Daily Virtue Post

What’s good, what’s of God, will always at some point be misunderstood, envied, hated, pursued, falsely accused, and eventually nailed to some cross. Every body of Christ inevitably suffers the same fate as Jesus: death through misunderstanding, ignorance, and jealousy. 

But there’s a flipside as well: Resurrection always eventually trumps crucifixion. What’s good eventually triumphs. Thus, while nothing that’s of God will avoid crucifixion, no body of Christ stays in the tomb for long. Resurrection invariably follows crucifixion. Every crucified body will rise again. Our hope takes its root in that.

On the morning of the resurrection, the women-followers of Jesus set out for the tomb of Jesus, carrying spices, expecting to anoint and embalm a dead body. Well-intentioned but misguided, what they find is not a dead body, but an empty tomb and an angel challenging them with these words: “Why are you looking for the living among the dead? Go instead into Galilee and you will find him there!”

Go instead into Galilee. Why Galilee? What’s Galilee? And how do we get there?In the gospels, Galilee is not simply a geographical location, a place on a map. It is first of all a place in the heart. Galilee refers to the dream and to the road of discipleship that the disciples once walked with Jesus and to that place and time when their hearts most burned with hope and enthusiasm.

They are told to go back to the place where it all began: “Go back to Galilee. He will meet you there!” And just as promised, Jesus appears to them. He doesn’t appear exactly as he was before. The Christ that appears to them after the resurrection is in a different modality,

And they do go back to Galilee, both to the geographical location and to that special place in their hearts where once burned the dream of discipleship. And just as promised, Jesus appears to them. He doesn’t appear exactly as he was before, or as frequently as they would like him to, but he does appear as more than a ghost and a memory. The Christ that appears to them after the resurrection is in a different modality, but he’s physical enough to eat fish in their presence, real enough to be touched as a human being, and powerful enough to change their lives forever.

Ultimately, the resurrection asks us to go back to Galilee, to return to the dream, hope, and discipleship that had once inflamed us but has now been lost through disillusionment. That is one of the essential messages of Easter: Whenever we are discouraged in our faith, whenever our hopes seem to be crucified, we need to go back to Galilee and Jerusalem, that is, back to the dream and the road of discipleship that we had embarked upon before things went wrong. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Where to Find Resurrection,” April 2015]

Our reflection verse today highlights the deep, intimate connection between Jesus and the Father, as well as the believer’s identity as a “sent” being. This phrase grounds Jesus’ authority in his origin, not just his actions. 

Ron Rolheiser notes that, like Jesus, our deepest identity comes from God. He emphasizes that by virtue of Baptism, we are sons and daughters of God, sent to bring his compassion to the world.

Because Jesus came from God and was sent, he knows the Father’s heart completely. This allowed Jesus to be in full solidarity with human suffering, taking on our condition and bringing the Divine face to it.

Just as Jesus was sent by the Father, Rolheiser writes that Christians are also “sent ones.” He emphasizes that our lives have purpose when they are aligned with this “sent” reality, which, for him, means carrying the spirit and mission of Jesus, even after his ascension.

As Christian’s, we must live within the divine energy (from which Jesus came), which is creative, loving, and a source of gratitude. Our lives are deeply rooted in God. Realizing that, like Jesus, we have a divine origin and a purposeful, “sent” mission in life.

Who exactly is this Joseph? He is that quiet figure named in the Christmas story as the husband of Mary and the stepfather of Jesus, and then basically is never mentioned again. The pious conception we have of him is that of an older man, a safe protector to Mary, a carpenter by trade, chaste, holy, humble, quiet, the perfect patron for manual laborers and anonymous virtue, humility incarnate.

Joseph and Mary were at this stage of their relationship, legally married but not yet living together when Mary became pregnant. Joseph, knowing that the child was not his, had a problem. If he wasn’t the father, who was? In order to save his own reputation, he could have demanded a public inquiry and, indeed, had Mary been accused of adultery, it might have meant her death. However, he decided to “divorce her quietly”, that is, to avoid a public inquiry which would leave her in an awkward and vulnerable situation.

