IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI

As a Lutheran priest, Dietrich Bonhoeffer would frequently offer this advice to a couple when he presided at their wedding: Today you are in love and believe your love will sustain your marriage, but it can’t. Let your marriage sustain your love.

Wise words, but what exactly do they mean? Why can’t love sustain a marriage?

What Bonhoeffer is highlighting is that it is naïve to think that feelings will sustain us in love and commitment over the long haul. They can’t, and they wouldn’t. But ritual can. How? By creating a ritual container that can keep us steady inside the roller coaster of emotions and feelings that will beset us in any long-term relationship.

Simply put, we will never sustain a long-term relationship with another person, with God, with prayer, or in selfless service on the basis of good feelings and positive emotions. This side of eternity, our feelings and emotions mostly come and go according to their own dictates and are not given to consistency.

We know the inconsistency of our emotions. One day we feel affectionate toward someone and the next day we feel irritated. The same is true for prayer. One day we feel warm and focused and the next day we feel bored and distracted.

And so, Bonhoeffer suggests we need to sustain ourselves in love and prayer by ritual, that is, by habitual practices that keep us steady and committed within the flux of feelings and emotions.

For example, take a couple in a marriage. They fall in love and commit themselves to love each other and stay with each other for the rest of their lives, and at root they fully intend that. They respect each other, are good to each other, and would die for each other. However, that’s not always true of their emotions. Some days their emotions seemingly belie their love. They are irritated and angry with each other. Yet, their actions toward each other continue to express love and commitment and not their negative feelings. They ritually kiss each other as they leave the house in the morning with the words, “I love you!” Are those words a lie? Are they simply going through the motions? Or is this real love?

The same holds true for love and commitment inside a family. Imagine a mother and a father with two teenage children, a boy of sixteen and a girl of fourteen. As a family they have a rule that they will sit together at dinner for forty minutes every evening, without their cellphones or other such devices. Many evenings when the son or daughter or one of the parents comes to the table (without their cellphone) out of dram duty, bored, dreading the time together, wanting to be somewhere else. But they come because they have made that commitment. Are they simply going through the motions or showing real love?

If Bonhoeffer is right, and I submit he is, they are not just going through the motions, they are expressing mature love. It’s easy to express love and be committed when our feelings are taking us there and holding us there. But those good feelings will not sustain our love and commitment in the long-term. Only fidelity to a commitment and ritual actions that undergird that commitment will keep us from walking away when the good feelings go away.

In our culture today, at most every level, this is not understood. From the person caught up in a culture addicted to feelings, to a good number of therapists, ministers of religion, prayer leaders, spiritual directors, and friends of Job, we hear the line: If you aren’t feeling it, it’s not real; you’re just going through the motions! That’s empty ritual!

Indeed, it can be an empty ritual. As scripture says, we can honor with our lips even as our hearts are far away. However, more often than not it is a mature expression of love because it is now a love that is no longer fueled by self-interest and good feelings. It’s now a love that’s wise and mature enough to account for the human condition in all its inadequacy and complexity and how these color and complicate everything – including the one we love, our own selves, and the reality of human love itself.

The book we need on love will not be written by passionate lovers on their honeymoon, just as the book we need on prayer will not be written by a religious neophyte caught up in the first fervor of prayer (nor by most enthusiastic leaders of prayer). The book we need on love will be written by a married couple who, through ritual, have sustained a commitment through the ups and downs of many years. Just as the book we need on prayer will be written by someone who has sustained a life of prayer and church going through seasons and Sundays when sometimes the last thing he or she wanted to do was to pray or go to church.

(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
Several years ago, at a time when the national news was much fixated on a high-profile case of sexual harassment, I asked three women colleagues: “what constitutes sexual harassment? What’s the line here that may not be crossed? What’s innocent behavior and what’s harassment?” They answered to this effect. It’s not so much a question of a clear line, a certain remark or behavior that goes too far. Rather, we know what is innocent and what is not. We can read the energy beneath the behavior. We know when it’s harassment and when it’s not.

I have no doubt that in most instances this is true. All of us have very perceptive inner radar screens. We naturally feel and read the energy in a room – tension, ease, jealousy, affirmation, innocence, aggression. You see this already in very young children, even babies, who can sense ease or tension in a room.

