Daily Virtue

Have you ever had to wait in line to get into a building, have your bags checked, or hope that the car lane that was closed in front of you would open back up? We all have had an experience like this, and what I find interesting is its relation to our reflection verse, which is the nature of generosity and how we use it versus how God uses it. Suppose after waiting for a substantial period of time, and just as you are getting closer to the opening that will allow you to finally proceed, someone comes along and opens another lane, but for people who have just arrived. You still got your turn, but something inside of you feels slighted and a little angry as you internally say to yourself: “That wasn’t fair! I’ve been waiting for forty minutes, and they got through this mess at the same time as I did!” You had been patiently waiting, but those who arrived later didn’t have to wait at all. While you intellectually know that you hadn’t been treated unfairly, you still were bothered that someone had been more fortunate than you had been. Fr. Ron Rolheiser, writing about a similar experience, noted that these types of encounters in life teach us something beyond the fact that our hearts aren’t always huge and generous. He went on to say, “It helped me understand something about Jesus’ parable concerning the workers who came at the 11th hour and received the same wages as those who’d worked all day and what is meant by the challenge that is given to those who grumbled about the unfairness of this. ‘Are you envious because I’m generous? Are we jealous because God is generous? Does it bother us when others are given unmerited gifts and forgiveness?’ You bet! Ultimately, that sense of injustice, of 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. The desire for strict justice blocks our capacity for forgiveness and thereby 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 has to 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 such is the love of the God to whom we must attune ourselves. Happiness is not about vengeance, but about forgiveness; not about vindication, but about unmerited embrace; and not about capital punishment, but about living beyond even murder.” God leaves us free. So whenever 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.

In the Gospels, we see Jesus perform several healings. He heals lame people, deaf people, mute people, people with leprosy, and two women who for different reasons are unable to become pregnant. What’s important to see in these various miracles is that, almost always, there’s more at issue than mere physical healing. Jesus is healing people in a deeper way, that is, he is healing the lame so that they can walk in freedom and in service of God. He is healing the deaf so that they can hear the Good News. He is healing the mute so that they can open their mouths in praise. He is healing those who are hemorrhaging internally so that they can bring new life to birth. We see this most clearly at those times when Jesus heals people who are blind.  He’s giving them more than just physical sight; he’s opening their eyes so that they can see more deeply. But that’s only an image. How might it be unpackaged? How can the grace and teachings of Jesus help us to see in a deeper way? G.K. Chesterton once affirmed that familiarity is the greatest of all illusions and that the secret to life is to learn to look at things familiar until they look unfamiliar again. We open our eyes to depth when we open ourselves to wonder. By shifting our eyes from seeing through paranoia and self-protection to seeing through metanoia and nurture. By shifting our eyes from seeing through jealousy to seeing through admiration. By shifting our eyes from seeing through bitterness to seeing through eyes purified and softened by grief. By shifting our eyes from seeing through relevance to seeing through contemplation. By shifting our eyes from seeing through anger to seeing through forgiveness. By shifting our eyes from seeing through longing and hunger to seeing through gratitude. Longing and hunger distort our vision. Gratitude restores it. It enables insight. The most grateful person you know has the best eyesight of all the people you know.[1]

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[1] Excerpt from Fr. Ron Rolheiser’s reflection “Seeing in a Deeper Way,” March 2015.

