IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
Perhaps the single, most-often quoted line from Pope Francis is his response to a question he was asked vis-à-vis the morality of a particularly-dicey issue. His infamous-famous reply: Who am I to judge?
Although this remark is often assumed to be flighty and less-than-serious; it is, in fact, on pretty safe ground. Jesus, it seems, says basically the same thing. For example, in his conversation with Nicodemus in John’s Gospel, he, in essence, says: I judge no one.
If the Gospel of John is to be believed, then Jesus judges no one. God judges no one. But that needs to be put into context. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t any moral judgments and that our actions are indifferent to moral scrutiny. There is judgment; except it doesn’t work the way it is fantasized inside the popular mind. According to what Jesus tells us in John’s Gospel, judgment works this way:
God’s light, God’s truth, and God’s spirit come into the world. We then judge ourselves according to how we live in the face of them: God’s light has come into the world, but we can choose to live in darkness.  That’s our decision, our judgment. God’s truth has been revealed, but we can choose to live in falsehood, in lies.
That’s our decision, our judgment to make. And God’s spirit has come into the world, but we can prefer to live outside that spirit, in another spirit. That too is our decision, our judgment. God judges no one. We judge ourselves. Hence we can also say that God condemns no one, though we can choose to condemn ourselves. And God punishes no one, but we can choose to punish ourselves.
Negative moral judgment is self-inflicted. Perhaps this seems abstract, but it is not. We know this existentially, we feel the brand of our own actions inside us. To use just one example:  How we judge ourselves by the Holy Spirit.
God’s spirit, the Holy Spirit, is not something so abstract and slippery that it cannot be pinned down. St. Paul, in the Epistle to the Galatians, describes the Holy Spirit in terms so clear that they can only be rendered abstract and ambiguous by some self-serving rationalization.
So as to make things clear he sets up a contrast by first telling us what the Holy Spirit is not. The spirit of God, he tells us is not the spirit of self-indulgence, sexual vice, jealousy, rivalry, antagonism, bad temper, quarrels, drunkenness or factionalism. Anytime we are cultivating these qualities inside of our lives, we should not delude ourselves into thinking we are living in God’s spirit, no matter how frequent, sincere or pious is our religious practice. The Holy Spirit, he tells us, is the spirit of charity, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, trustfulness, gentleness and chastity. Only when we are living inside of these virtues are we living inside God’s spirit.
So then, this is how judgment happens: God’s spirit has been revealed. We can choose to live inside the virtues of that spirit or we can choose to live instead inside their opposites. One choice leads to a life with God, the other leads away from God. And that choice is ours to make; it doesn’t come from the outside. We judge ourselves. God judges no one. God doesn’t need to.
When we view things inside this perspective it also clarifies a number of misunderstandings that cause confusion inside the minds of believers as well as inside the minds of their critics. How often, for instance, do we hear this criticism: If God is all-good, all-loving and all-merciful, how can God condemn someone to hell for all eternity? A valid question, though not a particularly reflective one.  Why? Because God judges no one; God punishes no one.
God condemns no one to hell. We do these things to ourselves: We judge ourselves, we punish ourselves and we put ourselves in various forms of hell whenever we do choose not to live in the light, the truth and inside God’s spirit. And that judgment is self-inflicted, that punishment is self-inflicted and those fires of hell are self-inflicted.
There are a number of lessons in this. First, as we have just seen, the fact that God judges no one, helps clarify our theodicy, that is, it helps deflate all those misunderstandings surrounding God’s mercy and the accusation that an all-merciful God can condemn someone to eternal hellfire. Beyond this, it is a strong challenge to us to be less judgmental in our lives, to let the wheat and the darnel sort themselves out over time, to let light itself judge darkness, to let truth itself judge falsehood and to, like Pope Francis, be less quick to offer judgments in God’s name and more prone to say: “Who am I to judge?”
(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX.)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
Going to Heaven – By Good Luck or by God’s Grace? This is a thought inside the head of Marilynne Robinson’s fictional character, Lila, in Robinson’s recent novel. Lila has reason to think that way, that is, to think outside the box of conventional religious piety because her story is not one that fits piety of any kind.
