Daily Virtue Post

I would like comment on Jesus’ most important commandment: “Love one another as I have loved you!” We too easily read that 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. If we rate ourselves on how we feel about ourselves in our best moments among like-minded friends, we can easily conclude both that we are loving persons and that we are measuring up to Jesus’ command to love as he did.

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 all those people with whom we are at odds, towards whom we feel suspicion, coldness, anger? What about those people whom we haven’t been able to forgive?

Where Jesus stretches us beyond our natural instincts and beyond all self-delusion is in his command to love our enemies, to be warm to those who are cold to us, to be kind to those who are cruel to us, to do good to those who hate us, to forgive those who hurt us, to forgive those who won’t forgive us, and to ultimately love and forgive those who are trying to kill us.

That command, love and forgive your enemies, more than any creedal formula or other moral issue, is the litmus-test for Christian discipleship. We can ardently believe in and defend every item in the creed and fight passionately for justice in all its dimensions, but the real test of whether or not we are followers of Jesus is the capacity or non-capacity to forgive an enemy, to remain warm and loving towards someone who is not warm and loving to us. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Measuring Ourselves in Love” May 2007]

My sister Isabel went home to the angels thirty years ago. Isabel loved prairie lilies. About a dozen years ago, these [lilies] appeared in our planter box around the anniversary of her passing.

“There’s no reason for them to be there – we didn’t plant them or introduce new soil… the only explanation that makes sense is that Isabel put them there. They come back spectacularly every summer… every year we are grateful.”

The most important thing to take with us on our journey of life is love. Many readers will remember the story “Box full of kisses”. A man’s three-year-old daughter wrapped a box in shining gold and put it under the Christmas tree for him. When he opened it, he saw nothing in it. He berated her soundly for wasting good wrapping paper in frugal times.

Later he felt badly and tried to explain to her: “Don’t you know, when you give someone a present, there is supposed to be something inside?” The little girl looked up at him with tears in her eyes and cried; “Oh, Daddy, it’s not empty at all. I blew kisses into the box. They’re all for you, Daddy.”

The father was crushed and begged for forgiveness. A short time later his little girl died. He kept the gold box for many years, and whenever he was discouraged, he would take out an imaginary kiss and remember the love of the child who had put it there.

In John’s Gospel (10, 16), Jesus says: I have other sheep too, that are not of this sheepfold. I must bring them also. They will listen to my voice, and there will be one flock and one shepherd.

I’ve learned the truth of that statement through personal experience. Within my nearly forty years in ministry I have met, befriended, and become a faith-companion to men and women from every type of denomination and religion: Protestants, Episcopalians, Anglicans, Evangelicals,  Unitarians, small free Churches of all kinds,  Jehovah Witnesses, Hindus, Moslems, and Buddhists. In all of these denominations and religious communities, I have met men and women of deep faith and outstanding charity.

And this has caused me to ask myself the question that Jesus once asked those who approached him and told him that his mother and family were outside the circle he was talking to, asking for him: “Who is my mother? And who are my brethren? And he stretched forth his hand toward his disciples, and said, Behold my mother and my brethren! For whosoever does the will of my Father which is in heaven, is my brother, and sister, and mother. (Matthew 12:46-50)

We tend to believe that “blood is thicker than water” and so we sometimes defend our own families, ethnic groups, countries, and churches, even when they do wrong things. What Jesus affirms is that “faith is thicker than blood” and, even more deeply, that faith is also thicker than denominational or religious affiliation.

St. Paul agrees: In his Epistle to the Galatians, he asks the question: Who is living inside the Holy Spirit? Who really has genuine faith? His answer: Those whose lives manifest charity, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and chastity. The presence of these virtues manifests faith and Christ. Conversely, he warns that we shouldn’t delude ourselves when our lives manifest, among other things, adultery, hatred, factionalism, strife, and envy. Our real brothers and sisters in faith are those whose lives manifest charity rather than selfishness, love rather than hatred, large hearts rather than selective sympathies, gentleness rather than hardness, and kindness rather than mean-spiritedness. Virtue trumps denominational identity.

I will always be a Roman Catholic, just as I will always be a member of my biological family, the Rolheisers, and my religious community, the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate. I’ve been baptized into these families and baptism, as the old catechisms rightly teach, leaves an indelible mark on our souls. These will always be my families; but they may not be my only loyalty. I have other families too, not of these sheepfolds: non-Roman Catholics, non-Rolheisers, non-Oblates. And I don’t love the Roman Catholic Church, my biological family, or the Oblates of Mary Immaculate any less because of this. Paradoxically, I love them more.

When Jesus asks the question: “Who is mother and brother and sister to me?” he answers that whoever does the will of God is his true mother, true brother, and true sister. But, as the Gospels writers have at that point already strongly emphasized, his biological mother, Mary, was the first person who fit that description. Hence, he is not denigrating his mother, but re-establishing her worth and importance at a higher place.

The same should be true for us in our relationship to the faith families into which we have been baptized, even as we open up our hearts more and more to embrace those others who are not of our fold. Faith is thicker than blood – and thicker even than religious affiliation. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Other Sheep Not Of Our Flock” January 2012]

Jesus warns us that we can commit a sin that is unforgivable which (in his words) is a blaspheme against the Holy Spirit. This is the context where Jesus gives us this warning. He had just cast out a demon and some of the people who had witnessed this believed, as a hard religious doctrine, that only someone who came from God could cast out a demon. But they hated Jesus, so seeing him cast out a demon was a very inconvenient truth, so inconvenient in fact that they chose to deny what they had just seen with their own eyes. And so, against everything they knew to be true, they affirmed instead that Jesus had cast out the demon by Beelzebub, the prince of demons. They knew better. They knew that they were denying the truth.

Jesus’ first response was to try to make them see their lie. He appeals to logic, arguing that if Beelzebub, the prince of demons, is casting out demons, then Satan’s house is divided against itself and will eventually fall. But they persist in their lie. It’s then, in that specific context, that Jesus utters his warning about the danger of committing a sin that cannot be forgiven because it blasphemes the Holy Spirit.

The people whom Jesus addressed had denied a reality that they had just seen with their own eyes because it was too difficult for them to accept its truth. So, they denied its truth, fully aware that they were lying.

Well, the first lie we tell is not so dangerous because we still know we are lying. The danger is that if we persist in that lie and continue to deny (and lie) we can reach a point where we believe the lie, see it as truth, and see truth as falsehood. Perversion is then seen as virtue, and the sin becomes unforgivable, not because forgiveness is withheld, but because we no longer believe we need forgiveness, nor in fact do we want it or remain open to receive it.

Whenever we lie or in any way deny the truth, we begin to warp our conscience and if we persist in this, eventually we will (and this is not too strong a phrase) pervert our soul so that for us falsehood looks like truth, darkness looks like light, and hell looks like heaven.

And how is that a “blaspheme against the Holy Spirit”?

In his letter to the Galatians, St. Paul lays out two fundamental ways we can live our lives. We can live outside of God’s spirit. We do that whenever we are living in infidelity, idolatry, hatred, factionalism, and dishonesty. And lying is what takes us there. Conversely, we live inside God’s spirit, the Holy Spirit, whenever we are living in charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, longsuffering, fidelity, gentleness, and chastity. And we live inside these whenever we are honest.

Thus, whenever we lie, whenever we deny reality, whenever we deny truth, we are (in effect and in reality) stepping outside of God’s spirit, blaspheming that spirit by disdaining it. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Lies and the Sin Against the Holy Spirit” January 2025]

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]