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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Gratitude is the root of all virtue

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

To be a saint is to be motivated by gratitude, nothing more and nothing less. Gratitude is the root of all virtue. It lies at the base of love and charity. Scripture always and everywhere makes this point.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

The struggle to purify consciousness through contemplation so as to better experience God is the struggle for a fuller awareness. In Western culture today, most of us have an atrophied contemplative faculty, a muddied self-awareness. God is present to us, but we are not present to God. We lack the ability to be contemplative, and because of this we lack a vital experience of God. The eclipse of God in ordinary awareness is a fault in contemplation.

Christ is telling us: "Do not try to capture God. Live in wonder. Let your agnosticism be very very wide. Do not try to understand the infinite within the confines of finite experience." Invariably, however, that is precisely what we try to do by approaching God through the categories of human understanding rather than through the categories of faith, making God meet human expectations, metaphysical, psychological, or moral. We also do it by attempting to be our own justification rather than letting God give us righteousness. The purity of heart needed for contemplation breaks down and God eventually dies in our experience.

The limits of human imagination and its frustrations vis-à-vis imagining the existence of God are not the same as the existence or non-existence of God. The fact that we cannot imagine God speaks more about the finitude of the mind than it does about the likelihood or unlikelihood of the existence of an infinite being.

Frustrations in attempting to conceive of and feel God's relationship to creation tend to lead, as they did in Gordon Sinclair's case, to the unfounded conclusion that, because we cannot think, picture, or understand how it is possible, then God does not exist. The atheism that arises from our incapacity to conceive of God is an idolatry that results from not properly respecting God's holiness. A God that has been slimmed down to fit the limits of a finite heart and mind is unable to measure up intellectually because (and this is a strange paradox) an intellectually conceivable God is, ultimately, inconceivable intellectually. Where does that leave us? If God cannot be conceived of, how can we know God? Are we doomed to either agnosticism or blind faith based solely on authority and revelation? For the Protestant contemplative tradition there is another option: awe and wonder! God cannot be thought, but God can be met. He can be experienced, touched, and encountered. In such a posture to God, we live in contemplation.

The problem of atheism and unbelief is not that the existence of God is denied, but that God is absent from the ordinary consciousness and lives of believers, not alive enough or important enough. It is in this way that "we have killed him.

The effect of excessive narcissism on contemplation is simple. When we stand before reality preoccupied with ourselves we will see precious little of what is actually there to be seen. Moreover, what little we do see will be distorted and shaped by self-interest.

When we are excessively preoccupied with ourselves, we tend to see nothing beyond our own heartaches and problems and our sense of reality shrinks. It is not surprising that we have trouble believing in the reality of God when we have trouble perceiving any reality at all beyond ourselves.

Technology is developing at a rate that staggers our capacity to cope with the novelties it produces and, at the same time, we cannot find ways to live together in our marriages, communities, countries, and the world as a whole. The priorities that a pragmatic culture sets in education are very useful in creating the good life but less useful in providing the values we need to share it equitably and amiably with each other.

We feel better about ourselves when we are doing useful things. We have little time for what is useless and, for that, we are contemplatively the poorer.

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.

Today, nothing seems enough for us. The simple and primal joys of living, those Merton describes, are lost as we grow ever more restless, driven, compulsive, and hyper. There is less ease in our lives, and more fever; less peacefulness, and more obsessive activity; less enjoyment, and more excess. These are the signs of unbridled restlessness. Have we not always been restless? Are we not pilgrims on earth, built with hearts made for the infinite, yet caught up in very finite and limited lives? Should we be surprised that we are constantly tormented by the insufficiency of everything attainable? To be hopelessly restless proves little more than that we are alive, emotionally healthy, and normal. Has not God built us so that we are restless until we rest in God?

Premature experience, he asserts, is bad precisely because it is premature. The period of nascent yearning is meant for sublimation - in the sense of making sublime, of orientating youthful inclinations and longings towards great love, great art, great achievement. Premature experience is like the false ecstasy of drugs in that "it artificially induces the exaltation naturally attached to the completion of the greatest endeavors - victory in a just war, consummated love, artistic creation, religious devotion, and the discovery of truth." It has the effect of draining great enthusiasm and great expectations that can only be built up through sublimation, tension, and waiting.

