Reflections on Life
By Father Jerome LeDoux, SVD
A 20-something lady was helping me transfer things from one car to another. Perhaps noticing that her lively pace outstepped me at every turn, she volunteered pointedly with a satisfied smile, “I am enjoying my youth!” Translated, that almost seemed to be saying, “How on earth do you old coots tolerate creeping old age?”
“You’ll enjoy your old age too, God willing,” I returned so low that she might have missed completely my hesitant effort to respond to such a pointed remark.
To get her attention, I could have said that at her age I could whistle a baseball toward the catcher well into the nineties, could break off a mean curve, could drive the ball 400-plus feet, run with the best, could snare a football pass nine feet in the air on a dead run-and-leap, could jump under a basketball rim and pop it.
“That was yesterday,” I mused, and as the song continues, “but yesterday’s gone.” One distant day a weightlifting high school seminarian at St. Augustine Seminary in Bay Saint Louis  was pressing 100 pounds. To his utter surprise, I reached down with my right hand and snatched it over my head. When he winced, for seconds I reached down again and snatched it over my head once more.
Needless to say, if I tried anything close to that now, I would need both an osteopath and a chiropractor. “Flights of fancy,” we call such memories we all have. Such was the case as I topped the hill of four score and five on February 26. And how is life in the mid-eighties? So far, I can hardly tell the difference from one year ago.
Nevertheless, there are some pointed items of interest. Never too cool to school, I notice that the tendency to shuffle is trying to grow stronger. This means that, unless he exerts extra caution, an older person compensates for a decrease in physical strength by dragging his feet instead of lifting them, especially on turns.
When one drags his feet in making a sudden turn to the left or right, the sole of the sandal/shoe grabs the rug or uneven surface, setting up a serious stumble or trip. In this maneuver, the body turns before the feet do, causing an entanglement of the feet that can easily trigger a painful fall that may result in some kind of injury.
A hazardous carryover from dragging one’s feet can happen when one moves to go around a chair, table or other object. The slouchiness resulting from weakened muscles inclines one to take shortcuts, and that causes one to clip the edges of objects instead of moving cleanly around them. That in turn can end in a crash. In spite of this ever-looming threat, I must continually remind myself to move wide.
This same awareness and caution of movement holds doubly strong for vertical travel up and down steps or hills. Weakening muscles also try to avoid the labor of lifting one’s feet high enough above a stair step to avoid tripping. More and more, a conscious effort must be made to assure one of stepping high enough.
For decades, all the way into my late forties, I literally streaked up and down flights of stairs, often mounting the flight in two bounds. In all those years I had one harmless slip on a flight of stairs, one slip on a landing and one interesting stumble halfway down a 22-step staircase. Flying through the air with the greatest of ease, I hit the deck with a crash and roll, no worse for the wear. So hard is a young body.
Nowadays, the very thought of such a stumble and rough landing steadies my every move around stairs, high precipices and uneven surfaces. For the young, the key to sureness and safety of movement is the combination of power, balance and dexterity of motion. Eventually eroded by time and usage, that great combination can be salvaged only partially by meticulous attention to one’s environs.
In a blast from the past, every now and then, I catch myself striding with near abandon, although running with abandon is out of the picture. I invariably smile as I walk that special walk, remembering the way it was so many summers ago.
It still startles me that I live free of any dependence on reading or magnifying glasses, reading a computer screen for many hours with no signs of strain, reading books or annoyingly-small texts of food ingredients or signs in the ambient world.
Since April 30, 1996, forgoing all meats, seafood, dairy, salt, sugar and caffeine has served me well, normalizing all my body organs and fluids to the point where I live free of pain and medications, except for the baby aspirin daily regimen.
No day is a work day, because every day is a bonus, a vacation, a special gift of God that brings with it more joy, more rewards, more thanks for all the relatives, friends and others in my life. How long will I live? Till I die. That’s enough for me.
