IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
Most of us have heard of St. Therese of Lisieux, a French mystic who died at age 24 in 1897 and who is perhaps the most popular saint of the last two centuries. She’s famous for many things, not least for a spirituality she called her “little way.”

Popular thought has often encrusted both Therese and her “little way” within a simple piety which doesn’t do justice to the depth of her person or her spirituality. Too often her “little way” is understood simply to mean that we do little, hidden, humble, acts of charity for others in the name of Jesus, without expecting anything in return. In this popular interpretation we do the laundry, peel potatoes, and smile at unpleasant people to please Jesus. In some ways, of course, this is true; however her “little way” merits a deeper understanding.

Yes, it does ask us to do humble chores and be nice to each other in the name of Jesus but there are deeper dimensions to it. Her “little way” is a path to sanctity based on three things: littleness, anonymity and a particular motivation.

Littleness: For Therese “littleness” does not refer first of all to the littleness of the act that we are doing, like the humble tasks of doing the laundry, peeling potatoes or giving a simple smile to someone who’s unpleasant. It refers to our own littleness, to our own radical poverty before God. Before God, we are little. To accept and act out of that constitutes humility. We move towards God and others in her “little way” when we do small acts of charity for others, not out of our strength and the virtue we feel at that moment, but rather out of a poverty, powerlessness and emptiness that allows God’s grace to work through us so that in doing what we’re doing we’re drawing others to God and not to ourselves.

As well, our littleness makes us aware that, for the most part, we cannot do the big things that shape world history. But we can change the world more humbly, by sowing a hidden seed, by being a hidden antibiotic of health inside the soul of humanity and by splitting the atom of love inside our own selves. And yes, too, the “little way” is about doing little, humble, hidden things.

Anonymity: Therese’s “little way” refers to what’s hidden, to what’s done in secret, so that what the Father sees in secret will be rewarded in secret. And what’s hidden is not our act of charity, but we, ourselves, who are doing the act. In Therese’s “little way” our little acts of charity will go mostly unnoticed, will seemingly have no real impact on world history and won’t bring us any recognition. They’ll remain hidden and unnoticed; but inside the Body of Christ what’s hidden, selfless, unnoticed, self-effacing, and seemingly insignificant and unimportant is the most vital vehicle of all for grace at a deeper level. Just as Jesus did not save us through sensational miracles and headline-making deeds but through selfless obedience to his Father and quiet martyrdom, our deeds too can remain unknown so that our deaths and the spirit we leave behind can become our real fruitfulness.

Finally, her “little way” is predicated on a particular motivation. We are invited to act out of our littleness and anonymity and do small acts of love and service to others for a particular reason, that is, to, metaphorically, wipe the face of the suffering Christ. How so?

Therese of Lisieux was an extremely blessed and gifted person. Despite a lot of tragedy in her early life, she was (by her own admission and testimony of others) loved in a way that was so pure, so deep and so wonderfully affectionate that it leaves most people in envy. She was also a very attractive child and was bathed in love and security inside an extended family within which her every smile and tear were noticed, honored and often photographed. But as she grew in maturity it didn’t take her long to notice that what was true in her life wasn’t true of most others. Their smiles and tears went mostly unnoticed and were not honored. Her “little way” is therefore predicated on this particular motivation.

In her own words: “One Sunday, looking at a picture of Our Lord on the Cross, I was struck by the blood flowing from one of his divine hands. I felt a pang of great sorrow when thinking this blood was falling on the ground without anyone’s hastening to gather it up. I was resolved to remain in spirit at the foot of the Cross and to receive its dew. … Oh, I don’t want this precious blood to be lost. I shall spend my life gathering it up for the good of souls. … To live from love is to dry Your Face.”

To live her “little way” is to notice and honor the unnoticed tears falling from the suffering faces of others.

(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, Texas. He can be contacted through his website www.ronrolheiser.com. Now on Facebook www.facebook.com/ronrolheiser)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
What would Jesus do? For some Christians, that’s the easy answer to every question. In every situation all we need to ask is: What would Jesus do?

At a deep level, that’s actually true. Jesus is the ultimate criterion. He is the way, the truth, and the life and anything that contradicts him is not a way to God. Yet, I suspect, many of us find ourselves irritated in how that expression is often used in simplistic ways, as a fundamentalism difficult to digest. Sometimes, in our irritation at this, we spontaneously want to say: Jesus has nothing to do with this! But, of course, as soon as those words escape our mouths we realize how bad that sounds! Jesus has a lot to do with every theological, ecclesial or liturgical question, no matter its complexity. Granted, there’s the danger of fundamentalism here; but it’s equally as dangerous to answer theological, ecclesial and liturgical questions without considering what Jesus might do. He’s still, and forever, a non-negotiable criterion.

