Author: DVO

Our reflection verse today comes from Psalm 24, attributed to David that was describing the ceremony of the entry of God (invisibly enthroned upon the ark), followed by the people, into the Temple. The Psalms are often looked down on as something we should pray with due to the hatred, anger, and violence, that speak of the glories of war and of crushing one’s enemies in the name of God. Fr. Ron Rolheiser calls on us to reflect on one classical definition of prayer that suggests it is the “lifting mind and heart to God.” Simple, clear, and accurate. Our problem is that we too seldom do this when we pray. Rather than lifting up to God what is actually on our minds and in our hearts, we treat God as someone from whom we need to hide the real truth of our thoughts and feelings. Instead of pouring out our minds and hearts, we tell God what we think God wants to hear – not murderous thoughts, desire for vengeance, or our disappointment with him. But expressing those feelings is the whole point. What makes the psalms great for prayer is that they do not hide the truth from God and they run the whole gamut of our actual feelings. They give honest voice to what is actually going on in our minds and hearts. And that is truly what God seeks from us, the openness of what lies in our heart for only then are we open to hear and receive his counsel.

Henri Nouwen writes that he found it very important in his own life to try to let go of his wishes and instead live in hope. He discovered that when he let go of his sometimes petty and superficial wishes and trust that his life was precious and meaningful in the eyes of God, something new, something beyond his own expectations, began to happen in him. To wait with openness and trust is an enormously radical attitude toward life. It is choosing to hope that something is happening for us that is far beyond our own imaginings. It is giving up control over our future and letting God define our life. It is living with the conviction that God molds us in love, holds us in tenderness, and moves us away from the sources of our fear. Our spiritual life is a life in which we wait, actively present to the moment, expecting that new things will happen to us that are far beyond our imagination or prediction. This is a very radical stance toward life in a world preoccupied with control. The newness and oneness we seek are found in the depths of our souls—a soul waiting and longing for the Lord.

Thomas Aquinas once defined the Holy Spirit as “the love between the Father and the Son.” Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that this definition is valuable, though more theologically than spiritually and pastorally. In terms of appropriating the Holy Spirit more personally, the biblical definition of the Holy Spirit is more described than defined. There are various ways, all of them rich, in which the Spirit is described in scripture. For example, St. Paul, in his letter to the Galatians, tells us that there are two kinds of spirit: the spirit of the sarx (a spirit that opposes God) and the spirit of God, the Holy Spirit. The former is the spirit of envy, anger, gossip, factionalism, idolatry, impurity, self-centeredness, and bitterness. Conversely, there is the Holy Spirit, the spirit of charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, long-suffering, mildness, faith, fidelity, and chastity. In terms of personal renewal, one of the things we might do is to stop deluding ourselves about what spirit we often live within. Suppose my life habitually contains more envy than admiration, anger than joy, gossip than praise, factionalism than community, impurity than chastity, and impatience than perseverance. In that case, I am not living in the Holy Spirit, irrespective of whatever religious or liturgical activities I am involved in and might feel good about. But that is the Holy Spirit at one level. John, in his Gospel, describes the Holy Spirit as a paraclete, an advocate, a lawyer for the poor. John tells us that the crucifixion of Jesus will set free the paraclete and that it will convict the world of its wrongness in crucifying an innocent person, Jesus. Among other things, then, the Holy Spirit in John is the defender of the accused, of the victim, of the scapegoat, of anyone whom society deems expendable for the sake of the culture. To live in the Holy Spirit, therefore, is to be an advocate, a lawyer, for the poor, and for those who are being victimized and scapegoated by the culture. Living in the Holy Spirit is not just a state of being, but a transformative journey. It is the person and the principle both of private renewal and of social justice. By living in the Holy Spirit, we are not only filled with selflessness and joy, but we also become advocates for the poor, bringing hope and justice to those in need.

