RonRolheiser,OMI

Our Struggle with Love

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Several years ago, a Presbyterian minister I know challenged his congregation to open its doors and its heart more fully to the poor. Initially the congregation responded with enthusiasm and a number of programs were introduced to invite people from the less-privileged economic areas of the city, including a number of street-people, to come to their church.

But the romance soon died as coffee cups and other loose items began to disappear, some handbags were stolen, and the church and meeting space were often left messy and soiled. A number of the congregation began to complain and demand an end to the experiment: “This isn’t what we expected! Our church isn’t clean and safe anymore! We wanted to reach out to these people and this is what we get! This is too messy to continue!”

But the minister held his ground, pointing out that their expectations were naïve, that what they were experiencing was precisely part of the cost of reaching out to the poor, and that Jesus assures us that loving is unsafe and messy, not just in reaching out to the poor but in reaching out to anyone.

We like to think of ourselves as gracious and loving, but, truth be told, that’s often predicated on a naïve notion of love. We struggle to love as Jesus invites us to love, namely, to love each other as I have loved you. The last clause in the sentence contains the real challenge: Jesus doesn’t say, love each other according to the spontaneous reactions of your heart; nor, love each other as society defines love. Rather, love each other as I have loved you.

And, for the most part, we struggle to do that.

  • We struggle to love our enemies, to turn the other cheek and to reach across to embrace those who hate us. We struggle to pray for those who oppose us.
  • We struggle to forgive those who hurt us, to forgive those who murder our loved ones. We struggle to ask God to forgive the people who are hurting us. We struggle to believe, like Jesus, that they are not really cognizant of what they are doing.
  • We struggle to be big-hearted and take the high road when we’ve been slighted or ignored, and we struggle then to let understanding and empathy replace bitterness and our urge to withdraw. We struggle to let go of grudges.
  • We struggle to be vulnerable, to risk humiliation and rejection in our offers of love. We struggle to give up our fear of being misunderstood, of not looking good, of not appearing strong and in control. We struggle to set out barefooted, to love without security in our pockets.
  • We struggle to open our hearts enough to imitate Jesus’ universal, non-discriminating embrace, to stretch our hearts to see everyone as brother or sister, regardless of race, color, or religion. We struggle to stop nursing the silent secret that our own lives and the lives of our loved ones are more precious than those of others.
  • We struggle to make a preferential option for the poor, to bring the poor to our tables, to abandon our propensity to prefer the attractive and the influential.
  • We struggle to sacrifice ourselves to the point of losing everything for the sake of others, to actually lay down our lives for our friends – and indeed for our enemies. We struggle to be willing to die for people who oppose us and are trying to crucify us.
  • We struggle to love with purity of heart, to not subtly seek ourselves within our relationships. We struggle to live chastely, to fully respect and not violate someone else.
  • We struggle to walk in patience, giving others the full space they need to relate to us according to their own inner dictates. We struggle to sweat blood in order to be faithful. We struggle to wait in proper patience, in God’s good time, for God’s judgment on right and wrong.
  • We struggle to resist our natural urge to judge others, to not impute motives. We struggle to leave judgment to God.
  • Finally, not least, we struggle to love and forgive our own selves, knowing that no mistake we make stands between us and God. We struggle to trust that God’s love is enough and that we are forever held inside God’s infinite mercy.

Yes, love is a struggle.

After his wife Raissa died, Jacques Maritain edited a book of her journals. In the Preface to that book, he describes her struggle with the illness that eventually killed her. Severely debilitated and unable to speak, she struggled mightily in her last days. Her suffering both tested and matured Maritain’s own faith. Mightily sobered by seeing his wife’s sufferings, he wrote: “Only two kinds of people think that love is easy: saints, who through long years of self-sacrifice have made a habit of virtue, and naïve persons who don’t know what they’re talking about.”

He’s right. Only saints and those who are naïve think love is easy.

Our Restless Selves

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During the last years of his life, Thomas Merton lived in a hermitage outside a monastery, hoping to find more solitude in his life. But solitude is an illusive thing and he found it was forever escaping him.

Then one morning he sensed that for a moment he had found it. However, what he experienced was a surprise to him. Solitude, it turns out, is not some altered state of consciousness or some heightened sense of God and the transcendent in our lives. Solitude, as he experienced it, was simply being peacefully inside your own skin, gratefully aware of and peacefully breathing in the immense richness inside your own life. Solitude consists in sleeping in intimacy with your own experience, at peace there, aware of its riches and wonder.

But that’s not easy. It’s rare. Rarely do we find ourselves at peace with the present moment inside us. Why? Because that’s the way we are built. We are overcharged for this world. When God put us into this world, as the author of the Book of Ecclesiastes tells us, God put “timelessness” into our hearts and because of that we don’t make easy peace with our lives.

We read this, for example, in the famous passage about the rhythm of the seasons in the Book of Ecclesiastes. There is a time and a season for everything, we are told: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to gather in what is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal … and so the text goes on. Then, after listing this natural rhythm of time and the seasons, the author ends with these words: God has made everything suitable for its own time but has put timelessness into the human heart so that human beings are out of sync with the rhythms of the seasons from beginning to end.

The Hebrew word used here to express “timelessness” is Olam, a word suggesting “eternity” and “transcendence”. Some English translations put it this way: God has put a sense of past and future into our hearts. Perhaps that captures it best in terms of how we generally experience this in our lives. We know from experience how difficult it is to be at peace inside the present moment because the past and the future won’t leave us alone. They are forever coloring the present.

