Daily Virtue Post

When one looks at the miracles of Jesus, it is interesting to see that so many of them are connected to opening up or otherwise healing someone’s eyes, ears, or tongue. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that these miracles, of course, always have more than a physical significance. Eyes are opened to see more deeply and spiritually; ears are opened to hear things more compassionately; and tongues are loosened to praise God more freely and speak words of reconciliation and love to each other. Thomas Merton describes a revelation he had one day while standing on the corner of Fourth and Walnut in Louisville: “I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all of those people, that they were mine, and I, theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness. Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts, where neither sin, desire, nor self-knowledge can reach the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only we could all see each other that way all the time! There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed.” This is a world in which we hear, see, and speak from the depth of our great soul of oneness with God in which I become a different person altogether; those moments when I am overwhelmed by compassion when everyone is brother or sister to me when I want to give of myself without concern of cost when I can carry the tensions of life without a breakdown in my virtue when I would willingly die for others, and when my arms and my heart would want nothing other than to embrace the whole world and everyone in it.

Fr. Ron Rolheiser reminds us that there was a time before there was light. The universe was dark before God created light. However, eventually, the world grew dark again. When? We are told in the Gospels that as Jesus was dying on the cross, between the sixth and ninth hour, it grew dark, and Jesus cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me!” There’s a darkness that besets us whenever the forces of love seem overpowered by the forces of hatred. The light extinguished then is the light of hope, but there is deeper darkness, and this is the kind of darkness that the Gospels say formed a cloud over the world as Jesus hung dying. The renowned biblical scholar Fr. Raymond E. Brown tells us that the darkness that beset the world as Jesus hung dying would last until we believe in the resurrection. Until we believe that God has a life-giving response for all death and that God will roll back the stone from any grave, no matter how deeply goodness is buried under hatred and violence, the darkness of Good Friday will continue to darken our planet. Mohandas K. Gandhi said that we can see the truth of God always creating new light simply by looking at history. Throughout history, the way of truth and love has always won. There have been murderers and tyrants, and they can seem invincible for a time. But in the end, they always fall. Love conquered all, even death.

We can never be challenged too strongly about being committed to social justice. A key, non-negotiable summons that comes from Jesus himself is the challenge to reach out to the poor, the excluded, and those whom society deems expendable. Therefore, the vast global issue of justice should preoccupy us. Can we be good Christians or decent people without letting the daily news baptize us? The majority of the world still lives in hunger, thousands are dying of one pandemic after another, countless lives are torn apart by war and violence, and we are still, as a world, a long way from dealing realistically with racism, sexism, abortion, and the integrity of physical creation. These are major moral issues; we may not escape into our private world and simply ignore them. Thomas Merton believed that the real battle we face is one of changing hearts. He says you have helped bring about permanent structural, moral change on this planet when you change a heart. Everything else is simply one power attempting to displace another. In his teaching about the vital importance of honesty in small things, John of the Cross says: “It makes no difference whether a bird is tied down by a heavy rope or by the slenderest of cords; it can’t fly in either case.” You can generate more energy by splitting a single atom than you can by harnessing all the forces of water and wind on earth. Private morality is not an unimportant, unaffordable luxury, a soft virtue, or something that stands in the way of commitment to social justice. It’s the deep place where the moral atom needs to be split – Fr. Ron Rolheiser.

Fr. Ron Rolheiser speaks to the nature of emptying ourselves. He writes that the incarnation, the central mystery of our Christian faith, invites us to look down, investigate the small, and descend. Why? Because that is what God did in the incarnation. He emptied Himself, taking on the form of a slave. He became small, a helpless baby. The movement of God in Jesus Christ is a downward one. Thus, among other things, it invites us to enter into the experience of powerlessness. It invites us to look down, to investigate the small. It invites us to look for God in the baby rather than in the corporate magnate, the president, the prime minister, the rock star, the star athlete, the brilliant writer, the Nobel prize-winning scientist, or the Hollywood god or goddess. It is not that God cannot be present in these. To be Christian, to be persons who keep giving flesh to God in this world, we must ultimately be free of the tyranny of ambition and achievement, measuring our meaning and success from what gives us upward mobility. A valuable criterion to discern is whether we are following Christ or following our own desires. Are moving upward or downward? Are we deeming equality with God as something to be grasped at? Are we growing in power, prestige, and admiration? Or are we emptying ourselves and assuming the powerlessness of the poor?

