Author: DVO

Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that scripture tells us that we carry within us the image and likeness of God. But we should not picture God’s image within us as some beautiful icon stamped inside our souls. God is fire, holy energy, infinite creativity, infinite freedom, wildness beyond our imaginations, and energy that is boundless and fuels everything that is, that lives, that breathes, that searches for meaning. We see from Scripture that real revelation, a true in-breaking of God into our lives, always comes as a surprise, as something we could not have anticipated, programmed for ourselves, manipulated, or even imagined. Thus, scripture tells us to make a special place in our lives for the unfamiliar, the stranger, the foreigner, the person who is utterly different from us. What’s unfamiliar is what brings us God’s revelation. One of the marks of true revelation is that it stretches us, takes us into new territory, and opens us up to realities we cannot imagine. We sometimes experience dark nights of the soul in our faith and religious beliefs. What happens is that our religious securities, including our imaginative sense of God’s existence, disappear, and we are left not just with a new and surprising (to us) insecurity in terms of our religious belief but, more painfully still, the incapacity to imagine with any certainty the existence and nature of God. Our inner powers to feel, imagine, and sense God’s existence dry up and leave us in a certain “agnosticism.” The agnosticism we feel is a healthy unknowing, an unknowing that opens us up to a purer and deeper way of experiencing God. Essentially, what a dark night of the soul does is clear away false debris, false securities, and the manipulative images of God that we created for ourselves. When C.S. Lewis was struggling with his decision to become a Christian, one of the turning points in his decision to become a Christian came as the result of a challenge from J.R.R. Tolkien, the author of Lord of the Rings. Hearing Lewis express his doubt, Tolkien simply said: “That is a poverty of imagination on your part!” Nothing could be truer. God and the great mysteries are indeed beyond our imaginations, and sometimes, when we try to imagine them, we experience agnosticism precisely because we end up meeting ourselves rather than the true God. In our religious quest, we attune ourselves to a reality and a consciousness that is beyond our own, as opposed to touching what is highest inside of ourselves or highest within the collective ideals of humanity. In real religion, we meet God, not ourselves.

Thomas Keating wrote that people came to him for spiritual direction, sharing how they used to have a warm and solid sense of God in their lives but now complain that all that warmth and confidence have disappeared and they’re left struggling with belief and struggling to pray as they used to. They feel a deep sense of loss and invariably this is their question: “What’s wrong with me?” His answer, in essence, says this: Despite your pain, there is something very right with you. You have moved past being a religious neophyte, past an initiatory stage of religious growth, which was right for you for its time, and are now being led into a deeper, not lesser, faith. You felt that you understood God and religion. Then the bottom fell out of your faith and certainty, and now you are finding yourself a lot less sure of yourself, considerably more humble, more empathetic, and less judgmental. Fr. Rolheiser writes that we tend to confuse faith with our capacity on any given day to conjure up a concept of God and imagine God’s existence. We think our faith is strongest at those times when we have affective and emotive feelings attached to our imaginations about God. Strong imaginative images and strong feelings about God are, in the end, just that, images. Wonderful, but images nonetheless, icons. An image is not the reality. Mystics such as John of the Cross call this experience of seemingly losing our faith “a dark night of the soul.” This describes the experience where we used to feel God’s presence with a certain warmth and solidity, but now we feel like God is non-existent, and we are left in doubt. This is what Jesus experienced on the cross, and this is what Mother Teresa wrote about in her journals. While that darkness can be confusing, it can also be maturing: It can help move us from being arrogant, judgmental, religious neophytes to humble, empathic men and women, living inside a cloud of unknowing, understanding more by not understanding than by understanding, helpfully lost in a darkness we cannot manipulate or control, so as to finally be pushed into genuine faith, hope, and charity.

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. The type of love most of us practice is “self-serving and often manipulative,” as Fr. Ron Rolheiser points out. “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.” That is a measuring stick that challenges all of us, especially me. I know this is the true path of holiness that scripture speaks to, the path his disciples walked, and the one we must walk if we choose to imitate him. It’s the test of true humility, of unconditional love, of loving all who hate us. It’s a high-measuring stick, one most of us consistently fail to reach. Yet, we must remember that what is impossible for us is possible with God. All he is asking us to do is try each day to be that kind of love to others. Each day, we must learn to empty ourselves of “us” so the Lord can fill us with “His” love. Then, with the help of the Holy Spirit, we go forth to give that love away to all we encounter.

