Ronald Rolheiser Quotes

True restfulness, though, is a form of awareness, a way of being in life. It is living ordinary life with a sense of ease, gratitude, appreciation, peace and prayer. We are restful when ordinary life is enough.

Becoming like Jesus is as much as about having a relaxed and joyful heart as it is about believing and doing the right thing, as much about proper energy as about proper truth.

Every choice is a renunciation. Indeed. Every choice is a thousand renunciations. To choose one thing is to turn one's back on many others.

There is within us a fundamental dis-ease, an unquenchable fire that renders us incapable, in this life, of ever coming to full peace. This desire lies at the center of our lives, in the marrow of our bones, and in the deep recesses of the soul. At the heart of all great literature, poetry, art, philosophy, psychology, and religion lies the naming and analyzing of this desire. Spirituality is, ultimately, about what we do with that desire. What we do with our longings, both in terms of handling the pain and the hope they bring us, that is our spirituality . . . Augustine says: ‘You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.’ Spirituality is about what we do with our unrest.

The quality of your faith will be judged by the quality of justice in the land; and the quality of justice in the land will be judged by how the weakest and most vulnerable groups in society (‘widows, orphans, and strangers’) fared while you were alive.

Spirituality is, ultimately, about what we do with that desire. What we do with our longings, both in terms of handling the pain and the hope they bring us, that is our spirituality.

The resurrection tells us it is never too late. Every so often we will be surprised. We must believe that the stone will be rolled back, and we must be ready to poke out our timid heads, take off the linen bindings of death, and walk free for a time, breathing resurrection air.

Spirituality is about what we do about the fire inside of us, about how we channel our eros.

Defined simply, narcissism means excessive self-preoccupation; pragmatism means excessive focus on work, achievement, and the practical concerns of life; and restlessness means an excessive greed for experience, an overeating, not in terms of food but in terms of trying to drink in too much of life...And constancy of all three together account for the fact that we are so habitually self-absorbed by heartaches, headaches, and greed for experience that we rarely find the time and space to be in touch with the deeper movements inside of and around us.

Evolution works through this principle: the survival of the fittest. One of the essential elements of Christian discipleship demands that we work for this principle: the survival of the weakest and the gentlest.

It is no easy task to walk this earth and find peace.

Charity is appeased when some rich person gives money to the poor while justice asks why one person can be that rich when so many are poor.

Near the end of our lives, many of us struggle to move beyond the death of our dreams, beyond how we have been wounded and cheated, and beyond all the resentments that come with aging.

Ultimately abortion takes place because there is something wrong within the culture, within the system, and not simply because this or that particular woman is seeking to end an unwanted pregnancy.

Anyone who deeply and honestly shares with us the struggles of her heart, her pains and fears, helps to make us more free. This is so because her story is really, in some way, our story. It is everyone’s story.

Write a book,” he told me, “that I can give to my adult children to explain why I still believe in God and why I still go to church—and that I can read on days when I am no longer sure why I believe or go to church.

In this life, all symphonies remain unfinished. Our deep longings are never really satisfied. What this means, among other things, is that we are not restful creatures who sometimes get restless, fulfilled people who sometimes are dissatisfied, serene people who sometimes experience disquiet. Rather, we are restless people who occasionally find rest, dissatisfied people who occasionally find fulfillment, and disquieted people who occasionally find serenity. We do not naturally default into rest, satisfaction, and quiet but into their opposite.

In Western culture, the joyous shouting of children often irritates us because it interferes with our depression. That is why we have invented a term, hyperactivity, so that we can, in good conscience, sedate the spontaneous joy in many of our children.

Spirituality is more about whether or not we can sleep at night than about whether or not we go to church. It is about being integrated or falling apart, about being within community or being lonely, about being in harmony with Mother Earth or being alienated from her.

Everyone has to have a spirituality and everyone does have one, either a life-giving one or a destructive one.

Gratitude is the root of all virtue

Social justice has to do with issues such as poverty, inequality, war, racism, sexism, abortion, and lack of concern for ecology because what lies at the root at each of these is not so much someone's private sin but rather a huge, blind system that is inherently unfair.

