Daily Virtue Post

For more than a thousand years, Christians have not experienced the joy of being one family in Christ. Although there were already tensions within the earliest Christian communities, it was not until the year 1054 that there was a formal split, in effect, to establish two formal Christian communities, the Orthodox Church in the East and the Catholic Church in the West. Then, with the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century, there was another split within the Western Church and Christianity fragmented still further. Today there are hundreds of Christian denominations, many of whom, sadly, are not on friendly terms with each other.

Division and misunderstanding are understandable, inevitable, the price of being human. There are no communities without tension and so it is no great scandal that Christians sometimes cannot get along with each other. The scandal rather is that we have become comfortable, even smug, with the fact that we do not get along with each other, no longer hunger for wholeness, and no longer miss each other inside our separate churches.

In almost all our churches today there is little anxiety about those with whom we are not worshiping. For example, teaching Roman Catholic seminarians today, I sense a certain indifference to the issue of ecumenism. For many seminarians today this is not an issue of particular concern. Not to single out Catholic seminarians, this holds true for most of us in all denominations.

But this kind of indifference is inherently unchristian. Oneness was close to the heart of Jesus. He wants all his followers at the same table, as we see in this parable.

Sadly, today, many of us are comfortable in churches that are far, far from whole. Sometimes, in our less reflective moments, we even rejoice in it: “Those others aren’t real Christians in any case! We’re better off without them, a purer, more faithful church in their absence! We’re the one true remnant!”

But this lack of solicitude for wholeness compromises our following of Jesus as well as our basic human maturity. We are mature, loving people and true followers of Jesus, only when, like Jesus, we are in tears over those “other sheep that are not of this fold”. When, like the woman who lost one of her coins, we cannot sleep until every corner of the house has been turned upside down in a frantic search for what’s been lost. We too need to solicitously search for a lost wholeness – and may not be at peace until it is found. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Ecumenism: The Imperative for Wholeness Inside the Body of Christ” January 2025]

In our reading today from Mark’s gospel, Jesus’ relatives try to grab him thinking that he was “out of his mind.” When we look closely at the Gospels, we see that there was no human pain, emotional or physical, from which Jesus was spared. It is safe to say, I submit, that no one, irrespective of his or her pain, can say to Jesus: You didn’t have to undergo what I had to undergo!  He underwent it all.

Given who Jesus was, given that his central message was good news for the poor, and given that he entered into human life precisely to experience all it contains, including its pains and humiliations, he could hardly have been born in a palace, enjoyed every kind of support, and been the center of love and attention. To be in real solidarity with the poor, as Merton once put it, he had to be born “outside the city”; and whether that was the case historically or not, it is a rich, far-reaching metaphor. Right from the beginning, Jesus knew both the pain and the shame of one who is excluded, who has no place in the mainstream.

During his ministry, he faced constant rejection, ridicule, and threat, sometimes having to hide away like a criminal on the run. He was also a celibate, one who slept alone, one deprived of normal human intimacy, one with no family of his own. Then in his passion and death, he experienced the extremes of both emotional and physical pain. Emotionally, he literally “sweated blood”, and physically, in his crucifixion, he endured the most extreme and humiliating pain possible for a human being to undergo.

The God who wrote the beginnings of it all with crooked lines also writes the sequence with crooked lines, and some of those lines are our own lives and witness. A God who did not hesitate to use the scheming as well as the noble, the impure as well as the pure, men to whom the world harkened and women upon whom the world frowned – this God continues to work through the same mélange.

Christianity isn’t just for the pure, the talented, the good, the humble, and the honest. The story of Jesus Christ was also written and keeps being written by the impure, by sinners, by calculating schemers, by the proud, by the dishonest, and by those without worldly talents. Nobody is so bad, so insignificant, so devoid of talent, or so outside the circle of faith, that he or she is outside the story of Christ.

We live in a world of deep divisions. Everywhere we see polarization, people bitterly divided from each other by ideology, politics, economic theory, moral beliefs, and theology. We tend to use over-simplistic categories within which to understand these divisions: the left and the right opposing each other, liberals and conservatives at odds, pro-life vying with pro-choice.

Scripture calls this enmity, hatred, and indeed that’s its proper name. We are becoming hate-filled people who both fuel and justify our hatred on religious and moral grounds. We need only to watch the news on any night to see this. How’s this to be overcome?

