Daily Virtue

“We talk as if we need to save the world as if everything depends on us. Well, it doesn’t. In the resurrection of Jesus, the world is already saved; the powers of death and darkness have already been vanquished. We only need to live in such a way to show that world that we believe this.” This quote came from William Stringfellow, an American lay theologian, lawyer, and social activist. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that what Stringfellow is telling us is what Jesus tried to teach, namely, that the opposite of faith is not so much unbelief and doubt in the existence of God as it is anxiety and fretless worry. The opposite of faith is what Jesus cautions Martha against: “Martha, Martha, you are anxious about many things!” We are not to be anxious about many things. We are in good hands all the time. To say the creed is to have a very particularized, concrete trust, a trust that God has not forgotten about me and my problems and that, despite whatever indications there are to the contrary, God is still in charge and is very concerned with my life and its concrete troubles. In the Garden of Gethsemane, with all the powers of death and darkness closing in on him, just when it seems that God has abandoned him and the earth, Jesus begins his prayer: “Abba, Father, all things are possible for you.”  What Jesus is saying is that, despite indications to the contrary, despite the fact that it looks like God is asleep at the switch, God is still in charge, is still Lord of this universe, is still noticing everything, and is still fully in power and worthy of trust. The trouble, though, is that this is hard to do, even when we do believe in a God who is Lord of the universe. Our problem is that we project our limited, selective care onto this God. We fear that God sometimes forgets and does not notice us, that God, like us, is an inadequate Lord of the universe. That is why we get anxious and fret because, like one without faith, we can feel that we are in an unfeeling universe. Remember Mary; she chose to rest in the love of God; we should do no less.

Faith asks us to believe that God’s saving activity in the Christ extends to more than only human beings and more than even animals and other living things. God’s saving activity in Christ reaches so deep that it saves creation itself – the oceans, the mountains, the soil that grows our food, the desert sands, and the earth itself. Christ came to save all of those things too, not just us, the people. Where, you might ask, does scripture teach this? Saint Paul writes in Romans, chapter 8: “I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.” What St. Paul is saying here is that physical creation itself, the cosmic world, will, at the end of time, be transformed in some glorious way and enter into heaven, just as human beings do. He’s also saying that, like us, it too somehow senses its mortality and groans to be set free from its present limits. Science tells us that physical creation is mortal, that the sun is burning out, that energy is ever-so-slowly decreasing and that the earth as we know it will someday die. The earth is as mortal as we are and so if it’s to have a future it needs to be saved by Something or Someone from outside itself. That Something and Someone are revealed in the mystery of the incarnation within which God takes on physical flesh in Christ in order to save the world and what he came to save was not just us, the people living on this earth, but rather, “the world”, the planet itself, and everything on it. Jesus assured us that nothing is ever ultimately lost. No hair falls from someone’s head and no sparrow falls from the sky and simply disappears forever, as if it had never been. God created, loves, cares for, and ultimately resurrects every bit of creation for all eternity. [Excerpt from Fr. Ron Rolheiser’s “Deep Incarnation – Another Meaning of Christmas”]

The first chapter of the Book of Revelation contains a powerful challenge that’s hidden within the overall esoteric language of that book. John, its author, speaking in the voice of God, says something to this effect: I have seen how hard you work; I have seen your fidelity and your hunger for the truth; but I have this against you, “you have less love in you now than when you were young.” Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that it’s easy to be blind to this inside of ourselves. We change, we grow, we age, and sometimes we don’t look at ourselves closely to see what those changes are doing to us. Hence, we can be dedicated, hard-working, truth-seeking, sincere persons, virtuous in most every way, except that this goodness has become encrusted inside an anger, bitterness, and hatred that wasn’t so evident in us when we were young. As we age, it’s easier to be committed to the right causes than to remain loving and not let bitter judgment and subtle hatred infect our character. Someone once quipped that we spend the first half of our lives struggling with the Sixth Commandment, with the fire of eros, and then spend the second half of our lives struggling with the Fifth Commandment, with the fire of disappointment, anger, and hatred. I’m haunted by an image Margaret Laurence gives us in the person of Hagar Shipley in her novel, The Stone Angel. As Hagar ages, she grows ever more bitter and critical of others, without ever recognizing how much she has changed. One day, ringing a doorbell, she overhears a little girl telling her mother “That horrible old woman is at the door.” Hearing this, stung to her roots, she goes to a bathroom, turns on all the lights, and for the first time in years examines her face in the mirror and is taken aback by what she sees. She no longer recognizes her own face. It has become something other than how she pictures herself. Her face now is that of a bitter, hateful old person. We need to do what she did, have a good look at our faces in a mirror. Better yet, lay out a series of photographs of yourself from childhood, through adolescence, through young adulthood, through middle age, to your present age and study your face over the years to see how it has changed from when you were younger. Sadly, you will probably see there some hardening that is less attributable to natural aging than it is to bitterness, jealousy, and hatred.

