Author: Daily Virtue

The gospels emphasize that what Jesus suffered most deeply in his crucifixion was not the pain of being scourged and having nails driven through his hands, but a deep loneliness of soul that dwarfs even the most intense physical pain. Jesus wasn’t a physical athlete, but a moral one, doing battle in the arena with soul.

In the writings of Robert Coles, he suggests that inside each of us there’s a deep place, a virginal center, where all that’s tender, sacred, cherished, and precious is held and guarded. It’s there that we are most genuinely ourselves, most genuinely sincere, most genuinely innocent. It’s where we unconsciously remember that once, long before consciousness, we were caressed by hands far gentler than our own. It’s where we still sense the primordial kiss of God.

In this place, more than any other, we fear harshness, disrespect, being shamed, ridiculed, violated, lied to. In this place we are deeply vulnerable and so we are scrupulously careful as to whom we admit into this space, even as our deepest longing is precisely for someone to share that place with us. More than we yearn for someone to sleep with sexually, we yearn for someone to sleep with there, morally, a soulmate. Our deepest yearning is for moral consummation.

But this isn’t easy to find. Rare is the perfect moral partner, even inside of a good marriage or friendship. And so we perennially face a double temptation: Resolve the tension by settling for certain compensations, tonics, that help us make it through the night or, perhaps worse, because the pain is too much to live with, giving ourselves over to bitterness, anger, and cynicism, thus denigrating the great dream. Either way, we sell ourselves short and settle for second best.

What’s to be learned from Jesus’ struggle with moral loneliness? This: he refused both the road of compensatory tonics and that of soul-hardening cynicism. He stayed the course and carried the tension to term.

Our own moral loneliness can be tyrannical. However, that’s not a license or invitation to begin jettisoning commitments, responsibilities, morals, and whatever else it takes to try to find that elusive soulmate for whom we yearn so deeply. What Jesus (and persons like Therese of Lisieux and Simone Weil) model is how to carry that tension ideally, how to carry our solitude at a high level, and how to resist, no matter the pain, calling second-best by any other name than second-best.[Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Coping with our own Souls” July 2022]

“We may say that the gospels, especially Mark, are aware of a great variety of forms of participation in Jesus’ cause. There were the Twelve. There was a broader circle of disciples. There were those who participated in Jesus’ life. There were localized, resident adherents who made their houses available. There were people who helped in particular situations, if only by offering a cup of water. Finally, there were the beneficiaries who profited from Jesus’ cause and for that reason did not speak against it. These structural lines that run through the gospels are not accidental. In today’s church, because it is a shapeless mass, we can find all these forms expressed. It is a complex pattern, as complex as the human body. The openness of the gospels, the openness of Jesus must warn us against regarding people as lacking in faith if they are unable to adopt a disciple’s way of life or if it is something completely alien to them. In any event, Jesus never did.” [Excerpt from “Jesus of Nazareth” Gerhard Lohfink]

The similarity to Jesus’ time is obvious. When we look at church life today, especially as we see it lived out concretely within parishes, it is obvious that it is made up of much more than only the core, committed congregation, namely, those who participate regularly in church life and accept (at least for the main part) the dogmatic and moral teachings their churches. The church also contains a wide variety of the less-engaged: people who practice occasionally, people who accept some of its teachings, guests who visit our churches, people who don’t explicitly commit but are sympathetic to the church and offer it various kinds of support, and, not least, people who link themselves to God in more-privatized ways, those who are spiritual but not religious. As Lohfink points out, these people were already around Jesus and “they were not unimportant” to his mission.

This does not mean that there are tiers within discipleship, where some are called to a higher holiness and others to a lower one, as if the full gospel applies only to some. The full gospel applies to everyone, as does Jesus’ invitation to intimacy with him. Jesus doesn’t call people according to more or less.  Christian discipleship doesn’t ideally admit of levels, notches, layers, and different tiers of participation … but something akin to this does forever happen, analogous to what happens in a love relationship. Each individual chooses how deep he or she will go and some go deeper than others, though ideally everyone is meant to go its full depth.