It is interesting that the great Carmelite mystic John of the Cross, draws on this notion when he writes on discernment in spiritual direction. How, he asks, do you discern if a person is in a genuine dark night of the soul (a healthy thing) or whether he is sad and down because of an emotional depression or because of bad moral behavior? John elaborates a number of criteria for discerning this, but ultimately they all come down to reading the energy that the person is radiating. Are they bringing oxygen into the room or are they sucking the oxygen out of the room? Are they depressing you as you listen to them? If yes, then their issue is not spiritual nor healthy. People who are in an authentic dark night of the soul, irrespective of their personal interior struggle, bring positive energy into a room and leave you inspired rather than depressed.

My purpose in sharing is not for us to become more critical and start judging others by trying to consciously read the energy they are radiating. (We are already unconsciously doing that.) What I want to highlight rather, as a challenge, is for each of us to more consciously examine ourselves vis-à-vis what energy we are bringing into a room and leaving behind.

Each of us needs to courageously ask: what energy do I bring into a room? What energy do I bring to the family table? To a community gathering? To those with whom I discuss politics and religion? To my colleagues and fellow workers? To the social circles within which I move? And more deeply, as a parent or as an elder, what energy am I habitually bringing to my children and to the young? As someone teaching or doing ministry, what energy am I radiating as I try to lead others?

That’s a critical question. What energy am I habitually bringing into a room and leaving behind? Frustration? Anger? Chaos? Jealousy? Paranoia? Bitterness? Depression? Instability? Or am I bringing and leaving behind some stability, some sanity, some joy of heart, some energy that blesses rather than curses others? Ultimately, what am I leaving behind?

When Jesus is giving his farewell speech in John’s Gospel, he tells us that it is better for us that he is going away because otherwise we will not be able to receive his spirit; and that his spirit, his final gift to us, is the gift of peace. Two things should be noted here: first, that the disciples couldn’t fully receive what Jesus was giving them until he had gone away; and second, that ultimately his real gift to them, his real legacy, was the peace he left behind with them.

What may seem strange at first glance is that his followers could only fully inhale his energy after he had gone away and left them his spirit. That is also true for each of us. It is only after we leave a room that the energy we left behind is most clear. Thus, it is after we die that the energy we have left behind will constitute our real legacy. If we live in anger and bitterness, in jealousy and unwillingness to affirm others, and if our lives sow chaos and instability, that will be what we ultimately leave behind and will always be part of our legacy. Conversely, if we are trustworthy and live unselfishly, morally, at peace with others, bringing sanity and affirmation into a room, then, like Jesus, we will leave behind a gift of peace. That will be our legacy, the oxygen we leave on the planet after we are gone.

And this is not a question of who can best light up a room with humor and banter, good as these can be. It is rather a question of who has enough personal integrity so as to bring trust and stability into a room?
Given all this, it’s good to ask oneself: when I enter a room am I bringing some oxygen into that room or am I sucking some oxygen out of that room?

(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
Several years ago, I went with another priest to visit a mutual friend. Our friend, a successful businessman, was living on the top floor of a very expensive apartment overlooking the river valley in the city of Edmonton. At one point during our visit, he took us out on his balcony to show us the view. It was spectacular. You could see for miles, the entire river valley and much of the city.

We were in awe and told him so. Thanking us for the compliments, he shared that, sadly, he seldom came out on the balcony to drink in the view. Here are some of his words: “You know, I should give this place to some poor family who could enjoy it. I could live in a basement apartment since I never have time to enjoy this. I can’t remember when I last came out here to watch a sunset or a sunrise. I’m always too busy, too pressured, too preoccupied. This place is wasted on me. About the only time I come out here is when I have visitors and want to show them the view.”

Jesus once said something that might be paraphrased this way: What does it profit you if you gain the whole world and are forever too much in a hurry and too pressured to enjoy it.