At the more macro level in politics and religion, it’s hard to see how these bitter divides will ever be bridged, especially when so much of our public discourse is feeding and widening the division. What’s needed is nothing short of religious conversion, a religious change of heart, and that’s contingent on the individual. The collective heart will change only when individual hearts first do. We help save the sanity of the world by first safeguarding our own sanity, but that’s no easy task.

The real answer, I believe, lies in an understanding of how the cross and death of Jesus brings about reconciliation. The author of the Letter to the Ephesians tells us that Jesus broke down the barrier of hostility that existed between communities by creating one person where formerly there had been two – and he did it this “by reconciling both [sides] in one body through his cross, which put that enmity to death.” (Ephesians 2, 16)

What Jesus did in his passion and death was to transform bitterness and division rather than to retransmit them and give them back in kind. In the love which he showed in his passion and death Jesus did this:  He took in hatred, held it inside himself, transformed it, and gave back love. He took in bitterness, held it, transformed it, and gave back graciousness. He took in curses, held them, transformed them, and gave back blessing. He took in paranoia, held it, transformed it, and gave back big-heartedness. He took in murder, held it, transformed it, and gave back forgiveness. And he took in enmity, bitter division, held it, transformed it, and through that revealed to us the deep secret for forming community, namely, we need to take away the hatred that divides us by absorbing and holding it within ourselves and thereby transforming it. Like a water purifier which holds within itself the toxins and the poisons and gives back only pure water, we must hold within ourselves the toxins that poison community land give back only graciousness and openness to everyone. That’s the only key to overcome division. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Overcoming the Divisions that Divide Us” January 2018]

Fr. Ron Rolheiser teaches us that Jesus’s death and resurrection was not merely a rescue mission for sin, but as the restoration of God’s original, intended design for humanity—an “Edenic” state of eternal life and communion with God that existed before the chaos of sin. The resurrection was a “second creation” or “new light” that transcended the original, overcoming the darkness of sin and death by rearranging the very atoms of the cosmos. 

In the resurrection, God creates light a second time, which unlike the physical light of Genesis 1, can never be extinguished. This new light and life represent a return to the original, eternal design of creation intended in Eden. The resurrection was not just a spiritual or metaphorical event, but a “real, cosmic, and corporeal” one. It rearranges the “atoms of this universe” to reflect a new, higher form of existence where death no longer has the last word.

When Jesus dies, the world goes back to its original “formless void” (or chaos). The resurrection functions as the new, permanent ordering of that chaos into a creation that is “perfectly transparent to [God’s] design.” Jesus was the redeemer who transformed the nature of death rather than simply sparing people from it. He “splitt[s] the moral atom” through his perfect obedience, releasing a creative power that reverses the effects of sin.

His “descent into hell” was the taking of his humanity into the deepest, darkest, and most broken parts of the human experience (the “void” created by sin) and, by staying in that love, “thaw[ing] out our frozen souls” The resurrection proves goodness and life are stronger than evil and death. The “stone that entombs them always eventually rolls back,” releasing life from every grave. 

The “New Life” Jesus brought was the transition of life to death to the new process of birth, where “we need to be born again from the earth’s womb” into a more permanent, eternal life. Because of the resurrection, the “ending of our story… is a happy ending.” All of human history will be vindicated in the end, as love and truth will ultimately triumph over the chaos and pain of our fallen state. The goal is a return to a state where, as in the Garden of Eden, we are in direct, unhindered communion with God, who “is a gracious and loving presence, even when we are sweating blood.” 

Jesus’s resurrection is the definitive, irreversible restoration of the original, divine intention for humanity—a state of life, joy, and love that is more vibrant and enduring than the life known before the resurrection. 

Jesus showed anger not as personal rage but as a powerful, holy reaction against evil, hypocrisy, and the commercialization of faith, exemplified by flipping tables in the temple; his anger was a catalyst for transformation, taking in negativity (like hatred, bitterness) and giving back love, forgiveness, and a call to a higher, purer way, like a water purifier turning poison into pure water, which Christians are called to imitate by transforming tension rather than transmitting it. 

Ways in which Jesus dealt with anger:

• His anger was never personal, it was prophetic: Jesus’ anger wasn’t selfish or directed at individuals for personal reasons but was a righteous indignation against injustice and sin.
• He sought to cleanse the Temple: He physically drove out money changers and merchants, overturning tables (a powerful act of protest) to cleanse the sacred space, a sign of his anger at turning God’s house into a marketplace.
• He called out hypocrisy: Jesus denounced religious leaders (Pharisees) who preached but didn’t practice their faith, showing anger at their spiritual blindness.
• The core of Jesus teaching was one of transformation, not retaliation: Jesus’ was a “water purifier” for the world; he absorbed hatred, jealousy, and resentment and transformed them into love, forgiveness, and compassion, rather than giving back hate for hate. 

