Daily Virtue Post

The phrase “the tattered houses of our lives” is a poetic and metaphorical expression, often used in literature, art, and personal reflection to describe the imperfect, worn, and sometimes damaged nature of our homes, our histories, and our very selves.

What kind of house can you build for me? Men and women of faith have generally taken this literally, and so from ancient times to this very day have built magnificent temples, shrines, churches, and cathedrals to show their faith in God. That’s wonderful, but the invitation Isaiah voices is, first and foremost, about the kind of house we’re meant to build inside ourselves. How do we enshrine the image and likeness of God inside our body, our intellect, our affectivity, our actions? What kind of “church” or “cathedral” is our very person? That’s the deeper question in terms of moral living.

Beyond a very elementary level, our moral decision-making should no longer by guided by the question of right or wrong, is this sinful or not?  Rather it should be guided and motivated by a higher question: What kind of house can you build for me? At what level do I want live out my humanity and my discipleship? Do I want to be more self-serving or more generous? Do I want to be petty or noble?

Allow me a simple, earthy example to illustrate this. Consider the issue of sexual chastity: is masturbation wrong and sinful? I once heard a moral professor take a perspective on this which reflects the challenge of Isaiah. Here, in a paraphrase, is how he framed the issue: “I don’t believe it’s helpful to contextualize this question as did the classical moral theology texts, by saying it’s a grave disorder and seriously sinful. Nor do I believe that it’s helpful to say what our culture and much of contemporary psychology is saying, that it’s morally indifferent.

I believe that a more helpful way to approach this is not to look at it through the prism of right or wrong, sinful or not. Rather, ask yourself this: at what level do I want to live? At what level do I want to carry my chastity, my fidelity, and my honesty? At what point in my life do I want to accept carrying more of the tension that both my discipleship and my humanity ask of me? What kind of person do I want to be? Do I want to be someone who is fully transparent or someone who has hidden goods under the counter? Do I want to live in full sobriety?” What kind of “temple” do I want to be?  What kind of house can I build for God?

This moral choice comes to us, as do all the invitations from God, as an invitation, not as a threat. It’s through love and not threat that God invites us into life and discipleship, always gently asking us: what kind of house can you build for me? [Exerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “What Kind of House Can You Build for Me?” October 202]

Love can grow numb between two people, just as it can within a whole culture. And that has happened in our culture, at least to a large part. The excitement that once guided our eyes has given way to a certain numbness and resignation. We no longer stand before life with much freshness. We have seen what it has to offer and have succumbed to a certain resignation: That’s all there is, and it’s not that great! All we can try for now is more of the same, with the misguided hope that if we keep increasing the dosage the payoff will be better.

What’s at the root of this? What has deprived us of wonder? Familiarity and its children: sophistication, intellectual pride, disappointment, boredom, and contempt. Familiarity does breed contempt, and contempt is the antithesis of the two things needed to stand before the world in wonder: reverence and respect. G.K. Chesterton once suggested that familiarity is the greatest of all illusions.

“Earth’s crammed with heaven. / And every common bush afire with God. / But only he who sees, takes off his shoes. / The rest sit round and pluck blackberries and daub their natural faces unaware.” – Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Chesterton suggests that the secret to recovering wonder and seeing divine fire in the ordinary is to learn to look at things familiar until they look unfamiliar again. That single line, that singular invitation, is the deep secret to recover our sense of wonder. Our sense of wonder is predicated initially on the naiveté of being a child, of not yet being unhealthily familiar with the world. Our eyes then are still open to marvel at the newness of things.

We have grown too familiar with sunsets! Wonder can make the familiar unfamiliar again. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “In our familiar lives, there’s no more ‘wonder’” Jun 2023]

Understanding your unworthiness in the context of God’s grace means recognizing that your value comes from God, not from your own achievements or perfection, but from His love and redemptive work.

God’s mark of genuine contrition is not a sense of guilt, but a sense of sorrow, of regret for having taken a wrong turn; just as the mark of living in grace is not a sense of our own worth but a sense of being accepted and loved despite our unworthiness. We are spiritually healthy when our lives are marked by honest confession and honest praise.

