Catholic For A Reason

Gratitude and thankfulness should be the bedrock of our daily lives. Fr. Rolheiser writes that to be a saint is to be motivated by gratitude, nothing more and nothing less. Scripture, everywhere and always, makes this point. For example, the sin of Adam and Eve was, first and foremost, a failure in receptivity and gratitude. God gives them life, each other, and the garden and asks them only to receive it properly, in gratitude, receive and give thanks. Only after doing this do we go on to “break and share.” Before all else, we first give thanks. To receive in gratitude and be properly grateful is the primary of all religious attitudes. Proper gratitude is the ultimate virtue. It defines sanctity. Saints, holy persons, are grateful people who see and receive everything as a gift. The converse is also true. Anyone who takes life and love for granted should never be confused with a saint. The failure to be appropriately grateful, to take as owed what’s offered as a gift, lies at the root of many of our deepest resentments towards others and their resentments towards us. Invariably, when we are angry at someone, especially at those closest to us, it is precisely because we are not being appreciated (that is, thanked) properly. Conversely, I suspect more than a few people harbor resentment towards us because we consciously or unconsciously think it is their job to take care of us. Like Adam and Eve, we take, as if it is ours by right, what can only be received gratefully as a gift. This goes against the very contours of love. It is the original sin.

Jesus is always telling us to wake up, stay awake, be vigilant, and be more alert to a deeper reality. What is meant by that, and how exactly are we “asleep?” Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that we all know how difficult it is for us to be in the present moment and not be asleep to the real riches in our lives. Daily life’s distractions and worries tend to consume us so much that we habitually take for granted what’s most precious to us: our health, the miracle of our senses, the love and friendships that surround us, and the gift of life itself. We go through our daily lives not only with a lack of reflectiveness and gratitude but with a habitual touch of resentment as well, a chronic, grey depression. We are very much asleep, both to God and to our own lives. How do we wake up? An awareness of our mortality does wake us up, as does a stroke, a heart attack, or cancer; but that heightened awareness is easier to sustain for a short season of our lives than it is for twenty, thirty, forty, or fifty years. Nobody can sustain that kind of awareness all the time. None of us can live seventy or eighty years as if each day was our last day. Or can we? Spiritual wisdom offers a nuanced answer: We can and can’t! On the one hand, everyday life’s distractions, cares, and pressures will invariably have their way with us, and we will, in effect, fall asleep to what’s deeper and more important inside of life. None of us live each day of our lives as if it were their last day. Our heartaches, headaches, distractions, and busyness invariably lull us to sleep. That’s forgivable; it’s what it means to be human. So we should ensure that we have regular spiritual rituals and spiritual alarm clocks to jolt us back awake so that it doesn’t take a heart attack, a stroke, cancer, or death to wake us up. For this reason, we need to begin each day with prayer, as this is how we maintain alertness to God’s actions. 

Fr. Rolheiser writes about a friend who likes to tease the Jesuits about their motto: “For the greater glory of God.” He notes that “God doesn’t need you to enhance his glory.” Fr. Rolheiser notes that his friend is partly he’s right, but he also notes that the Jesuits are right too. “God doesn’t need our praises, but we need to give praise, otherwise, our lives degenerate into bitterness and violence.” Why? Well, it might surprise some in what I have witnessed in many parish communities. In our daily experience, we sit around talking with each other and, invariably, unless we’re praising someone, we’re verbally “killing” someone. Gossip, slander, harsh judgment, and vicious comments are often both the tone and substance of our conversations and they’re the very antithesis of a doxology, of offering praise to God. Nothing sounds less like a doxology (“Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit”) than many of our everyday conversations. Fr. Rolheiser goes on to say, “The main reason our faith asks us to constantly render glory to God is that the more we praise the less we slander, gossip, or pass judgment. Offering praise to God, and others, is what saves us from bitterness and violence. When St. Paul begins his Epistles, he usually does so in a rapture of praise: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ from whose great mercy we all drink!” Only by praising something beyond ourselves do we save ourselves from bitterness.

You might wonder why Mark has spent so much time on this chilling episode of John the Baptist’s death as it is the only sustained narrative in his Gospel that is not directly about Jesus. Perhaps it is to highlight the passion of John as a foreshadowing of the passion of Christ. Herod’s actions show the snowball effect of unchecked sin, a common biblical theme. From adultery, Herod progressed to debauchery and, ultimately, via his rash oaths, to murder. Like Pilate later in the Gospel, Herod holds no malice toward his victim, yet cowardice and excessive concern for his reputation lead him to bloodshed. Each player in the drama is complicit in the evil: his scheming wife, her lascivious daughter, the ruthlessly efficient executioner, and even Herod’s dissipated guests, who raise no protest against the death of the innocent. Similarly, all the players in the passion of Jesus, and by extension, all of sinful humanity, are complicit in the death of the Son of God. Jesus, like John, will meet his end because he confronts people with the challenging but salutary truth about God’s claim on our lives and the call to repentance that is the doorway to salvation. The success of the apostles’ first mission, which immediately follows John’s death, is a symbolic anticipation of the countless multitudes who will enter the kingdom as a fruit of Christ’s death and of the witness of Christian martyrs, who testify to the gospel at the cost of their lives. 