Lila had been an unwanted orphan, dying from malnutrition and neglect, when at a young age she was taken up by a woman named Dolly, herself a social outcast. Lila spends all the years of her youth with Dolly, traveling with her as the two of them live on the edges of society and hunger, working as agricultural laborers with others like themselves, more slaves than paid workers.  Living this way, Lila never learns the social skills needed to function normally in society. Everything in her background, from her abandonment as a child to her life-long marginalization, sets her up to be a loner, someone condemned by circumstance to never find normal companionship, family, intimacy or grace.
Moreover, Dolly, her surrogate mother, has her own problems, beyond her struggles to feed Lila and herself. When she took up Lila and fled from their hometown, she was fleeing domestic violence. Eventually, years later, the man from whom she was fleeing finds her; but Dolly is no passive victim. She knifes the man to death. Sometime later, she dies, orphaning Lila a second time.
But, by now, Lila is old enough to take care of herself, except, lacking social skills, she still finds herself at the margins of society, ever the loner. Luck, though, is on her side and she is eventually befriended by a Christian minister who takes care of her and eventually marries her. This new world of acceptance, love, family and religion is radically new to Lila and she struggles mightily to sort it out, especially regarding how love and grace work.
One of the problems that bother her, as she listens to her husband’s Christian sermons, is what happens to someone like Dolly, who did so much for her, and yet was a murderer. Is she forgiven? Could she have gone to heaven, even after committing murder? Lila struggles to believe in faith, love, family life, forgiveness and heaven.
Her thoughts on this, especially on how Dolly might have met her Maker, contain their own important insights into love and grace: “In eternity, people’s lives could be altogether what they were and had been, not just the worst things they ever did, or the best things either. So she decided that she should believe in it, or that she believed in it already.  How else could she imagine seeing Dolly again? Never once had she taken her to be dead, plain and simple.
If any scoundrel could be pulled into heaven just to make his mother happy, it couldn’t be fair to punish scoundrels who happened to be orphans, or whose mothers didn’t even like them, and who would probably have better excuses for the harm they did than the ones who had somebody caring about them. It couldn’t be fair to punish people for trying to get by, people who were good by their own lights, when it took all the courage they had to be good. … Eternity had more of every kind of room in it than this world did.”
As Christians, we believe that, as part of the Body of Christ, we have been given the power to forgive each other’s sins and that, because of that, indeed a mother’s love can pull her child into heaven. Our love for each other is a powerful vehicle of grace, powerful enough to actually open the gates of heaven. As Gabriel Marcel once put it: To love someone is to, in effect, say: You at least will never die! Human love, even this side of eternity, has that kind of power. That’s also why we pray for loved ones who have died. Our love has the power to reach them, even there.
But, and this was Lila’s quandary: What about those who, like Dolly and herself, are outsiders in this life and who die without anyone much caring about the fact that they’ve gone or where they’ve gone? How do grace and forgiveness work then? Is human love then purely out of the picture and we are left only with the hope that God’s love can fill in where human love is absent?
Yes, God’s love can and does fill in where human love is absent. In fact, scripture assures us that God has a special love, and tenderness, for those who find themselves outside of the circle of human love. So we need not worry about the salvation of those who, like Dolly, died in less-than-ideal circumstances, even as they “took all the courage they had to be good.” Human love, while generally directed towards very specific persons, is also a symphony whose music circles wide and ultimately embraces everyone.
(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX.)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
A good part of our lives are taken up with daydreams, though few of us admit that and even fewer of us would own-up to the contents of those fantasies. We’re ashamed to admit how much we escape into fantasy and we’re even more ashamed to reveal the content of those fantasies. But, whether we admit it or not, we’re all pathological daydreamers; except this isn’t necessarily a pathology.
Our hearts and minds, chronically frustrated by the limits of our lives, naturally seek solace in daydreaming. It’s an almost irresistible temptation. Indeed the more sensitive you are, perhaps the stronger will be the propensity to escape into daydreams. Sensitivity triggers restlessness and restlessness doesn’t easily find quiet inside ordinary life. Hence, the escape into daydreams.
And what about the contents of those daydreams?
We tend to have two kinds of daydreams: The first kind are triggered more by the immediate hurts and temptations within our lives; for example, a lingering hurt or anger has you fantasizing about revenge and you play out various scenes of retaliation over and over again in your mind. Or an emotional or sexual obsession has you fantasying about various kinds of consummation.
