Author: DVO

We read in Proverbs that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” Today we again see the topic of fear in Jesus’ discussion with the Apostles. But this is not fear as we would traditionally define it. He is telling the Apostles and us not to fear what man can do to us; instead, we should fear God. But this fear is healthy; it must be understood as reverence, loving awe, and love that fears disappointment. Fr. Rolheiser says, “Healthy fear is love’s fear, a fear of betraying, of not being faithful to what love asks of us in return for its gratuity. We aren’t afraid of someone we trust, fearing that they will suddenly turn arbitrary, unfair, cruel, incomprehensible, vicious, and unloving. Rather we are afraid about our own being worthy of the trust that’s given us, not least from God.” We were made in his likeness and with all our human weaknesses. God still wants us despite this weakness; he wants us to be in communion with him and be at ease with him as if we were being held close to his breast. This only comes from the knowledge and belief that God’s love for us overcomes all.

Today is one of those difficult messages from Jesus. He is telling his disciples that they will face hardships and persecution. These instructions and warnings apply throughout the history of the Church. It is difficult for the world to understand the way of God. Sometimes there will be persecution, indifference to the Gospel’s message, or even a failure to understand it. Why should we be surprised that we could face difficulties today because of our faith? Genuine commitment to Christ always involves effort. Christian life inevitably involves nonconformity with anything that goes against the teachings of the Lord. This is a life that often involves choosing between fearlessness and betrayal. We should never shrink in the face of this challenge because we have God’s promise to give us the power, wisdom, and courage needed to deal with these demanding times humbly. We would be wise to remember that our words are not ours alone. Knowing that we are God’s messengers is especially important as we venture into a world that concurrently shuns religion and is desperate for what the “Spirit of our Father” has to say. Are we confident enough to allow the Spirit to say it through us?

Millions of people, particularly in the Western world, are Christian in name, come from Christian backgrounds, are familiar with Christianity, and believe that they know and understand Christianity but no longer practice that faith in a meaningful way. They’ve heard of Christ and the Gospel, even though they may be overrating themselves in their belief that they know and understand what all this means. No matter. Whatever their shortcomings in understanding a faith they no longer practice, they believe that they’ve already been evangelized and that their non-practice is an examined decision. Their attitude toward Christianity, in essence, is: I know what it is. I’ve tried it. And it’s not for me! How do we make the Gospel fresh for those for whom it has become stale? How do we, as G. K. Chesterton put it, help people to look at the familiar until it looks unfamiliar again? How do we try to Christianize someone who is already Christian? There are no simple answers. It’s not as if we haven’t already been trying to do that for more than a generation. Whatever we do must be done through the lens of relationships – relations with God, the Church, and a faith community. It’s not so much about proclaiming what we believe, it’s living out what you believe that impacts others. If we do not have a relationship with something, it means nothing to us; therefore, when we see no value in something, we move on to things that we do have a relationship with. Most of those we are discussing herein have found meaningful relationships with things in and around the world. Things they believe in and that matter to them. Until God is not just one of those things but THE THING that matters in their life, he will forever be distant and unimportant to them. How can this change? It all starts with building trust through the lived praxis of our lives lived with God at its center and how its effect on your life is something others see and long to have. That is how hearts and minds open to the idea of God and his love, grace, and endless mercy that changes lives.   

There is a friend who likes to humorously talk about his struggles growing up. “When I was in my twenties, I felt that by the time I was forty, I would have grown up enough to let go of my bad habits. But, when I turned forty, I gave myself an extra ten years, promising myself that I’d have conquered these habits by age fifty. Well, now I’m in my fifties, and I’ve promised myself that by age sixty, I’ll be more mature and more serious about the deeper things in life.” Most of us, if we are honest, have a similar story. We’re well-intentioned, but we keep pushing the things we need to change in our lives off into the future: Yes, I need to do this, but I’m not ready yet. I want more time. Sometime in the future, I’ll do this. That’s a near-universal sentiment and for good reason. The tension we experience between our desire to grow up and our perennial procrastination and infinite stalling in doing that reflects, in fact, a tension that lies at the heart of Jesus’ message, a tension between God’s promises as being already here and God’s promises as still coming. Simply put: Everything Jesus promised is already here, and everything Jesus promised is still coming. We’re already living the new, resurrected life, even as we’re still waiting for it. Jesus preached this very clearly; the problem was not that his hearers didn’t understand him. They understood, but almost universally, they resisted that message. Much as they yearned for God’s Kingdom to be already here, like my friend who keeps asking for another ten years to get his life in order, they preferred to push things into the future. Having God become concrete in their lives was far too threatening. (excerpt from Fr. Ron Rolheiser’s “May Your Kingdom Come, But Not Yet”)

