Daily Virtue Post

During my graduate studies in Louvain, I had the good fortune of having Cristianne Brusselmanns as a professor. Many will recognize that name and recognize as well the pivotal role this woman played in restoring the adult rite of initiation (RCIA) in the West. Cristianne was an exceptional teacher, one-in-a-million, who radiated catholicity, graciousness, and depth.

One of the things she would say again and again about the restored rite for adult initiation was that it was not meant as the one and only way of entering the church. It was meant as one way, an ideal way, even, but never, never as the only way. God, she would always affirm, works outside of programs, even of good ones. Sadly, we have fallen a long ways from both her catholicity and depth.

Today we are falling victim, I fear, to a new authoritarianism in the church, the tyranny of program. It may look different from the old authoritarianism, but it is not. Many of us remember only too well the days when all the power was concentrated in the hands of one man, the pastor, and where his ecclesiology, interpretation of church law, temperament, and whim, pretty much decided everything. The oral tradition abounds with stories (either horrific or humorous or both) of the classical, old pastor or monsignor, who ruled with an iron hand and by divine right.

But that kind of authoritarianism is now mostly the stuff of legends. Gone are the old pastor and monsignor of old who could do this. There is a new church, though it seems that things haven’t changed much. People are still too much the victim of one narrow view of ecclesiology and church law. Sadly, too, temperament and whim still play a large a role in deciding who enters the church, how one enters the church, and who gets to receive the sacraments.

The old patriarchy has largely been replaced by a new absolutism, the tyranny of good program. A narrow authoritarianism still rules, except now it is the authoritarianism of the parish staff, freshly trained in theology and liturgy, but is not nearly as deeply schooled in catholicity and compassion. The absolutism of the new parish staff has replaced the unquestioned authority of the old monsignor.

But the question that still must be asked: Is Christ being made more accessible? Is our ecclesiology healthier in its Catholicity, depth, and compassion? Are many of the poor still being excluded from church and sacraments because of our misuse of power? Is a false use of authority still blocking the full compassion of the gospel and giving God a bad name? Are there really fewer horror stories than before?

Certainly, new horrors abound: “I wasn’t allowed to join the church in this parish and diocese, except through one program, the RCIA.” “There will be no eulogy at a funeral in this parish or diocese (no matter how painful the anthropological and emotional circumstances in this particular instance) because the funeral liturgy is complete in and of itself!” “All parents must take the pre-baptism program, even if they themselves have helped instruct those who teach these programs!” “No hymn that isn’t approved by the parish team will be sung at a wedding in this parish, irrespective of background (religious, aesthetic, ethnic, and emotional) of the couple who are actually getting married!” The list goes on and on.

A new legalism is replacing the old and it parallels perfectly the old in its lack of compassion, catholicity, depth, and nuance—not to mention how, just like the old, it echoes the personality of the person or persons who are doing the adjudication.

We might all take a lesson in catholicity and good pastoral theology from the incident in the gospels where Jesus is confronted by a Canaanite woman, asking that he cure her daughter. Transliterated, this text, Matthew 15: 21-28 might read like this:

It was the night of the Easter vigil. Jesus had just helped to conduct an eight-month RCIA program and was helping set up things for the candidates who were to be baptized at the vigil liturgy, when I, a woman, who hadn’t taken the program, came up to him and said: “Jesus, leader of this RCIA program, I would like to be baptized tonight, with these others.” Jesus replied:

“You never took the program! This is only for those who took it. It isn’t fair to them to baptize you!”

But the woman addresses Jesus a second time: “Jesus, you who are the compassion of God for the world and not just for this parish and program, I’m as ready as all those who did take the program!” And Jesus, after interviewing her, right then and there, concludes: “Amen. Indeed, you are more ready than any of the candidates scheduled for baptism tonight. Step into line and be baptized … even though you didn’t take the program”!

There’s a lesson here – Ron Rolheiser.

When Jesus instituted the Eucharist at the Last Supper, he held up bread and wine as two elements within which to make himself especially present to us. Since that time, now more than 2000 years ago, Christians celebrating the Eucharist have used the same two things, bread and wine, to ask Christ to bless this world and to bring God’s special presence to our world. Why two elements? Why both bread and wine? What reality does each represent?

I have always found this insight from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin particularly meaningful. Commenting on why both bread and wine are offered at each Eucharist, his says this: “In a sense the true substance to be consecrated each day is the world’s development during that day – the bread symbolizing appropriately what creation succeeds in producing, the wine (blood) what creation causes to be lost in exhaustion and suffering in the course of that effort.”

