Catholic For A Reason

A sound theology and a sound science will both recognize that the law of gravity and the Holy Spirit are one in the same principle. There isn’t a different spirit undergirding the physical than the spiritual. There’s one spirit that’s speaking through both the law of gravity and the Sermon on the Mount.

We first meet the person of the Holy Spirit in the opening line of the Bible: In the beginning there was a formless void and the Spirit of God hovered over the chaos. In the early chapters of the Scriptures, the Holy Spirit is presented as a physical force, a wind that comes from the very mouth of God and not only shapes and orders physical creation but is also the energy that lies at the base of everything, animate and inanimate alike: Take away your breath, and everything returns to dust.

The ancients believed there was a soul in everything and that soul, God’s breath, held everything together and gave it meaning. They understood that the same breath that animates and orders physical creation is also the source of all wisdom, harmony, peace, creativity, morality, and fidelity. God’s breath was understood to be as moral as it is physical, as unifying as it is creative, and as wise as it is daring. For them, the breath of God was one force and it did not contradict itself. The physical and the spiritual world were not set against each other. One Spirit was understood to be the source of both.

We need to understand things in the same way. We need to let the Holy Spirit, in all its fullness, animate our lives. What this means concretely is that we must not let ourselves be energized and driven too much by one part of the Spirit to the detriment of other parts of that same Spirit. 

Thus, there shouldn’t be creativity in the absence of morality, education in the absence of wisdom, sex in the absence of commitment, pleasure in the absence of conscience, and artistic or professional achievement in the absence of personal fidelity. Not least, there shouldn’t be a good life for some in the absence of justice for everyone. Conversely, however, we need to be suspicious of ourselves when we are moral but not creative, when our wisdom fears critical education, when our spirituality has a problem with pleasure, and when our personal fidelity is over-defensive in the face of art and achievement. One Spirit is the author of all of these. Hence, we must be equally sensitive to each of them.  Someone once quipped that a heresy is something that is nine-tenths true. That’s our problem with the Holy Spirit. We’re forever into partial truth when we don’t allow for a connection between the law of gravity and the Sermon on the Mount. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “The Law of Gravity and the Holy Spirit” January 2024]

Several years ago, a friend of mine made a very unromantic type of marriage proposal to his fiancé. In essence, this was his proposal: “I’d like to ask you to marry me but I need to put my cards on the table. I don’t pretend to know what love means. There was a time in my life when I thought I did, but I’ve seen my own feelings and the feelings of others shift too often in ways that have made me lose confidence in my understanding of love. So, I’ll be honest, I can’t promise that I will always feel in love with you. But I can promise that I’ll always be faithful, that I’ll always treat you with respect, that I’ll always do everything in my power to be there for you to help further your own dreams, and that I’ll always be an honest partner in trying to build a life together. I can’t guarantee how I will always feel, but I can promise that I won’t betray you in infidelity.”

When I was in the seminary, a classmate of mine set off one summer to make a thirty-day retreat. His aim was to try to acquire a faith that he would feel with more fervor, which would more affectively warm his heart. By his own admission, he lacked affectivity, fire, emotion, and warmth about his faith and he went off in search of that.

“I never got what I asked for,” he said in his return from the retreat, “but I got something else. I learned to accept that my faith might always be stoic, and I learned too that this is okay…Faith for me now means that I need to live my life in charity, respect, patience, chastity, and generosity. I just need to do it; I don’t need to always feel it.”

Faith and love are too easily identified with emotional feelings, passion, fervor, affectivity, and romantic fire. And those feelings are part of love’s mystery, a part we are meant to embrace and enjoy. But, wonderful as these feelings can be, they are, as experience shows, fragile and ephemeral. Our world can change in fifteen seconds because we can fall in or out of love in that time. Passionate and romantic feelings are part of love and faith, though not the deepest part, and not a part over which we have much emotional control.