Augustine’s confession is a work of a true moral conscience because it is both a confession of praise and a confession of sin. Gil Bailie suggests that this comment underlines an important criterion by which to judge whether or not we are living in grace: “If the confession of praise is not accompanied by the confession of sin it an empty and pompous gesture. If the confession of sins is not accompanied by a confession of praise, it is equally vacuous and barren, the stuff of trashy magazines and tabloid newspapers, a self-preening parody of repentance.”

We generally find ourselves falling into either a confession of praise where there is no real confession of our own sin; or into the “self-preening parody of repentance” of a still self-absorbed convert, where our confession rings hollow because it shows itself more as a badge of sophistication than as genuine sorrow for having strayed. In neither case is there a true sense of grace. Neither the self-confident believer (who still secretly envies the pleasures of the amoral that he’s missing out on) nor the wayward person who converts but still feels grateful for his fling, has yet understood grace.

We understand grace only when we grasp existentially what’s inside the Father’s words to his older son in the parable of the prodigal son: My son, you are always with me, and everything I have is yours.  But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.

Only when we understand what the father of the prodigal son means when he says to the older brother: Everything I have is yours”, will we offer both a confession of praise and a confession of sin.

Today is the first Sunday of Advent, which marks the beginning of the liturgical year in Western Christianity. This day starts the four-week season of Advent, a time of preparing for the coming of Christ through prayer, reflection, and anticipation of both Christmas and His second coming. Our reflections will following the commentary on this season of waiting.

Annie Dillard shares this story about proper waiting: She had been watching a butterfly emerge from its cocoon and was fascinated by the process until she grew impatient with how long it w as taking and, to speed things up, took a candle and heated the cocoon, albeit very gently.

The experiment worked, but it was a mistake in the long run. The butterfly emerged more quickly; however, because adding heat violated something within the natural process, the butterfly was born with wings too weak to fly. Haste and prematurity had stunted and deformed a natural process. Some things can’t be rushed.

Dillard understood immediately what had gone wrong. A certain chastity had been violated. Impatience had triggered an irreverence that had interfered with and damaged the natural order of things. In essence, the Christmas gift had been opened too early; the bride had been slept with before the wedding; a process that needed an allotted period of time ha d been short- circuited. There hadn’t been enough advent.

Scripture and Christian tradition emphasize that Jesus was born of a virgin to underscore the fact that he had no human father and also to teach an important truth, namely, that in order for something sublime to be born there must, first, be a proper chastity, a proper time of waiting, a season of advent. Why?

The answer lies in properly understanding chastity. Chastity is not, first of all, something to do with sex. Chastity has to do with how we experience reality in general. To be chaste is to have proper reverence—toward God, toward each other, towards nature, toward ourselves, toward reality in general, and toward sex.

Lack of chastity is irreverence, in any area of life, sex included. And reverence is a lot about proper waiting. Chastity is about proper waiting, and waiting is about patience in carrying the tensions and frustrations we suffer as we live the unfinished symphony that constitutes our lives. We must learn to wait—for God, for love, for the bride, and for Christmas.[Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Advent-A Time to Learn to Wait” November 2025]

Ron Rolheiser writes that one of the reasons we need to pray is so that we don’t lose heart. We all do sometimes. We lose heart whenever frustration, tiredness, fear, and helplessness in the face of life’s humiliations conspire together to paralyze our energies, deaden our resiliency, drain our courage, and leave us feeling weak in depression.

We see an example of praying so as not to lose heart in Jesus when, facing his passion and death, he prays in the Garden of Gethsemane.  It’s the low-point of Jesus’ life and ministry: The people have stopped listening to him, the religious authorities are conspiring with the civil authorities to have him killed, those few, his inner circle of disciples, who are still listening to his message, are not understanding it, and he feels utterly alone, “a stone’s throw away from everyone”. So as not to lose heart, he drops to his knees in prayer, a prayer so intense that he “sweats blood’, but that prayer eventually ends in consolation, with “an angel from heaven coming down to strengthen him”. He brings his beaten-down, misunderstood, fearful, and painfully isolated heart to prayer, and he is strengthened, given all the sustenance he needs to regain his courage.

Jesus is contrasted with his apostles. At that very moment, they too are discouraged, lonely, and fearful. But they are asleep while he prays, and their sleep, as the gospels hint, is something more than physical. They are, we are told, “asleep out of sheer sorrow”. In essence, they are too depressed to be awake to the full strength of their own lives. This loss of heart has them paralyzed in fear and when they finally do act they act in ways contrary to what Jesus had taught them. They attempt violence and then flee. They couldn’t face impending suffering as Jesus did because they didn’t pray as he did. They lost heart.