Nobody gets to heaven without a letter of reference from the poor! That’s a quote attributed to James Forbes, an interdenominational pastor in New York City, and it wonderfully captures something that the ancient prophets of Israel underlined many centuries ago. The great prophets of Israel had coined this mantra: The quality of your faith will be judged by the quality of justice in the land. And the quality of justice in the land will always be judged by how “widows, orphans, and strangers” are faring while you are alive. That phrase, “widows, orphans, and strangers”, was code for the three weakest, most vulnerable groups in society at the time. For the great prophets of Israel, ultimately, we will be judged religiously and morally on the basis of how the poorest of the poor fared while we were alive. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that this is a scary thought, but it becomes more frightening when we see how Jesus strongly endorsed that view. While this needs to be contextualized within Jesus’ message as a whole, we have in Matthew’s Gospel the famous text about the Last Judgment where Jesus tells us that, at the end of the day, when we stand before the great King on the day of judgment, we will be asked only one set of questions and they all will have to do with how we treated the poor: Did you feed the hungry? Give drink to the thirsty? Welcome the stranger? Clothe the naked? Visit the sick? Visit prisoners? I doubt that any of us would have the raw courage to preach this, just as it is written in the gospels, from any pulpit today. And yet Jesus meant it. Nobody gets to heaven without a letter of reference from the poor. God has a preferential love for the poor, the suffering, the sick, and the weak, and so must we. Our faith assures us that the poor enter the Kingdom more easily than the rich and the strong. What can one person do in the face of all the global issues of injustice that beset us? Gustavo Gutierrez is a Peruvian philosopher, Catholic theologian, and Dominican priest. He acknowledged the complexity of the question and suggested the following: “Minimally, make sure that you always have at least one concrete poor person in your life to who you are especially attending. This will ensure that your commitment will always at least have some concrete flesh!” A single letter of reference from the poor is better than no letter at all.

It’s common, particularly among religious commentators, to describe the human heart as small, narrow, and petty: How small-hearted and petty we are! But God did not put us on earth with small, narrow, and petty hearts. The opposite is true. God puts us into this world with huge hearts as deep as the Grand Canyon. When not closed off by fear, wound, and paranoia, the human heart is the antithesis of pettiness. As Augustine describes it, the human heart is not fulfilled by anything less than infinity itself. There’s nothing small about the human heart. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that the problem that Jesus speaks of today regarding the heart is not its size or natural dynamics but what the heart tends to do when it is wounded, fearful, disrespected, paranoid, or self-deluded by greed and selfishness.  The early Church Fathers taught that the heart has two souls. Each person has a small, petty heart, a pusilla anima. We operate out of this heart when we are not at our best. This is the heart within which we feel our wounds and our distance from others. This is the heart within which we are chronically irritated and angry, the heart within which we feel the unfairness of life. This is the heart most often described by religious thinkers when they represent human nature as small and petty. But the Church Fathers taught that inside us was another heart, a magna anima, a huge, deep, big, generous, and noble heart. This is the heart we operate out of when we are at our best. This is the heart within which we feel empathy and compassion. This is the heart within which we are enflamed with noble ideals. This is the heart where we inchoately feel God’s presence in faith and hope and can move out to others in charity and forgiveness. Inside each of us, sadly often buried under suffocating wounds that keep us far from the surface, lies the heart of a saint, bursting to get out. Thus, on any given day and at any given moment, we can feel like Mother Teresa or a bitter terrorist. We can feel ready to give our lives in martyrdom, or we can feel ready to welcome the sensation of sin. We can feel like the noble Don Quixote, enflamed with idealism, or like a despairing cynic, content to settle for whatever short-range compensation and pleasure life can give rather than believing in deeper, more life-giving possibilities for ourselves and others. Everything depends upon which heart we are connected to at a given moment. When fanned to full flame, our virtues leave no room inside us for pettiness and small-heartedness. Fanning what’s highest in us eventually moves us more and more towards living out of our big hearts rather than petty hearts. Nowhere is this more important than in how we name both the size and the struggles of the human heart. We are not petty souls who occasionally do noble things. We are rather noble souls who, sadly, occasionally do petty things.

