Author: DVO

To be affirmed is a human need. We are created to get and to give love. Today’s interaction between Jesus and Peter connects to many people who long for that second chance. Three times, Jesus asks Peter: “Do you love me?” Three times, Peter replies that he does. One of the lessons on love is hidden in this interaction. Jesus assures us that God’s love is always both unmerited and unconditional; nothing we do can ever make God love us, just as nothing we do can ever stop God from loving us. God loves just as God does everything else – perfectly. The challenge for many is to accept the reality that God loved Judas as much as he did Peter. The difference is not in how God loves them but in how they, in turn, love God. Judas and Peter’s responses to the actions against the Lord are very different. How we respond to God’s love either draws us closer to him or drives us away from him. Our actions, or lack thereof, separate us from him because his perfect love can never be driven away. God will always love us.

Today’s reading from the Gospel of John is the classical text of the ecumenical movement, which the Catholic Church officially joined in 1964. The movement seeks to foster complete unity among all Christians. In this reading from John, we see Jesus asking the Father to give his disciples four things: unity, perseverance, joy, and holiness. By praying to him to keep them in his name, Jesus is asking for their perseverance in the teaching he has given them and in communion with him. An immediate consequence of this perseverance is unity, which was the foundation of the ecumenical movement. Dr. Mary Marrocco, an associate secretary for the Canadian Council of Churches, writes that this movement “arose out of Christians’ sorrow at finding ourselves not ‘one’ and realizing this means in some ways we’re a broken image of the Trinity. That’s tragic, for the Trinity unites us and is disturbing because we wonder if we’re making it harder for people to find God.” I love that we are a gift from the Father to Jesus, just as we are, broken and confused, even about to betray him as the disciples were that night. Despite it all, Jesus considers us a gift. Out of this awareness, we can be moved to find that unity he already gave us and to find that we’re also gifts to each other. Saint Pope John Paul II was deeply involved in the ecumenical movement, as noted in his encyclical Ut Unum Sint: On Commitment to Ecumenism, referred to this movement as the “ecumenical gift exchange, this organic part of the church’s life and work, that must pervade all that she is and does.” Just as the Lord freely gave us his gift of love, let us unite with other Christians and share this gift with others. That is the joy of God’s gift to us.

French philosopher Gabriel Marcel famously stated, To say to someone “I love you” is to say, “you will never be lost.” As Christians, we understand this in terms of our unity inside the Body of Christ. Our love for someone links him or her to us, and since we are part of the Body of Christ, he or she too is linked to the Body of Christ, and to touch Christ is to touch grace. Thanks to the marvels of the Incarnation, every sincere Christian can say, “my heaven includes this or that particular person whom I love.” We used to call this “baptism by desire”, except that in this instance the desire for “baptism” is on our part, but still equally efficacious. We need to recognize that God loves these persons more than we do and is more solicitous for their happiness and salvation than we are. God loves everyone individually and passionately and works in ways to ensure that nobody gets lost. God is infinitely patient. If we bracket piety for a moment, we might profitably compare God to a Global Positioning System (GPS) given how infinitely patient and yet persistent a GPS is in giving us directions. It never gives up on us. God is the same. We have an intended destination and God gives us constant instructions along the way. Like a trusted GPS, God is forever saying ‘recalculating’ and giving us new instructions predicated on our failure to accept the previous instruction. Eventually, no matter our number of wrong turns and dead ends, God will get us home. Ultimately, God is the only game in town, in that no matter how many false roads we take and how many good roads we ignore, we all end up on the one, same, last, final road. All of us: atheists, agnostics, nones, dones, searchers, procrastinators, those who don’t believe in institutionalized religion, the indifferent, the belligerent, the angry, the bitter, and the wounded, end up on the same road heading towards the same destination – death. However, the good news is that this last road, for all of us, the pious and the impious alike, leads to God.