But while Jesus is a non-negotiable criterion, he’s not a simplistic one. What did Jesus do? Well, the answer isn’t simple. Looking at his life we see that sometimes he did things one way, sometimes another way, and sometimes he started out doing something one way and ended up changing his mind and doing it in a different way, as we see in his interaction with the Syro-Phoenician woman. That’s why, I suspect, within Christianity there are so many different denominations, spiritualities and ways of worship, each with its own interpretation of Jesus. Jesus is complex.

Given Jesus’ complexity, it’s no accident then that theologians, preachers and spiritualities often find in his person and his teachings ways that reflect more how they would handle a situation than how he would. We see this in our churches and spiritualities everywhere, and I say this with sympathy, not with judgment. None of us gets Jesus fully right.

So where does this leave us? Do we simply rely on our private interpretation of Jesus? Do we give ourselves over uncritically to some ecclesial or academic authority and trust that it will tell us what Jesus would do in every situation? Is there a “third” way?

Well, there’s a “third” way, the way of most Christian denominations, wherein we submit our private interpretation to the canonical (“dogmatic”) tradition of our particular church and accept, though not in blind, uncritical obedience, the interpretation of that larger community, its longer history, and its wider experience, humbly accepting that it can be naïve (and arrogant) to bracket 2000 years of Christian experience so as to believe that our insight into Jesus is a needed corrective to a vision that has inspired so many millions of people through so many centuries.

Still, we’re not meant to park the dictates of our private conscience, our critical questions, our unease with certain things and the wounds we carry, at our church door either. In the end, we all must be true to our own consciences, faithful to the particular insights that God graces us with, and mindful of the wounds we carry. Both our graces and our wounds are meant to be listened to and they, along with the deepest voices within our conscience, need to be taken into account when ask ourselves: What would Jesus do?

We need to answer that for ourselves by faithfully holding and carrying within us the tension between being obedient to our churches and not betraying the critical voices within our own conscience. If we do that honestly, one thing will eventually constellate inside us as an absolute: God is good! Everything Jesus taught and incarnated was predicated on that truth. Anything that jeopardizes or belies that, be it a church, a theology, a liturgical practice, or a spirituality is wrong. And any voice within dogma or private conscience that betrays that is also wrong.

How we conceive of God colors for good or for bad everything within our religious practice. And above all else, Jesus revealed this about God: God is good. That truth needs to ground everything else, our churches, our theologies, our spiritualities, our liturgies and our understanding of everyone else. Sadly, often it doesn’t. The fear that God is not good disguises itself in subtle ways but is always manifest whenever our religious teachings or practices somehow make God in heaven not as understanding, merciful, and indiscriminate and unconditional in love as Jesus was on earth. It’s also manifest whenever we fear that we’re dispensing grace too cheaply and making God too accessible.

Sadly, the God who is met in our churches today is often too-narrow, too-merciless, too-tribal, too-petty, and too-untrustworthy to be worthy of Jesus … or the surrender of our soul.

(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, Texas. He can be contacted through his website www.ronrolheiser.com. Now on Facebook www.facebook.com/ronrolheiser)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
We’re all familiar, I suspect, with the difference between justice and charity. Charity is giving away some of your time, energy, resources and person so as to help to others in need. And that’s an admirable virtue, the sign of a good heart. Justice, on the other hand, is less about directly giving something away than it is about looking to change the conditions and systems that put others in need.
No doubt, we’re all familiar with the little parable used to illustrate this difference. In brief, it goes like this: A town situated on the edge of a river finds itself confronted every day by a number of bodies floating downstream in the river. The townsfolk tend to the bodies, minister to those who are alive and respectfully bury the dead.

They do this for years, with good hearts; but, through all those years, none of them ever journey up the river to look at why there are wounded and dead bodies floating in the river each day. The townsfolk are good-hearted and charitable, but that in itself isn’t changing the situation that’s bringing them wounded and dead bodies daily. As well, the charitable townsfolk aren’t even remotely aware that their manner of life, seemingly completely unconnected to the wounded and dead bodies they’re daily attending to, might in fact be contributing to the cause of those lost lives and dreams and that, good-hearted as they are, they may be complicit in something that’s harming others, even while it’s affording them the resources and wherewithal to be charitable.

The lesson here is not that we shouldn’t be charitable and good-hearted. One-to-one charity, as the parable of the Good Samaritan makes clear, is what’s demanded of us, both as humans and as Christians. The lesson is that being good-hearted alone is not enough. It’s a start, a good one, but more is asked of us. I suspect most of us already know this, but perhaps we’re less conscious of something less obvious, namely, that our very generosity itself might be contributing to a blindness that lets us support (and vote for) the exact political, economic and cultural systems which are to blame for the wounded and dead bodies we’re attending to in our charity.