The movie Noah is best interpreted, I think, as a modern cinematic midrash on the Biblical tale.  The midrashim—extremely popular in ancient Israel—were imaginative elaborations of the often-spare Scriptural narratives.  They typically explored the psychological motivations of the major players in the stories and added creative plot lines, new characters, etc.  In the midrashic manner, Darren Aronofsky’s film presents any number of extra-Biblical elements, including a conversation between Noah and his grandfather Methuselah, an army of angry men eager to force their way onto the ark, a kind of incense that lulls the animals to sleep on the ship, and most famously (or infamously), a race of fallen angels who have become incarnate as stone monsters.  These latter characters are not really as fantastic or arbitrary as they might seem at first blush.  Genesis tells us that the Noah story unfolds during the time of the Nephilim, a term that literally means “the fallen” and that is usually rendered as “giants.”  Moreover, in the extra-Biblical book of Enoch, the Nephilimare called “the watchers,” a usage reflected in the great hymn “Ye Watchers and Ye Holy Ones.”  In Aronofsky’s “Noah,” the stone giants are referred to by the same name.
What is most important is that this contemporary midrash successfully articulates the characteristically Biblical logic of the story of Noah.  First, it speaks unambiguously of God:  every major character refers to “the Creator.”  Secondly, this Creator God is not presented as a distant force, nor is he blandly identified with Nature.  Rather, he is personal, active, provident, and intimately involved in the affairs of the world that he has made.  Thirdly, human beings are portrayed as fallen with their sin producing much of the suffering in the world.  Genesis itself remains pretty down on the way human beings operate—read the stories of Cain and Abel and the Tower of Babel for the details.  And “Noah’s” portrayal of the rape of nature caused by industrialization is nowhere near as vivid as Tolkien’s portrayal of the same theme in “The Lord of the Rings.”  Fourthly, the hero of the film consistently eschews his own comfort and personal inclination and seeks to know and follow the will of God.  At the emotional climax of the movie, Noah moves to kill his own granddaughters, convinced that it is God’s will that the human race be obliterated, but he relents when it becomes clear to him that God, in fact, wills for humanity to be renewed.  What is significant is that Noah remains utterly focused throughout, not on his own freedom, but on the desire and purpose of God.  God, creation, providence, sin, obedience, salvation.
There is a minor scene in the film that depicts some members of Noah’s family administering sleep-inducing smoke to the animals.  They look, for all the world, like priests swinging thuribles of incense around a cathedral.  I’m quite sure that this was far from the mind of the filmmakers, but it suggested to me the strong patristic theme that Noah’s Ark is symbolic of the Church.  During a time of moral and spiritual chaos, when the primal watery chaos out of which God created the world returned with a vengeance, the Creator sent a rescue operation, a great boat on which a microcosm of God’s good order would be preserved.  For the Church Fathers, this is precisely the purpose and meaning of the Church:  to be a safe haven where, in the midst of a sinful world, God’s word is proclaimed, where God is properly worshipped, and where a rightly ordered humanity lives in justice and non-violence.  Just as Noah’s Ark carried the seeds of a new creation, so the Church is meant to let out the life that it preserves for the renewal of the world.[1]

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[1] Bishop Robert Barron review of the film “Noah,” April 2024.

Spiritual writers have always told us that we are either growing or regressing, never neutral. This means that we are either praising someone or demanding we be praised, offering gratitude or muttering in bitterness, blessing or cursing, turning attention away from ourselves or demanding it be focused on us, expressing admiration or demanding it, praying a doxology or doing violence. We are always doing one or the other and it’s only by deflecting attention away from ourselves, which is what we do in essence when we give glory to God, that we save ourselves from egoism, jealousy, bitterness, greed, and violence. It’s no accident that when good art depicts someone as being martyred, it always depicts the victim’s eyes as turned upwards, towards heaven, while the eyes of those who are doing the killing or watching it are turned in other directions, never upward. A good artist knows that if we don’t have our eyes turned heavenward we are involved somehow in violence. 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 judgement. 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!” That isn’t a throwaway opening, it’s a key part of the main lesson: Only by praising something beyond ourselves do we save ourselves from bitterness. All the great spiritual writers do the same: They won’t write for long, no matter how bitter or difficult the topic, before they insert some kind of doxology: “Glory be to the Father, the Son, and Holy Spirit”. They know a deep secret: Only praise saves us from bitterness and only by blessing others do we save ourselves from cursing them.[1]

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[1] Excerpt from Fr. Ron Rolheiser’s reflection, “The Value of Praying A Doxology” October 2003.

Luke’s Sermon on the Plain emphasizes a strong focus on social justice and caring for the marginalized, with Jesus directly addressing the poor and hungry, declaring their “blessedness” and highlighting the need to actively love and serve those on the fringes of society, rather than just focusing on personal spiritual practices alone; essentially, it’s a call to action for tangible change in the world, not just inward reflection. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that in the past, because we knew less, it was possible to be good and saintly and less involved in social justice, despite the fact that scripture and Christ’s explicit teaching make the call to justice just as non-negotiable as the call to prayer and private morality. Today we know more, not just because modern communications daily shows us the victims of injustice on our television screens and in our newspapers, but also, and especially, because we are less sociologically naive. Put positively, this lack of naivete means that we understand better how social systems affect us, both for good and for bad … and social justice is really about how systems affect us, especially adversely. It is very important that this be understood. Although they interpenetrate each other and depend upon each other, social justice and social morality are distinct from private charity and private morality. Private morality is something that, precisely, I do on my own. Other persons might guide me or inspire me, but, in the end, I am moral and charitable at this level on the basis of my own personal goodness and personal actions. Social justice, on the other hand, has to do with the social systems I am part of and participate in. I can be a good person in my private life, churchgoing, prayerful, kind, honest, gentle, and generous in my dealings with others, and still, at the same time, be part of a social, economic, political, and even ecclesial system that is unfair in that it works for the benefit of some at the cost of victimizing others. Issues such as war, poverty, violation of the ecology, feminism, native rights, abortion, and racism (to name just a few) are caused not just, nor indeed any longer primarily, by individual persons acting in bad conscience and doing bad things, but by huge impersonal systems which are inherently unfair and are, to an extent, beyond the control of the individuals who participate in them.

