Daily Virtue

Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that God lets his sun shine on the bad as well as the good. God’s love doesn’t discriminate; it simply embraces everything. God loves us when we are good, and God loves us when we are bad. God loves the saints in heaven and the devils in hell equally. They just respond differently. Why be good if God loves us equally when we are bad and good? That is an interesting question, though not a deep one. Love, understood properly, is never a reward for being good. Instead, goodness is always a consequence of having been loved. We aren’t loved because we are good, but hopefully, we become good because we experience love. That is the power of unconditional love.

The verse we are reflecting on today speaks of contradiction. Simeon’s words bring me back to the basic principle of “non-contradiction,” which says, “something is, or it is not, it cannot be both, and two plus two can never be five. Our God is One. That means that there is no internal contradiction within God, and that assures us that there is no internal contradiction possible within the structure of reality and a sane mind. Jesus is either the messiah or a crazy person; he cannot be both. God incarnate existed, and that fact will forever be true and cannot be denied. The single most dangerous thing in the whole world is lying, dishonesty, and denying facts. To deny a fact is not only to play fast and loose with your sanity and the very foundations of rationality; it is also to play fast and loose with our God, whose consistency undergirds all sanity and all meaning. God is one, undivided, and consistent.

Discipline. Let’s look at the word’s origin to understand what discipline is and what it means. The root word of discipline is “disciple,” which comes from the Latin word discipulus, meaning “student.” Most people believe a disciple is a “follower.” To be a disciple is to put yourself under a discipline. That, as St. Paul says today, is the enduring “discipline” to make “straight” our paths in life, striving “for peace with everyone,” seeking “holiness” that will be blessed by the “grace of God.” The greatest discipline we can exhibit as a disciple is living in ever-greater transparency and honesty through an ever-wider embrace of being compassionate as God is, trusting as God is, and loving as God is.