As a Roman Catholic priest, I have the privilege of presiding at the Eucharist, and whenever I do,  I try always to remain conscious of the separate realities which the bread and wine symbolize. When I lift up the bread, I try to be conscious of the fact that I am holding up for God’s blessing all that is healthy, growing in life, and is being celebrated in our world today. When I lift up the wine, I try to be conscious that I am holding up for God’s blessing all that is being crushed, is suffering, and is dying today, as life on this earth moves forwards.

Our world is a big place and at every moment somewhere on this planet new life is being born, young life is taking root, some people are celebrating life, some are finding love, some are making love, and some are celebrating success and triumph. And, while all of this is happening, others are losing their health, others are dying, others are being raped and violated, and others are being crushed by hunger, defeat, hopelessness, and a broken spirit. At the Eucharist, the bread speaks for the former, the wine for the latter. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Praying for Both – The Weak and the Strong” July 2023]

Several years ago, a friend of mine made a very unromantic type of marriage proposal to his fiancée. In essence, this was his proposal: I’d like to ask you to marry me but I need to put my cards on the table. I don’t pretend to know what love means. There was a time in my life when I thought I did, but I’ve seen my own feelings and the feelings of others shift too often in ways that have made me lose confidence in my understanding of love. So, I’ll be honest, I can’t promise that I will always feel in love with you. But I can promise that I’ll always be faithful, that I’ll always treat you with respect, that I’ll always do everything in my power to be there for you to help further your own dreams, and that I’ll always be an honest partner in trying to build a life together. I can’t guarantee how I will always feel, but I can promise that I won’t betray you in infidelity.

That’s not exactly the type of marriage proposal we see in our romantic movies and novels, predicated as they mostly are on the naïve belief that the passion and excitement we initially experience when we fall in love will remain that way forever. His is a mature proposal, one that doesn’t naively promise something it can’t deliver.

When I was in the seminary, a classmate of mine set off one summer to make a thirty-day retreat. His aim was to try to acquire a faith that he would feel with more fervor, which would more affectively warm his heart. He returned from the retreat still stoic, though changed nonetheless: “I never got what I asked for,” he said, “but I got something else. I learned to accept that my faith might always be stoic, and I learned too that this is okay.

Faith and love are too easily identified with emotional feelings, passion, fervor, affectivity, and romantic fire. And those feelings are part of love’s mystery, a part we are meant to embrace and enjoy. But, wonderful as these feelings can be, they are, as experience shows, fragile and ephemeral. Our world can change in fifteen seconds because we can fall in or out of love in that time. Passionate and romantic feelings are part of love and faith, though not the deepest part, and not a part over which we have much emotional control.

Thus, unromantic though it is, I like the stoic approach that’s expressed in the marriage proposal of my friend, particularly as it applies to faith. For some of us, faith will never be, other than for short periods of time, something that fires our emotions and fills us with warmth. We know how ephemeral feelings can be.

Like my colleague with the “stoic” faith, some of us might have to settle for a faith that says to God, to others, and to ourselves: I can’t guarantee how I will feel on any given day. I can’t promise I will always have emotional passion about my faith, but I can promise I’ll always be faithful, I’ll always act with respect, and I will always do everything in my power, as far as my human weakness allows, to help others and God.

Love and faith are shown more in fidelity than in feelings. We can’t guarantee how we will always feel, but we can live in the firm resolve to never betray what we believe in! [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Love and Faith as Fidelity” February 2025]

G.K. Chesterton once wrote: “There comes a time, usually late in the afternoon, when the little child tires of playing policeman and robbers. It’s then that he begins to torment the cat!” Mothers, with young children, are only too familiar with this late afternoon hour and its particular dynamic. There comes an hour, usually just before supper, when a child’s energy is low, when it is tired and whining, and when the mother has exhausted both her patience and her repertoire of warnings: “Leave that alone! Don’t do that!” The child, tense and miserable, is clinging to her leg. At that point, she knows what to do. She picks up the child. Touch, not word, is what’s needed. In her arms, the child grows calm and tension leaves its body.

That’s an image for the Eucharist. We are that tense, over-wrought child, perennially tormenting the cat. There comes a point, even with God, when words aren’t enough. God has to pick us up, like a mother her child. Physical embrace is what’s needed. Skin needs to be touched. God knows that. It’s why Jesus gave us the Eucharist. Indeed that is what all sacraments are, God’s physical embrace. Words, as we know, have a relative power. In critical situations they often fail us. When this happens, we have still another language, the language of ritual. The most ancient and primal ritual of all is the ritual of physical embrace. It can say and do what words cannot.