The spiritual life of the Christian is based on the practice of the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love, for as Severian of Gabala stated: “Faith encourages us to do good, charity to bear pain and effort, and hope to resist patiently.” Faith must be reflected in one’s conduct, for “faith apart from works is dead.” As St. John Chrysostom taught, “Belief and faith are proved by works, not by simply saying that one believes, but by real actions, which are kept up, and by a heart burning with love.” For God’s sake, the service of others is proof of this love. A person who practices this virtue always rises to the occasion and does not try to dodge sacrifice or effort. Hope is a virtue that St. Thomas said “enables one to endure adversity.” St. Paul, in this letter to the Thessalonians, encourages us to rejoice in hope and to be patient in tribulation, for hope fills the soul with joy and gives it the strength to bear every difficulty for the love of God.

Have you noticed in the gospels that Jesus, it seems, doesn’t want people to know his true identity as the Christ, the Messiah? Why? Fr. Rolheiser writes that Peter has the right answer but the wrong conception of that answer. He has a false notion of what it means to be the Messiah. When Peter says: “You are the Christ,” his Messiah is one who has come to bring about earthly glory and worldly triumph. In Peter’s view, he will be someone so powerful, strong, attractive, and invulnerable that everyone will have to fall at his feet. Hence Jesus’ sharp reply: “Don’t tell anyone about that!” Jesus is not a Superman, a Superstar, or a miracle worker who will prove his power through spectacular deeds. Who is he? Jesus is the Messiah, a dying and rising Messiah who, in his own life and body, will demonstrate that evil is not overcome by miracles but by forgiveness, generosity, and nobility of soul and that these are attained not through crushing an enemy but through loving them more fully. And the route to this is paradoxical: The glory of the Messiah is not demonstrated by overpowering us with spectacular deeds. Instead, it is shown in Jesus letting himself be transformed through accepting with proper love and graciousness the unavoidable passivity, humiliation, diminishment, and dying that eventually found him. That’s the dying part. But when one dies like that or accepts any humiliation or diminishment in this way, there’s always a subsequent rising to real glory, that is, to the glory of a heart so stretched and enlarged that it is now able to transform evil into good, hatred into love, bitterness into forgiveness, humiliation into glory. That’s the proper work of a Messiah. So, how do you imagine the Messiah? How do you imagine triumph? Imagine Glory? If Jesus looked you square in the eye and asked, as he asked Peter: “How do you understand me?” Would he laud you for your answer or say, “Don’t tell anyone about that!”

More than twenty-five hundred years ago, Moses gave us the Ten Commandments. The centuries since, the Enlightenment notwithstanding, have yet to give us a single reason to doubt the validity and importance of any of those precepts. However, we struggle to live them out. Fr. Rolheiser offers these ten thoughts on befriending each other as a way to live out the commandments.
Befriend humanity: To be human is to be fallible, wounded, scarred, sinful, and living in a far-from-perfect history, body, family, and church. This is called the human condition. Make friends with it. Don’t live in a sulk.
Befriend what’s best in you: As long as we look out at the world through our wounds, we will always fill with self-pity, bitterness, and jealousy. If we look out through the prism of what’s best in us, our jealousy can turn to appreciation, and we can again be astonished at others’ goodness. We need to be better friends with what’s best in us.
Befriend those who love you: There are only two potential tragedies in life: To go through life and never love and to go through life and not express love and affection to those who love us. Thank those who love you for loving you. Never take their love for granted or as owed. Give out a lot more compliments. Say thank you constantly.
Befriend chastity: So much of our pain and restlessness comes from our lack of chastity, and much of our subsequent rationalization and bitterness come from not admitting this. We have sophisticated ourselves into unhappiness. Make a searing, honest confession soon.
Befriend your own body: Don’t be afraid of your own body, of its goodness, its sexuality, its pleasures, its tiredness, its limits. Befriend it. Don’t punish it, don’t spoil it, don’t denigrate it. It’s a church, a temple. Give it enough rest, enough exercise, enough discipline, and enough respect.
Befriend the other gender: The mothers and the fathers, the wives and the husbands are fighting. Small wonder the children are suffering. Never trivialize the issues of gender. Make friends with what seems most threatening to you in the other gender.
Befriend your father: Father hunger is one of the deepest hungers in the Western world today. Reconcile with your father, other fathers, and God the Father. Forgive him for his inadequacy. Acknowledge your hunger.
Befriend your mortality: Death comes to us all. Make friends with aging, wrinkles, grey hair, and a body that is no longer young. Accept, let go, grieve, and move on. Bless the young. Share your wisdom with them. Give away what’s left of your life.
Befriend humor: In our laughter, we taste transcendence. Humor takes us above the tragic. Laughter gives us wings to fly. Thomas More cracked a joke to the man who was about to behead him. That’s a quality of sanctity that we too often neglect.
Befriend your God: The gospel is not so much good advice as it is “good news,” it tells us how much God loves us and what God has already done for us. Peace comes to us when we can enjoy that favor. Befriend the God who tells us 365 times in scripture not to be afraid. Walk in that confidence.

