Daily Virtue Scripture Readings

Scientists tell us that every second, inside the sun, the equivalent of 4 million elephants are being transformed into light, an irretrievable, one-time gift. The sun is giving itself away. If this generosity should halt, all energy would eventually lose its source, and everything would die and become inert. We, and everything on our planet, live because of the sun’s generosity. Fr. Rolheiser writes that in this generosity, the sun reflects the abundance of God. This largesse also invites us to be generous, to have big hearts, to risk giving ourselves away in self-sacrifice, and to witness God’s abundance. In the biblical parable of the Sower, Jesus describes God as not a calculating person who sows his grain carefully and discriminately only into worthy soil. This Sower scatters seeds indiscriminately everywhere: on the road, in the bushes, in the rocks, into barren soil, and into good soil. It seems he has unlimited seeds, so he works from a generous sense of abundance rather than from a guarded sense of scarcity. From everything we can see, God is so rich in love and mercy that he can afford to be wasteful, over-generous, non-calculating, non-discriminating, incredibly risk-taking, and big-hearted beyond our imaginations. Jesus assures us that the measure we measure out is the measure that we will receive in return. Essentially, that says that the air we breathe out will be the air we re-inhale. That isn’t just true ecologically. It is a broad truth for life in general. If we breathe out miserliness, we will re-inhale miserliness; if we breathe out pettiness, we will breathe in pettiness; if we breathe out bitterness, then bitterness will be the air that surrounds us; and if we breathe out a sense of scarcity that makes us calculate and be fearful, then calculation and fearfulness will be the air we re-inhale. But, if we are aware of God’s abundance, we breathe out generosity and forgiveness; we will breathe in the air of generosity and forgiveness. We re-inhale what we exhale.

In today’s Gospel verse, Jesus identifies us as his disciples. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that when we look at church life today, especially as we see it lived out concretely within parishes, it is evident that it is made up of much more than only the core, committed congregation, namely, those who regularly participate in church life and accept the dogmatic and moral teachings their churches. The church also contains a wide variety of the less-engaged: people who practice occasionally, people who accept some of its teachings, guests who visit our churches, people who don’t explicitly commit but are sympathetic to the church and offer it various kinds of support, and, not least, people who link themselves to God in more-privatized ways, those who are spiritual but not religious. But we must be careful in how we understand this. This does not mean there are tiers within discipleship, where some are called to a higher holiness and others to a lower one, as if the full gospel applies only to some. There were centuries in church history where Christian spirituality suffered from this misunderstanding, where it was common to think that monks, nuns, contemplatives, priests, and other such people were called to live the full gospel. In contrast, others were exempt from the more demanding of Jesus’ invitations—no such exemptions. The church may never be divided into the perfect and less perfect, the better and the half-baked, full-participation and partial-participation. The full gospel applies to everyone, as does Jesus’ invitation to intimacy with him. Jesus doesn’t call people according to more or less. Christian discipleship doesn’t ideally admit there are levels, notches, layers, and different tiers of participation. Still, something akin to this forever happens, analogous to what occurs in a love relationship. Each individual chooses how deep they will go, and some go deeper than others, though ideally, everyone is meant to go its full depth. And, given human history and human freedom, this is not surprising. There will always be a significant variation in both depth and participation. Each of us has our own history of being graced and wounded, formed and deformed. So, we all come to adulthood with very different capacities to see, understand, love, accept love, and give ourselves over to someone or something beyond us. None of us is whole, and none of us is fully mature. All of us are limited in what we can do. Hence, religiously, nobody can be expected to respond to something entirely outside their sphere of possibility, so we will inevitably gather around Jesus in very different ways, depending upon our capacity to see and give ourselves over. Jesus, it seemed, was okay with that. In his view, there was no such category as a cafeteria disciple or a disciple light. In our understanding, there shouldn’t be such categories either.