Fr. Ron Rolheiser offers some guidelines to those who serve. He begins by noting that we should try to serve others and not be caught up in the many tensions, some that beset from without and others that beset from within. How can we remain energized, effective, and true in service to others?
(1) Refuse to be pre-defined by any ideology of the left or the right. Like Jesus, transcend boundaries, constantly surprise, refuse to be classified.
(2) Don’t be afraid to be nothing and don’t be afraid to be everything! Jesus was both the Christ of silent, anonymous witness and the Christ of chanting, public processions. Honor both.
(3) Take your stand with the marginalized, even as you are known for your sanity and capacity to relate warmly and deeply to every kind of person and group.
(4) Be led by the artist but listen to the street! Be a leader, a creative person trying to lead others forward. Be a leader with empathy, without disdaining others’ culture, sentiment, or piety.
(5) Don’t be afraid to smash idols and don’t be afraid to bow in reverence! Great hearts hold near contradictory principles, lesser ones do not. Help smash the false gods that need to be smashed, even as you are unafraid to kneel often in reverence.
(6) Learn to be comfortable leading both a peace march and devotional prayer! Do not choose between justice and Jesus, between committing yourselves to the poor and fostering private intimacy with Jesus.
(7) Be thoroughly in the world, even as you are rooted elsewhere. Live in a tortured complexity! Love the world, love its pagan beauty, let it take your breath away, even as you root your heart in something deeper so that the realities of faith also take your breath away.
(8) Eat the tension around you! Mary pondered, not by thinking deep intellectual thoughts but by holding, carrying, and transforming tension so as not to give it back in kind.
(9) Go into dark places, but don’t sin! Stand up for the God-given freedom we enjoy, even as you model and show others how that freedom can be carried in a way that never abuses it.
(10) Forget about yourself and how others react to you! A bad singer on stage makes love to himself; a more mature singer makes love to his audience; a really mature singer makes love to the song. Forget your image, your need to prove yourself, and eventually forget about your audience too so that you and your song are not about yourself or about your people, but about God.

Wake up! Wake up before death wakes you up. In a less dramatic expression, that’s a virtual leitmotif in the Gospels. Jesus always tells us to wake up, stay awake, be vigilant, and be more alert to a deeper reality. What is meant by that? How are we asleep to depth? How are we to wake up and stay awake? How are we asleep? Fr. Rolheiser writes that we all know how difficult it is for us to be inside the present moment, to not be asleep to the real riches inside our own lives. The distractions and worries of daily life tend to so consume us that we habitually take for granted what’s most precious to us, our health, the miracle of our senses, the love and friendships that surround us, and the gift of life itself. We go through our daily lives not only with a lack of reflectiveness and lack of gratitude but with a habitual touch of resentment as well, a chronic, grey depression, Robert Moore calls it. We are very much asleep, both to God and to our own lives. How do we wake up? Having an awareness of our mortality does wake us up, as does a stroke, a heart attack, or cancer, but that heightened awareness is easier to sustain for a short season of our lives than it is for twenty, thirty, forty, or fifty years. Nobody can sustain that kind of awareness all the time. None of us can live seventy or eighty years as if each day was their last day. Or can we? Spiritual wisdom offers a nuanced answer: We can and can’t! On the one hand, the distractions, cares, and pressures of everyday life will invariably have their way with us, and we will, in effect, fall asleep to what’s deeper and more important inside of life. But it’s for this reason that every major spiritual tradition has daily rituals designed precisely to wake us from spiritual sleep, akin an alarm clock waking us from physical sleep. It’s for this reason we need to begin each day with prayer. What happens if we don’t pray on a given morning is not that we incur God’s wrath, but rather that we tend to miss the morning, spending the hours until noon trapped inside a certain dullness of heart. The same can be said about praying before meals. We don’t displease God by not centering ourselves in gratitude before eating, but we miss out on the richness of our actions. Liturgical prayer and the Eucharist have the same intent among their other intentions. They’re meant to regularly call us out of a certain sleep. None of us live each day of our lives as if it were their last day. So we should ensure that we have regular spiritual rituals and spiritual alarm clocks to jolt us back awake—so that it doesn’t take a heart attack, a stroke, cancer, or death to wake us up.

