Catholic For A Reason

Shortly after ordination, doing replacement work in a parish, I found myself in a rectory with a saintly old priest. He was over eighty, nearly blind, but widely sought out and respected, especially as a confessor. One night, alone with him, I asked him this question: “If you had your priesthood to live over again, would you do anything differently?” From a man so full of integrity, I had fully expected that there would be no regrets. So his answer surprised me.

Yes, he did have a regret, a major one, he said: “If I had my priesthood to do over again, I would be easier on people the next time. I wouldn’t be so stingy with God’s mercy, with the sacraments, with forgiveness. You see what was drilled into me was the phrase: `The truth will set you free,’ and I believed that it was my responsibility to challenge people so as to protect something inside of them. That’s good. But I fear that I’ve been too hard on people. They have pain enough without me and the church laying further burdens on them. I should have risked God’s mercy more!”

I was struck by this because, less than a year before, as I took my final exams in the seminary, one of the priests who examined me, gave me this warning: “Be careful,” he said, “never let your feelings get in the way. Don’t be soft, that’s wrong. Remember, hard as it is, only the truth sets people free!” Sound advice, it would seem, for a young priest.

However, as the years of my ministry move towards middle-age, I feel more inclined to the old priest’s advice: We need to risk God’s mercy more. The place of justice and truth should never be ignored, but we must risk letting the infinite, unbounded, unconditional, undeserved mercy of God flow free. The mercy of God is as accessible as the nearest water tap, and so we. like Isaiah, must proclaim a mercy that has no price tag: “Come, come without money and without virtue, come everyone, drink freely of God’s mercy!”

Divine Mercy is an unconditional, universal, and undeserved gift that embraces everyone, regardless of merit, religion, or personal weakness. This prodigal mercy challenges legalism, urging believers to move from a “stingy” or judgmental mindset to a generous, forgiving, and compassionate life.

It is interesting to note in the gospels how the apostles, well-meaning of course, often tried to keep certain people away from Jesus as if they weren’t worthy, as if they were an affront to his holiness or would somehow stain his purity. So they tried to shoe away children, prostitutes, tax-collectors, known sinners, and the uninitiated of all kinds. Always Jesus over-ruled their attempts with words to this effect: “Let them come! I want them to come.”

Things haven’t changed. Always in the church, we, well-intentioned persons, for the same reasons as the apostles, keep trying to keep certain individuals and groups away from God’s mercy as this is expressed in word, sacrament, and community. Jesus handled things then; I suspect that he can handle them now. God doesn’t want our protection. What God does want is for everyone, regardless of morality, orthodoxy, lack of preparation, age, or culture, to come to the unlimited waters of divine mercy.[Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Risking God’s Mercy,” Ocotber 2000]

Because the apostles were not renowned for scholarship, oratory, or theological education, their transformation speaks to the power of God rather than their own abilities. Jesus used “crooked lines” (the “uneducated,” fishermen, sinners) to start the church; God continues to work through imperfect, ordinary, and even dysfunctional people today.

When we are “learned and the clever,” we can more easily forget that we need others and consequently don’t as naturally reach for another’s hand as does a child. It’s easier for us to isolate ourselves. When we are less aware of our contingency, we more easily lose sight of the things to which God and life are inviting us.

The very strength that intelligence and learning bring into our lives can instill in us a false sense of self-sufficiency that can make us want to separate ourselves in unhealthy ways from others and understand ourselves as superior In some way.  And superiority never enters a room alone, but always brings along a number of her children: arrogance, disdain, boredom, cynicism. All of these are occupational hazards for the “learned and the clever” and none of these helps unlock any of life’s deep secrets.

But we must be careful not to misread the lesson. Faith does not ask us to not stretch our minds. Neither ignorance nor naiveté serve faith. Faith not only doesn’t fear the hard questions it invites us to ask them. The depths of infinity are never threatened by finite intelligence. And so it’s never a bad thing to become learned and sophisticated; it’s only a bad thing is we remain there. The task is to become post-sophisticated, that is, to remain full of intelligence and learning even as we put on again to the mindset of a child. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Things Hidden from the Learned and the Clever,” July 2011]

“There is a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in. ” Whatever else Leonard Cohen had in mind when he coined that phrase, it says something about how wisdom, compassion, and morality seep into our lives.