In his article “Splitting the Inner Atom,” Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that we can never be challenged too strongly about social justice. A key, non-negotiable component of the gospel is the summons to reach out to the poor, the excluded, and those whom society deems expendable. It’s all too easy to conclude that, given the mega-problems of our world, it doesn’t matter much how we live in the deeper recesses of our private worlds as long as we are doing the correct battle on the big front. Do we believe that God cares much whether or not we say our morning prayers, gossip about a colleague, reconcile with someone over a petty dispute, or keep our sexual lives fully in line with the biblical ideal? Does God really care about these things? Yes. God cares because we care. Significant, global issues notwithstanding, issues of personal integrity are generally what make or break our happiness, not to mention our character and our intimate relationships. In the end, they aren’t petty concerns at all. They shape the big things. Social morality is simply a reflection of private morality. What we see in the global picture merely magnifies the human heart. Thomas Merton said when you change a heart, “you have helped bring about some permanent structural, moral change on this planet.” Everything else is simply one power attempting to displace another. Private morality and all that comes with it – private prayer and the attempt to be honest and transparent in even the most minor and most secret things – is the core of all morality. Private morality is not unimportant, an unaffordable luxury, a soft virtue, or something that stands in the way of commitment to social justice. It’s the actual place where the moral atom needs to be split.

“Repent and believe in the gospel.” The Good News is him. So now it’s time to make a decision. Servant of God Madeleine Delbrel writes that we should set out without a road map to discover God, knowing that the way is sure and has no end. Don’t try to find him through new techniques but let yourself be formed by him in the poverty of a banal life. Monotony is a kind of poverty: accept it. Don’t look for beautiful trips in your imagination. May the varieties of the Kingdom of God suffice for you and bring you joy. Don’t be overly concerned about your life because to be that concerned is a kind of wealth: then old age will speak to you of birth and death of resurrection. Time will seem to you like a small fold in the vastness of eternity you will judge everything in the light of the eternal.

When stripped of everything, you can only see in the world an unfinished house and in yourself total poverty with no façade; think of those shadowy eyes open in the center of your soul and fixed on things that are beyond words, for the Kingdom of heaven is yours.

In the book “Essential Spiritual Writings” by Fr. Ron Rolheiser, this parable from G.K. Chesterton offers a lot of food for thought: “A man who was entirely careless of spiritual affairs died and went to hell. And he was much missed on earth by his old friends. His business agent went down to the gates of hell to see if there was any chance of bringing him back. But though he pleaded for the gates to be opened, the iron bars never yielded. His priest also went and argued: ‘He was not really a bad fellow; given time, he would have matured. Let him out, please!’ The gates remained stubbornly shut against all their voices. Finally, his mother came; she did not beg for his release. Quietly and with a strange catch in her voice, she said to Satan: ‘Let me in.’ Immediately, the great door swung open upon their hinges. For love goes down through the gates of hell, and there redeems the dead.” Monsignor Ellsworth Walden writes that Jesus came into our world, knocking at the door of every heart, seeking to embrace us with His unconditional love. While He made a great impact, His seeking and knocking on hearts is still a work in progress. Not everyone opened their hearts to Him. He faced the wrath of hell as He endured rejection and His passion and death on the cross. Yet even there, He kept seeking and knocking. All He had to gain was every person who responded with humble faith and joy for eternity. Jesus does not wait for us to be perfect; he loves us as we are now. That puts the ball in our court. How wide do we open the door of our hearts to Him? Is prayer a nourishing, hopeful time every day, or is it just another thing to check off the list of things to do? Is Sunday Mass an uplifting, life-giving experience, or is it just another thing to check off for a routine Sunday? There is nothing routine about Jesus and His love for us. We can ignore Him and His love and become blasé and indifferent. But as much as we try and test His love, He will never give up. 

God calls each of us to a particular vocation and mission for which we have been created. Some, like the twelve apostles, are called to dedicate their lives in service to God as a priest or in religious orders for women and men who consecrate themselves to the service of the Lord. Others, as Amy Welborn writes, “live quietly within layers and layers of hard work and sacrifice that are poured out in answer to God’s call, working together with the Lord, to build that extravagant place called the Kingdom of God.” In his “great commission,” Jesus told his apostles and all disciples who came after them, to teach everything that he taught to the world. This is the perpetual mission of His Church and each of us. While we’re not all called to be missionaries in foreign lands, all are called to do their part according to their state in life by giving witness to the truths of our One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Faith. The core of this mission is to bring the light and love of Christ to the world and, through our lived examples, preach the saving grace found only in Him and sustained by His Church.

