Daily Virtue Scripture Readings

Are we jealous because God is generous? Does it bother us when others are given unmerited gifts and forgiveness? Fr. Rolheiser’s response, “You bet! Ultimately, that sense of injustice, envy that someone else caught a break, is a huge stumbling block to our happiness. Why? Because something in us reacts negatively when it seems that life is not making others pay the same dues as we are paying. In heaven, we will be given what we are owed and more (unmerited gift, forgiveness we don’t deserve, joy beyond imagining), but, it seems, we will not be given that catharsis we so much want here on earth, the joy of seeing the wicked punished. The natural itch we have for strict justice (“An eye for an eye”) is exactly that, a natural itch, something the Gospels invite us beyond. The desire for strict justice blocks our capacity for forgiveness. It prevents us from entering heaven, where God, like the Father of the Prodigal Son, embraces and forgives without demanding a pound of flesh for a pound of sin. We know we need God’s mercy, but if grace is true for us, it must be true for everyone; if forgiveness is given to us, it must be given to everybody; and if God does not avenge our misdeeds, God must not avenge the misdeeds of others either. Such is the logic of grace and the love of the God to whom we must attune ourselves. Happiness is not about vengeance, but about forgiveness; not about retribution, but about unmerited embrace; and not about capital punishment, but about living beyond even murder. God leaves us free. When I, or anyone else, is upset at an airport, a parole board hearing, or anywhere else where someone gets something we don’t think they deserve, we must accept that we’re still a long way from understanding and accepting the kingdom of God.”

I found myself wrestling with this passage, mainly because it spoke to situations in my own life of struggling with God’s will. I recognize that I am not alone in struggling with God, as we all face this struggle. Rabbi Heschel, a noted Jewish theologian, said, “From Abraham through Jesus, we see how the great figures of our faith are not in the habit of easily saying ‘Thy will be done!’ but often, for a while at least, they counter God’s invitation with, “Thy will be changed!” Fr. Rolheiser, reflecting on our struggles with God, said, “Wrestling with God should be part of our understanding of faith and prayer. Human will doesn’t bend easily, nor should it, and the heart has complexities that need to be respected, even as we try to rein in its more possessive longings.” God expects that, at some point, we will resist his will. But just as Jesus did in the Garden of Gethsemane, we need to be open and honest with God, speaking from the depth of our hearts in ruthless honesty. God, who created us, understands this and is up to the task of wrestling with us and our resistance. A life lived outside of the will of God is not really life at all. That’s something I’ve learned from experience. “In The Problem with Pain,” C.S. Lewis wrote, “God’s will is determined by His wisdom which always perceives, and His goodness which always embraces the intrinsically good.” If we are in a place where we’re not sure what the Lord wants us to do, we should avail ourselves of all the ways He makes his purposes known to us. The inner witness of the Spirit is usually the final piece of the puzzle that must fall into place, but we must be wary of making it the first and only piece.

Saint Pope John Paul II writes that the question which the rich young man puts to Jesus of Nazareth is one which rises from the depths of his heart. “It is an essential and unavoidable question for every person’s life, for it is about the moral good which must be done and about eternal life.” All are called to spiritual detachment from the things of this world. But Jesus invites this young man to consider something better still, to embrace a means of perfection that entails dispossessing himself of monetary assets. It is not that poverty is romanticized or idealized for its own sake but that surrendering worldly wealth frees the heart to find its true treasure in heaven. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that God wants from us “not a million acts of virtue, but a million acts of surrender, culminating in one massive surrender of soul, mind, and body.” In “The Great Divorce,” C.S. Lewis has a fantasy of some (ten) interviews between someone in heaven trying to coax someone not there to come to heaven. Each of the ten persons seeking entrance into heaven is blocked by some significant flaw, pride, anger, idolatry, the incapacity to forgive, shame, lust, and the like. In each case, irrespective of the flaw, the person in heaven keeps telling the other: “All you have to do is to give me your hand and let me lead you there. All you have to do is surrender!” I continue to learn that age brings us physically to our knees, and more and more, everything we have so painstakingly built up in our life begins to mean less and less. But that, as Fr. Rolheiser would say, “is the order of things.” Salvation is not about great achievements but about a great embrace. C.S. Lewis succinctly captured the point, “All we have to do is surrender.”

It’s interesting as a parent to hear a priest talk about children since their celibate life will never allow them to have children of their own. But does that stop them from gaining wisdom from their upbringing or, more importantly, as a shepherd for the flock they lead? Listen to what Fr. Ron Rolheiser offers in today’s verse reflection: “Let the children come to me.” He writes, “We need our children. Our children raise us, not vice versa. It is they who put a rope around us and take us where we would rather not go, namely, into adulthood and into a selflessness that, without them, we would never attain. We become adults by having and raising children. That, perhaps more than anything else, moves us beyond being children ourselves. Why is this so? Some of the reasons are more obvious than others: When we are raising children, it is more natural for us to stop thinking of ourselves as children. When we are forced to respond to others’ needs, we tend to be less focused on our own. Raising children forces us to live a certain virtue. It is conscripted adulthood; we mature almost against our will. But there is a deeper dynamic operative: Children have the power to fire within us the deepest and most powerful surges of love that we can ever experience in this life. More so than does romantic love or the love that we have when we get involved in causes, love for our children is a love that can take us beyond ourselves, break our narcissism, and let us genuinely imitate (weak though it may be) the life-giving love of God. There is something in children, some combination of helplessness, dependence, innocence, trust, vulnerability, simplicity, playfulness, and simple physical beauty that opens the heart to selflessness in a way that our other loves do not.”

