Daily Virtue

All of us will get hurt. That is a given. However, and this was his challenge, how we handle that hurt, with either bitterness or forgiveness, will color the rest of our lives and determine what kind of person we will be. Fr. Rolheiser writes that suffering and humiliation will find us all and in full measure, but how we respond to them will determine our maturity level and what kind of person we are. Suffering and humiliation will either soften our hearts or harden our souls. There is no depth of soul without suffering. There is no depth of soul without suffering. Human experience has long ago taught us this. We attain depth primarily through suffering, especially through the kind of suffering that is also humiliating. If any of us were to ask ourselves the question: What has given me depth? What has opened me to deeper perception and deeper understanding? Almost invariably, the answer would be one of which we would be ashamed to speak: we were bullied as a child, we were abused in some way, something within our physical appearance makes us feel inferior, we speak with an accent, we are always somehow the outsider, we have a weight problem, we are socially awkward, the list goes on, but the truth is always the same: To the extent that we have depth we have also been humiliated, the two are inextricably connected. Humiliation makes us deep, but it can make us deep in very different ways: It can make us deep in understanding, empathy, and forgiveness, or it can make us deep in resentment, bitterness, and vengeance. As Jesus prepares to face his crucifixion and the shameful humiliation within it, he cringes before the challenge, and he asks God whether there is another way of getting to the depth of Easter Sunday without having to undergo the humiliation of Good Friday. The issue was not whether to die or not die. It was about how to die. Jesus’ choice was this: Do I die in bitterness or in love? Do I die in hardness of heart or softness of soul? Do I die in resentment or in forgiveness? We know which way he chose. His humiliation drove him to extreme depths, but these were depths of empathy, love, and forgiveness. And, ultimately, for all of us, as was the case with Jesus, we will have to face this choice on the ultimate playing field: In the face of our earthly diminishment and death, will we choose to let go and die with a cold heart or a warm soul?

Scripture details how Jesus often went into the desert to places where he could be alone with the Father. The desert, scripture assures us, is where God is especially near. God sends his angels to minister to us when we are in the desert and the garden of Gethsemane. The desert, as we know, is a place that is stripped of everything that generally nourishes and supports us. We are exposed to chaos, raw fear, and demons of every kind. In the desert, we are exposed, body and soul, made vulnerable to be overwhelmed by chaos and temptations of every kind. But precisely because we are so stripped of everything we usually rely on, this is also a privileged moment for grace. Why? Because all the defense mechanisms, support systems, and distractions that we usually surround ourselves with to keep chaos and fear at bay work at the same time to keep much of God’s grace at bay. What we use to buoy us upwards off both chaos and grace, demons and the divine alike. Conversely, when we are helpless, we are open. That is why the desert is both the place of chaos and the place of God’s closeness. It is no accident that while feeling all is lost, God’s presence shows up. Just at that point in our lives, when we have lost everything that can support us, we find ourselves in the desert of life. And scripture assures us that it is there that God can send angels to minister to us.

Our reflection verse today describes how Jesus tasted death for the sins of everyone through the grace of God. The gospels do not focus on his physical sufferings (which must have been horrific). What they highlight instead is his emotional suffering and his humiliation. He is presented as lonely, betrayed, alone, helpless to explain himself, a victim of jealousy, morally isolated, mocked, misunderstood, stripped naked so as to have to feel embarrassment and shame, and yet, inside of all this, as clinging to warmth, goodness, and forgiveness. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that whenever we find ourselves outside the circle of health and vibrancy, on a sick bed alone, with the sure knowledge that, despite the love and support of family and friends, in the end, it is us, by ourselves, who face disability and disfigurement, who have to lose a breast or an organ to surgery, who face chemotherapy and maybe death, when we are alone inside of that, alone inside of fear, we are feeling what Jesus felt on Good Friday. When we taste that bitterness, there is little else to say other than what Jesus said when he was arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane and led away to humiliation and death. We know what that means. All of us have moments when our world falls apart and when, as the Book of Lamentations says, all we can do is put our mouths to the dust and wait. Wait for what? Wait for darkness and death to have their hour, wait for the curtain of the temple to be torn from top to bottom, and the earth to shake, and the rocks to split open, and the graves to open and to show themselves to be empty. Our verse today conveys that Jesus tasted death for everyone through the grace of God, “For we know that since Christ was raised from the dead, he cannot die again; death no longer has mastery over him. The death he died, he died to sin once and for all, but the life he lives, he lives to God. In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus (Romans 6:9-11).”