In our culture there are some whose lives, for whatever reason, are considered inferior and deemed not worthwhile. Moreover we are convinced that we may on occasion even snuff out the heartbeat of these persons. Euthanasia, abortion, and various kinds of mercy killing are being promoted precisely in the name of compassion, open-mindedness, and human dignity.

Imagine how soulless would be a world within which only the strong, the young, the healthy, the physically attractive, the intellectually bright, and the achievers have a place! Imagine how soulless would be a world that views the handicapped, the unborn fetus, the physically paralyzed, and the dying as having nothing to offer! Such a world would be able to recognize neither the birth nor the death of Jesus because, in both of these, compassion, morality, and wisdom seep in precisely through what is helpless and marginalized. Our present culture is drawing ever nearer this soullessness.

A world that sincerely believes that killing someone, anyone – be it Tracy Latimer, an unborn fetus, or a criminal on death row – can be an act that enhances human dignity has let its compassion be coopted and commandeered by vested interests. We will never admit this of course, but it is true.  The reason we do not see value in the lives of the severely handicapped, the terminally ill, those plagued by Alzheimer’s disease, and many of the other poor in the world is that these people precisely stand in the way of someone’s comfort, someone’s efficiency, someone’s rationality, someone’s supposed enlightenment, and someone’s limited compassion.

Better they should die than that this should be disturbed! In both the world and the church today we are becoming blind to one of the deepest truths that Jesus taught us in the crucifixion, namely, that what looks useless and meaningless has the deeper value. Inferiority builds soul.

Those who fall through the cracks of the culture are indeed the crack where the light gets in. If our world has any real soul left, if indeed we still even understand the words wisdom, compassion, and morality, then it is because someone who has no power in the culture, someone who has been marginalized and rejected, has shared a gift with us. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “The Rejected One As Cornerstone,” November 1998]

Today, it is rare that we hear someone simply and humbly say, beyond any reference to circumstances or excuses: “I’ve sinned.” There aren’t any excuses…outside of being human. We are poorer for not being able to say that.

When we refuse to admit that we sin, we are forced to be dishonest because, in the end, no one can, honestly, stand before God and others and not have to say: “I am weak, I do things I shouldn’t. The good I want to do, I cannot. The evil I want to avoid, I end up doing. I need forgiveness.” Not to say this, is to lie. Not to admit sin forces us to rationalize, to give excuses, to project blame, and to over-emphasize psychological and sociological influences on our behavior.

Forgiveness doesn’t wash away neuroses or immaturities. It washes away sin. It is when we humbly and simply own our sin that we take our place among God’s broken, the ones Jesus came to save, and are given the chance to start again, new, fresh, loved.

A man I know is fond of expressing his displeasure with his own moral failures by saying: “That was incredibly stupid…but it seemed like a good idea at the time!” That’s a contemporary form of the publican’s prayer. There’s an honesty in that which allows him to accept forgiveness.

Another person I know, a lady who has been coming to me for the sacrament of reconciliation for some time, always begins her confession with the beautiful phrase: “I am a loved sinner.” In that expression, she keeps in correct balance the most important truths of humanity: We are sinners, and we are loved in spite of it. To admit sin sets us free to receive love under the only condition it can be truly offered. To acknowledge that we are loved, in spite of sin, sets us free from false guilt and self-hatred.[Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Be Brave, Admit Your Sinfulness,” July 1988]

What do we do when we’re depressed? What’s our temptation when a dream is shattered, when we feel betrayed, and when it seems like the trust we’ve shown someone was childish naivety? Generally, the temptation is to gather what pride we have left and walk away, away from that person, away from that place of rejection, away from the humiliation, and away from our former dream, all the while saying to ourselves: “I’ll never trust in this way again! I’ve been burned, taken in, I now know the lesson!”

In Luke’s Gospel, we see this in the story of two dispirited disciples walking away from Jerusalem towards Emmaus on Easter Sunday morning, unaware that Jesus had risen from the dead. Luke writes that on the morning of the Resurrection, “two disciples were walking away from Jerusalem toward Emmaus, a village some seven miles away, their faces downcast.”

What they were doing was out of depression; their dream had been crucified when Jesus died. Indeed, when they describe their faith in Jesus, they use the past perfect tense: “We had hoped.” Their dream is over, dead. So is their faith.

