Daily Virtue Scripture Readings

How about for Lent this year we do our very best to stop hating each other. Hatred and contempt are everywhere. Is this new or are we just more aware of it? Why is this happening and intensifying? Why do we justify this hatred on moral grounds, even biblical grounds, claiming that the Gospel itself gives us grounds for our disrespect – My truth is so right and you are so wrong that I can disrespect you and I have biblical grounds to hate you! Well, even a cursory look at scripture should be enough to enable us to see this for what it is; rationalization, self-interest, and the farthest thing from Jesus. He asks us to do something else: “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor^’ and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. … If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” This is the very essence of Christian morality. Can you love someone who hates you? Can you do good to someone who wishes you evil? Can you forgive someone who has wronged you? Can you forgive a murderer? Can you move beyond your natural proclivity for vengeance? Sadly, today we are failing that test on both sides of the ideological and religious spectrum. People are openly espousing disrespect, division, hatred, and vengeance – and trying to claim the moral high ground in doing this. Worse still, churches and church leaders of every kind are lining up behind them and giving them “Gospel” support for their espousal of hatred and vengeance. This needs to be named and challenged: anyone who is advocating division, disrespect, hatred, or revenge is antithetical to Jesus and the Gospels. As well, anyone supporting such a person by an appeal to Jesus, the Gospels, or authentic morality, is also antithetical to Jesus and the Gospels. God is love. Jesus is love enfleshed. Disrespect, hatred, division, and revenge may never be preached in God’s or Jesus’ name, no matter the cause, no matter the anger, no matter the wrong. This doesn’t mean that we cannot have disagreements, spirited discussions, and bitter debates. But disrespect, hatred, division, and revenge may not be advocated in the name of goodness and Jesus. Division, disrespect, hatred, and vengeance are the Anti-Christ. (Adapted from Fr. Ron Rolheiser’s article: Breaking Faith With Each Other).

Jesus uses the simile of the leaven to show the vitality of his teaching. Here, “leaven” is used in the sense of bad disposition. In the making of bread, leaven is what causes the dough to rise; the Pharisees’ hypocrisy and Herod’s dissolute life, stemming from their personal ambition, were the “leaven” which was poisoning from within the “dough” of Israel, and which would eventually corrupt it. Jesus seeks to warn his disciples about these dangers and to have them understand that if they are to take in his teaching, they need a pure and simple heart. Sr. Chris Koellhoffer says, “I suspect that if my mother had been present for the multiplication of the loaves and fishes, Jesus would not have had to remind her of the fragments. With a large family, she honed her skills at bringing leftovers to life in a new and appealing form. So vigilant and careful was she that hardly a crumb in our home ever went to waste under her thoughtful planning of meals.” In Jesus’ question to the disciples, we can hear his frustration at their difficulty in “getting it.” Beyond that, perhaps his question to them, “Do you not remember?” also reminded them that he left nothing behind. When it came to the significance and dignity of the human person, Jesus was forever mindful of what others might deem useless, forgotten, and leftover. Jesus, as we enter this Lenten season, help us to savor your words.

Human beings tend to look for signs that will interpret various experiences or affirm plans and decisions. In their faith lives, there are any number of people who ask for signs from God, and God seems to come through for them frequently and generously. Sr. Ephrem Hollermann writes that she sometimes envies them because she has never been a good “reader of signs” in her spiritual life. When God breaks into my life, it seems more like a fleeting moment of intensified divine presence, unaccompanied by the concreteness of a sign. I wonder if I am too much like the Pharisees in today’s Gospel, who seem to have missed concrete signs all along the way. But it’s not just the Pharisees who miss this. In the scene immediately preceding today’s text, Jesus miraculously fed four thousand with just seven loaves and several fish. Within the ten verses that follow today’s Gospel, Jesus addresses his disciples with a barrage of questions: “Do you still not perceive or understand? Are your hearts hardened? Do you have eyes and fail to see? Do you have ears and fail to hear? And do you remember when I broke the seven loaves for the four thousand? Do you not yet understand?” Small wonder Jesus’ frustration gets the best of him: “Why does this generation seek a sign? Amen, I say to you, no sign will be given to this generation.” It seems a sign “on demand” will not be forthcoming. Whether we are sign readers or caught off guard by jolts of the divine, we face the same challenge to be continually alert to the workings of God in our lives. No sign, after all, will be given to a faithless generation.

