Author: DVO

God is unimaginable. God cannot be circumscribed and put into a mental picture of any kind. Thank goodness. If God could be understood, God would be as limited as we are. But God is infinite. Infinity, precisely because it’s unlimited, cannot be circumscribed. Hence, it cannot be captured in a mental picture. Indeed, we don’t even have a way of picturing God’s gender. God is not a man, woman, or some hybrid, half-man and half-woman. God’s gender, like God’s nature, is intellectually inconceivable. We can’t grasp it and have no language or pronoun for it. God, in a modality beyond the categories of human thought, is somehow perfect masculinity and perfect femininity all at the same time. It’s a mystery beyond us. But while that mystery cannot be grasped rationally, we can know it intimately. We can know God in a radical intimacy, even as we cannot conceptualize God with any adequacy. God may be ineffable, but God’s nature is known. Divine revelation, as seen through nature, as seen through other religions, and especially as seen through Jesus, spells out what’s inside God’s ineffable reality. And what’s revealed there is both comforting beyond all comfort and challenging beyond all challenge. What’s revealed in the beauty of creation, in the compassion that’s the hallmark of all true religion, and in Jesus’ revelation of his Father takes us beyond a blind date into a trustworthy relationship.  Nature, religion, and Jesus conspire together to reveal an Ultimate Reality, a Ground of Being, a Creator and Sustainer of the universe, a God who is wise, intelligent, prodigal, compassionate, loving, forgiving, patient, good, trustworthy, and beautiful beyond imagination. And as our reflection verse tells us, he will “never forsake you or abandon you.”[1]

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[1] Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s reflection: “God’s Ineffability”, September 2015.

Our reflection verse today comes from Mark’s gospel. It tells of the Twelve apostles anointing the ill. The church teaches that the Anointing of the Sick is a sacrament for the seriously ill or those nearing the end of their lives. It intends to provide them with spiritual strength and comfort. Fr. Rolheiser writes that an elderly monk had asked him how to best prepare for his death. So how do we prepare to die? How do we live so that death does not catch us unaware? What do we do so we don’t leave this world with too much unfinished business? The first thing to note is that we don’t prepare for death by withdrawing from life. The opposite is true. What prepares us for death, anoints us for it, in Christ’s phrase, is a deeper, more intimate, fuller entry into life. We get ready for death by beginning to live our lives as we should have been living them all along. How do we do that? We prepare to die by pushing ourselves to love less narrowly. In that sense, readying ourselves for death is an ever-widening entry into life. John Powell, in his book Unconditional Love, tells the story of a young student who was dying of cancer. In the final stages of his illness, he came to see Powell and said something to this effect: “Father, you once told us something in class that has made it easier for me to die young. You said that there are only two potential tragedies in life, and dying young isn’t one of them. These are the two tragedies: If you go through life and don’t love and if you go through life and you don’t tell those whom you love that you love them. When the doctors told me that my cancer was terminal, I realized how much I’d been loved. I’ve been able to tell my family and others how much they mean to me. I’ve expressed love. People ask me, `What’s it like being 24 years old and dying?’ I tell them: `It’s not so bad. It beats being 50 years old and having no values!’” We prepare ourselves for death by loving deeply and by expressing love, appreciation, and gratitude to each other.  

St. John of the Cross once proposed this axiom, “Learn to understand more by not understanding than by understanding.” A curious statement, though obviously a profound one. What does he mean by this? How do we understand “by not understanding”? A healthy fire is built into the dynamics of love. It is a fear of violating others, of not fully respecting who they are in all their uniqueness and complexity. It is the fear of self-inflating, of being insensitive, of being boorish, of hurting those whom we love. We experience this fear, and appreciate most its value, when we first fall in love with someone. In the glow of first fervor, that delightful feeling of finally finding that one person who will make us whole, we know healthy fear. At that point in the relationship, we are over-cautious, respectful, understanding and overly fearful that we might disappoint that significant other by doing something stupid or selfish. When we first fall in love, we do not take the other for granted, but respect his or her otherness, uniqueness and complexity. We also live in face of the fact that this person is a gift in our own lives. But familiarity breeds contempt. that initial caution and respect disappear, replaced precisely by a lack of fear – and that one so-unique, so-rich person we fell in love with is now somebody familiar, someone we understand, and someone before whose love we no longer have any apprehensions. Love shuts off at that moment. It has no choice. It is being violated. Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. It is also the secret to love, harmony and respect. One of the greatest gifts any of us could receive from the Holy Spirit is the gift of healthy fear. Few things would help us as much to become more gracious, respectful, and loving. If we each had the wisdom that comes from fear of the Lord, the face of the earth would be renewed because our marriages, families, churches and places of work would explode with new meaning as we began to understand more by not understanding and began to see things familiar as unfamiliar again.[1]

