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 poet Rumi suggests that we live with a deep secret that sometimes we know, then not, and then know again. That’s a good description of faith. Faith isn’t something you nail down and possess once and for all. It goes this way: sometimes you walk on water; sometimes you sink like a stone.  

The Gospels testify to this in the story of Peter walking on the water: Jesus asks Peter to step out of a boat and walk across the water to him. At first it works. Peter, unthinking, walks on the water. Then, becoming more conscious of what he’s doing, he sinks like a rock. We also see this in the massive fluctuations in belief that Jesus’ disciples experience during the forty days after the resurrection. Jesus would appear to them, they would trust he was alive, then he would disappear again, and they would lose their trust and go back to the lives they’d led before they met him. The post-resurrection narratives illustrate the dynamics of faith pretty clearly: You believe it. Then you distrust. Then you believe it again. At least, so it seems on the surface. 

To be real, faith need not be explicitly religious, but it can express itself simply in faithfulness, loyalty, and trust. We need to trust the unknown, knowing that we will be OK, no matter that on a given day we might feel like we are walking on water or sinking like a stone. Faith runs deeper than our feelings” (35).

Daybreaks: Daily Reflections for Lent & Easter

by Ron Rolheiser, OMI

“Form a plan, it shall be thwarted;
make a resolve, it shall not be carried out,
for “with us is God!”.

(ISAIAH 8:10)

“In a masterful book on grace, author Piet Fransen suggests that we can test how well we understand grace by gauging our reaction to this story:

Imagine a man who, during his whole life, is entirely careless about God and morality. He’s selfish, ignores the commandments, ignores all things religious, and is basically consumed with pursuing his own pleasure – wine, sex, and song. Then, just hours before his death, he repents of his irresponsibility, makes a sincere confession, receives the sacraments of the Church, and dies inside that conversion. 

What’s our immediate reaction to that story? Isn’t it wonderful that he received the grace of conversion before he died? Or, more likely: the lucky beggar, he got away with it! He got to have all that pleasure and still gets to go to heaven!   

If we felt the latter emotion, even for a moment, we have never deeply understood the concept of grace. Rather, like the older brother in the Prodigal Son, we are sill seeing life away from God’s house as fuller than life inside God’s house, we’re still doing the right things mostly out of bitter duty, and we’re secretly envying the amoral. But if this is true, we must be gentle with ourselves. This is an occupational hazard for good, faithful people.
 

We need to be honest in admitting that, despite our real goodness and fidelity, such a reaction indicates that we’re still far from being full saints” (34).