IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
With the resurrection of Jesus, time started over. Simply put, up until Jesus rose from the dead all things that died stayed dead. After Jesus’ resurrection, nothing stays dead anymore. Time has begun anew.
Luke’s Gospel account of the resurrection begins with the words “on the morning of the first day.” This is a double reference. He is referring to Sunday, the first day of the week, but he is also referring to the first day of a new creation. With the resurrection, time has started over. In fact, the world measures time by that day. We are in the year 2026 since that morning when Jesus rose from the dead.

From the beginning of time until Jesus’ resurrection, everything mortal died and remained in death. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, in the story of Adam and Eve and their fall from grace, we are given to believe that originally humans were not intended to die. In this view, death entered the world through the sin of our first parents. Today, for sound theological and scientific reasons, the Adam and Eve story is considered, like the other “in the beginning” stories in Genesis, to be more metaphoric and archetypal than literal. To be human is to be mortal.
Irrespective as to whether you take the Adam and Eve story literally and see death because of their sin or not, the bottom line is the same: From our first parents onward, everything that died stayed dead.
That changed with the resurrection of Jesus. When God raised him from the dead, creation was changed at its very roots. Nature changed. A dead body was brought to new life. Impossible? Yes, except that time started over! There was a new first day, a new Genesis, a second time when we can say, “in the beginning.”
And nothing stays dead now because Jesus is the “first fruit” of this new creation. What happened to him now happens to us. We too will not stay dead but will rise to new life. Moreover, this isn’t just true for us as humans. It’s also true for the earth itself and everything on it. Jesus came to save the world, not just the people living in the world.
St. Paul makes this clear in his Epistle to the Romans when he writes that all creation, physical creation, has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth and – it itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God. (Romans 8:21-23)
Our planet earth, like our human body, is also mortal. It is dying too. As we know, the sun will eventually burn out and that will spell the death of our planet. Our planet also needs to be resurrected, and scripture assures us that it will.
What all this means stretches our imagination beyond its limits. Does this mean that animals will also have eternal life? Will our beloved pets be with us in heaven? Will plants enter heaven? Will the whole cosmos and our planet earth be transformed and enter heaven?
The answer is yes, though how this will happen is beyond our imagination. Our human mind is too limited. This is impossible to imagine, except, except that God who is the Father of Jesus Christ is ineffable, beyond imagination, and can do the unimaginable, including transforming all things into new life.
The Gospel of John has a particularly poignant text which links the resurrection of Jesus to the original creation as described in Genesis. John tells us that in his first resurrection appearance to the apostles, Jesus finds them huddled in fear inside a room with the doors locked. The resurrected Jesus goes right through the locked doors, enters their midst, greets them, shows them his hands and his side, and then breathes on them. (John 20:21)
This breathing out by Jesus parallels what happened at the original creation when God breathed over the formless void, and light began to separate from darkness and creation began to take shape.
After the resurrection, Jesus breathes on his disciples and for the second time in history light begins to separate from darkness. The confusion, fear, timidity, and the weaknesses of the apostles, their “formless void,” their darkness, begins to separate from the new light brought by the resurrection, namely, the eternal light of charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, the fruits of the Holy Spirit.
So, it’s appropriate to say that with the resurrection of Jesus, time started over. There was a new first day where light again separated from darkness. The resurrection of Jesus is the most radical thing that has occurred since God originally said – let there be light! – nearly fourteen billion years ago. The earth itself and everything on it, humans, animals, plants, and minerals, and the earth itself, are now given life beyond death.
Until the resurrection of Jesus, all things that died stayed dead. This is no longer true. Time has started over.

(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser is a professor of spirituality at Oblate School of Theology and award-winning author.)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
It is becoming ever more acceptable today, whether in politics or in general discourse, to speak of brute human strength, force, and power as being the forces we need to guide our lives. Indeed, empathy is now sometimes named explicitly as a weakness.

It is one thing for people to say that strength, force, and power are in fact what govern the world, but it is dangerously wrong to try to throw a Christian cloak over this. In brief, this is the antithesis of Jesus, as the Gospels make clear.

Here’s how the Gospels define strength and weakness.

For centuries the chosen people, feeling oppressed, longed and prayed for a Messiah from God who would come brandishing intimidating muscle, would vanquish their enemies, bring them prosperity, and bind them together in community by a strength, force and power that was superhuman. But that’s not what they got.

Against every one of their expectations, when their hopes and prayers were finally answered, their longed-for Messiah appeared, not as a superhuman, but as a helpless baby unable to feed himself, helpless to nurture himself into adulthood.

Granted, as an adult he performed miracles and sometimes displayed a strength and power that was supernatural. However, the power he displayed in his miracles was never political, militaristic, or physically intimidating. His miracles were always displays of God’s compassion and fidelity.

