Author: DVO

Today’s verse comes from Psalm 81, in which the people praise God, and he calls on them to hear him and obey his Law. How do we hear God’s voice in the noise of our everyday lives? Whenever you listen to a voice that sounds coercive, threatening, overbearing, that is somehow loud, and in your face, you can be sure that it is not God’s voice, no matter how religious and holy it might claim to be. God’s voice in this world is never coercive or overbearing in any way but is always an invitation and a beckoning that respects you and your freedom in a manner that no human institution or person ever does. God’s voice is thoroughly underwhelming, like a baby’s presence. Ultimately all our aching is, for one thing, to hear God, lovingly and individually, call us by name. There comes a moment in the night for each of us when nothing will console us other than this, hearing our names pronounced by the mouth of God. In Fr. Rolheiser’s book, Prayer: Our Deepest Longing, he writes that we need to discern the unique cadence of God’s voice among all the voices that surround and beckon us. And several principles come to us from Jesus, Scripture, and the deep wells of our Christian tradition that can help us discern God’s voice among the multitude of voices that beckon us.

• The voice of God is recognized both in whispers and in thunder and in the storm.
• The voice of God is recognized in the call to what’s higher and invites us to holiness, even as it is recognized in the call to humility.
• The voice of God is the one that most challenges and stretches us, even as it is the only voice that ultimately soothes and comforts us.
• The voice of God always invites us to live beyond all fear, even as it inspires holy fear.
• The voice of God is always heard wherever there is genuine enjoyment and gratitude, even as it asks us to deny ourselves and die to ourselves.

Fr. Rolheiser writes about the growing body of literature that chronicles the experience of persons who were clinically dead for some time (minutes or hours) and were medically resuscitated and brought back to life. The movie “Miracles from Heaven” portrays the true story of a young Texas girl who was clinically dead, medically revived, and shares what she experienced in the afterlife. Hundreds of stories like this are gathered through dozens of years, published, or shared with loved ones. What’s interesting (and consoling) is that virtually all these stories are wonderfully positive, irrespective of the person’s faith or religious background. In virtually every case, their experience, while partially indescribable, was one in which they felt a warm, personal, overwhelming sense of love, light, and welcome, and not a few of them found themselves meeting relatives of theirs that had passed on before them, sometimes even relatives that they didn’t know they had. In virtually every case, they did not want to return to life here but wanted to stay there like Peter on the Mountain of the Transfiguration. As Christians, we believe that God is infinite and ineffable. This means that while we can know God, we can never imagine God. Given that truth, it makes it even harder for us to imagine that the infinite Creator and Sustainer of all things is intimately and personally present inside us, worrying with, sharing our heartaches, and knowing our most guarded feelings. How can God be as close to us as we are to ourselves? Partly this is a mystery, and wisdom bids us befriend mystery because anything we can understand is not very deep! The mystery of God’s intimate, personal presence inside us is beyond our imaginations. But everything within our faith tradition and most everything in the testimony of hundreds of people who have experienced the afterlife assure us that, while God may be infinite and ineffable, God is very close to us, closer than we imagine.

Fr. Michael Peterson, reflecting on today’s reading from Matthew’s gospel, suggests that the darkness must have been palpable when Herod snuffed out such a great light as John the Baptist. Yet, as Zechariah foretold at John’s birth, he was preparing the way for Jesus: “The dawn from on high shall break upon us, to shine on those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death.” We claim these words daily at Morning Prayer, often when the sun rises in the east, giving light to our world. We may ask, “Who am I to be this kind of light?” Lights of any kind are lifesaving in the many storms we face. Light is salvation. Sometimes, we experience the light of other people. At other times, we are called to be a light for others. Fr. Rolheiser writes that we are all called to live in the light, but we tend to have an overly romantic idea of what that should mean. We tend to think that to live in the light means that there should be a kind of special sunshine inside of us, a divine glow in our conscience, a sunny joy inside us that makes us constantly want to praise God, and an ambiance of sacredness surrounding our attitude. But that’s unreal. What does it mean to live in the light? Living in the light means living in honesty, being pure and simple, being transparent, and not having part of us hidden as a dark secret. John the Baptist stands as our witness: It is not the amount of darkness in our world that matters. How we stand as a light in that darkness makes all the difference.