Questions. We all have them. It started for many of us before we could even speak as we explored the new world we had been brought into. Part of our makeup as human beings is this desire to know. It drives so much of who and what we become. While I never realized some of my childhood dreams, the journey of trying to bring them to fulfillment taught me many truths about life, one of them being the importance of staying steadfast to the truths I learned. I am reminded about the truth my father taught me of “first things first” and how distractions from the task at hand can lead to unfortunate consequences. This reality of distraction can be easily seen in the picture of the young boy standing in the outfield of a baseball game, his attention captured by a bumble bee feeding on a flower in the field. Suddenly a fly ball is hit his way, but he misses it because his focus was on the bee and not on the game [been there before].When we allow ourselves as adult believers, to become distracted from what Christ taught us, we can begin to drift away from him. This can lead to apathy, spiritual neglect, prayerlessness, and detachment from God’s Word. This is what we hear in the Lord’s words to the disciples today; stay steadfast to what I have spoken to you; remain in me so that I will remain in you.

What is a father? What is a dad?  What does your father do for you simply by fathering you and then do to you by his love and his absence, by his care and his neglect, and by his virtues and his weaknesses? If the Neo-Freudians are right, then your father and your mother have very different roles in the formation of your person. It is the mother who is your symbiotic link to life, and it’s from her, much more so than from your father, that you get your body, your link to the earth, and, to the extent that you have this, your sense of being loved, wanted, cradled, and cherished. It’s she who gestates, carries, and then licks, cradles, and nourishes the child. No child or adult ultimately ever forgets this and the constrictions or freedoms in our hearts are very linked to our mothers. But it is the father who mediates authority and who must give the child both permission to enjoy life and the challenge of discipline. It’s the father who must, especially by the way he himself lives, model for the child the correct combination of pleasure and renunciation. It’s from him, more so than from the mother, that the child learns the combination of release and control, submission to authority, and the freedom to walk one’s own path. A father’s task is also key in initiating you into adulthood, in helping to lead you beyond being the little boy or the little girl towards the adult, the man or the woman. A father does this to you by, first of all, showing you in his own life how erotic energy and warrior energy (your energy for love and your energy to fight) should flow into each other and form some harmony so that all the boundless and chaotic forces within you can be contained, focused, and then creatively opened and spent for the service of God and community. The father must show his child the purpose of both sexual and warrior energy, namely, how enjoyment and creativity blend with courageous self-renunciation and how erotic and warrior energy merge in the fight to protect the community (especially its weakest members). Your father must teach you how to be both a lover and a warrior.

My own father, imperfect as are all human fathers, didn’t always find, nor radiate, the perfect balance between enjoyment and discipline, lover and warrior, sexual enjoyment and self-abnegation. As one of his sons, I also do not always know how to walk the tightrope, and there is sloppiness between laziness and overwork, love and anger, self-indulgence, and masochism. Sometimes, I can protect the community, and sometimes, I cannot even protect myself. But I have steadiness, too, sometimes, beyond the slopping around. I had a good dad. He both loved and fought, and he was sometimes too hard on himself, but sometimes he thoroughly enjoyed his life.

“Joy is the gist of the Christian Good News. Yet only if we open wide our senses will we be able to drink from the source of this joy. Only then will the Good News prove truly good and ever new.” The above quote comes from a book by Benedictine monk, Brother David Steindl-Rast, The Way of Silence: Engaging the Sacred in Everyday Life. One of the takeaways from the book is the connection between the joy Jesus speaks to in today’s reading and gratefulness. Brother David makes the case that most of us go through life missing its true splendor because “We plod along half-blind, half-deaf, with all our senses throttled, and numbed by habituation. How much joy is lost on us? How many surprises do we miss? It is as if Easter eggs had been hidden under every bush and we were too lazy to look for them.” Brother David goes on to say that “joy goes beyond happiness because joy is not dependent on what happens. Joy springs from gratefulness, and gratefulness is the key to living life in its fullness. Here is a little exercise Brother David offers to help us understand gratefulness in a way that will lead to experiencing “complete” joy. Tomorrow morning, before you open your eyes, reflect on the reality that, at this very instant, there are millions of blind people in the world. Linger on that thought for a few moments. Now, open your eyes. You are most likely initially grateful that you can still see. Brother David says, “As soon as we stop taking our eyesight for granted, gifts spring into our eyes which we did not even recognize as gifts before. To recognize a gift as gift is the first step towards gratefulness.” Since gratefulness is the key to joy, we hold the key to joy in our own hands, the key to what we most desire.

Henri Nouwen writes that Jesus invites us to abide in his love, which means to dwell with all that we are in him. It is an invitation to total belonging, full intimacy, and unlimited being with him. “The anxiety that plagues me shows that a great part of me is not yet ‘abiding’ in Jesus. My mind and heart keep running away from my true dwelling place, and they explore strange lands where I end up in anger, resentment, lust, fear, and anguish. I know that living a spiritual life means bringing every part of myself home to where it belongs. Jesus describes the intimacy that he offers as the connectedness between the vine and its branches. I long to be grafted onto Jesus as a branch onto the vine so that all my life comes from the vine. In communion with Jesus, the vine, my little life can grow and bear fruit. I know it, but I do not live it. Somehow, I keep living as if there are other sources of life that I must explore outside of Jesus. But Jesus keeps saying, ‘Come back to me, give me all your burdens, all your worries, fears, and anxieties. Trust that with me, you will find rest.’ I am struggling to listen to that voice of love and to trust in its healing power. My true spiritual work is to let myself be loved, fully and completely, and to trust that in that love, I will come to the fulfillment of my vocation. I keep trying to bring my wandering, restless, anxious self home so that I can rest there in the embrace of love.”