What are the lessons we can take from this knowledge?

• Righteous Anger: We are called to have a “holy hatred for sin” that motivates us to act justly, driven by God’s love for others, not personal hurt.
• Metanoia (Higher Mind): Instead of reacting defensively (paranoia), we should engage our “higher mind” (metanoia) to absorb tension and transform it, like Mary pondering at the cross.
• Imitation: We should strive to take in negativity (anger, bitterness) from the world, hold it, and transmute it into positive virtues like love, graciousness, and compassion, thereby helping to “take away the sin of the world”. 

In essence, Jesus’ anger was a holy, transformative force, a model for how followers can confront evil and create positive change by purifying, rather than perpetuating, negative energies. 

We have a commandment from God: Remember to keep the Sabbath day holy. I think we can all agree that this commandment has fallen on hard times today. It is not just that fewer and fewer people are going to their churches on Sunday, or that more and more shops and businesses are open on Sunday, or that sporting events now take up much of the Sabbath space once reserved for religion. The deeper issue is that more and more of us can no longer slow down our lives, shut down the communication machines, get away from the stress and preoccupations in our lives, and simply stop and rest.

We are living where we can always be reached and have for the most part lost the notion of Sabbath in our lives. We are now treating a commandment to keep the Sabbath day holy as an idealized lifestyle suggestion: Helpful, if you can find the time to do it. With this in mind, I offer Ten Councils for practicing Sabbath today.

• Practice Sabbath with the discipline demanded of a commandment, even as you practice the discipline of life and duty.
• Have at least one “Sabbath” moment every day. Give yourself something to look forward to every day. Sabbath doesn’t have to be a day; it can be special hour, a special moment, where you step off the treadmill and treat yourself to something you enjoy.
• Go somewhere every week where you can’t be reached and have a “cyber-Sabbath”. Once a week turn off all your electronic communication for six hours or, better yet, for twelve hours. Go to a place where, save for an emergency, you are unavailable. You might find this the hardest discipline of all – and perhaps the most important one.
• Honor the “wisdom of dormancy”. Do something regularly that is non-pragmatic. Farmers know that you can’t seed a field continuously and still get a good yield. Fields require regular seasons where they lie fallow so that they can (in that seeming condition of dormancy) soak in the nutrients and other elements they need to produce. The human body and psyche are the same. We need, regularly, periods of dormancy where our energies lie fallow to the pragmatic world.
• Pray and meditate regularly in some way. There is only one rule and counsel for this: Do it! Show up regularly, and whatever happens, happens. This is a major way that we step off the treadmill and have some Sabbath in our lives.
• Be attentive to little children, old people, and the weather. Sabbath is meant to restore wonder to our lives, and today wonder has left the building. So, as the poet John Shea says, borrow wonder from the children. It is one of the few places we can still find it.As well, time spent with elderly people can help give us a healthier perspective on life. Also, when have we last noticed the weather as a source of wonder?
• Live by axiom: “If not now, when? If not here, where? If not with these people, with whom? If not for God, why? We spend ninety-eight percent of our lives waiting for something else to happen to us. Have some moments where you realize that what you are waiting for is already here.
• Let your body also know that it is Sabbath. Sabbath is meant not just for the soul but also for the body. Give your body a Sabbath treat, at least once a week.
• Make family and relationships the priority. At the end of the day, life is about family, friendships, and relationships, a truth easily eclipsed and lost in the pressures of our fast-paced lives. Sabbath is meant to reground us in that truth at least once a week.
• Don’t nurse grudges and obsessions. Our deepest tiredness isn’t the result of overwork, but of the wounds, grudges, and obsessions we nurse. The invitation to rest for a day includes, especially, the invitation to let go of our hurts. Indeed, the notion of the statute of limitations is based on Judeo-Christian concept of the Sabbath. For every grudge we are nursing there is a statute of limitations.

God gave us Sabbath, for our health and our enjoyment. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Keeping the Sabbath” July 2024]

We live too frustrated by our own mediocrity. The problem lies not in our unwillingness to convert, but in our inability to convert. We keep trying, by the way of good resolutions, to wage war against the bad habits of our hearts and minds. But we fail, grow discouraged, and generally live with a non-expressed despair, which lets us believe that for us, things cannot really change.

