Author: DVO

Today’s scripture verse focuses on the “all-in” aspect of the widow’s giving. The Widows Offering story is well known, but we must ask ourselves what it would mean if we similarly gave to our faith community. Fr. Kevin O’Brien writes that to learn the lesson of generosity from the widow in today’s Gospel, we must first notice the widow, which may be the more significant challenge Jesus puts before us. In Jesus’ society, a widow—along with the poor, the child, the sick, the stranger, and the woman—was easily lost in the crowd. Those on the margins of society were overshadowed by the crowd of rich, powerful, and privileged persons. But Jesus notices the widow and sees what she is doing, tossing in her precious coins. Jesus makes the widow the center of attention. The one on the margin is brought to the center. Jesus creates a new way of looking at the world, religion, and one another. The widow challenges us to be more generous with our time, talent, and resources. Jesus challenges us to notice those easily overlooked. In the course of a day, do we see what those on the margins are doing? Do we hear what they are saying? Do we notice who is cleaning up after us, waiting on us, and laboring for us? Do we read about and delve into the plight of those on the edges of our life experience? What we see and hear depends on where we stand. So perhaps the first response to Jesus’ challenge is for us to stand in a different place, at the frontiers where Pope Francis calls us to venture. The view there may be unfamiliar and a little uncomfortable, but the widows and their friends await, ready to teach us something new from where they stand.

To bless the Lord means to praise, exalt, and worship Him. The word “bless” and “praise” are often said interchangeably in scripture, with blessing denoting a higher form of praise. Ashely Crane of St. Vianney writes that the idea of “blessing” is a very common one in Christianity. We ask God to bless us, and we thank him for his blessings. We pray for blessings for others. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says that “Blessing is a divine and life-giving action, the source of which is the Father” and “From the beginning until the end of time, the whole of God’s work is a blessing.” As St. James says, “Every good endowment and every perfect gift is from above.” Everything good that we have comes from God—starting with our very existence and the existence of creation all around us and culminating in the gift of God’s divine Self, “the Gift that contains all gifts, the Holy Spirit.” How can I bless or praise God? It takes only a moment to examine our lives and begin to recognize the myriad of ways in which God blesses us. But what does it mean for us to bless God? Does God need anything from us? Can we give him anything that he doesn’t already possess? Well, no. God isn’t lacking in anything, so he doesn’t need anything from us. If he did, he wouldn’t be God. But we need to give something to God. Justice—the virtue that requires us to give each person his due—requires us to offer our sacrifice of thanksgiving to God in return for his many blessings. The kind of blessing we are called upon to offer to God is fundamentally different from the kind of blessing God bestows on us. God’s blessing is something outside of ourselves that he gives to us. When we “bless the Lord,” we offer something from within ourselves to God in response. We use the same word to refer to two distinct (but related) actions. God blesses first, and our blessing of thanksgiving and adoration is always a response.

What does our Gospel verse from Mark mean? Bishop Barron writes that the law is finally about love, and the love of God and neighbor are inextricably bound to one another. We’re wasting our time if we love God but hate our neighbors. When you really love someone, you tend to love, as well, what they love. Well, what does God love? He loves everything and everyone that he has made. So, if you want to love God, and you find this move difficult because God seems so distant, love anyone you come across for the sake of God. We are all called to journey through our days and years, trying our best to realize the reign of God through learning to love. It is the task of a lifetime. The more we mature in love, the closer we are to God. Sr. Pat Kozak writes that this idea of loving in a manner of giving our all to it is worth thinking about or, better yet, praying about. Because loving this way is what the Gospel is all about, what the following Jesus is about. The choice is not gaining or losing but letting go and waking up. It is coming alive with fullness and freedom, filled with a sense of possibility and immanence. And in a moment of pure gift, I suddenly see that everything around me is an invitation, an opening, and that giving over to this loving makes me feel more alive than holding on to my own small and separate self. It’s worth thinking about or, better yet, praying about. To love, as Jesus speaks about, is the task of a lifetime.