“There’s so much evil in the world, and so many people are suffering from other people’s sins that there must be retribution, some justice. Don’t tell me that the people who are doing these things – from molesting children to ignoring all morality – are going to be in heaven when we get there! What would that say about God’s justice?” How would you answer this person’s question on God’s justice? Many of us today, conservatives and liberals alike, have a need to see punishment befall the wicked. It is not enough that eventually, the good should have its day that we should be rewarded. No, the bad must also be punished. Liberals and conservatives might disagree on what constitutes sin and wickedness, but they tend to agree that it must be punished. Fr. Rolheiser writes that this desire for justice is not always healthy and, in a way, speaks volumes about a certain frustration and bitterness within our own lives. All that worry that somebody might be getting away with something and all that anxiety that God might not be an exacting judge suggest that we, like the older brother of the prodigal son, might be doing a lot of things right but are missing something important inside of ourselves. We are dutiful and moral but bitter underneath and are unable to enter the circle of celebration and the dance. Everything about us is right, except for the lack of real warmth in our hearts. Alice Miller, the famous Swiss psychologist, suggests that the primary spiritual task of the second half of life is dealing with this. We need to grieve, she says, or the bitterness and anger that come from our wounds, disappointments, bad choices, and broken dreams will overwhelm us with the sense of life’s unfairness. Our problem is more that we have never really heard in our hearts the gentle words that the Father spoke to the older brother: “My child, you have always been with me, and all I have is yours, but we, you and I, need to be happy and dance because your younger brother was dead and has come back to life!” In the end, it’s all about our ability to see through the lens of the “other.”

Why is it so difficult to trust? Why do we struggle to honestly say the psalmist’s words, “In you, my God, I place my trust?” Fr. Rolheiser writes that we fail to understand the need to surrender. Emotionally, psychologically, and sexually the deepest imperative inside us is simply to surrender. The entire gospel can be summed up in that ultimate threshold we must cross to accept the reality that we need God because, in the end, we cannot take care of ourselves, make ourselves whole, and hide our weaknesses from each other. We need to surrender, trust, and let ourselves fall into stronger and safer hands than our own. But to do this, we need to trust, trust that it is safe to love, let go, reveal who we really are, show weakness, and not have to pretend that we are whole and self-reliant. How do we move towards trust? We need to be willing to open ourselves to vulnerability. Ruth Burrows, the British Carmelite, writes that surrender and abandonment are like a deep, inviting, frightening ocean into which we are drawn. We make excursions into it to test it, to see whether it’s safe, to enjoy the sensation of it. But, for all kinds of reasons, we always go back to dry land, to solid ground, to where we are safe. But the ocean beckons us out anew, and we risk again being afloat in something bigger than ourselves. And we keep doing that, wading in and then going back to safety, until one day, when we are ready, we just let the waters carry us away.

Fr. Rolheiser wrote a beautiful piece, “Finding Rest for Our Souls,” that I have abridged for this post because it speaks to the core of the verse we are reflecting on. It speaks to finding rest among so much activity that captures our life. Yale philosopher, Nicholas Wolterstorff, wrote a book entitled, “Lament for a Son.” It’s a chronicle of his struggles to come to grips with the death of his 25-year-old son, Eric, who died in a mountain climbing accident. He keeps asking: “Why? Why was a young person with such potential so tragically struck down? How does one make sense of a life that ends before being given a chance to achieve anything? Is his death to be lamented more than the death of another twenty-five-year-old who spent his life in routine but, through that routine, loved those he knew, trusted God, and cherished the earth? What is it that we carry into God’s abiding kingdom? Is it only love and faith and trust? Or is it culture too?” Fr. Rolheiser writes that our notes written and unwritten will lie mute in boxes for virtually all of us. Does it matter that our life stories, with all their unique and precious insights, will not interest anyone, nor even be known after we die? Does it matter that, as Thoreau says, when we reach middle age, we are forced into the kind of realism that salvages a woodshed from the materials we once gathered in hopes of building a bridge to the moon or a palace or a temple? Socrates once said that we come into life possessed by a divine madness that pushes us to try to recover wholeness by embracing another, trying to perpetuate our seed, and trying to get others to remember our deeds. Plato and Aquinas agreed. The ache for immortality is part of our hard wiring, an instinct nearly synonymous with our drive for life itself. We are compulsively driven to leave something behind, which will tell future generations that we are significant. Only in a true saint, in someone whose faith in God is so strong that they know and trust that the only mark which truly remains is the hidden mark one makes in the body of Christ, is this ache transformed so that it no longer restlessly haunts our every action. Those of us who aren’t saints play out and act out the same familiar tapes and scripts. We compulsively plant trees, have children, and write books to make some immortality for ourselves. When Christ says: “Come to me all you who labor and are heavy burdened, and I will give you rest,” the rest of what he speaks is not a rest that we can give ourselves through a good night’s sleep or a good vacation. It’s a much deeper rest for the soul, a rest from all the compulsive restlessness that emanates from our genetic propensity to achieve that special something that would forever leave a mark.

