Catholic For A Reason

Recently, inside church circles, a debate took place as to whether Therese of Lisieux should be named a “doctor” of the church. Her proponents pointed to her influence within the faith and argued that few theologians or writers, at least not within the last century, have touched as many lives as Therese. Another constituency argued against it: She died at 24, not exactly the age of wisdom. Moreover her writings consist of just three short manuscripts which, while moving and aesthetically exceptional, are hardly in the same theological league with Augustine, Aquinas, Rahner, Barth, or Tillich. Nor do her writings, in terms of academics, measure up to the standards demanded even of graduate- level students in our theological institutions. So why declare her a “doctor”?

We know who won this argument. Therese is today a “doctor” of the church. A wise choice. Why? Because doctors heal people and her writings have healed persons in a way that many other writings that are academically and theologically superior have not. That’s not to say that the writings of the academy of theology don’t have their place, but it is to say that the power to heal depends upon things beyond brilliance, learning, professional standards, and authority or position.

We’re told there that Jesus “spoke with authority, unlike the scribes and the pharisees” (many of whom were, no doubt, brilliant, learned, and sincere). What set Jesus’ teaching apart? Its effect. He cured people and changed their lives in a way none of the other preachers and teachers of his time could. The word of God coming from his mouth simply affected things in a way that this same word coming from other mouths didn’t. His words made sick people healthy, made sinners change their lives, and even brought some dead people back to life. As a teacher or preacher, I can only envy that!

What I don’t sense is that I speak “with authority”, even when people do positively affirm me in words. Why do I say that? Because the longer I teach, preach, and write, the more sceptical I become about the effect of my efforts. It’s one thing to be told you’re wonderful, it’s quite another to have someone actually change his or her life on the basis of your preaching.

That isn’t true for everybody. Mother Theresa used to go out on a stage, face a thousand people, say “God loves you!”, and everyone’s eyes would fill with tears and they would know that this, the deepest of all realities, was true. She spoke with authority. I envy her too. When I speak or write I still need an infinitely more complex message to have any effect.

There’s a lesson here, but its shouldn’t be misread. People will recognize us as speaking with authority only when they sense that, like Jesus, we are under divine authority ourselves, that our message is not our own, that our actual lives stand behind the message, that our words are meant to reveal God and not ourselves, that we love others enough to give up protecting ourselves, that our real concern is God’s kingdom and not how we impress others, that we consider the community bigger than ourselves, and that we are willing to sweat blood rather than get bitter or walk away. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Ministering with Authority” January 2003]

Sometimes we’re a mystery to ourselves, or, perhaps more accurately, sometimes we don’t realize how much paranoia we carry within ourselves. A lot of things tend to ruin our day.

I went to a meeting recently and for most of it felt warm, friendly towards my colleagues, and positive about all that was happening. I was in good spirits, generative, and looking for places to be helpful. Then, shortly before the meeting ended, one of my colleagues made a biting comment which struck me as bitter and unfair. Immediately a series of doors began to close inside me. My warmth and empathy quickly turned into hardness and anger and I struggled not to obsess about the incident. Moreover the feelings didn’t pass quickly. For several days a coldness and paranoia lingered inside me and I avoided any contact with the man who had made the negative comments while I stewed in my negativity.

Time and prayer eventually did their healing, a healthier perspective returned, and the doors that had slammed shut at that meeting opened again and metanoia replaced my paranoia.

The word, metanoia, comes from two Greek words: Meta, meaning above; and Nous, meaning mind. Metanoia invites us to move above our normal instincts, into a bigger mind, into a mind which rises above the proclivity for self-interest and self-protection which so frequently trigger feelings of bitterness, negativity, and lack of empathy inside us. Metanoia invites us to meet all situations, however unfair they may seem, with understanding and an empathic heart. Moreover, metanoia stands in contrast to paranoia. In essence, metanoia is “non-paranoia”, so that Jesus’ opening words in the Synoptic Gospels might be better rendered: Be un-paranoid and believe that it is good news. Live in trust!

Henri Nouwen, in a small but deeply insightful book entitled, With Open Hands, describes wonderfully the difference between metanoia and paranoia. He suggests that there are two fundamental postures with which we can go through life. We can, he says, go through life in the posture of paranoia. The posture of paranoia is symbolized by a closed fist, by a protective stance, by habitual suspicion and distrust. Paranoia has us feeling that we forever need to protect ourselves from unfairness, that others will hurt us if we show any vulnerability, and that we need to assert our strength and talents to impress others. Paranoia quickly turns warmth into cold, understanding into suspicion, and generosity into self-protection.