What’s at issue? I suspect the issue is more about our unwillingness to move toward the radicalism and upheaval that genuine conversion implies. Perhaps the best analogy available to us for understanding the real meaning of the word conversion is that of revolution. Conversion is an interior revolution. Anything less radical simply misses most of the meaning of that word. As Scripture puts it: “You cannot put new wine into old wineskins!”

When we look at the phenomenon of a political-social revolution, we see that a successful revolution brings about a new consciousness and a new system, a “new guard.” This replaces an “old guard,” a previously established consciousness and way of doing things.

Revolution is dramatic, not gradual. It is an upheaval, a radical overturning. It arises precisely when people have despaired of gradual change. When simple evolution and ordinary everyday changes provide the necessary growth, then revolution is not necessary. Revolution becomes necessary only when the old order is hopelessly stagnant, when there is no longer any hope that peaceful, non-violent, gradual change can bring about improvements of any significance.

Once the new consciousness and order have been established, they must – and very quickly, too – purge themselves of all elements which are not single-mindedly and unequivocally supportive of the new ideals and the new system. Aristotle said: “Habits become one’s second nature.” He is correct. Bad habits do become our second natures. This is a realty that tells us that too many things have been happening for too many years. Evolution is no longer possible for us. Revolution and a certain violence are necessary. We must radically shake up our lives.

Year after year, we try to change ourselves through good resolutions, through means that will not be too dramatic, painful or disruptive. That is why we fail and stay ever the same: mediocre, frustrated, and unable to break out of bad habits that have dominated our lives. It is our fear of dramatic upheaval, painful uprooting and new patterns of life that are hostile to established habits that, precisely, allow our bad habits and mediocrity to keep the upper hand.

Genuine conversion and real change will come when we have the nerve to risk dramatic upheaval. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Conversion Is Revolution!” February 1987]

Scripture, our creeds, and our Christian tradition have a certain language. Among other things, we say: “He paid the price for our sins. We are saved by his blood. He paid the debt of sin. We are washed clean in his blood, the blood of the lamb. He is the Lamb of God who takes away our sins. He restored us to life, after our death in Adam’s sin. He conquered death, once and for all. By his stripes we were healed. He offered an eternal sacrifice to God. He is our victim. He opened the gates of heaven. He stripped the principalities and Satan of their power. He descended into hell.”

Accepting the truth of this language is one thing, explaining in within the categories and language of ordinary life is something else. About Jesus’ death, we have a language but we don’t have a vocabulary. We know its meaning, but we can never adequately explain it.

What exactly do we mean by these statements? How does Jesus’ death save me from being accountable for my sins? How does his death vicariously substitute for human shortcoming, including our own, through the centuries? Why does God need someone to suffer that agonizingly in order to forgive me? How does Jesus’ death open the gates of heaven? Why had they been closed? What does it mean that, in his death, Jesus descended into hell?

Literal explanations come up short here. The words are more like an icon, an artifact that highlights form to bring out essence. The language of scripture, the creeds, and our dogmas put us in touch with something that we can know but struggle to conceptualize and explain. It is meant to be grasped at levels beyond the just the intellect. It is a language to be contemplated and knelt-before more than a language to be understood literally.

Some years ago, Time magazine did a cover story on the death of Jesus. Among other things, they interviewed various people and asked them how they understood the blood of Jesus as washing them clean. One of those interviewed was JoAnne Terrell, the author of Power in the Blood? The Cross in the African American Experience. For her, the question of how Jesus’ blood saves us triggered a deep personal search. Sitting in a seminary classroom and studying the death of Jesus, she began having flashbacks: As a young girl she had seen her mother murdered by a boyfriend. She vividly recalled the blood-soaked mattress and her mother’s bloody fingerprints on the wall. And so her search was very much a search “to find the connection between my mom’s story and my story and Jesus’ story.”

For her, the language around the death of Jesus, its blood and heartbreak, became an icon to be contemplated for meaning. She began to look at it from various angles and to see how it spoke to her in her life-situation, to the blood in her own history. The language of redemptive blood gave meaning and dignity to her mother’s blood.