In biblical times, people who had leprosy were ostracized from society, condemned to live in regions outside of everyday life, and cry out “unclean” whenever anyone approached them. But they had legitimate reasons for putting these persons outside the circle of everyday life. Leprosy held the danger of contagion. Fr. Rolheiser writes that today, without any legitimacy, we’re still designating certain people as “lepers” unfit to flourish inside the circles of everyday life. We classify them as “losers” and condemn them to the fringes. They’re the new lepers. Examples of this abound, but perhaps we see this most simplistically played out in our high schools where there is always a popular crowd, an “in” crowd who dictates the ethos, decides what’s acceptable, and holds down the center of the community, even as they don’t constitute its majority. Most students are outside that more exclusive inner circle of popularity, on the edges of it, trying for full acceptance, not entirely “in” and not fully “out.” But there’s always another set, the ones seen as “losers,” as not measuring up, as not worthy of full status and recognition. This group is not permitted to fully belong. Every human circle has that category of persons. There are a myriad of complex reasons, many to do with mental health, which can help explain why, sometimes, tragically, a high school boy will take up a gun, come into his school, and shoot his classmates. But it’s hard not to notice that, almost always, it’s a young man who has been deemed a “loner,” a loser. We can’t blame his immediate peers and his classmates for deeming him such, however consciously or unconsciously this is done. His classmates are victims, not just of this young man’s illness and rage, but also of a society that blindly helps produce this kind of illness and rage. I’m not a parent, but if I were, I would try with all the moral powers that I possessed as a parent to have my children purge their vocabulary of racial, gender, and disability slurs. Both society and the church are houses. We have, thank goodness, in recent decades forbidden the use of words that disparage another person based on their race, gender, or disability. It’s time we forbid some other slurs inside the house!

Today we celebrate the memorial of St. Scholastica. Bishop Robert Barron writes that St. Gregory the Great tells a charming story about St. Benedict and his twin sister, Scholastica, a woman deeply devoted to God. As was her annual custom, Scholastica came to visit her brother in a small building just outside the monastery. The two of them engaged in intense theological conversation long into the night. When Benedict announced that it was time for him to go, Scholastica begged him to stay. When he continued to insist that he return to the main house, his sister bowed her head in prayer. Immediately, a terrific storm blew up, which prevented Benedict from leaving. “God Almighty forgive you, sister!” Benedict said. “What have you done?’ “I asked you to stay,” she said, “and you would not hear me. So I prayed to God and he heard me.” Smiling knowingly at Scholastica, he remained, and the two of them spoke of divine things until dawn. 

Professor Mary Healy begins our reflection by speaking about healing. “Like all healings in the Gospels, the physical cure of the deaf and mute man is real but also has a deeper spiritual significance. God designed human beings not only with the physical senses but also with marvelous spiritual capacities to see, hear, and relate to him. These interior faculties were disabled by original sin, causing a severe communication block between God and humanity. Jesus’ healings of people who are deaf, blind, and lame is a sign of his restoration of humanity to the fullness of life and of communion with our Creator.” Bishop Robert Barron notes that “this deaf man stands for all of us who do not hear the word of God, who have grown oblivious to it. And what is the result of this deafness? A speech impediment. At the spiritual level, if you don’t hear the Word of God clearly, then your capacity to speak it is also severely compromised.” Now, by the grace of Christ, we are able to hear God’s voice in our hearts, sing his praises, and proclaim his mighty deeds. ‘The glory of God is man fully alive’ (St. Irenaeus).

The powerful Gospel story of Jesus’ encounter with a Syro-Phoenician woman brings to mind the challenges we face today with accepting people of other faiths or no faith. If all the violence stemming from religious extremism hasn’t woken us up yet, then we are dangerously asleep. The world has become one village, one community, one family, and unless we begin to understand and accept each other more deeply, we will never be a world at peace. But what of Christ’s uniqueness? What about Christ’s claim that he is the (only) way, truth, and life and that nobody can come to God except through him? How can we view the truth of other religions in the light of Christ’s claim that he is the only way to the Father? Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that Christian theology (and Roman Catholic theology) has always accepted and proactively taught that the Mystery of Christ is much larger than what can be observed in the visible, historical enfolding of Christianity and the Christian churches in history. Christ is larger than our churches and operates outside of them, too. He still tells the church what Jesus once told his mother: “I must be about my Father’s business.” The Body of Christ, the full body of believers, has both a visible and invisible element. In explicit, baptized believers, we see the visible Body of Christ. However, at the same time, we acknowledge that there are countless others who, for all kinds of inculpable reasons, have not been explicitly baptized and do not profess an explicit faith in Christ but who, by the goodness of their hearts and actions, must be considered as kin to us in the faith. This may come as a surprise to some, but the dogmatic teaching of the Roman Catholic Church is that sincere persons in other religions can be saved without becoming Christians, and to teach the contrary is heresy. This is predicated on understanding the God we worship as Christians. The God whom Jesus incarnated wills the salvation of all people and is not indifferent to the sincere faith of billions of people throughout thousands of years. We dishonor our faith when we teach anything different. All of us are God’s children. In the end, there is only one God, and that God is the Father of all of us, which means all of us, irrespective of religion.

