Author: DVO

In today’s verse from Exodus, Moses speaks of the “bread from heaven” God provides his people. This manna is a central point in our Eucharistic celebration as John’s Gospel tells us that the Eucharist is the new manna, the new bread from heaven, the new way God gives us daily sustenance. Fr. Rolheiser writes that the Roman Catholic practice of daily Eucharist takes its root here. That is why too, in Roman Catholic spirituality, unlike much of Protestantism, the Eucharist has not been called “the Lord’s Supper” since it was understood not as an extraordinary ritual to commemorate the last supper, but as an ordinary, ideally daily, practice to give us sustenance from God. How does the Eucharist give us daily sustenance? As we saw in the earlier columns in this series, the Eucharist nurtures us by providing us God’s physical embrace (“the real presence”) and, like a Quaker-silence, it gives us a oneness with each other that we cannot give to ourselves. However, it nurtures us in yet a further way. It provides us with a life-sustaining ritual, a regular meeting around the word and person of Christ that can become the daily bread of our lives and our communities. How? Monks have secrets worth knowing. One of these is that a community sustains itself not primarily through novelty, titillation, and high emotion but through rhythm and routine, namely, through simple, predictable ritual processes. For example, a wise family will say to itself: “We will all be home at regular times, we will all eat together twice a day, and we will all be together in the living room at least once a day – even if it isn’t exciting, even if real feelings aren’t shared, even if some are bored, and even if some are protesting that this isn’t worthwhile. We will do this because, if we don’t, we will soon fall apart as a family. To stay together, we need regular, straightforward, predictable daily rituals. We need the manna of daily presence to each other. Otherwise, we’ll die.” In the Eucharist, God sustains us in just this way.

Bishop Richard Sklba writes that people usually expect a sign of cooperation from their colleagues at work, a sign of regret from someone who gave offense, even accidentally. Parents expect signs of willingness to share household chores from children according to their age level. Spouses expect signs of respect and affection from each other, at least occasionally. Teachers have a right to expect signs of effort from their students when a new area of study is part of the curriculum. Society expects signs of sorrow when a loved one dies. We all look for a sign of credibility before we commit ourselves to an idea or a project, especially if it requires our time or a financial contribution. So what’s the problem in the Gospel? Why does Jesus become so irritated when pressed by the religious authorities of his day? Why does he call them “evil and unfaithful”? Bishop Robert Barron cites the example of Jonah, who God called to preach conversion to Nineveh, described as an enormously large city. I can’t help but think of Nineveh as one of our large, modern cities, a center of worldly activity and preoccupation. What would its conversion look like? A turning back to God as the only enduring good. After hearing the word of Jonah, the Ninevites “proclaimed a fast, and all of them, great and small, put on sackcloth.” What is the purpose of these ascetic practices? The practices intend to wean people away from an attachment to worldly pleasures. Repent. Live as though nothing in this world finally matters. And you will be living in the Kingdom of God!  

French philosopher Leon Bloy once stated: “There is only one real sadness in life, that of not being a saint!” Fr. Rolheiser writes that this is not a statement of piety but a deep insight into the heart of life itself. Sin makes us sad. Life would be better if we understood that. We’ve always associated sin with badness more than sadness, but we lose something in that equation. Sin makes us more sad than it makes us bad. Adam and Eve’s sin was one of disobedience. But afterward, they tried to hide and cover themselves with clothes and excuses, and that is what ultimately put them outside the garden of joy. We have the same impulse every time we sin: to try to cover and excuse ourselves. We try to make sin all right by denying how it affects us. The problem with sin is not that it makes us bad or puts us outside God’s love; it’s that it makes us sad, here and now. And this, as we know from experience, is not an abstract thing. To the exact degree that we sin, we begin to lose our capacity for simple joy, delight, and freshness and become bored, angry, jealous, and incapable of appreciating anything or praising anyone. Sin robs us of our innocence by wounding and killing the child inside. To be innocent, as we know, means to be “un-wounded,” our capacity to experience joy, as we can see from experience and scripture, is very much linked to innocence, to what’s still childlike inside us. When the rich young man in the gospels walks away from Jesus’ invitation to radical discipleship, it doesn’t say that he walked away bad, only that he walked away sad. A couple of years ago, a group of young priests would come together to support each other in their resolution to try to live out their priesthood in a more honest, transparent, non-compensatory, and saintly way. So, each week, they met and, with searing honesty, confessed their most private sins and weaknesses to each other. This made them better priests, but what surprised them, as a delightful by-product, was that it also made them much happier with their lives. Their joy (and their lack of anger, lack of self-pity, and lack of complaint) was palpable. The action of actively and deliberately addressing sin freed them to embrace the joy and happiness of life that God desires for us all to have.

