Daily Virtue Post

Joy is an infallible indication of God’s presence, just as the cross is an infallible indication of Christian discipleship. What a paradox! And Jesus is to blame. In our reading today from Luke’s Gospel we hear him being asked why he doesn’t encourage fasting among his followers. His answer: Why should they fast? The bridegroom is still with them. Someday the bridegroom will be taken away and they will have lots of time to fast. His counsel here speaks in a double way: More obviously, the bridegroom refers to his own physical presence here on earth which, at a point, will end. But this also has a second meaning: The bridegroom refers to the season of health, youth, joy, friendship, and love in our lives. We need to enjoy those things because, all too soon, accidents, ill health, cold lonely seasons, and death will deprive us of them. We may not let the inevitable prospect of cold lonely seasons, diminishment, ill health, and death deprive us of fully enjoying the legitimate joys that life offers. Genuine enjoyment, as Jesus taught and embodied, is integrally tied to renunciation and self-sacrifice.

And so, it’s only when we can give our lives away in self-renunciation that we can thoroughly enjoy the pleasures of this life, just as it is only when we can genuinely enjoy the legitimate pleasures of this life that we can give our lives away in self-sacrifice. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “The Gospel Challenge to Enjoy Our Lives” July 2017

Ron Rolheiser writes about his leaving home to enter the seminary at age seventeen. “Everything I owned in the world fit into one medium-sized suitcase (and it wasn’t full). Now I can’t go for even a week carrying so little. From a certain point onward in our lives we begin to accumulate things, often without really realizing it.” Today’s theme from Luke’s Gospel speaks to the Lord’s call to detach ourseleves completely from the attachment of things that possess us that are not of the Lord.

The first thing that generates surplus baggage in our lives is our grandiosity. It feeds off our achievements, successes, ambitions daydreams, and the recognition we receive in life. Next come our wounds – the hurts, resentments, and rejections that we have suffered through the years.  Then there are our sexual fantasies, our imaginings (both noble and coarse) of consummation, of sexual fulfillment, of physical and emotional ecstasy. Then there is the psychological bric-a-brac of our lives: our television sitcoms, the sports scores, the talk shows, and the current gossip and humour about the celebrities in the culture. Any extra space inside ourselves is crammed with these. Finally there is health and life itself.  To ensure these, we have, literally, cabinets full of medicines, vitamins, and cosmetics, along with a basement full of exercise equipment – matching all kinds of internal baggage we have stored as a resource to insure health, youth, attractiveness, and life.

Like the rooms in our houses, every day that we live, our internal rooms too fill up with more and more stuff – valuable things, toxic things, and junk. It challenges our ability to “center life” around the Lord – having but one priority each day to start and end that day doing His will. Julian of Norwich states that we will cling to God only when we no longer cling to everything else. Robert Barron writes that in many ways, everything else in your life becomes secondary, is commentary. When the Lord Jesus Christ gets into your boat, he will always lead you to the depths. Rohr expresses this idea: As we get older, he submits, the real task of life, both in terms of human growth and life in God, is to begin to shed things, to carry less and less baggage, to slim-down spiritually and psychologically to match the meagerness of  the possessions we  had  when we  were seventeen years  old and could still put  all we own  into  one little suitcase. “Naked I came from my mother’s womb and naked I go back again. The Lord gives and the Lord takes. Blessed be the name of the Lord.” 

Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Shedding Things” July 1998

Where does God speak in our world? How does God speak? Clearly he speaks to us through his words in scripture. But how do we “hear” that word that is read and then how do we share that word with other’s?

God’s voice in this world is never coercive or overbearing in any way, but is always an invitation and a beckoning that respects you and your freedom in a way that no human institution or person ever does. God’s voice is thoroughly underwhelming, like a baby’s presence. God’s voice does judge and it does condemn, but it judges and condemns not by coercive force, but in the same way that the innocence of a baby judges false sophistication, in the way that generosity exposes selfishness, in the way that big-heartedness reveals pettiness, in the way that light makes darkness flee, and in the way that the truth shames lies. God’s voice judges us not by overpowering us but by shining love and light into all those places were we find ourselves huddled in fear, shame, bitterness, hostility, and sin.

