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).