Author John Shea shared a story about the effect of a deep blessing. It’s the story of a woman he met while teaching in Ireland. During a summer school there, he had asked each person in his class to recount an incident of blessing from their own life. One woman, very timidly, shared the following: “I came from a large family and, each Sunday morning to ready them for church, my mother would line up all of us and then, one by one, wash each of our faces and comb our hair. We would wait patiently in line for our turn and then go out to play while the mother finished with the rest. One Sunday, I was second in line and anxious to finish my turn because it would mean nearly a half hour of playtime while the others were being washed and combed. Then, just before my turn, my mother noticed that our youngest sister, at the end of the line, was missing a shoelace and asked me to go into the bedroom and get one. But, not wanting to lose my place in the line and given that Mother did not ask me again, I decided not to get the shoelace. My mother said nothing to me as she combed my hair. When Mother was finished, I went out to play. However, after playing for about ten minutes, I felt very guilty and returned to the house to get the shoelace for my baby sister. When I entered the house, mother had just removed her own shoelace and was bent down, putting it into my baby sister’s shoe. Feeling doubly guilty, I went into my parents’ bedroom and got a shoelace, and as my mother was combing our baby sister’s hair, I bent down and put the shoelace into my mother’s shoe. While I was doing this, my mother said nothing but gently stroked my hair.” A day later, Shea, who had the habit of sitting under a particular tree every day during the afternoon break and smoking a cigar, had settled himself under that tree but had forgotten to bring a cigar. Out of nowhere, the woman appeared: “Where is your cigar today?” she asked shyly. “I forgot to bring one!” He answered. Immediately she produced a cigar, gave it to him, and without a word, disappeared. The next day Shea found her sitting by herself at the back of the room. He went to her and confronted her with these words: “THE CIGAR IS THE SHOELACE, ISN’T IT?”  “Yes,” she answered, “Ever since that day that my mother stroked my hair, through all these years and long after she has died, I have had this secret covenant with her; I go through life supplying what is missing!” Blessing begets blessing. When we are treated gently, gentleness grows in us. We all make an unconscious secret covenant with those who have blessed us, who have stroked our hair gently.

Jesus recognized the true outcasts, the ones beyond pity. Not only did he love them, but he made them part of his team. He didn’t look for perfection; he looked for comrades. He didn’t wait until they had changed their lives to eat with them; he sat down with them while they were still doing damage. As a tax collector, Matthew would have been held at arm’s length by his family and despised by his neighbors. His co-workers had a reputation for coming up with scams to line their own pockets, and Matthew might have done the same thing himself. So, it’s not hard to imagine him leading a lonely life or trying to use money to make up for the lack of friendship. But then Jesus arrives and offers his invitation, and Matthew follows. The next thing we hear, they are having a meal together with a host of other people like him! Perhaps this is the key: Matthew felt love and acceptance in a way he hadn’t in a long time. Jesus was compassionate. He saw who had been left out and rejected. He let them know that he wanted to be with them. It’s a simple but powerful message: “I want to know you. I’m happy to spend time with you. Let’s have dinner.” This idea of breaking bread together is an affirmation that can change lives. So, who’s coming to dinner with you tonight?

Saint Thomas, commenting on this verse, notes that the person with paralysis symbolizes a “sinner lying in sin, trapped by the sin, unable to move toward the healing power of God. The people choose to accompany the person with paralysis, giving them good advice and leading them to God’s healing grace and mercy.” Bishop Barron says this story affirms God’s forgiveness and healing power. “Even though we are sinners, even though we are hopeless in our hatred and stupidity, even though we had gone (and would still go today) to the limits of killing God’s son, God still loves us and forgives us. We know that nothing can separate us from God’s love because we hear in the greeting of the risen Jesus that every sin can be forgiven.” Have you ever felt weighed down or paralyzed by sin? Then you know that forgiveness is the permission and the power to rise and walk on. Pharisees were blind to the fact that Jesus and the Father were one. So, they missed the entire point of his statement. They missed the real healing, available right in front of them. We don’t have to. We can call on Jesus in our sins and weakness; his love will enable us to rise again.