In reading God’s word we need to find the few words that we can take and truly own as our own – and then speak them, clearly but softly – never in anger, bitterness, or selfish indulgence. God is love and we must speak in love when sharing his word.

Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “God’s Voice as Invitation” April 2007

In John’s Gospel account of the resurrection, he tells the story of how on the morning of the first Easter, the Beloved Disciple runs to the tomb where Jesus has been buried and peers into it. He sees that it is empty and that all that’s left there are the clothes, neatly folded, within which Jesus’ body had been wrapped. And, because he is a disciple who sees with the eyes of love, he understands what this all means, he grasps the resurrection, and knows that Jesus has risen. He sees spring. He understands with his eyes. Hugo of St. Victor once famously said: Love is the eye. When we see with love, we not only see straight and clearly, but we also see depth and meaning. The reverse is also true. It is not for some arbitrary reason that, after Jesus rose from the dead, some could see him and others could not. Love is the eye. Those searching for life through the eyes of love, like Mary of Magdala searching for Jesus in the Garden on Easter Sunday morning, see spring and the resurrection. Any other kind of eye, and we’re blind in springtime. Without the eyes of love, we’re blind to both spring and the resurrection.[1]

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[1] Excerpt from Fr. Ron Rolheiser’s reflection, “Seeing Spring and Easter,” April 2012.

And there is a huge irony in how it is described. Jesus is on trial, but the story is written in such a way that, in effect, everyone is on trial, except Jesus. The Jewish authorities who orchestrated his arrest are on trial for their jealousy and dishonesty. The Roman authorities who wield the final power on the matter are on trial for their religious blindness. Jesus’ friends and contemporaries are on trial for their weakness and betrayal. Those who challenge Jesus to invoke divine power and come off the cross are on trial for their superficial faith. And, not least, each of us is on trial for our own weaknesses, jealousies, religious blindness, and superficial faith. The transcript of the trial of Jesus reads like a record of our own betrayals. Recently the church has tried to help us grasp this by the manner in which it has the Passion proclaimed on Palm Sunday and Good Friday. In many churches today when the Passion is read the narrative is broken up in such a way that one narrator proclaims the overall text, another person takes the part of Jesus, several others take the parts of the various people who spoke during his arrest and trial, and the congregation as a whole is asked to proclaim aloud the parts that were spoken by the crowds. This could not be more appropriate because a congregation in any Christian church today, and we, as individual members of those congregations, in our actions and in our words, in countless ways, mimic perfectly the actions and words of Jesus’ contemporaries in their weaknesses, betrayals, jealousies, religious blindness, and false faith. We too indict Jesus countless times by how we live. It is the same when the crowds say to Pilate: “We have no king, except Caesar!” In saying this, they were abandoning their own messianic hopes in favor of a momentary security. We say the same thing every time when, for our own well-being, we sell-out our higher ideals and settle for second best. As well, all too frequently, we mimic the words of the crowds who challenged Jesus as he was hanging on the cross with these words: “If you are the Son of God, come off the cross, save us, and save yourself.” We do this every time we let our prayers become a test of God’s existence and goodness; if we get a positive answer, God loves us, if not, we begin to doubt. Generally, on reading the account of Jesus’ Passion and Death, our spontaneous inclination is to judge very harshly those who surrounded Jesus at his arrest, trial, and sentencing: How could they not see what they were doing? How could they be so blind and jealous? How could they choose false security over God’s ultimate shelter? A murderer over the Messiah? How could his followers so easily abandon him? Not much has changed in 2000 years. The choices that those around Jesus were making during his trial and sentencing are identical to the choices we are still making today. And most days we are not doing any better than they did because, still, far too often, given blindness and self-interest, we are saying: Away with him! Crucify him![1]

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[1] Excerpt from Fr. Ron Rolheiser’s reflection, “The Transcript of Our Trial” April 2014.

