Daily Virtue

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.

Psalm 51 haunts the heart with the refrain: “A heart contrite and humbled, O God, you will not spurn.” Our problem is that, despite considerable sincerity, our hearts are rarely humble and contrite. The norm is judgment of others, anger at them, and a certain moral smugness and self-righteousness. Rarely are we on our knees with our heads against the breast of a forgiving God, contrite about what we’ve done and left undone—our betrayals, our sins, our inadequacies. Most of the time our posture is that of the judge. Our own faults are rarely at issue as we adjudicate others’ need for contrition and pronounce judgment on their faults. Our own judgmental attitude and self-righteousness is, most of the time, hidden from us. In our own eyes we are never the hypocrite, the one sitting in judgment on somebody else’s life. No. We are the honest ones, the compassionate ones, the humble ones. What is true here in terms of the self-righteousness and self-blindness that exists within our ideological circles is perhaps even more true within the ordinary give and take of our daily lives. We are invariably judge, never repentant sinner. Conversion begins when we stop standing as judge in order to kneel as sinner. When we are humble and contrite of heart we will not be spurned by God—nor by each other.[1]

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[1] Excerpt from Fr. Ron Rolheiser’s reflection, “A Humbled Heart” November 1993.

“My soul thirsts for God, the living God. When can I enter and see the face of God?” We’ve all heard these lines, prayed them, and in our more reflective moments tried to mean them; but, mostly, our hearts have belied those words. We haven’t really, at least not in our more conscious thoughts and feelings, longed for God with any real intensity and in our beds at night our souls are generally keeping vigil for someone other than God.  But, for this, we need not apologize. We are human beings, not angels, and nature and instinct conspire to direct our gaze and our desire towards this earth. It is persons and things of this earth for which our hearts long with intensity. Moreover, our longings are wide and promiscuous. We ache for a lot of things, though are most intense longings mostly have to do with yearning for a soulmate and with emotional and sexual consummation. The point here is that, consciously and unconsciously, we understand these powerful earthy and erotic attractions as taking us away from God and as something we need to give up in order to move closer to God.  Our desire for God and our more earthy and sexual desires are perceived as competitors, incompatible, demanding that we renounce one for the other. That misconception, more than we imagine, hurts us. Why? Because everything that is beautiful and attractive, however earthy and sexual, is contained inside of God. God is the creator of all that is beautiful, attractive, colorful, sexual, witty, brilliant, and intelligent.  All that we are attracted to on this earth, including the beauty that allures us sexually, is found inside of God and our attraction and longing for it here on earth is, in the end, a longing for God. Our souls need to keep vigil at a deeper level. This is what many of the saints and mystics intuited when they felt such intensity in their longing for union with God. All that is beautiful and attractive is found inside of God and is found there in a form that exceeds our experience of it here. Hence their longing for God could indeed be compared to a thirsty deer longing for a drink from a cool stream. Ultimately, a yearning for God is because everything we desire, be it ever so human, fleshly, or sexual, is inside of God, the author of all that is good. Our souls too thirst for God and they keep vigil for God at night, even though mostly we are unaware of it. But we never really understand this. Why aren’t we more interested in the One of which these things are only a pale reflection? [1]

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[1] Excerpt from Fr. Ron Rolheiser’s reflection, “Longing, Desire, and the Face of God” December 2010.

Why is that the things which should bring us happiness, admiration, and harmony, so often bring us the opposite? Are success, admiration, and money bad? No. All good things come from God, success and money included. What is bad is that, too often, these are attained before a person has been sufficiently prepared to handle them. Then they destroy rather than build up. The desert is that place where we go to face our demons, feel our smallness, be in a special intimacy with God, and prepare ourselves for the promised land. The scriptures tell us that, before they could enter into the promised land, the Israelites had to first wander in the desert for forty years – letting themselves be led by God, undergoing many trials, and swallowing much impatience. A long period of uprooting and frustration preceded the prosperity of the promised land. This was God’s planning. Thus the desert came to be seen as the place that correctly shapes the heart and the idea developed that one should prepare oneself for major transitions by first spending some time in the desert. Initially this was taken quite literally and religious men and women looking for purification would often go off into some actual physical desert and stay there for a time. Jesus did this. After his baptism, he went off for “forty days” into the Sinai desert. In order to be filled by God one must first be emptied. The desert does this for you. It empties you. Hence it is not a place wherein you can decide how you want to grow and change, but is a place that you undergo, expose yourself to, and have the courage to face. The idea is not so much that you do things there, but that things happen to you while there – silent, unseen, transforming things. The desert purifies you, almost against your will, through God’s efforts. In the desert, what really occurs is a cosmic confrontation between God and the devil; though this happens within and through you. Your job is only to be have the courage to be there. The idea is that God does the work, providing you have the courage to show up.[1]

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[1] Excerpt from Fr. Ron Rolheiser’s reflection, “The Desert: A Place of Preparation” March 2000.

Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes about a recent series of lectures he gave when confronted by a rather angry man who accused him of being soft on hell, God’s judgment, and God’s justice: “I cannot accept what you say. There is so much evil in the world and so many people are suffering from other people’s sins that there must be, after this life, some retribution, some justice. Don’t tell me that all these people who are doing these things—from molesting children to ignoring all morality—are going to be in heaven when we get there! What does that say about God’s justice?” His lament is, in fact, quite an old one. The prophet Isaiah had the same kind of wish (Isaiah 61:2). For him, it was not enough that the Messiah should usher in a time of peace and freedom for good people. Along with rewards for the good, he felt, there needed to be too a “day of vengeance” on the bad. Interestingly, in a curious omission, when Jesus quotes this text to define his own ministry, he leaves out the part about vengeance (Luke 4:18). To my mind, this desire for justice (as we call it) is, at its root, unhealthy and speaks volumes about the bitterness within our own lives. All these worries that somebody might be getting away with something and all these wishes that God better be an exacting judge suggest that we, like the older brother of the prodigal son, might be doing things right, but real love, forgiveness, and celebration have long gone out of our hearts. We are bitter as slaves and are quite outside the circle of the dance. This is one of the best descriptions of God ever written. I often meditate on it, and, to be honest, most times, it makes for a painful meditation. Far from basking in gratitude in the beautiful symphony of relaxed, measureless love and infinite forgiveness that makes up heaven, I feel instead the bitterness, self-pity, anger, and incapacity to let go and dance that was felt by the older brother of the prodigal son. To be fit for heaven, we must let go of our bitterness. Like the older brother, our problem is ultimately not the excessive love that is seemingly shown to someone else. Our problem is that we have never fully heard or understood God’s words: “My child, you have always been with me and all I have is yours, but we, you and I, should be happy and dance because your younger brother who was dead has come back to life!”

The parable in today’s gospel of the wealthy landowner who sends his servants out to collect the produce from his tenant farmers is a cautionary tale about what can go wrong when we try to build things on our own— even the kingdom of God. At the same time, it is a great consolation to know that the Lord is not stymied by our rejections. One might think this is just another example of Jesus facing off against the scribes and Pharisees, the religious authorities of his day. But there is something there for all of us, regardless of our canonical station in life. We, too, can get it wrong, can reject what should be embraced, can drive off messengers whose messages we don’t like. Our hope, finally, is only in the Lord, who makes a firm foundation for our lives, even out of something we initially rejected. The father in the story fails to fathom the deep resentment his tenants hold against his family. “They will respect my son,” he assumes, but they do not. The greedy tenants kill the man’s beloved son to gain his inheritance. Bishop Robert Barron notes that when God sent his son to us, we killed him. “This is the insane resistance to God’s intentions, which is called sin. One of the most fundamental spiritual mistakes we can make is to think that we own the world. We are tenants, entrusted with the responsibility of caring for it, but everything that we have and are is on loan.” That brings us appropriately back to our Lenten journey and the sobering reality that our lives are not about us.

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!” A gracious, all-powerful, loving God is solidly in charge, and nothing will happen in the world and nothing will happen to us that this Lord is indifferent to. Our faith, at its core, invites trust, and not just abstract trust, the belief that good is stronger than evil. No. To say the creed, to say that I believe in God 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. When we anxiously worry, in essence, we are denying the Christian creed because we are, in effect, saying that God has either forgotten about us or that God does not have the power to do anything about what is troubling us. It is then that we, like Martha, begin rushing around and fretting about many things. We see the opposite of this in Jesus’ prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane. He truly says the creed. With all the powers of death and darkness closing in on him, just when it seems that God has abandoned him and the earth, he 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 feel that God is inadequate because often we are, that God falls asleep at the switch because we occasionally do and that God forgets about us in our problems because we have a habit of letting certain persons and things slip off of our radar screens. And so 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; like one without faith, we can feel that we are in an unfeeling universe.[1]

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[1] Excerpt from Fr. Ron Rolheiser’s reflection, “The Way of Trust” September 1997.