“God is the author of all that is good and all that is true! Hence, since no one religion, one church, one culture, one philosophy, or one ideology contains all of the truth, we must be open to perceiving and receiving goodness and truth in many, many different places – and we must be open to the tensions and ambiguity this brings into our lives.” This quote from Fr. Ron Rolheiser has been, in many ways, the driving force of my maturity as a Christian. It has led me through a myriad of viewpoints of the Christian faith, especially orthodoxy, that eventually helped me move past a very naïve view of God that coincidentally fit perfectly with my life ideals and philosophy. If we seek to find the core of life’s meaning and our place in all of this, truth requires an open mind, body, and spirit massively balanced by humility. St. Augustine beautifully captured this by stating, “Humanity is helpless in the face of the ultimate truth that God is the source of all truth.” His famous “Rule of Augustine” was centered on the greatest truth: “We must be of one mind and heart on the way to God knowing that love of God, and love of neighbor is the center of the Christian life.” It is the search for how we live in this manner that I have often felt today’s reflection verse speaking to all searches for truth, leading the great thinkers like Augustine to eventually see the powerful simplicity that we can do nothing without God, who is the source of all truth and the definition of love. Fr. Rolheiser writes, “True faith is humble enough to accept truth, wherever it sees it, irrespective of the tension it causes and irrespective of the religion or ideology of whoever is speaking it. Big minds and big hearts are large enough to contain and carry large ambiguities and great tensions. And true worshippers of God accept God’s goodness and truth wherever these are manifest, no matter how religiously or morally inconvenient that manifestation might be.” It is that truth we “ought to accept” if we seek to find true happiness and peace in life.

Nothing is as important as forgiveness. This statement from Fr. Ron Rolheiser highlights a key to true happiness and the most important spiritual imperative in our lives. “We need to forgive, to make peace with the hurts and injustices we have suffered so as not to die angry and bitter. Before we die, we need to forgive others, ourselves, and God, for what happened to us in this life. Wounds to the soul take time, a long time, to heal, and the process is excruciatingly slow, something that cannot be rushed. Indeed, the trauma from an emotional wound often affects our physical health. Healing takes time. The ability to forgive is more contingent upon grace than upon willpower. To err is human, but to forgive is divine. This little slogan contains a deeper truth than is immediately evident. What makes forgiveness so difficult, existentially impossible at times, is not primarily that our egos are bruised and wounded. Rather, the real difficulty is that a wound to the soul works the same as a wound to the body; it strips us of our strength. This is particularly true for those soul-searing and soul-shattering traumas that take can take a lifetime to heal or sometimes can never be healed in this lifetime. Wounds of this kind radically disempower us, particularly towards the person who did this to us, making it very difficult for us to forgive. We need a Spirituality of Sabbath to help us. God set up a certain rhythm for our lives. That rhythm is supposed to work this way:
We work for six days, then rest for one day.
We work for seven times seven years, forty-nine years, then have a jubilee where the world itself goes on sabbatical.
We work for seven years, then rest for one year (a sabbatical).
We work for a lifetime, then enjoy an eternity of sabbatical.
Now, that rhythm is also intended as the rhythm for how we move towards forgiveness:
We can hold a mini-grudge of seven days, but then we need to give it up.
We can hold a major grudge for seven years, but then we need to give it up. (The “statute of limitations” is based on this.)
We can hold a massive soul-searing wound for forty-nine years, but then we need to give it up.
We can hold a massive soul-shattering wound until our deathbed, but then we need to give it up.
This highlights something which is too often absent in therapeutic and spiritual circles today, namely, that we need time to be able to forgive and that the length of time needed is contingent upon the depth of the hurt.”

