Fr Ronald Rolheiser
A Benedictine monk shared this story with me. During his early years in religious life, he had been resentful because he was required to ask permission from his abbott if he wanted anything: “I thought it was silly, me, a grown man, an adult, having to ask a superior if I wanted a new shirt. I felt like a child.”
But as he aged his perspective changed: “I’m not sure of all the reasons, though I’m sure they have to do with grace, but one day I came to realise that there was some deep wisdom in having to ask permission for everything. We don’t own anything; nothing comes to us by right. Everything is gift. So ideally everything should be asked for and not taken as if it were ours by right. We need to be grateful to God and the universe for everything that’s been given us. Now, when I need something and need to ask permission from the abbott, I no longer feel like a child. Rather, I feel that I’m more properly in tune with the way things should be in a gift-oriented universe within which nobody has a right to ultimately claim anything.”
Principle
What this monk came to understand is a principle which undergirds all spirituality, all morality, and every one of the commandments, namely, that everything comes to us as gift, nothing can be claimed as if owed to us. We should be grateful to God for giving us what we have and careful not to claim, as by right, anything more.
The voice of Jesus is radically antithetical to these voices. Empathy is the penultimate human virtue, the antithesis of weakness”
But this goes against much in our instinctual selves and within our culture. Within both, there are strong voices which tell us that if you cannot take what you want then you’re a weak person, weak in a double way. First, you’re a weak personality, too timid to fully claim life. Second, you’ve been weakened by religious and moral scruples and are unable to properly seize the day and be fully alive. These voices tell us that we need to grow up because there is much in us that’s fearful and infantile, a child held captive by superstitious forces.
We need an important reminder.
Antithetical
The voice of Jesus is radically antithetical to these voices. Empathy is the penultimate human virtue, the antithesis of weakness. Jesus would look on so much that is assertive, aggressive, and accumulative within our society and, notwithstanding the admiration it receives, tell us clearly that this is not what it means to come to the banquet which lies at the heart of God’s kingdom. He would not share our admiration of the rich and famous who too often claim, as by right, their excessive wealth and status. When Jesus states that it is harder for a rich person to go to Heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, he might have qualified this by adding: “Unless, of course, the rich person, childlike, asks permission from the universe, from the community, and from God, for every new shirt!”
Nothing ultimately belongs to anybody and it’s best never to forget that”
When I was a religious novice, our novice master tried to impress upon us the meaning of religious poverty by making us write inside every book that was given to us the Latin words: ad usum. Literally: for your use. The idea was that, although this book was given to you for your personal use, you didn’t own it. It was only for your use; real ownership lay elsewhere. We were then told that this was true as well of everything else given to us for our personal use, from our toothbrushes to the shirts on our backs. They were not really ours, merely given to us for our use.
No matter how rich, strong, and grown-up we are, there’s something healthy in having to ask permission to buy a new shirt. It keeps us attuned to the fact that the universe belongs to everyone, to God ultimately. Everything comes to us as a gift and so we may never take anything for granted, but only as granted!