Daily Virtue

In John’s Gospel account of the resurrection, he tells the story of how on the morning of the first Easter, the Beloved Disciple runs to the tomb where Jesus has been buried and peers into it. He sees that it is empty and that all that’s left there are the clothes, neatly folded, within which Jesus’ body had been wrapped. And, because he is a disciple who sees with the eyes of love, he understands what this all means, he grasps the resurrection, and knows that Jesus has risen. He sees spring. He understands with his eyes. Hugo of St. Victor once famously said: Love is the eye. When we see with love, we not only see straight and clearly, but we also see depth and meaning. The reverse is also true. It is not for some arbitrary reason that, after Jesus rose from the dead, some could see him and others could not. Love is the eye. Those searching for life through the eyes of love, like Mary of Magdala searching for Jesus in the Garden on Easter Sunday morning, see spring and the resurrection. Any other kind of eye, and we’re blind in springtime. Without the eyes of love, we’re blind to both spring and the resurrection.[1]

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[1] Excerpt from Fr. Ron Rolheiser’s reflection, “Seeing Spring and Easter,” April 2012.

And there is a huge irony in how it is described. Jesus is on trial, but the story is written in such a way that, in effect, everyone is on trial, except Jesus. The Jewish authorities who orchestrated his arrest are on trial for their jealousy and dishonesty. The Roman authorities who wield the final power on the matter are on trial for their religious blindness. Jesus’ friends and contemporaries are on trial for their weakness and betrayal. Those who challenge Jesus to invoke divine power and come off the cross are on trial for their superficial faith. And, not least, each of us is on trial for our own weaknesses, jealousies, religious blindness, and superficial faith. The transcript of the trial of Jesus reads like a record of our own betrayals. Recently the church has tried to help us grasp this by the manner in which it has the Passion proclaimed on Palm Sunday and Good Friday. In many churches today when the Passion is read the narrative is broken up in such a way that one narrator proclaims the overall text, another person takes the part of Jesus, several others take the parts of the various people who spoke during his arrest and trial, and the congregation as a whole is asked to proclaim aloud the parts that were spoken by the crowds. This could not be more appropriate because a congregation in any Christian church today, and we, as individual members of those congregations, in our actions and in our words, in countless ways, mimic perfectly the actions and words of Jesus’ contemporaries in their weaknesses, betrayals, jealousies, religious blindness, and false faith. We too indict Jesus countless times by how we live. It is the same when the crowds say to Pilate: “We have no king, except Caesar!” In saying this, they were abandoning their own messianic hopes in favor of a momentary security. We say the same thing every time when, for our own well-being, we sell-out our higher ideals and settle for second best. As well, all too frequently, we mimic the words of the crowds who challenged Jesus as he was hanging on the cross with these words: “If you are the Son of God, come off the cross, save us, and save yourself.” We do this every time we let our prayers become a test of God’s existence and goodness; if we get a positive answer, God loves us, if not, we begin to doubt. Generally, on reading the account of Jesus’ Passion and Death, our spontaneous inclination is to judge very harshly those who surrounded Jesus at his arrest, trial, and sentencing: How could they not see what they were doing? How could they be so blind and jealous? How could they choose false security over God’s ultimate shelter? A murderer over the Messiah? How could his followers so easily abandon him? Not much has changed in 2000 years. The choices that those around Jesus were making during his trial and sentencing are identical to the choices we are still making today. And most days we are not doing any better than they did because, still, far too often, given blindness and self-interest, we are saying: Away with him! Crucify him![1]

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[1] Excerpt from Fr. Ron Rolheiser’s reflection, “The Transcript of Our Trial” April 2014.

The children we have are never really ours. They are given to us, in trust, for a time, a short time really, and we are asked to be mothers and fathers, stewards, mentors, guardians, teachers, priests, ministers, and friends to them, but they are never really our children. They belong to somebody else, God, and to themselves more than they ever belong to us. There is both a deep challenge and a deep consolation in understanding and accepting that. If we accept this, we will be less inclined to act as “owners” of our children and we will be less prone to manipulate our children for our own ends, to see them as a satellites within our own orbits, and more inclined to love, cajole, challenge, and correct, even while giving them their freedom. When we realize, in the healthy sense, that our children are not really ours, we also realize that we are not alone in raising and caring for them. We are, in a manner of speaking, only foster parents. God is the real parent and God’s love, care, aid, and presence to our children is always in excess of our own. God’s anxiety for our children is also deeper than our own. God can touch, challenge, soften, and inspire at levels inside of a child that you cannot reach. Fear not you are inadequate! You can live with that. You’re only a foster parent. God is the real parent.[1]

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[1] Excerpt from Fr. Ron Rolheiser’s reflection, “Not Our Own Children,” July 2006.