The past haunts us with half-forgotten lullabies and melodies that trigger memories about love found and lost, about wounds that have never healed, and with inchoate feelings of nostalgia, regret, and wanting to cling to something that once was. The past is forever sowing restlessness into the present moment.

And the future? It impales itself into the present as well, looming as promise and threat, forever demanding our attention, forever sowing anxiety into our lives, and forever stripping us of the capacity to simply rest inside the present.

The present is forever colored by obsessions, heartaches, headaches, and anxieties that have little to do with people we are actually sitting with at table.

Philosophers and poets have given various names to this. Plato called it “a madness that comes from the gods”; Hindu poets have called it “a nostalgia for the infinite”; Shakespeare speaks of “immortal longings”, and Augustine, in perhaps the most famous naming of them all, called it an incurable restlessness that God has put into the human heart to keep it from finding a home in something less than the infinite and eternal – “You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”

And so, it’s rare to be peacefully present to our own lives, restful inside of our own skins. But this “torment”, as T.S. Eliot, once named it, has a God-given intentionality, a divine purpose.

Henri Nouwen, in a remarkable passage both names the struggle and its purpose: “Our life is a short time in expectation, a time in which sadness and joy kiss each other at every moment. There is a quality of sadness that pervades all the moments of our life. It seems that there is no such thing as a clear-cut pure joy, but that even in the most happy moments of our existence we sense a tinge of sadness. In every satisfaction, there is an awareness of limitations. In every success, there is the fear of jealousy. Behind every smile, there is a tear. In every embrace, there is loneliness. In every friendship, distance. And in all forms of light, there is the knowledge of surrounding darkness. But this intimate experience in which every bit of life is touched by a bit of death can point us beyond the limits of our existence. It can do so by making us look forward in expectation to that day when our hearts will be filled with perfect joy, a joy that no one shall take away from us.”

Our restless hearts keep us from falling asleep to the divine fire inside us.

Jesus and The Poor

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I grew up a second-generation immigrant in the outback of the Western Canadian prairies. Our family was poor economically, subsistence farmers, with the necessities but seldom with much more. My father and mother were charitable to a fault and tried to instill that in us. However, given our own poverty, understandably we did not have much of a vision in terms of social justice. We were the poor.

Growing up in this way can deeply ingrain certain instincts and attitudes inside you, some good, some bad. Positively, you grow to believe that you need to work hard, that nothing is given to you free, that you need to take care of yourself, and everyone else should do the same. Ironically, that very ethos can blind you to some major truths regarding the poor.

I can testify to this. It took me many years, work that took me over many borders, some firsthand encounters with people who didn’t have the basic necessities of life, and countless hours in theology classrooms before I even became aware of some of the basic biblical and Christian truths regarding the poor.

Now I am struggling to live them, but at least I accept that they are non-negotiable for a Christian, irrespective of denomination or political persuasion. In brief, as a Christian, we are given a non-negotiable mandate to reach out to the poor in compassion and justice. Moreover, this mandate is just as non-negotiable as keeping the commandments, as is clear most everywhere in Scripture.

Here is the essence of that mandate …

  • The great Jewish prophets coined this mantra: The quality of your faith will be judged by the quality of justice in the land; and the quality of justice in the land will always be judged by how “widows, orphans, and strangers” (biblical code for the weakest and most vulnerable groups in a society) are doing while you are alive.
  • Jesus not only ratifies this; he deepens it, identifying his very person with the poor.  (“Whatsoever you do to the least of my people, you do to me.”). He tells us that we will be judged for eternal life on the basis of how we treated the poor.
  • Moreover, in both Testaments in the Bible, this is particularly true regarding how we treatforeigners, strangers, and immigrants. How we treat them is how we are in fact treating Jesus.
  • Note that Jesus defines his mission with these words: I have come to bring good news to the poor. Hence, any teaching, preaching, or government policy that is not good news for the poor may not cloak itself with either Jesus or the Gospel.

As well, most of us have been raised to believe that we have the right to possess whatever comes to us honestly, either through our own work or through legitimate inheritance. No matter how large that wealth might be, it’s ours as long as we didn’t cheat anyone along the way. By and large, this belief has been enshrined in the laws of democratic countries, and we generally believe that it is morally sanctioned by the Christianity. It is not, as we can see from these truths in Scripture:

  • God loves everyone. There are no favorite ones or privileged ones in God’s eyes, and

God intended the earth and everything in it for the sake of all human beings. Thus, created goods should flow fairly to all.

  • Wealth and possessions must be understood as ours to steward rather than to possess absolutely.
  • No person or nation may have a surplus if others do not have the basic necessities.
  • All people are obliged to come to the relief of the poor.
  • The condemnation of injustice is a non-negotiable aspect of our discipleship.
  • In all situations where there is injustice, unfairness, oppression, grinding poverty, God is not neutral. Rather God wants action against everything and everyone who deals injustice and death.

These principles are strong, so strong in fact that it is easy to believe that Jesus can’t really be asking this of us. Indeed, if taken seriously, these principles would radically disrupt our lives and the social order. It would no longer be business as usual.

To take just one example: there are nearly forty-five million refugees in our world today, most of them looking to cross a border into a new country. Is it realistic for any country today, in biblical terms, “to welcome the stranger”, to simply open its borders and welcome anyone who wants to cross? That’s simply not realistic or socially expedient regarding what it would mean practically in terms of our comfort and security.

While that may be granted, what may not be granted is that our (seemingly) necessary social and political pragmatism in dealing with “the widow, the orphan, and the immigrant” may cloak itself with Jesus and the Bible. It may not. This is antithetical to Jesus. Whether or not this upsets our security and comfort, God is always on the underside of history, on the side of the poor.