It’s hard to recognize how far we are at times from the love Jesus speaks to in today’s gospel reading. It is easy for us to feel connected to the commandment of Jesus to “love one another” when, in reality, all we do is love those who love us. The real test of this commandment comes in loving those who have hurt us, who don’t like us, and we don’t want to be around. Fr. Ron Rolheiser points out that the type of love most of us practice is self-serving and often manipulative. “The love of Jesus takes us past our natural instinct to love those who love us and challenges us to be warm to those who are cold to us, to be kind to those who are cruel to us, to do good to those who hate us, to forgive those who hurt us, to forgive those who won’t forgive us, and to ultimately love and forgive those who are trying to kill us.” Jesus’ command to love and forgive your enemy is more than a creedal formula; it is the litmus test for Christian discipleship. Fr. Rolheiser says we can ardently believe in and defend every item in the creed and fight passionately for justice in all its dimensions, “but the real test of whether or not we are followers of Jesus is the capacity or non-capacity to forgive an enemy, to remain warm and loving towards someone who is not warm and loving to us. What shatters our illusion of love is the presence in our lives of people who hate us. They’re the test. Here, we have to measure up: If we can love them, we’re real lovers; if we can’t, we’re still under a self-serving illusion.”

Christ is speaking to his disciples and tells them, “Have courage, I have conquered the world.” How do we get so confused in today’s world that we fail to understand what he has conquered? So many of us strive to find joy and happiness in conquering the world so we might gain its riches and thereby find our joy and happiness. Alexander the Great is a wonderful example of the reality that man’s contentment is in his mind and not his possessions. It is said that Alexander, with all the world at his feet, cried because there were no more worlds to conquer. Phillip Homes writes that “The human heart is impossible to satisfy with temporal conditions or earthly goods. We always want more.” C.S. Lewis notes in his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, that “true joy is the ache for something beyond this world, like those little moments in life when the light falls just a certain way on a summer evening that it stirs in you a deep longing that’s hard to define. Earthly pursuits cannot fill the void. The quest for true joy and happiness is connecting to something, not of this world – and that would be the movement of the Holy Spirit in your life.” It’s the spirit who will use this restlessness to awaken a spiritual hunger within you, this ache for something beyond this world. It will push you deeper and deeper into your relationship with God. Pursue Him. Allow that longing for Him to become the hottest fire in your heart, for that is where true joy and happiness are found.

Mark is the evangelist of evangelization. From Jesus’ beginning proclamation, “Repent, and believe in the Gospel,” to his Great Commission, “Go into the whole world and proclaim the Gospel,” we are called to evangelize. Evangelization is about naming grace. It is not about bringing God to people as though God were not already there. Evangelists in every age do not make God present but name God’s presence. Mark’s Gospel shows us how the familiar is our Temple, and the ordinary is the home of God. The apostles did more than preach about Jesus. They shared the personal stories of their own development of a love relationship with Christ. Love became a golden thread that bound them to their listeners and captivated their hearts. That is why they became such astonishing convert makers. They used the most irresistible force ever invented to change people’s minds by changing people’s hearts first. The Gospel of Mark lets us conclude that every human experience if given a chance, can speak to us of God. The commission to evangelize requires us to be poets or interpreters of everyday experiences. We help others see life as touched by God. We do that by looking at life in the light of faith. Evangelizing involves looking more deeply into the ordinary to see the Extraordinary and then naming the divine graciousness sustaining us.

Not having an unhealthy notion of God doesn’t necessarily mean that you have a particularly healthy one. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that the God he was raised with was not overly stern and judgmental, but neither was he very joyous, playful, witty, or humorous. He wasn’t sexual and had a particularly vigilant and uncompromising eye in that area. Essentially, he was grey, a bit dour, and not very joyous to be around. Around him, you had to be solemn and reverent. Under such a God, you had permission to be essentially healthy, but to the extent that you took him seriously, you still walked through life less than fully robust, and your relationship with him could only be solemn and reverent. We rarely recognize what tells us about God and, equally, fail to seek out literature that outlines key aspects of knowing that which is ineffable. What kind of creator makes billions of throwaway universes?  What kind of creator makes trillions upon trillions of species of life, millions of them never to be seen by the human eye? What kind of father or mother has billions of children? And what does the exuberance in the energy of young children say about our creator? What does their playfulness suggest about what must also lie inside of sacred energy? What does the energy of a young puppy tell us about what’s sacred? What do laughter, wit, and irony tell us about God? When we try to imagine the heart of reality, we might picture things this way: At the very center of everything, there sit two thrones. On one sits a King, and on the other sits a Queen, and from these two thrones issues forth all energy, all creativity, all power, all love, all nourishment, all joy, all playfulness, all humor, and all beauty. All images of God are inadequate, but this image hopefully can help us understand that God is perfect masculinity and perfect femininity, making perfect love all the time and that from this union issues forth all energy and all creation. Moreover, that energy, at its sacred root, is not just creative, intelligent, personal, and loving; it’s also joyous, colorful, witty, playful, humorous, erotic, and exuberant at its very core. To feel it is an invitation to gratitude. The challenge of our lives is to live inside that energy in a way that honors it and its origins. That means taking our shoes off before the burning bush as we respect its sacredness, even as we take from it permission to be more robust, free, joyous, humorous, playful, and especially more grateful.

