Jesus says, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law and the prophets; I have come to fulfill them.” What he is saying here is basically this: I have not come to do away with the Ten Commandments; I have come to invite you to something higher.
Unfortunately, we tend to think of living a moral life mostly in terms of keeping the Commandments and avoiding sin. What we call “moral theology” has classically been focused on ethical issues, what’s right and what’s wrong? But that’s not what we hear from Jesus as a moral teacher. His Sermon on the Mount (perhaps the greatest moral code ever written) focuses instead on an invitation to do what’s higher. It assumes we are already living the elementary essentials of morality, the Ten Commandments, and instead invites us to something beyond those essentials, namely, to be the adult in the room who helps the world carry its tension.
Jesus invites us to a “virtue that goes deeper than that of the scribes and the Pharisees.” It’s easy to miss the point here because, almost without exception, we tend to think that Jesus is referring to the hypocrisy of some of the scribes and Pharisees. He isn’t. Most of the scribes and Pharisees were good, honest, sincere people who practiced a high virtue. For them, living a good moral and religious life meant keeping the Ten Commandments (all of them!) and being a man or woman who was scrupulously fair to everyone. It meant being a just person.
So, what’s lacking here? If I am a person who keeps all the Commandments and am fair and just in all my dealings with others, what is lacking in me morally? Why isn’t that enough?
He points out that the demands of justice still permit us to hate our enemies, to curse those who curse us, and to execute murderers (an eye for an eye). He invites us to something beyond that, namely, to love those who hate us, to bless those who curse us, and to forgive those who kill us. That is the essence of moral theology. And note that it comes to us as an invitation, inviting us always to something higher. It’s not concerned about what’s a sin and what isn’t (thou shalt not). Rather, it’s a positive invitation beckoning us to reach higher, to transcend our natural impulses, to be more than someone who just keeps the commandments and avoids sin. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “An Invitation to Something Higher” January 2025]
This is the story: Jesus had been preaching to a large crowd, several thousand people. But they were in a remote place and, after a time, the people had been without food for a long time. They were hungry, so famished in fact that they lacked the strength to return to their own towns and villages. The disciples approached Jesus and asked him whether they should go into the neighboring towns and buy food for the crowd. Jesus told them instead to feed the people themselves. They protested that they had too little food, almost none. Jesus asked them what they in fact did have. Their answer: “Only five barley loaves and two fish.” And this came with a question: What good is that among so many? The equation is hopeless: so little food, so many people.
And so Jesus asked them to bring the loaves and fish to him. He blessed the food and asked the disciples to distribute it among the hungry thousands. We know the rest of the story: They set out the food; everyone ate as much as he or she wanted, and they gathered up twelve baskets of scraps left over afterwards. And the crowd was impressed, so much in fact that the next day they followed Jesus around the lake, hoping for another such feeding. Jesus, for his part, was saddened by their lack of understanding: They hadn’t understood about the loaves.
What do we need to understand about the loaves? We need to understand that we are with the bread of life, everything we need to feed the world we already have. We don’t need to go anywhere to buy anything. We have the resources already; though on the surface those resources will always look over-matched, hopeless, dwarfed, nonsensical, wishful thinking. On the surface, invariably, we will look like David before Goliath, puny and pathetic, not up to the task of defeating a giant or feeding a hungry, greedy world.
The challenge is to roll the dice on the reality of the Gospel. The Gospel works! It is adequate to the task, both of feeding the world and defeating the giant. It only needs to be trusted. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Rolling the Dice on the Gospel” January 2011]
“Ephphatha” (Be opened), spoken by Jesus in Mark 7:34, is a powerful, ongoing invitation to spiritual, emotional, and relational openness. It signifies healing the inner deafness and silence that isolates individuals, urging a receptive heart towards God, others, and oneself.
There is a need in our faith journey to move beyond fear, prejudice, or apathy that restricts our hearing of God’s word and our ability to connect with the world. This aspect of “being open” is not merely a passive state but a command to actively open oneself—mind, heart, and soul—to grace, love, and the needs of others.
The miracle of Christ healing the deaf man demonstrates His desire to break down barriers, allowing “deaf and dumb” aspects of our lives—where we fail to listen or speak the truth—to be restored to wholeness.
