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).