There’s an interesting play of words in the Gospels when they speak of “power” or “authority”. They use three different Greek words: Sometimes they refer to power as Energia – the type of power a star athlete can bring to a playing field; and sometimes power is referred to as Dynamis – the type of power a rock star can bring to a stage. However, whenever the Gospels refer to Jesus as powerful or as having authority, they never use these words. Instead, they use the word Exousia (for which we have no English equivalent), though we do have a concept of it.

Exousia is the paradoxical power a baby brings into a room. On the surface, it looks like powerlessness, but ultimately it’s the greatest power of all – vulnerability, the moral power to create intimacy.
Simply put, if you put three people into a room: an athlete in the prime of his physical prowess, a rock star who can electrify a stadium with energy, and a baby. Who ultimately has the most power? Jesus answers that.

We see this clearly in the manner of his death. As he hangs on the cross, suffering and humiliated, he is being taunted, if you are the son of God, come down off that cross! If you have divine power, show it! Jesus doesn’t take the bait. Instead of demonstrating the kind of power we like to believe God should be using, Jesus instead resorts to another power, a higher one. In his powerlessness, he gives over his spirit in love and empathy and, in that, shows us the place where intimacy is born.

Moreover, Jesus could not be clearer in his teaching. As he makes clear in the Sermon on the Mount (perhaps the greatest moral code ever written) human strength, force, and power are not what bring about the kingdom. What creates community and intimacy among us?

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. (Matthew 5:3-11)

Unfortunately, today in our politics and in our civil discourse (which sadly often lacks civility) people are increasingly putting their faith in brute human power – political power, economic power, military power, social media power, historical privilege. These, as many politicians now claim, are what’s real. They decide things in the world. It’s the strong, the powerful, and the rich who will inherit the good things of this earth. Those who are poor in spirit, who mourn, who are meek, who are merciful, and who are persecuted, will miss out on life. And, undergirding this is the belief that empathy is a weakness.

What’s to be said in the face of this? What should be the Christian response?

Since the beginning of human life on this planet, brute strength and power have always made themselves felt and have often been a dominant force in shaping history. The meek haven’t always inherited the earth (at least not this earth). And today the meek are being threatened from all sides.

However, whatever its political or economic expediency, this kind of raw strength and power may not cloak itself with Jesus and the Gospels. It is the antithesis of Jesus and the Gospels.

(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser is a professor of spirituality at Oblate School of Theology and award-winning author.)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
I once lived in community for several years with an Oblate brother who was wonderfully generous and pious to a fault. But he struggled to pick up symbol and metaphor. He took things literally. For him, what the words said is what they meant!

This caused him considerable confusion and consternation when each day praying the psalms we would pray for Jerusalem and Israel and would occasionally pray for the demise of some other nation. Coming out of prayer, he would ask: “Why are we praying for Jerusalem? For Israel? What makes those places more special in God’s eyes than other cities and other countries? Why does God hate some countries and cities?”

We would try our best to have him understand that these names were not to be taken literally, as places on a map, but rather as symbols. Wisely or unwisely, I would sometimes say, “Brother, whenever you read the word ‘Jerusalem’ or ‘Israel’, just take that to mean the ‘church’, and whenever a nation or a city is named that God seems to hate, take that to mean that God hates sin.”

We might smile at his piety and literalism, but I’m not sure we don’t all still struggle with our own literalism in understanding what in fact the scriptures mean by words like Jerusalem, Israel, Chosen people, and God’s elect. Indeed, as Christians, what do we mean with the words Christian, Church, and Body of Christ?

For whom are we praying when we pray for Jerusalem and Israel?

What we see in scripture is a progressive de-literalizing of names and places. Initially, Israel meant an historical nation, Jerusalem meant an historical city, the Chosen People meant a genetic race, and God’s elect was literally that nation, that city, and that genetic race. But as revelation unfolds, these names and concepts become ever more symbolic.

Most parts of Judaism understand these words symbolically, though some still understand these words literally. For them, Jerusalem means the actual city of Jerusalem, and Israel means an actual strip of land in Palestine.

Christians mirror that. Mainstream Christian theology has from its very origins refused to identify those names and places in a way where (simplistically) Jerusalem means the Christian Church and Christians are the Chosen Race. However, as is the case with parts of Judaism, many Christians, while de-literalizing these words from their Jewish roots, now take them literally to refer to the historical Christian churches and to its explicitly confessing members. Indeed, my answer to my Oblate brother (“Jerusalem means the church, Israel means Christianity”) seems to suggest exactly that.

However, the words Church and Christianity themselves need to be de-literalized. The church is a reality which is much wider and more inclusive than its explicit, visible, baptized membership. Its visible, historical aspect is real, is important, and is never to be denigrated; but (from Jesus through the history of Christian dogma and theology) Christianity has always believed and taught clearly that the mystery of Christ is both visible and invisible. Partly, we can see it and partly we can’t. Partly it is visibly incarnated in history, and partly it is invisible. The mystery of Christ is incarnate in history, but not all of it can be seen. Some people are baptized visibly, and some people are baptized only in unseen ways.