There will always be a great variation in both depth and participation. Each of us has his or her own history of being graced and wounded, formed and deformed, and so we all come to adulthood with very different capacities to see, understand, love, accept love, and give ourselves over to someone or something beyond us. None of us is whole and none of us is fully mature. All of us are limited in what we can do, and all are around Jesus in different ways and we must be careful not to judge each other, given that Donatism and her adopted children are forever on the prowl. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Disciples with Many Faces” July 2014]

How can there be an all-loving and an all-powerful God if there is so much suffering and evil in our world? Christians believe that what is ultimately at stake is human freedom and God’s respect for it. God gives us freedom and (unlike most everyone else) 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 does not protect us from pain, but instead enters it and ultimately redeems it.

The sisters of Lazarus, Martha and Mary, send a message to Jesus telling him that “the man you love” is gravely ill. Curiously though Jesus does not immediately rush off to see Lazarus. Instead he stays where he is for two more days, until Lazarus is dead, and then sets off to see him. When he arrives near the house, he is met by Martha who says to him: “If you had been here, my brother would not have died!” Basically her question is: “Where were you? Why didn’t you come and heal him?” Jesus does not answer her question but instead assures her that Lazarus will live in some deeper way.

Jesus does not engage the question in theory; instead he becomes distressed and asks: “Where have you put him?” And when they offer to show him, he begins to weep. His answer to suffering: He enters into peoples’ helplessness and pain. Afterwards, he raises Lazarus from the dead. And what we see here will occur in the same way between Jesus and his Father. The Father does not save Jesus from death on the cross even when he is jeered and mocked there. Instead the Father allows him to die on the cross and then raises him up afterwards.

God’s seeming indifference to suffering is not so much a mystery that leaves the mind befuddled as 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. Sometimes the only answer to the question of suffering and evil is the one Jesus gave to Mary and Martha – shared helplessness, shared distress, and shared tears, with no attempt to try to explain God’s seeming absence, but rather a trusting that, because God is all-loving and all-powerful, in the end all will be well and our pain will someday be redeemed in God’s embrace.

It’s significant that the first word out of Jesus’ mouth in the Synoptic Gospels is the word, metanoia. Jesus begins his ministry with these words: “Repent [metanoia] and believe in the good news” and that, in capsule, is a summary of his entire message. But how does one repent?

In English, repentance implies that we have done something wrong and must regretfully disavow ourselves of that action and begin to live in a new way. The biblical word, metanoia, has much wider connotations.

The word, metanoia, comes from two Greek words: Meta, meaning above; and Nous, meaning mind. Metanoia invites us to move above our normal instincts, into a bigger mind, into a mind which rises above the proclivity for self-interest and self-protection which so frequently trigger feelings of bitterness, negativity, and lack of empathy inside us.

Henri Nouwen describes wonderfully the difference between metanoia and paranoia. He suggests that there are two fundamental postures with which we can go through life. We can go through life in the posture of paranoia, which is symbolized by a closed fist, by a protective stance, by habitual suspicion and distrust.

The posture of metanoia, on the other hand, is seen in Jesus on the cross. There, on the cross, we see him exposed and vulnerable, his arms spread in a gesture of embrace, and his hands open, with nails through them. That’s the antithesis of paranoia, wherein our inner doors of warmth, empathy, and trust spontaneous slam shut whenever we perceive a threat. Metanoia, the meta mind, the bigger heart, never closes those doors.

Metanoia and paranoia vie for our hearts. Jesus, in his message and his person, invites us to metanoia, to move towards and stay within our big minds and big hearts, so that in the face of a stinging remark our inner doors of warmth and trust do not close. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “From Paranoia to Metanoia” September 2016]

Jesus declares his desire to spread eternal life among human beings. He said, “I have come to set the earth on fire, and how I wish it were already blazing!” The Jesus message should connect us to his mission to torch the world with the heat and light of the divine Spirit, which is none other than the love shared by the Father and the Son, the very inner life of God.

Jesus came precisely to bring peace to this earth, as the angels proclaim at his birth, as his entire ministry attests to, and as he powerfully witnesses to in his death. Jesus came to bring peace to the world; no one may doubt that. Then how does division enter that he speaks to in Luke’s Gospel?