Jesus, in his message and his person, invites us to metanoia, to move towards and stay within our big minds and big hearts, so that in the face of a stinging remark our inner doors of warmth and trust do not close. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “From Paranoia to Metanoia” September 2016]

There is a marvelous story told about a four year old child who woke up one night frightened, convinced that there were all kinds of spooks and monsters in her room. In terror she fled to her parents’ bedroom. Her mother took her back to her room and, after soothing her fears, assured her that things were safe there: “You don’t have to be afraid. After I leave, you won’t be alone in the room. God will be here with you.” “I know that God will be here,” the child protested, “but I need someone in this room who has some skin.”

This little story can teach us a whole lot about the incarnation. God knows that we all need a God who has some skin for we are creatures of the senses. We see, hear, touch, taste, and smell. Everything that goes into to us enters through those senses, just as everything that comes out of us exits through them. Through our senses we are open to the world and to each other. Through them, we communicate. 

In the incarnation, God comes to us through the senses. In Jesus, the ineffable, spiritual, invisible reality of God, which is beyond all physical sense, becomes precisely something which can be seen, heard, and touched through the senses.

This mystery, the incarnation, is the centre of our entire faith. It is also often misunderstood. What we tend to not understand is its ongoing nature. Generally, we understand the incarnation too much as a thirty-three year experiment: In Jesus, God takes on flesh, lives on earth for thirty-three years, and then, after his death and resurrection, ascends back to God and sends us the Holy Spirit (who has no flesh and is not physical). In this view, God took on flesh, for a while, but has returned to heaven and is now working invisibly again.

What is wrong with this view? One main thing: The ascension of Jesus does not end, nor fundamentally change, the incarnation. God continues still to have real flesh on earth. Jesus returned to God but, in a manner of speaking, Christ did not. The word “Christ”, as we know, is not Jesus’ surname name; for example, as we might say in: Jack Smith, Susan Parker, Jesus Christ. Jesus did not have a surname. The word “Christ” is a title which connotes God’s anointed presence on earth. 

To say that the body of believers is the body of Christ is not any more of a metaphor than to say that the Eucharist is the body of Christ. The Eucharist and the body of believers are not like the body of Christ. Each is the body of Christ, just as Jesus is the body of Christ.

Jesus makes this clear. In John’s gospel as he tells us that, as his disciples, we can do all the things that he does, and even greater things. This is not a pious platitude. If we ever understood its real truth we would no longer doubt that the gospel is “good news” and we would sing out joy filled Christmas songs until our lungs burst. The power that came into our world with Jesus, at that first Christmas, is still with us. It is in us. Like Jesus, we too can freely dispense God’s forgiveness, heal each other with God’s touch, and reach through death itself to save our loved ones. Christmas begins the mystery of God’s body on earth. Our own bodies are part of that mystery. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Helping to Give Birth to God” November 1996]

Karl Rahner once said that one of the secrets to faith is to always see your life against an infinite horizon. This meant that you always searched for the finger of God, some faith meaning, in every incident within your life.

Thus, for example, if something tragic happened to you (sickness, the death of loved one, an accident, the loss of your job, or economic disaster) you would always ask yourself: “What is God saying to me in this?” Conversely, if something good happened to you (you met a marvelous person, you fell in love, you had a huge success, or you made a lot of money) you would ask yourself the same question: “What is God saying to me in this?” The idea was that, in every event of life, God spoke, said something to you, and meant this event to have spiritual significance for your life.

Part of the idea was that nothing was purely secular. Hence, my parents, who were farmers, would have a priest come and bless their land, bless their house, and even bless their marriage bed. Then, if they had a good crop, it was not interpreted simply as good luck, a lucky year, but seen as God’s blessing: “For God’s good reason, we are being blessed this year.”  Conversely, if there was a poor crop, or no crop, it wasn’t written off as simple bad luck (“Rotten weather this year!”) but it was seen in the context of providence: “God wants us to live with less!” The idea was always that somehow God was behind things, if not actively arranging them at least speaking through them.

Sometimes, of course, they overdid it. Rather than seeing God as speaking through an event, they saw God as actually causing the event. Thus, God was literally seen to be sending sickness, death, drought, and pestilence upon the earth; or, conversely, deliberately privileging some people over others. Beyond making for an awful theology of God, this sometimes led to an unhealthy fatalism: “It’s in God’s hands. I won’t take my child to the doctor. If God wants her to live, she’ll live. If God wants to take her home to heaven, then so be it. It’s God’s will!” That is just bad theology. God speaks through thse events but is not the cause of them.