There are countless persons, basilicas, churches, shrines, seminaries, convents, and even towns and cities named after St. Joseph. My native country, Canada, has him as its patron.  In the Gospel of Matthew, the annunciation of Jesus’ conception is given to Joseph rather than to Mary: Before they came together, Mary was found to be with child by the Holy Spirit. Joseph, her husband, being an upright man and unwilling to shame her, had decided to divorce her quietly, when an angel appeared to him in a dream and told him not to be afraid to take Mary as his wife, that the child in her had been conceived through the Holy Spirit. After receiving revelation in a dream, he agrees to take her home as his wife and to name the child as his own. Partly we understand the significance of that, he spares Mary embarrassment, he names the child as his own, and he provides an accepted physical, social, and religious place for the child to be born and raised. But he does something else that is not so evident: He shows how a person can be a pious believer, deeply faithful to everything within his religious tradition, and yet at the same time be open to a mystery beyond both his human and religious understanding. And this was exactly the problem for any Christians, including Matthew himself, at the time the Gospels were written: They were pious Jews who didn’t know how to integrate Christ into their religious framework. What does one do when God breaks into one’s life in new, previously unimaginable ways? How does one deal with an impossible conception? Here’s how Raymond Brown puts it: The hero of Matthew’s infancy story is Joseph, a very sensitive Jewish observer of the Law. In Joseph, the evangelist was portraying what he thought a Jew [a true pious believer] should be and probably what he himself was. In essence what Joseph teaches us is how to live in loving fidelity to all that we cling to humanly and religiously, even as we are open to a mystery of God that takes us beyond all the categories of our religious practice and imagination.[1]

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[1] Excerpt from Fr. Ron Rolheiser’s reflection, “Joseph and Christmas,” December 2009.

Recently a student I’d taught decades ago made this comment to me: “It’s been more than twenty years since I took your class and I’ve forgotten most everything you taught. What I do remember from your class is that we’re supposed to always try not to make God look stupid.” I hope that’s something people take away from my lectures and writings because I believe that the first task of any Christian apologetics is to rescue God from stupidity, arbitrariness, narrowness, legalism, rigidity, tribalism, and everything else that’s bad but gets associated with God. A healthy theology of God must underwrite all our apologetics and pastoral practices. Anything we do in the name of God should reflect God. It’s no accident that atheism, anti-clericalism, and the many diatribes leveled against the church and religion today can always point to some bad theology or church practice on which to base their skepticism and anger. Atheism is always a parasite, feeding off bad religion. So too is much of the negativity towards the churches which is so common today. An anti-church attitude feeds on bad religion and so we who believe in God and church should be examining ourselves more than defending ourselves. Moreover more important than the criticism of atheists are the many people who have been hurt by their churches. A huge number of persons today no longer go to church or have a very strained relationship to their churches because what they’ve met in their churches doesn’t speak well of God. What did Jesus reveal about God? First, that God has no favorites and that there must be full equality among races, among rich and poor, among slave and free, and among male and female. No one person, race, gender, or nation is more favored than others by God. Nobody is first. All are privileged. Next, God is especially compassionate and understanding towards the weak and towards sinners. A theology of God that reflects the compassion and mercy of God should always be reflected in every pastoral decision we make. Otherwise, we make God look stupid – arbitrary, tribal, cruel, and antithetical to church practice.[1]

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[1] Excerpt from Fr. Ron Rolheiser’s reflection, “Mercy, Truth, and Pastoral Practice” May 2018.

Lent is the season of return. This is the theme we hear in the weekday liturgies of Lent, especially in the Old Testament readings. Day after day, we hear accounts of the people coming back to the Lord, opening their hearts to confess their sins and failures, and asking his forgiveness. The people’s honesty about themselves and their weaknesses is astonishing. So is their confidence that God will treat them with mercy and welcome them back. As I write, we are early in the second week of Lent. On Monday, we heard the prophet Daniel’s confession: “We have sinned, been wicked and done evil; we have rebelled and departed from your commandments and your laws.” Even the saints are sinners. The Scriptures tell us that the righteous fall seven times daily. That is why we need confession. We need to have some way to tell God that we are sorry, to hear his words of forgiveness, and to pick ourselves up. The most beautiful scenes in the Gospel are scenes of confession and forgiveness, as Jesus shows the merciful face of God to those who come seeking healing and liberation. We all remember the story of the prodigal son who confesses his sins and is welcomed home to the loving arms of his father. God’s mercy matters; we all need it. That is why his door is always open to us, he is always waiting for our return. Just as in the story of the prodigal son. God forgives the contrite heart, even though we continue to sin or make the same mistakes. What is important is our resolve, our desire to get stronger, to grow in holiness. Here I want to appeal to you to make a habit of regular confession — once a month, even once every couple of weeks. Do not make it complicated, or get hung up on the “form.” The priest will be there to help you. Tell the priest, “Lord, you know all things, you know that I love you.” Then confess your sins. Speak honestly, tell all your sins; you do not need to go into detail or give explanations. And most important, have true sorrow in your heart and the intention not to commit these sins again. Just know that the more often you go to confession, the easier it gets. The better you are able to examine your conscience and to make a complete confession, the more satisfying the experience is.[1]

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[1] Excerpt from Archbishop Jose H. Gomez’s reflection, “Mercy for the Journey” March 2022.