We cheat ourselves of meaning whenever we treat scripture, the creeds, and the dogmas of our faith as simple statements of history, newspaper accounts in literal language. They have a historicity and they are true, but the language surrounding them is not the language of the daily newspaper. They are anchored in history and we risk our very lives on their truth, but they speak to us more as does an icon than as does yesterday’s newspaper. Their language is meant to be contemplated, knelt-before, and absorbed in the heart as we experience more and more of life’s mysteries. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Religious Language as Icon” August 2009]

Some years ago, a young man came to me for confession. It was a difficult confession for him. He had been having an affair with a girl and she had become pregnant. He recognized that he had sinned. He also recognized that he had helped create a situation that was irrevocable, a certain ease and innocence had been destroyed, some things would never be quite the same again. He ended his confession on a note of sadness and hopelessness: “There is no way I’ll ever live normally again, beyond this. Even God can’t unscramble an egg!” What this young man was saying was that, for him, there would always be a skeleton in the closet. Ordinary life would, in its own way, limp along, but he would remain forever marked by this mistake.

Today we live in a world and a church in which this kind of brokenness and attitude are becoming more the rule than the exception. For more and more people, there is a major something to live beyond, some skeleton in the closet. What we need today, in the church, perhaps more than anything else, is a theology of brokenness that relates failure and sin seriously enough to redemption.

If the Catholicism that I was raised in had a fault, and it did, it was precisely that it did not allow for mistakes. It demanded that you get it right the first time. There was supposed to be no need for a second chance. If you made a mistake, you lived with it and, like the rich young man, you were doomed to be sad, at least for the rest of your life. A serious mistake was a permanent stigmatization, a mark that you wore like Cain.

We need a theology which teaches us that even though God cannot unscramble an egg, God’s grace lets us live happily and with renewed innocence far beyond any egg we might have scrambled. We need a theology that teaches us that God does not just give us one chance, but that every time we close a door, God opens another one for us. We need a theology that challenges us not to make mistakes, that takes sin seriously, but which tells us that when we do sin, when we do make mistakes, we are given the chance to take our place among the broken, among those whose lives are not perfect, the loved sinners, those for whom Christ came.

We need a theology which tells us that a second, third, fourth, and fifth chance are just as valid as the first one. We need a theology that tells us that mistakes are not forever, that they are not even for a lifetime, that time and grace wash clean, that nothing is irrevocable. Finally, we need a theology which teaches us that God loves us as sinners and that the task of Christianity is not to teach us how to live, but to teach us how to live again, and again, and again. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “God Overcomes Scrambled Eggs” June 2016]

The poet, Rumi, submits that we live with a deep secret that sometimes we know, and then not.

That can be very helpful in understanding our faith. One of the reasons why we struggle with faith is that God’s presence inside us and in our world is rarely dramatic, overwhelming, sensational, something impossible to ignore. God doesn’t work like that. Rather God’s presence, much to our frustration and loss of patience sometimes, is something that lies quiet and seemingly helpless inside us. It rarely makes a huge splash.

Because we are not sufficiently aware of this, we tend to misunderstand the dynamics of faith and find ourselves habitually trying to ground our faith on precisely something that is loud and dramatic. We are forever looking for something beyond what God gives us. But we should know from the very way God was born into our world, that faith needs to ground itself on something that is quiet and undramatic. Jesus, as we know, was born into our world with no fanfare and no power, a baby lying helpless in the straw, another child among millions. Nothing spectacular to human eyes surrounded his birth. Then, during his ministry, he never performed miracles to prove his divinity; but only as acts of compassion or to reveal something about God. Jesus never used divine power in an attempt to prove that God exists, beyond doubt. His ministry, like his birth, wasn’t an attempt to prove God’s existence. It was intended rather to teach us what God is like and that God loves us unconditionally.

Moreover, Jesus’ teaching about God’s presence in our lives also makes clear that this presence is mostly quiet and hidden, a plant growing silently as we sleep, yeast leavening dough in a manner hidden from our eyes, summer slowly turning a barren tree green, an insignificant mustard plant eventually surprising us with its growth, a man or woman forgiving an enemy. God, it seems, works in ways that are quiet and hidden from our eyes. The God that Jesus incarnates is neither dramatic nor splashy.

And there’s an important faith-lesson in this. Simply put, God lies inside us, deep inside, but in a way that’s almost non-existent, almost unfelt, largely unnoticed, and easily ignored. However, while that presence is never overpowering, it has within it a gentle, unremitting imperative, a compulsion towards something higher, which invites us to draw upon it. And, if we do draw upon it, it gushes up in us in an infinite stream that instructs us, nurtures us, and fills us with endless energy.

This is important for understanding faith. God lies inside us as an invitation that fully respects our freedom, never overpowers us; but also never goes away. It lies there precisely like a baby lying helpless in the straw, gently beckoning us, but helpless in itself to make us pick it up. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “How God works in our lives quietly, just below the surface” November 2025]