There’s a need for silence. What the great spiritual writers of all ages tried to teach on this subject can perhaps be captured in a single line from Meister Eckhart: Nothing resembles the language of God as much as silence. In essence, Eckhart is saying that silence is a privileged entry into the divine realm. There’s a huge silence inside each of us that beckons us into itself and can help us learn the language of heaven. What’s meant by this?
Silence is a language that’s deeper, more far-reaching, more understanding, more compassionate, and more eternal than any other language. In heaven, it seems, there will be no languages, no words. Silence will speak. We will wholly, intimately, and ecstatically understand each other and hold each other in silence. Ironically, for all their importance, words are part of the reason we can’t fully do this already. Words unite, but they also divide. There’s a deeper connection available in silence.
John of the Cross expresses this in a wonderfully cryptic line: “Learn to understand more by not understanding than by understanding.” Silence can speak louder than words, and more deeply. We experience this already in different ways: when we are separated by distance or death from loved ones, we can still be with them in silence; when we are divided from other sincere persons through misunderstanding, silence can provide the place where we can be together; when we stand helpless before another’s suffering, silence can be the best way of expressing our empathy; and when we have sinned and have no words to restore things to their previous wholeness, in silence a deeper word can speak and let us know that, in the end, all will be well and every manner of being will be well.
Nothing resembles the language of God as much as silence. It’s the language of heaven, already deep inside of us, beckoning us, inviting us into deeper intimacy with everything, even as we still need the therapy of a public life. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “The Place of Silence” February 2026]
During my graduate studies in Louvain, I had the good fortune of having Cristianne Brusselmanns as a professor. Many will recognize that name and recognize as well the pivotal role this woman played in restoring the adult rite of initiation (RCIA) in the West. Cristianne was an exceptional teacher, one-in-a-million, who radiated catholicity, graciousness, and depth.
One of the things she would say again and again about the restored rite for adult initiation was that it was not meant as the one and only way of entering the church. It was meant as one way, an ideal way, even, but never, never as the only way. God, she would always affirm, works outside of programs, even of good ones. Sadly, we have fallen a long ways from both her catholicity and depth.
Today we are falling victim, I fear, to a new authoritarianism in the church, the tyranny of program. It may look different from the old authoritarianism, but it is not. Many of us remember only too well the days when all the power was concentrated in the hands of one man, the pastor, and where his ecclesiology, interpretation of church law, temperament, and whim, pretty much decided everything. The oral tradition abounds with stories (either horrific or humorous or both) of the classical, old pastor or monsignor, who ruled with an iron hand and by divine right.
But that kind of authoritarianism is now mostly the stuff of legends. Gone are the old pastor and monsignor of old who could do this. There is a new church, though it seems that things haven’t changed much. People are still too much the victim of one narrow view of ecclesiology and church law. Sadly, too, temperament and whim still play a large a role in deciding who enters the church, how one enters the church, and who gets to receive the sacraments.
The old patriarchy has largely been replaced by a new absolutism, the tyranny of good program. A narrow authoritarianism still rules, except now it is the authoritarianism of the parish staff, freshly trained in theology and liturgy, but is not nearly as deeply schooled in catholicity and compassion. The absolutism of the new parish staff has replaced the unquestioned authority of the old monsignor.
But the question that still must be asked: Is Christ being made more accessible? Is our ecclesiology healthier in its Catholicity, depth, and compassion? Are many of the poor still being excluded from church and sacraments because of our misuse of power? Is a false use of authority still blocking the full compassion of the gospel and giving God a bad name? Are there really fewer horror stories than before?
Certainly, new horrors abound: “I wasn’t allowed to join the church in this parish and diocese, except through one program, the RCIA.” “There will be no eulogy at a funeral in this parish or diocese (no matter how painful the anthropological and emotional circumstances in this particular instance) because the funeral liturgy is complete in and of itself!” “All parents must take the pre-baptism program, even if they themselves have helped instruct those who teach these programs!” “No hymn that isn’t approved by the parish team will be sung at a wedding in this parish, irrespective of background (religious, aesthetic, ethnic, and emotional) of the couple who are actually getting married!” The list goes on and on.
A new legalism is replacing the old and it parallels perfectly the old in its lack of compassion, catholicity, depth, and nuance—not to mention how, just like the old, it echoes the personality of the person or persons who are doing the adjudication.