Writing in “Everyday Faith,” Karl Rahner says, “Our heart is so inert and tired. It is worn out with everyday things. And God seems so far away. So, it seems to us the spiritually blind and lame. We must humble ourselves at our lovelessness in regard to God as the God-effected beginning of our love. Prayer for love of God, a prayer which protests against our heart’s secret and unavowed aversion from God, is our beginning of love of God, and we can always make this by his grace, which is always offered to us.” In reply to the question in our reflection verse today, our Lord points out that the whole of God’s law can be condensed into two commandments: the first and most important consists in unconditional love of God; the second is a consequence and result of the first because when man is loved, St Thomas says, God is loved, for man is the image of God. A person who genuinely loves God also loves his fellows because he realizes that they are his brothers and sisters, children of the same Father, redeemed by the same blood of our Lord Jesus Christ. The Lord establishes as the guideline for our love of neighbor the love each of us has for ourselves; both love of others and love of self are based on the love of God. From all this, we can deduce that self-love of the right kind, based on God’s love for man, necessarily involves forgetting oneself in order to love God and our neighbor for God.

Fr. James Stephen Behrens reflects on Nathanael’s question, “Can anything good come from Nazareth?” Nathanael’s response to Philip’s telling him that he found the Messiah is worth pondering. The Gospel of John is filled with accounts of people discovering that Jesus was not who they expected him to be. He was both less than they anticipated and far more than they had hoped. Wondrous things would spring forth from lowly Nazareth. We may take some satisfaction in our after-the-fact awareness that we now have this paradox down pat. But the lessons of John’s Gospel can and do puncture our inflated expectations of divine arrivals from above. Jesus is in our midst in everyone we meet. He especially calls out to us in the lives of the poor, the lonely, the oppressed, and the suffering. Whereas we may be accustomed to looking toward the end of life for his arrival, our faith encourages us to open our eyes and look around. It is the hurting of this world that pulls us out of ourselves to enter more deeply into the life of Jesus. A Christian may find that they raise difficulties in trying to communicate his faith to others. What should they do? Do what Philip did and not trust their own explanation but invite them to approach Jesus personally: “Come and see.” In other words, a Christian should bring his brothers and sisters into Jesus’ presence through the means of grace which he has given them. It’s about intimacy with the Lord.

Are we jealous because God is generous? Does it bother us when others are given unmerited gifts and forgiveness? Fr. Rolheiser’s response, “You bet! Ultimately, that sense of injustice, envy that someone else caught a break, is a huge stumbling block to our happiness. Why? Because something in us reacts negatively when it seems that life is not making others pay the same dues as we are paying. In heaven, we will be given what we are owed and more (unmerited gift, forgiveness we don’t deserve, joy beyond imagining), but, it seems, we will not be given that catharsis we so much want here on earth, the joy of seeing the wicked punished. The natural itch we have for strict justice (“An eye for an eye”) is exactly that, a natural itch, something the Gospels invite us beyond. The desire for strict justice blocks our capacity for forgiveness. It prevents us from entering heaven, where God, like the Father of the Prodigal Son, embraces and forgives without demanding a pound of flesh for a pound of sin. We know we need God’s mercy, but if grace is true for us, it must be true for everyone; if forgiveness is given to us, it must be given to everybody; and if God does not avenge our misdeeds, God must not avenge the misdeeds of others either. Such is the logic of grace and the love of the God to whom we must attune ourselves. Happiness is not about vengeance, but about forgiveness; not about retribution, but about unmerited embrace; and not about capital punishment, but about living beyond even murder. God leaves us free. When I, or anyone else, is upset at an airport, a parole board hearing, or anywhere else where someone gets something we don’t think they deserve, we must accept that we’re still a long way from understanding and accepting the kingdom of God.”