The Church is always God hung between two thieves. Thus, no one should be surprised or shocked at how badly the church has betrayed the gospel and how much it continues to do so today. It had never done very well. Conversely, however, nobody should deny the good the church has done either. It has carried grace, produced saints, morally challenged the planet, and made, however imperfectly, a house for God to dwell in on this earth. To be connected with the church is to be associated with scoundrels, warmongers, fakes, child molesters, murderers, adulterers, and hypocrites of every description. It also, at the same time, identifies you with the saints and the finest persons of heroic soul within every time, country, race, and gender. To be a member of the church is to carry the mantle of both the worst sin and the finest heroism of soul...because the church always looks exactly as it looked at the original crucifixion, God hung among thieves.

We do not wake up in this world calm and serene, having the luxury of choosing to act or not act. We wake up crying, on fire with desire, with madness. What we do with that madness is our spirituality.

You must try to pray so that, in your prayer, you open yourself in such a way that sometime—perhaps not today, but sometime—you are able to hear God say to you, “I love you!” These words, addressed to you by God, are the most important words you will ever hear because, before you hear them, nothing is ever completely right with you, but after you hear them, something will be right in your life at a very deep level.

Karl Rahner, a twentieth-century admirer of Augustine, once said that “in the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable, we come to realize that, in this life, all symphonies must remain unfinished.

Ronald Rolheiser, my undisputed favorite Catholic writer of all time, with hurricane force: Today, a number of historical circumstances are blindly flowing together and accidentally conspiring to produce a climate within which it is difficult not just to think about God or to pray, but simply to have any interior depth whatsoever…. We, for every kind of reason, good and bad, are distracting ourselves into spiritual oblivion. It is not that we have anything against God, depth, and spirit, we would like these, it is just that we are habitually too preoccupied to have any of these show up on our radar screens. We are more busy than bad, more distracted than nonspiritual, and more interested in the movie theater, the sports stadium, and the shopping mall and the fantasy life they produce in us than we are in church. Pathological busyness, distraction, and restlessness are major blocks today within our spiritual lives.

Go to your cell, and your cell will teach you everything you need to know: Stay inside your vocation, inside your commitments, inside your legitimate conscriptive duties, inside your church, inside your family, and they will teach you where life is found and what love means. Be faithful to your commitments, and what you are ultimately looking for will be found there.

If you are home alone with small children whose needs give you little uninterrupted time, then you don’t need an hour of private prayer daily. Raising small children, if it is done with love and generosity, will do for you exactly what private prayer does.

As we age we need to forgive—forgive those who hurt us, forgive ourselves for our own mistakes, forgive life for having been unfair, and then forgive God for seemingly not having protected us—all of this so that we do not die bitter and angry, which is perhaps the greatest religious imperative of all.

Certain vocations, e.g., raising children, offer a perfect setting for living a contemplative life. They provide a desert for reflection, a real monastery. The mother who stays home with small children experiences a very real withdrawal from the world. Her existence is certainly monastic. Her tasks and preoccupations remove her from the centres of social life and from the centres of important power. She feels removed. Moreover, her constant contact with young children, the mildest of the mild, gives her a privileged opportunity to be in harmony with the mild and learn empathy and unselfishness. Perhaps more so even than the monk or the minister of the Gospel, she is forced, almost against her will, to mature. For years, while she is raising small children, her time is not her own, her own needs have to be put into second place, and every time she turns around some hand is reaching out demanding something.

One of our deepest struggles in life is dealing with the unconscious anxiety inside of us that pressures us to try to give ourselves significance and immortality. There is always the inchoate gnawing: do something to guarantee that something of your life will last. It is this propensity that tempts us to try to find meaning and significance through success and accumulation. But in the end it does not work, irrespective of how great our successes have been.

Success has little to teach us during the second half of life.5 It continues to feel good, but now it is often more an obstacle to maturity than a positive stimulus toward it.