The other kind of daydream we escape into is not so much triggered by the hurts and obsessions of the present moment but takes its root in something deeper, something classically expressed by St. Augustine in the opening lines of his Confessions (a hermeneutical key for his life and our own): You have made us for yourself Lord and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.
Simply put, we are over-charged for our lives, given infinite spirits and infinite appetites and put into this world wherein everything is finite. That’s a formula for chronic dissatisfaction. What’s our escape?  Daydreams.
However these second kind of daydreams are somewhat different from the first. They aren’t so much focused on the immediate angers and temptations in our lives but rather are the habitual imaginary lives that we have interiorly fashioned for ourselves, fantasy lives that we play over and over again in our minds the way we might play and replay a favorite movie.
But there’s something interesting and important to note here. In these daydreams we are never petty or small, rather we are always noble and grand, the hero or the heroine, generous, big-hearted, immune from faults, drawing perfect respect, and making perfect love. In these daydreams we, in fact, intuit the vision of Isaiah where he foresees a perfect world, the lamb and the lion lying down together, the sick being healed, the hungry being fed, all restlessness being brought to calm, and God, himself, drying away every tear. Isaiah too fantasied about perfect consummation. His fantasy was a prophecy.  In our earthy fantasies we might not prophesize but we do intuit the Kingdom of God.
With that being said, we still need to ask ourselves: How good or bad is it to escape into daydreams?
At one level, daydreams are not just harmless but can be a positive form of relaxation and a way to steady us inside the frustrations of our lives. Sitting back in an easy chair and sinking into a daydream can be little different than sitting back and turning on your favorite piece of music. It can be an escape that takes the edge off of the frustrations within your life.
But there’s a potential downside to this: Since in our daydreams we are always the hero or the heroine and the center of attention and admiration, our daydreams can easily stoke our natural narcissism. Since we are the center of everything in our daydreams we can easily become over-frustrated with a world within which we are not much the center of anything.
And there’s more: Etty Hillesum, reflecting on her own experience, suggests another negative consequence from habitually escaping into daydreams. She affirms that because we make ourselves the center of the universe inside our daydreams we often end up not being able to give anything or anybody the simple gaze of admiration.
Rather, in her strong words, in our daydreams we take in what we should be admiring. For this reason, among others, daydreams help block us from mindfulness, from being in the present moment. When we are all wrapped-up in fantasy it’s hard to see what’s in front of us.
So where should we go with all of this? Given both the good and bad within our daydreams and given our near-incurable propensity to escape into fantasy, we need to be patient with ourselves. Henri Nouwen suggests that the struggle to turn our fantasies into prayer is one of the great congenital struggles within our spiritual lives. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin shares in his journals that when he was young he struggled a lot with fantasy but, as he grew older, he was able more and more to stand in the present moment without the need to escape into daydreams. That’s the task we need to set before ourselves.
(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX.)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
Normally none of us like feeling sad, heavy, or depressed. Generally we prefer sunshine to darkness, lightheartedness to melancholy. That’s why, most of the time, we do everything we can to distract ourselves from melancholy, to keep heaviness and sadness at bay. We tend to run from those feelings inside us that sadden or frighten us.
We tend to think of melancholy and her children (feelings of loss, feelings of regret, intimations of our own morality, a sense of missing out on life, fear of what lies in the dark corners of our minds and heaviness of soul) as negative. But these feelings have their positive sides. Simply put, they help keep us in touch with those parts of our soul to which we are normally not attentive.
Our souls are deep and complex, and trying to hear what they are saying involves listening to them inside of every mood within our lives, including, and sometimes especially, when we feel sad and out of sorts. In sadness, melancholy and fear, the soul tells us things that we normally refuse to hear. Hence, it’s important to examine the positive side of melancholy.
Unfortunately, today it is common to see sadness and heaviness of soul as a loss of health, as a deficiency in our vibrancy, as an unhealthy condition. That’s both unfortunate and shortsighted. For instance, in many medieval and renaissance medical books melancholy was seen as a gift to the soul, something that one needed to pass through, at certain points in his or her life, in order to come to deeper health and wholeness. This, of course, doesn’t refer to clinical depression, a true loss of health, but to all those other depressions that draw us inward and downward. Why do we need to pass through melancholy in order to come to wholeness?