That our own good works of charity can help blind us to our complicity in injustice is something highlighted in a recent book by Anand Giridharada, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World. In a rather unsettling assertion, Giridharada submits that generosity can be, and often is, a substitute for and a means of avoiding the necessity of a more just and equitable system and fairer distribution of power. Charity, wonderful as it is, is not yet justice; a good heart, wonderful as it is, in not yet good policy that serves the less-privileged; and philanthropy, wonderful as it is, can have us confuse the charity we’re doing with the justice that’s asked of us. For this reason among others, Giridharada submits that public problems should not be privatized and relegated to the domain of private charity, as is now so often the case.

Christiana Zenner, reviewing his book in America, sums this up by saying: “Beware of the temptation to idealize a market or an individual who promises salvation without attending to the least among us and without addressing the conditions that facilitated the domination in the first place.” Then she adds: When we see the direct violation of another person, a direct injustice, we’re taken aback, but the unfairness and the perpetrator are obvious. We see that something is wrong and we can see who is to blame. But, and this is her real point, when we live with unjust systems that violate others we can be blind to our own complicity because we can feel good about ourselves because our charity is helping those who have been violated.

For example: Imagine I’m a good-hearted man who feels a genuine sympathy for the homeless in my city. As the Christmas season approaches I make a large donation of food and money to the local food bank. Further still, on Christmas day itself, before I sit down to eat my own Christmas dinner, I spend several hours helping serve a Christmas meal to the homeless. My charity here is admirable and I cannot help but feel good about what I just did. And what I did was a good thing! But then, when I support a politician or a policy that privileges the rich and is unfair to the poor, I can more easily rationalize that I’m doing my just part and that I have a heart for the poor, even as my vote itself helps ensure that there will always be homeless people to feed on Christmas day.

Few virtues are as important as charity. It’s the sign of a good heart. But the deserved good feeling we get when we give of ourselves in charity should not be confused with the false feeling that we’re really doing our part.

(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, Texas.)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
Everywhere in church circles today you hear a lament: Our churches are emptying. We’ve lost our youth. This generation no longer knows or understands the classical theological language. We need to announce Jesus again, as if for the first time, but how? The church is becoming evermore marginalized.

That’s the situation pretty much everywhere within the secularized world today. Why is this happening? Faith as a spent project? Secularity’s adolescent grandiosity before the parent who gave it birth, Judeo-Christianity? The “buffered self” that Charles Taylor describes? Affluence? Or is the problem mainly with the churches themselves? Sexual abuse? Cover-up? Poor liturgies? Poor preaching? Churches too liberal? Churches too conservative?

I suspect it’s some combination of all of these, but I’ll single out one issue here to highlight, affluence. Jesus told us that it’s difficult (impossible, he says) for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven. No doubt, that’s a huge part of our present struggle. We’re good at being Christians when we’re poor, less educated and on the margins of mainstream society. We’ve had centuries of practice at this. What we haven’t had any practice at, and aren’t any good at, is how to be Christians when we’re affluent, sophisticated and constitute the cultural mainstream.

So, I’m suggesting that what we need today is not so much a new pastoral approach as a new kind of saint, an individual man or woman who can model for us practically what it means to live out the Gospel in a context of affluence and secularity. Why this?

One of the lessons of history is that often genuine religious renewal, the type that actually reshapes the religious imagination, does not come from think-tanks, conferences and church synods, but from graced individuals – saints, wild men and women who, like Saint Augustine, Saint Francis, Saint Clare, Saint Dominic, Saint Ignatius or other such religious figures can reshape our religious imagination. They show us that the new lies elsewhere, that what needs fixing in the church will not be mended simply by patching the old. What’s needed is a new religious and ecclesial imagination. Charles Taylor, in his highly-respected study of secularity, suggests that what we’re undergoing today is not so much a crisis of faith as a crisis of imagination. No Christians before us have ever lived within this kind of world.
What will this new kind of saint, this new St. Francis, look like? I honestly don’t know. Neither, it seems, does anyone else. We have no answer yet, at least not one that’s been able to bear much fruit in the mainstream culture. That’s not surprising. The type of imagination that reshapes history isn’t easily found. In the meantime we’ve come about as far as we can along the road that used to take us there, but which for many of our children no longer does.

Here’s our quandary: We’re better at knowing what to do once we get people into a church than we are at knowing how to get them there. Why? Our weakness, I believe, lies not in our theological imagination where we have rich theological and biblical insights aplenty. What we lack are saints on the ground, men and women who, in a passion and fidelity that’s at once radically faithful to God and fiercely empathic to our secular world, can incarnate their faith into a way of living that can show us, practically, how we can be poor and humble disciples of Jesus even as we walk in an affluent and highly secularized world.