When Christ’s story gets to his passion, the very darkness of the world seems to capture many people. This most horrific suffering, death by crucifixion, represents the worst part of our humanness. Yet, in the moments leading up to his suffering, Jesus is not sitting in fear worrying about himself; he is thinking of his disciples and his desire for them to have peace. We will read later in the Gospel of John on how the resurrected Jesus appears to the disciples who were huddled together in a locked room in fear. We know that Jesus came through the locked doors twice and stood amid them and said, “Peace be with you.” Jesus wants all of his disciples to have peace, to be deeply joyful, and to have a faith that is unshakable. Jesus’ life points to his desire for our true happiness. Time and again, he went into all the dark, taboo places and took in God’s light and love so that peace and joy would reign. He desires peace and joy for all—the kind of peace that is not of the world, the kind of joy that is not of the world, and the kind of faith that is not of the world. This Jesus gives freely to all who love and follow him. This promise of Jesus is our hope when we feel overwhelmed by life’s problems. Life offers us many joys, but it has its problematic side, too. We might have to do something that seems beyond our strength. Perhaps we’re burdened by the unrealistic expectations of others. Whatever our difficulties might be, Jesus is with us to help us through them. Our trust in his presence helps us mitigate our fear and strengthen our hope.

There is a reality that most Christians do not want to discuss or acknowledge, for it speaks to a topic that many find laughable or embarrassing to acknowledge. There is a great battle being fought each day for us. It is what C.S. Lewis wonderfully explored in ‘The Screwtape Letters’—being captured by the devil. The letters, written by a devil named Screwtape to his nephew, a young devil named Wormwood, are all about Wormwood’s tempting of a young man, the patient, to move away from God—the Enemy as Screwtape calls him—and embrace sin. Wormwood seeks to entice the patient [us] to live a life of sin, a life that separates us from communion with the Lord. It involves conduct on our part that could be described as impure, extravagant, idolatrous, mean-spirited, jealous, or being captured by the addictions of the world – drugs, sex, power, and the like. Wormwood’s secret is that he does this softly, with distraction, doubt, and fear. This is a real battle that Christ intimately knew of and is why he said the Father would send ‘The Advocate’ to be our guide, comforter, and warrior with the Evil One. The Advocate seeks to have our lives permeated with the light of love that is known by charity, joy, peace, patience, endurance, kindness, generosity, faith, mildness, and chastity. This dwelling in spirit is like, as Fr. Ron Rolheiser says, “the movement of giving and receiving in gratitude between two people that creates a warm hearth where others spontaneously come to seek the warmth in a world which offers too little peace, patience, joy, and the like.” The battle is real, and I pray that your life will be intimately connected to the power of the Advocate to fight the distractions of sin. 

In our readings this Sunday from Acts, First John, and the Gospel of John, the Church calls us to absolute faith in, and deep love for, God, in Jesus, risen to life after dying on the cross. Jesus is the cornerstone of our faith and our lives. “Let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.” At first glance, human speech is absent from the holiness equation for disciples of Jesus. However, we know that our manner of speech can be a loving expression of our faith and the spirit that dwells within us. Love is expressed in deeds, and speech must never be a substitute for doing the right and often difficult thing. The only way to live out this truth is to be spiritually transformed by abiding in Jesus. The Greek word that John uses means to dwell or remain, and it becomes a metaphor for life in Christ. To abide in Christ throughout your life means doing so, not snippets of time like Sunday morning. The disciple must dwell continually in Christ’s heart, mind, and consciousness. That is how we are nourished spiritually and how we are transformed. John expressed this in the metaphor of the vine. Christ is the vine, providing spiritual sustenance; we are the branches fed continuously through this vine. Our words, thoughts, and actions will flow from this dwelling in Christ, for He is the source of our transformation and holiness. This is not religiosity or piety but a way of life. It is essential to remain connected, for our nourishment ceases once we sever that connection through laziness, sin, inattention, or any other reason. This is not punishment but the consequence of failing to remain connected to our divine source. Only when we abide in Him can we ask and receive whatever is needed to do His will, for in that state, we are not separate or distant from the Lord. The Lord is only as distant as we wish Him to be. The image of the vine also reveals that since we all drink from the same well and are nourished from the same source, we are not separate from one another. When we abide in Him, we become an extension of Christ Himself.