It is not Jesus’ message that divides; it is how we react to that message that divides. We see this already at the time of his birth. Jesus is born, and some react 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 especially 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 the time of his birth until today, we have perennially used Jesus’ to rationalize our own 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 does not agree with them, to the judgmental way we talk about each other inside our coffee circles. Our moral fevers invariably bring about more division than unity.

There is a fire that divides, even while remaining the fire of love and Pentecost. But it is as fire that is always and everywhere respectful, charitable, and inclusive, never enflaming us with bitterness, as does so much of our contemporary religious and moral rhetoric. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Rationalizing Our Anger and Moral Indignations” August 2013]

Our reflection verse today emphasizes that hope is not a mere wish, but a perspective grounded in the reality of God’s kindness and acceptance. It suggests that even when people are disappointed in themselves, God is not, and that this inherent kindness is the foundation for our hope, especially during times of need. This perspective encourages people to turn to God for love and acceptance, rather than hiding from it, as God delights in them, not disappoints them. 

• Hope grounded in reality: Hope not as a feeling or a wish, but as a perspective that must be based on a “sufficient reality”. In this context, that reality is God’s fundamental kindness.
• God’s acceptance: God accepts us, delights in us, and is eager to smile at us. This idea counteracts the human tendency to feel that God is disappointed in us, especially when we are disappointed in ourselves. 
• Turning to God in need: Because of this inherent kindness, we are encouraged to turn to God when we are most in need of love and acceptance, rather than avoiding the one person who understands us completely.

Jonah’s unforgiving nature regarding Nineveh is an example of a deep spiritual challenge that mirrors humanity’s own struggles with resentment, bitterness, and envy. The final spiritual struggle is often not against the “devil” (our early weaknesses) but against God, specifically the bitterness that comes from feeling wounded or cheated by life. Jonah’s intense anger at God for forgiving Nineveh serves as a powerful biblical example of this struggle. 

Jonah is angry at God’s mercy because he knows the Assyrians of Nineveh are evil and undeserving of forgiveness. His demand for justice for his enemies blinds him to God’s universal compassion and his own need for grace. Jonah is unable to accept the forgiveness that God provides the Ninevites.

Forgiveness is the antidote to the bitterness and anger that can consume us as we get older. Jonah’s final words in the book, full of self-pity and resentment, serve as a stark warning about the danger of an unforgiving heart. The point of the story is not to show that Jonah was right, but to challenge the reader’s own willingness to accept God’s expansive mercy.

Jonah’s final argument with God is a perfect illustration of this. The prophet is not struggling with a base sin but with God’s very nature of being “gracious and merciful, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love”. And this is our final challenge in life. Jonah’s story is the mirror forcing us to ask if we are okay with God loving our enemies. It challenges us to move beyond our own resentments to embrace the radical, expansive nature of God’s love. [Adapted from Ron Rolheiser’s “Overcoming Anger – the Final Spiritual Struggle” April 1997]

Who is my neighbor? What does it mean to be neighbor to one another? Jesus once answered this by telling us the parable of the Good Samaritan. One of the interesting things in this parable is that those who did not stop to help him, the priest and the scribe, did so for reasons that go far beyond the question of their individual selfishness and selflessness. They did so for certain ideological, religious reasons. One of the interesting things in this parable is that those who did not stop to help him, the priest and the scribe, did so for reasons that go far beyond the question of their individual selfishness and selflessness. They did so for certain ideological, religious reasons. Thus, the priest did not stop because he feared that the man was dead and, being a priest, if he touched a dead body he would be ritually defiled and thereby unable to offer sacrifice in the temple. The scribe had his own religious reasons for not stopping. The Samaritan, who had the least to lose religiously, was able to be moved by simple human compassion. What if we updated the characters in the story to modern day roles – how would that change our choices?

One day a man was taking a walk in a city park when he was mugged, beaten up, and left for dead by a gang of thugs. It so happened that, as he lay there, the provincial superior of a major religious order walked by and saw him. He thought to himself: “If I help this man, I will set a dangerous precedent. Then what will I do? Having helped him, where will I draw the line? This is ultimately a question of fairness.” And thus he passed him by.