There is too little anguish in our Eucharists. To become one heart with each other involves anguish, the painful letting go of paranoia, selfishness, bitterness, hurt, jealousies, pettiness, the narrowness of vision, aggressiveness, shyness, and all those other things that keep us apart. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes the above statement as a reality check on our fear of opening ourselves to the reality of being vulnerable. Jim Wallis writes, “In worship, the community is edified…if it does not edify itself here, it certainly will not do so in daily life, nor in the execution of its ministry to the world.” Christ was effective because Christ was vulnerable. He was also often in anguish. It would perhaps do all of us good occasionally to leave the Eucharist and, instead of going off for a lively brunch with the folks, go off as Jesus did after the first Eucharist to a lonely place to have an agony in the garden and to sweat some blood as we ask for the strength to drink from the real chalice – the chalice of vulnerability. Occasionally, when St. Augustine would hand the Eucharist to a communicant, he would, instead of saying “the body of Christ,” say: “Receive what you are.” Augustine had perceived, for whatever reasons, that the words of consecration – “this is my body, this is my blood” – are intended more to change the people present than they are meant to change the bread and wine. For him, it was more important that the people become the real presence of God, that they become food and drink for the world, than that the bread and wine do. That is, in fact, the real task of the Eucharist: to change people, to create out of us the real presence. It is in this vulnerability that Christ showed us that we touch the heart of God and the true joy of living this life he has blessed us with. People will celebrate as a community only when self-protectiveness, mutual suspicion, and macho posturing are first broken down. When this happens, hearts of stone will turn to hearts of flesh, bitterness to charity.

We have been reading over the past several weeks what is referred to as “The Last Supper Discourses.” Today, Jesus is giving them further consolation by telling the disciples that he is not leaving them permanently and promises that he will come back to stay with them. However, the apostles fail to grasp what he means. One of the saddest and most memorable scenes in my life was crouching down to console my 7-year-old son, who was just told that I was leaving on an airplane to join those in our squadron who were deploying for the Mediterranean and the start of the Iraq War. I picked him up and promised that I would be back. But he had no concept of what those words meant since I had never been away from him up to that point in his life. He just knew that he didn’t want me to leave. I was blessed to stay in touch with him throughout my deployment, with emails and video messages, so that he knew I was okay, that I loved him, and that I would be coming home soon. We have that same opportunity with the Lord. While we desire to be with him and wish he would return soon to fix this crazy world, he has given us his promise that he will return. God’s Word is his love letter to us. Embrace it and believe it. For in a “little while,” he will greet you in love and say, “Welcome home, my good and faithful servant.”

In her book “Guidelines for Mystical Prayer,” Ruth Burrows describes what it means to die a “happy death.” To die in a good way, she states, is not a question of whether death catches us in a morally good moment or a morally bad one (e.g., dying drunk in a bar as opposed to dying in a church). Rather, to die a happy death is to die in honesty, without pretense, and without the need to lie about our lives. Only a saint, she says, can afford a saint’s death. The task for the rest of us is to die in honesty as sinners, asking God to forgive us for a life of weakness. We read in scripture how Jesus picked up parables and stories that were current in his culture and tailored them to further his own religious and moral teachings. Moreover, he taught, and with precious little equivocation, that we are to honor truth wherever we see it, irrespective of who’s carrying it. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that true faith is humble enough to accept truth wherever it sees it, irrespective of the tension it causes and irrespective of the religion or ideology of whoever is speaking it. Big minds and big hearts are large enough to contain and carry large ambiguities and great tensions. And true worshippers of God accept God’s goodness and truth wherever these are manifest, no matter how religiously or morally inconvenient that manifestation might be. God is the author of all that is good and all that is true! Hence, since no one religion, one church, one culture, one philosophy, or one ideology contains all of the truth, we must be open to perceiving and receiving goodness and truth in many, many different places – and we must be open to the tensions and ambiguity this brings into our lives.