Jesus acted on this. For most of his ministry, he used words. Through words, he tried to bring us God’s consolation, challenge, and strength. His words, like all words, had a certain power. Indeed, his words stirred hearts, healed people, and affected conversions. But at a time, powerful though they were, they too became inadequate. Something more was needed. So on the night before his death, having exhausted what he could do with words, Jesus went beyond them. He gave us the Eucharist, his physical embrace, his kiss, a ritual within which he holds us to his heart.

The Eucharist is God’s kiss. Andre Dubos, the Cajun novelist, used to say: “Without the Eucharist, God becomes a monologue.” Skin needs to be touched. This is what happens in the Eucharist and that is why the Eucharist, and every other Christian sacrament, always has some very tangible physical element to it – a laying on of hands, a consuming of bread and wine, an immersion into water, an anointing with oil. An embrace needs to be physical, not only something imagined.

G.K. Chesterton once wrote: “There comes a time, usually late in the afternoon, when the little child tires of playing policeman and robbers. There comes an hour, usually just before supper, when a child’s energy is low, when it is tired and whining, and when the mother has exhausted both her patience and her repertoire of warnings: “Leave that alone! Don’t do that!” The child, tense and miserable, is clinging to her leg. At that point, she knows what to do. She picks up the child. Touch, not word, is what’s needed. In her arms, the child grows calm and tension leaves its body.

That’s an image for the Eucharist. We are that tense, over-wrought child. There comes a point, even with God, when words aren’t enough. God has to pick us up, like a mother her child. Physical embrace is what’s needed. Skin needs to be touched. God knows that. It’s why Jesus gave us the Eucharist. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Eucharist as God’s Physical Embrace” May 2006]

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.

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 loves ones where we are and what we are doing.

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

·       To live in the light is to not 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. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “To Live In The Light” April 2012]

A Jesuit friend of mine was an actual shepherd in his youth. He had spent plenty of time out in the fields, so I asked him what taking care of sheep was like. He surprised me. He said he hated being a shepherd and would never want to go near it again. Never. Why? Because today there are huge numbers of sheep in a herd and you could never know which was which, much less have names for them. Sheep-dogs, not the shepherd, could keep them more or less together. It was a cold job, uncomfortable and unrewarding, an industry now, with nothing personal about it.

What a surprise. This seemed like the exact opposite of what we hear in the Bible.

In Jesus’ day, however, the herds were much smaller. A shepherd could name each sheep and they knew their master’s voice by heart, the way the way the family dog knows your voice. Good shepherds would search and search for one lost sheep. Or if one was turned absurdly on its back, unable to roll over because of its full fleece, the shepherd would take his “crook,” and using the big curve on one end, easily maneuver that sheep back to its feet.

And if there was real danger, as for instance if wolves were ready to pounce, the shepherd would take out his “staff,” which served as a weapon, and deal with the predators.

Bad shepherds, on the other hand, would actually scatter the sheep. Sheep feared and trembled and many went missing. Sometimes the uncaring shepherds would lessen their burden by driving the sheep off. People were hired who were not shepherds at all, who simply ran away when a wolf approached.

In our reflection reading from today’s gospel, we see that Jesus was becoming very popular. Many people were coming and going, so that he and his apostles “had no opportunity even to eat.” He wisely invited them to come away with him to a quiet place for rest. They went off in a boat to a “deserted place.”

But the needy throng traced where they figured the boat was going. They formed a “vast crowd” and ran to the spot! What should Jesus do, start ministering to them again instead of resting? The Gospel says “his heart was moved with pity for them, for they were like sheep without a shepherd.” And, “he began to teach them many things.”

The question for you and me is not whether we should go without food and drink or be workaholics for the sake of others. It is whether our own hearts are ever moved even once with pity for the scattered and fear-filled sheep-folk of our own time. Can we love them and each other, with Jesus’ love? Can we be good shepherds? [Excerpt from John Foley S.J. “Good Shepherds and Bad” July 2018]

We are not created by God and put in this earth with small, narrow, and petty hearts. The opposite is true. God puts us into this world with huge hearts, hearts as deep as the Grand Canyon. The human heart in itself, when not closed off by fear, wound, and paranoia, is the antithesis of pettiness. The human heart, as Augustine describes it, is not fulfilled by anything less than infinity itself. There’s nothing small about the human heart.

