Daily Virtue Post

In his remarkable book, “The Inner Voice of Love,” Henri Nouwen shares these words: “The great challenge is living your wounds through instead of thinking them through. It is better to cry than to worry, better to feel your wounds deeply than to try to understand them, better to let them enter into your silence than to talk about them. The choice you face constantly is whether you are taking your hurts to your head or to your heart. In your head you analyze them, find their causes and consequences, and coin words to speak and write about them.  But no final healing is likely to come from that source. You need to let your wounds go down into your heart. Then you can live them through and discover that they will not destroy you. Your heart is greater than your wounds.” We need to embrace our wounded humanity and not act out. To grieve our human limitations and endure hunger, emptiness, disappointment, and humiliation without looking for a quick fix or for a fix at all is to not try to fill our emptiness too quickly without sufficient waiting. We won’t ever make peace with our wounds without sufficient grieving.

As our faults become more manifest in a relationship, others’ affection for us often does lessen. So, Fr. Rolheiser says, we do what comes naturally; we hide our faults and failures and try to reveal our strengths and achievements instead. This then carries over into our prayer, church, and even our most intimate relations with God. The same is true in our church lives: Invariably, when we most need God and the support of the community of faith, we stay away from church and community. This is manifest everywhere, sadly so. I know so many people, especially young people, who stop going to church because something is wrong in their lives. They stop going to church precisely until such a time when all on their own, they can somehow rectify the problem, and then they go back to church and present their “unsullied” selves, now seemingly more at rights with holiness and goodness. Generally, this expresses itself this way: “Given how I’m living, I would be a hypocrite if I went to church! I’m too honest and humble to go to church right now.” That may sound noble and humble, but it betrays a false understanding of God and ultimately does us no favors. For we can easily, if we are open to hearing, God say to us, “You must not know me very well if you think that a detailed account of your faults would in any way lessen the tenderness I feel towards you.” In fact, we might learn a lesson from Adam and Eve on this score. After they sinned, they too did what comes naturally; they hid and tried to camouflage their shame by their own efforts at clothing themselves. But their shame remained until God found them and gave them real clothing with which to cover their guilt. We do not know God very well when we fear coming into God’s presence, replete with all that is within us, weaknesses and strengths. Nothing we do can ever lessen God’s tenderness toward us.

We often too easily read this verse simplistically, romantically, and in a one-sided, over-confident manner. What does it mean to obey Jesus’ commandment to love? Fr. Rolheiser writes that this command to love one another, as Jesus has shown us his love contains the most important challenge of the gospel and, like the deepest part of the gospel to which it is linked, the crucifixion, is 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 that we are loving persons and measure up to Jesus’ command to love as he did. That command, love and forgive your enemies, more than any creedal formula or other moral issues, 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. Still, 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. There’s a sobering challenge in an old Stevie Nicks song, “Gold Dust Woman,” when she suggests that it’s good that, at a point in life, someone “shatters our illusion of love” because far too often, blind to its own true intentions, our love is manipulative and self-serving. Too often, the song points out, we are lousy lovers who unconsciously pick our prey. What shatters our illusion of love is the presence of people who hate us in our lives. They’re the test. Here, we have to measure up: If we can love them, we’re real lovers; if we can’t, we’re still under a self-serving illusion.

Our Gospel verse brings forth a warning of hatred in the world for believers. Jesus told the apostles, “Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” Fr. Rolheiser says, “We know this works for love, but does it also work for hatred? Can someone’s hatred follow us, even into eternity? That is not an easy question. Leo Tolstoy once said: “There is only one way to put an end to evil, and that is to do good for evil.” We see that in Jesus. Some hated him, and he died like that. However, that hatred lost its power over him because he refused to respond in kind. Rather, he returned love for hatred, understanding for misunderstanding, blessing for curse, graciousness for resentment, fidelity for rejection, and forgiveness for murder.” The choice is ours. Another person’s hatred holds us, but only if we meet it on its terms, hatred for hatred. We cannot make someone stop hating us, but we can refuse to hate them, and, at that moment, hatred loses its power to bind and punish us. Granted, this isn’t easy, certainly not emotionally. Hatred tends to have a sick, devilish grip on us, paralyzing in us the very strength we need to let it go. In that case, there’s still another salvific thing remaining. God can do things we cannot do for ourselves. Remember, we “can do all things in God who strengthens” us.

Mother Maria Skobtsova, in her “Essential Writings,” says there is not, and there cannot be any following in the steps of Christ without taking upon ourselves a certain share, small as it may be, of participation in the sacrificial deed of love. Gail Goleas writes in “Living Faith” that loving one another can be messy. Consider the clerk, briefcase in hand, headed toward the train station after work. The sidewalk was jammed with people going in the same direction, except for a homeless man asking for change. The clerk thought, “No problem.” He opened his wallet and discovered he only had a twenty-dollar bill. It was more than he wanted to give, but how could he say no? Overjoyed at what seemed like a windfall, the homeless man threw his arms around the clerk and lifted him off his feet. That caught the attention of a policeman, who called the clerk over to his squad car and asked, “Did you just give that guy money?” “Yes,” was his reply, and the policeman shook his head and laughed. As the clerk continued walking, a pigeon flew overhead and left a wet stain on his jacket. On the train ride home, he thanked God for the gift of humor and decided he would have dodged the pigeon if he had to do it all over again. Mother Maria closes by reminding us that one cannot love sacrificially in one’s own name, but only in the name of Christ, in the name of the image of God that is revealed to us.