Moreover, this is not new, liberal theology. Jesus himself taught that it is not necessarily those who say ‘Lord, Lord’ who are his true believers, but rather it’s those who actually live out his teaching (however unconsciously) who are his true followers. Christian theology has always taught that the full mystery of Christ is much larger than its historical manifestation in the Christian churches.

Kenneth Cragg, a Christian missionary, after living and ministering for years in the Muslim world, offered this comment: I believe it will take all the Christian churches to give full expression to the full Christ. To this, I would add, that it will not only take all the Christian churches to give full expression to the mystery of Christ, it will also take all people of sincere will, beyond all religious boundaries, and beyond all ethnicity, to give expression to the mystery of Christ.

When my pious Oblate brother who struggled to understand metaphor and symbol asked me why we were always praying for Jerusalem and Israel, and I replied that he might simply substitute the word Church and Christianity for those terms, my answer to him (taken literally) was itself over pious, simplistic, and a too-narrow understanding of the mystery of Christ. Those terms Church and Christianity, as we see in the progressive unfolding of revelation in scripture, must themselves be de-literalized.

For whom are we praying when we pray for Jerusalem or for Israel? We are praying for all sincere people, of all faiths, of all denominations, of all races, of all ages. They are the new Jerusalem and the new Israel.

(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser is a professor of spirituality at Oblate School of Theology and award-winning author.)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
I once had the privilege of visiting Holy Land. It’s a strangely different place. Soaked in history, in struggle, in religion, in blood. Virtually every inch of its soil has been soaked in blood, including the blood of Jesus. History leaps out at you from every stone.

Ancient things come to the surface there and mix with the things of today. When you stand in its sacred spots, you begin to understand why Moses was told to take his shoes off and why, through the centuries, so many wars have been fought over this small strip of desert. Aptly named the Holy Land, I walked its ground, barefoot in soul.

Of all the things I saw there, including the tomb of Jesus, few touched me as deeply as did the Church of the Visitation. It stands in sharp contrast to most of the other churches there that mark the key events in Jesus’ life.

Unlike most of the other churches, the Church of the Visitation is a very modest building. You don’t see any gold or marble. Its wooden walls and oak ceiling are plain and mostly bare. However, on the front wall, behind the altar, there is a painting that depicts the scene of the Visitation, and it was this painting that struck me deeply.

It’s a picture of two peasant women, Mary and Elizabeth, both pregnant, greeting each other. Everything about it suggests smallness, littleness, obscurity, dust, small town, insignificance.

You see two plain looking women, standing in the dust of an unknown village. Nothing suggests that either of them, or anything they are doing or carrying, is out of the ordinary or of any significance. Yet, and this is the genius of the painting, all that littleness, obscurity, seeming barrenness, and small-town insignificance makes you automatically ask the question: Who would have thought it? Who would ever have imagined that these two women, in this obscure town, in this obscure place, in this obscure time, were carrying inside of them something that would radically and forever change the whole world?

Who would have thought it? Yes. Who would have thought that what these obscure peasant women were gestating and carrying inside of them would one day change history more than any army, philosopher, artist, emperor, king, queen, or superstar ever would?

Inside them, they were gestating Jesus and John the Baptist, the Christ and the prophet who would announce him. These two births changed the world so radically that today we even measure time by the event of those births. We live in the year 2025 after that event.

There’s a lesson here: Never underrate, in terms of world impact, someone living in obscurity who is pregnant with promise. Never underestimate the impact in history of silent, hidden gestation. How can any of us have any real significance in our world when we live in obscurity, unknown, hidden away, unable to do big acts that shape history?

We can take a lesson from Mary and Elizabeth. We can become pregnant with promise, with hope, with the Holy Spirit and then, hidden from the world, gestate that into real flesh, our own. We too can reshape history.

If we can grasp this, there will be more peace in our lives because some of the restless fires inside us will torment us less. In brief, there’s a perpetual dissatisfaction inside us that can only be stilled by accepting something we might term the martyrdom of obscurity, that is, the self-sacrifice of accepting a life in which we will never have adequate, satisfactory self-expression. That acceptance can help still that pressure inside us which pushes us to be known, to make a difference, to make our lives count in terms of the big picture.

We all know the feeling of sitting inside of our own lives and feeling unknown, small time, undistinguished and frustrated because our riches are unknown to others. We have so much to give to the world, but the world doesn’t know us. We yearn to do great things, important things, things that affect the world beyond the boundaries of the small towns we live in (even when we are living in large cities).

