Daily Virtue

Our scriptures begin with the affirmation that what’s deepest in us, what defines us, is the IMAGO DEI, the image and likeness of God. To be in God’s “image and likeness” does not mean that we have stamped, somewhere in our souls, a beautiful icon. God, scripture tells us, is fire, wild, holy, undomesticated. To be in the image and likeness of God is to have this wildness in us. It’s this God-fire that these secular best-sellers are, each in its own way, referring to, and they are so popular because essentially what they say is true. Where, then, does Christian theology differ from them? On one very critical point: What Christianity (and every other great religion in the world) affirms, and what is generally lacking in these secular books, is the all-important insight that, while this fire is good and godly, we must never try to cope with it without connecting it to the other world. Anyone who tries to handle this energy without referring it to a world beyond our own will find that, far from being a source of wonder and enchantment, this fire will be a source of destruction, restlessness, and depression. Why? Precisely because this innate wildness over-charges us for life in this world. Divine fire trying to satiate itself solely within a finite situation, perhaps more clearly than anything else, explains why things don’t happen smoothly in our lives. There’s a divine fire within each of us. If we link ourselves to it properly and connect it to the other world, it becomes godly energy, the source of all that’s wonderful in life. However, if we run with the wolves, sit under Venus or Mars, and enter our wildness without reference to God and a world beyond, that fire will destroy us. Nobody can look at God and live! That’s not just a biblical statement but a practical formula for survival.[1]

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[1] Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s reflection, “Coping with the Imago Dei,” January 2002.

Skin needs to be touched! God knows that better than anyone. It’s why Jesus gave us the Eucharist. In the Eucharist, skin gets touched. The Eucharist isn’t abstract, a theological instruction, a creed, a moral precept, a philosophy, or even just an intimate word. It’s bodily, an embrace, a kiss, something shockingly physical, the real presence in a deeper way than even the old metaphysics imagined; for whatever reasons, we tend to shy away from admitting how radically physical the Eucharist actually is. St. Paul didn’t share that fear. For him, the physical communion that takes place in the Eucharist, between us and Christ as well as among ourselves, is as real and radical as sexual union. Our union with Christ and each other in the Body of Christ is intimate and real. Strong words. They’re predicated on a very earthy conception of the Eucharist. The late essayist and novelist Andre Dubus once wrote an extraordinary little apologia as to why he went to Eucharist regularly, despite the critical circles he moved in: “This morning I received the sacrament I still believe in: at seven-fifteen the priest elevated the host, then the chalice, and spoke the words of the ritual, and the bread became flesh, the wine became blood, and minutes later I placed on my tongue the taste of forgiveness and of love that affirmed, perhaps celebrated, my being alive, my being mortal. This has nothing to do with immortality, with eternity; I love the earth too much to contemplate a life apart from it, although I believe in that life. No, this has to do with mortality and the touch of flesh, and my belief in the sacrament of the Eucharist is simple: without touch, God is a monologue, an idea, a philosophy; he must touch and be touched, the tongue on flesh, and that touch is the result of the monologues, the idea, the philosophies which led to faith; but in the instant of the touch there is no place for thinking, for talking, the silent touch affirms all that and goes deeper: it affirms the mysteries of love and mortality.” Skin heals when touched. It’s why Jesus gave us the Eucharist.[1]

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[1] Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s reflection, “The Eucharist as Touch”, October 2002.

Let’s briefly look at three men caught up in the divine drama: the prophet Isaiah, the apostle Paul, and Peter, the head of the Apostles and the first Pope. In many respects, they were quite different from one another. Isaiah was likely from an upper-class family, was apparently well-educated, and was married to a prophetess. Paul was also highly educated and a prize student of the great rabbi Gamaliel, and before his conversion on the Damascus Road, he was a fervent enemy of the budding Church. Peter was also undoubtedly fervent but did so as a fisherman and blue-collar businessman. Each man was called, in dramatic and personal fashion, to proclaim the Word of God in difficult, harrowing circumstances. The prophet Isaiah has a vision of the throne room of the Lord of hosts. Faced with God’s fascinating and mysterious presence, man discovers his own insignificance. Isaiah sees himself in the light of God’s holiness and recognizes his desperate plight, “Woe is me, I am doomed! For I am a man of unclean lips, living among a people of unclean lips.” Isaiah was told by the seraphim, “Now that this has touched your lips, your wickedness is removed, your sin purged.” Paul was also transformed and purified by a heavenly vision while traveling to Damascus, “a light from the sky suddenly flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, ‘Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?’ He asked, ‘Who are you, Lord?’ The reply came, ‘I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. But get up and enter the city, and you will be told what you are to do.’” Whereas Isaiah’s sinful lips were purified by fire, Paul’s blinded eyes were healed by the prayer and hands of Ananias, a disciple of Jesus Christ. Upon witnessing the miracle of the fish, Peter responded to God with the same humility as Isaiah and Paul: “Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man.” Yet Jesus does not ask only Peter and the apostles to be fishers of men; the Lord asks it of every son and daughter.

Shepherds train their sheep to be attuned to their voice and their voice only. The shepherd could walk away from the enclosure, calling his sheep, often by their individual names, and they would follow him. His sheep were so attuned to his voice that they would not follow the voice of another shepherd, even if that shepherd tried to trick them by imitating the voice of their own shepherd. How do we discern the unique cadence of God’s voice among all the voices that surround and beckon us? We have several principles that come to us from Jesus, scripture, and the deep wells of our Christian tradition that can help us.

• The voice of God is recognized both in whispers and in soft tones, even as it is recognized in thunder and storms.

• The voice of God is recognized wherever one sees life, joy, health, color, and humor, even as it is recognized wherever one sees dying, suffering, conscriptive poverty, and a beaten-down spirit.

• The voice of God is recognized in what calls us to what’s higher, sets us apart, and invites us to holiness, even as it is recognized in what calls us to humility, submergence into humanity, and in that which refuses to denigrate our humanity.

• The voice of God is recognized in what appears in our lives as “foreign,” as other, as “stranger,” even as it is recognized in the voice that beckons us home.

• The voice of God is the one that most challenges and stretches us, even as it the only voice that ultimately soothes and comforts us.

• The voice of God enters our lives as the greatest of all powers, even as it forever lies in vulnerability, like a helpless baby in the straw.

• The voice of God is always heard in a privileged way in the poor, even as it beckons us through the voice of the artist and the intellectual.

• The voice of God always invites us to live beyond all fear, even as it inspires holy fear.

• The voice of God is heard inside the gifts of the Holy Spirit, even as it invites us never to deny the complexities of our world and our own lives.

• The voice of God is always heard wherever there is genuine enjoyment and gratitude, even as it asks us to deny ourselves, die to ourselves, and freely relativize all the things of this world.

It would seem that God’s voice is forever found in paradox.[1]

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[1] Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s reflection: “Searching for God Among Many Voices”, July 2024.

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.