The spiritualities of the resurrection and psychologies of self-actualization, whatever their other strengths, no longer permit us to be in pain, to be less than whole, ill, unattractive, aged, unfulfilled, or even just alone on a Friday night. Ron Rolheiser writes that the idea is all too present today that we can only be happy if we somehow fulfill every hunger within us – living lives that are completely whole and consummated so we are never alone on a Friday night. Unless every pleasure we yearn for can be tasted, we cannot be happy. Because of this, we over-expect. We stand before life and love in a greedy posture and with unrealistic expectations, demanding the resolution of all our eros and tension. However, life, in this world, can never give us that. We are pilgrims on earth, exiles journeying towards home. The world is passing away. We have God’s word for it. And we need God’s word for it! Maybe it is the movie and television industries with their leading men and leading ladies who are presented to us as already redeemed, gorgeous persons, immersed in love and meaning, and who have the wherewithal within their grasp to taste whatever life has to offer. But something has led us to the belief that we need not put up with tension and frustration and that there are persons in this life who are already enjoying a redeemed life. That belief, however unconscious and unexpressed, lies at the root of much of our restlessness and unhappiness today. Too much in our experience today militates against the fact that here in this life all symphonies remain unfinished. Somehow, we have come to believe that a final solution for the burning tensions within us lies within our present grasp. I am not sure who or what gives us this idea. So much of our unhappiness comes from comparing our lives, our friendships, our loves, our commitments, our duties, our bodies, and our sexuality to some idealized and non-Christian vision of things that falsely assures us that there is a heaven on earth. How tragic it is to go through life and not be able to taste every pleasure on earth! It almost isn’t worth living! There is wisdom and, yes, even comfort, in the old “mourning and weeping in this vale of tears” philosophy. Those who lived that philosophy were a lot less restless and greedy for experience than we are today. They could much more restfully enjoy God’s great gifts – life, love, youth, health, friendship, and sexuality – even as they are limitedly given in this life.

Jesus came to light a fire on the earth, the fire of the Holy Spirit, the fire of faith, and the fact that we exist now as a church 2000 years later is a sign of the persistence of that fire. Robert Barron writes that this question, which is left disturbingly open, anticipates the Lord’s second coming, the final coming of Christ when He returns to the earth. Will he find faith? Here are a couple of disturbing facts: We are always one generation away from the extinction of the faith. Faith is caught like a contagion. I got it from my parents; my generation got it from the previous generation, and we passed it on. If we fail to pass on the faith, that’s it. It can fade away in one generation. There are places on this earth where the Christian faith was once very vibrant and has ceased to exist: Turkey, Asia Minor, Middle East, Egypt, North Africa, and Western Europe. In these parts of the world, great people of faith were at work: St. Paul, Saint John Chrysostom, Origen, the Desert Fathers, Saint Augustine, Cyprian of Carthage, Saint Francis of Assisi, and Thomas Aquinas. We worship, after all, a crucified God who was put to death by cultural and political forces. So, what is it in the contemporary culture that is opposed to the proclamation of the faith? The symbol of what’s wrong with our culture is that we are a very individualist, self-regarding, self-contained culture. Niche, of course, is the very influential German philosopher who said, “I determine value based upon the decision of my will. What’s good is what I declare to be good. My values are mine because they flow from my will.” In today’s culture, we invent our own values and our own truths. This directly contrasts God’s truth. The church proposes a truth to the world that is not my truth; it’s not your truth but “the truth.” We propose a moral structure that doesn’t flow from my will or your will but from God’s will and that confronts us as an objective value. We suggest something is beautiful not because I say or you think so but because it is beautiful. We have to be aware that the subjectivism, relativism, and nicheanism of our culture are opposed to the faith. We must be willing to defend the objectivity of the faith over and against these cultural moves, in line with the gospel and the great scriptural tradition. In a religious tradition, it’s not primarily passing on beliefs that come. It’s first and foremost the passing out of practices, things that we do: prayers, rituals, sacraments, processions, signs of the cross, putting your hand in the holy water, genuflecting, kneeling, gesturing with your body, doing the corporal and spiritual works of mercy. Maybe the best way we can hand down the faith is by putting the moves of the faith in the bodies of the next generation. Don’t privatize the faith; make it something interior. The culture is opposed to us in many ways. Ways, though, that we can fight with beauty and with practice and thereby hand down the faith. Will the Son of Man find faith on the earth when he returns?

