Author: DVO

“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.” This quote from Fr. Ron Rolheiser has been, in many ways, the driving force of my maturity as a Christian. It has led me through a myriad of viewpoints of the Christian faith, especially orthodoxy, that eventually helped me move past a very naïve view of God that coincidentally fit perfectly with my life ideals and philosophy. If we seek to find the core of life’s meaning and our place in all of this, truth requires an open mind, body, and spirit massively balanced by humility. St. Augustine beautifully captured this by stating, “Humanity is helpless in the face of the ultimate truth that God is the source of all truth.” His famous “Rule of Augustine” was centered on the greatest truth: “We must be of one mind and heart on the way to God knowing that love of God, and love of neighbor is the center of the Christian life.” It is the search for how we live in this manner that I have often felt today’s reflection verse speaking to all searches for truth, leading the great thinkers like Augustine to eventually see the powerful simplicity that we can do nothing without God, who is the source of all truth and the definition of love. Fr. Rolheiser writes, “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.” It is that truth we “ought to accept” if we seek to find true happiness and peace in life.

Nothing is as important as forgiveness. This statement from Fr. Ron Rolheiser highlights a key to true happiness and the most important spiritual imperative in our lives. “We need to forgive, to make peace with the hurts and injustices we have suffered so as not to die angry and bitter. Before we die, we need to forgive others, ourselves, and God, for what happened to us in this life. Wounds to the soul take time, a long time, to heal, and the process is excruciatingly slow, something that cannot be rushed. Indeed, the trauma from an emotional wound often affects our physical health. Healing takes time. The ability to forgive is more contingent upon grace than upon willpower. To err is human, but to forgive is divine. This little slogan contains a deeper truth than is immediately evident. What makes forgiveness so difficult, existentially impossible at times, is not primarily that our egos are bruised and wounded. Rather, the real difficulty is that a wound to the soul works the same as a wound to the body; it strips us of our strength. This is particularly true for those soul-searing and soul-shattering traumas that take can take a lifetime to heal or sometimes can never be healed in this lifetime. Wounds of this kind radically disempower us, particularly towards the person who did this to us, making it very difficult for us to forgive. We need a Spirituality of Sabbath to help us. God set up a certain rhythm for our lives. That rhythm is supposed to work this way:
We work for six days, then rest for one day.
We work for seven times seven years, forty-nine years, then have a jubilee where the world itself goes on sabbatical.
We work for seven years, then rest for one year (a sabbatical).
We work for a lifetime, then enjoy an eternity of sabbatical.
Now, that rhythm is also intended as the rhythm for how we move towards forgiveness:
We can hold a mini-grudge of seven days, but then we need to give it up.
We can hold a major grudge for seven years, but then we need to give it up. (The “statute of limitations” is based on this.)
We can hold a massive soul-searing wound for forty-nine years, but then we need to give it up.
We can hold a massive soul-shattering wound until our deathbed, but then we need to give it up.
This highlights something which is too often absent in therapeutic and spiritual circles today, namely, that we need time to be able to forgive and that the length of time needed is contingent upon the depth of the hurt.”

Some of the teachings of Jesus created confusion at the time he said and continue to this day to cause unintended confusion. An example of that is our reflection verse today about binding and loosing. Fr. Ron Rolheiser provides insightful teaching on what it means to bind or lose someone. “These words of Jesus apply not just to those who are ordained to ministry and administer the Sacrament of Reconciliation but to everyone inside the body of Christ. All of us have the power to bind and to loose. One part of this teaching allows for some easier explanation. Here’s an example:  If you are a member of the Body of Christ and you forgive someone, Christ forgives that person, and he or she is loosed from sin…That is one of the incredible gifts given to us in the incarnation. But what about the reverse? Suppose I refuse to forgive someone who has wounded me in some way; suppose I hold grudges and refuse to let go of the wrong that another has done to me; am I binding that person in sin? Does God also refuse to forgive and let go because I refuse to forgive and let go? This is a difficult question, though a couple of preliminary distinctions can shed some light on the issue. In grace, just as in love, you can be gifted beyond what you deserve, but the reverse is not true. The algebra of undeserved grace works only one way. Love can give you more than you deserve, but it cannot punish you more than you deserve. God gives us the power to set each other free but not the same kind of power to keep each other in bondage. Put more simply, when I hold a grudge against someone who has wronged me, keeping him constantly aware that he has done wrong, I am keeping that person tied to their sin – but God isn’t endorsing this. Heaven will not go along with my emotional blackmail. The Christian power to bind and loose is the power to bind and loose in conscience, truth, goodness, and love. When I refuse to forgive another and hold a grudge, I act not as the Body of Christ nor as an agent of grace. Biblically, we bind each other when, in love, we refuse to compromise truth and when we refuse to give each other permission to take false liberties and make bad choices. Thus, for example, parents bind their children when they, lovingly but clearly, refuse to give them permission to ignore Christ’s teaching on marriage and sexuality. We bind a friend when we refuse to give them our approval to cheat in their business in order to make more money. A friend binds you when she refuses to bless your moral compromises. Ever since God took on concrete human flesh, grace has had a visible human dimension. Heaven is watching Earth – and is letting itself be helped by the best of what we do down here but not bound by the worst of what we do down here.”