My mother and father had strong faith. They prayed every day and had us, as a family, pray with them. One of the prayers they said daily was the SALVE REGINA, an old, classic prayer which asks Mary to intercede for us. Many of us, I suspect, are familiar with it. At one point it describes our state in this life as “mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.” Is this a healthy way to describe ourselves? They never gave it a thought. For them, it made eminent sense to pray like that. For many of us today, it would seem, it doesn’t make sense any more. To describe ourselves as “mourning and weeping in a valley of tears” seems for many of us to be morbid, bad theology, an affront to the spirit of wholeness, celebration, and joy that should permeate our lives. There can be a lot of value in praying in exactly this way. What a prayer like this does is give us permission to not feel abnormal precisely when we aren’t bubbling with happiness. What it tells us is that it’s okay to have a bad day, a lonely season, a life that somehow never fully gets free of tension and restlessness. To accept that we live in an habitual state of incompleteness is to not let an unrealistic ideal crucify what’s good in our lives. Karl Rahner, in his unique Germanic phraseology, has his own take on this. Rahner: In the torrent of the insufficiency of everything attainable, we come to realize that here in this life all symphonies remain unfinished. My parents understood that and for them this was expressed precisely in lines like: “We pray, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.” Praying like this gave them permission to accept the inevitable limitations that life imposes. It gave them permission too to not have to demand from this life something it can never give, clear-cut pure joy. They didn’t have to do violence to life because it couldn’t give them everything they wanted. They accepted the unfinished symphony of their lives – and of all lives – and, because of that, were able to enjoy the beauty and joy that was there. They were equipped, in ways that we aren’t, to handle frustration. For all of our emphasis on health, holism, and positive theology, and for all of our attempts to exorcize everything that suggests limits, how equipped are we really to deal with life’s inevitable frustrations?[1]

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[1] Excerpt from Fr. Ron Rolheiser’s reflection, “Weeping in a Valley of Tears,” November 2000.

We are forever searching for God, though mostly without knowing it. Our normal search for meaning, fulfillment, and even for pleasure, is in fact our search for God. By nature, we search for meaning, love, a soulmate, friendship, emotional connection, sexual fulfillment, significance, recognition, knowledge, creativity, play, humor, and pleasure. However, we tend not to see these pursuits as searching for God. In our minds, we are simply looking for happiness, meaning, fulfillment, and pleasure, and our search for God is something we need to do in another way, more consciously through some explicit religious practices. Well, we are not the first persons to think like that. It has always been this way. For instance, St. Augustine struggled with exactly this, until one day he realized something. “Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you! You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you. In my unloveliness I plunged into the lovely things which you created. You were with me, but I was not with you. … You called, you shouted, and you broke through my deafness. You flashed, you shone, and you dispelled my blindness.” This is an honest admission that he lived a good number of years not loving God; but it is also an admission that, during those years, he had massively misunderstood something and that misunderstanding lay at the root of his failure. His recognition that for all those years while he was searching for life in the world, a search he generally understood as having nothing to do with God, he was actually searching for God. Reading his confession, we tend to focus on the first part of it, namely, on his realization that God was inside of him all the while, but that he was not inside of himself. This is a perennial struggle for us too. Best to realize this early, so we do not have to write: “Late, late, have I loved you!” [1]

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[1] Excerpt from Fr. Ron Rolheiser’s reflection, “Our Unconscious Search fpr God” February 2021.

Henri Nouwen, remarking on what he learned from this inner darkness, collapse, and his eventual return to health, writes that, in the end, our hearts are stronger than our wounds. His affirmation that our hearts are stronger than our wounds and the (seeming) antithetical truth that sometimes our wounds can kill the heart, we need to add a further truth which embraces both sides of this: God’s grace, forgiveness, and love are stronger than our wounds, our collapses, our failures, and seeming despairs. Sometimes, in our struggles, we can access the inner strength buried below our wounds, which will enable us to rise above them and walk again in health, strength, and enthusiasm. However, sometimes our wounds so paralyze the heart that we can no longer access the strength that lies deep within us. In this life, that kind of brokenness can look and feel like a terminal collapse, a sadness for which there is no healing, a despair, a wasted life. However, whenever a collusion of bitter circumstance and mental fragility break someone, when a person’s heart is no longer stronger than his or her wounds, we can take refuge in a deeper truth and consolation, namely, the strength that lies within God’s heart: God’s grace, understanding, and love are stronger than our wounds, our collapses, our failures, and seeming despairs. What sets Christian faith apart from most other religions (as well as from all prosperity gospels) is that Christianity is a religion of grace and not primarily of self-effort (important though that is). As Christians, we don’t have to save ourselves, and we don’t have to get our lives right all on our own. Indeed, nobody ever does. As St. Paul says so clearly in his farewell message in Romans 1-8, none of us ever get our lives right on the basis of our own strength. That’s also true in terms of overcoming our wounds. All of us are weak and break down sometimes. However, and this is the point, when the storms of life overpower us, when we reach down for strength to withstand the storm only to find out that the storm is stronger than we are, we need then to reach still deeper and there we will find that God’s heart is stronger than our brokenness.[1]

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[1] Excerpt from Fr. Ron Rolheiser’s reflection, “Our Heart is Stronger than Our Wounds” April 2021.

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.