Daily Virtue Scripture Readings

In Hebrew, the figure of seventy times seven means the same as “always.” Therefore, our Lord did not limit forgiveness to a fixed number but declared that it must be continuous and forever. The parable also clearly shows that we are totally in God’s debt. A talent was the equivalent of six thousand denarii, and a single denarius was a working man’s daily wage. Ten thousand talents, an enormous sum, gives us an idea of the immense value attached to the pardon we receive from God. We must force ourselves, if necessary, to always forgive those who offend us from the very first moment. The greatest injury or offense you can suffer from them is nothing compared with what God has pardoned each of us from.

The problem of faith in our time is the problem of unbelief among believers. Faith is no longer believable to, nor livable for, many in our age. Why? Why is Christ known but not really believed in? Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that conservatives blame our present malaise upon lack of prayer and the failure of our age to keep the commandments, pure and simple. If we don’t pray and our moral lives are shabby, how can we expect to have a vital faith?  Liberals point to slow renewal within the church as the cause. We are not really renewed, they argue. We still pray to God, talk about God, and worship God in mythical and medieval images. We live modern lives but try to live an old-time religion. Ultimately, this freezes God out of all the important areas of life. Religion becomes the great art form, and the church becomes the great museum. Social justice advocates submit that the problem is one of affluence. If Christ made a preferential option for the poor and Christianity is seeing life from the bottom, it is, quite simply, impossible to live as affluently and selfishly as we do and still have a vital connection to Christ. There is some truth in each of these, but, in the end, the real reason for the erosion of faith and hope in Christ is something beyond all of these.  What, singularly, are we missing today within Christianity that could make us credible to the world and to our own families? Community. The greatest need in our time is, as Jim Wallis puts it, “not simply for kerygma, the preaching of the Gospel; nor for Diakonia; service on behalf of justice; nor for charisma, the experience of the spirit’s gifts; nor even for prophesies; the challenging of the King. The greatest need of our time is for Koinonia, the call simply to be church. To offer to the world a living, breathing, loving community of the church. This is the foundation of all answers.” When there is a strong experience of community, there is generally a strong faith. RCIA groups, Cursillo groups, marriage encounter groups, social justice groups, charismatic groups, Bible study groups, third order groups. These are pockets of fervor within the church, and it is no accident that all of them are linked to strong community experiences. Christianity, in the end, is a communal endeavor. We believe in it when community works, we stop believing in it when community and family breakdown.  Our primary task today is to live community. If we can do that, then the visible body of Christ, the church, will have an incredible resurrection.

Fr. Daniel Berrigan SJ wrote a little book entitled, “Ten Commandments for the Long Haul.” It was intended as spiritual sustenance, sustaining food, for those who walk the lonely, long road of faith and often find themselves discouraged and running out of gas. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that Berrigan doesn’t offer a quick fix but points out the right direction within which we should be walking and where, at key junctures, if we cast our eyes at the right spot, we might find Elijah’s jug, God’s food for the journey.

1. Acknowledge your contingency, your helplessness. You are a creature, not the creator. Only God is “ipsum esse subsistens”, self-sufficient being. Proper living begins with the words: “I am not God!”

2. Pray, prayers of helplessness, gratitude, and praise. Pray from your weaknesses and helplessness: “Lord, hang on to me lest I slip away from you. Do for me what I cannot do for myself.”

3. Welcome and accept the present moment. Don’t let the busyness, pressures, and heartaches of life steal the present moment from you. It’s the only place you will experience love and joy.

4. Give yourself permission to be inadequate. Don’t be too hard on yourself and, especially, on others. Everyone falls short. You’re loved as you are. Fear not; you are inadequate!

5. Be sufficiently loving and critical, both at the same time. Your loved ones, your church, and your community need you to be loving and critical, both at the same time. Pull the new as well as the old from your bag.

6. Be post-ideological, post-personal-history, post-conservative, post-liberal, post-naive, and post-sophisticated. Be non-classifiable. Admit that the right and left have both run out of imagination. See both as phases to pass through. Forgive your past.

7. Bless what’s good and beautiful, even as you stand where the cross of Christ is erected. All that’s good and beautiful has God as the author. Honor it before speaking any word of challenge to the world. Imitate Christ.

8. Be shockingly “Catholic” – earthy and wine-drinking. Bask in the goodness of life. We have divine permission to be happy. Jesus scandalized people with his capacity to enjoy life. He drank wine and let his heart be warmed by friends.

9. Accept aging. All that dies brings rich new life, even our own bodies. Aging needs to be defined aesthetically. Aging is an art form.

10, Serve the right God! God radiates love. Don’t serve any other God than this One. Don’t bow to any molten calf created in the image and likeness of our own tensions and bitterness.

Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that all around us, we can see nature teeming with everything: prodigal, fertile, overabundant, wasteful. Why else do we have 90% more brain cells than we need, and why else is nature scattering billions of seeds of virtually everything all over the planet every second? And if life is so extravagant, what does this say about God, its author? Dictionaries define “prodigal” as “wastefully extravagant and lavishly abundant.” That certainly describes the God that Jesus incarnates and reveals. God, as we see in both nature and in scripture and know from experience, is over-generous, over-lavish, over-extravagant, over-prodigious, over-rich, and over-patient. If nature, scripture, and experience are to be believed, God is the absolute antithesis of everything that is stingy, miserly, frugal, narrowly calculating, or sparing in what it doles out. God is prodigal, and so are the chances God gives us. Sr. Margaret Halaska once captured this wonderfully in a poem she entitled Covenant:

The Father knocks at my door, seeking a home for his son:
Rent is cheap, I say
I don’t want to rent. I want to buy, says God.
I’m not sure I want to sell,
but you might come in to look around.
I think I will, says God.
I might let you have a room or two.
I like it, says God. I’ll take the two.
You might decide to give me more some day.
I can wait, says God.
I’d like to give you more,
but it’s a bit difficult. I need some space for me.
I know, says God, but I’ll wait. I like what I see.
Hmm, maybe I can let you have another room.
I really don’t need that much.
Thanks, says God, I’ll take it. I like what I see.
I’d like to give you the whole house
but I’m not sure –
Think on it, says God. I wouldn’t put you out.
Your house would be mine and my son would live in it.
You’d have more space than you’d ever had before.
I don’t understand at all.
I know, says God, but I can’t tell you about that.
You’ll have to discover it for yourself.
That can only happen if you let him have the whole house.
A bit risky, I say.
Yes, says God, but try me.
I’m not sure –
I’ll let you know.
I can wait, says God. I like what I see.

The parable in today’s gospel of the wealthy landowner who sends his servants out to collect the produce from his tenant farmers is a cautionary tale about what can go wrong when we try to build things on our own— even the kingdom of God. At the same time, it is a great consolation to know that the Lord is not stymied by our rejections. One might think this is just another example of Jesus facing off against the scribes and Pharisees, the religious authorities of his day. But there is something there for all of us, regardless of our canonical station in life. We, too, can get it wrong, can reject what should be embraced, can drive off messengers whose messages we don’t like. Our hope, finally, is only in the Lord, who makes a firm foundation for our lives, even out of something we initially rejected. The father in the story fails to fathom the deep resentment his tenants hold against his family. “They will respect my son,” he assumes, but they do not. The greedy tenants kill the man’s beloved son to gain his inheritance. Bishop Robert Barron notes that when God sent his son to us, we killed him. “This is the insane resistance to God’s intentions, which is called sin. One of the most fundamental spiritual mistakes we can make is to think that we own the world. We are tenants, entrusted with the responsibility of caring for it, but everything that we have and are is on loan.” That brings us appropriately back to our Lenten journey and the sobering reality that our lives are not about us.

Sister Joyce Rupp writes that this past year, she has become more aware of the scenarios that crowd and clutter her mind, whose imaginary settings she conceives of what someone might be thinking, feeling, or planning to do. “These scenarios waste a lot of my energy that could be spent on something worthwhile. The more I intentionally send those mental judgments on their way, the more quickly I become alert to them when they zoom into my mind. It becomes increasingly easy to boot them out with an inner smile as I say to myself, ‘Oh, here is my six thousand and five hundredth scenario.’ The word spoken to Jeremiah strengthens my resolve to recognize that I have neither the ability nor the right to ‘probe the mind and test the heart’ of another with my mental ruminations.” Fr. Rolheiser reminds us that in these times of mental ruminations, God alone seeks to know what is in the deepest depth of our hearts and minds through prayer. Lifting mind and heart to God means lifting up, at any given moment, exactly what’s there and not what, ideally, might be there. When you go to pray, lift up what’s inside of you at that moment. If you are bored, lift up that boredom; if you are angry, lift up your anger; if you are tired, lift up that tiredness; if you feel selfish, don’t be afraid to let God see that. We need to “pray always” by doing everything out of that kind of awareness. Rabbi Abraham Heschel points out how, in prayer, the great figures of scripture did not always easily acquiesce to God and say: “Thy will be done!” They sometimes fought bitterly and said: “Thy will be changed!” That can be a good prayer. It lifts the mind and heart to God.

Thomas Kempis writes in The Imitation of Christ that there will always be many who love Christ’s heavenly kingdom, but few who will bear his cross. Jesus has many who desire consolation but few who care for adversity. He finds many to share his table, but few who will join him in fasting. Many are eager to be happy with him; few wish to suffer anything for him. Many will follow him as far as the breaking of bread, but few will remain to drink from his passion. Many are awed by his miracles, and few accept the shame of his cross…Decide then, like a good and faithful servant of Christ, to bear bravely the cross of your Lord. It was out of love that he was crucified for you. Drink freely from the Lord’s cup if you wish to be his friend. Leave your need for consolation to God. Let him do as he wills. On your part, be ready to bear sufferings and consider how in these sufferings lies your greatest consolation. The sufferings of this life are not worthy to be compared with the glory to come…Realize that to know Christ you must lead a dying life. The more you die to yourself, the more you will live unto God. You will never enjoy heavenly things unless you are ready to suffer hardship for Christ. Nothing is more acceptable to God, nothing more helpful for you on this earth. When there is a choice to be made, take the narrow way. This alone will make you more like Christ.