Then, after receiving a revelation in a dream, he agrees to take her home as his wife and to name the child as his own, thus claiming that he is the father. By doing this, he spares Mary embarrassment, perhaps even saves her life, and he provides an accepted physical, social, and religious place for the child to be born and raised. But he does something else that is not as evident. He shows how a person can be a committed believer, deeply faithful to everything within his religious tradition, and yet at the same time be open to a mystery beyond both his human and religious understanding.

And this was exactly the problem for many Christians, including Matthew himself, at the time the Gospels were written. They were committed Jews who did not know how to integrate Christ into their religious framework. What does one do when God breaks into one’s life in new, previously unimaginable ways? How does one deal with an impossible conception? Joseph is the paradigm. As Raymond Brown puts it: “The hero of Matthew’s infancy story is Joseph, a very sensitive Jewish observer of the Law. In Joseph, the evangelist was portraying what he thought a Jew [a true pious believer] should be and probably what he himself was.”

In essence, Joseph teaches us how to live in loving fidelity to all that we cling to humanly and religiously, even as we are open to a mystery of God that takes us beyond all the categories of our religious practice and imagination. And isn’t that one of the real challenges of Christmas? [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Joseph and the Christmas Story,” December 2023]

To believe in the resurrection of Jesus is to be comforted, comforted at a level so deep that nothing in life is any longer ultimately a threat. In the resurrection, the hand of God soothes us, and the voice of God assures us, frightened children that we are, that all is good, and that all will remain good forever and ever.

Sociologist of religion, Peter Berger, outlining what he calls “rumours of angels in everyday life”, gives us the following reflection:

Consider the most ordinary, and probably the most fundamental of all – the ordinary gesture by which a mother reassures her anxious child. A child wakes up in the night, perhaps from a bad dream and finds himself surrounded by darkness, alone, beset by nameless threats. At such a moment the contours of trusted reality are blurred and invisible, in the terror of incipient chaos the child cries out for his mother. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that, at this moment, the mother is being invoked as a high priestess of protective order. It is she (and, in many cases, she alone) who has the power to banish the chaos and to restore the benign shape of the world. And, of course, any good mother will do just that. She will take the child and cradle him in the timeless gesture of the Magna Mater who became our Madonna. She will turn on a lamp, perhaps, which will encircle the scene with a warm glow of reassuring light. She will speak or sing to the child and the content of this communication will invariably be the same – “Don’t be afraid – everything is in order, everything is all right.

The mother’s comforting reassurance, “Don’t be afraid, it is all right”, is, in fact, a profession of faith in God and the resurrection. When she says these words, she is making an act of faith just as surely, even if not as explicitly, as if she were saying: “I believe in God, the Father Almighty … and I believe in the resurrection of the body and life everlasting.”

Do you want to understand the power of the resurrection? Meditate on Michelangelo’s Pieta: A woman holds a dead body in her arms, but everything about her and about the scene itself says loudly and clearly: “Don’t be afraid. It’s all right. Everything is all right!” [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “I Believe in the Resurrection,” March 1994]

The Sabbath is a symbol of resting and playing in God. It is also a symbol for praying to God.

Sabbath is not just stopping work; it is taking time for joy, celebration, family, and relationship-building. The Sabbath is made for humanity, meaning it serves human flourishing. Doing good works, such as caring for a sick loved one or connecting with the community, aligns with this purpose.

Ron Rolheiser argues that enjoying the fruits of creation—good food, leisure, and beauty—is a key part of Sabbath and acts as a form of thanksgiving. The third commandment teaches us that, ultimately, we have no purpose outside of enjoying creation and glorifying its maker. Everything else we do is in function of that. Regularly, we need to stop working and hurrying and re-appreciate that fact. It is when we forget that the unimportant things become too important and we become consumed by hurry and pressure.

What can all of this mean, today, concretely, in a culture of Sunday shopping, Sunday jobs, Sunday business as usual, and sporting events which dominate our Sundays? It doesn’t mean that we should feel riddled by a false guilt which says: “God has given you six days, now you can’t even give him one day or one hour back!” We don’t owe God anything. God made us freely, in love, and wants us to respond freely in gift. He doesn’t demand our love.