And such new persons will appear. We’ve been at this spot before in history and have always found our way forward. Every time the world believes it has buried Christ, the stone rolls back from the tomb; every time the cultural ethos declares that the churches are on an irrevocable downward slide, the Spirit intervenes and there’s soon an about face; every time we despair, thinking that our age can now longer produce saints and prophets, some Augustine or Francis comes along and shows that our age, like times of old, can too produce its saints; and every time our imaginations run dry, as they have now, we find that our scriptures are still full of fresh insight. We may lack imagination, but we don’t lack hope.

Christ promised we will not be orphaned, and that promise is sure. God is still with us and our age will produce its own prophets and saints. What’s asked of us in the moment is biblical patience, to wait on God. Christianity may look tired, tried and spent to a culture within which affluence and sophistication are its current gods, but hope is already beginning to show its face. As secularization, with its affluence and sophistication, marches unswervingly forward we’re already beginning to see a number of men and women who have found ways to become post-affluent and post-sophisticated. These will be the new religious leaders who will teach us and our children, how to live as Christians in this new situation.

(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, Texas.)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
We tend to nurse a certain naiveté about what faith means in the face of death. The common notion among us as Christians is that if someone has a genuine faith she should be able to face death without fear or doubt. The implication then of course is that having fear and doubt when one is dying is an indication of a weak faith. While it’s true that many people with a strong faith do face death calmly and without fear, that’s not always the case, nor necessarily the norm.

We can begin with Jesus. Surely he had real faith and yet, in the moments just before his death, he called out in both fear and doubt. His cry of anguish, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me,” came from a genuine anguish that was not, as we sometimes piously postulate, uttered for divine effect, not really meant, but something for us to hear. Moments before he died, Jesus suffered real fear and real doubt. Where was his faith? Well, that depends upon how we understand faith and the specific modality it can take on in our dying.

In her famous study of the stages of dying, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, suggests there are five stages we undergo in the dying process: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Our first response to receiving a terminal diagnosis is denial – This is not happening! Then when we have to accept that it is happening our reaction is anger – Why me! Eventually, anger gives way to bargaining – How much time can I still draw out of this? This is followed by depression and finally, when nothing serves us any longer, there’s acceptance – I’m going to die. This is all very true.

But in a deeply insightful book, The Grace in Dying, Kathleen Dowling Singh, basing her insights upon the experience of sitting at the bedside of many dying people, suggests there are additional stages: doubt, resignation and ecstasy. Those stages help shed light on how Jesus faced his death.

The night before he died, in Gethsemane, Jesus accepted his death, clearly. But that acceptance was not yet full resignation. That only took place the next day on the cross in a final surrender when, as the Gospels put it, “he bowed his head and gave over his spirit.” And, just before that, he experienced an awful fear that what he had always believed in and taught about God was perhaps not so. Maybe the heavens were empty and maybe what we deem as God’s promises amount only to wishful thinking.
But, as we know, he didn’t give into that doubt but rather, inside of its darkness, gave himself over in trust. Jesus died in faith – though not in what we often naively believe faith to be. To die in faith does not always mean that we die calmly, without fear and doubt.

For instance, the renowned biblical scholar, Raymond E. Brown, commenting on the fear of death inside the community of the Beloved disciple, writes: “The finality of death and the uncertainties it creates causes trembling among those who have spent their lives professing Christ. Indeed, among the small community of Johannine disciples, it was not unusual for people to confess that doubts had come into their minds as they encountered death. … The Lazarus story is placed at the end of Jesus’ public ministry in John to teach us that when confronted with the visible reality of the grave, all need to hear and embrace the bold message that Jesus proclaimed: ‘I am the life.’ … For John, no matter how often we renew our faith, there is the supreme testing by death. Whether the death of a loved one or one’s own death, it is the moment when one realizes that it all depends on God. During our lives we have been able to shield ourselves from having to face this in a raw way. Confronted by death, mortality, all defenses fall away.”

Sometimes people with a deep faith face death in calm and peace. But sometimes they don’t and the fear and doubt that threatens them then is not necessarily a sign of a weak or faltering faith. It can be the opposite, as we see in Jesus. Inside a person of faith, fear and doubt in the face of death is what the mystics call ‘the dark night of the spirit” … and this is what’s going on inside that experience: The raw fear and doubt we are experiencing at that time make it impossible for us to mistake our own selves and our own life-force for God. When we have to accept to die in trust, inside of what seems like absolute negation and can only cry out in anguish to an apparent emptiness, then it is no longer possible to confuse God with our own feelings and ego. In that, we experience the ultimate purification of soul.
We can have a deep faith and still find ourselves with doubt and fear in the face of death. Just look at Jesus.

(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, Texas. He can be contacted through his website www.ronrolheiser.com. Now on Facebook www.facebook.com/ronrolheiser)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
In a remarkable book, The Inner Voice of Love, written while he was in a deep emotional depression, Henri Nouwen shares these words: “The great challenge is living your wounds through instead of thinking them through. It is better to cry than to worry, better to feel your wounds deeply than to try to understand them, better to let them enter into your silence than to talk about them. The choice you face constantly is whether you are taking your hurts to your head or to your heart. In your head you analyze them, find their causes and consequences, and coin words to speak and write about them. But no final healing is likely to come from that source. You need to let your wounds go down into your heart. Then you can live them through and discover that they will not destroy you. Your heart is greater than your wounds.”