Like my colleague with the “stoic” faith, some of us might have to settle for a faith that says to God, to others, and to ourselves: I can’t guarantee how I will feel on any given day. I can’t promise I will always have emotional passion about my faith, but I can promise I’ll always be faithful, I’ll always act with respect, and I will always do everything in my power, as far as my human weakness allows, to help others and God.

Love and faith are shown more in fidelity than in feelings. We can’t guarantee how we will always feel, but we can live in the firm resolve to never betray what we believe in! [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Love and Faith as Fidelity” February 2025]

A few years ago, I had a friend who was a very respected and successful business man. He doted on his employees who loved for it. He told me: “There isn’t one of them, my employees, who wouldn’t give me the shirt off his or her back. I’ve been good to everyone of them.”His problem wasn’t there. It was at home with his family. He had a drinking problem and all the inconsistencies that come with that.

Simply put, he was never as nice at home as he was at the office. Here is how he would generally put things to me: “Everyone likes me, except my family. I suspect that it’s because they can’t deal with my popularity. I go to the office and there isn’t one person there who isn’t indebted to me, whom I haven’t helped specially. We have a good atmosphere there. We laugh a lot and I’m appreciated. Then I go home … well, everything changes! Half the time everyone is avoiding me. If I’m upstairs, they’re all downstairs; if I’m downstairs, they’re all upstairs. They’re forever on my case about one thing or another. If I come home late a couple of times or miss a family thing I said I’d be there for it’s as if committed murder in public. I am fed up with it, being the leper at home, just because I miss the odd thing. They don’t love and appreciate me like the folks do at the office. I’m not asking for much at home, just a little understanding!”

A nice guy at office and an angry alcoholic at home! He didn’t see the glaring inconsistency. For him, the problem was simply that his wife and children were not as appreciative of him as they should be and as he deserved.

Jesus once told a very similar story: Once upon a time there was a judge in a certain town who was well respected by everyone and, in public, people used to bring out gifts and give them to him because he had been good to them. Everyone respected him, except one widow to whom he hadn’t given justice. She hounded him, demanding her just due. Finally, he said to himself: “I fear neither God nor man, but if I don’t give her justice she will hound me to death!” He gave her her due.

The moral of all this, then, is that we are asked to hear God’s voice in the persons who upset us, that is, in those people who, for whatever reason, are not very impressed with us. Usually that is the people we live with. Obviously, the principle breaks down when that voice is an abusive one. The gospel does not ask us to let ourselves be abused, but it does ask us to make an option for the poor and that option, like the house of God itself, has many surprising rooms, some of which are not very romantic or much to our liking.

Thus, beware of the voice that humbles you: It might just be one of God’s widows, puncturing your persona, and calling you to justice and honesty. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Listening to Your Widows” July 1996]

In today’s Gospel, Jesus is passive as soldiers jeer at him on the Cross. This comes after his silence before Pontius Pilate, who sentences him to death. As Luke Timothy Johnson notes in his commentary on the Gospel of Luke, this response could only have been “disappointing” to those in Jesus’ time, whether “Jew or Greek,” to use the New Testament distinction. For many Jews, accustomed to reading about Moses boldly standing before Pharaoh, and for many Greeks, steeped in tales of Socrates responding “stirringly” to the Athenian judges, a mute leader might have seemed an aberration at best. 

And perhaps our readings for the “Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe” are disappointing to some Christians today. In recent years, we’ve seen an uptick in the number of people, at least in the United States, who proclaim either on T-shirts, social media or bumper stickers: “Christ is my king!” Well, he’s my king too of course. But the question needs to be asked: What kind of king is he to you? More importantly, what kind of king do we find in the Gospel?

Certainly not one concerned with the outward signs of power, domination or arrogance that we usually associate with earthly rulers. During the temptation in the desert, when Satan offers Jesus authority over all the world, he declines it. Later, after Jesus performs many miracles and the crowds press to make him a king, he escapes them. In time, Jesus accepts the designation of “Christ” (anointed one) when Peter identifies him as such, but he immediately reminds Peter that the Christ must suffer. And finally, in what may be his most “triumphal” moment, when he enters Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, with the crowds receiving him rapturously, he arrives on a lowly donkey. 