As we approach Palm Sunday, Saint Peter Damian’s beautiful prayer foreshadows the hope for a nation of believers in what our savior will endure for us. “When your soul goes forth from your body, may the radiant company of angles come to meet you, and may your judge, the senate of the apostles, release you; may Christ, who suffered for you, rescue you from punishment; may Christ who was crucified for your sake, free you from excruciating pain; may Christ, who humbled himself to die for you, free you from death; may Christ, the Son of the living God, set you in the evergreen loveliness of his paradise, and may he, the true Shepherd, recognize you as one of his flock, may he free you from all your sins and assign you a place at his right hand in the company of his elect. May you see your Redeemer face to face, and standing in his presence forever, may you behold with blessed eyes Truth revealed in all its fullness. And so, having taken your place in the ranks of the saints, may you enjoy the sweetness of divine contemplation forever and ever. Amen.”

Looking at the world today, it is not easy to believe that everywhere Christ is born again, that God looks down on the wreckage and misery, the fiasco if you like, that we have made of the world, and, seeing us in the midst of it says, “This is my well-beloved Son!” Caryll Houselander writes that this is so, and however difficult or insignificant our life may seem, it is precious to God as Christ is precious to God. On each one in whom Christ lives, God’s infinite love is concentrated at every moment. If this were realized, there could be no one who could not fulfill the first condition of rest, which is trust. If it were not for Christ in us, we would be unable to trust. We are too weak and could not believe in God’s goodness if we had only ourselves to believe in; neither could we love one another if we had only ourselves to worship. We can trust God with Christ’s trust in the Father; that is the trust which is our rest. Our rest in a world that is full of unrest is Christ’s trust in his Father; our peace in a world without peace is our surrender, complete as the surrender of the sleeping child to its mother, of the Christ in us, to God who is both Father and Mother. 

Jesus was not concerned with the controversy many of his pronouncements created. Today was one of the most striking statements made to his Jewish audience, “Amen, amen, I say to you, before Abraham came to be, I AM.” In our catechesis, we learn early in our faith lives this wording of “I AM” was how God identified himself to Moses in the story of the burning bush, “If the Israelites ask me, ‘what is his name?’ what am I to tell them?” “God replied, ‘I am who I am.'” Jesus was making a direct statement of his relationship with the Father. Bishop Barron asks, “What does that mean when God defines himself this way? God is saying, in essence, that he cannot be defined, described, or delimited. God is not a being but rather the sheer act of to-be itself. The sheer act of being itself cannot be avoided, and it cannot be controlled. It can only be surrendered to in faith.” This was a revelatory moment and one that set the Lord on his journey to the cross.  

To “remain in my word” is to make our home in the heart of Christ. Fr. Kevin O’Brien writes that in that heart, we see ourselves as we truly are; beautifully gifted, flawed, and complicated creatures, called to serve as disciples amid an equally beautiful and broken world. We long for truth; we love it and endlessly search for it because it is the goal of our being. And one day, we will possess it completely. We want to live the spiritual life intensely and deeply, the interior life, the beginning of eternal life, and we wander blindly along this path of good, which we find most lovely, and upon which we sow our efforts, our struggles, and our desires. The gratuitous search for beauty, the passionate concern for justice, and the love of truth are so many paths that lead to God. The truth sets us free from all that gets in the way of our loving and being loved. While this interior work is not an easy grace, the freedom it leads to is transformative.

Fr. Herbert McCabe in God, Christ, and Us writes that it is hard to think of God but easy to think of the gods. If God were one of the gods, a powerful, the most powerful, inhabitant of the universe, then if we did what he decided we should indeed not be doing what we decided. We should be his puppets, manipulated from outside by another being. But God is not an inhabitant of the universe. He is not another being alongside us and competing with us. God the Creator is the author of the entire universe and of all that is in it. He is so far outside it that he is in every bit of it while not himself being a bit of it. He is not one of the beings. He is within every being keeping it in being. He is within you making you to be you. What you do freely you do from the depth within you that is yourself. But you also do it from the even greater depth within you that is God making you to be yourself. There are things in our universe that are not free but are always moved by other things. And there are things like ourselves that are sometimes not determined by other creatures but are free. But God is the author of them all.

In today’s reading from John’s Gospel, Jesus tells the woman caught in adultery, “go and sin no more.” The connection between Jesus and the woman is not the consequence of condemnation but rather the fruit of forgiveness offered and accepted. Nothing is as important as forgiveness. It is the key to happiness and the most crucial spiritual imperative in our lives. 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. Instead, 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.