Divine providence might be defined as a conspiracy of ordinary accidents within which God’s voice can be heard. John of the Cross said as much when he wrote: The language of God is the experience that God writes into our lives. Karl Rahner, as we saw, suggests that it is a question of seeing against an infinite horizon.

My parents, and most of their generation, had some understanding of what this meant and searched always for the finger of God in their everyday lives. Sometimes they did this healthily and sometimes in less healthy ways. In either case, they prayed in a way that too often we do not.

When Scripture tells us to “pray always”, it doesn’t mean that we should always be saying prayers. Among other things, though, it does mean that we, like generations of old, should be looking at every event in our lives and asking ourselves: “What is God saying to me in all of this? What is providential for me in this event?” [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Divine Providence” January 1999]

We share the world with more than seven and a half billion people and each of us has the irrepressible, innate sense that we are special and uniquely destined. This isn’t surprising since each one of us is indeed unique and special. But how does one feel special among seven and half billion others?

We try to stand out. Generally we don’t succeed, and so, as Allan Jones puts it, “We nurse within our hearts the hope that we are different, that we are special, that we are extraordinary. We long for the assurance that our birth was no accident, that a god had a hand in our coming to be, that we exist by divine fiat. We ache for a cure for the ultimate disease of mortality. Our madness comes when the pressure is too great and we fabricate a vital lie to cover up the fact that we are mediocre, accidental, mortal. We fail to see the glory of the Good News. The vital lie is unnecessary because all the things we truly long for have been freely given us.”

All of us know what those words mean: We sense that we are extraordinary, precious, and significant, irrespective of our practical fortunes in life. Deep down we have the feeling that we are uniquely loved and specially called to a life of meaning and significance. We know too, though more in faith than in feeling, that we are precious not on the basis of what we accomplish but rather on the basis of having been created and loved by God.

And so we struggle to be content with ordinary lives of anonymity, hidden in God. Rather we try to stand out, to leave a mark, to accomplish something extraordinary, and so ensure that we will be recognized and remembered. Few things impede our peace and happiness as does this effort. We set for ourselves the impossible, frustrating task of assuring for ourselves something which only God can give us, significance and immortality. Ordinary life then never seems enough for us, and we live restless, competitive, driven lives. Why isn’t ordinary life enough for us?

The answer: We do all of these things to try to set ourselves apart because we are trying to give ourselves something that only God can give us, significance and immortality.

Scripture tells us that “faith alone saves.” That simple line reveals the secret: Only God gives eternal life. Preciousness, meaning, significance and immortality are free gifts from God and we would be a whole lot more restful, peaceful, humble, grateful, happy, and less competitive if we could believe that. A humble, ordinary life, shared with billions of others, would then contain enough to give us a sense of our preciousness, meaning, and significance.

Thomas Merton, on one of his less restless days wrote: “It is enough to be, in an ordinary human mode, with one’s hunger and sleep, one’s cold and warmth, rising and going to bed. Putting on blankets and taking them off, making coffee and then drinking it. Defrosting the refrigerator, reading, meditating, working, praying. I live as my Fathers have lived on this earth, until eventually I die. Amen. There is no need to make an assertion of my life, especially so about it as mine, though doubtless it is not somebody else’s. I must learn to live so as to gradually forget program and artifice.”

Ordinary life is enough. There isn’t any need to make an assertion with our lives. Our preciousness and meaning lie within the preciousness and meaning of life itself, not in having to accomplish something special. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Our Ache For Earthly Immortality” February 2018]

Jesus’ words emphasizes living fully, embracing compassionate wisdom over tribalism, finding triumph in surrender (like the Passion), and recognizing the transformative power in both action and passive suffering, ultimately calling for deep trust in God’s ultimate victory (Resurrection) over evil, even amidst human pain and limitations. Jesus’ words were truth spoken to a disbelieving world.

Take for example what he says before he dies on the cross. Jesus utters these words: “It is finished!” What’s “finished”? These words can be spoken in different ways: They can be words of defeat and despair (“It’s over, hopeless, I give in!) or they can be words of accomplishment and triumph (“I’ve done it, succeeded, I’ve held out!”).

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 gentleness of heart than to bitterness, to honesty than to lying, to fidelity than to compromise, to forgiveness than to revenge.