There comes a point in our lives when meaning must be predicated on something beyond the feeling we get from success and achievement.

Above all, such an understanding of loneliness should help liberate us. It should teach us that loneliness is both a good and a natural force in our lives.

we spend the last half of our lives struggling with forgiveness and anger. That anger is often, however unconsciously, focused on God. In the end, our real struggle is with God.

Jesus does not just ask us to give in charity to the poor, he also asks us to work at correcting all the social, political, and economic structures that disadvantage the poor and help keep them poor.28

All of us experience, to a greater or lesser extent, a loneliness that results from not having enough anchors, enough absolutes, and enough permanent roots to make us feel secure and stable in a world characterized by transience.

Amusing ourselves to death,” as the social critic Neil Postman called it, has never been more convenient.[3] You can disappear into the black hole of Netflix, become a workaholic in pursuit of riches or fame, or simply “eat, drink, and be merry” in the adult playground of the modern city. Western culture is arguably built around the denial of death through the coping mechanism of distraction. As Ronald Rolheiser put it, “We are distracting ourselves into spiritual oblivion.”[4]

Nikos Kazantzakis shares a conversation he once had with an old monk named Father Makários. Sitting with the saintly old man, Kazantzakis asked him: “Do you still wrestle with the devil, Father Makários?” The old monk reflected for a while and then replied: “Not any longer, my child. I have grown old now, and he has grown old with me. He doesn’t have the strength.… I wrestle with God.” “With God!” exclaimed the astonished young writer. “And you hope to win?” “I hope to lose, my child,” replied the old ascetic.

Success has little to teach us during the second half of life.5 It continues to feel good, but now it is often more an obstacle to maturity than a positive stimulus toward it. Why? How can it be that something that once was healthy for us now is unhealthy? Because the feeling of success that earlier helped positively to ground our sense of self-worth becomes, at a later stage of life, when meaning needs to be grounded in something less ephemeral, more like a narcotic keeping us from health than a medicine aiding our health.

Present injustices exist not so much because simple individuals are acting in bad faith or lacking in charity, but because huge, impersonal systems (that seem beyond the control of the individuals acting within them) disprivilege some even as they unduly privilege others.

Being lonely does not mean that we are abnormal, love-starved, oversexed, or alienated. Perhaps all it means is that we are incurably human and sensitive to the fact that God made us for an ecstatic togetherness in a body with divine love and with all other persons of sincere will.

scripture scholars point out that in the Christian scriptures, one out of every ten lines deals directly with the physically poor and the challenge to respond to them. In the Gospel of Luke, that becomes every sixth line, and in the Epistle of James that challenge is there, in one form or another, in every fifth line.

the prodigal son, illustrating the first half of life, is very much caught up in the fiery energies of youth and is, metaphorically, struggling with the devil; the older brother, illustrating the second half of life, struggling instead with resentment, anger, and jealousy, is, metaphorically and in reality, wrestling with God.

The theologian and storyteller John Shea once suggested that the kingdom of heaven is open to all who are willing to sit down with all. That’s a one-line caption for discipleship. In essence, the single condition for going to heaven is to have the kind of heart and the kind of openness that makes it possible for us to sit down with absolutely anyone and to share life and a table with him or her. If

But within ourselves we can experience a real difference between restlessness and solitude. What is that difference? It is the difference between living in freedom rather than compulsion; restfulness rather than restlessness; patience rather than impatience; inwardness rather than frenzied outwardness; altruism rather than greediness; authentic friendship rather than possessive clinging; and empathy rather than apathy.3

At one point, he asked the old monk: “Do you still wrestle with the devil, Father Makarios?” The old priest sighed and replied: “Not any longer, my child. I have grown old now, and he has grown old with me. He doesn’t have the strength.… I wrestle with God.” “With God!” Kazantzakis exclaimed in astonishment. “And you hope to win?” “I hope to lose, my child,” the old man replied. “My bones remain with me still, and they continue to resist.