Thomas Moore, who writes with deep insight on how we need to learn to listen more carefully to the impulses and needs of our souls, offers this insight: “Depression gives us valuable qualities that we need in order to be fully human. It gives us weight, when we are too light about our lives. It offers a degree of gravitas. It was associated with the metal lead and was said to be heavy.
“It also ages us so that we grow appropriately and don’t pretend to be younger than we are. It grows us up and gives us the range of human emotion and character that we need in order to deal with the seriousness of life. In classic Renaissance images, found in old medical texts and collections of remedies, depression is an old person wearing a broad-rimmed hat, in the shadows, holding his head in his hands.”
Milan Kundera, the Czech writer, in his classic novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, echoes what Moore says. His heroine, Teresa, struggles to be at peace with life when it’s not heavy, when it’s too much lightness, sunshine, and seemingly non-mindful; when it’s devoid of the type of anxieties that hint at darkness and mortality. Thus, she feels always the need for gravitas, for some heaviness that signals that life is more than simply the present flourishing of health and comfort. For her, lightness equates with superficiality.
In many cultures, and indeed in all of the great world religions, periods of melancholy and sadness are considered as the necessary path one must travel in order to sustain one’s health and come to wholeness. Indeed, isn’t that part of the very essence of undergoing the paschal mystery within Christianity? Jesus, himself, when preparing to make the ultimate sacrifice for love, had to, painfully, accept that there was no path to Easter Sunday that didn’t involve the darkness of Good Friday. Good Friday was bad, long before it was good; or, at least, so it looks from the outside. Melancholy, sadness, and heaviness of soul mostly look the same.
So how might we look at periods of sadness and heaviness in our lives? How might we deal with melancholy and her children?
First off, it’s important to see melancholy (whatever its form) as something normal and healthy within our lives. Heaviness of soul is not necessarily an indication that there is something wrong inside us. Rather, normally, it’s the soul itself signally for our attention, asking to be heard, trying to ground us in some deeper way, and trying, as Moore puts it, to age us appropriately.
But, for this to happen, we need to resist two opposite temptations, namely, to distract ourselves from the sadness or to indulge in it.
How do we do that? James Hillman gives us this advice: What to do with heaviness of soul? “Put it into a suitcase and carry it with you.” Keep it close, but contained; make sure it stays available, but don’t let it take you over. That’s secular wording for Jesus’ challenge: If you wish to be my disciple, take up your cross every day and follow me.
(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX.)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
It’s common for us to see God’s grace and blessing in what unites us. We naturally sense the presence of grace when, at our core, we feel a strong moral bond with certain other persons, churches, and faiths. That, biblically, is what defines family.
But what if what separates us, what if what makes other persons, churches, and faiths seem foreign and strange is also a grace, a difference intended by God? Can we think of our differences, as we think of our unity, as a gift from God? Most religions, including Christianity, would answer affirmatively.
Thus in both the Jewish and the Christian scriptures there is the strong, recurring motif that God’s message to us generally comes through the stranger, the foreigner, from the one who is different from us, from a source from which we would never expect to hear God’s voice.
Added to this is the notion that when God speaks to us we generally experience it as a surprise, as something unexpected, and as something that does not easily square with our normal expectations as to how God should work and how we should learn. There’s a reason for this. Simply put, when we think we are hearing God’s voice in what’s familiar, comfortable, and secure, the temptation is always to reshape the message according to our own image and likeness, and so God often comes to us through the unfamiliar.
Moreover, what’s familiar is comfortable and offers us security; but, as we know, real transformative growth mostly happens when, like the aged Sarah and Abraham, we are forced to set off to a place that’s foreign and frightening and that strips us of all that is comfortable and secure.
Set off, God told Sarah and Abraham, to a land where you don’t know where you’re going. Real growth happens and real grace breaks in when we have to deal with what is other, foreign, different. Learn to understand, writes John of the Cross, more by not understanding than by understanding. What’s dark, unfamiliar, frightening, and uninvited will stretch us in ways that the familiar and secure cannot. God sends his word to the earth through “angels” and they’re not exactly something we’re familiar with.
If this is true, then our differences are also a grace. Accordingly, seeing things differently does not mean that we are not seeing the same things. Accordingly, different notions about God and different ways of speaking about God do not mean that we’re speaking of a different God. The same holds true for our churches, having difference concepts of what it means to be church does not necessarily mean that there isn’t some deeper underlying unity inside our diversity.