Millions of people, particularly in the Western world, are Christian in name, come from Christian backgrounds, are familiar with Christianity, and believe that they know and understand Christianity but no longer practice that faith in a meaningful way. They’ve heard of Christ and the Gospel, even though they may be overrating themselves in their belief that they know and understand what these mean. No matter. Whatever their shortcomings in understanding a faith they no longer practice, they believe they’ve already been evangelized and that their non-practice is an examined decision. Their attitude toward Christianity, in essence, is: I know what it is. I’ve tried it. And it’s not for me! And so it no longer makes sense to speak of trying to evangelize such persons in the same way as we intend that term when speaking of taking the Gospel to someone for the first time. It’s more accurate precisely to speak of a new evangelization, of an attempt to bring the Gospel to individuals and to a culture that has already largely been shaped by it, is in a sense over-familiar with it, but hasn’t really, in fact, examined it. The new evangelization tries to take the Gospel to people who are already Christian but no longer practicing as Christians. How to do that? How do we make the Gospel fresh for those who it has become stale? How do we, as G. K. Chesterton put it, help people to look at the familiar until it looks unfamiliar again? How do we try to Christianize someone who is already Christian? Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that there are no simple answers. We have already been trying to do that for more than a generation. Anxious parents have been trying to do this with their children. Anxious pastors have been trying to do that with their parishioners. Anxious bishops have been trying to do that with their dioceses. Anxious spiritual writers, including this one, have attempted to do that with their readership. And an anxious church has been trying to do that with the world. What more might we be doing? In my view, we are in for a long, uphill struggle that demands faith in the power and truth of what we believe in and a long, difficult patience. Christ, the faith, and the church will survive. They always do. The stone always eventually rolls away from the tomb, and Christ always eventually re-emerges, but we, too, must do our parts. Let’s start by working at winning over hearts, not hardening them.

Dr. Carolyn Y. Woo writes that getting older has the benefit of letting time and experience help us better understand certain things that puzzled us earlier. “Today’s Gospel used to trouble me in the way it seems to set a condition for God’s unconditional love and boundless mercy. Worse is that the condition is us: our own capacity to forgive and give to others. We all know how limited that is. From an unlikely place, I picked up an insight that helped me approach these three verses differently. In management literature, there is a concept called absorptive capacity. Organizations have different capacities—prior experiences, skills of their people, culture, attitude, commitment, and discipline—to absorb learning and undertake improvement. God’s gifts are, of course, boundless and unconditional. But our capacity to receive and absorb needs cultivation. When our life is cluttered with things, worries, resentment, bitterness, and busyness, there is not much room to receive. More importantly, God does not give us things, even if our blessings often lead us to acquire badges, buildings, and bling. God does give us power: the power to accept our own sinfulness, to acknowledge this in others. Still, we believe in the inexhaustible goodness in us and others because this is what it means to be made in God’s image. God’s power within us is like a current that, when turned on, illuminates and energizes. When we unplug from others in negative judgment and self-centeredness, we disconnect ourselves from God’s power. When we plug in to give and forgive, we invite the flow of God’s love and mercy into us. What I take away from today’s Gospel: Give to others, take from God.”

If Christ was born into the world to redeem it, why doesn’t our world look more redeemed? Why is our world still full of loneliness, anxiety, betrayals, sickness, poverty, violence, war, and death? What did Christ’s birth into our world change? Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that these aren’t irreverent questions but the right ones. Only in struggling to answer them do we begin to understand the mystery of Christ more deeply. The fact that Christ is born into our world does not mean that those who believe in him will be spared the pain, loneliness, seasons of sickness, heartaches, betrayals, anxieties, fears, and humiliations that afflict everyone else. Faith offers no one an escape from pain. Moreover, believers, like unbelievers, will suffer too the darkness of doubt, the painful fear that the heavens are empty. Faith in Christ doesn’t remove any of the pains inherent within the human condition, including the pain of doubting God’s existence. Faith promises no magic pass-cards. So how can we say that “God is with us” when mostly it feels like God isn’t there for us? Generally, we struggle to feel God in the present moment, to see God’s face in the here and now. In the present, God often seems absent. Yet, when we turn around and look back on our lives, when we look back on our story, we more easily see how God has been there all along and how we have walked in a divine presence, protection, guidance, and love that were imperceptible at the time but are apparent in retrospect. We see God more clearly in our past than in our present. This can help us understand how Christ is present to us, even when it doesn’t always feel like it. Faith doesn’t promise us a ladder to crawl out of the pains of life; it promises a friend to walk with us through those pains. Mostly, though, it’s only when we look back on our lives that we see that this friend has always been there.