A short time later, a young woman, a theology student, happened to come along. She too saw the man lying wounded. Her first instinct was to stop and help him, but a number of thoughts made her hesitate. “The course on pastoral care I just took, taught that it is not good to try to rescue someone. It’s simply a savior complex which doesn’t do the other person any good in the long run and comes out of a less than pure motivation besides. I would only be trying to help that person because it makes me feel good and useful. It would be a selfish act really; ultimately only this man can help himself.” So, she too, passed by the wounded person.

Finally, the CEO of Texaco Oil happened to be out joy riding in the new BMW he had just purchased. He chanced to see the wounded man lying there. Seeing the face of that wounded person, something in him suddenly changed. A compassion he didn’t even know he possessed took possession of him. Tears filled his eyes and, deeply moved, he got out of his car, bent over, and gently picked up the man. He carried him to his car and gently laid him in the back seat, oblivious of the fact that blood was staining the clean white upholstery. Arriving at the emergency entrance of the nearest hospital, he rushed in and hollered for the paramedics. After a stretcher had brought the man into the emergency room, they discovered that he had no medical insurance. The CEO produced a Visa Gold Card and told the hospital staff to give the wounded man the best medical attention possible money was to be no object. He promised to cover all hospital expenses.

Who was neighbor to the wounded man? [Adaptation of Ron Rolheiser’s “The Good Samaritan” July 2016]

Sometimes you can see a whole lot of things just by looking. That’s one of Yogi Berra’s infamous aphorisms. It’s a clever expression of course, but, sadly, perhaps mostly, the opposite is truer. Mostly we do a whole lot of looking without really seeing much. Seeing implies more than having good eyesight. Our eyes can be wide open and we can be seeing very little. 

We see this most clearly at those times when Jesus heals people who are blind.  He’s giving them more than just physical sight; he’s opening their eyes so that that can see more deeply. But that’s only an image. How might it be unpackaged? How can the grace and teachings of Jesus help us to see in a deeper way? Here are some suggestions:

• By shifting our eyes from seeing through familiarity to seeing through wonder.
• By shifting our eyes from seeing through paranoia and self-protection to seeing through metanoia and nurture.
• By shifting our eyes from seeing through jealousy to seeing through admiration.
• By shifting our eyes from seeing through bitterness to seeing through eyes purified and softened by grief.
• By shifting our eyes from seeing through fantasy and auto-eroticism to seeing through appreciation and prayer.
• By shifting our eyes from seeing through relevance to seeing through contemplation.
• By shifting our eyes from seeing through anger to seeing through forgiveness.
• By shifting our eyes from seeing through longing and hunger to seeing through gratitude.

Longing and hunger distort our vision. Gratitude restores it. It enables insight. The most grateful person you know has the best eyesight of all the people you know. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Seeing in a Deeper Way” March 2015]

There’s an oddity in the gospels that begs for an explanation: Jesus, it seems, doesn’t want people to know his true identity as the Christ, the Messiah. He keeps warning people not to reveal that he is the Messiah. Why?

Some scholars refer to this as “the messianic secret”, suggesting that Jesus did not want others to know his true identity until the conditions were ripe for it. There’s some truth in that, there’s a right moment for everything, but that still leaves the question unanswered: Why? Why does Jesus want to keep his true identity secret? What would constitute the right conditions within which his identity should be revealed?

At Caesarea Philippi, when Jesus asks his disciples: “Who do you say that I am?” Peter answers: “You are the Christ.” Peter has the right answer, but the wrong conception of that answer. He has a false notion of what means to be the Messiah.

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 immediately shuts it down. 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.”

When Peter says: “You are the Christ!” that’s how he’s thinking about it, as earthily glory, worldly triumph, as a man so powerful, strong, attractive, and invulnerable that everyone would simply have to fall at his feet. Hence Jesus’ sharp reply: “Don’t tell anyone about that!” Jesus then goes on to instruct Peter, and the rest of us, who he really is a Savior. He’s not a Superman or Superstar in this world or a miracle worker who will prove his power through spectacular deeds. Who is he? 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!”[Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “How does God Act in Our World?” January 2018]