Jesus, for most of his ministry, used words. Through words, he tried to bring us God’s consolation, challenge, and strength. His words, like all words, had a certain power. Indeed, his words stirred hearts, healed people, and affected conversions. But at a time, powerful though they were, they too became inadequate. Something more was needed. So, on the night before he death, having exhausted what he could do with words, Jesus went beyond them. He gave us the Eucharist, his physical embrace, his kiss, a ritual within which he holds us to his heart. That is the best understanding of the Eucharist. I took long courses on the Eucharist during my undergraduate and graduate theological training. In the end, these didn’t explain the Eucharist to me, not because they weren’t good, but because the Eucharist, like a kiss, needs no explanation and has no explanation. If anyone were to write a four-hundred-page book entitled “The Metaphysics of a Kiss,” it would not deserve a readership. Kisses work. Their inner dynamics need no metaphysical elaboration. The Eucharist is God’s kiss. In a remarkable little essay entitled, In Praise of Skin, Brenda Peterson describes how she once was inflicted by a skin rash that no medicine could effectively soothe. She tried every kind of doctor and medicine to no avail. Finally, she turned to her grandmother, remembering how, as a little girl, her grandmother used to massage her skin whenever she had rashes, bruises, or was otherwise ill. The ancient remedy worked again. Her grandmother massaged her skin, over and over again, and the rash that seemingly couldn’t be eradicated disappeared. Skin needs to be touched. This is what happens in the Eucharist and that is why the Eucharist, and every other Christian sacrament, always has some very tangible physical element to it – a laying on of hands, a consuming of bread and wine, an immersion into water, an anointing with oil. An embrace needs to be physical, not only something imagined. When words aren’t enough. God has to pick us up, like a mother her child. Physical embrace is what’s needed. Skin needs to be touched. God knows that. It’s why Jesus gave us the Eucharist.[1]

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[1] Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s reflection, “The Eucharist as God’s Physical Embrace”, May 2006.

During the last year of her life, Therese of Lisieux corresponded regularly with a young man named Maurice, who was preparing to become a missionary. He was always afraid to tell her about his moral failures. Eventually, though, he did muster up the courage and trust needed to share his weaknesses with her, though only after first expressing his fear: “I was afraid that in love you would take on the prerogative of justice and holiness and that everything that is sullied would then become an object of horror for you.” Therese’s response to this comment is most noteworthy: “It must be that you don’t know me well at all if you are afraid that a detailed account of your faults would lessen the tenderness that I feel for your soul.” Our problem, given the fear that what is wrong in us will somehow lessen God’s affection, is that we rarely really lay bare what is actually inside of our hearts. Instead, we treat God as we would a visiting dignitary, namely, we show God what we think God wants to see in us, tell God what we think God would want to hear about us, and hide all those things that we feel will lessen God’s affection. Silly as it sounds, we, like Adam and Eve after the fall, try to hide our faults from God, worrying that if we really bared our souls, God would be displeased. The same is true in our church lives: Invariably, when we most need God and the support of the community of faith, we stay away from church and community. As Therese says: “You must not know me very well if you think that a detailed account of your faults would in any way lessen the tenderness I feel towards you.” In fact, on this score we might well learn a lesson from Adam and Eve. After they sinned, they too did what comes naturally, they hid and tried to camouflage their shame by their own efforts at clothing themselves. But their shame remained until God found them and gave them real clothing with which to cover their guilt. We do not know God very well at all when we fear coming into God’s presence replete with all that is within us, weaknesses as well as strengths. Nothing we do can ever lessen God’s tenderness towards us.[1]

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[1] Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s reflection, “On Not Hiding From God,” August 1999.