Similarly for how we conceive of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, how we imagine Christ as being really present inside of bread and wine, can take many forms and can be spoken of in different ways, without it meaning that we’re speaking of a different reality.
John Paul II, addressing an interfaith gathering, once commented that “there are differences in which are reflected the genius and spiritual riches of God to the nations.” Christian de Cherge, after a lifetime of dialogue with Islam, suggests that our differences have a “quasi-sacramental function”, that is, they help to give real flesh in this world to the riches of God, who is ineffable and can never be captured in any one expression.
Our differences then are part of the mystery of our unity. Real unity, which needs to reflect the richness of God, does not exist in uniformity and homogenization, but only in bringing into harmony many different gifts and richness, like a beautiful bouquet of flowers brings together of a variety of different flowers inside one vase. Our legitimate differences are rooted inside of the same God.
This has implications for every area of our lives, from how we receive immigrants in our countries, to how we deal with different personalities inside our families and places of work, to how we deal with other Christian denominations and other religions.
Without endorsing a naive syncretism and without denying the rightful place for discernment, it must still be affirmed that our differences, conceived as an expression of a deeper unity that we cannot yet conceive, open us up more fully to the deep unfathomable, ineffable mystery of God and, at the same time, prevents us from making an idol of our own ideas, our own religious traditions, our own ways of understanding faith, and our own theologies and ideologies. Moreover, accepting differences as being intended by God and as the presence of grace in our lives should prevent us from constructing our identity, particularly our religious identity, on the basis of opposition to others and the unhealthy need to forever protest our own uniqueness and truth against what’s other.
God loves us all equally. Difference, then, understood as part of the mystery of unity, should help keep us humble and honest enough to let others take their proper place before God.
(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX.)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
We are all familiar with the biblical story of the Visitation. It happens at the beginning of Luke’s Gospel. Mary and her cousin, Elizabeth, both pregnant, meet. One is carrying Jesus and the other is carrying John the Baptist. The Gospels want us to recognize that both these pregnancies are biologically impossible; one is a virginal conception and the other is a conception that occurs far beyond someone’s childbearing years. So there is clearly something of the divine in each. In simple language, each woman is carrying a special gift from heaven and each is carrying a part of the divine promise that will one day establish God’s peace on this earth.
But neither Mary nor Elizabeth, much less anyone around them, consciously recognizes the divine connection between the two children they are carrying. The Gospels present them to us as “cousins,” both the children and their mothers; but the Gospels want us to think deeper than biology. They are cousins in the same way that Christ, and those things that are also of the divine, are cousins. This, among other things, is what is contained in the concept of the Visitation.
Mary and Elizabeth meet, both are pregnant with the divine. Each is carrying a child from heaven, one is carrying Christ and the other is carrying a unique prophet, the “cousin” of the Christ. And a curious thing happens when they meet. Christ’s cousin, inside his mother, without explicit consciousness, leaps for joy in the presence of Christ and that reaction releases the Magnificat inside of the one carrying Christ.
There’s a lot in that image. Christian de Cherge, the Trappist Abbott who was martyred in Algeria in 1996, suggests that, among other things, this image is the key to how we, as Christians, are meant to meet other religions in the world.
He sees the image as illustrating this paradigm: Christianity is carrying Christ and other religions are also carrying something divine, a divine “cousin,” one who points to Christ. But all of this is unconscious; we do not really grasp the bond, the connection, between what we are carrying and what the other is carrying. But we will recognize their kinship, however unconsciously, when we stand before another who does not share our Christian faith but is sincere and true to his or her own faith. In that encounter we will sense the connection.
What we are carrying will make something leap for joy inside the other and that reaction will help draw the Magnificat out of us and, like Mary, we will want to stay with that other for mutual support.
And we need that support, as does the other. As Christian de Cherge puts it: “We know that those whom we have come to meet are like Elizabeth: they are bearers of a message that comes from God. Our church does not tell us and does not know what the exact bond is between the Good News we bear and the message that gives life to the other.  … We may never know exactly what that bond is, but we do know that the other is also a bearer of a message that comes from God. So what should we do? What does witness consist in? What about mission?  …  See, when Mary arrives, it is Elizabeth who speaks first. Or did she? … For most certainly Mary would have said: ‘Peace, Peace be with you’. And this simple greeting made something vibrate, someone, inside of Elizabeth. And in this vibration, something was said. … Which is the Good News, not the whole of the Good News, but what can be glimpsed of it in the moment.”