It’s not hard to imagine how others stereotype us when we grow up or when they meet us so many years later when we return to their presence. They find it difficult to reconcile who we are now versus how they previously viewed us. Anyone who has attended a reunion can instantly connect to the words of Jesus. The Nazarenes can only see Jesus as the son of a carpenter, not the Messiah he had been revealed to be. What causes this inability to get past the stereotyping of people? Many experts will point to our human pride. Think about the voices you thankfully didn’t hear at the reunion, “Who does she think she is? Just because she married a fancy lawyer doesn’t change where she came from. We know who she really is!” For Jesus, a similar conversation occurred among the Nazarenes, “Can you believe this? Joseph, the carpenter’s son, thinks he’s a prophet! I know for a fact that he didn’t receive any formal religious education. Where is he getting this teaching of his? Does he really think he’s somebody great?” This type of behavior should concern us and probably put the fear of God in us. Pride has an incredible ability to close our eyes to the truth. It can also harden our hearts. But most of all, it puts us at odds with the Lord, as noted in The Letter of James: “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.” As disciples, our daily prayer should include a reflection on these verses from Psalm 139: “Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my thoughts. See if there is any wicked way in me and lead me in the way everlasting.” Amen, amen.

We are entering the month of August. The year is more than half over. How are your New Year’s resolutions going? I bring this thought up, hoping your resolutions have been going well. But if that is not the case, today’s reading from Matthews Gospel gives us something to reflect on that could lead to some amazing resolutions in your life. The things we resolve to do are not necessarily goals we have set. They are things in our life that we won’t allow other things to interfere with. They are real-life regulators of how we spend our time. In today’s reading, the merchant searches for pearls finding a great pearl, and sells all he has to buy it. Earlier in the reading, we see a person finding a buried treasure and selling all he has to buy the field the treasure is located in. Jesus tells us that the kingdom of heaven is greater than all the found treasures. Is your faith journey reflective of this joy in your life, that the kingdom of heaven is the “one thing” in your life that is the treasure above all treasures? If you’re unsure about your answer, seek to add to your resolutions this year by making the kingdom of God the treasure of your heart, mind, and soul – your life’s “one thing” daily regulator.

The responsorial verse from Psalm 103 reminds us: “The Lord is kind and merciful.” It seems at times in this faith journey I have been blessed to walk that the Church and I can tend to restrict God’s infinite, unbounded, unconditional, undeserved mercy of God to flow freely to others. Like many others, I can find myself conflicted in guarding the truth of the Lord’s teachings and our responsibility as followers of the Lord to protect the deposit of faith with God’s merciful nature. The conflict comes in understanding the depth of mercy that God continues to show us through stories like The Prodigal Son, how, from our human viewpoint of what is “fair,” – why did the sinful actions of the son not result in God’s wrath – but instead he received God’s indiscriminate mercy. Why do we find it so hard to connect to this reality? I feel it’s partly because, as Fr. Rolheiser writes, “We have a legitimate concern over some important things: truth, justice, orthodoxy, morality, proper public form, proper sacramental preparation, fear of scandal, and concern for the ecclesial community that needs to absorb and carry the effects of sin.” But Fr. Rolheiser states, “Love always needs to be tempered by truth, even as truth must be moderated by love. However, sometimes our motives are less noble, and our hesitancy arises out of timidity, fear, jealousy, and legalism – the self-righteousness of the Pharisees or the hidden jealousy of the older brother of the prodigal son…we must risk proclaiming the prodigal character of God’s mercy. We must not spend God’s mercy as if it were ours to spend, dole out God’s forgiveness as if it were a limited commodity, put conditions on God’s love as if God were a narrow tyrant or a political ideology, or cut off cut access to God as if we were the keepers of the heavenly gates. We are not!” Jesus wanted every kind of person to come to him then, and he wants them to come to him now. God wants everyone to come to the unlimited waters of divine mercy regardless of morality, orthodoxy, lack of preparation, age, or culture.

A parable is an extended metaphor or simile frequently becoming a brief narrative, generally used in biblical times for didactic purposes. We are in the Gospel of Matthew and continue reading Jesus’ parables. Today is the parable of the mustard seed. In these verses, the man is Jesus Christ and the field, the world. The grain of mustard seed is the preaching of the Gospel and the Church, which will spread throughout the world from very small beginnings. The parable refers to the universal scope and spread of the Kingdom of God: The Church, which embraces all humanity of every kind and condition, in every latitude and all ages, is forever developing despite obstacles, thanks to God’s promise and aid. The comparison of leaven is taken from everyday experience. Just as leaven gradually ferments all the dough, the Church spreads to convert all nations. The leaven is also a symbol of the individual Christian. Living in the middle of the world and retaining his Christian quality, he wins souls for Christ by his word and example: Our calling to be children of God amid the world requires us not only to seek our own personal holiness but also to go out onto all the ways of the earth, to convert them into roadways that will carry souls over all obstacles and lead them to the Lord. As we participate in all temporal activities as ordinary citizens, we are to become leaven acting on the mass.