“It is not what goes into a person’s mouth that defiles him or her, it is what comes out of the mouth. For what comes out of the mouth comes from the heart and, from there, issue forth lies, evil thoughts, and slander.” With words very similar to these, Jesus summarizes the eighth commandment. Leo Tolstoy once said that all happy families resemble each other but that each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that it is true, and it is also true of generations. Each generation has its own unique demons peculiar to it, which spawn a particular form of unhappiness. We see the effects of this in a growing hardness of heart everywhere within the culture and the church. In virtually every circle, liberal and conservative alike, we see hardness, cynicism, the tendency to demonize and slander others, and a blunt, angry, rationalized refusal to look honestly at the truth without inflations, ideologies, denial, and distortion. We see, as well, an absence of healthy self-criticism, which is then compensated for by an excess of criticism of those outside the circle. We rarely see pockets of tenderness, forgiveness, and repentance today. The absence of these is an infallible sign that we are not living in the truth but are lying and not sinning bravely. Lying and rationalization form the root of bitterness, the root of slander, and the root of the unhappy hardness of the heart. If I am a liberal, I lie through self-hatred. I look at my background and history and find no difficulty seeing and naming the lies of the great institutions that shaped me. Thus, I look at family, church, and nation and can see and name every kind of falsehood in them. So, I go through life made unhappy by the liberal life, a “recovering Catholic,” bitter at my own past, hating my own roots and, not infrequently, distorting those roots through a revisionist rereading of them that is based more on ideology and hatred than accuracy. If I am conservative, my drug of choice when it comes to lying is denial. As a conservative, I have little difficulty in seeing and naming personal sin. I see sin all over. Moreover, I have no trouble genuflecting; I am forever insisting that everyone genuflect. My failure of not facing the truth is the exact opposite of the liberal. I can never admit the real faults, historical and present, inherent and incidental, which come from family, church, nation, and every other revered institution within life. The most dangerous of all sins is lying. The unforgivable sin against the Spirit begins with a lie. But there is a flip side to this. Scripture also tells us that the single condition for finding and acknowledging Christ is the refusal to lie. The eighth commandment is trying to teach us just this.

One of the classical definitions of prayer suggests that “prayer is lifting mind and heart to God.” Simple, clear, and accurate. Our problem is that we seldom actually do this when we pray. Rather than lifting up to God what is on our minds and hearts, we treat God as someone from whom we need to hide the truth of our thoughts and feelings. Instead of pouring out our minds and hearts, we tell God what we think God wants to hear, not murderous thoughts, desire for vengeance, or our disappointment with him. Fr. Rolheiser writes that expressing those feelings is the whole point of heartfelt prayer. Sometimes, we feel good, and our spontaneous impulse is to speak words of praise and gratitude. But we don’t always feel that way. Our lives have too their cold, lonely seasons when disappointment and bitterness spontaneously boil under the surface. One of the beautiful things is knowing that scripture can give us a voice, particularly the Psalms (“Why are you so silent? Why are you so far from me?”), even as they make us aware that God is not afraid of our anger and bitterness but, like a loving parent, only wants us to come and talk about it. As Kathleen Norris puts it: “If you pray regularly, there is no way you can do it right. You will not always sit up straight, let alone think holy thoughts. You won’t wear your best clothes but whatever isn’t in the dirty clothes basket. You come to the Bible’s great book of praises through all the moods and conditions of life, and while you feel like hell, you sing anyway. To your surprise, the psalms do not deny your true feelings but allow you to reflect them right in front of God and everyone.” Feel-good aphorisms that express how we think we ought to feel are no substitute for the earthy realism of the Psalms, which express how we feel. Anyone who would lift their mind and heart to God without ever mentioning feelings of bitterness, jealousy, vengeance, hatred, and war should write slogans for greeting cards and not be anyone’s spiritual advisor.

The Church’s old catechisms used to tell us that we reach the age of reason at roughly age seven. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that at one level, that’s true, we can be responsible for ourselves then in a way we couldn’t when we were toddlers or in kindergarten. But it takes a lot longer than age seven, a lifetime, really, to be in full ownership of ourselves. And so, at another level, we might better peg the age of reason sometime after age 30, when we have a more responsible sense of who we are, what our lives mean, and what decisions we need to make to bring life to ourselves and theirs. It takes a long time before we can be really responsible. But there’s a further problem, by the time we reach maturity, we have also lost some vital, life-giving parts of ourselves. By the time we get to possess ourselves, all of us have been wounded and shamed in our enthusiasm, and parts of our bodies and our souls have died and turned cold. By the time we get to be more fully in possession of ourselves, we are no longer whole. We are all familiar with the story of a woman who, we are told, had been suffering from internal hemorrhaging for twelve years and had spent all her money on doctors without getting any better, approaches him surreptitiously, saying to herself: “If I but touch the hem of his garment, I will be healed!” She does just that and, the gospels tell us, instantly the flow of blood stopped. Touching Jesus did for her what doctors couldn’t do, it stopped her internal hemorrhaging. What Jesus does is give back to this woman the possibility of giving life, in one case by stopping the flow of blood and in the other by starting it. How do we, like the woman, touch the hem of the garment to be healed? Willpower, while important, is not enough. Only by touching some higher power, and this is most easily done inside a community, can we change our lives. Therapy too is helpful to a point, but only to a point. In the end, the power to give life can only be restored to us through grace and community, through letting a power beyond give us something that we cannot give to ourselves.