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[1] Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s reflection: “Fear of the Lord”, March 1998.

Just before he dies on the cross, Jesus utters these words: “It is finished!” What’s “finished”? When he speaks these words, he’s like the winner in the Olympic marathon throwing up his arms in triumph at the finish line. And his triumph here left him precisely in blood, tears, and helplessness. He’s won, but it’s cost him his life, tested his faith to the limit, lost him his popularity, scattered his friends, shrouded his life in misunderstanding, left him looking compromised, and isolated him in an unspeakable loneliness. So, what’s “finished”? At one level, what’s finished is Jesus’ own struggle with doubt, fear, and loneliness. What was that struggle? The painful, lonely, crushing discrepancy he habitually felt between the warmth and ideals inside his heart and the coldness and despair he met in the world. Everything inside of him believed that, in the end, always, it is better to give yourself over to love than to hatred, to affirmation than to jealousy, to the gentleness of the heart than to bitterness, to honesty than to lying, to fidelity than to compromise, to forgiveness than to revenge. Everything about him pointed uncompromisingly towards the “road-less-taken” and revealed that real love means carrying your solitude and chastity at a high level. For him, as for us, it wasn’t easy to live that out. As scripture says, sometimes it gets dark in the middle of the day, we find ourselves very much alone in what we believe in, and God seems far away and dead. When Jesus utters those famous words: “It is finished!” it’s a statement of triumph, not just of his own faith, but of love, truth, and God. He’s taken God as his word, risked everything on faith, and, despite the pain it’s brought, is dying with no regrets. The struggle for faith, for him, is finished. He’s crossed the finish line successfully. “It is finished” also means that the reign of sin and death is finished. The forces of sin and death are finished because we can, in full maturity and utter realism, believe in the sun even when it isn’t shining, in love even when we don’t feel it, and in God, even when God is silent. Faith and God deliver on their promise when we run the race to its very end.[1]

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[1] Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s reflection: “Jesus’ Last Words”, April 2006.

Jesus states that he is the way that leads to life. What is this way of Jesus? Among other things, it is the way of wisdom and pondering. The way of Jesus is the way of standing amid all delight, joy, contradiction, ambiguity, division, and complexity with a heart and a faith big enough to hold it all somehow. Jesus’ way is the way of holding things. Part of this can be understood by looking at its opposite. The opposite of the way of wisdom, the way of holding things, scripture tells us, is the way of amazement. Time and time again, the crowds following Jesus are described as being amazed at what he says and does. Invariably, they are chided for it: “Don’t be amazed!” Jesus says. Amazement is not what Jesus wants, and it is never something that does us good. Why? Is it not good to be amazed? The same persons who were amazed at Jesus and who tried to make him King would, not long afterwards, shout: “Crucify him!” What we are amazed at we will eventually try to crucify, as every celebrity soon learns. Amazement is the opposite of wisdom. If amazement is bad, and the opposite of wisdom, what is good and what is wisdom? Pondering and helplessness are wisdom. We see an example of this in Mary, Jesus’ mother. She is never amazed. When others are amazed, she goes off and silently ponders things in her heart instead. In amazement, we fall prey to every kind of superficiality, novelty, trick, and one-sided ideology. Amazement is the unrecognized face of fundamentalism, the antithesis of wisdom. The way of amazement is the way of fundamentalism, the way of letting one piece, or person, be the whole. And the way of amazement is everywhere. The way of wisdom is the way of pondering, the way of holding every kind of pain, suffering, delight, and contradiction long enough until it transforms you, gestates compassion within you and brings you to your knees in a thousand surrenders. You and I are wise, and we walk the way of Jesus, when we are so stunned by it all that, in wonder, we ask: “If that is the case, who then can be saved?”[1]

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[1] Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s reflection: “Jesus’ Way of Wisdom,” April 1997.

