RonRolheiser,OMI

Who Are Our Real Faith Companions?

April 29, 2024

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I work and move within church circles and find that most of the people there are honest, committed, and for the most part radiate their faith positively. Most churchgoers aren’t hypocrites. What I do find disturbing in church circles though is that many of us can be bitter, mean-spirited, and judgmental in terms of defending the very values that we hold most dear.

It was Henri Nouwen who first highlighted this, commenting with sadness that many of the bitter and ideologically driven people he knew, he had met inside of church circles and places of ministry. Within church circles, it sometimes seems, almost everyone is angry about something. Moreover, within church circles, it is all too easy to rationalize that in the name of prophecy, as a righteous passion for truth and morals.

The algebra works this way: because I am sincerely concerned about an important moral, ecclesial, or justice issue, I can excuse a certain amount of anger, elitism, and negative judgment, because I can rationalize that my cause, dogmatic or moral, is so important that it justifies my mean spirit, that is, I have a right to be cold and harsh because this is such an important truth.

And so we justify a mean spirit by giving it a prophetic cloak, believing that we are warriors for God, truth, and morals when, in fact, we are struggling equally with our own wounds, insecurities, and fears. Hence we often look at others, even whole churches made up of sincere persons trying to live the gospel, and instead of seeing brothers and sisters struggling, like us, to follow Jesus, we see “people in error”, “dangerous relativists”, “new age pagans”, “religious flakes”, and in our more generous moments, “poor misguided souls”. But seldom do we look at what this kind of judgment is saying about us, about our own health of soul and our own following of Jesus.

Don’t get me wrong: Truth is not relative, moral issues are important, and right truth and proper morals, like all kingdoms, are under perpetual siege and need to be defended. Not all moral judgments are created equal, and neither are all churches.

But the truth of that doesn’t override everything else and give us an excuse to rationalize a mean spirit. We must defend truth, defend those who cannot defend themselves, and be faithful in the traditions of our own churches. However, right truth and right morals don’t all alone make us disciples of Jesus. What does?

What makes us genuine disciples of Jesus is living inside his Spirit, the Holy Spirit, and this is not something abstract and vague. If one were searching for a single formula to determine who is Christian and who isn’t, one might look at the Epistle to the Galatians, Chapter 5. In it, St. Paul tells us that we can live according to either the spirit of the flesh or of the Holy Spirit. 

We live according to the spirit of the flesh when we live in bitterness, judgment of our neighbor, factionalism, and non-forgiveness. When these things characterize our lives, we shouldn’t delude ourselves and think that we are living inside of the Holy Spirit.

Conversely, we live inside of the Holy Spirit when our lives are characterized by charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, longsuffering, constancy, faith, gentleness, and chastity. If these do not characterize our lives, we should not nurse the illusion that we are inside of God’s Spirit, irrespective of our passion for truth, dogma, or justice.

This may be a cruel thing to say, and perhaps more cruel not to say, but I sometimes see more charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, and gentleness among persons who are Unitarian or New Age (people who are often judged by other churches as being wishy-washy and as not standing for anything) than I see among those of us who do stand so strongly for certain ecclesial and moral issues that we become mean-spirited and non-charitable inside of those convictions. Given the choice of whom I’d like as a neighbor or, more deeply, the choice of whom I might want to spend eternity with, I am sometimes conflicted about the choice. Who is my real faith companion? The mean-spirited zealot at war for Jesus or cause, or the gentler soul who is branded wishy-washy or “new age”? At the end of the day, who is living more inside the Holy Spirit?

We need, I believe, to be more self-critical vis-a-vis our anger, harsh judgments, mean-spirit, exclusiveness, and disdain for other ecclesial and moral paths. As T.S. Eliot once said: The last temptation that’s the greatest treason is to do the right thing for the wrong reason. We may have truth and right morals on our side, but our anger and harsh judgments towards those who don’t share our truth and morals may well have us standing outside the Father’s house, like the older brother of the prodigal son, bitter both at God’s mercy and at those who are, seemingly without merit, receiving it.