Scripture tells us that as John the Baptist grew up he became strong in spirit. My growing up was somewhat different. The virtue of courage is not contingent upon birth, temperament, or mental toughness, though these can be helpful. Courage is a gift from the Holy Spirit and that’s why one’s temperament and background may only serve as an explanation and not as an excuse for a lack of courage. Fr. Rolheiser writes that he highlights the above because our situation today demands courage from us, the courage for prophecy. We desperately need prophets today, but they are in short supply and too many of us are not particularly eager to volunteer for the task. Bryan Massingale, a strong prophetic voice on the issue of racism, submits that the reason we see so little real progress in dealing with racial injustice is the absence of prophetic voices where they are most needed, in this case, among the many good white people who see racial injustice, sympathize with those suffering from it, but don’t do anything about it. Several years ago, a visiting professor at our school, an Afro-American man, was sharing with our faculty some of the near daily injustices he experiences simply because of the color of his skin. At one point I asked him: “If I, as a white man, came to you like Nicodemus came to Jesus at night and asked you what I should do, what would you tell me?” His answer: Jesus didn’t let Nicodemus off easily just because he confessed his fears. Nicodemus had to do a public act to bring his faith into the light, he had to claim Jesus’ dead body. Hence, his challenge to me: you need to do a public act. He’s right; but I’m still praying for the prophetic courage to do that. And aren’t we all?

We long for peace but fail to understand why we cannot find it. When watching the news at night, most of what we see reflects what is inside of us. There is an intrinsic, never-to-be-neglected connection between what seems radically private and what’s political and social. Thus, there can be no peace on the big stage when there is greed, jealousy, unwillingness to forgive, and unwillingness to compromise within our private hearts. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that when the outer body gets sick, it nearly always signals a breakdown in the internal immune system. Hence, given the state of our world today, one can be pretty sure that there is not much in the way of antibodies (charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, long-suffering, faith, mildness, gentleness, and chastity) within the body of humanity, namely, within our private lives. When we cannot get along with each other within our own marriages and families, we should not be surprised that countries do not get along with each other. When we cannot move beyond past hurts in our own lives, we should not expect the issues causing violence in Northern Ireland, Israel, Bosnia, Iran, and Africa to be resolved simply by better politics. When we spend billions of dollars a year on cosmetics and clothing that serve to build up our appearance and make us less vulnerable, we have no right to self-righteously demand that governments cut their budgets for defense. When nearly all of us have borrowed money to have, right now, the things we cannot yet afford but want, then we should have some understanding of why our countries have all overspent and are hopelessly in debt. Waging peace requires more than simply confronting the powers that be. What must be confronted is our own greed, hurt, jealousy, inability to forgive, compromise, and respect. Peace is the opposite of internal discord or longing for something we lack. When we are not at peace, it is because we are experiencing chaos or sensing some unfinished business inside us. To be at peace, something has to have an inner consistency so that all of its movements are in harmony with each other, and it must also have a completeness so that it is not still aching for something it is missing.

The heart has its reasons, says Pascal, and sometimes those reasons have a long history. Personal contact, friendship, and theological dialogue with other denominations and faiths help open our minds and hearts. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that we are still dealing with the fruit of centuries of bitter misunderstanding, which doesn’t disappear so easily, especially when it’s institutionally entrenched and nurtured as a prophetic protection of God and truth. We have suffered through five hundred years of misunderstanding. The effects of the historical break within Christianity and its reaction are present today. They are still seen everywhere, from high church offices to debates within the academy of theology to suspicions inside the popular mind. It is sad how we’ve focused so much on our differences when at the center, at the heart, we share the same essential faith, the same essential beliefs, the same basic moral codes, the same Scriptures, the same belief in an afterlife and the same fundamental tenet that intimacy with Jesus Christ is the aim of our faith. Granted, there are some real differences among us, mainly in terms of how we understand certain aspects of the church and certain issues within morality rather than how we understand the deeper truths about the nature of God, the divinity of Christ, the gift of God’s Word, the gift of the Eucharist, and the inalienable dignity and destiny of all human beings. Within the hierarchy of truth, this essential core is what’s most important, and on this essential core, we agree. That’s the real basis of our common discipleship. The issues that divide us focus primarily on church authority, ordination to ministry, whether to emphasize word or sacrament, how to understand the presence of Christ in the Eucharist, the number of sacraments, the place of sacramentals and devotions within discipleship, and how scripture and tradition interplay with each other. The earliest Christian Creed had but a single line: Jesus is Lord! All Christians still agree on that, and so we remain brothers and sisters, separated only by five hundred years of misunderstanding.