He’s right; your heart is greater than your wounds, though it needs caution in dealing with them. Wounds can soften your heart; but they can also harden you heart and freeze it in bitterness. So what’s the path here? What leads to warmth and what leads to coldness?

In a remarkable essay, The Drama of the Gifted Child, the Swiss psychologist, Alice Miller, tells us what hardens the heart and what softens it. She does so by outlining a particular drama that commonly unfolds in many lives. For her, giftedness does not refer to intellectual prowess but to sensitivity. The gifted child is the sensitive child. But that gift, sensitivity, is a mixed blessing. Positively, it lets you feel things more deeply so that the joys of living will mean more to you than to someone who is more callous. That’s its upside.

Conversely, however, if you are sensitive you will habitually fear disappointing others and will forever fear not measuring up. And your inadequacy to always measure up will habitually trigger feelings of anxiety and guilt within you. As well, if you are extraordinarily sensitive, you will tend to be self-effacing to a fault, letting others have their way while you swallow hard as your own needs aren’t met and then absorb the consequences. Not least, if you feel things deeply you will also feel hurt more deeply. That’s the downside of sensitivity and makes for the drama that Alice Miller calls the “drama of the gifted child,” the drama of the sensitive person.

Further, in her view, for many of us that drama will only begin to really play itself out in our middle and later years, constellating in frustration, disappointment, anger and bitterness, as the wounds of our childhood and early adulthood begin to break through and overpower the inner mechanisms we have set up to resist them. In mid-life and beyond, our wounds will make themselves heard so strongly that our habitual ways of denial and coping no longer work. In mid-life you realize that your mother did love your sister better than you, that your father in fact didn’t care much about you and that all those hurts you absorbed because you swallowed hard and played the stoic are still gnawing away bitterly inside you. That’s how the drama eventually culminates, in a heart that’s angry.

So where does that leave us? For Alice Miller, the answer lies in grieving. Our wounds are real and there is nothing we can do about them, pure and simple. The clock can’t be turned back. We cannot relive our lives so as to provide ourselves with different parents, different childhood friends, different experiences on the playground, different choices and a different temperament. We can only move forward so as to live beyond our wounds. And we do that by grieving. Alice Miller submits that the entire psychological and spiritual task of midlife and beyond is that of grieving, mourning our wounds until the very foundations of our lives shake enough so that there can be transformation.

A deep psychological scar is the same as having some part of your body permanently damaged in an accident. You will never be whole again and nothing can change that. But you can be happy again; perhaps more happy than ever before. But that loss of wholeness must be grieved, or it will manifest itself in anger, bitterness and jealous regrets.

The Jesuit music composer and spiritual writer, Roc O’Connor, makes the same point, with the added comment that the grieving process also calls for a long patience within which we need to wait long enough so that the healing can occur according to its own natural rhythms. We need, he says, to embrace our wounded humanity and not act out. What’s helpful, he suggests, is to grieve our human limitations. Then we can endure hunger, emptiness, disappointment and humiliation without looking for a quick fix – or for a fix at all. We should not try to fill our emptiness too quickly without sufficient waiting.
And we won’t ever make peace with our wounds without sufficient grieving.