(Father Jerome LeDoux, SVD, is pastor of Our Mother of Mercy Parish in Fort Worth, Texas. He has written “Reflections on Life since 1969.)

Forming our future
By Jennifer Henry
While I was having lunch with my daughter, Mary, a couple came up to our table and said to me, “ I just want to thank you for taking such good care of my granddaughter at the daycare.” The grandmother went on to say that she had met me when her daughter came to take a tour of our early learning center.  I remembered her and could see in her eyes the resemblance to her granddaughter, Lilly Claire.  An overwhelming feeling of gratitude came over me! What a gift I have been given!  The opportunity to love and watch the 107 young children at St. Paul Early Learning Center grow and learn is a blessing and a privilege.
I said to my daughter what I had said when she and her siblings were growing up – “it takes a village to raise a child.”  You need lots of people to love your children!  We fondly  remembered  “Ms. Faye,” “Ms. Carolyn,” “Mrs. Lamar,” “Mrs. Wilcox” and how much a part of our lives these wonderful teachers and caregivers were.
I have been a principal leader at the elementary and high school level but now, as director of an early learning center, I feel even more passionate that our students’ first experience in education be rich in language and reading, music and song, play and fun, delivered by teachers sharing God’s love through their care.  As expert in Catholic education, Thomas Groome, says, “It is a sacred privilege and an awesome responsibility to be an educator.”
What do children need most though in those early years to succeed? Is it learning through play, or learning the ABC’s, colors, pushing forward and preparing them to pass the tests that lie ahead?  Have we forgotten what Friedrich Froebel, the German educator, who coined the name “kindergarten” originally meant – “a garden of children” – a place where each child is nurtured with the same love and care given to a seedling. Our modern day expert Mister Rogers might have said it best about early childhood learning, “Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning.  But for children, play is serious learning.”
At a recent workshop presented by Christ United Methodist Preschool Program Director, Terre Harris, my staff and I were introduced to a book called, “Their Name is Today – Reclaiming Childhood in a Hostile World” by Johann Christoph Arnold.  The title of the book comes from Nobel Laureate, Gabriela Mistral:
“We are guilty of many errors and many faults, but our worst crime is abandoning the children, neglecting the fountain of life. Many things can wait. Children cannot. Right now their bones are being formed, their blood is being made, and their senses are being developed.  To them we cannot answer, “Tomorrow.” Their name is today.”
Terre talked about the importance of play, how tired parents are, how distracting cell phones are in raising children, the importance of reading and talking to young children, affirming the role of the teacher/caregiver and how it is critical to seize the time we have with our children. Terre’s presentation confirmed and energized the St. Paul’s staff’s focus on play, and learning through doing.
At St. Paul Early Learning Center we have enrolled in Quality Stars – Mississippi’s Quality Rating and Improvement System (QRIS). The QRIS is a tiered block system. Programs must meet all criteria at one level before advancing to the next level. The program is administered by the Mississippi State University Early Childhood Institute through a competitive grant process from the Mississippi Department of Human Services Division of Early Childhood Care and Development. The requirements go above and beyond basic licensure requirements. Participating centers must meet all licensure requirements to participate.
My staff and I have found the Quality Stars program to be quite challenging. We are a 1 STAR but have great aspirations to improve and progress to at least a 3 or 4 STAR in the next year.  I believe the program provides an outstanding framework to achieve the important things in early childhood education: protection of health and safety, building relationships with children, family and community and opportunities for learning by doing.  Using this framework with our own Catholic school mission to teach the whole child – mind, body and spirit, brings a rich curriculum to our early learners.
We have great hope in successfully meeting our goal. We ask the readers of Mississippi Catholic to keep all Catholic educators and our programs in your prayers. Children are fragile like young seedlings and “their name is today.”
Carl Jung said it well, “One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.”