For the contemplative, God's ways are not our ways, his thoughts are not our thoughts. There are two sets of rules for reality, one for the infinite (God) and another for the finite (us). It is understood that the human mind cannot answer questions about things like evil, predestination, or injustice because it is finite and operates with a finite system of symbols. It is by definition limited. Infinite things cannot be grasped by finite minds.

In this posture of unbridled restlessness, we stand before life too greedy, too full of expectations that cannot be realized, and unable to accept that, here, in this life, all symphonies remain unfinished. We are unable to rest or be satisfied because we are convinced that all lack, all tension, and all unfulfilled yearning is tragic... When we are obsessed in this way it is hard to be contemplative. We are too focused on our own heartaches to be open and receptive.

This parable is Jesus's own metaphor for non-contemplative lack of awareness. When life is dominated by the headaches, pressures, and concerns for making a living, running a household, meeting schedules, and measuring up to the demands of an achievement-oriented culture, there is a constant press to manipulate rather than just wonder at the world. When manipulation of reality replaces wonder, there is by definition a reduced awareness. The preoccupation with measuring land and testing oxen reduces the chances of being aware that there is a divinely initiated banquet going on at the heart of ordinary life.

Narcissism also reduces awareness by falsely enhancing our perception of ourselves as individuals to the point that we incorrectly perceive ourselves as independent when in reality we are radically and organically interdependent with others and the world. The non-contemplative person experiences little sense of the whole, of our radical connectedness (as elucidated in Bell's theorem), of reality as being somehow all of a piece, of the Body of Christ.

This is true not because God does not exist to be experienced, but because we in Western culture have a very reduced experience of God. God is present to us, but we are no longer present to God because we are no longer contemplative. Our contemplative faculty - like a limb that has been immobilized in a cast and is now healed and healthy but unable to function without rehabilitation - needs exercise and therapy. Or, like a weightlifter who has overdeveloped certain muscles to the detriment of others and has distorted his natural body, we have overfocused on one part of our consciousness and neglected another to the point where our natural consciousness is distorted. We are living the unexamined life, and its price is a practical atheism. Fortunately, it can be overcome by contemplative awareness. God will be seen in ordinary experience when ordinary experience is fully open to him.

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.

According to the great mystics, our awareness is both reduced and clouded by self-concern, excessive preoccupation with our own agendas, and with restless distractions, and we lack the purity of heart necessary to experience any God that is not of our own creation. In the mystical tradition, the road beyond practical atheism and idolatry lies in the purification of our awareness - that is, in the purging from our minds and hearts of narcissism, pragmatism, and distraction.

The active aspect begins when a person makes the choice to guide his life on the basis of God's word alone like Abraham, who "set out without knowing where he was going." If we try to understand through faith, love through charity, and relate through hope, God does the rest.

Isaiah's reminder that "God's ways are not our ways," God's reminder to Job that anyone who was not around when the foundations of the universe were being laid should be more filled with wonder and less with conclusions, and Paul's reminder that we can approach God only through faith and that we depend for life upon his justification rather than upon our own contain the seeds of Protestantism contemplation. Living those truths is contemplation.

Our planet is one of many billions of planets. During each second of time on earth thousands of people are being born, thousands are being conceived, thousands of others are dying, are sinning, are doing virtuous acts, are suffering, celebrating, hoping, praying, despairing, and all of this has been happening for hundreds of thousands of years. Can we really believe that a God exists who is Lord over all of this so that "no sparrow falls from the sky or no hair from a human head" without that Lord knowing and caring deeply? The answer is no! When one considers evil and the sheer immensity of phenomena, one cannot conceive of a God who could truly be lord and master of it all. Our minds and imaginations cannot stretch far enough. We cannot picture it. But that is precisely the point: the divine reality cannot be grasped through a finite imagination.

Although the stories in Jesus's parables are about people, the real plot is God. They are revelatory, revealing the heart of God. They teach us that the divine mystery cannot be pinned down or figured out by human projections and expectations. It is dangerous to suppose that God must feel and think as we do! The parables try to move us beyond that temptation. They show us a God whose heart is full of surprises and who has perspectives far beyond ours. This is depicted with unequivocal clarity in the parable of the prodigal son - none of Christ's listeners could have anticipated the Father's reaction, in the parable of the vineyard workers - who would have surmised that the last workers would receive the same pay as the first ones?, and in the parable of the good Samaritan - who would have foretold that the priest would pass by and the enemy, the Samaritan, would stop?

