Thursday, October 20, 2022
           (click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Life is difficult for everybody
Brothers and sisters, I kneel before the Father that he may grant you, rooted and grounded in love, the strength to comprehend what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
Ron Rolheiser, recently retired president of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio and author of eleven very popular books, grew up in rural Saskatchewan, in “a small, sheltered, farming, immigrant community in the heart of the Canadian prairies.” The priests that attended his family’s parish “tended to preach to us as if we were a group of idyllic families on TV, in Little House on the Prairie.”
And the priests were happy. “They shared with us how pleased they were to be ministering to us simple farm folk, living uncomplicated lives in an uncomplicated place, far from the problems of those living in the big cities.”
Rolheiser, just a young farm boy, had a problem with this.
I lived a sheltered life, and I was young, but this message didn’t always digest well. First of all, I didn’t feel very uncomplicated and simple. I harbored a deep restlessness and had more than my own share of heartaches. I felt already then, just as I feel now, that both human life and the human heart have a depth that’s always partially beyond our grasp.
Margaret and I have been with Fr. Ron on several weekend retreats at Kings House in Belleville, Illinois. On Saturday night he shows a film. He chooses edgy Christian movies like Jesus of Montreal and Babette’s Feast. These cinematic treats don’t let my mind rest easy. They ask more questions than they answer.
Good art is good precisely because it takes life’s complexity and depth seriously and shines a light into it in a way that does not resolve the tension in too easy a way. Poor art is invariably sentimental precisely because it does not take that complexity seriously, either by refusing to acknowledge it or by resolving it too easily.
Jesus made good art (so to speak). He took life’s complexity and depth seriously. Jesus’ answers, such as they were, drove his questioner deeper into his mind and soul.
From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked. I have come to set the earth on fire, and how I wish it were already blazing!
Want to follow Jesus? Don’t try to figure it out, just faith it out, as Bob Jones told me one day at the Vineyard Church in 1991. As simple as following Jesus is, or should be, I am a complicated disciple. Fr. Rolheiser helps me accept that:
Good theology and spirituality need to take seriously the complexity of the human heart. Our pathological complexity presses us ever towards greater light.
And we are not alone. All of us are in this boat.
Here is where we can finally find the threads of empathy and forgiveness: Life is difficult for everybody. Everyone is hurting. We don’t need to blame someone. We are all beset with the same issues.
Understanding and accepting that can help us to forgive each other – and then forgive ourselves.
Knowing this truth allows me to cease fruitless attempts to duplicate what God does with ease, and to let God lead me on, joyful in the midst of all the people (like me) who have ever lived.
The plan of the Lord stands forever; the design of his heart, through all generations.
(Ephesians 3, Psalm 33, Philippians 3, Luke 12)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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