St. John Paul II writes that in giving life to man, God demands that he love, respect, and promote life. The gift thus becomes a commandment, and the commandment is itself a gift. The precepts of the Lord are a gift of grace entrusted to man always and solely for his good, preservation of his personal dignity, and pursuit of his happiness. By working these cures, our Lord shows that he is both God and Man. He cures by his divine power and by using his human nature. In other words, only in the Word of God become man is the work of our Redemption effected, and the instrument God used to save us was the human nature of Jesus—his body and soul—in the unity of the person of the Word. St Thomas Aquinas speaks to this crowding around Jesus, which Christians repeat throughout all time: “The holy human nature of our Lord is our only route to salvation; it is the essential means we must use to unite ourselves to God. Thus, today, we can approach our Lord using the sacraments, especially and pre-eminently, the Eucharist. And through the sacraments there flows to us, from God, through the human nature of the Word, a strength which cures those who receive the sacraments with faith.” Fr. Rolheiser writes that God is not just a noun but also a verb. God is not just a person but also a particular flow of life, receptivity, and gratitude between three persons. Inside of God, there is a kind of family life going on. Jesus has assured us that when we give and receive from each other within a family, when we break open our lives, hearts, joys, frustrations, egos, agendas, and finances and share these with each other, we are letting the life of God flow through us. We are giving skin to the inner life of the Trinity.

In these passages, Christ teaches God’s purpose in instituting the Sabbath: God established it for man’s good, to help him rest and devote himself to divine worship in joy and peace. The Pharisees, through their interpretation of the Law, had turned this day into a source of anguish and scruple due to all the various prescriptions and prohibitions they introduced. By proclaiming himself “lord of the Sabbath,” Jesus affirms his divinity and his universal authority. Because he is lord, he has the power to establish other laws, as Yahweh had in the Old Testament. The Sabbath had been established not only for man’s rest but also to allow him to give glory to God: that is the correct meaning of the expression “the Sabbath was made for man.” Jesus has every right to say he is lord of the Sabbath because he is God. Christ restores to the weekly day of rest its full, religious meaning: it is not just a matter of fulfilling several legal precepts or of concern for physical well-being: the Sabbath belongs to God; it is one way suited to human nature, of rendering glory and honor to the Almighty. The Church, from the time of the apostles onwards, transferred the observance of this precept to the following day, Sunday—the Lord’s Day—in celebration of the resurrection of Christ.

In these passages, Christ teaches God’s purpose in instituting the Sabbath: God established it for man’s good, to help him rest and devote himself to divine worship in joy and peace. The Pharisees, through their interpretation of the Law, had turned this day into a source of anguish and scruple due to all the various prescriptions and prohibitions they introduced. By proclaiming himself “lord of the Sabbath,” Jesus affirms his divinity and his universal authority. Because he is lord, he has the power to establish other laws, as Yahweh had in the Old Testament. The Sabbath had been established not only for man’s rest but also to allow him to give glory to God: that is the correct meaning of the expression “the Sabbath was made for man.” Jesus has every right to say he is lord of the Sabbath because he is God. Christ restores to the weekly day of rest its full, religious meaning: it is not just a matter of fulfilling a number of legal precepts or of concern for physical well-being: the Sabbath belongs to God; it is one way suited to human nature, of rendering glory and honor to the Almighty. The Church, from the time of the apostles onwards, transferred the observance of this precept to the following day, Sunday—the Lord’s Day—in celebration of the resurrection of Christ.

Today, we hear the story of Jesus and his disciples being admonished for not practicing the same ascetical customs as was the habit of John the Baptist and the Pharisees. But Jesus is speaking to a different reality. If our life is full of prayer, fasting, giving alms, and living a good moral life with a healthy concern for social justice, what could be missing? Balance. Fr. Ron Rolheiser notes that “Any journey that takes you towards God will demand, at a point, some vigorous asceticism, some real fasting, a real purification and a disciplined ordering of the countless, obsessive feelings and desires that act through us. We must break what some spiritual masters call ‘the tyranny of the ego.’ We will not get in touch with the deep source of our lives if the activities of our lives are so consuming and obsessive that we can never find an identity and meaning in something beyond them. That is the ultimate reason behind asceticism and fasting of all kinds: we renounce something, even if it is good, in the function of getting in touch with its deeper source, God.” But all of this must be done within a balanced life. As Fr. Rolheiser warns, “Otherwise, like the older brother of the prodigal son, we might succumb to the temptation that T.S. Eliot describes, ‘The last temptation that’s the greatest treason is to do the right thing for the wrong reason.’ We do not just need the right truth, and we also need the right energy.”