Our desire for a mighty king (or queen) is not surprising. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be led by a benevolent person who has our best interests in mind and who can, on his or her own, simply make life easier for all of us? But that desire, though compelling, is almost always misplaced. There are no perfect rulers and history has shown that Lord Acton was right: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” That fact has been a disappointment (and a tragedy) for people for centuries.

So who is our king? It is Jesus, the Christ, who rules by way of service, poverty and humility. He says and demonstrates this truth too many times in the Gospels to even name them. He is even willing to suffer on behalf of others. Jesus is a “servant leader,” always putting the needs of others, especially those who are poor or marginalized in any way, before his own. Go and do likewise.

[Excerpt from Fr. James Martin, S.J. “Christ is my king. But what kind of king is he?” Outreach, November 2025]

Some of my favorite authors are agnostics, men and women who face life honestly and courageously without faith in a personal God.  They’re stoics mostly, persons who have made peace with the fact that God may not exist and that perhaps death ends everything for us. I see this, for example, in the late James Hillman, a man whom I greatly admire and who has much to teach believers about what it means to listen to and honor the human soul.

But here’s something I don’t admire in these agnostic stoics: While they face with courage what it should mean for us if God doesn’t exist and death ends our personal existence, they don’t, with the same courage ask the question of what it should mean for us if God does exist and death does not end our personal existence. What if God does exist and what if the tenets of our faith are true? They need too to face that question.

I believe that God exists, not because I have never had doubts, or because I was raised in the faith by persons whose lives gave deep witness to its truth, or because perennially the vast majority of people on this planet believe in God. I believe that a personal God exists for more reasons than I can name: the goodness of saints; the hook in my own heart that has never let me go; the interface of faith with my own experience, the courage of religious martyrs throughout history; the stunning depth of Jesus’ teachings; the deep insights contained in other religions, the mystical experience of countless people; our sense of connection inside the communion of saints with loved ones who have died; the convergence of the anecdotal testimony of hundreds of individuals who have been clinically dead and resuscitated back to life.

I believe that God exists because faith works; at least to the extent we work at it. The existence of God proves itself true to the extent that we take it seriously and live our lives in face of it.  Simply put, we’re happy and at peace to the exact extent that we risk, explicitly or implicitly, living lives of faith. The happiest people I know are also the most generous, selfless, gracious, and reverent persons I know. That’s no accident.

None of this, of course, proves God’s existence with the kind of proof we find in science or mathematics; but God isn’t found at the end of an empirical test, a mathematical equation, or a philosophical syllogism. God is found, explicitly or implicitly, in living a good, honest, gracious, selfless, moral life, and this can happen inside of religion or outside of it. Yet in the end, we will find that God is eternal and that it was what he intended for all that believe in him. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Why I Believe in God” August 2018]

The more we bump into the folks who are so-called “other,” the more we are stretched and the more we are pulled out of bias. We have new truths, because we have tangible evidence of the beautiful, powerful creativity of our God who made all of this diversity for us to enjoy.  

Dr. Jacqui Lewis writes: “The one we follow into mission and ministry—Jesus the Christ—was an avowed boundary crosser, a reformer of the religious and secular culture of his time. We are in good company when we lead the way on radical inclusion of those different from ourselves. In some contexts that might mean a black church reaching out to Korean neighbors, a Latino congregation starting a ministry to immigrant families from North Africa, or a Chinese church hosting an afterschool program for African American junior high students. We believe the commitment to inclusion and diversity is a high calling, issued to all who count themselves as Christians, no matter what our ethnicity or culture.”

When we don’t have intense and sustained personal contact with “the other,” our prejudices and false assumptions go unchallenged. Think of the child who is told by people he trusts that people of another race, religion, culture, sexual orientation, or class are dirty and dangerous. 

You can immediately see the self-reinforcing cycle: those people are dirty or dangerous, so I will distrust and avoid them, which means I will never have sustained and respectful interactive contact with them, which means I will never discover that they are actually wonderful people to be around. 