This is a mystical image worth meditating. Like these dispirited disciples in Luke’s Gospel, we too, when faced with the kind of pain that brings us to our knees in agony and humiliation, too often are too discouraged and too disheartened to grasp the lesson that’s being taught. We “fall asleep out of sheer sorrow” and then, in our sadness and discouragement, we feel tempted to walk away from what’s hurting us and move instead towards some human consolation, towards something in the world that promises earthly compensation to replace our crucified dream of faith.

The good news is that Jesus finds us on that road and turns us around so that, like the disciples, we never actually get to Emmaus. Instead, after re-reading the scriptures and breaking the bread, we regain our vision and our idealism and find the courage to again return to our faith and to our church. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Walking Away Out of Sorrow,” March 2006]

Mary of Magdala’s Easter Prayer:
I never suspected Resurrection to be so painful… to leave me weeping
With joy to have met you, alive and smiling, outside an empty tomb.
With regret, not because I’ve lost you but because I’ve lost you in how I had you — in understandable, touchable, kissable, clingable flesh not as fully Lord, but as graspably human.

I want to cling, despite your protest cling to your body cling to your, and my, clingable humanity cling to what we had, our past.
But I know that…if I cling, you cannot ascend and
I will be left clinging to your former self …unable to receive your present spirit.

On Easter Sunday morning, Mary Magdalene goes out to the tomb to anoint the body of Jesus. But she finds him in a garden (the typical place where lovers meet). But she doesn’t recognize him. Jesus turns to her and, repeating the question with which the gospel began, asking her: “What are you looking for?” Mary replies that she is looking for the body of the dead Jesus, and could he give her any information as to where that body is. And Jesus simply says: “Mary.” He pronounces her name in love. She falls at his feet.

In essence, that is the whole gospel: What are we ultimately looking for? What is the end of all desires? What drives us out into gardens to search for love? The desire to hear God pronounce our names in love. To hear God lovingly saying our name: Daniel! [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Mary Magdala’s Easter Prayer,” April 1985]

The execution of Jesus had seemed final. Under the authority of Pontius Pilate, Roman soldiers had carried out the crucifixion with brutal efficiency. At the request of certain religious leaders, the tomb had even been secured, sealed, and guarded to prevent any tampering.

To them, this was necessary. Jesus had spoken of rising again, and rumors, they feared, could spread quickly during a crowded festival. So the stone was sealed. The guards were posted. The matter, it seemed, was closed. But something happened.

According to the account preserved in the Gospel of Matthew, the ground shook, and the tomb was found empty. The guards, trained, disciplined men, were shaken enough to report what they had experienced.

They did not go first to their Roman superiors, but to the chief priests. What followed, Matthew says, was a decision made in private. Money was brought out, and a story was agreed upon that the disciples stole the body of Jesus from the tomb.

Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes about the irony that the same religious and Roman authorities who sought to silence Jesus through death continued to use deception after his resurrection, specifically creating a false narrative that the disciples stole the body.

The Roman guards’ false testimony (that they slept while the body was stolen) was a desperate attempt by authorities to maintain control over the narrative and avoid the implications of Jesus rising from the dead. Despite this collusion between the soldiers and leaders to conceal the resurrection, God’s truth eventually triumphs, turning the darkness of their deception into the light of faith.

The very existence of the accusation that “the disciples stole the body” is significant. It suggests that something about the tomb required explanation. The complicity noted by Matthew is a classic human effort to hide behind “false stories” when confronted with undeniable facts that threaten their power.

The disciples were filled with their own worries as they traveled along the Emmaus road—they were filled with anxiety, and disappointment about the future. A stranger joined them on the road and they repeated the recent events—the crucifixion, the empty tomb, the testimony of the women about the angel visitation saying that Jesus had risen. But these two were not buying any of that because disappointment and anxiety hung around them. “We had hoped he was the one who would redeem Israel.”

That’s one of the most melancholy statements in Scripture—”we had hoped he would be the one…We had hoped….” We know how that feels, don’t we?  We had hoped our finances worked out differently. We had hoped our health was better.  We had hoped our kids would go to church. We had hoped there would be no more war by now. We had hoped we would stop wondering about our faith by this age.

It’s funny how worry and anxiety and disappointment can blind us from seeing what is right in front of our eyes. When the mind doesn’t believe something possible, it is hard for the senses to receive the information. Cleopas and his friend on the road to Emmaus were so anxious, and so certain that Jesus was still dead, that the risen Lord appeared to them, walked along beside them, taught them all about the Hebrew scriptures and how Jesus was the fulfillment of that—and they still did not see him. The light of the world was right beside them, but to their eyes, the risen Lord just looked like a fellow traveler on the way to Emmaus.