We might all take a lesson in catholicity and good pastoral theology from the incident in the gospels where Jesus is confronted by a Canaanite woman, asking that he cure her daughter. Transliterated, this text, Matthew 15: 21-28 might read like this:
It was the night of the Easter vigil. Jesus had just helped to conduct an eight-month RCIA program and was helping set up things for the candidates who were to be baptized at the vigil liturgy, when I, a woman, who hadn’t taken the program, came up to him and said: “Jesus, leader of this RCIA program, I would like to be baptized tonight, with these others.” Jesus replied:
“You never took the program! This is only for those who took it. It isn’t fair to them to baptize you!”
But the woman addresses Jesus a second time: “Jesus, you who are the compassion of God for the world and not just for this parish and program, I’m as ready as all those who did take the program!” And Jesus, after interviewing her, right then and there, concludes: “Amen. Indeed, you are more ready than any of the candidates scheduled for baptism tonight. Step into line and be baptized … even though you didn’t take the program”!
When Jesus instituted the Eucharist at the Last Supper, he held up bread and wine as two elements within which to make himself especially present to us. Since that time, now more than 2000 years ago, Christians celebrating the Eucharist have used the same two things, bread and wine, to ask Christ to bless this world and to bring God’s special presence to our world. Why two elements? Why both bread and wine? What reality does each represent?
I have always found this insight from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin particularly meaningful. Commenting on why both bread and wine are offered at each Eucharist, his says this: “In a sense the true substance to be consecrated each day is the world’s development during that day – the bread symbolizing appropriately what creation succeeds in producing, the wine (blood) what creation causes to be lost in exhaustion and suffering in the course of that effort.”
As a Roman Catholic priest, I have the privilege of presiding at the Eucharist, and whenever I do, I try always to remain conscious of the separate realities which the bread and wine symbolize. When I lift up the bread, I try to be conscious of the fact that I am holding up for God’s blessing all that is healthy, growing in life, and is being celebrated in our world today. When I lift up the wine, I try to be conscious that I am holding up for God’s blessing all that is being crushed, is suffering, and is dying today, as life on this earth moves forwards.
Our world is a big place and at every moment somewhere on this planet new life is being born, young life is taking root, some people are celebrating life, some are finding love, some are making love, and some are celebrating success and triumph. And, while all of this is happening, others are losing their health, others are dying, others are being raped and violated, and others are being crushed by hunger, defeat, hopelessness, and a broken spirit. At the Eucharist, the bread speaks for the former, the wine for the latter. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Praying for Both – The Weak and the Strong” July 2023]
Several years ago, a friend of mine made a very unromantic type of marriage proposal to his fiancée. In essence, this was his proposal: I’d like to ask you to marry me but I need to put my cards on the table. I don’t pretend to know what love means. There was a time in my life when I thought I did, but I’ve seen my own feelings and the feelings of others shift too often in ways that have made me lose confidence in my understanding of love. So, I’ll be honest, I can’t promise that I will always feel in love with you. But I can promise that I’ll always be faithful, that I’ll always treat you with respect, that I’ll always do everything in my power to be there for you to help further your own dreams, and that I’ll always be an honest partner in trying to build a life together. I can’t guarantee how I will always feel, but I can promise that I won’t betray you in infidelity.
That’s not exactly the type of marriage proposal we see in our romantic movies and novels, predicated as they mostly are on the naïve belief that the passion and excitement we initially experience when we fall in love will remain that way forever. His is a mature proposal, one that doesn’t naively promise something it can’t deliver.
When I was in the seminary, a classmate of mine set off one summer to make a thirty-day retreat. His aim was to try to acquire a faith that he would feel with more fervor, which would more affectively warm his heart. He returned from the retreat still stoic, though changed nonetheless: “I never got what I asked for,” he said, “but I got something else. I learned to accept that my faith might always be stoic, and I learned too that this is okay.
Faith and love are too easily identified with emotional feelings, passion, fervor, affectivity, and romantic fire. And those feelings are part of love’s mystery, a part we are meant to embrace and enjoy. But, wonderful as these feelings can be, they are, as experience shows, fragile and ephemeral. Our world can change in fifteen seconds because we can fall in or out of love in that time. Passionate and romantic feelings are part of love and faith, though not the deepest part, and not a part over which we have much emotional control.
Thus, unromantic though it is, I like the stoic approach that’s expressed in the marriage proposal of my friend, particularly as it applies to faith. For some of us, faith will never be, other than for short periods of time, something that fires our emotions and fills us with warmth. We know how ephemeral feelings can be.