(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX. He can be contacted through his website www.ronrolheiser.com. Now on Facebook www.facebook.com/ronrolheiser)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
Some years ago I went on a weekend retreat given by a woman who made no secret about the fact that not being able to have children constituted a deep wound in her life. So she offered retreats on the pain of being unable to have children. Being a celibate and not having my own children, I went on one of these retreats, the only man to venture there. The rest of the participants were women, mostly in their 40s and 50s, who had not borne children of their own.
Our leader, using scripture, biography, poetry and psychology, examined the issue of barrenness from many points of view. The retreat came to a head on Saturday evening with a ritual in chapel in which various participants went up to a huge cross and spoke out their pain for Jesus and everyone else to hear. That was followed by us watching, together, the British movie, Secrets and Lies, within which one woman’s heartache at being unable to conceive a child is powerfully highlighted. Afterwards there was a lot of honest sharing of feelings – and lots and lots of tears! But after that painful sharing of pain and the over-generous tears which accompanied it, the entire atmosphere changed, as if some dark storm had just done its thing but left us still intact. There was relief and plenty of laughter and lightheartedness. A storm had indeed passed us over and we were safe.
“All pain can be borne if it can be shared.” Art Schopenhauer is credited with saying that, but irrespective of who said it first, it captures what happened at that retreat. A deep pain was made easier to bear not because it was taken away but because it was shared, and shared in a “sacramental” way. Yes, there are sacraments that don’t take place in a church, but still have sacramental power. And we need more of these.
For example, Rachel Held Evans writes: “Often I hear from readers who have left their churches because they had no songs for them to sing after the miscarriage, the shooting, the earthquake, the divorce, the diagnosis, the attack, the bankruptcy. The American tendency toward triumphalism, of optimism rooted in success, money, and privilege, will infect and sap of substance any faith community that has lost its capacity for holding space for those in grief.”
She’s right. Our churches aren’t creating enough space for holding grief. In essence: In the everyday, practical spirituality of community, prayer, liturgy and Eucharist within our churches we don’t lean sufficiently on the fact that Christ is both a dying and a rising reality. We generally don’t take the dying part of Christ as seriously as we should. What are the consequences?
Among other things, it means that we don’t create enough communal, ritual celebrations in our churches within which people can feel free to own and express their brokenness and grief communally and in a “sacramental” way. Granted our churches do have funeral rites, sacraments of the sick, reconciliation services, special prayer services after a tragedy within a community and other rituals and gatherings that are powerful spaces for holding grief and brokenness. However (with the exception of the sacrament of reconciliation which though is generally a private, one-to-one ritual) these are generally tied to a special, singular circumstance such as a death, a serious sickness or an episodic tragedy within a community. What we lack are regular ecclesially-based communal rituals, analogous to an Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, around which people can come, share their brokenness and experience a grace that can only come from community.
We need various kinds of “sacramental” celebrations in our churches within which, to use Rachel Held Evans’ terminology, we can create and hold space for those who are grieving a broken heart, a miscarriage, an abortion, a dire medical diagnosis, a bankruptcy, the loss of a job, a divorce, a forced retirement, a rejection in love, the death of a cherished dream, the movement into assisted living, the adjustment to an empty nest within a marriage, barrenness and frustrations of every kind.
What will these rituals look like? Mostly they don’t exist yet so it is up to us to invent them. Charles Taylor suggests that the religious struggle today is not so much a struggle of faith but a struggle of the imagination. Nobody has ever lived in this kind of world before. We need some new rituals. We’re pioneers in new territory and pioneers have to improvise. Admittedly, pain and brokenness have always been with us, but past generations had communal ways of creating space for holding grief. Families, communities and churches then had less of a struggle with the kind individualism that today leaves us mostly alone to deal with our brokenness. Today there’s no longer a sufficient communal and ecclesial structure to help us accept that, here in this life, we live “mourning and weeping in a valley of tears.”
We need to imagine some new, sacramental rituals within which to help hold our grief.

(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX. He can be contacted through his website www.ronrolheiser.com. Now on Facebook www.facebook.com/ronrolheiser)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
Imagine this: A man, entirely careless of all moral and spiritual affairs, lives his life in utter selfishness, pleasure his only pursuit. He lives the high life, never prays, never goes to church, has numerous sexual affairs and has no concern for anyone but himself. After a long life of this, he’s diagnosed with a terminal illness and, on his deathbed, tearfully repents, makes a sincere confession, receives the Eucharist and dies inside the blessing of the church and his friends.

Now, if our reaction is, “Well, the lucky fellow! He got to live a life of selfish pleasure and still gets to go to heaven!” then (according to Piet Fransen, a renowned theologian on Grace) we haven’t yet, at all, understood the workings of grace. To the degree that we still envy the amoral and wish to exclude them from God’s grace, even as we count ourselves in, we are the “older brother” of the prodigal son, standing outside the Father’s house, heaven, in envy and bitterness.

I teach in a seminary that prepares seminarians for ordination. Recently our professor of Sacramental Theology shared that he’s been teaching a course on the Sacrament of Reconciliation for more than forty years and only in the last few years have the seminarians asked: “When do we have to refuse giving someone absolution in confession?”

What’s betrayed in this concern? The seminarians asking the question are, no doubt, sincere; they’re not trying to be rigid or hard. Their anxiety is rather about grace and mercy. They are sincerely anxious about perhaps dispensing God’s mercy too liberally, too cheaply, too indiscriminately, in essence, too unfairly. Their fear is not so much that God’s mercy is limited and that there’s only so much grace to go around. Not that. Their concern is more that by giving out grace so liberally they are being unfair to those who are practicing faithfully and bearing the heat of the day. Their fear is about fairness, justice and merit.

What’s at stake here? That grace is not something we merit. After the rich young man in the Gospels turns down Jesus’ invitation to leave everything and follow him, Peter, who watched this encounter and who, unlike the rich young man, has not turned down Jesus’ invitation and has given up everything to follow him, asks Jesus what those who do give up everything are going to get in return. In response, Jesus tells him the parable of the generous land owner and the vineyard workers who all arrive at different times, wherein some work for many hours and some for virtually no time at all, and yet they all receive the same reward, leaving those who worked the full day and bore the heat of the sun bitter with sense of unfairness. But, the vineyard owner (God) points out that there is no unfairness here since everyone has in fact received an over-generous return.