But Jesus met the disciples where they were at—walking away from Jerusalem, not believing the testimony of the empty tomb, and full of disappointment and anxiety. That’s exactly where Jesus shows up in our lives, too. It is so easy to believe that fears, worries, doubts, anxieties separate us from God, drive God away from us, disappoint Jesus and mean that we are somehow outside the family of God and circle of faith—but that is precisely where Jesus meets us, walks with us, engages us, loves us.

A friend of mine had a plaque in her kitchen that said, “Before you go to bed at night, give your worries to God, he’ll be up all night anyway!” Rev. Ralph Abernathy during the Civil rights movement once said, “I don’t know what the future holds, but I know Who holds the future.” Lay your worries at the altar, for the Risen One who reveals himself in the breaking of the bread, holds the night, and our future secure. (Excerpt from Linda Little’s “The Road to Emmaus: The Walk of Worry and Revelation,” May 2019]

In celebrating the Easter Vigil on Saturday evening, it is interesting to compare how scripture describes God creating the new light of the resurrection with how God created the original light at the origins of creation. The Gospel of John has a wonderfully revealing passage that describes Jesus’ first appearance to the whole community after his resurrection. It tells us that on the evening of Easter Sunday the disciples (representing here the church) were gathered in a room with the doors locked because of fear. Jesus comes to them, passing right through their locked doors, and stands in the middle of their huddled fearful circle and says to them, “Peace be with you!” And after saying this, he breathes on them and says: “Receive the Holy Spirit.”

Note the parallels to the original creation story. For the writer of John’s Gospel, this huddling in fear behind locked doors is the darkness of Good Friday, a moral “formless void”. And Jesus brings light to that darkness in the same way light was brought to the original creation, through God’s word and God’s breath. Jesus’ words, “Peace be with you!” are the resurrected Jesus’ way of saying, “Let there be light!” Then, just as at the original creation God’s breath begins to order the physical chaos, Jesus’ breath, the Holy Spirit, begins to order the moral chaos, continually turning darkness into light – hatred into love, bitterness into graciousness, fear into trust, false religion into true worship, ideology into truth, and vengeance into forgiveness.

Good Friday was bad long before it was good. We crucified God and plunged the world into darkness at midday. But God created light a second time, a light that cannot be extinguished even if we crucify God – and we have never really stopped doing that! Good Friday still happens every day. But, beyond wishful thinking and natural optimism, we live in hope because we now know God’s response to any moral darkness, God can generate, resurrection, the creation of new light, life beyond death. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Easter Light,” April 2023]

“It is fulfilled!” The Greek word here is Tetelesti.  This was an expression used by artists to signify that a work was completely finished and that nothing more could be added to it. It was also used to express that something was complete.

When is our life fulfilled? At what point in our lives do we say: “That’s it! That’s the climax! Nothing I can do from now on will outdo this. I’ve given what I have to give.”

Henri Nouwen suggests that people will answer this very differently: “For some it is when they are enjoying the full light of popularity; for others, when they have been totally forgotten; for some, when they have reached the peak of their strength; for others, when they feel powerless and weak; for some it is when their creativity is in full bloom, for others, when they have lost all confidence in their potential.”

For Jesus, it wasn’t immediately after his miracles when the crowds stood in awe, and it wasn’t after he had just walked on water. It wasn’t when his popularity reached the point where his contemporaries wanted to make him king that he felt he had accomplished his purpose in life and that people began to be touched in their souls by his spirit. None of these. When did Jesus have nothing further to achieve?

Henri Nouwen again, in answering this question: “We know one thing, however, for the Son of Man the wheel stopped when he had lost everything: his power to speak and to heal, his sense of success and influence, his disciples and friends – even his God. When he was nailed against a tree, robbed of all human dignity, he knew that he had aged enough, and said: ‘It is fulfilled’”

On the cross, faithful to the end, to his God, to his word, to the love he preached, and to his own integrity, he stopped living and began dying, and that’s when he gave off his seed and that’s when his spirit began to permeate the world. He had reached his deepest center, his life was fulfilled. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “When is our Life Fulfilled?” November 2018]