Perspective is everything. When it’s lost, headaches and heartaches set in, take root and begin to dominate our lives. When we lose perspective, everything is reduced: the vast horizon, the depth of our minds, the compassion of our hearts, and the enjoyment of our lives. When perspective is lost, the world turns upside down: contentment gives way to restlessness, humility to ambition, and patience to a hopeless pursuit of a consummation, renown, and immortality that this life can never provide. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the French scientist/priest/mystic/philosopher, was like the rest of us, living a life with its share of hurts, ambitions, cold, lonely seasons, and obsessions. He spent most of his life unsure that anyone really understood him. But, and this is where he is rare, he invariably was able to put things into perspective, to regain the vast horizon, and to see things, no matter how bad they appeared on the surface, as making sense in Christ. A chip of rock in the desert or an opera in Paris or New York held equal potential for delight. The simple pleasures of life, the elementary act of looking at the world and feeling its elements- the weather, the soil, the sun, and the very dust- could give him joy that borders on ecstasy. It didn’t matter whether he was with his loved ones, at home in France, or away from his loved ones and loved land, in exile in China; every kind of everyday experience could leave him feeling deeply grateful just for the fact of living. He could love deeply, and he could also let go, and this letting go was what saved him from the always-present fear, ambition, and loneliness that so often asphyxiates so many. At age thirty-five, he found himself on the front lines of the First World War. Before a particular battle, fearing that he might be killed, he wrote: “I shall go into this engagement in a religious spirit, with all my soul, borne on by a single great impetus in which I am unable to distinguish where human emotions end, and adoration begins. And if I am destined not to return from those heights, I would like my body to remain there, molded into the clay of the fortifications, like a living cement thrown by God into the stonework of the New City.” Humbling words, noble words, from a rare person with a rare faith. We all need to read and write words like this, and then, perhaps, we won’t live in restlessness and ambition, waiting for that special something that never comes. [Excerpt from Fr. Ron Rolheiser’s “Christian Perspective”]

In our humanness, we are often plagued by what seems to be an inherited procrastination. We keep pushing things off into a yet-to-be-seen future. These are usually things that we know we must change in our own lives, but we choose to fool ourselves by saying, “I know I need to do this, but I’m not ready yet. I want more time. Sometime in the future, I’ll do this.” Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that this is a near-universal sentiment, and for good reason. The tension we experience between our desire to grow up and our perennial procrastination and infinite stalling in doing that reflects, in fact, a tension that lies at the heart of Jesus’ message, a tension between God’s promises as being already here and God’s promises as still coming. Everything Jesus promised is already here, and everything Jesus promised is still coming. We’re already living the new, resurrected life, even as we’re still waiting for it. What lies inside this paradox? Everything Jesus came to bring us (the Reign of God, the Kingdom of God, the New Age, the Final Age, the reign of justice on this earth, new life, the resurrection, eternal life, heaven) is already here, except that it’s also still coming. When Jesus says that he has come to bring us new life, he is not talking simply about our future our lives in heaven; he is also talking about our lives here, already now. The new life is already here, he assures us. Heaven has already begun. Why is there a failure to accept this and change? Having God become concrete in our lives is far too threatening. We’re like the guests in the Gospel parable invited to the wedding banquet. We, too, want to go to the feast and intend to go to the feast, but first, we need to attend to our marriages, our businesses, and our ambitions. We can get serious later. There’s time. We fully intend to take Jesus seriously; we just want a little more time before we do that. But let us not forget the Lord’s own words in Matthew’s Gospel: “Keep awake, therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.” The time to change is now.

Jesus tells us that he is the “Good Shepherd.” How do we discern the shepherd’s voice from the many voices we encounter every day? Some voices invite us in, promising us life if we do this or that or buy a particular product or idea; others threaten us. Some voices beckon us towards hate, bitterness, and anger, while others challenge us towards love, graciousness, and forgiveness. Some voices tell us that they are playful and humorous, not to be taken seriously, even as others trumpet that they are urgent and weighty, the voice of non-negotiable truth, God’s voice. Fr. Ron Rolheiser asks us, “Within all of these, which is the voice of God?” He tells us there’s no easy answer; sometimes, the best we can do is trust our gut feeling about right and wrong. However, we have a number of principles that come to us from Jesus, scripture, and the deep wells of our Christian tradition that can help us. What follows is a series of principles to help us discern God’s voice among the multitude of voices that beckon us:
The voice of God is recognized in whispers and soft tones, as well as in thunder and lightning.
The voice of God is recognized wherever one sees life, joy, health, color, and humor, even as it is recognized wherever one sees dying, suffering, conscripted poverty, and a beaten-down spirit.
The voice of God is recognized in what calls us to what’s higher, sets us apart, and invites us to holiness, even as it is recognized in what calls us to humility, submergence into humanity, and in that which refuses to denigrate our humanity.
The voice of God is recognized in what appears in our lives as “foreign,” as other, as “stranger,” even as it is recognized in the voice that beckons us home.
The voice of God is the one that most challenges and stretches us, yet it is also the only voice that ultimately soothes and comforts us.
The voice of God enters our lives as the greatest of all powers, even as it forever lies in vulnerability, like a helpless baby in the straw.
The voice of God is always heard in a privileged way in the poor, even as it beckons us through the voice of the artist and the intellectual.
The voice of God always invites us to live beyond all fear, even as it inspires holy fear.
The voice of God is heard inside the gifts of the Holy Spirit, even as it invites us never to deny the complexities of our world and our own lives.
The voice of God is always heard wherever there is genuine enjoyment and gratitude, even as it asks us to deny ourselves, die to ourselves, and freely relativize all the things of this world.
The voice of God, it would seem, is forever found in paradox.