If a child or a brother or a sister or a loved one of yours strays from the church in terms of faith practice and morality, as long as you continue to love that person, and hold him or her in union and forgiveness, he or she is touching the hem of the garment, is held to the Body of Christ, and is forgiven by God, irrespective of his or her official external relationship to the church and Christian morality. Your touch is Christ’s touch. When you love someone, unless that someone actively rejects your love and forgiveness, she or he is sustained in salvation. And this is true even beyond death. If someone close to you dies in a state which, externally at least, has her or him at odds ecclesially and morally with the visible church, your love and forgiveness will continue to bind that person to the Body of Christ and continue to forgive that individual, even after death. One

Alienation results because human beings speak the same language only when they appear to each other as they really are, vulnerable, without impressively constructed towers. Vulnerability is that space within which human beings can truly meet each other and speak the same language. Sin and pride serve to destroy this space and drive us away from each other, leaving us to babble in our own language as we scatter to our respective corners of the earth.

Here from Ronald Rolheiser, my undisputed favorite Catholic writer of all time, with hurricane force: Today, a number of historical circumstances are blindly flowing together and accidentally conspiring to produce a climate within which it is difficult not just to think about God or to pray, but simply to have any interior depth whatsoever…. We, for every kind of reason, good and bad, are distracting ourselves into spiritual oblivion. It is not that we have anything against God, depth, and spirit, we would like these, it is just that we are habitually too preoccupied to have any of these show up on our radar screens. We are more busy than bad, more distracted than nonspiritual, and more interested in the movie theater, the sports stadium, and the shopping mall and the fantasy life they produce in us than we are in church. Pathological busyness, distraction, and restlessness are major blocks today within our spiritual lives.12

No relationship, however deep and intimate, can ever fully take our loneliness from us. And as long as we go through life expecting this, we are doomed to constant disappointment. We also do constant violence to our friendships and love relationships because we will demand from our friends something that they cannot give us, namely, total fulfillment. For example, a goodly number of persons get married precisely because of loneliness. They see their marriage as a panacea for loneliness. After marriage, they discover that they are still lonely, sometimes as lonely as before. Immediately, there is the temptation to think that there is something seriously amiss in the marriage, to foist blame on the marriage partner or on the self, to become disenchanted and seek out new relationships, hoping of course to someday discover the rainbow of total fulfillment.

The canyons of our minds and hearts are so deep and so full of mystery that we try at all costs to avoid entering them deeply. We avoid journeying inward because we are too frightened: frightened because we must make that journey alone; frightened because we know it will involve solitude and perseverance; and frightened because we are entering the unknown. Aloneness, suffering, perseverance, the unknown: All these frighten us. Our own depths frighten us! And so we stall, distract ourselves, drug the pain, party and travel, stay busy, try this and that, cling to people and moments, junk up the surface of our lives, and find any and every excuse to avoid being alone and having to face ourselves. We are too frightened to travel inward. But we pay a price for that, a high one: superficiality and shallowness. So long as we avoid the painful journey inward, to the depth of our caverns, we live at the surface.

As John Shea so aptly put it: "God is not a law to be obeyed but a presence to be seized and acted on." In an analogy that comes from Jesus - "Take the fig tree as a parable; as soon as its twigs grow supple and its leaves come out, you know that summer is near" - letting God be God means undergoing the presence of God as a tree undergoes the presence of summer. The metaphor is simple and perfectly apt: a tree is brought to bloom by summer. It does not understand summer, conceptualize summer, nor is it able to project what summer will do to it; it simply acts under its presence. To let God be God is to live in openness to the mystery of God without limiting the nature or effect of his presence by any expectations or by withdrawal. The task of contemplation is not to specify what conditions must be met before we believe in God's existence, power, or goodness. Rather the task of contemplation is to let God be God, and like the fig tree, act under his presence. The proper approach to God is not to try to analyze the infinite, but to celebrate it.