What’s the deep lesson? Whenever we are protesting that it “isn’t fair” that those who are not as faithful as we but are still receiving the full mercy and grace of God we are some distance from understanding grace and living fully inside it.

My dental hygienist knows I’m a Catholic priest and likes to ask me questions about religion and church. One day she shared this story: Her mother and father had both, as far as she knew, never attended church. They had been benign enough about religion, but not interested themselves. She, their daughter, had begun practicing as a Methodist, mainly through the influence of friends. Then her mother died and as they talked about plans for a funeral, her father revealed that her mother had been baptized as a Roman Catholic, though she had not practiced since her middle-school years. He suggested they try to arrange a Roman Catholic funeral for her. Given all those years of absence, it was with some trepidation that they approached a priest at a nearby parish to ask whether they might have a Roman Catholic funeral for her. To their surprise, the priest’s response was non-hesitant, warm and welcoming: “Of course, we can do this! It will be an honor! And I’ll arrange for a choir and a reception in the parish hall afterwards.”

No price was exacted for her mother’s life-long absence from the church. She was buried with the full rites of the Church … and her father, well, he was so touched by it all, the generosity of the church and the beauty of the liturgy, that he has since decided to become a Roman Catholic.

One wonders what the effect would have been had the priest refused that funeral, asking how they could justify a church funeral when, for all these years, they weren’t interested in the church. One wonders too how many people find this story comforting rather than discomforting, given a strong ecclesial ethos today wherein many of us nurse the fear that we are handing out grace and mercy too cheaply.

But grace and mercy are never given out cheaply since love is never merited.

(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX. He can be contacted through his website www.ronrolheiser.com. Now on Facebook www.facebook.com/ronrolheiser)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
We live in a culture that idealizes youth and marginalizes the old. And, as James Hillman says, the old don’t let go easily either of the throne or the drive that took them there. I know; I’m aging.

For most of my life, I’ve been able to think of myself as young. Because I was born late in the year, October, I was always younger than most of my classmates, graduated from high school at age seventeen, entered the seminary at that tender age, was ordained to the priesthood at age twenty-five, did an advanced degree within the next year and was teaching graduate theology at age twenty-six, the youngest member on the faculty. I was proud of that, achieving those things so early. And so I always thought of myself as young, even as the years piled up and my body began to betray my conception of myself as young.

Moreover, for most of those years, I tried to stay young too in soul, staying on top of what was shaping youth culture, its movies, its popular songs, its lingo. During my years in seminary and for a good number of years after ordination, I was involved in youth ministry, helping give youth retreats in various high schools and colleges. At that time, I could name all the popular songs, movies, and trends, speak youth’s language and I prided myself in being young.

But nature offers no exemptions. Nobody stays young forever. Moreover, aging doesn’t normally announce its arrival. You’re mostly blind to it until one day you see yourself in a mirror, see a recent photo of yourself or get a diagnosis from your doctor and suddenly you’re hit on the head with the unwelcome realization that you’re no longer a young person. That usually comes as a surprise. Aging generally makes itself known in ways that have you denying it, fighting it, accepting it only piecemeal and with some bitterness.

But that day comes round for everyone when you’re surprised, stunned, that what you are seeing in the mirror is so different from how you have been imagining yourself and you ask yourself: “Is this really me? Am I this old person? Is this what I look like?” Moreover you begin to notice that young people are forming their circles away from you, that they’re more interested in their own kind, which doesn’t include you and you look silly and out of place when you try to dress, act and speak like they do. There comes a day when you have accept that you’re no longer young in in the world’s eyes – nor in your own.

Moreover gravity doesn’t just affect your body, pulling things downward, so too for the soul. It’s pulled downward along with the body, though aging means something very different here. The soul doesn’t age, it matures. You can stay young in soul long after the body betrays you. Indeed we’re meant to be always young in spirit.

Souls carry life differently than do bodies because bodies are built to eventually die. Inside of every living body the life-principle has an exit strategy. It has no such strategy inside a soul, only a strategy to deepen, grow richer and more textured. Aging forces us, mostly against our will, to listen to our soul more deeply and more honestly so as to draw from its deeper wells and begin to make peace with its complexity, its shadow and its deepest proclivities – and the aging of the body plays the key role in this. To employ a metaphor from James Hillman: The best wines have to be aged in cracked old barrels. So too for the soul: The aging process is designed by God and nature to force the soul, whether it wants to or not, to delve ever deeper into the mystery of life, of community, of God and of itself. Our souls don’t age, like a wine, they mature and so we can always be young in spirit. Our zest, our fire, our eagerness, our wit, our brightness and our humor are not meant to dim with age. Indeed, they’re meant to be the very color of a mature soul.