A particular Christian activist ended her presentation with words to this effect: “I work for the poor, and I do it out of my Christian faith. I’m committed to this because of Jesus, but I can go for three years on the streets without ever mentioning his name because I believe that God is mature enough that he doesn’t demand to be the center of our conscious attention all the time.” Does God mind that we don’t give him explicit attention for long periods of time? Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that there’s an important truth here, though only if it’s sufficiently qualified. Taken as it stands, this can be used to justify too many things (spiritual laziness, selfishness, excessive self-preoccupation, culpable resistance to deeper thought, excessive procrastination with what’s important, and countless other things) that are not good. But here’s its truth: God understands! God is a loving parent who understands the inattentiveness and self-preoccupation of his children. However, because the unexamined life is less than human, we also need to have moments where we try to make God the center of our conscious awareness. We need regular moments of explicit prayer, of meditation, of contemplation, of worship, of Sabbath, of explicit acknowledgement of God and of explicit gratitude to God. We do need moments when we make ourselves consciously aware that there is a next life, an eternal one, beyond this present one. God understands that we’re human, spiritually frail, busy, and instinctually geared towards the things of this world so that we don’t naturally move towards prayer and church, and that even when we are at prayer or in church, we’re generally still distracted, tired, bored, impatient, thinking of other things, and longing for prayer and church to be over with. Coming at this from the Mennonite tradition, Kate Bowler comments on what the Church calls “Ordinary time,” that is, those times during the year when there is nothing special to celebrate, unlike the Advent, Lenten, Christmas, or Easter seasons. What happens then? Well, what happens then is that things get “ordinary”: “There is no birth at the manger or death on the cross, just the ponderous pace of people singing, praying, and keeping their kids quiet during the sermon. The magic fades and reveals the church for what it is: a plain people in a boring building who meet until kickoff.” Yes, most of the time, that’s us, plain people in boring buildings waiting for the kickoff. And God understands perfectly.[1]

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[1] Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Divine Understanding” reflection, August 2019.

We are forever creating God in our own image and likeness. We picture God, what we believe God to be and stand for, according to what we imagine God should be like. Sometimes that speaks for what’s best in us, and sometimes it does the opposite. In either case, we are usually far from the God Jesus revealed. That is why we often believe in and preach a God who, like us, is jealous, arbitrary, legalistic, unfair, fearful, consumed with protecting himself, vengeful, unforgiving, and violent. It is no accident that in every age, including our own, the worst violence, bigotry, and murder are usually justified in the name of God, even when this is done in the name of atheism or secularity. We all have innate mechanisms for health, and whenever we go wrong, something inside reacts. That isn’t just true for our bodies but also for our souls. Faith has its inbuilt immune system. We want God on our own terms, but ultimately, it doesn’t work. Divine love and divine revelation are pure gifts, and the inner dynamics of faith ensure that they have to be received as pure gifts or not received at all. And that is why we sometimes experience dark nights of the soul in our faith and religious beliefs. Our inner powers to feel, imagine, and sense God’s existence dry up and leave us in a certain “agnosticism.” Mystics call this a dark night of the soul. Paul Tillich once defined real religion as what we attain when, 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.[1]

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[1] Excerpt from Ronald Rolheiser’s “The Nature of Faith” February 2008.

Jesus was once asked why he spoke in parables. His answer is more than a little curious: “I speak in parables . . . lest they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart and turn again, and I should heal them.” Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that at first glance, this suggests that Jesus was deliberately vague so that people would not understand the truth and could remain ignorant and obstinate. The opposite is true. His deliberate vagueness is a studied gentleness, a deep compassion that recognizes people’s lives are complex and that truth is not a sledgehammer. It is not enough to have the truth. Truth can set free, but it can also freeze hearts further if not presented with the utmost compassion, gentleness, and understanding. There is a story told about Vincent de Paul which says that, on his deathbed, he spoke words like these to his community: “When you grow tired of giving to others, when you are tempted to self-pity and begin to believe that others, the poor, are taking advantage of you, that you are being asked to give more than is fair, then continue to give and, maybe, sometime in the future, the poor will find it in their hearts to forgive you. It is more blessed to give than receive—and it is also a lot easier!” Maybe, sometime in the future, the poor will find it in their hearts to forgive us for, so often, using the truth as a hammer to enslave them further rather than to set them free.