The children we have are never really ours. They are given to us, in trust, for a time, a short time really, and we are asked to be mothers and fathers, stewards, mentors, guardians, teachers, priests, ministers, and friends to them, but they are never really our children. They belong to somebody else, God, and to themselves more than they ever belong to us. There is both a deep challenge and a deep consolation in understanding and accepting that. If we accept this, we will be less inclined to act as “owners” of our children and we will be less prone to manipulate our children for our own ends, to see them as a satellites within our own orbits, and more inclined to love, cajole, challenge, and correct, even while giving them their freedom. When we realize, in the healthy sense, that our children are not really ours, we also realize that we are not alone in raising and caring for them. We are, in a manner of speaking, only foster parents. God is the real parent and God’s love, care, aid, and presence to our children is always in excess of our own. God’s anxiety for our children is also deeper than our own. God can touch, challenge, soften, and inspire at levels inside of a child that you cannot reach. Fear not you are inadequate! You can live with that. You’re only a foster parent. God is the real parent.[1]

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[1] Excerpt from Fr. Ron Rolheiser’s reflection, “Not Our Own Children,” July 2006.

My mother and father had strong faith. They prayed every day and had us, as a family, pray with them. One of the prayers they said daily was the SALVE REGINA, an old, classic prayer which asks Mary to intercede for us. Many of us, I suspect, are familiar with it. At one point it describes our state in this life as “mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.” Is this a healthy way to describe ourselves? They never gave it a thought. For them, it made eminent sense to pray like that. For many of us today, it would seem, it doesn’t make sense any more. To describe ourselves as “mourning and weeping in a valley of tears” seems for many of us to be morbid, bad theology, an affront to the spirit of wholeness, celebration, and joy that should permeate our lives. There can be a lot of value in praying in exactly this way. What a prayer like this does is give us permission to not feel abnormal precisely when we aren’t bubbling with happiness. What it tells us is that it’s okay to have a bad day, a lonely season, a life that somehow never fully gets free of tension and restlessness. To accept that we live in an habitual state of incompleteness is to not let an unrealistic ideal crucify what’s good in our lives. Karl Rahner, in his unique Germanic phraseology, has his own take on this. Rahner: In the torrent of the insufficiency of everything attainable, we come to realize that here in this life all symphonies remain unfinished. My parents understood that and for them this was expressed precisely in lines like: “We pray, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.” Praying like this gave them permission to accept the inevitable limitations that life imposes. It gave them permission too to not have to demand from this life something it can never give, clear-cut pure joy. They didn’t have to do violence to life because it couldn’t give them everything they wanted. They accepted the unfinished symphony of their lives – and of all lives – and, because of that, were able to enjoy the beauty and joy that was there. They were equipped, in ways that we aren’t, to handle frustration. For all of our emphasis on health, holism, and positive theology, and for all of our attempts to exorcize everything that suggests limits, how equipped are we really to deal with life’s inevitable frustrations?[1]

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[1] Excerpt from Fr. Ron Rolheiser’s reflection, “Weeping in a Valley of Tears,” November 2000.

We are forever searching for God, though mostly without knowing it. Our normal search for meaning, fulfillment, and even for pleasure, is in fact our search for God. By nature, we search for meaning, love, a soulmate, friendship, emotional connection, sexual fulfillment, significance, recognition, knowledge, creativity, play, humor, and pleasure. However, we tend not to see these pursuits as searching for God. In our minds, we are simply looking for happiness, meaning, fulfillment, and pleasure, and our search for God is something we need to do in another way, more consciously through some explicit religious practices. Well, we are not the first persons to think like that. It has always been this way. For instance, St. Augustine struggled with exactly this, until one day he realized something. “Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you! You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you. In my unloveliness I plunged into the lovely things which you created. You were with me, but I was not with you. … You called, you shouted, and you broke through my deafness. You flashed, you shone, and you dispelled my blindness.” This is an honest admission that he lived a good number of years not loving God; but it is also an admission that, during those years, he had massively misunderstood something and that misunderstanding lay at the root of his failure. His recognition that for all those years while he was searching for life in the world, a search he generally understood as having nothing to do with God, he was actually searching for God. Reading his confession, we tend to focus on the first part of it, namely, on his realization that God was inside of him all the while, but that he was not inside of himself. This is a perennial struggle for us too. Best to realize this early, so we do not have to write: “Late, late, have I loved you!” [1]

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[1] Excerpt from Fr. Ron Rolheiser’s reflection, “Our Unconscious Search fpr God” February 2021.