When Jesus talks about gaining the whole world and suffering the loss of your own soul, he isn’t first of all referring to having a bad moral life, dying in sin and going to hell. That’s the more radical warning in his message. We can lose our soul in other ways, even while we are good, dedicated, moral people. The man whose story I just shared is indeed a very good, dedicated, moral and kind man. But he is, by his own humble admission, struggling to be a soulful person, to be more inside the richness of his own life because when you live under constant pressure and are perennially forced to hurry, it isn’t easy to get up in the morning and say: “This is the day that the Lord has made, let us be glad and rejoice in it.” We are more likely to say: “Lord, just get me through this day!”

As well, when Jesus tells us that it’s difficult for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, he isn’t just referring to material riches, money and affluence, though these are contained in the warning. The problem can also be a rich agenda, a job or a passion that so consumes us that we rarely take the time (or even think of taking the time) to enjoy the beauty of a sunset or the fact that we are healthy and have the privilege of having a rich agenda.

Full disclosure, this is one of my struggles. During all my years in ministry, I have always been blessed with a rich agenda, important work, work that I love. But, when I’m honest, I need to admit that during these years I have been too hurried and over pressured to watch many sunsets (unless, like my friend, I was pointing out their beauty to a visitor).

I have tried to break out of this by conscripting myself to regular times of quiet prayer, regular walks, retreats, and several weeks of vacation each year. That has helped, no doubt, but I’m still too much of an addict, pressured and hurried almost all the time, longing for space for quiet, for prayer, for sunsets, for a hike in a park, for a glass of wine or scotch, for a contemplative cigar. And I recognize an irony here: I’m hurrying and tiring myself out in order to carve out some time to relax!

I’m no Thomas Merton, but I take consolation in the fact that he, a monk in a monastery, was often too busy and pressured to find solitude. In search of that, he spent the last few years of his life in hermitage, away from the main monastery except for Eucharist and the office of the church each day. Then, when he found solitude, he was surprised at how different it was from the way he had imagined it. Here’s how he describes it in his diary:

Today I am in solitude because at this moment “it is enough to be, in an ordinary human mode, with one’s hunger and sleep, one’s cold and warmth, rising and going to bed. Putting on blankets and taking them off, making coffee and then drinking it. Defrosting the refrigerator, reading, meditating, working, praying. I live as my ancestors lived on this earth, until eventually I die. Amen. There is no need to make an assertion about my life, especially so about it as mine … I must learn to live so as to forget program and artifice.”

And to check out the sunset from my balcony!

When we are rich, busy, pressured and preoccupied, it’s hard to taste one’s own coffee.

(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
Inside each of us, beyond what we can picture clearly, express in words, or even feel distinctly, we have a dark memory of having once been touched and caressed by hands far gentler than our own. That caress has left a permanent mark, an imprint of a love so tender and deep that its memory becomes a prism through which we see everything else. This imprint lies beyond conscious memory but forms the center of our soul.

This is not an easy concept to explain. Bernard Lonergan, one of the great intellectuals of the past century, tried to explain it philosophically by saying we bear inside us “the brand of the first principles,” namely, the oneness, truth, goodness and beauty which are the attributes of God. That’s accurate, but abstract. Maybe the old myths and legends capture it better when they say that, before birth, each soul is kissed by God, and it then goes through life always in some dark way remembering that kiss and measuring everything it experiences in relation to that original sweetness. To be in touch with your heart is to be in touch with this primordial kiss, with both its preciousness and its meaning.

What exactly is being said here?

Within each of us, at that place where all that is most precious within us lives, there is an inchoate sense of having once been touched, caressed, loved, and valued in a way that is beyond anything we have ever consciously experienced. In fact, all the goodness, love, value, and tenderness we experience in life fall short precisely because we are already in touch with something deeper. When we feel frustrated, angry, betrayed, violated or enraged, it is because our outside experience is antithetical to what we already hold dear inside.

We all have this place, a place in the heart, where we hold all that is most precious and sacred to us. From that place our own kisses issue forth, as do our tears. It is the place that we most guard from others, but the place where we would most want others to come into; the place where we are the most deeply alone and the place of intimacy; the place of innocence and the place where we are violated; the place of our compassion and the place of our rage. In that place we are holy. There we are temples of God, sacred churches of truth and love. There we bear God’s image.