Faith is not the same thing as being able to imagine God's existence or even of being able to feel God on an emotional level. The mind is mostly unequal to the task to the task of imagining God's existence and the heart is often just as inept at giving us any feeling of it. But God doesn't cease to exist for that reason, nor is faith dead just because the imagination and the heart have run dry. God exists, independent of our perceptions.

These images, of faith as a hangover, of religion as struggling with God's shadow, of an absent God whose calling card we still possess, describe in a general way our everyday struggle with faith and agnosticism. We still have some experience of God, though rarely is it a vital one in which we actually drink, first-hand, from living waters. Insofar as God does enter our everyday experience, most often He is not experienced as a living person to whom we actually talk, from who we seek ultimate consolation and comfort, and to whom we relate person to person, friend to friend, lover to lover, child to parent.

God, then, is more of a moral and intellectual principle than a person, and our commitment to this principle runs the gamut from fiery passion, by which people are willing to die for a cause, to a vague nostalgia, in which God and religion are given the same kind of status as the royal family in England - namely, the symbolic anchor of a certain way of life, but hardly important to its day-to-day functioning. It is not that this is bad, it is just that there is little evidence in it that anyone is actually all that interested in God. We are interested in virtue, justice, a proper way of life, and perhaps even in building communities for worship, support, and justice. But, in the end, moral philosophies, human instinct, and a not-so-disguised self-interest are more important in motivating these activities than are love and gratitude stemming from a persona relationship with a living God. God is not only often absent in our marketplaces, he is frequently absent from our religious activities and religious fervor as well.

God is not found at the conclusion of a syllogism, nor in a miraculous intervention in ordinary life, but in living a certain way of life. It involves every dimension of our personalities (moral, spiritual, psychological, emotional, physical, sexual, aesthetic) and every dimension of our lives (private and social). At the end of a long journey towards optimal openness, a journey that ultimately demands conversion in every dimension of our personality, God will spontaneously be part and parcel of our ordinary awareness.

In affirming that faith is not understanding, this tradition does not affirm that faith goes against understanding or that faith is based upon blind trust. Faith takes us beyond understanding, but does not denigrate it any more than Einstein's physics denigrates grade-school arithmetic, or reality denigrates a photograph, or the light of dawn denigrates a candle burning in the night. It just goes infinitely beyond it. What was grasped in the mind and heart before faith's light eclipsed it was real and remains so. The trust in which we now live takes its root in there. Grade-school arithmetic is still valid after Einstein, a photograph is still real even when you actually see the person in it, and a candle still gives off light even when a bright sun eclipses it; they remain as the foundation from which we move on to a trust in what is greater than they are.

To fear God is also, as Michael Buckley puts it, to let God "contradict the programs and expectations of human beings in order to fulfill human desires and human freedom at a much deeper level than subjectivity would have measured out in its projections." To fear God means to set aside our own expectations, needs, and imaginings and let God set the agenda and define the limits.

God's answer to Moses might be stated: "I am the one who cannot be encountered in thought, imagination, or feeling; the one who can never be controlled or manipulated; but who, despite this and because of it, is ever graciously and powerfully present to you. Trust that presence, walk in it, undergo it.

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.

Western culture today is so powerful and alluring that it often swallows us whole. Its beauty, power, and promise generally take away both our breath and our perspective. The lure of present salvation - money, sex, creativity, the good life - has, for the most part, entertained, amused, distracted, and numbed us into a state where we no longer have a perspective beyond that of our culture and its short-range soteriology.

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.

The prohibition boils down to this: God has told Adam and Eve that they may receive life as gift, but they may never take life as if it were theirs by right. The condition God places on them is not an arbitrary or petty test. No. It expresses an entire morality: as long as you receive and respect reality as gift it will continue to give you life and goodness. If you attempt to seize it or take it as owed, you will know shame, disharmony, pain, death, and loss of a connection with God.

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.

the friends of Jesus, do not recognize him, even though he has been dead and absent for only a day and a half. Why can they not recognize him? Because they are too focused on his former reality.

In South Africa, prior to the abolition of apartheid, people used to light a candle and place it in their windows as a sign of hope, a sign that one day this evil would be overcome. At one point, this was declared illegal, just as illegal as carrying a gun. The children used to joke about this, saying: “Our government is scared of lit candles!” Eventually, as we know, apartheid was overcome. Reflecting upon what ultimately brought its demise, it is fair to suggest that “lit candles” (which the government so wisely feared) were considerably more powerful than were guns.