What can help bring some peace is the image expressed in that painting in the Church of the Visitation, namely, that what ultimately changes the world is what we give birth to when, in the obscurity and dust of our small towns and in the frustration of lives that forever seem too small for us, we become pregnant with hope and, after a silent gestation process, one not advertised or known to the world, we bring that hope to full term.

When I was teaching at Newman College in Edmonton, our president then was a Holy Cross priest who brought us some Maritime color. When surprised by something, he would exclaim: “Who would have thunk it?”

Yes, two pregnant women, two thousand years ago of no status, isolated, standing in the dust, forever changing the world? Who would have thunk it?

(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser is a professor of spirituality at Oblate School of Theology and award-winning author.)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
Recently I was listening to a religious talk show on the radio when a caller asked: How do we know that God exists? A good question.

The radio host answered by saying that we know it through faith. That’s not a bad answer, except what needs to be teased out is how we know this through faith.

First, what does it mean to know something? If we believe that to know something means to be able to somehow picture it, understand it, and imagine its existence, then this side of eternity, we can never know God. Why?

Because God is ineffable. That’s the first and non-negotiable truth we need to accept about God and it means that God, by definition, is beyond our imagination. God is infinite and the infinite can never be circumscribed or captured in a concept. Try imagining the highest number to which it is possible to count. God’s nature and existence can never be conceptualized or imagined. But it can be known.

Knowing isn’t always in the head, something we can explicate, own in a picture, and give words to. Sometimes, particularly with things touching the deepest mysteries in life, we know beyond our head and our heart. This knowing is in our gut, something felt as a moral imperative, a nudge, a call, an obligation, a voice which tells us what we must do to stay true. It’s there we know God, beyond any imaginative, intellectual, or even affective grasp.
The revealed truths about God in scripture, in Christian tradition, and in the witness of the lives of martyrs and saints, simply give expression to something we already know, as the mystics put it, in a dark way.
So, how might we prove the existence of God?

I wrote my doctoral thesis on exactly that question. In that thesis, I take up the classical proofs for the existence of God as we see these articulated in Western philosophy. For example, Thomas Aquinas tried to prove God’s existence in five separate arguments.

Here’s one of those arguments: Imagine walking down a road and seeing a stone and asking yourself, how did it get there? Given the brute reality of a stone, you can simply answer, it’s always been there. However, imagine walking down a road and seeing a clock still keeping time. Can you still say, it’s always been there? No, it can’t always have been there because it has an intelligent design that someone must have built into it and it is ticking away the hours, which means it cannot have been there forever.
Aquinas then asks us to apply this to our own existence and to the universe. Creation has an incredibly intelligent design and, as we know from contemporary physics, has not always existed. Something or someone with intelligence has given us and the universe a historical beginning and an intelligent design. Who?

How much weight does an argument like this carry? There was once a famous debate on BBC radio in England between Frederick Copleston, a renowned Christian philosopher, and Bertrand Russell, a brilliant agnostic thinker. After all the give and take in their debate, they agreed, as atheist and believer, on this one thing: If the world makes sense then God exists. As an atheist, Russell agreed to that, but then went on to say that ultimately the world doesn’t make sense.

Most thinking atheists accept that the world doesn’t’ make sense; but then, like Albert Camus, struggle with the question, how can it not make sense? If there isn’t a God then how can we say that is better to help a child than to abuse a child? If there isn’t a God, how can we ground rationality and morality?

At the end of my thesis, I concluded that existence of God cannot be proven through a rational argument, a logical syllogism, or a mathematical equation, albeit all of those can give some compelling hints regarding God’s existence.

However, God is not found at the end of an argument, a syllogism, or an equation. God’s existence, life, and love are known (they are experienced) inside a certain way of living.

Simply put, if we live in a certain way, in the way all religions worthy of the name (not least Christianity) invite us to live, namely, with compassion, selflessness, forgiveness, generosity, patience, long-suffering, fidelity, and gratitude, then we will know God’s existence by participation in God’s very life – and whether or not we have an imaginative sense of God’s existence is of no importance.

Why do I believe in God? Not because I’m particularly persuaded by proofs from great philosophical minds like Aquinas, Anselm, Descartes, Leibnitz or Hartshorne. I find their proofs intellectually intriguing but existentially less persuasive.

I believe in God because I sense God’s presence at a gut level, as a silent voice, as a call, an invitation, a moral imperative which, whenever listened to and obeyed, brings community, love, peace and purpose.

That’s the real proof for the existence of God.

(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser is a professor of spirituality at Oblate School of Theology and award-winning author.)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
John Muir once asked: “Why are Christians so reluctant to let animals into their stingy heaven?”