No matter who we are or how rich and blessed our lives may be, it is impossible to go through life without, at times, feeling bitterly misunderstood, becoming deeply disconsolate, succumbing to a paralyzing tiredness, and simply losing heart.  We are human and, like Jesus, we will have days when we feel “a stone’s throw away from everyone.”  And what’s paralyzed inside of us is what’s highest in us: our capacity to forgive, our capacity to radiate huge, generous hearts, our capacity for empathy and understanding, our capacity for joy, and our capacity for courage.

But in moments like this, let us hold fast to the truth of God’s love, knowing that in the depths of heartbreak, the loving breeze of the Father’s love will awaken us out of our paralysis and back into the embracing the love he offers.

There is a despair we feel when life begins to pass us by, when our real dream for love seems over, and when, daily, we become more and more unsure as to whether or not we are on the side of life or not.

What we need when we begin to lose heart for the ideal is to get our hearts in touch with what, deep down, they really want. And how do we do that? By committing ourselves to what will give us real life in the long run. Allow me an example, namely, the infamous, unenthusiastic, but deep, commitment that Peter gives to Jesus at a low point in his discipleship.

The incident takes place in John’s gospel. Jesus had just given a teaching that both confused and upset everyone, the disciples included. He told the people: “Unless you eat my flesh, you will not have life within you!” John reports that, after he said this, everyone walked away, saying this was an intolerable teaching. Jesus then turned to his disciples and asked: “Do you want to walk away too?” Peter answered: “Yes, we would like to, but you have the words of everlasting life!”

This response, devoid of all enthusiasm, speaks though of real maturity: “You have the words of everlasting life!” What gives us life sometimes calls for commitment even when our hearts aren’t onside. In essence, Peter is saying this: “We don’t get it, but we know that we’re better off not getting it with you than getting it with somebody else!”

I once used those exact words in a class when explaining this story and a man quipped: “That sounds like my marriage!” There was snicker in the classroom, but he said: “I’m serious. Anyone who’s ever been married or committed in a relationship knows that there are times when that relationship will be full of tension, disappointment, and even flat-out coldness. It might feel dead, but you’re smart enough to know that, for you, life lies there, not elsewhere. For you, long-range, life means staying in that relationship even though, on this day, it seems lifeless. Deep down, all of us know exactly what it means to say: “I’m not getting it with you, but I’m better off not getting it with you than getting it with somebody else!”

Love is a decision, not a feeling. We find that hard to believe because, long before we have to decide for love, we first fall into love. Initially it chooses us more than we choose it. But that changes, as we know, and real maturity comes at that exact moment when, like Peter, we commit ourselves to something beyond what feels best in the present moment. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “What’s Worthwhile is Worth Waiting For” February 2006]

To be a saint is to be motivated by gratitude, nothing more and nothing less. Scripture, everywhere and always, makes this point. For example, the sin of Adam and Eve 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—receive and give thanks. Only after doing this, do we go on to “break and share” Before all else, we first give thanks.

The converse is also true. Anyone who takes life and love for granted should not ever be confused with a saint. Let me try to illustrate this from an event I witnessed in the hospital. One night a patient is brought into a room next to mine. 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 administer 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 a number of times, she said to him: “Sir, you don’t need to thank me. This 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!” I am struck by that, how, even in his great pain, this man remained conscious of the fact that life, love, care, and everything else come to us as a gift, not as owed. 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!

It’s our propensity to forget this that gets us into trouble. The failure to be properly grateful, to take as owed what’s offered as gift, lies at the root of many of our deepest resentments towards others—and their resentments towards us. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Gratitude the Basic Virtue” May 1992]

A sound theology and a sound science will both recognize that the law of gravity and the Holy Spirit are one in the same principle. There isn’t a different spirit undergirding the physical than the spiritual. There’s one spirit that’s speaking through both the law of gravity and the Sermon on the Mount.

We first meet the person of the Holy Spirit in the opening line of the Bible: In the beginning there was a formless void and the Spirit of God hovered over the chaos. In the early chapters of the Scriptures, the Holy Spirit is presented as a physical force, a wind that comes from the very mouth of God and not only shapes and orders physical creation but is also the energy that lies at the base of everything, animate and inanimate alike: Take away your breath, and everything returns to dust.