But this needs understanding: the image of God inside of us is not a beautiful icon stamped inside of our soul. No. The image and likeness of God inside us is energy, fire and memory; especially the memory of a touch so tender and loving that its goodness and truth become the prism through which we ultimately see everything. Thus, we recognize goodness and truth outside of us precisely because they resonate with something that is already inside us. Things touch our hearts when they touch us here. Isn’t it because we have already been deeply touched and caressed that we passionately seek a soulmate, that we seek someone to join us in this intimate place?

And, consciously and unconsciously, we measure everything in life by how it touches this place: why do certain experiences touch us so deeply? Why do our hearts burn within us in the presence of any truth, love, goodness or tenderness that is genuine and deep? Is not all deep knowledge simply a waking up to something we already know? Is not all love simply a question of being respected for something we already are? Are not the touch and tenderness that bring ecstasy nothing other than the stirring of deep memory? Are not the ideals that inspire hope only the reminder of words somebody has already spoken to us? Does not our desire for innocence (and innocent means “not wounded”) mirror some primal unwounded place deep within us? And when we feel violated, is it not because someone has irreverently entered the sacred inside us?

When we are in touch with this memory and respect its sensitivities, we are in touch with our souls. At those times, faith, hope and love will spring up in us, joy and tears will both flow through us freely, and we will be deeply affected by the innocence and beauty of children, as pain and gratitude alternately bring us to our knees.

That is what it means to be recollected, centered. To be truly ourselves is to remember, to touch and to feel the memory of God’s original touch in us. That memory fires our energy and provides us with a prism through which to see and understand.

Sadly, today, too often a wounded, calloused, cynical, over sophisticated and overly adult world invite us to forget God’s kiss in the soul, to view this as childish. But, unless we lie to ourselves and harden ourselves against our own ourselves (the most dangerous of all activities), we will always remember, dimly, darkly, unrelentingly, the caress of God.

(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

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Most of us are familiar with these words from Robert Frost which have been used countless times in graduation and commencement addresses and other inspirational talks as a challenge to not just follow the crowd, but rather to risk carrying yourself and your solitude at a higher level. Well, Jesus offers us that same invitation daily as we stand looking at two very different roads.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus summarizes many of his key teachings. However, they are easy to misunderstand and rationalize. Mostly though we don’t pick up on what lies front and center in those teachings, that is, how our virtue must go deeper than that of the Scribes and the Pharisees. What’s at issue here?

Most of the Scribes and Pharisees were good, sincere, committed, religious people with a high virtue. They kept the Commandments and were women and men who practiced a strict justice. They were fair to everyone and indeed were extra gracious and generous to strangers. So, what’s lacking in this? Well, good as this is, it doesn’t go far enough. Why not?

Because you can be a person of moral integrity, fully just and generous, and still be hateful, vengeful and violent because these can still be done in justice. In strict justice you may hate someone who hates you, you may exact revenge when you are wronged, and you may practice capital punishment. An eye for an eye!

But, in doing that you are still doing what comes naturally. It is natural to love those who love you, just as it is natural to hate those who hate you. Real virtue asks more than this. Jesus invites us to something higher. He invites us to love those who hate us, to bless those who curse us, to never seek revenge, and to forgive those who kill us – even mass murderers.

Admittedly, that isn’t an easy road to take. Almost every natural instinct inside us resists this. What’s our spontaneous reaction when we are wronged? We feel vengeful. What’s our natural reaction when we hear that the gunman at a mass killing was killed? We feel relieved. What’s our natural reaction when an unrepentant murderer is executed? We feel happy he died; and we cannot help ourselves in that reaction. There’s the sense that justice has been served. Something has been righted in the universe. Our moral indignation has been assuaged. There’s closure.

Or is there? Not really. What we feel rather is emotional release, catharsis; but there’s a huge difference between catharsis and real closure. While the emotional release may even be healthy psychologically, we are invited (by Jesus and by all that’s highest inside us) to something else, to a road beyond feeling emotional release, namely, the less travelled road towards wide compassion, understanding and forgiveness.
In assessing this, it can be helpful to look at how Pope John Paul II addressed the question of capital punishment. He was the first pope in the Church’s two-thousand-year history to speak out against capital punishment. Interestingly, he didn’t say it was wrong. Indeed, in strict justice it may be done. What he said was simply that we shouldn’t do it because Jesus invites us to something else, namely, to forgive murderers.