The problem is not the size or the natural dynamics of the human heart, but what the heart tends to do when it is wounded, fearful, disrespected, paranoid, or self-deluded by greed and selfishness.  It’s then that it closes itself to its own depth and greatness and becomes narrow, petty, fearful, and selfish. But that behavior is anomalous, not the human heart at either its normal or its best. At its normal and at its best, the human heart is huge, generous, noble, and self-sacrificing.

The Church Fathers taught that inside of each of us there was also another heart, a magna anima, a huge, deep, big, generous, and noble heart. This is the heart we operate out of when we are at our best. This is the heart within which we feel empathy and compassion. This is the heart within which we are enflamed with noble ideals. This is the heart where we inchoately feel God’s presence in faith and hope and are able to move out to others in charity and forgiveness. Inside each of us, sadly often buried under suffocating wounds that keep if far from the surface, lies the heart of a saint, bursting to get out.

Thus on any given day, and at any given moment, we can feel like Mother Teresa or like a bitter terrorist. We can feel ready to give our lives in martyrdom or we can feel ready to welcome the sensation of sin. We can feel like the noble Don Quixote, enflamed with idealism, or we can feel like a despairing cynic, content to settle for whatever short-range compensation and pleasure life can give rather than believing in deeper, more life-giving possibilities for ourselves and others. Everything depends upon which heart we are connected to at a given moment.

If that is true then our invitation to others in terms of moving towards nobleness of heart will be most effective when, rather than emphasizing their faults and narrowness, we instead invite them to try to access what is best, highest, within themselves. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “The Size of our Hearts” June 2011]

In 2015, Dylann Roof shot nine members inside an African American church in South Carolina and was publicly forgiven by the relatives of his victims. And in 2006, when a gunman shot ten Amish children in a school room in Pennsylvania and then killed himself, the Amish community there not only forgave him, they went to visit his family and expressed sympathies to them for their loss. What was the general response? Admiration for extraordinary selflessness and virtue? No, not that. More generally, these instances of forgiveness were judged as naïve fundamentalism and as unhelpful.  Why?

Timothy Keller, writing in Comment Magazine, suggests that there are a number of reasons for this, but he singles out two in particular. We are a “therapeutic culture” (where only our own truth and feelings matter) and a culture that has a “religion without grace” (its vision and virtue go no further than what echoes in our emotions and willpower).  Hence, our culture sees forgiveness more negatively than positively.  For it, forgiveness allows oppression to maintain its power and thus permits the cycle of violence and abuse to go on. Like a family refusing to stand up to an alcoholic member, it enables rather than stops the abuse and allows a sick situation to continue. Forgiveness then is a further injustice to the one who has been violated and can lead to a form of self-loathing, an acceptance of a humiliation destructive of one’s self-image, a further loss of dignity. Moreover, the moral pressure to forgive can be a further burden on the victim and an easy escape for the perpetrator. Is this logic correct?

From a purely emotional point of view, yes, it feels right; but it is wrong when scrutinized more deeply. First, it is evident that vindictiveness will only produce more vindictiveness. Vindictiveness will never soften a heart and help change it. Only forgiveness (analogous to dialysis) can take violence and hatred out of a relationship. As well, in the words of Martin Luther King, anyone devoid of the power of forgiveness is also devoid of the power of love. Why? Because each of us will get hurt by others and will hurt others in every one of our relationships. That is the price of community inside human inadequacy. Hence, relationships at every level, personal and social, can only sustain themselves long term if there is forgiveness. 

Moreover, with Jesus, forgiveness becomes singularly the most important of all virtues. It decides whether we go to heaven or not. As Jesus tells us when he gives us the Lord’s Prayer, if we cannot forgive others, God will not be able to forgive us. Why? Because the banquet table, eternal community of life, is only open to everyone who is willing to sit down with everyone. God cannot change this. Only we can open our hearts sufficiently to sit down with everyone.

That being said, it must also be said that forgiveness is not simple or easy. That is why in the Judeo-Christian spirituality of Sabbath, there is a (too-little-known) spirituality of forgiveness. As we know, the command to celebrate Sabbath asks us to honor this cycle in our lives: Work for six days – rest for one day. Work for 7 years – rest for one year.  Work of seven times seven (forty-nine) years – have a major rest (sabbatical). Work for a lifetime – and then be on sabbatical for eternity.