Doesn’t Scripture itself say that the road that leads to life is narrow…and few find it! So, doesn’t this mean that not everyone is going to heaven? Underneath this fear of many of not going to heaven is the fact that the Lord has told us that we make choices in life, and some of those choices are serious. Sin is real and the passage to eternal life is not easily found. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that we can lose heaven and that hell is a real option. But if God is love, and he is, doesn’t he want all to be one with him for eternity? The drama of the incarnation has as its central point the revelation of the heart of God…a heart of infinite love which can, even given human sin, bring about the salvation of most, perhaps of all, persons. What does this mean? First, it means that God loves us unconditionally and that there is nothing we can do, sin included, that even for one second can change that. Hence we live under the law of mercy, not of justice. There is no great book or great law within which all sins are recorded and where a pound of retribution is demanded for a pound of sin. Salvation, going to heaven, is nothing other than accepting we are loved unconditionally and forever. Of course, we can, and in this life, we often do reject this. That is why here, in this life, most of us have not yet found the road that leads to life. Few of us are really happy, actually redeemed by love. It is easy to go to hell in this life. Hence, in this life, we are often in hell, miserable, biting so as not to be bitten, sinning so as to compensate for being outside of love. However, God’s love can, as we see in Christ’s death and resurrection, descend into hell and embrace and bring to peace tortured and paranoid hearts. Our moral choices in this life are crucial. We can and frequently do make choices that make it harder for us to accept unconditional love. Moreover, there is a real danger of not sinning honestly, of rationalizing, and of warping ourselves so that a permanent hell becomes a real possibility. But this is, I submit, rare. Few people will, when confronted by an unconditional embrace, resist. That is why most people will go to heaven. [Excerpt from Fr. Ron Rolheiser’s “Living Under a Merciful God.”]

A young priest wrote about the students he works at a university and noticed they have a zest for life and an energy and color that he could only envy. He writes: “But inside of all this zest and energy, I notice that they lack hope because they don’t have a meta-narrative. They don’t have a big story or vision that can give them perspective beyond the ups and downs of their everyday lives. When their health, relationships, and lives are going well, they feel happy and full of hope, but the reverse is also true. The bottom falls out of their world when things aren’t going well. They don’t have anything to give them a vision beyond the present moment.” Henri Nouwen wrote that there is a quality of sadness that pervades all the moments of our lives so that even in our most happy moments, there is something missing. In every satisfaction, there is an awareness of limitations. In every success, there is fear of jealousy. In every friendship, there is distance. In every embrace, there is loneliness. There is no such thing as clear-cut, pure joy in this life. Every bit of life is touched by a bit of death. The world can give us peace, except it never does this perfectly. Fr. Ron Rolheiser asks, “What is this peace?” At the last supper, and as he was dying, Jesus offered us his gift of peace. And what is this? It is the absolute assurance that we are connected to the source of life in such a way that nothing, absolutely nothing, can ever sever—not bad health, not betrayal by someone, indeed, not even our own sin. We are unconditionally loved and held by the source of life itself; nothing can change that. Nothing can change God’s unconditional love for us. That’s the meta-narrative we need to keep perspective during the ups and downs of our lives. We are being held unconditionally by God, the source of life itself. If that is true, and it is, then we have an assurance of life, wholeness, and happiness beyond the loss of youth, the loss of health, the loss of reputation, the betrayal of friends, the suicide of a loved one, and even beyond our own sin and betrayals. In the end, as Julian of Norwich says, all will be well, and all will be well, and every manner of being will be well. We need to more deeply appropriate Jesus’ farewell gift to us: “I leave you a peace that no one can take from you: Know that you are loved and held unconditionally.”