Today, we hear the story of Jesus and his disciples being admonished for not practicing the same ascetical customs as was the habit of John the Baptist and the Pharisees. But Jesus is speaking to a different reality. If our life is full of prayer, fasting, giving alms, and living a good moral life with a healthy concern for social justice, what could be missing? Balance. Fr. Ron Rolheiser notes that “Any journey that takes you towards God will demand, at a point, some vigorous asceticism, some real fasting, a real purification and a disciplined ordering of the countless, obsessive feelings and desires that act through us. We must break what some spiritual masters call ‘the tyranny of the ego.’ We will not get in touch with the deep source of our lives if the activities of our lives are so consuming and obsessive that we can never find an identity and meaning in something beyond them. That is the ultimate reason behind asceticism and fasting of all kinds: we renounce something, even if it is good, in the function of getting in touch with its deeper source, God.” But all of this must be done within a balanced life. As Fr. Rolheiser warns, “Otherwise, like the older brother of the prodigal son, we might succumb to the temptation that T.S. Eliot describes, ‘The last temptation that’s the greatest treason is to do the right thing for the wrong reason.’ We do not just need the right truth, and we also need the right energy.”