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

“My dwelling shall be with them; I will be their God, and they will be my people”.

(EZEKIEL 37:27)

“Are we ultimately saints or sinners? What’s the deepest inside us, goodness or selfishness? Or, are we dualists with two innate principles inside us, one good and one evil, in a perpetual duel with each other?   

Certainly, at the level of experience, we feel a conflict. There’s a saint inside us who want to mirror the greatness of life, even as there is someone else inside us who want to walk a seedier path. I like the honesty of Henri Nouwen when he describes this conflict in his own life: ‘I want to be great saint,’ he once confessed, ‘but I don’t want to miss out on all the sensations that sinners experience.’ It’s because of this tension inside us that we find it so hard to make clear moral choices. We want the right things, but we also want many of the wrong things. Every choice is a renunciation, and so the struggle between saint and sinner inside us often manifests itself precisely in our inability to make hard choices. 

That’s part of the mystery of human freedom. The saint and sinner inside us are not separate entities. Rather the saint in us, the big soul, is not only our true self, it’s our only self. The sinner in us, the pretty soul, is not a separate person or moral force doing perpetual battle with the saint. It’s simply the wounded part of the saint, that part of the saint that’s been cursed and never properly blessed” (45).

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

“But the Lord is with me, like a mighty champion:
my persecutors will stumble, they will provide”.

(JEREMIAH 20:11)

“In order to deal with the frustrations and tensions that can build up in us, we need to be connected to something beyond ourselves and the situation we’re in, such as God, a person, a friendship, a hand, a creed, or a perspective”.   

Scripture offers wonderful images for this. In the Book of Daniel, three young men are thrown into a blazing furnace. They walked around in the midst of the flames, untouched by the fire because they were singing sacred songs. They sustained their love and faith amid bitter jealousy and hatred by staying connected to something outside of the fiery forces that were consuming everyone else. 

Like Jesus and everyone else who’s ever walked this planet, we all find ourselves forever inside families, communities, church, friendships, and work circles that are filled with tension of every kind. Our natural temptation is to simply give back in kind, jealousy for jealousy, gossip for gossip, anger for anger. But what our world really needs is for women and men to step forward and help carry and purify this tension, to help take it away by transforming it inside themselves.
 

That’s not east for us adults, so when we volunteer to step into the fire, it’s wise not to go in alone. Like Jesus, we need to stay connected to some hand, some friend, some creed, and our God who will help sustain us in love and faith, right inside the madness and fire” (40).

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

“Jesus said, ‘If you remain in my word, you will truly be my disciples,
and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free”.

(JOHN 8:31-32)

“Before they could enter the Promised Land, Scripture says the Israelites first had to wander in the desert for forty years – letting themselves be led by God, undergoing many trials. The desert came to be seen as the place that correctly shapes the heart, and the idea developed that one should prepare for major transitions by first spending time in the desert.   

Later, as the Scriptures developed, the concept of desert was made symbolic. It came to mean more a place in the heart than a place on a map and was understood to be mystical: before you are ready to fully and gratefully receive life, you have to first be readied by facing your own demons, which means going “into the desert”, namely entering that place where you are most frightened, lonely, and threatened.

The desert does this for you. It empties you. Hence it is not a place wherein you can decide how you want to grow and change, but it is a place that you undergo, expose yourself to, and have the courage to face. The desert purifies you, almost against you will, through God’s efforts. 

The season of Lent is meant to be a time in the desert to courageously face the chaos and the demons within us. The result is that we are purified, made ready, so that the intoxicating joy of Easter might then serve to bind us more closely by God” (40).

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

“Jesus said, ‘If you remain in my word, you will truly be my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free’.”

(JOHN 8:31-32)

“Before they could enter the Promised Land, Scripture says the Israelites first had to wander in the desert for forty years – letting themselves be led by God, undergoing many trials. The desert came to be seen as the place that correctly shapes the heart, and the idea developed that one should prepare for major transitions by first spending time in the desert.   

Later, as the Scriptures developed, the concept of desert was made symbolic. It came to mean more a place in the heart than a place on a map and was understood to be mystical: before you are ready to fully and gratefully received life, you have to first be readied by facing your own demons, which means going ‘into the desert’, namely entering that place where you are most frightened, lonely, and threatened.

The desert does this for you. It empties you. Hence it is not a place wherein you can decide how you want to grow and change, but is a place that you undergo, expose yourself to, and have the courage to face. The desert purifies you, almost against your will, through god’s efforts. 

The season of Lent is meant to be a time in the desert to courageously face the chaos and the demons within us. The result is that we are purified, made ready, so that the intoxicating joy of Easter might then serve to bind us more closely to God” (42).

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).