Karl Rahner made the statement that there would soon come a time when each of us will either be a mystic or a non-believer. At one level, this statement refers to anyone who wants to have faith today, as they will need to be much more inner-directed than in previous generations. Fr. Rolheiser asks, “Why?” Because up until our present generation in the secularized world, by and large, the culture helped carry the faith. We lived in cultures (often immigrant and ethnic subcultures) within which faith and religion were part of the very fabric of life. Faith and church were embedded in sociology. It took a strong, deviant action not to go to church on Sunday. Today, as we know, the opposite is true. It takes a strong, inner-anchored act to go to church on Sunday. We live in a moral and ecclesial diaspora and experience a special loneliness that comes with that. We have few outside supports for our faith. The culture no longer carries the faith and the church. Simply put, we knew how to be believers and churchgoers when we were inside communities that helped carry that for us, communities within which most everyone seemed to believe, went to church, and had the same set of moral values. Many of us now live in situations where to believe in God and church is to find ourselves without the support of the majority and, at times, without the support even of those closest to us, spouse, family, friends, and colleagues. That’s one thing that Rahner refers to when he says we will be either mystics or non-believers. On Easter Sunday morning, Mary Magdala goes out searching for Jesus. She finds him in a garden, but she doesn’t recognize him. Jesus turns to her and asks her: “What are you looking for?” Mary replies that she is looking for the dead Jesus’s body and that if he could give her any information as to where that body is, she needed to know. And Jesus simply says: “Mary.” He pronounces her name in love. She falls at his feet. In essence, that is the whole gospel: What are we ultimately looking for? What is the end of all desire? What drives us out into gardens to search for love? The desire to hear God pronounce our names in love.

As we journey through life in search of the answers to the “why” of life, we learn that salvation can only come when we surrender to God. Scripture is not as much about worthiness as it is about surrender. What God wants from us is not a million acts of virtue, but a million acts of surrender, culminating in one massive surrender of soul, mind, and body. When we have given up everything and are entirely helpless to give ourselves anything, as we will all eventually be when we face death, then salvation can be given to us. Fr. Rolheiser writes that this is the key; salvation can only be given to us as it can never be taken, earned, or possessed by right or might. Perhaps this is not so true for the first forty or so years of our lives because we are still seeking to come to bloom. We are young and looking to grow and thus are like a flower that still needs to take in things in order to bloom and come to seed. There is then more place for assertion, ambition, achievement, for accumulation. In the ideal order of things, surrender is for the mature, for the flower that has come to bloom and needs to give off its seed. That is less true of us during the first half of our lives, for we are still building, but it becomes the most profound truth of the second half of life. After forty, understood religiously, life is not about claiming worthiness or building things, especially our egos, but about getting in touch with helplessness. Age brings us physically to our knees, and more and more, everything we have so painstakingly built up begins to mean less and less. But that is the order of things: Salvation is not about great achievements but about a great embrace, and, as C.S. Lewis puts it in his outstanding work, “The Great Divorce,” all we must do is surrender.

Meekness. This word can often come with negative connotations. People may see being meek as a doormat for people to walk all over. One dictionary defines meekness as “overly submissive or compliant; spiritless; tame.” Meekness begins when we put our trust in God. Then, because we trust him, we commit our way to him. We roll onto him our anxieties, frustrations, plans, relationships, jobs, and health. The quietness, openness, and vulnerability of meekness are beautiful and painful. It goes against all that we are by our sinful nature. It requires supernatural help. Patience with God is perhaps our greatest faith struggle. Fr. Rolheiser notes that “the need for patience arises out of the rhythms innate within life and within love. They need to unfold, as do flowers, according to their own innate rhythms and within their own good time. They cannot be rushed, no matter how great our impatience or how great our discomfort.” As a disciple of Jesus Christ, we commit our way of life to patiently waiting on God, for in this patience, he begins to help us learn what it is to embrace meekness. In this quiet confidence, we speak slowly and quickly listen. We become reasonable and open to correction. St. James refers to this as “the wisdom in meekness.” That is why our Lord taught that the meek will inherit the earth. It is part of the perfection of love.