Elie Wiesel once said: “Life and death are not separate domains; they meet in us, though not in God. It is possible to live with death: all one needs to do is to turn one’s back on living. It is possible to be dead and not know it.” It is possible to be dead and not know it, to be asleep and still think we are awake, bitter as an enslaved person, and still believe we are loving. Physical death, for most of us, comes last. First, there is a long series of other deaths of crucifixions. In this, too, we follow the pattern of what happened in Christ. Christ came as God’s perfect image, the most precious, sensitive, and extraordinary human being ever. It was that uniqueness and goodness which was crucified. It is that which still gets crucified in us. It is precisely in those areas of our lives where we bear God’s image perfectly, where we are most precious, most sensitive, and most special, and that invariably gets crucified. What’s calloused, tough, homogenized, survives, living on, helping us go through Life’s motions: our automatic pilot in death. Our infidelities, our lack of gratitude, our lack of prayer, our propensity to misunderstand and to hurt each other, our need to lie and rationalize, and our excessive self-preoccupations occur primarily because of what’s best in us, the image of God that lies frozen (assets we cannot touch). Our poverty and bitterness come from that. And so, we begin to settle for second best. We live on, far from fully alive, on automatic pilot, the Christ in us lying in the tomb, what’s most precious in us frozen under bitterness. Every spring, a warm sun reappears, and nature and ourselves are given the opportunity to unthaw, to resurrect, to leave behind us a string of empty tombs, to let our crucified hopes and dreams be resurrected so that, like Christ, our lives will radiate that, in the end, everything is good, reality can be trusted, love does triumph over apathy and hatred, togetherness over loneliness, peace over chaos, and forgiveness over bitterness. God is not God of the dead but of the living. Trust in His love and embrace Life. – Fr. Ron Rolheiser

Fr. Herbert McCabe, in God, Christ, and Us, writes that Jesus is not just extricating himself neatly from a trap. After all, in the final showdown, he doesn’t bother to extricate himself at all. He allows himself to be betrayed by the nationalists to the colonial power. He is not just wriggling out of a difficult situation with a kind of “No Comment.” He wants to say that the question put to him is the wrong one. The quarrel between Herodians and Pharisees, between collaborationists and the resistance, is not the ultimate struggle. The liberation he has come to bring goes beyond political liberation. Jesus has come to show them that the real liberation of people lies in the faith that God is he who loves us, he who ultimately and unconditionally loves us (not because we are Jewish, Christian, or revolutionaries, but because we are who we are). That is the terrifying and destructive love of God that makes us able to see who we are, smashes our idols and images of ourselves, and confess our sin. And, in doing so, it liberates us and raises us from the dead to a new and free life in the Spirit of love. The Kingdom of which Jesus speaks is not to be achieved just by defeating Roman domination (or by replacing it with the Jewish Law or by the authority of the Church). The Kingdom is fully reached only when Jesus hands over the Kingdom to God the Father, having done away with every sovereignty, authority, and power so that God may be all in all. Everything comes from God and returns to God.

There is a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in. Whatever else Leonard Cohen had in mind when he coined that phrase, it says something about how wisdom, compassion, and morality seep into our lives. Fr. Rolheiser writes that there is a crack in everything, and our culture is no exception. Despite tremendous technological progress and even some genuine moral achievement, all is far from well with the world. People are falling through its cracks, and it is these persons – the sick, the unattractive, the broken, the disabled, the untalented, those with Alzheimer’s disease, the unborn, and the poor in general – who are the crack where the light is entering. They give soul to our world. Imagine how soulless it would be in a world where only the strong, the young, the healthy, the physically attractive, the intellectually bright, and the achievers have a place! Imagine how soulless a world would be that views the disabled, the unborn fetus, the physically paralyzed, and the dying as having nothing to offer! Too often, even in our churches, we no longer stand where Jesus stood, where the cross stood, namely with the helpless. We stand instead where vested interest stands, be that the vested interest of the business world, the academic world, or pop culture. Such a world would be able to recognize neither the birth nor the death of Jesus because compassion, morality, and wisdom seep in precisely through what is helpless and marginalized. Our present culture is drawing ever nearer this soullessness. Those who fall through the cracks of the culture are indeed the crack where the light gets in. If our world has any real soul left, if indeed we still even understand the words wisdom, compassion, and morality, then it is because someone who has no power in the culture, someone who has been marginalized and rejected, has shared a gift with us.

G.K. Chesterton once said that one of the reasons he believed in Christianity was because of its belief in the Trinity. Fr. Rolheiser writes that if Christianity had been made up by human people, it would not have at its very center a concept that is impossible to grasp or explain: the idea that God exists as one but within three persons. How do we understand the Trinity? We don’t! God, by definition, is ineffable, beyond conceptualization, beyond imagination, and beyond language. The Christian belief that God is a trinity helps underscore the rich mystery of God and how our experience of God is always richer than our concepts and language about God. Many of the most powerful myths ever told arose out of the experience of God’s overwhelming richness and the ancient peoples’ incapacity to conceptualize God and God’s activity in any singular way. Whatever else might be said about polytheism and ancient myths about the gods and goddesses, ancient religious practices, and the incredible canon of mythology that these produced speak of how rich, untamed, and beyond simplistic imagination and language is the human experience of God. The ancients believed that their experience pointed to the existence of many deities. And then a massive shift took place: Judaism, soon followed by Christianity and Islam, introduced the strong, clear, doctrinaire idea that there is only one God. Now all divine power and energy were seen as coming from a single source, monotheism, YHWH, the Father of Jesus, Allah. There were no other gods or goddesses. But from the time of Jesus’ resurrection onwards, Christians began to struggle with simple monotheism. Their experience of grace and God’s action in the world was at odds with their simplistic conception of monotheism. The Council of Nicea in 325 gave us the creedal formula we profess today: There is one God in three persons; except they wrote that formula in Greek, and the words there state literally that God is one substance in three subsistent relations. That formula isn’t meant to give us perfect clarity. To what does this call us? To humility. All of us, believers and atheists, need to be humbler in our language about God. The idea of God needs to stretch, not shrink, the human imagination.