Henri Nouwen, remarking on what he learned from this inner darkness, collapse, and his eventual return to health, writes that, in the end, our hearts are stronger than our wounds. His affirmation that our hearts are stronger than our wounds and the (seeming) antithetical truth that sometimes our wounds can kill the heart, we need to add a further truth which embraces both sides of this: God’s grace, forgiveness, and love are stronger than our wounds, our collapses, our failures, and seeming despairs. Sometimes, in our struggles, we can access the inner strength buried below our wounds, which will enable us to rise above them and walk again in health, strength, and enthusiasm. However, sometimes our wounds so paralyze the heart that we can no longer access the strength that lies deep within us. In this life, that kind of brokenness can look and feel like a terminal collapse, a sadness for which there is no healing, a despair, a wasted life. However, whenever a collusion of bitter circumstance and mental fragility break someone, when a person’s heart is no longer stronger than his or her wounds, we can take refuge in a deeper truth and consolation, namely, the strength that lies within God’s heart: God’s grace, understanding, and love are stronger than our wounds, our collapses, our failures, and seeming despairs. What sets Christian faith apart from most other religions (as well as from all prosperity gospels) is that Christianity is a religion of grace and not primarily of self-effort (important though that is). As Christians, we don’t have to save ourselves, and we don’t have to get our lives right all on our own. Indeed, nobody ever does. As St. Paul says so clearly in his farewell message in Romans 1-8, none of us ever get our lives right on the basis of our own strength. That’s also true in terms of overcoming our wounds. All of us are weak and break down sometimes. However, and this is the point, when the storms of life overpower us, when we reach down for strength to withstand the storm only to find out that the storm is stronger than we are, we need then to reach still deeper and there we will find that God’s heart is stronger than our brokenness.[1]

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[1] Excerpt from Fr. Ron Rolheiser’s reflection, “Our Heart is Stronger than Our Wounds” April 2021.

It’s hard not to envy the amoral, especially if you’re dutifully trying to be faithful to. It’s one thing to be responsible and dutiful, it’s quite another be grateful for living that way. The danger is that, like the older brother of the Prodigal Son, we end up doing the right thing and then becoming bitter about having to do it. What happens then is that we stand outside the circle of the dance, angry, secretly jealous of the amoral, protesting that life isn’t fair, that God isn’t fair: “I’ve stayed home, done my duty, never seriously strayed, and now the fuss is all about others who have had a fling and haven’t been as faithful as I!” Check out your reaction to this, namely, a classical death-bed conversion. You hear tell of a man who lives his life entirely oblivious to spiritual and moral affairs. He is interested rather in other kinds of affairs. A dilettante, irresponsible, selfish, he deems life only for the pleasure it can bring. He pursues the good life, pleasures of every kind, comfort, luxurious vacations, sexual irresponsibility, without a thought to God, the poor, or duty of any kind. And so he lives from his youth until old age. Then, just before dying, he repents, makes a sincere confession, and dies prayerfully, throwing himself into the arms of God at the last minute in genuine sincerity. What’s your spontaneous reaction to that? The lucky beggar! He got to have a fling and now he gets heaven besides! Yet like the older brother of the prodigal son, we have not yet understood God’s grace. If we understood the grace we live in then, like the Father of the Prodigal Son, we would be deeply grateful because someone who has missed out on so much of life has finally, again, come back to life. What a sincere death bed conversion reveals is that going the way of the Prodigal Son does not constitute life, but is a stepping away from it, an abandoning of happiness, an act of despair. But God, as the parable of the Prodigal Son makes clear, is equally as gentle with the bitter as with the prodigal. The Father’s words to the older brother as just as loving and forgiving (and revealing) as are his words to the prodigal son: “My child, you have always been with me and everything I have is yours.” When one owns everything, he or she does not become bitter and jealous over someone else’s pleasure. Grace, like the sun, is free and its warmth and light dwarf all else.[1]

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[1] Excerpt from Fr. Ron Rolheiser’s reflection, “On Envying the Amoral” April 2002.