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January 22, 2019 | The Valley Catholic
COMMENTARY
Struggling for Sustenance
By Rev. Ron Rolheiser, OMI
Theologian, teacher, award-winning
author, and President of the Oblate
School of Theology in San Antonio, TX
We all struggle to not give in to coldness and ha-
tred. This was even a struggle for Jesus. Like the rest
of us he had to struggle, mightily at times, to remain
warm and loving.
It’s interesting to trace this out in the Gospel of
Luke. This is the gospel of prayer. Luke shows Jesus
praying more than all the other gospels combined.
Moreover, in Luke’s gospel, Jesus’ disciples were
intrigued by his prayer. They sensed something ex-
traordinary about Jesus, not because he could walk
on water and do miracles, but because, unlike the
rest of us, he could in fact turn the cheek. He was
strong enough not to give into coldness in the face
of hatred, so strong that it threatened his very life.
In every situation, no matter how bitter, he could be
understanding and forgiving and never doubt that
love and grace are what’s most real.
His disciples sensed that he drew this strength
from a hidden source, some deep well of sustenance
which he called his Father and which he accessed
through prayer. For this reason, in Luke’s gospel, the
disciples ask Jesus to teach them how to pray. They
too want draw sustenance from this source.
But we see too in Luke’s gospel that this doesn’t
always come without struggle. Sometimes things
seem easy for Jesus; he meets love and understanding,
and his ministry is joyous and easy. But when things
begin to collapse, when the forces of hatred begin to
encircle him, when majority of his followers abandon
and betray him, and when his own death becomes
imminent, then like the rest of us, fear and paranoia
threaten to overwhelm him. This is in fact the essence
of his struggle in the Garden of Gethsemane, his so-
called agonia.
Simply put, it’s easy enough to be understanding,
loving, and forgiving when you are bathed in them.
It’s quite another thing when your very adherence to
them is making you the object of misunderstanding,
hatred, and murder. And so, in Gethsemane, we see
Jesus prostrate, humanly devastated, on the ground,
struggling mightily to cling to a cord of sustenance
that had always sustained him in trust, love, and
forgiveness and had kept paranoia, hatred, and de-
spair at bay. And the answer doesn’t come easy for
him. He has to pray repeatedly and, in Luke’s words,
“sweat blood” before he can regain his balance and
root himself again in that grace that sustained him
throughout his ministry. Love and forgiveness are
not easy. Not giving into to anger, bitterness, self-pity,
hatred, and the desire for vengeance didn’t come easy
for Jesus either.
And that’s our ultimate moral struggle: to not
give into to our natural reaction whenever we are not
respected, slighted, ignored, misunderstood, hated,
or in small or large ways victimized. In the face of
these, paranoia automatically takes over and most
everything inside us conspires to create an obsessive
pressure towards giving back in kind, slight for slight,
disrespect for disrespect, ugliness for ugliness, hatred
for hatred, violence for violence.
But there’s another possibility: Like Jesus, who
himself had to struggle mightily to not give in to cold-
ness and hatred, we too can draw strength through
the same umbilical cord that nurtured him. His
Father, God’s grace and strength, can nurture us too.
In his famous movie, The Passion of the Christ, Mel
i son focuses on the hysical suffering esus had to
endure during his passion and death. Partly this has
some merit since esus’ sufferings were in fact retty
horrific. ut mostly it misses the oint, as we see
from the gospels. They make it a point to minimize
any focus on the hysical sufferings of esus. or the
gospels, Jesus’ passion is not a physical drama but a
moral one, indeed the ultimate moral drama. The real
struggle for Jesus as he sweated blood in Gethsemane
was not whether he would allow himself to die or
invoke divine power and escape. The question was
only about how he was going to die: In bitterness or
love? In hatred or forgiveness?
That’s also our ultimate moral struggle, one which
won’t just confront us at the moment of death but one
which confronts us daily, hourly. In every situation
in our lives, small or large, where we are unfairly
ignored, slighted, insulted, hated, or victimized in
any way, we face a choice of how to respond: Bitter-
ness or understanding? Hatred or love? Vengeance
or forgiveness?
And, like Jesus struggling in Gethsemane, we will
have to struggle to continue to cling onto something
beyond our natural instincts, beyond common sense,
beyond our cultural dictates. Doing what comes natu-
rally will not serve us well. Something beyond our
DNA needs to be accessed.
The first word out of esus’ mouth in the yno tic
gospels is the word metanoia. Among its other mean-
ings, it’s the opposite of paranoia. It means to trust
even in the face of distrust. Paranoia is natural to us,
metanoia isn’t; it requires struggling to draw suste-
nance from a deeper source.
Pope Advances Sainthood Causes for 17 Women
By Carol Glatz
VATICAN CITY (CNS) – Pope Fran-
cis advanced the sainthood causes of
three women and recognized the mar-
tyrdom of 14 religious sisters who were
killed during the Spanish Civil War.
The pope formally recognized a
miracle needed for the canonization of
Blessed Marguerite Bays, a laywoman
from Switzerland known for her spiri-
tuality in the face of great physical suf-
fering and for bearing the stigmata of
Christ.
Born in 1815, she grew up helping
the peasant farmers in her small village
and became a professed member of the
Secular Franciscan Order.
She was particularly devoted to Our
Lady and discovered she was cured
of colon cancer on Dec. 8, 1854, when
Pope Pius IX proclaimed the dogma of
the Immaculate Conception. The same
year, she started to show signs of the
stigmata on her hands, feet and chest.
She died in 1879 and St. John Paul II
eatified her in
.
In other decrees signed at the Vati-
can Jan. 15, the pope:
• Recognized the martyrdom of
Sister Isabella Lacaba Andia, who was
known as Mother Mary del Carmen –
the mother superior of a community of
Franciscan Conceptionist nuns – and
13 of her companions. They were mur-
dered “in hatred of the faith” in Spain
in 1936. The move clears the way for
their eatification.
• Recognized the heroic virtues
of Mother Soledad Sanjurjo Santos of
the Servants of Mary. Born in Arecibo,
Puerto Rico, in 1892, she was known as
the “Pearl of the Antilles” as she served
as provincial superior of the Antilles
and extended the congregation’s work
in caring for the sick throughout Cuba,
the Dominican Republic and Puerto
Rico. She died in 1973.
• Recognized the heroic virtues of
Polish Sister Anna Kaworek, who lived
1872-1936, and co-founded the Congre-
gation of the Sisters of St. Michael the
Archangel.