Easier said than done! When I hear of a mass shooting, my thoughts and feelings don’t naturally turn toward understanding and empathy for the shooter. I don’t agonize about how he must have suffered to bring himself to do something like this. I don’t naturally feel sympathy for those who because of fragile or broken mental health might do something like that. Rather my emotions naturally put me on the road more traveled, telling me that this is a terrible human being who deserves to die! Empathy and forgiveness aren’t the first things that find me in these situations. Hateful and vengeful feelings do.
However, that is the road of our emotions, the road more taken. Understandable. Who wants to feel sympathy for a killer, an abuser, a bully?

But that’s only our emotions venting. Something else inside us is forever calling us to what’s higher, namely, to the empathy and understanding to which Jesus invites us in the Sermon on the Mount. Love those who hate you. Bless those who curse you. Forgive those who murder you.

Moreover, such virtue is not something we ever achieve once and for all. No. Faith works this way: some days we walk on water and some days we sink like a stone.

So, like Robert Frost, on any given day I find myself standing where two roads diverge. One, the road more traveled, invites me to walk the road of hate, vengeance, and feeling I am a victim; the other, the road less taken, invites me to walk the road of wider compassion, empathy and forgiveness.

Which one do I take? Sometimes one, sometimes the other; though always I know the one to which Jesus is inviting me.

(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

Prayer is most needed just when it seems most useless. Michael J. Buckley, one of the major spiritual mentors in my life, wrote those words. What does he mean by them?

In the face of so many problems we can get the feeling that praying about them is useless. For example, in the face of the discouragement and helplessness we feel before some of the mega problems in our world, it is easy to feel that praying about them is useless. What will my prayer do vis-à-vis the wars raging in different parts of the world? What’s the value of my prayer in the face of injustice, famine, racism and sexism? What will my prayer do vis-à-vis the divisions and hatred now dividing our communities? It is easy to feel that praying about these situations is useless.

The same holds true about how we often feel about the value of prayer when serious illnesses beset us. Will prayer bring about a cure for someone with terminal cancer? Do we really expect a miraculous cure? Mostly, we don’t, but we continue to pray despite the feeling that our prayer won’t in fact change the situation. Why?

Why pray when it seems useless to do so? Theologians and spiritual writers have given us various perspectives on this which are helpful, though not adequate. Prayer, they say, is not meant to change the mind of God, but to change the mind of the person who is praying. We don’t pray to put God on our side; we pray to put ourselves on God’s side. As well, we have been taught that the reason it might seem that God doesn’t answer our prayers is that God, like a loving parent, knows what is good for us and answers our prayers by giving us what we really need rather than what we naively want. C.S. Lewis once said that we will spend a lot of time in eternity thanking God for those prayers that God didn’t answer.

All of this is true and important. God’s ways are not our ways. Faith asks us to give God the space and time to be God, without having to conform to our very limited expectations and habitual impatience. We can indeed be grateful that God doesn’t answer many of our prayers according to our expectations.

But still, still … when Jesus invited us to pray, he didn’t do so with a caveat: but you need to ask for the right things if you expect me to answer your prayer. No, he simply said: Ask and you will receive. He also said that some demons are only cast out by prayer and fasting.

So, how might the demons of violence, division, hatred, war, hunger, global warming, famine, racism, sexism, cancer, heart disease and the like be cast out by prayer? How is prayer useful in any practical way in the face of these issues?

In brief, prayer doesn’t just change the person who is praying, it also changes the situation. When you pray you are in fact part of the situation about which you are praying. Sincere prayer helps you become the change you are praying to bring about. For example, praying for peace helps you to calm your own heart and bring a more peaceful heart into the world.

While this is true, there is also a deeper reality at play. More deeply, when we pray there is something happening that goes beyond how we normally imagine the simple interplay between cause and effect. By changing ourselves we are changing the situation; yes, but in a deeper way than we normally imagine.

