Daily Reflection
May 25, 2025

There is a Spring-time morning outside my window. Grass, flowers and trees are sipping from the slow-falling rain. It is Growing-Time and the leaves and buds are silently making their noise of gratitude by letting it all happen to and for them.

The Gospel for this Seventh Sunday of Easter is packed with invitations to receptivity, to love, to receive peace and a call to listen and believe. This is a complicated reading to which we stand in community. We listen and hear and try to find at least one word or praise which comforts each for the journey. Here is the challenge for this Reflection. It is a personal drum upon which I pound in classes here and talks elsewhere. Hang on!

We may go to the gym to run, lift or play. You actually go to improve your body, shape, health. Good for us! Physical health and care of it is a praise of the Giver, the Creator. WE can go to health-stores, libraries, therapists all for reasons of self-improvement, self-wellbeing.

Here it comes! Get set and be open!

Prayer, liturgy and the Spiritual Life is not about personal improvement! Nope!

My fear, based on self-awareness and observations of others, is, often, if not always, an ego-centric enterprise.  We can go to prayer-times, the sacraments, read Scripture for the purpose of doing this or not doing that. Now we can imagine that God or Jesus is very impressed and approves of us and our desires to be better. Well, God does not approve or disapprove. God is not impressed or depressed. We might be very impressed with our physical advancements in lifting or running and this is appropriate. Feeling good about ourselves, because we prayed or knelt for an hour is not about becoming holier or more spiritual, (whatever that means). Physical improvement is what each of us does, good for us. Spiritual, (whatever that means) is not measurable, or available to evaluation. We evaluate or get evaluated so we know how we are doing.

In the Spiritual, there is no grading, measuring; it is of the Spirit and for our spirits. Prayer, devotion, piety, is not our work. We are the “worked-upon, worked-within”.

For effort we desire results, improvement of any kind. What I worry most about in this area is how we can listen to any scripture, hear any homily, read any book and interpret something where we are challenge to do more, believe more, act more, be more. Always the “more” which then becomes the center of what we can easily call the Spiritual Life. I fear it can more easily become the center of our “Egoality”. The main result for our spirits is that we are not enough and so feel spiritually inadequate and inferior.

Of course! I want to be better, a better writer, priest, (I am already perfect of course as a Jesuit), but there is always I want to be more and do more. What is it all about then?

Jesus, the Incarnation of the Loving Creative God, does not challenge, but invites, encourages and sends the Advocate to continue God’s on-going creational love in our lives. God does the laboring within us and around us. If we are to feel better about ourselves, it will be as a result of our allowing ourselves to be poor enough to be enriched, met, encouraged and improved, by our having been met in the simplicity of our true selves.

The result of all this then is listening to the words “Do not let your hearts be troubled or afraid.” “Peace I give to you; Not as the world gives do I give it to you.” God gives it, we do not earn it! This is an insult to our egos and good for God! As with the grass, flowers and trees, we grow interiorly first and then Easter all over the place.