“It is not good to always be alone”—not just in terms of emotional loneliness but also in terms of healthy human and moral growth. “The human being needs a helpmate.” Those words, attributed to God just before the creation of Eve, are meant as an antidote to the pain of human loneliness and inconsummation. That is evident. At the deepest level of everything, from atomic particles through men and women, there is an archetypal primal imperative that says something can be whole only if it has two mutually complementary principles, one female and the other male. The uniting of gender is constitutive of nature itself. It is also not good to be alone for reasons that have to do with human maturity and morality. Simply put, when I am alone it is often a lot easier to be selfish, immature, given over to addictions and blind to the needs of others. All of us have an itch for privacy, for control, for ownership, to have things exclusively for ourselves, and to decide things all on our own. We also want our own space and the power to control things around us—and to walk in and out on others on our own terms. Family and community life today are struggling for exactly those reasons. It is dangerous to be alone, dangerous because, when we are alone, we do not have to adjust ourselves to another’s rhythm, another’s needs and another’s demands. It is then a lot easier to grow selfish. It is also not good to be alone for moral reasons. It is no accident that we like to be alone when we act out in relation to our addictions. All alcoholics crave privacy, as do those who have drug, sex or gambling addictions. Bad morality doesn’t want an audience. Nobody watches pornography with his family! It is not good to be alone. Everyone needs a helpmate, not just to not be lonely but also to be mature and moral.[1]

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[1] Excerpt from Fr. Ron Rolheiser’s reflection, “Why It’s Not Good to Be Alone” September 1996.

How can there be an all-loving and an all-powerful God if there is so much suffering and evil in our world? A colleague once challenged Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the French Jesuit Catholic Priest, with this question. You believe that good will ultimately triumph over evil; well, what if we blow up the world with an atomic bomb? What happens to goodness then? Teilhard answered this way. If we blow up the world with an atomic bomb, that would be a two-million-year setback, but goodness will triumph over evil, not because I wish it, but because God promised it and, in the resurrection, God showed that God has the power to deliver on that promise. He is right. Except for the resurrection, we have no guarantees about anything. That is our hope. Jesus was a great moral teacher, and his teachings, if followed, would transform the world. Simply put, if we all lived the Sermon on the Mount, our world would be loving, peaceful, and just; but self-interest is often resistant to moral teaching. From the Gospels, we see that it was not Jesus’ teaching that swayed the powers of evil and ultimately revealed the power of God. Not that. The triumph of goodness and the final power of God were revealed instead through his death, by a grain of wheat falling in the ground and dying and so bearing lots of fruit. Jesus won victory over the powers of the world in a way that seems antithetical to all power. He did not overpower anyone with some intellectually superior muscle or by some worldly persuasion. No, he revealed God’s superior power simply by holding fast to truth and love even as lies, hatred, and self-serving power were crucifying him. The powers of the world put him to death, but he trusted that somehow God would vindicate him, that God would have the last word. God did. God raised him from the dead as a testimony that he was right and the powers of the world were wrong, and that truth and love will always have the last word. That is why St. Paul says that if Jesus was not resurrected, then we are the most deluded of all people.[1]

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[1] Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s reflection, “The Triumph of Good Over Evil”, January 2021.

Our scriptures begin with the affirmation that what’s deepest in us, what defines us, is the IMAGO DEI, the image and likeness of God. To be in God’s “image and likeness” does not mean that we have stamped, somewhere in our souls, a beautiful icon. God, scripture tells us, is fire, wild, holy, undomesticated. To be in the image and likeness of God is to have this wildness in us. It’s this God-fire that these secular best-sellers are, each in its own way, referring to, and they are so popular because essentially what they say is true. Where, then, does Christian theology differ from them? On one very critical point: What Christianity (and every other great religion in the world) affirms, and what is generally lacking in these secular books, is the all-important insight that, while this fire is good and godly, we must never try to cope with it without connecting it to the other world. Anyone who tries to handle this energy without referring it to a world beyond our own will find that, far from being a source of wonder and enchantment, this fire will be a source of destruction, restlessness, and depression. Why? Precisely because this innate wildness over-charges us for life in this world. Divine fire trying to satiate itself solely within a finite situation, perhaps more clearly than anything else, explains why things don’t happen smoothly in our lives. There’s a divine fire within each of us. If we link ourselves to it properly and connect it to the other world, it becomes godly energy, the source of all that’s wonderful in life. However, if we run with the wolves, sit under Venus or Mars, and enter our wildness without reference to God and a world beyond, that fire will destroy us. Nobody can look at God and live! That’s not just a biblical statement but a practical formula for survival.[1]

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[1] Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s reflection, “Coping with the Imago Dei,” January 2002.