However, in making the assertion that a certain service—in this case, raising children—can in fact be prayer, I am bolstered by the testimony of contemplatives themselves. Carlo Carretto, one of the twentieth century’s best spiritual writers, spent many years in the Sahara Desert by himself praying. Yet he once confessed that he felt that his mother, who spent nearly thirty years raising children, was much more contemplative than he was, and less selfish. If that is true, and Carretto suggests that it is, the conclusion we should draw is not that there was anything wrong with his long hours of solitude in the desert, but that there was something very right about the years his mother lived an interrupted life amid the noise and demands of small children. ... For years, while she is raising small children, her time is not her own, her own needs have to be put into second place, and every time she turns around some hand is reaching out demanding something. Years of this will mature most anyone. It is because of this that she does not need, during this time, to pray for an hour a day. And it is precisely because of this that the rest of us, who do not have constant contact with small children, need to pray privately daily.

Spirituality is more about whether or not we can sleep at night than about whether or not we go to church. It is about being integrated or falling apart, about being within community or being lonely, about being in harmony with Mother Earth or being alienated from her. Irrespective of whether or not we let ourselves be consciously shaped by any explicit religious idea, we act in ways that leave us either healthy or unhealthy, loving or bitter. What shapes our actions is our spirituality. And what shapes our actions is basically what shapes our desire. Desire makes us act and when we act what we do will either lead to a greater integration or disintegration within our personalities, minds, and bodies—and to the strengthening or deterioration of our relationship to God, others, and the cosmic world. The habits and disciplines5 we use to shape our desire form the basis for a spirituality, regardless of whether these have an explicit religious dimension to them or even whether they are consciously expressed at all. Spirituality concerns what we do with desire. It takes its root in the eros inside of us and it is all about how we shape and discipline that eros. John of the Cross, the great Spanish mystic, begins his famous treatment of the soul’s journey with the words: “One dark night, fired by love’s urgent longings.”6 For him, it is urgent longings, eros, that are the starting point of the spiritual life and, in his view, spirituality, essentially defined, is how we handle that eros.

Long before that, we are shamed at a deeper level. We are shamed in our enthusiasm. We are made to feel guilty, naïve, and humiliated about our very pulse for life and about our very trust of each other. Long before we are ever told that sex is bad, or that our body isn’t quite right, or that we have failed in our duty somewhere, we are told we are bad because we are so trusting and enthusiastic.

Desire is the straw that stirs the drink.

Without church, we have more private fantasy than real faith.

Henri Nouwen,

Spirituality is about what we do with the fire inside of us, about how we channel our eros. And how we do channel it, the disciplines and habits we choose to live by, will either lead to a greater integration or disintegration within our bodies, minds, and souls, and to a greater integration or disintegration in the way we are related to God, others, and the cosmic world.

The soul is not a something that has a capacity for God. It is a capacity for God.

In both cases, I am still Mary Magdala trying to cling to an old body even as she is looking at a new reality.

How do you honor and channel blind desire in a child? By accepting that energy for what it is, the deep principle of life made manifest. Accordingly, we should never shame it: “You are a pig!” “You are selfish!” The child should never be made to feel dirty and guilty for having this energy. Instead the child should be initiated into its fuller meaning by connecting this desire to the heart of life itself within the family.

this lack of a healthy solicitude for wholeness compromises maturity and Christian discipleship.

Good spiritual writing, among other things, should help introduce us to ourselves.

Spiritual writers describe the fault in this way: pride in the mature person takes the form of refusing to be small before God and refusing to recognize properly our interconnection with others.

Wonder and awe do us good precisely because they stun and mute our spontaneous energies.

To be pure of heart is to relate to others and the world in a way that respects and honors the full dignity, value, and destiny of every person and every being on the planet. To be pure of heart is to see others as God sees them and to love them with their good, not our own, in mind. To be pure of heart is to see others in a way that fully respects their sexuality.

But as the mystics say, this is not a crisis of faith but a crisis of the imagination, a particular dark night of the soul within which we have to sort through a death of what is precious to us religiously so as to receive God, Christ, and church into our lives in a new and deeper way.

Prayer is meant to respect the natural rhythms of our energy. Praying is like eating, and, as we know from experience, you do not always want a banquet.