But there’s second level of meaning to his words. “It is finished” also means that the reign of sin and death is finished. An order of things (wherein we live our lives believing that, eventually, everyday joys give way to darkness and the underworld; that paranoia and sin unmask trust and goodness as naive; that the reality of the physical world and this life is all there is; that compromise and infidelity trump everything else, and that death is more real than hope) is also finished. It is exposed as unreal, as a lie, by love, fidelity, gentleness, trust, childlikeness, vulnerability, and the paradoxical power of a God who, in the deeper recesses of things, works more by underwhelming than by overpowering.

Mohandas Gandhi, in a remarkable passage, once wrote: “When I despair, I remember that all through history, the way of truth and love has always won. There have been murderers and tyrants, and for a time they can seem invincible. But in the end they always fall. Think of it, always.” Many things were finished on the cross, including rule of tyranny and murder. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Jesus’ Last Words” April 2006]

Jesus repeatedly enjoined his followers to “be compassionate as God is compassionate.” Each time God appears in Scripture, the first words are “Do not be afraid.” If something frightens you, you can be sure it’s not from God. Fear of the Lord is healthy since it is more about reverence. That fear is more that we might hurt God, not that God might hurt us.

Compassion is central to all authentic religions, it’s the penultimate invitation since it’s the medium that takes us to our last invitation, which is union with God.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect” – an impossibility for human beings in the Greek-rooted sense in which we understand perfection, meaning “without flaws.” But in Hebrew thought, perfection means compassion. Luke’s Gospel reflects this by saying, “Be compassionate as your heavenly Father is compassionate.”

Scripture scholar Dr. Walter Brueggemann, said that proper prayer and proper practice were seen as the essence of religion in Old Testament times until the prophets came and said, “God doesn’t care so much about all these rules; God cares about the poor.” They said, “The quality of your faith will be judged by the quality of your justice; the quality of justice will be judged by the treatment of the three weakest groups – widows, orphans and strangers.”

Jesus explained that God lets the sun shine on the righteous and the unrighteous alike. If you tease that out, God loves the saints in heaven and the devils in hell equally; God loves Mary in heaven and Lucifer equally; God loves pro-life and pro-choice equally; God loves Catholics and Protestants equally; God loves Christians and Muslims equally; God loves us when we’re bad and when we’re good equally.

Fr. Richard Rohr said, “There isn’t a single thing you can do to make God love you more, and there isn’t a single thing you can do to make God love you less. That’s the way I want you to be compassionate. Your compassion must extend to everybody, not just to the worthy, or whoever gives you a room, and so on.”

After Jesus had fed a crowd of more than five thousand with five loaves and two fishes, he asked his apostles to gather up the fragments that were left over, scattered here and there on the ground. They did as he asked and ended up filling twelve baskets with leftovers.

Recently, I attended a series of lectures by Walter Brueggemann. He is widely respected for his biblical scholarship, he feeds crowds from some healthy baskets, but he is perhaps even more deeply regarded because of his concern for the poor and his challenge to us to reach out to them with justice and generosity. After he had fed us, the crowds, here are some of the fragments that were gathered up:

• There is today a real danger of excessive privatization of our faith. The church must advocate too for the public conscience, not just for the private conscience. 
• Where truth operates you see poverty turn into abundance; death turn into life; war turn into peace; and hunger turn into food.
• You can always recognize a “Pharaoh”: If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all! Pharaohs all have bad dreams, accumulate things, need ever larger bins to store their possessions, are permeated with anxiety, and are de-absolutized as soon as God enters the situation. Where do we have bad dreams?
• A truth-filled God always conspires against Pharaoh. God, eventually, comes to a crisis and redefines it.
• Scripture ultimately speaks of bodily pain and painful slavery. Redemption, just as at the original Exodus, will always begin with a cry of distress and end with a dance of joy. Bodies that hurt must come to voice and that voice must say that this pain is abnormal and shouldn’t be borne any longer. Painful slavery and a truth-filled God will eventually make for you a path through the waters where Pharaoh cannot follow. Therefore we must never allow our pathologies to become normal, nor accept slavery for the security it brings.
• The Book of Deuteronomy is one of the greatest social documents ever written, it links faith to public life, to economics, and to justice. It directs faith always to the poor, towards “widows, orphans, and strangers.” Deuteronomy might be the most subversive document in the entire Old Testament. Among other things, it teaches uncompromisingly that laissez-faire economics needs some clear moral checks. In the temptations of Jesus in his dialogue with the devil, he quotes scripture three times and each time it is a passage from Deuteronomy. 
• Deuteronomy keeps reminding us that we once all were slaves and that it is not good to have amnesia. We should not absolutize the present and imagine it has always been this way. All of us should remember where we came from, not least today in our debates about immigration.
• If we do not heed the words of Deuteronomy about taking care of the poor we will have to deal with the scroll of Jeremiah who assures us that the world as we know it will come to and end because it cannot be sustained in its falseness.
  [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Fragments from some Prophetic Loaves and Fishes” July 2010]

After the birth of Christ, we need not look to the extraordinary, the spectacular, the miraculous to find God. God is now found where we live, in our kitchens, at our tables, in our wounds and in each others’ faces. That is hard to believe and always has been. When Jesus was on earth, virtually no one believed he was the Messiah precisely because he was so ordinary, so unlike what they’d imagined God to be. 