Indeed, why? Especially since St. Paul tells us in the Epistle to the Romans that all creation (mineral, plant, animal) is groaning to be set free from its bondage to decay to enter eternal life with us. How? How will minerals, plants and animals go to heaven? That’s beyond our present imagination, just as we cannot imagine how we will enter heaven: “Eye has not seen, nor ear heard. Nor has it entered the heart of man the things God has prepared for those who love Him.” Eternal life is beyond our present imagination.
What John Muir asks concerning animals might be asked in a wider sense: are we too stingy about who gets to go to heaven?

What I mean by “stingy” here is how we are so often obsessed with purity, boundaries, dogma and religious practice that we exclude millions from our church doors, our church programs, our sacramental programs, our Eucharistic tables, and from our notion of who will be going to heaven. This is true across denominational lines. As Christians, we all tend to create a stingy heaven.
However, I can appreciate the instinct behind this. Following Jesus must mean something concrete. Christian discipleship makes real demands and churches need to have real boundaries in terms of dogma, sacraments, membership and practice. There is a legitimacy in creating a dividing line between who is in and who is out. The instinct behind this is healthy.
But its practice is often not healthy. We often make heaven stingy. Metaphorically, we are too often like that group in the Gospel who is blocking the paralytic from coming to Jesus, so that he can only get to Jesus by entering through a hole in the roof.

Our instinct may be right, but our practice is often wrong. We, those of us who are invested deeply in our churches, need to be strong enough in our own faith and practice to be anchors of a spirituality and ethos that welcomes in and dines with those who are not invested. How so? Here’s an analogy.

Imagine a family of ten, now all adults. Five of the children are deeply invested in the family. They come home regularly for visits, have meals together every weekend, check in with each other regularly, have regular rituals and celebrations to ensure that they stay connected, and make it their family business to see that their parents are always okay. They might aptly be called “practicing” members of the family.
Now, imagine that five of the children have drifted from the family. They no longer cultivate any regular meaningful connection with the family, are dissociated from its everyday life and ethos, aren’t particularly concerned with how their parents are doing, but still want to have some connection to the family to occasionally share an occasion, a celebration, or meal with them. They might aptly be described as “non-practicing” members of the family.

This poses the question: Do the “practicing members” of the family refuse them entry into their gatherings, believing that allowing them to come jeopardizes the family’s beliefs, values and ethos? Or do they allow them to come, but only on condition that they first make a series of practical commitments to regularize contact with the family?

My guess is that in most healthy families the “practicing” members would happily welcome the “non-practicing” members to a family event, gathering or meal – grateful they are there, graciously accepting them without initially asking for any practical promises or commitments. Nor would they feel threatened by them joining the celebration and taking a seat at the table, fearful that the family’s ethos might somehow be compromised.

As “practicing” members of the family they would have a steady confidence that their own commitment sufficiently anchors the family’s ethos, standards and rituals so that those who are present and uncommitted aren’t threatening anything but are making the celebration richer and more inclusive. That confidence would be grounded on knowing (in terms of this particular family) that they are the adults in the room and can welcome others without compromising anything. They would not be stingy with the gift and grace of family.

There’s a lesson here, I submit: We who are “practicing” Christians, responsible for proper church practice, proper doctrine, proper morals and the authentic continuation of preaching and Eucharist, should not be stingy with the gift and grace of Christian family.

Like Jesus, who welcomed everyone without first demanding conversion and commitment, we must be open in our welcome and wide in our embrace. Inclusion, not exclusion, should always be our first approach. Like Jesus we should not be threatened by what seems impure, and we should be prepared to occasionally scandalize others by whom we are seen with at table.

Let’s not be stingy in sharing God’s family, especially since the God we serve is a prodigal God who isn’t threatened by anything!

(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser is a professor of spirituality at Oblate School of Theology and award-winning author.)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
“God behaves in the psalms in ways he is not allowed to behave in systemic theology.”

That quip from Sebastian Moore might be highlighted at a time when fewer people want to use the psalms as a form of prayer because they feel offended that the psalms speak of murder, revenge, anger, violence, war-making and patriarchy.

Yet for centuries the psalms have been central to both Jewish and Christian prayer. They form the very heart of the Divine Office (the church’s prayer for the world), are sung in Vespers’ services, are prayed daily by millions of men and women, and have been chanted by monks for centuries as a central part of their prayer.

Why the objection to the psalms? Some ask: “How can I pray with words that are sometimes full of hatred, anger, violence, and speak of the glories of war and of crushing one’s enemies in the name of God?” For others, the objection is to the patriarchal nature of the psalms. For yet others, the offense is aesthetic: “They’re terrible poetry!” they say.

Perhaps the psalms aren’t great poetry and they do, undeniably, smack of violence, war, hatred of one’s enemies in the name of God, and the desire for vengeance. They’re also patriarchal in character. But does that make them poor language for prayer? No, to the contrary.