Love, understood properly, is never a reward for being good. Goodness, rather, is always a consequence of having been loved. We are not loved because we are good, but hopefully we become good as we experience love.

What is “God’s compulsion”? It is an intuitive sense, rooted in something deeper than thought or feeling, of what we need to do to find and sustain authentic life within ourselves

The need to hide some action from others is a strong moral nudging. If we are walking in grace, we do not need any other commandment: we can do anything as long as we do not have to lie about it.

We do not, at the most basic of all levels, need explicit confession to a priest to have our sins forgiven—that is an unequivocal truth taught in scripture, by the church fathers, in Christian theology of every kind, in dogmatic tradition (even in the Council of Trent and the theology and catechisms that ensued from it), in church tradition, and especially in the lived practice of the faith. 12 The essential sacrament of reconciliation has always been sincerity and contrition as one approaches Eucharist and touches the Christian community. But that does not say that confession is unnecessary and unimportant.

Looking at this, we see that Jesus was prescribing four things as an essential praxis for a healthy spiritual life: a) Private prayer and private morality; b) social justice; c) mellowness of heart and spirit; and d) community as a constitutive element of true worship.

As Nikos Kazantzakis puts it: “Wherever you find husband and wife, that’s where you find God; wherever children and petty cares and cooking and arguments and reconciliation are, that is where God is too.” 19 The God of the incarnation is more domestic than monastic.

First, they would always try to understand that energy as coming from God and as ultimately directed back toward God. Hence, they surrounded religious and sexual energy, desire, with very high symbols. Where we use biological and psychological symbols, they used theological ones; for example, where we look at desire and speak of being horny or being obsessed, they spoke of “eternal longings” and “hunger for the bread of life.” Desire was always understood against an infinite horizon.

And many good, sincere persons struggle today with their faith and with their churches. Lots of things contribute to this: the pluralism of an age which is rich in everything, except clarity; the individualism of a culture which makes family and community life difficult at every level; an anti-church sentiment within both popular culture and the intellectual world; an ever-growing antagonism between those who see religion in terms of private prayer and piety and those who see it as the quest for justice; and a seeming tiredness right within the Christian churches themselves. It is not an easy time to be a Christian, especially if you are also trying to pass your faith on to your own children.

Hope isn’t a wish or a mood; it is a perspective on life that needs to be grounded on a sufficient reality. What is that sufficient reality?

The Eucharist is God’s banquet table, and in the end, it will manifest the universal salvific will of God who plays no favorites but embraces everyone without discrimination.

Without the Eucharist, God becomes a monologue.

Three Kinds of Souls, Three Prayers 1) I am a bow in your hands, Lord, draw me, lest I rot. 2) Do not overdraw me, Lord, I shall break. 3) Overdraw me, Lord, and who cares if I break! —NIKOS KAZANTZAKIS

What we choose to fight is so tiny! What fights with us is so great! If only we would let ourselves be dominated as things do by some immense storm, we would become strong too, and not need names. —RAINER MARIA RILKE, “THE MAN WATCHING

When you carry someone’s cross, don’t send them the bill!

To be forced to work, to be tied down with duties, to have to get up early, to have little time to call your own, to be burdened with the responsibility of children and the demands of debts and mortgages, to go to bed exhausted after a working day is to be in touch with our humanity.

So much of our unhappiness comes from comparing our lives, our friendships, our loves, our commitments, our duties, our bodies and our sexuality to some idealized and non-Christian vision of things which falsely assures us that there is a heaven on earth. When that happens, and it does, our tensions begin to drive us mad, in this case to a cancerous restlessness.

Like a mother weaning a child, God dries up the feeling of satisfaction and takes away the pleasure in the things of God as well as in things of earth. We become wearied of both God and creature and are left with the painful feeling that we are not serving God or our neighbor properly. We no longer feel the enjoyment, good feelings, and security we used to feel. John says that if we endure and persevere in prayer to God and service to others despite the absence of all satisfaction, then we will begin to act with a new motivation - Christ's. The connection between satisfaction and our motivation to act will have been severed. We will then act and choose not because of the pleasure we bring ourselves but because of something higher, namely, a desire to be of help to everything and everybody in their struggle towards consummation and union in love, beauty, truth, and goodness.