Like my colleague with the “stoic” faith, some of us might have to settle for a faith that says to God, to others, and to ourselves: I can’t guarantee how I will feel on any given day. I can’t promise I will always have emotional passion about my faith, but I can promise I’ll always be faithful, I’ll always act with respect, and I will always do everything in my power, as far as my human weakness allows, to help others and God.
Love and faith are shown more in fidelity than in feelings. We can’t guarantee how we will always feel, but we can live in the firm resolve to never betray what we believe in! [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Love and Faith as Fidelity” February 2025]
G.K. Chesterton once wrote: “There comes a time, usually late in the afternoon, when the little child tires of playing policeman and robbers. It’s then that he begins to torment the cat!” Mothers, with young children, are only too familiar with this late afternoon hour and its particular dynamic. There comes an hour, usually just before supper, when a child’s energy is low, when it is tired and whining, and when the mother has exhausted both her patience and her repertoire of warnings: “Leave that alone! Don’t do that!” The child, tense and miserable, is clinging to her leg. At that point, she knows what to do. She picks up the child. Touch, not word, is what’s needed. In her arms, the child grows calm and tension leaves its body.
That’s an image for the Eucharist. We are that tense, over-wrought child, perennially tormenting the cat. There comes a point, even with God, when words aren’t enough. God has to pick us up, like a mother her child. Physical embrace is what’s needed. Skin needs to be touched. God knows that. It’s why Jesus gave us the Eucharist. Indeed that is what all sacraments are, God’s physical embrace. Words, as we know, have a relative power. In critical situations they often fail us. When this happens, we have still another language, the language of ritual. The most ancient and primal ritual of all is the ritual of physical embrace. It can say and do what words cannot.
Jesus acted on this. For most of his ministry, he used words. Through words, he tried to bring us God’s consolation, challenge, and strength. His words, like all words, had a certain power. Indeed, his words stirred hearts, healed people, and affected conversions. But at a time, powerful though they were, they too became inadequate. Something more was needed. So on the night before his death, having exhausted what he could do with words, Jesus went beyond them. He gave us the Eucharist, his physical embrace, his kiss, a ritual within which he holds us to his heart.
The Eucharist is God’s kiss. Andre Dubos, the Cajun novelist, used to say: “Without the Eucharist, God becomes a monologue.” Skin needs to be touched. This is what happens in the Eucharist and that is why the Eucharist, and every other Christian sacrament, always has some very tangible physical element to it – a laying on of hands, a consuming of bread and wine, an immersion into water, an anointing with oil. An embrace needs to be physical, not only something imagined.
G.K. Chesterton once wrote: “There comes a time, usually late in the afternoon, when the little child tires of playing policeman and robbers. There comes an hour, usually just before supper, when a child’s energy is low, when it is tired and whining, and when the mother has exhausted both her patience and her repertoire of warnings: “Leave that alone! Don’t do that!” The child, tense and miserable, is clinging to her leg. At that point, she knows what to do. She picks up the child. Touch, not word, is what’s needed. In her arms, the child grows calm and tension leaves its body.
That’s an image for the Eucharist. We are that tense, over-wrought child. There comes a point, even with God, when words aren’t enough. God has to pick us up, like a mother her child. Physical embrace is what’s needed. Skin needs to be touched. God knows that. It’s why Jesus gave us the Eucharist. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Eucharist as God’s Physical Embrace” May 2006]
We’re called to live in the light, but we tend to have an overly romantic idea of what that should mean. We tend to think that to live in the light means that there should be a kind of special sunshine inside of us, a divine glow in our conscience, a sunny joy inside us that makes us constantly want to praise God, an ambience of sacredness surrounding our attitude. But that’s unreal. What does it mean to live in the light?
To live in the light means to live in honesty, pure and simple, to be transparent, to not have part of us hidden as a dark secret.
Spiritual health lies in honesty and transparency and so we live in the light when we are willing to lay every part of our lives open to examination by those who need to trust us.
· To live in the light is to be able always to tell our loves ones where we are and what we are doing.
· To live in the light is not have to worry if someone traces what websites we have visited.
· To live in the light is to not be anxious if someone in the family finds our files unlocked.
· To live in the light is to be able to let those we live with listen to what’s inside our cell-phones, see what’s inside our emails, and know who’s on our speed-dial.