As Christians, we believe that we are part of a body, the Body of Christ, and that our union there with each other is more than some idealized corporate community. Rather, we are part of a living organism in which every part affects every other part, just as in a physical body. Because of this, for us, there is no such a thing as a private act – good or bad. I hesitate to suggest that this is analogous to the immune system inside the human body because this is more than an analogy. It’s real, organic. Just as in a human body there is an immune system which protects the health of the overall body by killing off cells and viruses that are endangering its health, so too inside the Body of Christ. At all times, we are either healthy cells bringing strength to the immune system inside the Body of Christ or we are a virus or cancerous cell threatening its health. Praying about an issue makes a difference because it helps strengthen the immune system inside the Body of Christ – precisely as it is dealing with the issue about which we are praying.

While on the surface prayer can sometimes feel useless, it is doing something vital underneath – something most needed precisely when we feel that our prayer is useless.

(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
Our own complexity can be befuddling. We are better than we think and worse than we imagine, too hard and too easy on ourselves all at the same time. We are a curious mix.

On the one hand, we are good. All of us are made in the image and likeness of God and are, as Aristotle and Aquinas affirm, metaphysically good. That’s true, but our goodness is also less abstract. We are good too, at least most of the time, in our everyday lives.

Generally, we are generous, often to a fault. Despite appearances sometimes, mostly we are warm and hospitable. The same is true in terms of the basic intent in both our minds and our hearts. We have big hearts. Inside everyone, easily triggered by the slightest touch of love or affirmation, lies a big heart, a grand soul, a magna anima, that’s itching to be altruistic. Mostly the problem isn’t with our goodness, but with our frustration in trying to live that out in the world. Too often we appear cold and self-centered when we’re only frustrated, hurt and wounded.
We don’t always appear to be good, but mostly we are; though often we are frustrated because we cannot (for reasons of circumstance, wound and sensitivity) pour out our goodness as we would like, nor embrace the world and those around us with the warmth that’s in us. We go through life looking for a warm place to show who we are and often don’t find it. We’re not so much bad as frustrated. We’re more loving than we imagine.

But that’s half of it, there’s another side: we’re also sinners, more so than we think. An old Protestant dictum about human nature, based on St. Paul, puts it accurately: “It’s not a question of are you a sinner? It’s only a question of what is your sin?” We’re all sinners, and just as we possess a big heart and a grand soul, we also possess a petty one (a pusilla anima). At the very roots of our instinctual make-up, there’s selfishness, jealousy, and pettiness of heart and mind.

Moreover, we are often blind to our real faults. As Jesus says, we easily see the speck on our neighbor’s eye and miss the plank in our own. And that generally makes for a strange irony, that is, where we think we are sinners is usually not the place where others struggle the most with us or where our real faults lie. Conversely, it’s in those areas where we think we are virtuous and righteous that often our real sin lies and where others struggle with us.

For example, we’ve have forever put a lot of emphasis on the sixth commandment and haven’t been nearly as self-scrutinizing in regard to the fifth commandment (which deals with bitterness, judgments, anger and hatred) or with the ninth and tenth commandments (that have to do with jealousy). It’s not that sexual ethics are unimportant, but our failures here are harder to rationalize. The same isn’t true for bitterness, anger, especially righteous anger, nor for jealousy. We can more easily rationalize these and not notice that jealousy is the only sin for which God felt it necessary to write two commandments. We are worse than we imagine and mostly blind to our real faults.

So where does that leave us? In better and worse shape than we think. If we could recognize that we’re more lovely than we imagine and more sinful than we suppose, that could be helpful both for our self-understanding and for how we understand God’s love and grace in our lives.

Aristotle says, “two contraries cannot co-exist within the same subject.” He’s right metaphysically, but two contraries can (and do) exist inside of us morally. We’re both good and bad, generous and selfish, big-hearted and petty, gracious and bitter, forgiving and resentful, hospitable and cold, full of grace and full of sin, all at the same time. Moreover, we’re generally too blind to both, too unaware of our loveliness as well as of our nastiness.

To recognize this can be humbling and freeing. We are loved sinners. Both goodness and sin make up our identity. Not to recognize this truth leaves us either unhealthily depressed or dangerously inflated, too hard or too easy on ourselves. The truth will set us free, and the truth about ourselves is that we’re both better and worse than we picture ourselves to be.