So, in the end, aging is a gift, even if unwanted. Aging takes us to a deeper place, whether we want to go or not.

Like most everyone else, I still haven’t made my full peace with this and would still like to think of myself as young. However I was particularly happy to celebrate my 70th birthday two years ago, not because I was happy to be that age, but because, after two serious bouts with cancer in recent years, I was very happy just to be alive and wise enough now to be a little grateful for what aging and a cancer diagnosis has taught me.

There are certain secrets hidden from health, writes John Updike. True. And aging uncovers a lot of them because, as Swedish proverb puts it, “afternoon knows what the morning never suspected.”

(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, Texas.)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
There’s a huge difference between being bright and being wise, between brilliance and wisdom. We can be highly intelligent, but not very wise. Ideally, of course, we should strive to be both, but that isn’t always the case, particularly today.

We’re living in a culture that rewards brilliance above wisdom and within which we pride ourselves first of all in being brighter than each other. Who has the highest degree? Who went to the most elite university? Who’s the most entrepreneurial? Who’s the most popular? Who’s the cleverest scientist, researcher, writer, journalist, television personality, or wit at the office or family table? Who’s the most brilliant? We never ask: Who’s the wisest? Today intelligence is valued far above wisdom and that’s not always good. We’re a highly informed and intelligent people, but our compassion is not nearly on par with our brilliance. We’re bright, but not wise.

What’s the difference between intelligence and wisdom? Wisdom is intelligence that’s colored by understanding (which, parsed to its root, means infused with empathy). In end, what makes for wisdom is intelligence informed by empathy, intelligence that’s grasps with sympathy the complexity of others and the world, and this has implications.

Learning, to be truly helpful, must be matched by an equal growth in empathy. When this isn’t happening, then growth in intelligence is invariably be one-sided and, while perhaps providing something for the community, will always lack the kind of understanding that can help bind the community together and help us better understand ourselves and our world. When intelligence is not informed by empathy, what it produces will generally not contribute to the common good. Without a concomitant empathy, intelligence invariably becomes arrogant and condescending. True learning, on the other hand, is humble, self-effacing and empathic. When we develop ourselves intellectually, without sufficient empathy, our talents invariably become causes for envy rather than gifts for community.

Ironically, at the end of the day, intelligence not sufficiently informed by empathy will not be very bright, but instead will be an arrested intelligence wherein its fault will not be in what it has learned (for learning itself is good) but in where its learning stopped. It will suffer from a hazard aptly named by Alexander Pope, where “a little learning is a dangerous thing,” where we have read one book too many but one book too few!

One might object here and make a plea for science and scientific objectivity. Isn’t empirical science the product of a pure intellectual pursuit which refuses to be colored by anything outside itself? Isn’t the ideal of all learning to be purely objective, to not have a bias of any sort? Where does empathy play a role in pure research? Doesn’t an eye turned towards empathy fudge pure objectivity?

Pure objectivity doesn’t exist, in science or anywhere else. Science today accepts that it can never be purely objective. All measurement has its own agenda, its own angle, and cannot help but interfere (however infinitesimally perhaps) with what it measures. Everyone and everything, including science, has a bias (euphemistically, a pre-ontology). Thus, since all learning necessarily begins with an angle, a bias, pre-ontology, the question is not: How can I be purely objective?” But rather: What serves us best as an angle from which to learn? The answer is empathy. Empathy turns intelligence into wisdom and wisdom turns learning into something that more properly serves community.

However empathy is not to be confused with sentimentality or naiveté, as is sometimes the case.
Sentimentality and naiveté see a fault within intellectuality itself, seeing learning itself as the problem. But learning is never the problem. One-sided learning is the problem, namely, learning that isn’t sufficiently informed by empathy, which seeks knowledge without understanding.

I teach graduate students who are mainly preparing for ministry within their churches and so, for them, graduate learning is, by definition, meant to be more than just scoring high marks, graduating with honor, being informed and educated, or even just satisfying their own intellectual curiosities and questions. By their very vocation, they are striving for wisdom more than for mere intelligence. But even they, like most everyone else in our culture, struggle to not be one-sided in their learning, to have their studies bring them as much compassion as knowledge. We all struggle with this. It’s hard to resist a temptation that’s as endemic in our culture as certain bacteria are in our waters, that is, the temptation to be clever and bright, more informed than everyone else, no matter if we aren’t very compassionate persons afterwards.
And so this column is a plea, not a criticism: To all of us, whether we’re doing formal studies; whether we’re trying to learn the newest information technology; whether we’re trying to keep ourselves informed socially and politically; whether we’re writing articles, books, or blogs; whether we’re taking training for a job; or whether we’re just mustering material for an argument at our family table or workplace, remember: It’s not good merely to be smart, we must also be compassionate.

(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX.)