Inevitably the fear of anonymity and mortality overwhelms us. When we feel this - and outside of a deep faith it can be the dominant feeling during the second half of our lives - we begin to believe that we are meaningful only when we accomplish something that sets us apart and ensures that we will be remembered. For most of us, the dominant obsession of adult life is trying to guarantee our own preciousness, lovableness, meaning, immortality, and sanctity. We do not believe we can have these independent of our own accomplishments. And so we fabricate the lie, we try to make a mark for ourselves.

We can understand this more clearly if we look at where holy fear breaks down in our interpersonal relations. When we examine our deepest resentments, we invariably find that at their roots lies the fact that someone has not respected us. Usually the violation is not blatant. Almost always it is subtle: someone has taken us for granted, has assumed that he understands us and our motives, has boxed us in with her own preconceived notions of who we are; has not respected our uniqueness, mystery, and complexity; or has taken as owed to them what we can only offer as gift. This is a picture of the illusion of familiarity, and it is what is expressed in the axiom "familiarity breeds contempt". By extension, to live in fear of God means that we live before God and the rest of reality in such a way that there is never contempt within us. We take nothing for granted, everything as a gift. We have respect. We are always poised for surprise before the mystery of God, others, and ourselves. All boredom and contempt is an infallible sign that we have fallen out of a healthy fear of God.

In our normal consciousness, whenever we approach God, even in formal prayer and in our churches, it is with very measured expectations. The God who is met in the measured expectations of our own desires and imagination dies in his own impotence and irrelevance.

Paley tells us to look at the design in our world and especially at the design in ourselves. The human body, with its brain and central nervous system, is such an incredible entity of intelligence and deliberate design that one cannot look at it and say, as one might in the case of a stone, that it does not need anything beyond itself to be here. The intelligent purposeful design of the human body, heart, and mind demand a different answer, require something beyond themselves to explain their existence. That something has to be a reality that itself is not contingent on anything else. It must be the ground of all intelligence, purpose, and existence. In a word, it must be God.

To be a saint is never to take anything as owed, but to receive everything as gift.

But gratitude, like all virtues, is the result of discipline. An earlier generation expressed it this way: Count your blessings. To become grateful, one must practice the asceticism of joy. The greatest compliment one can offer the giver of a gift is to thoroughly delight in his gift. We owe it to our creator to delight in the gift of life and creation.

To have a sense of God's presence in everyday life, we don't need the kind of miracles that drastically change ordinary reality and prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that there is a supernatural world beyond our natural world (a miracle in the common sense understanding). No. We need a deeper sense that God is already present and acting in the seemingly ordinary events of our lives.

The road back to a lively faith is not about answers, but about living in a certain way - contemplatively.

The God of ordinary life will be found in the ordinary.

Atheism is not, as we so popularly imagine, the result of the human race coming of age and having the courage to rid ourselves of fairy tales and superstitions. Atheism, for the most part, is rooted in the opposite. It questions too little, and it examines too narrowly. Jesus tells us that it is children who will see God.

This parable illustrates what Jesus meant when he said that love demands "obedience unto death." It demands that we let go of what we cling to instinctually so as to be able to receive that very thing in its reality and fullness. To be obedient to love, to give oneself over to it, means always hearing the call to self-sacrifice, to self-abandonment.

The road beyond the practical atheism of our everyday consciousness lies in self-abandonment. If John of the Cross were your spiritual director and you went to him with the complaint that God did not seem very alive or real to you, he would prescribe this exercise: "As unpopular as this advice might be in a world that tells you to do your own thing, bend your will according to the beatitudes of Jesus. Stand before your loved ones and before your God and practice saying what Jesus said to his Father in the garden: 'Not my will, but yours, be done.' Then come back in a few years and tell me whether God still seems absent from your life.