Daybreaks: Daily Reflections for Lent & Easter
by Ron Rolheiser, OMI

“Indeed, only with difficulty does one die for a just person,
though perhaps for a good person one might even find courage to die.
But God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners,
Christ died for us”.

(ROMANS 5:7-8)

“Anyone who has ever watched a fire knows that, at a point, the flames subside and disappear into smoldering coals that themselves eventually cool and turn into cold, gray ash. But there’s a moment in that process, before they cool off, that the coals can be stirred in order to make them burst into flame again.

That’s the image St. Paul uses to encourage us to rekindle the fires of our faith when they seem to be burning low: “I remind you to stir into flame the gift of God” (2 Timothy 1:6). It’s a meaningful image. Our faith sometimes needs some stirring at its roots to make it alive again. How do we do that?

We stir our faith bak into flame by resituating ourselves inside its roots. Even though faith is a divine gift, it can be helpful sometimes to journey back and examine what earthly forces helped plant the faith inside us.     

Who and what helped give us faith? That’s a deeply personal question that each of us can only answer for himself or herself. It could be the faith and witness of our parents, our church community, our teachers, or others who helped us find ways to hear God’s voice and left deep, permanent roots in our souls.

But sometimes God’s voice can feel completely silent. Sometimes our imagination can run dry so that we don’t feel God’s presence. It’s then that we need to stir the seemingly smoldering coals of our faith by making a journey back to reground ourselves to where our faith found its roots.

This kind of journey can be helpful for most everybody, with one cautionary flag. The seeming silence of God in our lives as adults can in fact be a deeper modality of God’s presence rather than a sign of a deteriorating faith. The voice of God often seems clear at times but later on that clarity gives way to what the mystics call the “dark nights of the soul”, where God’s seeming absence is not a question of a loss of faith but of a new, richer, less-imaginative mode of God’s presence in our lives. Fervor is not always a sign of a deep faith, just as the seeming absence of God is not necessarily a sign of a weakening faith. God must be patiently waited for and will arrive in our lives only on God’s terms, not ours.

Even so, St. Paul’s advice remains: ‘I remind you to stir into flame the gift of God'” (23).