The Gospels tell us that one of the things that distinguished Jesus from the other religious preachers of his time was that he spoke with authority, while they didn’t. Fr. Rolheiser asks: “What gives words authority? What gives them transformative power? There are, as we know, different kinds of power. There’s a power that flows from strength and energy. We see this, for example, in the body of a gifted athlete who moves with authority. There’s power, too, in charisma, in a gifted speaker or a rock star. They, too, speak with a certain authority and power. But there’s still another kind of power and authority, one very different from that of the athlete and the rock star. There’s the power of a baby, the paradoxical power of vulnerability, innocence, and helplessness. Powerlessness is sometimes the real power. If you put an athlete, a rock star, and a baby into the same room, who among them is the most powerful? Who has the most authority? Whatever the power of the athlete or the rock star, the baby has more power to change hearts. The Gospel text today has the Jewish authorities asking Jesus where he gets his authority. Jesus spoke in ways defined by the Greek word exousia. We don’t have an English equivalent, but we have a concept. Exousia might be described as the combination of vulnerability, innocence, and helplessness that a baby brings into a room. Its very helplessness, innocence, and vulnerability have a unique authority and power to touch your conscience. Jesus spoke with vulnerability, and innocence gave his words a special power and authority. What moves the world is often the powerful energy and charisma of the highly talented, but a different kind of authority moves the heart.”

Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that forgiveness is the one thing we do not do well. Lack of forgiveness is our Achilles’ heel. Everywhere we turn, somebody is nursing a grudge; somebody has a history that justifies anger; and somebody is protesting that, in their case, the call to forgiveness does not apply. All of which is an infallible sign that our hearts are not near the size of our faith. We rationalize this non-forgiveness in every way: “I have a fierce desire for justice, and there can be no forgiveness until there is justice.” “I have been victimized and therefore am above the demand for forgiveness – at least right now, at least as it pertains to this particular thing, or at least as it pertains to this particular person or group.” “Nobody knows my pain, and pain such as mine justifies my bitterness and anger.” “The challenge to forgive is easily spoken by those in power and those who have done the wrong – I wonder how they would feel if they were on the other end!” In each of these cases, unspoken but present, is the subordinate clause – “and thus I have the right to hate!” In each case too, unspoken but present, there is the bracketing of a key subordinate clause in the Lord’s Prayer “as we forgive those who trespass against us.” To err is human to forgive is divine. Forgiveness is not something we human beings can do all on our own. Forgiveness is a non-human power that God gives to the world in the resurrection of Jesus. For many, the pain they have endured that challenges forgiveness is something they will struggle with their entire lives. That is why we must continue to seek God’s assistance over and over and over again. Forgiveness is the only thing new in the world, the one sure sign that there is a God.  

Why is this “What do you want?” question so important? Fr. Rolheiser, the author of The Holy Longing and Sacred Fire, writes that what lies deepest inside authentic faith is the truth that God is the object of all human desire, no matter how earthy and unholy that desire may seem. That implies that everything we desire is contained in God. Yet, accepting this is a challenge. Fr. Rolheiser writes, “Do we really believe that God is the real object of our desires? When we look at all that is beautiful, full of life, attractive, sexually alluring, and pleasurable on earth, do we really think and believe that this is contained in an infinitely richer way inside of God and inside the life into which God invites us?” The answer for many of us is no. But what if you tried a little experiment? What if we asked ourselves, “What do I want?” and see if we could trace the answer back to God? Can we search for that desire and find peace in knowing that God is there for us? Maybe we desire to travel, pray more, or spend time with a loved one. Write your answers down. Then, ask yourself, “What do I really want?” The word “really” is essential here because it leads straight to the heart of your yearnings. Are your desires in line with God’s will for your life, or are they distancing your life from having God at its center? God desires joy and happiness for each of us in fulfilling the focus He created for us in being the best version of His creation.