Fr. Timothy Radcliffe asks: “Why do we celebrate the Assumption of Mary? Nothing in the New Testament supports this doctrine, and the classical representations of Mary shooting upward like a rocket do not help. But East and West Christians have celebrated this feast for over 1,500 years.” The Holy Spirit has been poured upon the faithful, so we have an instinct for the truths of faith. It must say something fundamental about Christ and especially his ascension. Paul says that Jesus ascended “that he might fill all things.” Christ is not departing to be with a distant God but becoming one with his Father, who is present everywhere, at the core of our existence. We lose Jesus as a person among us to gain him in a new intimacy, penetrating our very being. The ascension can never be a victory just for Jesus. He draws near to us all. And this conquest is first shared, naturally, with his mother. All the texts for today’s feast are about victory. This victory is over every form of alienation and separation, not just of distance but of sin, misunderstanding, and, above all, death. Nothing now can come between us and God. May this sharing in Christ’s victory by Mary give us all the confidence to reach out to those from whom we have become estranged, whether by neglect or misunderstanding, or failure.

Jesus assures us that his disciples will recognize his voice. But we are surrounded by many voices which promise life. How do we recognize which is the voice of the Good Shepherd? How do we distinguish voices which infuse life from voices which lead us away from life? James Mackey teaches that divine providence is a conspiracy of accidents through which God speaks. Frederick Buechner notes that this does not mean that God makes events happen to us that move us in certain directions, like chessmen. Instead, events happen under their own steam as random as rain, which means that God is present in them not as their cause but as the one who, even in the most demanding and most hair-raising of them, offers us the possibility of that new life and healing. God is always speaking to us in every event in our lives. For a Christian, there’s no such thing as a purely secular experience. The event may result from purely secular and contingent forces, but it always contains a faith-related message for us. Our task is to read that message. Fr. Rolheiser writes that we mostly hear God’s voice only in deeply painful experiences rather than in events that bring us joy and pleasure. But we shouldn’t misread this. It’s not that God speaks only through pain and is silent when things go right. In the words of C.S. Lewis, pain is God’s microphone to a deaf world. God is always speaking; most of the time, sadly, we aren’t listening. God doesn’t cause AIDS, global warming, the refugee situation in the world, a cancer diagnosis, world hunger, hurricanes, tornadoes, COVID, or any other such thing to teach us a lesson, but something in all of these invites us to try to discern what God is saying through them. It’s only when our hearts start breaking that we begin to attune ourselves to the voice of God.

Have you ever wondered if the mustard seed realized what it would become? In the familiar parable, Jesus compares the kingdom of God to a mustard seed, “the smallest of all the seeds on earth.” From such a small, seemingly insignificant start grows “the largest of plants,” with branches attracting birds of the sky. Deacon Greg Kandra writes that all of this is so improbable. “Let’s face it: the mustard seed is so small, the sort of thing most of us would easily overlook. But it holds something tantalizing; a tiny grain contains growth, life, shelter, and shade. Its future is vast—a story aching to be told, a purpose waiting to be fulfilled. How often do we forget that? And how often we forget this simple but humbling reality: life is full of mustard seeds. We share the world with so many who are easily neglected, abandoned, and swept away: the elderly, the poor, the disabled, the lonely, and the unborn. But Jesus assures us that every seed, even the smallest, contains possibility and purpose. Hold a seed in your hand, and you’re holding an unwritten future. We can’t begin to imagine what will come. Faith is like that. God’s kingdom is like that, too: a place where even those who feel small and forgotten are given the grace to grow. We become more than we ever thought possible. In this way, we are all mustard seeds. Do we realize what we can become?”