It is hard to measure up. In our lucid moments, we admit this. Rarely is there a day when we cannot echo these words by Henri Nouwen: There is a nagging sense that there are unfinished tasks, unfulfilled promises, and unrealized proposals. There is always something else that we should have remembered, done, or said. There are always people we did not speak to, write to, or visit. Thus, although we are very busy, we also have a lingering feeling of never really fulfilling our obligations. A gnawing sense of being unfulfilled underlies our filled lives. It would seem that St. Paul understood this better than many when he said: “Woe to me, wretch that I am, the good I want to do, I cannot do; and the evil I want to avoid, I end up doing!” Nobody does it perfectly, and accepting this, our congenital inadequacy can bring us to a healthy humility and perhaps even to a healthy humor about it. But it should bring us to something more: prayer, especially the Eucharist. The Eucharist is, among other things, a vigil of waiting. When Jesus instituted the Eucharistic celebration, he told the disciples to keep celebrating it until he returned again. The early apostolic communities cannot be understood outside of the matrix of intense expectation. They were communities imminently awaiting Christ’s return. They gathered in the Eucharist, among other reasons, to foster and sustain this awareness, namely, that they were living in wait, waiting for Christ to return. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that the older he gets, the less confident, in some ways, he is becoming. “I don’t always know whether I’m following Christ properly or even know exactly what it means to follow Christ, and so I stake my faith on an invitation that Jesus left us on the night before he died: To break bread and drink wine in his memory and to trust that this if all else is uncertain, is what we should be doing while we wait for him to return.”

God writes straight with crooked lines. We know that expression, though we rarely apply it to sacred history or the birth of Jesus. Fr. Rolheiser writes that we should. Matthew, in a text we like to ignore, traces the lineage of Jesus from Abraham to Mary. What Matthew reveals in his list of people begetting other people is, as Fr. Raymond Brown highlights, quite a checkered story. Jesus’ family tree contains as many sinners as saints, and his origins take their roots too in the crooked lines written by liars, betrayers, adulterers, and murderers. Jesus was pure, but his origins were not. Matthew begins his story of the origins of Jesus with Abraham, who fathers Isaac and then sends his other son, Ishmael, and his mother packing off into the desert to be rid of them. Then Jacob steals his older brother’s blessing from Isaac. Matthew lists the names of fourteen kings who are part of the genetic origins of Jesus. Of those fourteen, only two, Hezekiah and Josiah, were considered faithful to God as judged by the Book of Kings. The rest, in Brown’s words, were “adulterers, murderers, incompetents, power-seekers, and harem-wastrels.” Then there is the question of which women are named as significant in Jesus’ lineage. Instead of naming Sarah, Rebekah, and Rachel, Matthew names Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba before finally naming Mary as Jesus’ mother. Each of these women had marital issues that contained elements of irregularity or scandal, and yet each was able to be an instrument in God’s birth on this planet. Matthew highlights their names to set the stage for Mary, whose pregnancy is also irregular since Jesus had no human father. The God who wrote the beginning with crooked lines also writes the sequence with crooked lines; some of those lines are our own lives and witness. Grace is pure, but we who mediate it often aren’t. Still, God’s love and God’s plan aren’t derailed by our infidelities, sin, and scheming. God’s designs for grace still somehow work. One wonders, too, how many people find this story comforting rather than discomforting, given a strong ecclesial ethos today wherein many of us nurse the fear that we are handing out grace and mercy too cheaply. But grace and mercy are never given out cheaply since love is never merited.