What the Sabbath does mean is that on one day a week, ideally Sunday, we must stop work, try to center our lives, try to slow things down, try to re-appreciate why we are here in the first place, and then worship and celebrate that with God and each other through prayer, food, and play.  Life is too short for the way we are living.[Exceprt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Slow The Rat Race, Take A Rest,” April 1988]

Our reflection verse today is one of many biblical promises of something new awaiting us. Some interpret this as the destruction of our current world, while others see it as a promise of its transformation. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that this verse emphasizes what is good and loving in life, which will be redeemed and transfigured.

Our future existence is the renewal of this earth, where God’s promise means taking the current reality and bringing it to perfection. Our actions of love, justice, and kindness in this life possess an eternal, irrevocable quality that carries over into this new creation.

The “new heavens and new earth” represents the ultimate hope where all suffering, iniquity, and limitations of the current, broken world are transformed, fulfilling the longing for a paradise where God dwells among us.

Kathy McGovern reflects on the story of Edie Littlefield Sundby and her walking the El Camino Real de las Californias, the old mission trail from Loreto, Mexico, to Sonoma, California, having only one lung left and surviving widespread metastasis of stage IV gall bladder cancer.

McGovern asks, “What is the point of it all, a dying woman forcing herself through often desolate and harsh landscapes in order to reach another mission, some of them decrepit and long abandoned?”

McGovern writes that we might see Sundby’s journey as an excruciating exercise in nostalgia. Yet, unseen in all of this is what God is doing in her tormented body. As she pushes herself on to every single mission site (some still in use, most in ruins), she is being healed. She lives today, twelve years after her diagnosis and six years after setting out on her journey.

Of this stunning pilgrimage, Sundby says: “If I was walking, I was alive.” Might that be what the Spirit is saying to us today as Church, as the People of God? We are all “under construction” in one way or another. God is doing something new. Keep walking, Church, keep walking, People of God. It just might be that God is healing us too.

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.

All conversion and recovery programs worthy of the name are based on bringing us to this type of honesty. We move towards spiritual health precisely by flushing out our sickest secrets and bringing them into the light. Sobriety is more about living in honesty and transparency than it is about living without a certain chemical, gambling, or sexual habit. It’s the hiding of something, the lying, the dishonesty, the deception, the resentment we harbor towards those who stand between us and our addiction, that does the real damage to us and to those we love.

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 loved ones where we are and what we are doing.

– To live in the light is not to have to worry if someone traces what websites we have visited.

– To live in the light is not to 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.

Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that a theology of God that reflects God’s compassion and mercy should always be reflected in every pastoral decision we make. Otherwise, we make God look stupid – arbitrary, tribal, cruel, and antithetical to church practice. He shares a quote from Marilynne Robinson, the American novelist and essayist: “Christianity is too great a narrative to be underwritten by any lesser tale, and that should forbid in particular its being subordinated to narrowness, legalism, and lack of compassion.”

So what did Jesus reveal to us about God?

First, that God has no favorites and that there must be full equality among races, among rich and poor, among slave and free, and among male and female. No one person, race, gender, or nation is more favored than others by God. Nobody is first. All are privileged.

Next, Jesus taught that God is especially compassionate and understanding towards the weak and towards sinners. Jesus scandalized his religious contemporaries by sitting down with public sinners without first asking them to repent. He welcomed everyone in ways that often offended the religious propriety of the time and he sometimes went against the religious sensitivity of his contemporaries, as we see from his conversation with the Samaritan woman or when he grants a healing to the daughter of a Syro-Phoenician woman. Moreover he asks us to be compassionate in the same way and immediately spells out what that means by telling us the God loves sinners and saints in exactly the same way.  God does not have preferential love for the virtuous.

Shocking to us too is the fact that Jesus never defends himself when attacked. Moreover he is critical of those who, whatever their sincerity, try to block access to him. He surrenders himself to die rather than defend himself. He never meets hatred with hatred and dies loving and forgiving those who are killing him.

Jesus is also clear that it’s not necessarily those who explicitly profess God and religion who are his true followers, but rather those, irrespective of their explicit faith or church practice, who do the will of God on earth. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Mercy, Truth, and Pastoral Practice,” May 2018]

Fr. Ron Rolheiser, in his article, “Measuring Ourselves in Love,” writes that the older we get, the more we begin to know love’s dark side. We fall in love and think it will last forever, but then fall out of love, feel love go sour, feel love grow cold, see love betrayed, feel ourselves wounded by love, and wound others. Finally, even more upsetting, we all find that there are always people in our lives who are cold, bitter, and unforgiving towards us so that it is not always easy to feel love and be loving.