Cardinal Francis George once famously commented that we live in a culture where “everything is permitted, and nothing is forgiven.” Bishop Robert Barron writes that in the typical Georgean manner, the saying is pithy, memorable, and dead right. Even the most casual survey of our society discloses the truth of the first part of the Cardinal’s adage. Men are allowed to be women, and women men. Male athletes, claiming a female identity, can dominate women’s sports. Transgender surgery, even when it amounts to the mutilation of children, is positively encouraged in many parts of our country, including my home state of Minnesota. Abortion, even to the moment of birth, is legal (indeed celebrated) in a number of states; assisted suicide of the suffering is considered a fundamental right of the individual and a prerogative of the state. But the truth of the second part of the Cardinal’s statement is equally obvious. Violations of the accepted secular orthodoxy today result in cancellation, elimination, and permanent ostracization. If you doubt me, try posting something even mildly anti-woke on the internet. The Jacobin mob will be on you in moments. And if you read the ideologues behind wokeism, you will see that being, say, a white male or an advocate of traditional religious values makes you permanently a reprobate with no hope of redemption. If you doubt me on this score, ask any woke enthusiast just how much apology or reparation is required to relieve an offender of his guilt. You will find that the answer is “never enough.” So, on the one hand, everything seems to be permitted, but on the other hand, nothing is ever really forgiven. What brought the Lord Jesus Christ to the cross was a demonic farrago of hatred, stupidity, violence, cruelty, institutional injustice, self-serving careerism, betrayal, denial, and gross indifference to the will of God. Though many of those responsible for the death of Jesus wrapped themselves in the mantle of righteousness or offered pathetic justifications for their behavior, all of them were exposed as frauds and sinners. The cross itself served as a judgment on human folly and wickedness. In its light, there was no chance to hide. But in the Gospel story, the man who had been hurt as thoroughly as a person can be hurt returned that action by providing forgiving love. Every sin is forgivable, and the ineffable God cancels no one.

Our scripture reflection verse today comes from the Gospel of Mark and the story of the Sower. I found this beautiful reflection in the Word Among Us and share it with you today.

Have you ever planted seeds from a packet and sat back to see what would happen? With little attention and just a little water and some sunshine, you soon see little sprouts popping up through the soil. It’s like watching a miracle! This is similar to what the sower in today’s parable does. His method may not be the best in terms of growing a food crop, but it does illustrate an approach to evangelization that probably feels more natural to us. Sometimes, when we feel the Spirit nudging us to reach out to someone, we can overthink it: “What will I say? What will I do? What if he asks a question I can’t answer?” But that wouldn’t be the situation if we were to sow the seeds of the gospel as liberally as this farmer. Perhaps there are ways to reach out and bless people without feeling forced or uncomfortable. Start by thinking about your personality. Are you an encourager? Or maybe you find little ways to help a co-worker who always seems overworked. Or you might love spending time with people, or you like to bring people little gifts that make them happy: a cup of coffee on a cold morning or a plate of cookies for an afternoon snack at the office. Guess what? These are all “seeds” you can sow. They are much more than kind gestures; they are signs that you are actively going out of your way to bless the people around you. Now, imagine that a prayer is behind every seed, a prayer that your gesture will help draw that person a little closer to Christ. What power could be released! As you go about your day, don’t worry about how to talk to someone about your faith. Just live your life with a focus on the people around you. That’s the secret to evangelization. Your witness may come through words, but it may come through consistently loving and caring for someone who needs it. Don’t be discouraged if you don’t see fruit right away. Today’s parable reassures us that the seeds are growing and sprouting almost of their own accord. Our job is just to scatter as many of them as you can.