Some of the teachings of Jesus created confusion at the time he said and continue to this day to cause unintended confusion. An example of that is our reflection verse today about binding and loosing. Fr. Ron Rolheiser provides insightful teaching on what it means to bind or lose someone. “These words of Jesus apply not just to those who are ordained to ministry and administer the Sacrament of Reconciliation but to everyone inside the body of Christ. All of us have the power to bind and to loose. One part of this teaching allows for some easier explanation. Here’s an example:  If you are a member of the Body of Christ and you forgive someone, Christ forgives that person, and he or she is loosed from sin…That is one of the incredible gifts given to us in the incarnation. But what about the reverse? Suppose I refuse to forgive someone who has wounded me in some way; suppose I hold grudges and refuse to let go of the wrong that another has done to me; am I binding that person in sin? Does God also refuse to forgive and let go because I refuse to forgive and let go? This is a difficult question, though a couple of preliminary distinctions can shed some light on the issue. In grace, just as in love, you can be gifted beyond what you deserve, but the reverse is not true. The algebra of undeserved grace works only one way. Love can give you more than you deserve, but it cannot punish you more than you deserve. God gives us the power to set each other free but not the same kind of power to keep each other in bondage. Put more simply, when I hold a grudge against someone who has wronged me, keeping him constantly aware that he has done wrong, I am keeping that person tied to their sin – but God isn’t endorsing this. Heaven will not go along with my emotional blackmail. The Christian power to bind and loose is the power to bind and loose in conscience, truth, goodness, and love. When I refuse to forgive another and hold a grudge, I act not as the Body of Christ nor as an agent of grace. Biblically, we bind each other when, in love, we refuse to compromise truth and when we refuse to give each other permission to take false liberties and make bad choices. Thus, for example, parents bind their children when they, lovingly but clearly, refuse to give them permission to ignore Christ’s teaching on marriage and sexuality. We bind a friend when we refuse to give them our approval to cheat in their business in order to make more money. A friend binds you when she refuses to bless your moral compromises. Ever since God took on concrete human flesh, grace has had a visible human dimension. Heaven is watching Earth – and is letting itself be helped by the best of what we do down here but not bound by the worst of what we do down here.”

Fr. Timothy Radcliffe asks: “Why do we celebrate the Assumption of Mary? Nothing in the New Testament supports this doctrine, and the classical representations of Mary shooting upward like a rocket do not help. But East and West Christians have celebrated this feast for over 1,500 years.” The Holy Spirit has been poured upon the faithful, so we have an instinct for the truths of faith. It must say something fundamental about Christ and especially his ascension. Paul says that Jesus ascended “that he might fill all things.” Christ is not departing to be with a distant God but becoming one with his Father, who is present everywhere, at the core of our existence. We lose Jesus as a person among us to gain him in a new intimacy, penetrating our very being. The ascension can never be a victory just for Jesus. He draws near to us all. And this conquest is first shared, naturally, with his mother. All the texts for today’s feast are about victory. This victory is over every form of alienation and separation, not just of distance but of sin, misunderstanding, and, above all, death. Nothing now can come between us and God. May this sharing in Christ’s victory by Mary give us all the confidence to reach out to those from whom we have become estranged, whether by neglect or misunderstanding, or failure.

Jesus assures us that his disciples will recognize his voice. But we are surrounded by many voices which promise life. How do we recognize which is the voice of the Good Shepherd? How do we distinguish voices which infuse life from voices which lead us away from life? James Mackey teaches that divine providence is a conspiracy of accidents through which God speaks. Frederick Buechner notes that this does not mean that God makes events happen to us that move us in certain directions, like chessmen. Instead, events happen under their own steam as random as rain, which means that God is present in them not as their cause but as the one who, even in the most demanding and most hair-raising of them, offers us the possibility of that new life and healing. God is always speaking to us in every event in our lives. For a Christian, there’s no such thing as a purely secular experience. The event may result from purely secular and contingent forces, but it always contains a faith-related message for us. Our task is to read that message. Fr. Rolheiser writes that we mostly hear God’s voice only in deeply painful experiences rather than in events that bring us joy and pleasure. But we shouldn’t misread this. It’s not that God speaks only through pain and is silent when things go right. In the words of C.S. Lewis, pain is God’s microphone to a deaf world. God is always speaking; most of the time, sadly, we aren’t listening. God doesn’t cause AIDS, global warming, the refugee situation in the world, a cancer diagnosis, world hunger, hurricanes, tornadoes, COVID, or any other such thing to teach us a lesson, but something in all of these invites us to try to discern what God is saying through them. It’s only when our hearts start breaking that we begin to attune ourselves to the voice of God.

Have you ever wondered if the mustard seed realized what it would become? In the familiar parable, Jesus compares the kingdom of God to a mustard seed, “the smallest of all the seeds on earth.” From such a small, seemingly insignificant start grows “the largest of plants,” with branches attracting birds of the sky. Deacon Greg Kandra writes that all of this is so improbable. “Let’s face it: the mustard seed is so small, the sort of thing most of us would easily overlook. But it holds something tantalizing; a tiny grain contains growth, life, shelter, and shade. Its future is vast—a story aching to be told, a purpose waiting to be fulfilled. How often do we forget that? And how often we forget this simple but humbling reality: life is full of mustard seeds. We share the world with so many who are easily neglected, abandoned, and swept away: the elderly, the poor, the disabled, the lonely, and the unborn. But Jesus assures us that every seed, even the smallest, contains possibility and purpose. Hold a seed in your hand, and you’re holding an unwritten future. We can’t begin to imagine what will come. Faith is like that. God’s kingdom is like that, too: a place where even those who feel small and forgotten are given the grace to grow. We become more than we ever thought possible. In this way, we are all mustard seeds. Do we realize what we can become?”