De Cherge then adds, “In the end, if we are attentive, if we situate our encounter with the other in the attention and the desire to meet the other, and in our need for the other and what he has to say to us, it is likely that the other is going to say something to us that will connect with what we are carrying, something that will reveal complicity with us … allowing us to broaden our Eucharist.”
We need each other, everyone on this planet, Christians and non-Christians, Jews and Muslims, Protestants and Roman Catholics, Evangelicals and Unitarians, sincere agnostics and atheists; we need each other to understand God’s revelation. Nobody understands fully without the other. Thus our interrelations with each other should not be born only out of enthusiasm for the truth we have been given, but it should issue forth too from our lack of the other.
Without the other, without recognizing that the other too is carrying the divine, we will, as Christian de Cherge asserts, be unable to truly release our own Magnificat. Without each other, none of us will ever be able to pray the Eucharist “for the many.”
(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX.)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
In 1996, Muslim extremists martyred nearly an entire community of Trappist monks in Atlas, Algeria. Many of us, thanks to the movie, Of Gods and Men, are familiar with their story and are familiar too with the extraordinary faith and courage with which these monks, particularly their Abbott, Christian de Cherge, met their deaths. Indeed the last letters of Christian de Cherge reveal a faith and love that is truly extraordinary.
For example, in the months leading up to his death, when he already sensed what was to befall him, he wrote a letter to his family within which he already forgave his killers and hoped that they would later be with him in heaven, with both them and him playing in the sun before God.  As well, after his first face-to-face meeting with a terrorist leader, who has just beheaded nine people, he prayed: “Disarm me, disarm them.”
In his journals, which are published today, he shares this story: On the morning of his First Communion, he told his mother that he really didn’t understand what he was doing in receiving the Eucharist. His mother replied, simply: “You will understand later on.” His journals then trace how his understanding of the Eucharist deepened during his lifetime, especially in the light of his interrelation with Islam and one extraordinary incident in his life.  This was the extraordinary incident:
From July 1959 until January 1961, Christian was an officer serving with the French army in Algeria. While there, he befriended a man named Mohammed, a family man, a simple man, and a devout Muslim. They soon forged a very deep bond. One day, during a military skirmish, Christian was taken captive by the Algerian army. His friend, Mohammed, intervened and convinced his captors that Christian was sympathetic to their cause. Christian was released but, the next day, Mohammed was found murdered, in retaliation for his role in freeing Christian.
This act of selflessness by his Muslim friend, who in effect gave his life for Christian, permanently seared Christian’s soul. It was never far from his mind and his decision, as a monk, to return to Algeria and live in solidarity with the Muslim community at Atlas and remain there until he died, was largely a result of that foundational event. But it also deepened his understanding of the Eucharist.
His mother had told him: “You will understand later,” and now he did understand: The Eucharist doesn’t just make Jesus present; it also makes present his sacrificial death for us. Jesus died for us “and for the many;” but so too did his friend, Mohammed. He also gave his death for another and in that sacrifice both imitated Jesus’ death and participated in it. Thus, for Christian, every time he celebrated the Eucharist, he celebrated too the gift of Mohammed’s sacrifice for him. His friend, Mohammed, had also shed his blood “for the many.”
Mohammed’s sacrifice helped Christian to recognize and more deeply appropriate Jesus’ sacrifice because he believed that, in the Eucharist, Jesus’ sacrifice and his friend’s sacrifice were both made real and both rendered present. Christian believed that Christ’s sacrifice includes the sacrifice shown in every act of sacrificial love and consequently his friend’s sacrifice was part of Christ’s sacrifice.
He’s right. At every Eucharist we memorialize the gift that Jesus made of his death, but that memorial includes too the sacrificial gift of everyone who has imitated Jesus’ selfless love and sacrifice. In the Eucharist, the sacrifice of Christ that we memorialize includes the sacrifice of all who have died, however unconsciously, “for the many.”