It is curious that Scripture refuses to describe what Jesus looked like. It never tells us whether he was short or tall, with beard or without, had light or dark hair, or blue or brown eyes. Neither does it ever assign to him anything extraordinary in terms of psychological countenance.

Nikos Kazantzakis once wrote: “God is not found in monasteries, but in our homes! Wherever you find husband and wife, that’s where you find God: wherever children and petty cares and cooking and arguments and reconciliation are, that’s where God is, too. The God I’m telling about, the domestic one, not the monastic one, that’s the real God.”

In the First Letter of John, we read: “God is love and whoever abides in love abides in God and God abides in him/her.” Love is a thing that happens in ordinary life, in kitchens, at tables, in workplaces, in families, in the flesh. God abides in us when we abide there. The Christ-child is also to be found in church, in the sacraments and in private meditations. All of these are ordinary and the incarnation crawls into them and helps us, there, to abide in God.

True acknowledgment of Christ is tied to following his way of life, taking up our cross each day, walking the path that goes through suffering and service, rather than simply proclaiming his status.[Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Born Into The Ordinary” December 1986]

A friend of mine, in his early forties, is the kind of person you want as a friend. Honest, gracious, generous to a fault, kind-hearted, full of humour, he brings colour and character into a room. But, although he’s loved by many people inside the church, he struggles with the church. Partly it’s indifference, partly it’s lack of faith, partly it’s because of how he perceives the church’s teaching on sex, and partly it’s because he grew up inside a generation that, for whatever reason, was neverproperly initiated into the church. Whatever the reasons, he rarely goes to church and feels himself an outsider to its life.

Until recently he didn’t think much about this. He was young and life was full of opportunities, friends, and things to experience and enjoy. Church and religion didn’t seem important to him. But now that he’s seen enough of life to recognize some its empty crevices and its incapacity to deliver the happiness he’d hoped for, he’s more humble and even a bit sad about his weak relationship to faith and the church.

When we talked about religion recently he simply said: “I’m not sure what I really believe, but, that’s me, that’s where I’m at.” Then, with a note of sadness, he added: “I guess if there’s a heaven, I won’t be part of it.”

As Christians, we believe that God took on flesh in Jesus, but we also believe that this was not just a one-shot, 33-year incursion, of God into human history. The mystery of the incarnation goes on. God is still taking on real flesh inside of us, the community of believers.

Scripture says: “We ARE the Body of Christ on earth.” We’re not a replacement for Jesus’ body, not a representation of it, or even his mystical body. We ARE his body and, as such, are meant to do all the things he did, including the forgiveness of sins and the binding of each other, through love, to the family of God. Jesus himself gave us this power: “Whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven. … Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven; whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”

Those statements, among others, have immense, almost unimaginable, implications. As a family of faith, we continue to give physical flesh to God on earth and so, like Jesus, have the power to forgive and to link anyone who is sincere to the family of God.

Stated in reverse, if, as members of the Body of Christ, we love someone, that person cannot go to hell unless he or she positively rejects our love and our efforts to connect him or her to the family of God. He or she must, of course, at some point, still make a personal choice to belong, but as long as our love is there, that person is solidly connected to the Body of Christ.

Love understands, forgives, and holds others in union in ways that take into account weakness, hurt, complexity, absence, and even sin. A loving mother knows that the family still includes a given child, even if that person is struggling in ways that don’t allow for him or her to be home and at the family table on a given night. Love binds, looses, forgives, and holds others in union even within the painful contingencies of immaturity, absence, anger, infidelity, and sin.

Every time I write about this, I’m flooded with letters, mostly from people who find it incredulous. Some object because, as they put it: “Only Christ can do this!” Point well taken, but, as scripture says: “We are the body of Christ.” Christ is doing this. More commonly the doubt expresses itself this way: “I’d like to believe this, but, if it’s true, it’s too good to be true!” But that’s simply a description of the incarnation! [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Keeping Our Loved Ones Connected To The Body Of Christ” August 2005]