One of the classical definitions of prayer suggests that “prayer is lifting mind and heart to God.” Simple, clear, accurate. Our problem is that we too seldom actually do this when we pray. Rather than lifting to God what’s actually on our minds and in our hearts, we treat God as someone from whom we need to hide the real truth of our thoughts and feelings. Instead of pouring out mind and heart, we tell God what we think God wants to hear – not murderous thoughts, desire for vengeance, or our disappointment with him.

But expressing those feelings is the whole point. What makes the psalms so apt for prayer is that they do not hide the truth from God and they express the whole gamut of our actual feelings. They give honest voice to what’s actually going on in our minds and hearts.

Sometimes we feel good and our spontaneous impulse is to speak words of praise and gratitude. The psalms give us that voice. They speak of God’s goodness – love, friends, faith, health, food, wine, enjoyment. But we don’t always feel that way. Our lives also have their cold, lonely seasons when disappointment and bitterness smolder under the surface. The psalms then give us honest voice and we can open all those angry feelings to God.

At other times, we fill with the sense of our own inadequacy, with the fact that we cannot measure up to the trust and love that’s given us. The psalms give us voice for this, asking God to have mercy, to soften our hearts, to wash us clean, to give us a fresh start. And then still there are times when we feel disappointed with God himself and need in some way to express this. The psalms give us this voice (“Why are you so silent? Why are you so far from me?”) even as they make us aware that God is not afraid of our anger and bitterness but, like a loving parent, only wants us to come and talk about it.

The psalms are a privileged vehicle for prayer because they lift the full range of our thoughts and feelings to God.

But we tend to struggle with that. First, because our age often fails to grasp metaphor and taken literally, some of the images within the psalms are offensive. Second, we are often in denial about our true feelings. It’s hard to admit that we feel some of the things we sometimes feel: grandiosity, sexual obsessions, jealousies, desire for revenge, murderous thoughts. Too often our prayer belies our actual thoughts and feelings and tells God what we think God wants to hear. The psalms have more honesty.

As Kathleen Norris puts it: If you pray regularly “there is no way you can do it right. You are not always going to sit up straight, let alone think holy thoughts. You’re not going to wear your best clothes but whatever isn’t in the dirty clothes basket. You come to the Bible’s great book of praises through all the moods and conditions of life, and while you feel like hell, you sing anyway. To your surprise, you find that the psalms do not deny your true feelings but allow you to reflect them, right in front of God and everyone.”

Feel good aphorisms that express how we think we ought to feel are no substitute for the earthy realism of the psalms which express how we actually do feel at times. Anyone who would lift mind and heart to God without ever mentioning feelings of bitterness, jealousy, vengeance, hatred and war, is better suited to write greeting cards than to give out spiritual counsel.

(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser is a professor of spirituality at Oblate School of Theology and award-winning author.)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
In the movie “The English Patient” there’s a very heartwarming scene.
A number of people from various countries are thrown together by circumstance in an abandoned villa in post-war Italy. Among them are a young nurse, attending to an English pilot who’s been badly burned in an air crash, and a young Asian man whose job is to find and defuse landmines. The young man and the nurse become friends and, one day, he announces he has a special surprise for her.

He takes her to an abandoned church in which he has set up a series of ropes and pulleys that will lift her to the ceiling where, hidden in darkness, are beautiful mosaics and wonderful works of art that cannot be seen from the floor. He gives her a torch as a light and pulls her up through a series of ropes so that she swings like an angel with wings, high above the floor and is able with the help of her torch to see beautiful masterpieces hidden in the dark.

For her, the experience is one of exhilaration; she has the sensation of flying and of seeing wonderful beauty all at the same time. When she’s finally lowered back to the floor she’s flushed with excitement and gratitude and covers the young man’s face with kisses, saying over and over again: “Thank you, thank you, thank you for showing this to me!”

And from her expression, you see too that she is expressing a double thanks: “Thank you for showing me something that I could never have come to on my own and thank you for trusting me enough to think that I would understand this, for trusting that I would get it!”

There’s a lesson here?

The church needs to do for the world exactly what this young man did for his nurse friend; it needs to show the world where to look for a beauty it would not find on its own, a beauty that is hidden in darkness. And it needs to trust that people will “get it,” will appreciate the richness of what they are being shown.

Where might the church find such hidden beauty? In the deep rich wells of its own history, and in nature, in art, in science, in children, in the energy of the young, and in the wisdom of the old. There are treasures of beauty hidden everywhere. The church’s task is to point these out to the world. Why?

Because beauty has the power to touch and transform the soul, to instill wonder and gratitude in a way that few things have. Confucius understood this. That’s why he suggested that beauty is the greatest of all teachers and why he based his philosophy of education on beauty. People can doubt almost anything, except beauty.