· To live in the light is to have a confessor and to be able to tell that person what we struggle with, without having to hide anything.
To live in the light is to live in such a way that, for those who know us, our lives are an open book. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “To Live In The Light” April 2012]
A Jesuit friend of mine was an actual shepherd in his youth. He had spent plenty of time out in the fields, so I asked him what taking care of sheep was like. He surprised me. He said he hated being a shepherd and would never want to go near it again. Never. Why? Because today there are huge numbers of sheep in a herd and you could never know which was which, much less have names for them. Sheep-dogs, not the shepherd, could keep them more or less together. It was a cold job, uncomfortable and unrewarding, an industry now, with nothing personal about it.
What a surprise. This seemed like the exact opposite of what we hear in the Bible.
In Jesus’ day, however, the herds were much smaller. A shepherd could name each sheep and they knew their master’s voice by heart, the way the way the family dog knows your voice. Good shepherds would search and search for one lost sheep. Or if one was turned absurdly on its back, unable to roll over because of its full fleece, the shepherd would take his “crook,” and using the big curve on one end, easily maneuver that sheep back to its feet.
And if there was real danger, as for instance if wolves were ready to pounce, the shepherd would take out his “staff,” which served as a weapon, and deal with the predators.
Bad shepherds, on the other hand, would actually scatter the sheep. Sheep feared and trembled and many went missing. Sometimes the uncaring shepherds would lessen their burden by driving the sheep off. People were hired who were not shepherds at all, who simply ran away when a wolf approached.
In our reflection reading from today’s gospel, we see that Jesus was becoming very popular. Many people were coming and going, so that he and his apostles “had no opportunity even to eat.” He wisely invited them to come away with him to a quiet place for rest. They went off in a boat to a “deserted place.”
But the needy throng traced where they figured the boat was going. They formed a “vast crowd” and ran to the spot! What should Jesus do, start ministering to them again instead of resting? The Gospel says “his heart was moved with pity for them, for they were like sheep without a shepherd.” And, “he began to teach them many things.”
The question for you and me is not whether we should go without food and drink or be workaholics for the sake of others. It is whether our own hearts are ever moved even once with pity for the scattered and fear-filled sheep-folk of our own time. Can we love them and each other, with Jesus’ love? Can we be good shepherds? [Excerpt from John Foley S.J. “Good Shepherds and Bad” July 2018]
We are not created by God and put in this earth with small, narrow, and petty hearts. The opposite is true. God puts us into this world with huge hearts, hearts as deep as the Grand Canyon. The human heart in itself, when not closed off by fear, wound, and paranoia, is the antithesis of pettiness. The human heart, as Augustine describes it, is not fulfilled by anything less than infinity itself. There’s nothing small about the human heart.
The problem is not the size or the natural dynamics of the human heart, but what the heart tends to do when it is wounded, fearful, disrespected, paranoid, or self-deluded by greed and selfishness. It’s then that it closes itself to its own depth and greatness and becomes narrow, petty, fearful, and selfish. But that behavior is anomalous, not the human heart at either its normal or its best. At its normal and at its best, the human heart is huge, generous, noble, and self-sacrificing.
The Church Fathers taught that inside of each of us there was also another heart, a magna anima, a huge, deep, big, generous, and noble heart. This is the heart we operate out of when we are at our best. This is the heart within which we feel empathy and compassion. This is the heart within which we are enflamed with noble ideals. This is the heart where we inchoately feel God’s presence in faith and hope and are able to move out to others in charity and forgiveness. Inside each of us, sadly often buried under suffocating wounds that keep if far from the surface, lies the heart of a saint, bursting to get out.
Thus on any given day, and at any given moment, we can feel like Mother Teresa or like a bitter terrorist. We can feel ready to give our lives in martyrdom or we can feel ready to welcome the sensation of sin. We can feel like the noble Don Quixote, enflamed with idealism, or we can feel like a despairing cynic, content to settle for whatever short-range compensation and pleasure life can give rather than believing in deeper, more life-giving possibilities for ourselves and others. Everything depends upon which heart we are connected to at a given moment.
If that is true then our invitation to others in terms of moving towards nobleness of heart will be most effective when, rather than emphasizing their faults and narrowness, we instead invite them to try to access what is best, highest, within themselves. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “The Size of our Hearts” June 2011]