Brother David Steindl-Rast, in his book, “The Way of Silence: Engaging the Sacred in Everyday Life,” writes about the connection between the joy Jesus speaks to in today’s verse and gratefulness. Brother David makes the case that most of us go through life missing its true splendor because “We plod along half-blind, half-deaf, with all our senses throttled, and numbed by habituation. How much joy is lost on us? How many surprises do we miss? It is as if Easter eggs had been hidden under every bush, and we were too lazy to look for them.” Joy goes beyond happiness because joy is not dependent on what happens. Joy springs from gratitude, which is the key to living life in its fullness. Here is a little exercise Brother David offers to help connect us to understanding gratefulness in a way that will lead to experiencing “complete” joy. Tomorrow morning, before you open your eyes, reflect on the reality that, at this very instant, there are millions of blind people in the world. Linger on that thought for a few moments. Now open your eyes. You are most likely initially grateful that you can still see. Brother David says, “As soon as we stop taking our eyesight for granted, gifts spring into our eyes which we did not even recognize as gifts before. To recognize a gift as gift is the first step towards gratefulness.” Since gratefulness is the key to joy, we hold the key to joy, the key to what we most desire, in our own hands.

Amid all the unknowns of today’s unprecedented chaos, there’s one thing we’re surely learning, how interconnected we all are. Fr. Brian Frain writes that this is such a contrast to the modern worldview of stringent individualism that we inherited from the Enlightenment era. It seems that we are not quite as autonomous as we imagined. And that’s a good thing. The demand for autonomy has bred an epidemic of loneliness, despair, and alienation. But we were not created to be self-sufficient. We were created to live connected to God and to each other. The key action of our verse today is to remain. It is translated in different ways: to stay, to abide, to live, to live in union. You can state it this way: “If you stay at home in me and I stay at home in you, you will bear much fruit.” Jesus is to be so much a part of our daily existence that He feels like home. Talking to Him becomes like talking to your best friend. Being with Him is like being at home on your favorite couch. We become like Jesus and do His great deeds not by trying harder or pumping up some spiritual energy. We do all of this by simply staying at home with Him. Bearing fruit then happens—because it’s ultimately His fruit, not ours. To make this point even more substantial, Jesus concludes this verse by stating the same truth in the negative: There is nothing you can do in terms of bearing fruit by yourself. Nothing. Zero. Zip. Let that sink in. It will change you.

The very darkness of the world seems to capture many people when Christ’s story gets to his passion. This most horrific suffering, death by crucifixion, represents the worst part of our humanness. Yet in the moments leading up to his suffering, Jesus is not sitting in fear worrying about himself. He is thinking of his disciples and his desire that they have peace. Fr. Kenneth Grabner writes that this promise of Jesus’ is our hope when we feel overwhelmed by life’s problems. Life offers us many joys, but it has its problematic side too. We might have to do something that seems beyond our strength. Perhaps we’re burdened by the unrealistic expectations of others. Whatever our difficulties, Jesus is with us to help us through them. Our trust in his presence enables us to mitigate our fear and strengthen our hope. I don’t think we can experience this strength fully without spending time with God in silent prayer. In attentive silence, we become aware of God’s guiding presence within us. When we experience his presence and surrender ourselves to it, a sense of hope flows into us that begins to transform our lives. That is God’s loving will for us.

St. Augustine wrote that God is not too grand to come, he is not too fussy or shy, and he is not too proud. On the contrary, he is pleased to come if you do not displease him. Listen to the promise he makes. Listen to him indeed promising with pleasure, not threatening in displeasure, “We shall come to him,” he says, “I and the Father.” To the one he had earlier called his friend, the one who obeys his precepts, the keeper of his commandment, the lover of God, the lover of his neighbor, he says, “We shall come to him and make our abode with him.” Henri Nouwen says that just as a whole world of beauty can be discovered in one flower, so the great grace of God can be tasted in one small moment. Just as no great travels are necessary to see the beauty of creation, no great ecstasies are needed to discover the love of God. But you have to be still and wait so that you can realize that God is not in the earthquake, the storm, or the lightning but in the gentle breeze with which he touches your back.

Since the fall of humankind, we have struggled with the falling apart of civilization. In our present time, we have faced a global pandemic, wars, and continued chaos in our communities with senseless acts of violence and disorder. In the early 1920s, William Butler Yeats wrote a poem entitled, The Second Coming. Its message is strong, adult, and ultimately quite depressing. Yeats sees a certain dissolution of civilization as he has known it; things are falling apart. What is at the root of this falling apart? He answers in a single line: “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.” Where can we find hope that in this life, we can believe in something greater than the darkness we see in the world? Fr. Rolheiser writes that it is to believe in a different credo: “I believe in the Resurrection.” I believe in the resurrection of Christ, precisely, to the degree that we believe that the center holds or does not hold, namely, to the degree that we can, in any circumstance of life, say and mean: “Lord, all things are possible for you.” And, in the end, this is not a theoretical thing, a matter of orthodoxy or raw intellectual commitment: Do I believe in God or not? Do I believe in the empty tomb? Can I say the creed and mean it? Notwithstanding that these are important, faith in the resurrection of Jesus is something more down-to-earth and ordinary. It is a practical thing, an everyday trust, a feeling, a sense, however inchoate but real, that, in the end, there is a deep anchor that is holding everything together and that we, for our part, can get on with the business of living and can live in trust, knowing that our inadequacies, failings, and even our deaths, are not the final answer. Faith is a practical thing. It is to trust that God is in charge, nothing more and nothing less. To believe in the resurrection, the essence of faith is to look at everything, including death, and believe that the center will hold.