Jesus’ most important commandment: “Love one another as I have loved you!” is too easily read simplistically, romantically, and in a one-sided, over-confident manner. But this command contains the most important challenge of the whole gospel and, like the deepest part of the gospel to which it is linked, the crucifixion, it is very, very difficult to imitate. Why?

It’s easy to consider ourselves as loving if we only look at one side of things, namely, how we relate to those people who are loving, warm, respectful, and gracious towards us. But if we begin to look at the skeletons in our relational closets, our naive confidence soon disappears: What about the people who hate us, whom we don’t like? What about the people whom we avoid and who avoid us? What about those people towards whom we feel resentment? What about those people whom we haven’t been able to forgive?

There’s a sobering challenge in an old Stevie Nicks’ song, Golddust Woman: She suggests that it’s good that, at a point in life, someone “shatters our illusion of love” because far too often, blind to its own true intentions, our love is manipulative and self-serving. Too often, the song points out, we are lousy lovers who unconsciously pick our prey. What shatters our illusion of love is the presence in our lives of people who hate us. They’re the test. It’s here where we have to measure up: If we can love them, we’re real lovers, if we can’t, we’re still under a self-serving illusion.

We close today’s reflection with some inspiring words from by Archbishop José H. Gomez’s article, “The Love Commandment.”
“Jesus knows that love is not easy. There are people who are not easy to like and who are not easy to love. But his love calls us to move beyond our own comfort, our own prejudices. That is why Jesus connects the love of God and the love of neighbor, because Jesus knows we cannot really say we love God if we do not love our neighbor. When we close our eyes to our neighbor’s needs, we close our hearts to God.

One of the saints said, ‘We love God as much as we love the one we love the least.’ And love is like anything else in our lives. The more we do it, the more it becomes a habit. Practice love and, by the grace of God, it will become perfect in you. So that means we need to make that decision to love — every day, in every moment. We need to say, ‘Lord, give me the grace to love — right here and right now. In this situation. With this person.'”

We often hear people involved with religion saying that one must “choose Jesus or choose the world.” Today’s reflection verse suggests that this is exactly what Jesus is saying. Yet, life and the reality of what it means to follow his teachings call us to a deeper reality, a deeper spiritual maturity. So the choice is more than a mere intellectual acceptance of his statement.

Ron Rolheiser writes that the life Jesus presents is a choice of embracing a deeper moral decision. Following Jesus involves a deep and often painful moral decision to sacrifice worldly desires. It is a conscious choice to accept the “cross”—an emotional crucifixion—in favor of deeper meaning and divine love. It’s accepting a “new maturity,” which balances loving the world’s energy (creativity, relationships, joy) while acting as “salt and light” rather than being consumed by it.

St. Augustine struggled with the choice between faith and the world until one day he realized something. A searcher by temperament, Augustine spent the first thirty-four years of his life pursuing the things of this world: learning, meaning, love, sex, and a prestigious career. However, even before his conversion, there was a desire in him for God and the spiritual. However, like us, he saw that as a separate desire from what he was yearning for in the world. Only after his conversion did he realize something. Here is how he famously expressed it:

“Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you! You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you. In my unloveliness, I plunged into the lovely things which you created. You were with me, but I was not with you. … You called, you shouted, and you broke through my deafness. You flashed, you shone, and you dispelled my blindness.”

Saint Augustine was an example of human procrastination. Like Augustine, many of us keep saying, eventually I need to do this, but not yet!

Rolheiser writes that “Ultimately, God is the only game in town, in that no matter how many false roads we take and how many good roads we ignore, we all end up on the one, same, last, final road. All of us: atheists, agnostics, nones, dones, searchers, procrastinators, those who don’t believe in institutionalized religion, the indifferent, the belligerent, the angry, the bitter, and the wounded, end up on the same road heading towards the same destination – death. However, the good news is that this last road, for all of us, the pious and the impious alike, leads to God.”

It would seem best to realize this early, so we do not have to write: “Late, late, have I loved you!” [Excerpts from Ron Rolheiser’s “Our Unconscious Search for God,” February 2021]