This verse from John’s gospel that we reflect upon today speaks of joy. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that the most demanding asceticism, this practice of the denying physical or psychological desires to attain a spiritual ideal or goal within life is the discipline of joy. Rarely is this recognized. For most of us, the word joy itself rings superficial. It speaks of empty victory celebrations, mindlessness, lack of full awareness, naiveté and lack of depth. There is a cynical adultness in our reaction to joy: “If you knew better, if you were fully awake, you wouldn’t be this happy!” Former Christian spiritualities tended to focus on the incompleteness of life…We live “mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.” There was great strength, and some real wisdom, in that. It gave people permission to cry, to taste life’s bitterness without feeling that there was something fundamentally wrong with them, and it helped people accept the truth that in this life all symphonies must remain unfinished. Other current spiritualities, at least as they are frequently lived out, affirm the equation between joy and superficiality by emphasizing anger, indignation, righteousness, and an undue sense of purpose and urgency about everything. These last words – grim, humorless, joyless and bitter – describe to some degree the church and secular circles we move in. Most frequently, these circles are somber, anxious, over-burdened, cynical, humorless, heavy places, hard untender places. There is an undue sense of urgency and precious little childlikeness, freedom and simple joy. As Christians, we need to be reminded that real asceticism lies in joy itself. It is far easier, and it takes infinitely less discipline, to be heavy than to be light. Heaviness, resentment, anger, grudges, moroseness and lack of joy come naturally; light-heartedness, forgiveness, long-suffering, humor and joy have to be worked at.

In today’s reflection verse from Luke’s gospel, we hear Jesus saying that he “wills” to do the good. But many in this world are trapped by a God they see as angry, bitter, and vengeful. How are we supposed to “see” God and the attributes of God that Jesus incarnated? Fr. Ron Rolheiser, who taught a course entitled The Theology of God for fifteen years, writes that it is not easy to reflect God adequately, but we must try to reflect better the God that Jesus showed us. So, what are the marks of that God? Fr. Rolheiser writes that first, we must understand that God has no favorites. No one person, race, gender, or nation is more favored than others by that God. All are privileged. God is also clear that it’s not only those who profess God and religion explicitly who are persons of faith but also those, irrespective of their explicit faith or church practice, who do the will of God on earth. Next, God is scandalously understanding and compassionate, especially toward the weak and sinners. God is willing to sit down with sinners without first asking them to clean up their lives. Moreover, God asks us to be compassionate in the same way to both sinners and saints and to love them both equally. That God does not have preferential love for the virtuous. In addition, God is critical of those who, whatever their sincerity, try to block access to him. God is never defensive but surrenders himself to death rather than defend himself, never meets hatred with hatred, and dies loving and forgiving those who are killing him. Finally, and centrally, God is, first of all, good news for the poor. Any preaching in God’s name that isn’t good news for the poor is not the gospel. Those are the attributes of the God who Jesus incarnated, and we need to remember that aspect of God in all of our preaching, teaching, and pastoral practices. We must also be sensitive to proper boundaries and the demands of orthodox teaching. The truth sets us free and the demands of discipleship are, by Jesus own admission, harsh. However, with that being admitted, the compassion, mercy, and intelligence of God still need to be reflected in every pastoral action we do. 

The challenge today that Jesus speaks of in loving that which you don’t want to love, is a similar challenge that faced the prophet Isaiah. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that 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 also needed to be a “day of vengeance” on the bad. Interestingly, in a curious omission, when Jesus quotes this text from Isaiah to define his own ministry, he leaves out the part about vengeance. There are too many of us in the church and the world today, in both conservative and liberal camps, who, like this man, have the same burning need. We want to see misfortune fall upon the wicked. It is not enough that eventually, the good should have their day. The bad must be positively punished. All ecclesial camps today agree that justice demands that sin and wickedness be positively punished. We only disagree on what constitutes sin and wickedness. 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 quite outside the circle of the dance. Alice Miller, the great Swiss psychologist, suggests that the primary task of the second half of life is grieving. We need to grieve, she says, or the bitterness and anger that come from our wounds, disappointments, bad choices, and broken dreams will overwhelm us with a sense of life’s unfairness. It is because we are wounded and bitter that we worry about God’s justice, worry that it might be too lenient, worry that the bad will not be fully punished, worry that there might not be a hell. But we should worry less about those things and more about our own incapacity to forgive, to let go of our own hurts, to take delight in life, to give others the sheer gaze of admiration, to celebrate and to truly join in the dance. To be fit for heaven, we must let go of our bitterness. 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!”