Robert Funk once formulated three dictums on grace which speak to this. He writes:

• Grace always wounds from behind, at the point where we think we are least vulnerable.
• Grace is harder than we think: we moralize judgment in order to take the edge off it.
• Grace is more indulgent than we think: but it is never indulgent at the point where we think it might be indulgent.
  We need to be both easier and harder on ourselves – and open to the way grace works.

(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

What is the Ascension? The Ascension is an event in of the life of Jesus and his original disciples, a feast day for Christians, a theology, and a spirituality, all woven together into one amorphous mystery that we too seldom try to unpackage and sort out. What does the Ascension mean?

Among other things, it is a mystery that is strangely paradoxical. Here’s the paradox: there is a wonderful life-giving gift in someone entering our lives, touching us, nurturing us, doing things that build us up, and giving life for us. But there’s also a gift in the other eventually having to say goodbye to the way he or she has been present to us. Passing strange, there’s also a gift in one’s going away. Presence also depends upon absence. There’s a blessing we can only give when we go away.

That’s why Jesus, when bidding farewell to his friends before his ascension, spoke these words: “It’s better for you that I go away. You will be sad now, but your sadness will turn to joy. Don’t cling to me, I must ascend.”

How might we understand these words? How can it be better that someone we love goes away? How can the sadness of a goodbye, of a painful leaving, turn to joy? How can a goodbye eventually bring us someone’s deeper presence?

This is hard to explain, though we have experiences of this in our lives. Here’s an example: When I was twenty-two years old, in the space of four months, my father and mother died, both still young. For myself and my siblings, the pain of their deaths was searing. Initially, as with every major loss, what we felt was pain, severance, coldness, helplessness, a new vulnerability, the loss of a vital life-connection, and the brute facticity of the definitiveness of death for which there is no adequate preparation. There’s nothing warm, initially, in any loss, death, or painful goodbye.

Time, of course, is a great healer, but there’s more to this than simply the fact that we become anaesthetized by the passage of time. After a while, and for me this took several years, I didn’t feel cold anymore. My parents’ deaths were no longer a painful thing. Instead their absence turned into a warm presence, the heaviness gave way to a certain lightness of soul, their seeming incapacity to speak to me now turned into a surprising new way of having their steady, constant presence in my life, and the blessing that they were never able to fully give me while they were alive began to seep ever more deeply and irrevocably into the very core of my person. The same was true for my siblings. Our sadness turned to joy and we began to find our parents again, in a deeper way, at a deeper place of soul, namely, in those places where their spirits had flourished while they were alive. They had ascended, and we were better for it.

We have this kind of experience frequently, just in less dramatic ways. Parents, for instance, experience this, often excruciatingly, when a child grows up and eventually goes away to start life on his or her own. A real death takes place and an ascension must happen. An old way of relating must die, painful as that death is. Yet, as we know, it’s better that our children go away.

The same is true everywhere in life. When we visit someone, it’s important that we come; it’s also important that we leave. Our leaving, painful though it is, is part of the gift of our visit. Our presence depends partly on our absence.

And this must be carefully distinguished from what we mean by the axiom: Absence makes the heart grow fonder. For the most part, that’s not true. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, but only for a while and mostly for the wrong reasons. Physical absence, simple distance from each other, without a deeper dynamic of spirit entering beneath, ends more relationships than it deepens. In the end, most of the time, we simply grow apart. That’s not how the ascension deepens intimacy, presence and blessing.

The ascension deepens intimacy by giving us a new presence, a deeper, richer one, but one which can only come about if our former way of being present is taken away. Perhaps we understand this best in the experience we have when our children grow up and leave home. It’s painful to see them grow away from us. It’s painful to have to say goodbye. It’s painful to let someone ascend.

But, if their words could in fact say what their hearts intuit, they would say what Jesus said before his ascension: “It’s better for you that I go away. There will be sadness now, but that sadness will turn to joy when, one day soon, I will be standing before you as an adult son or daughter who is now able to give you the much deeper gift of my adulthood.”

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