Civility Has Left the Building

April 22, 2024

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Why do we no longer get along with each other? Why is there such bitter polarization inside of our countries, our neighborhoods, our churches, and even in our families? Why do we feel so unsafe in many of our conversations where we are perpetually on guard so as not to step on some political, social, or moral landmine?

We all have our own theories on why this is, and mostly we choose our news channels and friends to bolster our own views. Why? Why this bitter polarization and nastiness among us?

Well, let me suggest an answer from an ancient source, scripture. In the Hebrew scriptures (our Old Testament), the prophet Malachi offers us this insight on the origins of polarization, division, and hatred. Echoing the voice of God, he writes: “Therefore, I have made you contemptible and base before all the people, since you do not keep my ways, but show partiality in your decisions. Have we not all the one Father? Has not the one God created us? Why do we break faith with one another?” 

Isn’t this particularly apropos for us today, given all the polarization and hatred in our houses of government, our churches, our communities, and our families, where for the most part we no longer respect each other and struggle even to be civil with each other? We have broken faith with each other. Civility has left the building.

Moreover, this afflicts both sides of the ideological, political, social, and ecclesial spectrums. Both sides have their particular ideological wings which are scornfully unsympathetic to those who don’t share their view, paranoid about hidden conspiracies, rigidly uncompromising, and disrespectful and belittling of anyone who does not share their perspective. And, for the most part, they preach, advocate, and practice hatred – believing that all this is done in service of God, truth, moral cause, enlightenment, freedom, or nationalism.

Someone once said, not everything can be fixed or cured, but it should be named properly. That’s the case here. We need to name this. We need to say out loud, this is wrong. We need to say out loud that none of this can be done in the name of love. And we need to say out loud that we may never rationalize hatred and disrespect in the name of God, the Bible, truth, moral cause, freedom, enlightenment, or anything else.  

This needs to be named, irrespective of wherever we find ourselves amid all the divisive and hate-filled debates that dominate public discourse today. Each of us needs to examine himself or herself vis-a-vis our partiality, namely, how little we even want to understand the other side, how much disrespect we have for some people, how civility is often absent from our speech, and how much hatred has unconsciously crept into our lives.

After this, we need a second self-scrutiny. The word “sincere” comes from two Latin words (sine – without and cere – wax). To be sincere is to be “without wax”, to be your real self, outside of others’ influence. But that’s not easy. How we picture ourselves, what we believe, and our view on most anything at a given moment is heavily colored by our personal history, our wounds, who we live with, what work we do, who our colleagues and friends are, the country we live in, and the political, social, and religious ideologies we inhale with the air we breathe. It’s not easy to know what we really think or feel about a given issue. Am I sincere or is my reaction predicated more on who my friends and colleagues are and where I get my news? At the core of my being, who am I really, without wax?

Given our struggle for sincerity, particularly in our present climate of division, disrespect, and hatred, we might ask ourselves, how much of what I am passionate about enough to generate hatred inside me, is really rooted in sincerity as opposed to ideology or my instinctual emotional or intellectual reaction toward something I dislike?

This is not easy to answer, understandably so. We are pathologically complex as human persons, and the quest for sincerity is the quest of a lifetime. However, while on that journey towards sincerity there are some non-negotiable human and spiritual rules. The biblical prophet Malachi names one of them: “Do not show partiality in your decisions and do not break faith with each other”. When we parse that out, what is it saying?

Among other things, this: You have a right to struggle, to disagree with others, to be passionate for truth, to be angry sometimes, and (yes) even to feel hateful occasionally (since hate is not the opposite of love, indifference is). But you may never preach hatred and division or advocate for them in the name of goodness; instead, in that place inside you where sincerity resides, you need to nurse a congenital distrust of anyone who does proactively advocate for hatred and division.

