RonRolheiser,OMI

Our Sometimes Stingy Hearts

July 13, 2026

A A A

John Muir once asked, “Why are Christians so reluctant to let animals into their stingy heaven?”

The same might be said of us as churches: why are we so reluctant sometimes to welcome others into God’s mercy and to our communion tables?

We certainly can’t use Jesus as our model in doing this. Looking at the Gospels, there is never a recorded incident where Jesus laid down some moral or religious condition to sit down at table with him.

Our model is rather the well-meaning disciples of Jesus, who, like us, tried to protect Jesus by sheltering him from various groups, including little children. But always in the face of this we hear Jesus saying clearly: Let them come me! Small wonder he sent his disciples away so he could have a meeting with the Samaritan woman who had been married five times.

What I am about to suggest is a risk since, admittedly, the issue of intercommunion is more complex than can be resolved simply by saying Jesus welcomed everyone (even as we may never ignore that).

Regarding the question of intercommunion: There is wide agreement theologically that baptism gives you access to the communion table. As Christian denominations, we recognize the validity each other’s baptisms. So why can’t any Christian go to any Christian church and be welcome at the communion table?

Because each denomination is its own family – and normally families eat at their own tables. Normally you go to your own denominational family for communion. But this is a pastoral consideration not a theological one.

However, occasionally we do eat at someone else’s home and table. Most mainline theologies of the Eucharist draw on this distinction and distinguish between “Occasional” intercommunion (funerals, weddings, faith gatherings) and “Regular” intercommunion. The former makes sense pastorally, the latter doesn’t. You only eat regularly at someone else’s table if you are a member of the family or household.

Given that pastoral concern, churches have had varied norms, ranging from wide welcome to strict exclusion, depending on how their leadership accesses the situation. For example, in the Roman Catholic Church, throughout the nineteen sixties and seventies, Roman Catholics generally welcomed others to receive communion on special occasions. Then, during the nineteen eighties and nineties, more and more, those presiding the Eucharist on those occasions were asked not to publicly invite those from other churches to receive communion. Further, after the year 2000, those presiding the Eucharist were asked to publicly disinvite those from other churches from receiving communion. More recently, there has been a growing shift back to a more welcoming stance.

What’s to be said about this shift back and forth? First, that this is a pastoral rather than a theological issue, and pastorally it can be argued legitimately in different ways. Where there is common agreement is that everyone wants the various Christian Churches to someday be one family with one communion table for all. The disagreement is on how to get there.

Some believe and argue that having to “fast” from intercommunion will make us hungrier to become one Church and will help motivate us to work more proactively for ecumenism. Others disagree and argue that being more welcoming about intercommunion will motivate us to work proactively for ecumenism. Who’s right?

There’s a logic in both arguments, but I confess that my heart lies with the latter group. In my experience, excluding each other from the Eucharist table tends to harden rather than soften our divisions, just as welcoming each other at the Eucharist table tends to soften the suspicions of each other we have nursed for the last five hundred years since the Reformation.

As well, I disagree with the belief and argument that any one church (in my case the Roman Catholic Church) is the only fully authentic expression of Church and that other denominations somehow lack authentic discipleship and therefore we would in some way cheapen the Eucharist and the real presence by allowing non-Roman Catholics to receive it at our communion table.

Here, like the well-meaning but mistaken disciples of Jesus, we are trying to protect Jesus from persons we feel are somehow not ready to have this encounter and intimacy with him. We need to remember that Jesus always met this with the words: Let them come to me! Jesus doesn’t need nor want our protection.

Moreover, the love, mercy, and embrace of God which Jesus incarnated and preached, was the antithesis of stingy. It was wide, inviting, and embracing of everyone universally. God has no favorites, except that everyone of us is God’s particular favorite. God is not a private or tribal deity, owned and controlled by any one faith, religion, denomination, or Church.

This is not to say that all faiths, religions, and Churches are equal and all the boundaries that separate them should be erased. No. But it is to say that we must not be so reluctant to incorporate others in our stingy understanding of Jesus’ universal embrace.

Share

A Naivete of the Heart

July 6, 2026

A A A

Darkness is only bad because there is light. Sin can only happen if first there is love.

Karl Rahner makes a very insightful comment about the text in the Gospels where Jesus is being crucified and says of his executioners: “Forgive them Father for they know not what they do!”

Rahner suggests that they knew exactly what they were doing. They knew they were putting an innocent man to death, that they were shedding innocent blood. So why does Jesus say what he said?

What was their innocence? What was their naivete?

Rahner’s answer: They didn’t know what they were doing because they didn’t know how much they were loved. And that can make for a naivete of the heart. How so?

There’s a place inside us, a place of which we are rarely consciously aware, where each of us is being held unconditionally in love by God. The people who crucified Jesus didn’t know what they were doing because they weren’t aware of that. That was their blindness, their ignorance. Despite what it looks like on the surface, they didn’t know what they were doing.

This is also true for us. Far too often we crucify others and ourselves because of this ignorance: we don’t know how much we are loved. Consequently, we’re sometimes cruel in our judgments and prone to do things which compromise our dignity. We struggle not to be one of the executioners at the crucifixion because, at the end of the day, we are acting out of ignorance. We don’t know any better, like the naivete of the child who hurts herself in ignorance.

But this isn’t a new insight.

Theology has classically drawn a distinction between culpable and inculpable ignorance. The latter, also called invincible ignorance, was seen to excuse one from sin and responsibility. Hence, there was the teaching that you could do things that were wrong but not sinful because you were acting in ignorance. This was predicated on the belief that you could act morally and responsibly only if you actually knew what you were doing. To sin, you had to act “knowingly”. Granted, that’s a tricky caveat.