In today’s gospel reading, Jesus speaks about giving our lives away. But that raised the question, is life over when we have fulfilled all we desire? When do we reach this point of total fulfillment in our lives? At what point do we say: “That’s it! That’s the climax! Nothing I can do from now on will outdo this. I’ve given what I have to give.” Fr. Rolheiser looks at this transition as when our living stops and our dying begins. He goes on to say, “When does this occur? The medieval mystic, John of the Cross, says we reach this point in our lives when we have grown to what he calls ‘our deepest center,’ the optimum point of our human growth, the deepest maturity we can grow to before we begin to die. For a flower, its deepest center, its ultimate point of growth, would be not its bloom but the giving of its seed as it dies. That’s its further point of growth, its ultimate accomplishment. When did Jesus give off his seed, the fullness of his spirit? On the cross. Jesus was faithful to the end, to his God, to his word, to the love he preached, and to his own integrity. At this point, he stopped living and began dying, and that’s when he gave off his seed, and his spirit began to permeate the world. He had reached his deepest center; his life was fulfilled. When do we move from being in bloom to giving off our seed? Superficially, of course, it’s when our health, strength, popularity, and attractiveness begin to wane, and we start to fade out into the margins and eventually into the sunset. But when this is seen in the light of Jesus’ life, we see that in our fading out, like a flower long past its bloom, we begin to give off something of more value than the attractiveness of the bloom. That’s when we can say: “It is fulfilled!”

Jean Vanier’s book, “Drawn into the Mystery of Jesus through the Gospel of John,” asks, “What is this life that Jesus is referring to, that we hold onto so desperately and that we must lose?” It is not just physical life but life according to the world’s values, a world as empty of God as it is filled with idols: greed for wealth and power. This “life” also refers to our psychological tendencies: our desires or compulsions for success, to be loved, to be held in esteem, to be acclaimed by those in our group, and to have power and control over others. These passions of life are found in each of us, and they appear in different ways at various stages of our lives:

We can feel the desire to be admired by the group, to become the best spiritual person and control others, or to become the best theologian in our church or group.

We can seek self-glory and self-satisfaction by doing good things.

We can create an intellectual or religious or “good” personage or mask.

These passions for life and the need for recognition can be oriented towards good and holy goals: they may be necessary at the beginning of our journey to God. But if we want to go further on our spiritual journey and grow in humility, love, and openness, we must separate ourselves from them. If we want to live eternal life now and follow the Spirit of God, we must die to our need for recognition, admiration, and power.

Scripture scholar Curtis Mitch notes that the scriptures provide us with many examples of people walking the faith that we should be emulating in our lives. We can read of the Blessed Mother Mary’s life and her example of discipleship; we can read of Mary and Martha, sisters with different focus points in life – prayer, and service – both of which we should emulate in our lives; and today, we see another example to emulate from the Canaanite woman, that being an effective prayer practice. Now, what do we make of the Canaanite woman’s story? A long tradition in interpreting this story stresses the woman’s perseverance in the face of the “test” that Jesus sets for her. And there is something right about it. St. Augustine says, “We pray in order to expand our will to accept what God is going to give us.” She does three things that we should check our prayer practices against. First, she approaches the Lord with faith, never questioning that Jesus can fulfill her request. Second, she perseveres and doesn’t simply make one request but repeatedly asks the Lord for his divine help. Third, she does all of this with an attitude of humility. Isn’t it amazing that the Canaanite woman doesn’t take offense when Jesus compares her to a house pet? Instead of being offended by the comment, she accepts that she has no claim on this Jewish Messiah. Her reaction presents us with the type of disposition that is essential in petitionary prayer. If we approach the Lord Jesus as the Canaanite woman did, we too can hope for a similar response: “Let it be done for you as you wish.”

Old Testament scholar James Mays, reflecting on Psalm 51, speaks to its nature as a prayer for help, “Be gracious to me, O God.” The psalm is a prayer made by David after the prophet Nathan confronted him with his sin in the affair with Bathsheba. The confession of sin is based on the grace of God. The plea appeals to God’s steadfast love and abundant mercy and is not merely an expression of human remorse or preoccupation with failure and guilt; it looks beyond self to God and lays hold on the marvelous possibilities of God’s grace. Those who confess their sin know and believe that God judges their life. The confession of sin seeks renewal and forgiveness: “Create a clean heart for me, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me.” The synonyms “heart” and “spirit” do not merely designate parts of a person; instead, they stand for that through which the self is expressed. A clean heart would be a mind and will open to God, oriented to God. A steadfast spirit would be a mind that will be fixed and steady toward God—ready to praise, faithful to God’s covenant, and trusting in God. It is a steadfast heart that holds close the words of St. Paul, “I am certain that neither death nor life, neither angels nor principalities nor any other creature can separate us from the love of God.”