In this way, the prejudice cycle spins on, unchallenged across generations. As prejudice persists, it becomes embedded in cultures and institutions, creating systems of racism and hatred, marginalizing groups who are stigmatized, dehumanized, scapegoated, exploited, oppressed, or even killed.   

I especially love the way Jesus challenges contact bias. Jesus reached out to the other at the table and put the other in the spotlight by giving the other a voice. On page after page of the Gospels, Jesus doesn’t dominate the other, or avoid the other. Instead, he incarnates into the other, joins the other in solidarity, protects the other, listens to the other, serves the other, and even lays down his life for the other…. In each case, he moves victims of scapegoating and exclusion from the margins to center stage so their voices are heard.[Excerpt from Brian McLaren’s,“Why Don’t They Get It?” 2019]

Perhaps the deepest imperative within the entire moral life is that of being non-violent. It undergirds everything else: Thou shalt not violate others! So reads the most basic of all commandments. But, for all its importance, it is a certain moral minimum. Beyond being non-violent, we are asked to be, positively, peacemakers. However, all efforts at peace-making must be predicated on non-violence. Violent efforts that try for peace are themselves part of the problem.

All our actions for peace must be rooted in the power of love and the power of truth and must be done for the purpose of making that power known and not for making ourselves known. Our motivation must always be to open people to the truth and not to show ourselves as right and them as wrong. Our best actions are those which admit our complicity and are marked by a spirit of genuine repentance and humility. Our worst actions are those that seek to demonstrate our own righteousness, our purity, and our moral distance from the violence we are protesting.

Action done in public always carries with it the great danger of presumption. Hence it should always be done in the spirit of humility and invitation. Judgement, arrogance, and exclusiveness, which so often mark our protest, are signs of spiritual immaturity and protest characterized by such things will have the effect of hardening hearts and cementing people in their present opinions.

Genuine peacemaking springs from genuine hope. 1960’s and 70’s peace activist, Bill Stringfellow, once scolded a peace group by telling them something to this effect: “I notice in your conversations a drastic omission, the resurrection. The victory of God over death is already assured and our modest task in peace-making is simply to live in a way that reveals that fact. We do not have to triumph over death by our own inspiration, efforts, and strategy. We do not have to defeat death all over again. Psalm 58 tells us: ‘Surely there is God who rules over the earth!’  We must never forget that. That hope, and not anger, must direct protest. Moreover, that hope, belief in the resurrection, is not a feeling or a mood, it is a necessary choice for survival.”[Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s, “Some Rules for Peacemaking” October 1994]

There’s a real difference between our achievements and our fruitfulness, between our successes and the actual good that we bring into the world.

What we achieve brings us success, gives us a sense of pride, makes our families and friends proud of us, and gives us a feeling of being worthwhile, singular, and important. We’ve done something. We’ve left a mark. We’ve been recognized. And along with those awards, trophies, academic degrees, certificates of distinction, things we’ve built, and artifacts we’ve left behind comes public recognition and respect. We’ve made it. We’re recognized. Moreover, generally, what we achieve produces and leaves behind something that is helpful to others. We can, and should, feel good about our legitimate achievements.

How have my achievements, my successes, the things that I’m proud to have done, positively nurtured those around me?  How have they helped bring joy into other people’s lives? How have they helped make the world a better, more-loving place? How have any of the trophies I’ve won or distinctions I’ve been awarded made those around me more peaceful rather than more restless? This is different than asking: How have my achievements made me feel? How have they given me a sense of self-worth? How have my achievements witnessed to my uniqueness?

And so the truth is that we can achieve great things without being really fruitful, just as we can be very fruitful even while achieving little in terms of worldly success and recognition. Our fruitfulness is often the result not so much of the great things we accomplish, but of the graciousness, generosity, and kindness we bring into the world. Unfortunately our world rarely reckons these as an achievement, an accomplishment, a success.

