up being a positive experience: “Israel learned more about God in the ashes of the Temple destroyed by the Babylonians than in the elegant period of the Temple under Solomon.” Fr. Rolheiser writes that the pain of being exiled and the doubts of faith that were triggered by the destruction of her temple were ultimately offset by what Israel learned through this humiliation and crisis, namely, that God is faithful even when we aren’t, that our failures open our eyes to us our own complacency and blindness, and that what looks like success is often its opposite, just as what looks like failure is often its opposite. Almost without exception, our major successes in life, our grander achievements, and the boost in status and adulation that come with that generally don’t deepen us in any way. Success usually doesn’t bring a shred of depth into our lives. If we reflect with courage and honesty on all the things that have brought depth and character into our lives, we will have to admit that, in virtually every case, it would be something that has an element of shame to it, a feeling of inadequacy about our own body, some humiliating element, some shameful moral failure in our life, or something in our character about which we feel some shame. Humiliation makes for depth; it drives us into the deeper parts of our soul. Like Israel on the shores of Babylon, when our temple is damaged or destroyed, in the ashes of that exile, we will have a chance to see some deeper things to which we are normally blind. And in this moment, we will have the opportunity to grow or become bitter. Life is always about choices.

In today’s reading from the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus speaks about angels: “Take care that you do not despise one of these little ones; for, I tell you, in heaven their angels continually see the face of my Father in heaven.” We also see in the reading from Psalm 81 a beautiful statement of God’s protection being partly provided by the angels. For many, angels are simply viewed as cute, winged figures as have been depicted in art or as kindly old men like Clarence in the movie “It’s A Wonderful Life.” Belief in guardian angels has been in the mind of the Church since the earliest days and has been discussed at length by many noteworthy theologians such as St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Jerome. The angels Jesus spoke to today in Matthew’s gospel can take on a visible form, such as when the Angel Gabriel came to Mary, or remain unseen. But even in an unrecognized state, angels can still be communicative. Many beloved saints enjoyed such a relationship with their guardian angel. St. Pio of Pietrelcina (Padre Pio) and St. Gemma Galgani are two well-known examples. Such direct contact with a guardian angel was also the case for St. Catherine of Siena, St. Francis De Sales, and others. With this thought in mind, we close today’s reflection with a prayer to our Guardian Angel: “Angel of God, my guardian dear, to whom His love commits me here; Ever this day (or night) be at my side, to light, guard, and guide my way. Amen.”