(Jennifer Henry is the director of  Flowood St. Paul Early Learning Center)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
Numerous groups and individuals today are challenging us in regards to our relationship to mother-earth. From Green Peace, various environmental groups, various Christian and other religious groups and various individual voices, comes the challenge to be less-blind, less-unthinking and less-reckless in terms of how we relate to the earth.
Every day our newscasts point out how, without much in the way of serious reflection, we are polluting the planet, strip-mining its resources, creating mega-landfills, pouring carbon dangerously into the atmosphere, causing the disappearance of thousands of species, creating bad air and bad water and thinning the ozone layer.
And so the cry goes out: live more simply, use fewer resources, lessen your carbon footprint, and try to recycle whatever you’ve used as much as you can.
That challenge, of course, is very good and very important. The air we breathe out is the air we will eventually inhale and so we need to be very careful about what we exhale. This planet is our home and we need to ensure that, long-term, it can provide us with the sustenance and comfort of a home.
But, true as this is, there’s still another very important reason why we need to treat mother-earth with more caution and respect, namely, Christ himself is vitally bound-up with nature and his reasons for coming to earth also include the intention of redeeming the physical universe. What’s implied here?
Let me begin with an anecdote which captures, in essence, what’s at stake: The scientist-theologian, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, in conversation with a Vatican official who was confused by his writings and doctrinally-suspicious of them, was once asked “What are you trying to do in your writings?”
Teilhard’s response, “I am trying to write a Christology that is wide enough to incorporate the full Christ because Christ is not just an anthropological event but he is also a cosmic phenomenon.”  Simply translated, he is saying that Christ didn’t just come to save people. He came for that yes, but he also came to save the planet, of which people are only one part.
In saying that, Teilhard has solid scriptural backing. Looking at the scriptures we find that they affirm that Christ didn’t just come to save people, he came to save the world. For example, the Epistle to the Colossians (1, 15-20) records an ancient Christian hymn which affirms both that Christ was already a vital force inside the original creation (“that all things were made through him”) and that Christ is also the end point to of all history, human and cosmic.
The Epistle to the Ephesians, also recording an ancient Christian hymn, (1, 3-10) makes the same point; while the Epistle to the Romans (8,19-22) is even more explicit in affirming that physical creation, mother-earth and our physical universe, are “groaning” as they too wait for redemption by Christ. Among other things, these texts affirm that the physical world is part of God’s plan for eventual heavenly life.
What’s contained in that, if we tease out its implications? A number of very clear principles:  First, nature, not just humanity, is being redeemed by Christ. The world is not just a stage upon which human history plays out; it has intrinsic meaning and value beyond what it means for us as humans. Physical nature is, in effect, brother and sister with us in the journey towards the divinely-intended end of history. Christ also came to redeem the earth, not just those of us who are living on it. Physical creation too will enter in the final synthesis of history, that is, heaven.
Second, this means that nature has intrinsic rights, not just the rights we find convenient to accord it. What this means is that defacing or abusing nature is not just a legal and environmental issue, it’s a moral issue. We are violating someone’s (something’s) intrinsic rights.
Thus when we, mindlessly, throw a coke-can into a ditch we are not just breaking a law we are also, at some deep level, defacing Christ. We need to respect nature, not, first of all, so that it doesn’t recoil on us and give us back our own asphyxiating pollution, but because it, akin to humanity, has its own rights. A teaching too rarely affirmed.
Finally, not least, what is implied in understanding the cosmic dimension of Christ and what that means in terms of our relationship to mother-earth and the universe is the non-negotiable fact that the quest for community and consummation within God’s Kingdom (our journey towards heaven) is a quest that calls us not just to a proper relationship with God and with each other, but also to a proper relationship with physical creation.
We are humans with bodies living on the earth, not disembodied angels living in heaven, and Christ came to save our bodies along with our souls; and he came, as well, to save the physical ground upon which we walk since he was the very pattern upon which and through which the physical world was created.
(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX.)