The Eucharist is a far-reaching mystery with multiple depths and levels of meaning. We don’t ever fully grasp it. But we’re in good company: When Jesus instituted the Eucharist at the Last Supper the apostles also didn’t really understand what he was doing, as is witnessed by Peter’s protests when Jesus tries to wash their feet. Peter’s protests show clearly that he did not comprehend what Jesus meant in this Eucharistic gesture. And so, Jesus’ words to Peter and the apostles are almost identical to those Christian de Cherge’s mother spoke to him when he told her that he didn’t understand the Eucharist: “Later, you will understand.”
When I made my First Communion, I had a childlike understanding of the Eucharist. In my seven-year-old, catechized mind, I believed that I was receiving the real body of Jesus and that, at the Mass where the Eucharistic hosts were consecrated, we celebrated the sacrifice of Jesus that opened the gates of heaven for us. Numerous theology degrees and 60 years later, I know now that what I understood about the Eucharist as a child was correct; but I also know that when those two things, Christ’s real presence and Christ’s sacrifice for us, are unpackaged, we find ourselves immersed in an ineffable mystery within which, among other things, all who sacrifice in love for us are also part of the Real Presence.
And so we keep going to Eucharist, knowing that later, we will understand.
(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX.)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
It’s not only love that makes the world go round. Resentment too is prominent in stirring the drink. In so many ways our world is drowning in resentment. Everywhere you look, it seems, someone is bitter about something and breathing out resentment. What is resentment? Why is this feeling so prevalent in our lives? How do we move beyond it?
Soren Kierkegaard once defined resentment in this way. Resentment, he suggested, happens when we move from the happy feeling of admiration to the unhappy feeling of jealousy. And this, sadly, happens all too frequently in our lives and we are dangerously blind to its occurrence. Me, resentful? How dare you make that accusation!
Yet it’s hard to deny that resentment and its concomitant unhappiness color our world. At every level of life, from what we see playing out in the grievances and wars among nations to what we see playing out in the bickering in our board rooms, class rooms, living rooms, and bedrooms, there is evidence of resentment and bitterness. Our world is full of resentment.
Everyone, it seems, is bitter about something, and, of course, not without cause. Few are the persons who do not secretly nurse the feeling that they have been ignored, wounded, cheated, treated unfairly, and have drawn too many short straws in life; and so many of us feel that we have every right to protest our right to be resentful and unhappy. We’re not happy, but with good reason.
Yes, there’s always good reason to be resentful; but, and this is the point of this column, according to a number of insightful analysts, both old and new, we are rarely in touch with the real reason why we are so spontaneously bitter. For persons such as Thomas Aquinas, Soren Kierkegaard, Robert Moore, Gil Bailie, Robert Bly, and Richard Rohr, among others, the deep root of our resentment and unhappiness lies in our inability to admire, our inability to praise others, and our inability to give others and the world a simple gaze of admiration.
We’re a society that for the most part can’t admire. Admiration is, for us, a lost virtue. Indeed in the many circles today, both in the world and in the churches, admiration is seen as something juvenile and immature, the frenzied, mindless shrieking of teenage girls chasing a rock star. Maturity and sophistication are identified today with the kind of intelligence, wit and reticence, which don’t easily admire, which don’t easily compliment. Learning and maturity, we believe, need to be picking things apart, suspicious of others’ virtues, distrustful of their motives, on hyper-alert for hypocrisy and articulating every reason not to admire. Such is the view today.
But what we don’t admit in this view of maturity and learning is how we feel threatened by those whose graces or virtues exceed our own. What we don’t admit is our own jealousy.  What we don’t admit is our own resentment. What we don’t admit, and never will admit, is how our need to cut down someone else is an infallible sign of our own jealousy and bad self-image. And what helps us in our denial is this: Cynicism and cold judgment make for a perfect camouflage; we don’t need to admire because we’re bright enough to see that there’s nothing really to admire.
That, too often, is our sophisticated, unhappy state: We can no longer truly admire anybody. We can no longer truly praise anybody. We can no longer look at the world with any praise or admiration. Rather our gaze is perennially soured by resentment, cynicism, judgment, and jealousy.
We can test ourselves on this: Robert Moore often challenges his audiences to ask themselves this question: When was the last time you walked across a room and told a person, especially a younger person or a person whose talents dwarf yours, that you admire her, that you admire what she’s doing, that her gifts enrich your life, and that you are happy that her path has crossed yours? When was the last time you gave someone a heartfelt compliment? Or, to reverse the question: When was the last time that someone, especially someone who is threatened by your talents, gave you a sincere compliment?
