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

“Jesus said, ‘The one who sent me is with me. He has not left me alone, because I always do what is pleasing to him”.

(JOHN 8:29)

“Much of the Gospels offer a challenge: keep your eyes trained upward, think with your big mind, feel with your big heart, imagine yourself as God’s child, mirror that greatness, let Jesus’ teachings stretch you, let his spirit fill you, and let high ideals enlarge you.   

Spiritualities of the ascent are those that invite us to always strive for what’s higher, for what’s more noble, for what stretches us and takes us (figuratively) upward beyond the humdrum moral and spiritual ruts within which we continually find ourselves. These spiritualities tell us that sanctity lies in the ascent and that we should habitually stretch ourselves toward higher goals.

But the Gospels also invite us to a spirituality of the descent. They tell us to make friends with the desert, the cross, with ashes, with self-renunciation, with humiliation, with our shadow, and with death itself. 

They tell us we grow not just by moving upward but also by descending downward. We also grow by letting the desert work us over, by renouncing cherished dreams to accept the cross, by letting the humiliations that befall us deepen our character, by having the courage to face our own deep chaos, and by making peace with our own mortality. 

These spiritualities tell us that sometimes our task, spiritual and psychological, is not to raise our eyes to the heavens, but to look down upon the earth, to sit in the ashes of loneliness and humiliation, to stare down the restless desert inside us” (41).

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

“The works that the Father gave me to accomplish,
these works that I perform testify on my behalf that the Father has sent me”.

(JOHN 5:36)

“The Gospels tell us that we can reach eternal life only by undergoing the darkness and death of Gethsemane and the cross. The mystics call this the dark night of the soul and assure us that the real transformation of soul does not happen at Disneyland but at Calvary.   

However, there can be a dangerous naivete in all this. The idea is too much that you should just let yourself free-fall into the great unknown, with all its darkness and chaos, and growth and happiness are assured. That isn’t always true. Far from it.

To enter the darkness, to go into the desert, to face your demons, you must first have the assurance that you will be held by someone or something – God, a loved one, a family, a faith that is strong enough to see you through – while undergoing such a journey. 

We see this in Jesus’ own paschal journey. He entered the darkness and chaos of Gethsemane and the cross, just as he had once entered the desert, not alone but with another. He was being held by his Father. 

Jesus was in the dark night, free-falling, but he wasn’t alone. He surrendered himself and jumped over love’s cliff, but only because he trusted that someone, his Father, would catch him before he hit the ground. All of us might want to ponder that before we counsel ourselves or others to too hastily abandon safety for chaos. The journey from Disneyland to Calvary should not be undertaken naively” (40).

Daybreaks: Daily Reflections for Lent & Easter

by Ron Rolheiser, OMI

“Jesus said to her, ‘Did I not tell you that if you believe you will see the glory of God?’.”

(John 11:40)

“Almost all spiritualities have a special place for deserts, wilderness, and other such places where we are unprotected and in danger from untamed nature, wild beasts, and threatening spirits.

In Christian spirituality, these wild places were not meant to lie forever untouched by us and God. The idea was that we men and women of faith were meant to help God finish creation by taming these wilds, exorcizing the bad spirits there, and turning the wilderness into a garden.    

In subtle ways, both this concept and its concomitant fears are still with us. What frightens us today is not untamed geography (which we now see as inviting peace and quiet). Rather, for many of us, the untamed, the wilderness, is now visualized more as a gang-infested area within a city, crack house, single bars, strip clubs, red-light districts. These are understood as lying outside our cultivated lives, split off from the safety of home and religion, godless places, dangerous, a wilderness. 

What frightens us more are the untamed and uncultivated deserts within our own hearts, the unexplored and dark areas inside of us. Like the ancients, we are frightened of what might lie in hiding there, how vulnerable we might be if we entered there, what wild beasts and demons might prey on us there, and whether a chaotic vortex might not swallow us up should we ever venture there. We also fear unexplored places, except our fear is not for our physical safety but for our sanity and our sanctity. 

Our Christian faith invites us to go into those areas and turn those dangerous regions into cultivated land, into safe gardens. After all, that is what Jesus did. He went into every dark place, from the singles’ bars of his time into death and hell itself, and took God’s light and grace there. But he wasn’t naive. He heeded the advice of the old fairy tales and didn’t venture there alone. He entered those underworlds with his hand safely inside his Father’s , not walking alone. 
 

Faith is meant to rid us of fear, including fear of the wild beasts and demons that lurk inside the deserts of our minds, hearts, and energies. We are meant to turn those wild, dark areas into safe gardens. But we should heed both our own instincts and the lessons of the old fairy tales: never venture into the dark woods naively and alone! Make sure you are armed with a sturdy creed and that you are walking hand-in-hand with your Father” (38-39).   

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

“Look, he is speaking openly and they say nothing to him. Could the authorities have realized that he is the Messiah?”.

(JOHN 7:26)

“I believe that God exists, not because I have never had doubts, or because I was raised in the faith by persons whose lives gave deep witness to its truth, or because perennially the vast majority of people on this planet believe in God.  

I believe that a personal God exists for more reasons than I can name: the goodness of saints, the hook in my own heart that has never let me go, the interface of faith with my own experience, the courage of religious martyrs throughout history, the stunning depth of Jesus’ teachings, the deep insights contained in other religions, the mystical experience of countless people, our sense of connection inside the communion of saints with loved ones who have died, the things we sometimes intuitively know beyond all logical reason, the constant recurrence of resurrection in our lives, the essential triumph of truth and goodness throughout history, the fact that hope never dies, the unyielding imperative we feel inside of ourselves to be reconciled with others before we die, the infinite depth of the human heart, and – yes – even the very ability of atheists and agnostics to intuit that somehow it all still makes sense. All of that points to the existence of a living, personal God. 

God isn’t found at the end of an empirical test, a mathematical equation, or a philosophical syllogism. God is found, explicitly or implicitly, in living a good, honest, gracious, selfless, moral life, and this can happen inside of religion or outside of it” (36).