Why can’t beauty be doubted? Because beauty is an attribute of God. Classical Christian philosophy and theology tell us that God has four transcendental properties, namely, God is “One, True, Good and Beautiful.” If this is true, then to be touched by beauty is to be touched by God; to admire beauty is to admire God; to be shown beauty in hidden places is to be shown God in hidden places; to be in awe of beauty is to be in awe of God; and to feel that awe is to feel a homesickness for heaven.

The renowned theologian Hans Urs Von Baltasar highlighted how beauty is a key component in how God speaks to us and how that should color how we speak about God to the world.

However, we shouldn’t be naïve in our understanding of this. Beauty isn’t always pretty in the way that popular culture perceives it. Granted, beauty can be seen in the spectacular colors of a sunset, or in the smile and innocence of a child, or in the perfection of a Michelangelo sculpture, but it can also be seen in the wrinkles of an old woman and in the toothless smile of an old man.

God speaks through beauty and so must we. Moreover, we must believe enough in people’s sensitivity and intelligence to trust that they, like the nurse in “The English Patient,” will appreciate what they are being shown.

In a famous line (often quoted by Dorothy Day) Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky writes: The world will be saved by beauty.

What’s the logic here? How might beauty cure the many ills which beset us?

Here’s Dostoevsky’s algebra: In the face of brutality, what’s needed is tenderness; in the face of hype and ideology, what’s needed is truth; in the face of bitterness and curses, what’s needed are graciousness and blessing; in the face of hatred and murder, what’s needed are love and forgiveness; in the face of the kind of familiarity that breeds contempt, what’s needed are awe and wonder; and in the face the ugliness and vulgarity that pervades our world and our evening news, what’s needed is beauty.

(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser is a professor of spirituality at Oblate School of Theology and award-winning author. He can be contacted through his website www.ronrolheiser.com.)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
Growing up in a Roman Catholic home, devotions were always a vital part of our religious diet. While our family saw the Eucharist as more important than devotions, we nourished our spiritual lives a lot on devotions, as did many Roman Catholics back then.

Among other things, we prayed the rosary every day, prayed the Angelus daily, prayed special litanies (St. Joseph in March, Mary in May and October, and the Sacred Heart of Jesus in June), prayed the Stations of the Cross each Friday in Lent, were anxious to attend Eucharist on First Fridays and First Saturdays to obtain special promises from God, and said special prayers to obtain indulgences.

As well, there were pilgrimages to Marian shrines for those who could afford them and most everyone wore medals from Lourdes or Fatima and had a special devotion to those shrines (with a special devotion in my own family and parish to Our Lady of the Cape, at Cap De Madeleine, Quebec). Devotions were a big part of our spiritual lives.

What’s to be said about devotions from a theological view and from the view of a culture that mostly distrusts them?

We might begin with the reaction of Martin Luther and the great Protestant reformers. They were fearful of two things in devotions. First, at that time, some devotions were too unbridled and were simply bad theology (famously, selling indulgences). Second, they saw devotions, not as necessarily bad in themselves, but as often displacing Jesus and God’s Word as our center and main focus. And so, they distanced themselves from basically all Roman Catholic devotions, the unbridled as well as the healthy.

For the most part that Protestant and Evangelical distrust of Roman Catholic devotions has come down right to our own day. While that distrust is breaking down today in some non-Roman churches today, it is still the prevalent attitude inside most Protestant and Evangelical circles. In brief, they distrust most devotions because they are seen not just as deflecting our focus from the centrality of Jesus and the Word, but also as potentially unhealthy contaminates, as junk food in our spiritual diet.

What’s to be said about that?

It’s a fair and needed warning to Roman Catholics (and others) who nourish their spiritual lives with devotions. Bottom line, devotions can easily ground themselves on shaky theology and can be a junk food contaminating our spiritual diet: where devotions replace scripture, Mary replaces Jesus as center, and certain ritual practices make God seem like a puppet on a string.

However, that being admitted, as Goethe once said, the dangers of life are many and safety is one of those dangers. Yes, devotions can be a danger, but they can also be a rich healthy supplement in our essential diet of Word and Eucharist.

Here’s how Eric Mascall (the renowned Anglican theologian at Oxford with C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Dorothy Sayers, and Austin Ferrar) spells out both the danger of devotions and the danger of not having devotions as part of your spiritual life: The protestant reformers (Luther, Calvin, Zwingli) were so afraid of contamination by Roman Catholic devotions, that they put us on a diet of antiseptics. When you’re on a diet of antiseptics, you won’t suffer from food poisoning, but you can suffer from malnutrition.

That’s an equal challenge to both those who practice devotions and those who fear them. The theology undergirding certain devotions admittedly can be sloppy (for example, Mary is not a co-redeemer with Jesus). However, inside many devotions (to Mary, to the saints, to Eucharist adoration, to the Sacred Heart) there can be a rich nutrition which helps nourish the center, namely, God’s Word and the Eucharist.