In today’s reflection verse from Matthew’s Gospel, we can see the Oneness between Jesus and the Father in this statement; “All things have been handed over to me by my Father.” This oneness with God is directly stated by Jesus in John’s gospel, “The Father and I are one.” As his disciples, we also long for this oneness with the Lord that is so beautifully stated by St. Augustine: “You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” This restless nature is what Fr. Ron Rolheiser refers to as the “longing of our hearts.”  Our connection to this oneness starts by knowing that God is in everything; nothing exists except in God. There is no time outside God. God is the beauty in all beauty. Those who allow divine friendship then partake of divine friendship, and it is almost that simple. God’s life and love flow through you when you are ready to enable it. Oneness with the Lord is available to all disciples when we truly embrace what Christ told us, “On that day, you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.” Open your heart – he is waiting there for you.

Curtis Mitch writes that some of us read passages like these and are not greatly affected by them. The situation is remote, the language of prophetic judgment is foreign, and there seems to be little that fits our contemporary Christian experience. Unfortunately, this is a serious miscalculation on our part. These verses are directly relevant to the lives of God’s people today. The lesson to be learned is simple: with great privilege comes great responsibility. The Galilean cities denounced by Jesus were blasted with unusually harsh words because they were among the precious few to see, hear, and touch the Messiah in person. They had incentives to believe in Jesus that most would never have. As a result, the culpability of these towns for impenitence could hardly be greater. What about us? Jesus has entrusted the Church with the fullness of Christian truth and grace. Christians of all confessions hold that salvation in Christ is ours for the taking and that the Bible is the living Word of God. Have we responded to these privileges with faith and zeal proportionate to their greatness? If we are honest with ourselves, we will surely find areas that are not fully surrendered to the Lordship of Jesus. Yet if Christ is truly present among us—in his Word, Eucharist, and Church—then we are in a situation much like that of ancient Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Capernaum as they witnessed his ministry. Here is a case where applying Scripture to our lives means learning from the mistakes of others. Unlike the towns of Galilee, will we take advantage of our time to repent of our sinful ways and pursue holiness? Or will we procrastinate until the window of opportunity closes for good? Much has been given to us, and so much will be required.

Christians often use the idea of taking up a cross as a metaphor to describe bearing life’s regular burdens: a long wait in traffic, a difficult boss, and a cold rainy day. However, for the first-century Jews, the image of taking up a cross evoked horror and shame. Crucifixion was the cruelest form of execution used by the Roman government. Therefore, when Jesus says the true disciple must “take up his cross,” he is not merely calling for acceptance of life’s inconveniences and hardships. He calls his disciples to be willing to give up everything, even their lives if necessary, to follow him. That is, in reality, a dying of the old self, the one who lived for human approval, honor, power, and prestige more than obediently following Jesus. The new self of the true disciple is ready to endure opposition, shame, suffering, and even death. For there is more gain in following Jesus, even through suffering, than there is in walking away from him, even with millions of earthly benefits.

Today’s reading from the Gospel of Matthew has Jesus telling the Parable of the Sower. A parish school I worked with had a yearly scripture focus, and one year the slogan was “The Good Soil,” based on the Parable of the Sower. I bring this up because of an article I read whose author noted that one of the reasons Jesus used parables was his knowledge that most, if not all, of those he was speaking to could not handle the truth he was trying to convey in a more direct manner. T.S. Eliot once said, “It’s not for nothing that Jesus challenged us to speak our truth in parables because truth cannot always be swallowed whole, and the context and tone within which it is spoken generally dictate whether it’s helpful to speak it at a given time, or to a given person. Simply put, it isn’t always helpful, or charitable, or mature, to throw a truth into someone’s face.” Drawing on the Parable of the Sower and the school’s use of “the good soil” imagery, we know that seedlings need to be protected and gently cared for to grow strong and survive. Plants that have grown to maturity are strong enough to handle a variety of seasons and living conditions. Applying this reality to our brothers and sisters, we know that everyone is at different points in understanding their faith. Therefore, we need to be sensitive to where and how we speak the deeper truths that come from maturity in the faith.