When I was a child there was a popular song whose chorus repeated this line: “Everyone is searching for Utopia.” And we all are. Every one of us longs for a world without limits, for a life where nothing goes wrong, for a place where there’s no tension or frustration. But it never happens. There’s…
Fr Ronald Rolheiser
What is the nature of God – Exuberance or the Cross?
It’s funny where you can learn a lesson and catch a glimpse of the divine. Recently, in a grocery store, I witnessed this incident: A young girl, probably around 16 years of age, along with two other girls her own age, came into the store. She picked up a grocery basket and began to walk…
Death on a ‘down bounce’ does not make for a true judgement of goodness
“We have all lost loved ones to suicide, alcoholism and other ways of dying that are far from ideal”, writes Fr Ron Rolheiser
God understands our humanity and fear
Unless you are already a full saint or a mystic, you will always live in some fear of death and the afterlife. That’s simply part of being human. But we can, and must, move beyond our fear of God. As a child, I lived with a lot of fear. I had a very active imagination…
Our fear of Hell is a creation all of our own
Hell is never a nasty surprise waiting for a basically happy person. Hell can only be the full-flowering of a pride and selfishness that have, through a long time, twisted a heart so thoroughly that it considers happiness as unhappiness and has an arrogant disdain for happy people. If you are essentially warm of heart…
Our failure to truly understand mental fragility can be fatal
As a young boy, I longed to be a professional athlete but I had to soon accept the unwelcome fact that I simply wasn’t gifted with an athlete’s body. Speed, strength, coordination, instinct, vision… I got by in ordinary life with what I had been given of these, but I wasn’t physically robust enough to…
Angels with sickles and God’s fury
There’s a haunting text in the Book of Revelations where poetic image, for all its beauty, can be dangerously misleading. The author there writes: “So the angel swung his sickle over the earth and cut the earth’s vintage. He threw it into the great winepress of God’s fury.” A fierce angel cleansing the world! God…
Our deepest insecurity
Why don’t we live happier lives? Why are we forever caught up in frustrations, tensions, angers and resentments? The reasons of course are too many to name. Each day, as Jesus himself tells us, brings problems enough for the day. We’re unhappy for reasons too many to count. And yet it can be helpful to…
We need better tools for handling our grandiosity
We live in a world wherein most everything over-stimulates our grandiosity, even as we are handed less and less tools to deal with that. Several years ago, Robert L. Moore wrote a very significant book, Facing the Dragon. The dragon that most threatens us, he believes, is the dragon of our own grandiosity, that sense…
Putting ourselves first goes against the Gospel
“I am a citizen, not of Athens or Greece, but of the world.” Socrates wrote those words more than 2,400 years ago. Today more than ever these are words which we would need to appropriate because, more and more, our world and we ourselves are sinking into some unhealthy forms of tribalism where we are…