Civility has left the building.

God’s Exuberant Energy

April 14, 2024

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All things considered, I believe that I grew up with a relatively healthy concept of God. The God of my youth, the God that I was catechized into, was not unduly punishing, arbitrary, or judgmental. Granted, he was omnipresent so that all of our sins were noticed and noted; but, at the end of the day, he was fair, loving, personally concerned for each of us, and wonderfully protective to the point of providing each of us with a personal guardian angel. That God gave me permission to live without too much fear and without any particularly crippling religious neuroses.

But that only gets you so far in life. Not having an unhealthy notion of God doesn’t necessarily mean you have a particularly healthy one. The God who I was raised on was not overly stern and judgmental, but neither was he very joyous, playful, witty, or humorous. Especially, he wasn’t sexual, and had a particularly vigilant and uncompromising eye in that area. Essentially he was somber, heavy, and not very joyous to be around. Around him, you had to be solemn and reverent. I remember the Assistant Director at our Oblate novitiate telling us that there is no recorded incident, ever, of Jesus having laughed.

Under such a God you had permission to be essentially healthy. However, to the extent that you took him seriously, you still walked through life less than fully robust and your relationship with him could only be solemn and reverent.

Then, beginning more than a generation ago, there was a strong reaction in many churches and in the culture to this concept of God. Popular theology and spirituality set out to correct this, sometimes with an undue vigor. What they presented instead was a laughing Jesus and a dancing God, and while this was not without its value, it still left us begging for a deeper literature about the nature of God and what that might mean for us in terms of a health and relationships.

That literature won’t be easy to write, not just because God is ineffable, but because God’s energy is also ineffable. What, indeed, is energy? We rarely ask this question because we take energy as something so primal that it cannot be defined but only taken as a given, as self-evident. We see energy as the primal force that lies at the heart of everything that exists, animate and inanimate. Moreover, we feel energy, powerfully, within ourselves. We know energy, we feel energy, but we rarely recognize its origins, its prodigiousness, its joy, its goodness, its effervescence, and its exuberance. Moreover, we rarely recognize what it tells us about God. What does it tell us?

The first quality of energy is its prodigiousness. It is prodigal beyond our imagination and this speaks something about God. What kind of creator makes billions of throwaway universes?  What kind of creator makes trillions upon trillions of species of life, millions of them never to be seen by the human eye? What kind of father or mother has billions of children?

And what does the exuberance in the energy of young children say about our creator? What does their playfulness suggest about what must also lie inside of sacred energy? What does the energy of a young puppy tell us about what’s sacred? What do laughter, wit, and irony tell us about God?

No doubt the energy we see around us and feel irrepressibly within us tells us that, underneath, before and below everything else, there flows a sacred force, both physical and spiritual, which is at its root, joyous, happy, playful, exuberant, effervescent, and deeply personal and loving. God is the ground of that energy. That energy speaks of God and that energy tells us why God made us and what kind of permissions God is giving us for living out our lives.

God is ineffable, that is the first truth that we hold about God. That means that God cannot be imagined or ever circumscribed in a concept. All images of God are inadequate; but, that being admitted, we might try to imagine things this way. At the very center of everything there lies an unimaginable energy that is not an impersonal force, but a person, a loving self-conscious mind and heart. From this ground, this person, issues forth all energy, all creativity, all power, all love, all nourishment, and all beauty. Moreover, that energy, at its sacred root, is not just creative, intelligent, personal, and loving, it’s also joyous, colorful, witty, playful, humorous, erotic, and exuberant at its very core. To live in it is to feel a constant invitation to gratitude.

The challenge of our lives is to live inside that energy in a way that honors both it and its origins. That means keeping our shoes off before the burning bush as we respect its sacredness, even as we constantly receive permission from it to be robust, free, joyous, humorous, and playful – without feeling we are stealing fire from the gods.

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