The late Wendy Wright in her book “Sacred Heart: Gateway to God” makes a wonderful apologia for Catholic devotional practices, particularly devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. For her, Catholic devotional practices are a tradition of the heart. While Jesus remains central and his resurrection remains the real anchor for our faith, devotions can give us something beyond just this raw essential.

Using devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus as an example, she writes: “In this devotion, we, and Jesus and the saints, exist in some essential way outside the chronology of historical time. The tradition of the heart makes this vividly, even grotesquely, clear. The divine–human correspondence is intimate. It is discovered in the flesh. Our fleshy hearts are fitted for all that is beyond flesh by conforming to the heart of Jesus. That divine–human heart is the passageway between earth and heaven. That heart is the tactile tracings of divine love on the created order. That heart is the widest, wildest longing of humankind’s own love.”

The dangers of life are many and safety is one of those dangers. Devotions can deflect us from what’s more central and can take their root in some questionable theology, but they can also, in Wendy Wright’s words, be a blessed passageway for the heart between heaven and earth.

(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser is a theologian, teacher and award-winning author. He can be contacted through his website www.ronrolheiser.com.)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
My father died when I was twenty-three, a seminarian, green, still learning about life. It’s hard to lose your father at any age, and my grief was compounded by the fact that I had just begun to appreciate what he had given me.

Only later did I realize that I no longer needed him, though I still very much wanted him. What he had to give me, he had already given. I had his blessing.

I knew I had his blessing. My life and the direction it had taken pleased him. Like God’s voice at the baptism of his Jesus, he had already communicated to me: You are my son in whom I am well pleased. Not everyone is that lucky. That’s about as much as a person may ask from a father.

And what did he leave me and the rest of his offspring?

Too much to name, but among other things, moral steadiness. He was one of the most moral people I have ever known, allowing himself minimal moral compromise. He wasn’t a man who bought the line that we are only human and so it’s okay to allow ourselves some exemptions. He used to famously tell us: “Anyone can show me humanity; I need someone to show me divinity!” He expected you not to fail, to live up to what faith and morality asked of you, to not make excuses. If we, his family, inhaled anything from his presence, it was this moral stubbornness.

Beyond this, he had a steady, almost pathological sanity. Today we joke that moderation was his only excess. There were no hysterical outbursts, no depressions, no giddiness, no lack of steadiness, no having to guess where his soul and psyche might be on a given day.

With that steadiness, along with my mother’s supporting presence, he made for us a home that was always a safe cocoon, a boring place sometimes, but always a safe one. When I think of the home where I grew up, I think of a safe shelter where you could look at the storms outside from a place of warmth and security. Again, not everyone is that lucky.

And because we were a large family and his love and attention had to be shared with multiple siblings, I never thought of him as “my” father, but always as “our” father. This has helped me grasp the first challenge in the Lord’s Prayer, namely, that God is “Our” Father, whom we share with others, not a private entity.

Moreover, his family extended to more than his own children. I learned early not to resent the fact that he couldn’t always be with us, that he had good reasons to be elsewhere: work, community, church, hospital and school boards, political involvement. He was an elder for a wider family than just our own.

Finally, not least, he blessed me and my brothers and sisters with a love for baseball. He managed a local baseball team for many years. This was his particular place where he could enjoy some Sabbath.

But blessings never come pure. My father was human, and a man’s greatest strength is often too his greatest weakness. In all that moral fiber and rock-solid sanity, there was also a reticence that sometimes didn’t allow him to fully drink in life’s exuberance. Every son watches how his father dances and unconsciously sizes him up against certain things – hesitancy, fluidity, abandonment, exhibitionism, momentary irrationality, irresponsibility.

My father never had much fluidity or abandon to his dance step, and I have inherited that, something that can pain me deeply. There were times, both as a child and as an adult, when, in a given situation, I would have traded my father for a dad who had a more fluid dance step, for someone with a little less reticence in the face of life’s exuberance.

And that is partly my struggle to receive his full blessing. I’m often reminded of William Blake’s famous line in Infant Sorrow, where he mentions “Struggling in my father’s hands.” For me, that means struggling at times with my dad’s reticence to simply let go and drink in life’s full gift.

But, if there was hesitancy, there was no irresponsibility in his dance, even if sometimes that meant standing outside the dance. I was grieved at his funeral, but proud too, proud of the respect that was poured out for him, for the way he lived his life. There was no judgment that day on his reticence.

I’m older now than he was when he died. My earthly days now outnumber his by fifteen years. But I still live inside his blessing, consciously and unconsciously, striving to measure up, to honor what he gave me. And mostly that’s good, though I also have moments when I find myself standing outside of life’s exuberance, looking in at the dance, reticent, his look on my face, feeling a certain envy of those who have a more fluid dance step – me, ever my father’s son.

(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser is a theologian, teacher and award-winning author. He can be contacted through his website www.ronrolheiser.com.)