Our story begins with a young man who had been having an affair with his girlfriend, and she became pregnant. For a variety of reasons, marriage was impossible. The pregnancy would have an irrevocable impact on a series of lives, his girlfriend’s, his own, and their families, not to mention the child that would be born. The story ended on a note of despair: “I was irresponsible and this has, forever, hurt some people because even God can’t unscramble an egg!” Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that for him, it now seemed, there would always be a certain skeleton in the closet, a past ghost to haunt his happiness. The cross of Jesus reveals that we can live, and live happily and healthily, beyond any egg we have ever scrambled. That is the central message of the cross. How does the cross tell us this? The cross of Jesus tears apart that veil and lets us see inside the holy of holies, the heart of God. And what do we see there? Unfathomable love, unfathomable forgiveness, compassion, and tenderness beyond understanding. In the cross, God tells us: “You can do this to me – and I will still love you!”  An elderly nun, whom I love and respect, is fond of saying: “I’m a loved sinner!” The secret to spiritual health is to acknowledge both parts of that equation in the roots of our souls: We are sinners without any need to rationalize or excuse ourselves, even as we have the sure knowledge that God loves us, deeply and irrevocably, in our weakness. The cross gives us that assurance by telling us precisely that God doesn’t stop loving us, even for one second, irrespective of weakness. The cross of Christ is a rich reality. Among other things, it tells us how God loves and redeems us even when we are unfaithful, and our lives are broken. It is not surprising that hundreds of millions of people, young and old, wear a cross in some form. The cross of Jesus is everywhere evident. We see it on hillsides, on church spires, in cemeteries, and almost everywhere where anything special, love or tragedy, has happened. Rightly so. The cross is the ultimate symbol of love. It shows what love is, what love costs, and what love does for us.

A question often posed by those searching for life meaning and confused by the phrase “God is love,” have often come back with the following statement: “If God loves us no matter what we do, then why keep the commandments? If we are not to be punished or rewarded for our efforts, then why make sacrifices?” Fr. Ron Rolheiser responds by telling us that we don’t try to be good so that God loves and rewards us. God loves us no matter what we do and heaven is never a reward for a good life. Are these glib statements? No. As Jesus assures us, God’s love is always both unmerited and unconditional; nothing we do can ever make God love us, just as nothing can stop God from loving us. God loves just as God does everything else perfectly. God loves everything and everybody perfectly. In fact, part of Christian belief is that God’s love is what keeps everything in existence. If God stopped loving anything, it would cease to be. Then why be good?  Why keep the commandments? What difference does our response make? Our response makes a big difference, but not in terms of giving God offense, driving God away, or making God punish or reward us. It makes a difference in how we stand and feel in the face of love. We cannot offend against God, but we can offend against others and ourselves. We can, like Satan, live in bitterness and unhappiness right within love itself, and we can deeply hurt others. As Martin Luther once said, the desire to be good and to keep the commandments follows from genuine faith and love the way smoke follows fire. The intent is never to earn love or reward but to respond properly to them. This is true in the case of mature love and faith. However, for those of us who are still struggling to be mature, the spiritual and moral precepts of the faith are meant as a discipline – precisely as discipleship – that helps teach us what it means to be a spiritual and sensitive human being. Trying to be good should still not be an attempt to earn love or heaven somehow, but rather a humble acknowledgment that one still needs a lot of help in knowing how to live in the face of love. Ethics follow naturally when truth, beauty, and love are properly appropriated.