We don’t compliment each other easily, or often, and this betrays a secret jealousy. It also reveals a genuine moral flaw in our lives. Thomas Aquinas one submitted that to withhold a compliment from someone who deserves it is a sin because we are withholding from him or her some of the food that he or she needs to live. To not admire, to not praise, to not compliment, is not a sign of sophistication but a sign moral immaturity and personal insecurity. It is also one of the deeper reasons why we so often fill with bitter feelings of resentment and unhappiness.
Why do we so often feel bitter and resentful? We fill with resentment for many reasons, though, not least, because we have lost the virtues of admiration and praise.
(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX.)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
Sometimes certain texts in the Bible make you wonder: Is this really the word of God? Why is this text in scripture? What’s the lesson here?
For example, we have verses in the Psalms, in passages that we pray liturgically, where we ask God to bash the heads of the children of our enemies against a rock. How does that invite us to love our enemies? We see passages in the Book of Job where Job is in despair and curses not on only the day he was born but the very fact that anyone was born. It’s impossible to find even a trace of anything positive in his lament.
Similarly, in a rather famous text, we hear Qoheleth affirm that everything in our lives and in the life of this world is simple vanity, wind, vapor, of no substance and of no consequence. What’s the lesson here? Then, in the Gospels, we have passages where the apostles, discouraged by opposition to their message, ask Jesus to call down fire and destroy the very people to whom they are supposed to minister. Hardly an exemplar for ministry!
Why are these texts in the Bible? Because they give us sacred permission to feel the way we feel sometimes and they give us sacred tools to help us deal with the shortcomings and frustrations of our lives.
They are, in fact, both very important and very consoling texts because, to put it metaphorically, they give us a large enough keyboard to play all the songs that we need to play in our lives. They give us the laments and the prayers we need to utter sometimes in the face of our human condition, with its many frustrations, and in the face of death, tragedy, and depression.
To give a simple example: A friend of mine shares this story: Recently he was in church with his family, which included his seven year-old son, Michael, and his own mother, Michael’s grandmother. At one point, Michael, seated beside his grandmother, whispered aloud: “I’m so bored!” His grandmother pinched him and chided him: “You are not bored!” as if the sacred ambience of church and an authoritative command could change human nature. They can’t. When we’re bored, we’re bored! And sometimes we need to be given divine permission to feel what we’re spontaneously feeling.
Some years ago, for all the noblest of intentions, a religious community I know wanted to sanitize the Psalms that they pray regularly in the Divine Office to rid them of all elements of anger, violence, vengeance, and war. They had some of their own scripture scholars do the work so that it would be scholarly and serious.
They succeeded in that, the product was scholarly and serious, but stripped of all motifs of violence, vengeance, anger, and war what resulted was something that looked more like a Hallmark card than a series of prayers that express real life and real feelings.
We don’t always feel upbeat, generous, and faith-filled. Sometimes we feel angry, bitter and vengeful. We need to be given sacred permission to feel that way (though not to act that way) and to pray in honesty out of that space.
My parents, and for the most part their whole generation, would, daily, in their prayers, utter these words: “To You do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.” Our own generation tends to view this as morbid, as somehow denigrating both the beauty and joy of life and the perspective that faith is meant to give us.
But there’s a hidden richness in that prayer. In praying that way, they gave themselves sacred permission to accept the limits of their lives. That prayer carries the symbolic tools to handle frustration; something, I submit, we have failed to sufficiently give to our own children.
Too many young people today have never been given the symbolic tools to handle frustration, nor sacred permission to feel what they are feeling. Sometimes, all good intentions aside, we have handed our children more of Walt Disney than Gospel.
In the Book of Lamentations we find a passage that while sounding negative on the surface, is paradoxically, in the face of death and tragedy, perhaps the most consoling text of all. The text simply states that, sometimes in life, all we can do is put our mouths to the dust and wait!
That’s sound advice, spoken from the mouth of experience and the mouth of faith.
The poet, Rainer Marie Rilke, once wrote these words to a friend who, in the face of the death of a loved one, wondered how or where he could ever find consolation. What do I do with all this grief? Rilke’s reply: “Do not be afraid to suffer, give that heaviness back to the weight of the earth; mountains are heavy, seas are heavy.” They are, so too is life sometimes and we need to be given God’s permission to feel that heaviness.
(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX.)