John Patrick Gillese, a Canadian writer, tells the story of going home to the small town in Alberta where he had grown up for a funeral of an older woman. Among the many messages of condolence sent to her family was a note from a family who now lived in British Columbia and had left that small Alberta district some 30 years before. The note expressed sympathy to the family on the loss of their grandmother and added: “We will never forget how kind she was to us back in the 1930s.” Here was a family who remembered a small act of kindness, whatever it was, fifty years later. Small acts of cruelty or kindness leave their effect long after the impact of events of seemingly much greater importance has passed away. Fr, Ron Rolheiser believes there is a profound lesson in this. The Kingdom of God, as Jesus assures us, is about mustard seeds, about small, seemingly unimportant things, but which, in the long run, are the big things. Not much in our world today helps us to believe that. Most everything urges us to think big and to be careless about small things. The impression is given to us that what is private in our lives is little and unimportant. Private morality, private grudges, the little insults that we hand out, our many angers and resentments, the small infidelities within our sexual lives, the many little acts of selfishness, and, conversely, the small acts of sacrifice and selflessness that we do and the little compliments that we hand out, these are not valued much in our culture. As a song suggests: “Our little lives don’t count at all!” Fr. Rolheiser emphatically states that God does care and cares a great deal because, in the end, we care, and small things affect a great deal. We tend to forget quickly who won such or such an award or who starred in such and such a movie or play. But we remember, and remember vividly, with all the healing and grace it brought, who was nice to us all those years ago on the playground at school. We remember who encouraged us when we felt insecure. Conversely, we also remember, and remember vividly, with all the scars it brought, who laughed at us on the playground, made fun of our clothes, or called us stupid. Falls come, winters come, springs come, summers come and go, and sometimes the only thing we can remember from a given year is some tiny mustard seed of cruelty or kindness. That is one aspect of God’s treasure he imparts to us.

This story of Martha and Mary is often seen as a choice between an active life or a contemplative life. We see Martha, who was arranging and preparing the Lord’s meal, busy doing many things, whereas Mary preferred to listen to what the Lord was saying. Some will say that Mary, in a way, deserted her very busy sister, sat herself down at Jesus’ feet, and just listened to his words, obedient to what the Psalm said: “Be still, and know that I am God.” Yet our challenge as disciples is to see beyond the either-or nature of this story. An active life forgetful of union with God is useless and barren. Still, an apparent life of prayer that shows no concern for serving and evangelizing the world through our daily, ordinary actions also fails to please God. The key to engaged discipleship is combining these two lives without harming the other. St Josemaría Escrivá says, “God is calling us to serve him in and from the ordinary, material, and secular activities of human life. He waits for us every day, in the laboratory, in the operating room, in the army barracks, in the university chair, in the factory, in the workshop, in the fields, in the home, and all the immense panorama of work. There is something holy, something divine, hidden in the most ordinary situations, and it is up to each one of you to discover it. Either we learn to find our Lord in ordinary, everyday life, or we shall never find him.”

During their time with Jesus, the disciples struggled with issues of meaning. Despite their struggles and because of their faith in Jesus, “knowledge of the mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven was granted to them.” The knowledge was offered to them and to all who would come to believe in Jesus through their testimony. For more than two thousand years, the Christian community has enjoyed the privilege of knowing that Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah, the Christ, the Savior of the world. This undeserved, generous gift from God requires intentional acceptance by each community member. Through an assent of faith, both as individuals and as a community of believers, we become engaged in a progressive, deepening knowledge of God. These mysteries of God will not likely manifest themselves as they did in the theophany on Mount Sinai: in thunder, cloud, and fire. Instead, the wondrous display of the power of God comes when we recognize the presence of Christ in each other. Do we accept how profound that reality is? Do we grasp the implications of what it means to be heirs to this ever-deepening understanding of the mysteries of God? The more we are open to encountering God in each other, the more we will know the mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven. Blessed are the eyes that see, the ears that hear—and the tongue that will proclaim. A spiritual inheritance of this magnitude obliges us to share the Good News of God in Christ.