Henri Nouwen also points out that when we distinguish between our achievements and our fruitfulness, we will see that, while death may be the end of our success, productivity, and importance, it isn’t necessarily the end of our fruitfulness. Indeed, often our true fruitfulness occurs only after we die when our spirit can finally flow out more purely. We see that this was true too for Jesus. We were able to be fully nurtured by his spirit only after he was gone. Jesus teaches this explicitly in his farewell discourse in John’s Gospel when he tells us repeatedly that it’s better for us that he goes away because it’s only when he’s gone that we will be able to truly receive his spirit, his full fruitfulness.  The same is true for us. Our full fruitfulness will only show after we have died. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Achievement versus Fruitfulness” September 2017]

One of the most debilitating aspects of life today is that we do not admit to each other the cost of struggle. Our real fears are seldom allowed to surface. Yet we all struggle. Our lives are full of pain, little comes easy for us, and we make a living, remain healthy, remain attractive and achieve success only at great cost. Fear is always present. The fear of failure, of slipping, of having others see that life and success are not automatic, that life is had at the edges of sickness, unattractiveness, boredom, failure and sadness.

Rarely do we genuinely share how we really feel, what our fears are, and how difficult it is to be who we are. Rarely do we admit anyone into our inner space where fear, struggle and inadequacy make themselves felt. We all go through life posturing strength, pretending; lying really, giving off the impression that all is easy and that friendship, health, achievement and attractiveness are easeful and automatic. But that is dishonest and debilitating. Dishonest because it isn’t true.

We go through life trying to impress others into liking us. Rather than sharing ourselves as we really are – vulnerable, tender, struggling, full of fear – we try to be so sensational that there can be no possible reason not to love us. Like the inhabitants of Babel, we try to build a tower that is so impressive that we overpower others. The result for us, as the result then, is counterproductive. Because of pretence, we go through life “speaking different languages,” that is, unable to find a common meeting ground upon which to understand each other. Understanding takes place through compassion and compassion is itself the fruit of shared vulnerability.

When fears and struggle are hidden, when achievement, health, attractiveness and friendship are projected as automatic, then our talents, intelligence, wit, charms, beauty, and artistic and athletic abilities cannot be seen for what they are intended to be, namely, beautiful gifts which enrich life. They are projected, then, as objects of envy and they become forces which create jealousy and further wound. When there is no shared vulnerability, life becomes what we can achieve, and our talents are possessions to be defended.

Scripture reminds us that here, in this life, we see each other as less than fully real – “as through a glass, darkly, an enigma.” We contribute to the enigma, we make ourselves less real, precisely to the extent that we do not admit to each other that it is hard for us. It is only when we see each others’ fears and struggles that we become real to each other. The path home, out of exile, lies in vulnerability. The threads of compassion and a concomitant intimacy will appear automatically when we present ourselves as we really are, without false props, as tender. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Becoming the Real Thing” September 1985″

People are forever predicting the end of the world. In Christian circles this is generally connected with speculation around the promise Jesus made at his ascension, namely, that he would be coming back, and soon, to bring history to its culmination and establish God’s eternal kingdom.

This was rampant among the first generation of Christians. So, they lived with this expectation, believing that the world, at least as they knew it, would end before their deaths. However, as the years moved on and Jesus did not return their understanding began to evolve so that by the time John’s Gospel is written, probably about seventy years after Jesus’ death, they had begun to understand things differently.

They now understood Jesus’ promise that some of his contemporaries would not taste death until they had seen the kingdom of God as being fulfilled in the coming of the Holy Spirit. Jesus was, in fact, already back and the world had not ended. And so they began to believe that the end of the world was not necessarily imminent.

But that didn’t change their emphasis on vigilance, on staying awake, and on being ready for the end.  But now that invitation to stay awake and live in vigilance was related more to not knowing the hour of one’s own death.

We need to be awake spiritually, not slouching. But the end of the world shouldn’t concern us, nor should we worry excessively about when we will die. What we should worry about is in what state our dying will find us. As Kathleen Dowling Singh puts in her book, The Grace in Aging: “What a waste it would be to enter the time of dying with the same old petty and weary thoughts and reactions running through our mind.” [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “The End of the World ” November 2016]