Well that is also the cycle for forgiveness.  In the spirituality of Sabbath: You may hold a minor grudge for six days – then you need let it go. You may hold a major grudge for seven years – then you need to let it go. You may hold a soul-searing grudge for forty-nine years – then you need to let it go. You may hold a grudge that ruined your life until your deathbed – then you need to let it go. That is the final Christian moral imperative. Desmond Tutu once said, “without forgiveness there is no future”. True – on both sides of eternity. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “The Fading of Forgiveness” August 2021]

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, 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.

And this bitterly limits how well we can love and especially how fully we can give life. In the gospels we are told, within a single story, how Jesus cured two women who, on the surface, seem to have very little in common. The story runs this way:

Jesus is approached by a man named Jairus, who asks him to come and cure his daughter who is thirteen years old. As Jesus is making his way to Jairus’ house, hemmed in by a curious crowd, a woman who, we are told, had been suffering from internal haemorrhaging 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 haemorrhaging.

Then, as Jesus is approaching Jairus’ house, he is told that the man’s daughter is already dead, but he enters the house anyway, goes to the young girl’s bed, takes her by the hand, and brings her back to life.

What these two women have in common is this: For different reasons, both are unable to get pregnant and give life; the young girl, because she dies at puberty, just as she has the radical possibility of getting pregnant, and the other woman, because the forces inside her that are meant to give life are damaged and haemorrhaging, making it impossible for her to hold a pregnancy. What Jesus does is give back to both women the possibility of giving life, in one case by stopping the flow of blood and in the other by starting it.

We all need a similar miracle: By the time we’re finally ready to give life some deep parts of us have already died and are too cold and lifeless to ever become pregnant. As well, like the woman whose internal bleeding makes it impossible for her to get pregnant, we too are wounded in ways that have us forever haemorrhaging out the life forces we need in order to give life. Parts of us have died and parts of us have been wounded and we are forever haemorrhaging in body, heart, and soul. It’s hard for us to give life.

Only by touching some higher power, and this is most easily done inside a community, can we actually 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. Then, and only then, will those parts of us that are dead or diseased begin again to give life. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Stopping the Haemorrhaging by Touching the Hem of the Garment” July 2006]

Every one of us is called to “present ourselves” to God, to dedicate ourselves completely to Jesus Christ, following him in love and seeking his will for our lives and our world. That is what this great feast we celebrate today is all about.

Today’s Gospel scene is familiar to us because it is the fourth joyful mystery of the rosary. The holy man in the Temple, Simeon, recognizes that Jesus is not just any ordinary child. Inspired by the Holy Spirit, he is able to understand that Jesus is the One whom all the world has been waiting for, the living God and the true face of our humanity.

The feast of the Presentation of the Lord is another “epiphany,” another revelation of who Jesus Christ really is. And in the light of his presence, once again he manifests the beautiful possibilities of our lives as children of God.

Our God is not someone distant who doesn’t want to be involved in the lives of his creatures. Our God is the God of encounter, a God who comes from the heavens to be close to us, who comes down to join his life to our life in love. This is the beautiful reality of the Incarnation, “God with us.”

Our second reading, from the Letter to the Hebrews, tells us that Jesus came to share in our “blood and flesh,” and that he “had to become like his brothers and sisters in every way,” except for sin.

What a beautiful gift our God gives to us! Jesus comes to share in our human reality, as a brother, as a friend. And because our human reality includes pain, suffering, and death, Jesus shares in those things as well.

Jesus, who is perfect God and perfect man, loves us so much that he suffered death to set us free from our selfishness and sins.

Jesus comes into your life and mine; he comes to purify our humanity, to return our human nature to its “essence.” He comes to make holiness possible for us, to make it possible for us to offer ourselves in sacrifice to the Lord.

Our lives are made for “presentation” to the Lord. Jesus is waiting for us to love him as he loves us. Jesus is calling to each one of us personally, waiting for each one of us to offer our life to him as a “present,” to make our lives a gift to him, just as he gives his life for us.

And this is a beautiful way to live.

In a practical way, it is important for all of us to continue finding the time in our busy lives to spend more time with Jesus: reading the Gospels, contemplating his life, making ourselves ready every day to receive him in Holy Communion and, as much as possible, to try to live in the presence of God all day long.

This is the real meaning of life, this is what makes our life as beautiful as it is supposed to be — God wants to be with us and each one of us wants to be with God. – Archbishop José H. Gomez