The ancients believed there was a soul in everything and that soul, God’s breath, held everything together and gave it meaning. They understood that the same breath that animates and orders physical creation is also the source of all wisdom, harmony, peace, creativity, morality, and fidelity. God’s breath was understood to be as moral as it is physical, as unifying as it is creative, and as wise as it is daring. For them, the breath of God was one force and it did not contradict itself. The physical and the spiritual world were not set against each other. One Spirit was understood to be the source of both.

We need to understand things in the same way. We need to let the Holy Spirit, in all its fullness, animate our lives. What this means concretely is that we must not let ourselves be energized and driven too much by one part of the Spirit to the detriment of other parts of that same Spirit. 

Thus, there shouldn’t be creativity in the absence of morality, education in the absence of wisdom, sex in the absence of commitment, pleasure in the absence of conscience, and artistic or professional achievement in the absence of personal fidelity. Not least, there shouldn’t be a good life for some in the absence of justice for everyone. Conversely, however, we need to be suspicious of ourselves when we are moral but not creative, when our wisdom fears critical education, when our spirituality has a problem with pleasure, and when our personal fidelity is over-defensive in the face of art and achievement. One Spirit is the author of all of these. Hence, we must be equally sensitive to each of them.  Someone once quipped that a heresy is something that is nine-tenths true. That’s our problem with the Holy Spirit. We’re forever into partial truth when we don’t allow for a connection between the law of gravity and the Sermon on the Mount. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “The Law of Gravity and the Holy Spirit” January 2024]

Several years ago, a friend of mine made a very unromantic type of marriage proposal to his fiancé. 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.”

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. By his own admission, he lacked affectivity, fire, emotion, and warmth about his faith and he went off in search of that.

“I never got what I asked for,” he said in his return from the retreat, “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 for me now means that I need to live my life in charity, respect, patience, chastity, and generosity. I just need to do it; I don’t need to always feel it.”

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.

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]

A few years ago, I had a friend who was a very respected and successful business man. He doted on his employees who loved for it. He told me: “There isn’t one of them, my employees, who wouldn’t give me the shirt off his or her back. I’ve been good to everyone of them.”His problem wasn’t there. It was at home with his family. He had a drinking problem and all the inconsistencies that come with that.

Simply put, he was never as nice at home as he was at the office. Here is how he would generally put things to me: “Everyone likes me, except my family. I suspect that it’s because they can’t deal with my popularity. I go to the office and there isn’t one person there who isn’t indebted to me, whom I haven’t helped specially. We have a good atmosphere there. We laugh a lot and I’m appreciated. Then I go home … well, everything changes! Half the time everyone is avoiding me. If I’m upstairs, they’re all downstairs; if I’m downstairs, they’re all upstairs. They’re forever on my case about one thing or another. If I come home late a couple of times or miss a family thing I said I’d be there for it’s as if committed murder in public. I am fed up with it, being the leper at home, just because I miss the odd thing. They don’t love and appreciate me like the folks do at the office. I’m not asking for much at home, just a little understanding!”

A nice guy at office and an angry alcoholic at home! He didn’t see the glaring inconsistency. For him, the problem was simply that his wife and children were not as appreciative of him as they should be and as he deserved.

Jesus once told a very similar story: Once upon a time there was a judge in a certain town who was well respected by everyone and, in public, people used to bring out gifts and give them to him because he had been good to them. Everyone respected him, except one widow to whom he hadn’t given justice. She hounded him, demanding her just due. Finally, he said to himself: “I fear neither God nor man, but if I don’t give her justice she will hound me to death!” He gave her her due.

The moral of all this, then, is that we are asked to hear God’s voice in the persons who upset us, that is, in those people who, for whatever reason, are not very impressed with us. Usually that is the people we live with. Obviously, the principle breaks down when that voice is an abusive one. The gospel does not ask us to let ourselves be abused, but it does ask us to make an option for the poor and that option, like the house of God itself, has many surprising rooms, some of which are not very romantic or much to our liking.

Thus, beware of the voice that humbles you: It might just be one of God’s widows, puncturing your persona, and calling you to justice and honesty. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Listening to Your Widows” July 1996]