However, looking at our world today, I would risk saying that in a number of important moral matters, we are acting in invincible ignorance. Simply put, we don’t know any better. Only the type of ignorance that allowed sincere people to crucify Jesus can explain why we, good and sincere people, can be so massively blind, communally and individually, to the poor, to the economic and social demands made by our faith. The real reason we can live so comfortably as the gap between the rich and the poor widens is not because we are bad and without conscience, but rather, as Rahner says, we don’t know how much we are loved.

The same holds true for our attitude towards sex. We have been able to trivialize sex, split it off from the sacredness of marriage, and turn it into an extension of dating (or simply recreational sex) only because of a certain invincible ignorance. We don’t know any better, not because we lack conscience, but because we lack any real sense of the deep love of God and the dignity it gives us.

Like Jesus’ executioners, we have an astounding capacity to rationalize, trivialize, and compensate precisely because we don’t know what we’re doing. We don’t have a conscious sense of God’s love for us. Hence, it’s easy to lose perspective, feel excluded, and do things that we would never do if we were more aware of our full dignity.

Small wonder we settle for second-best or for most anything that promises comfort and security. Jesus, no doubt, is looking at us and saying: “Forgive them Father for they know not what they do!”

But is that true? Can we really plead ignorance and innocence and say that we don’t know any better?

I say yes, though it’s not that we’re stupid or lack intelligence. This is a naivete of the heart. We are inculpably unaware of how much God loves us.

Too few of us, at any existential level, have ever heard God say to us: “I love you!” Too few of us have ever heard felt what Jesus must have felt at his baptism when he heard his Father say: “You are my beloved child; in you I take delight!” Indeed, too few of us have ever heard another person, soul to soul, say to us, I love you unconditionally! In you I take delight! Is it a surprise then that, like Jesus’ executioners, we have an amazing capacity, in good conscience, to sometimes be blind and not true to ourselves?

Darkness is only bad because there is light. Sin can only happen if first there is love. Betrayal is only possible if first one has heard the words: “I love you.” Jesus’ executioners acted in a darkness that came from never having heard that. The same, I suspect, is true for many of us.

Share

The Narrow Gate

June 29, 2026

A A A

A priest I know shares this story. Recently, on their priests’ retreat, the retreat director began his opening presentation with these words: we take for granted that most people are going to hell. Then he tried to ground this assertion by quoting Jesus: “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the way that leads to life, and only a few find it.” (Matthew 7, 13-14)

On the surface, this would indeed seem to indicate that most people are not taking the road that leads to heaven but are taking the road that leads to hell.

Are most of us going to hell? Is this what’s implied here? No! That’s not what’s being taught. This teaching of Jesus needs some parsing.

First, when Jesus says, “but small is the gate and narrow the way that leads to life, and only a few find it,” he’s not talking so much about going to heaven or hell, but rather about our lives, here and now.

Indeed, we can all relate to his words that the gate that leads to life is narrow and few find it. How? By simply asking ourselves: How many times in our lives do we have a moment, let alone a lengthy season, where we are without any depressions, without regrets, without undue restlessness, without jealousies, without frustrations, and without any sense that we are missing something in life, but rather have a deep sense of soul that we’ve arrived at the deepest meaning of life, that we’ve found the deep secret, that there’s nothing more to strive for?

Sometimes we do have moments like this when we have passed through the narrow gate that leads to life, though mostly we are still struggling to get there.

We can experience this when we look at the lives of others. Without being judgmental, how often do we look at someone’s life at the level of soul and say: He’s found it! She’s there! That’s what a full life looks like! We say this of very few people.

Moreover, what precisely is the gate and why is it narrow?

Simply put, the gate that leads to life, to the deepest and fullest happiness of all, is the invitation Jesus gives us in the Sermon on the Mount. (Matthew 5-7) For Jesus, this is what makes for fullness of life, namely: to be poor in spirit; to be in touch with the world’s wounds and our own wounds; to be meek; to hunger for justice; to be merciful; to be pure of heart; to be peacemakers; to suffer for what is right; and especially to love those who hate us.

That’s the narrow gate leading to life, and we struggle to pass through it because most everything in our world militates against this. Our world tells us that it’s best to be rich, that meekness and empathy are weaknesses, and we may in good conscience hate those who hate us. Our natural instincts agree. Both our world and our natural instincts invite us to a wide gate where we can justly curse those who curse us and may execute murderers.

The Sermon the Mount proposes a narrow gate, and it becomes particularly narrow at the end of the Sermon when Jesus invites us to be compassionate as our heavenly Father is compassionate and spells out what that means.

God’s compassion, unlike our natural instincts, goes out equally to the bad as well as to the good, like the sun that shines indiscriminately on weeds as well as on vegetables. God loves sinners and virtuous persons equally.

And so must we. Our virtue, Jesus says, must go deeper than our natural instincts, where quite naturally we love those who love us, hate those who hate us, curse those who curse us, and refuse to forgive someone who murders our loved ones.

The narrow gate that leads to full life is the gate of wide compassion, that is, we pass through that gate which leads to the fullness of life, when we love those who hate us, bless those who curse us, and forgive those who murder us.

Sadly, much inside us and much inside our world resists that narrow gate.

However, when Jesus says: “Small is the gate and narrow the way that leads to life, and only a few find it,” he’s not saying that most of us will go to hell and only a few will go to heaven. Instead, he is speaking about our lives right now and astutely pointing out that what ultimately makes for happiness and full life here in this world, namely, living out the Sermon on the Mount, particularly the part that invites us to love those who hate us, bless those who curse us, and forgive those who murder us.

That’s a gate we struggle to pass through.

Share

Back to Top

Searching for Something?

Recent Columns

View more >