IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI

I work and move within church circles and find that most of the people there are honest, committed, and for the most part radiate their faith positively. Most churchgoers aren’t hypocrites. What I do find disturbing in church circles though is that many of us can be bitter, mean-spirited, and judgmental in terms of defending the very values that we hold most dear.

It was Henri Nouwen who first highlighted this, commenting with sadness that many of the bitter and ideologically driven people he knew, he had met inside of church circles and places of ministry. Within church circles, it sometimes seems, almost everyone is angry about something. Moreover, within church circles, it is all too easy to rationalize that in the name of prophecy, as a righteous passion for truth and morals.

The algebra works this way: because I am sincerely concerned about an important moral, ecclesial, or justice issue, I can excuse a certain amount of anger, elitism, and negative judgment, because I can rationalize that my cause, dogmatic or moral, is so important that it justifies my mean spirit, that is, I have a right to be cold and harsh because this is such an important truth.

And so we justify a mean spirit by giving it a prophetic cloak, believing that we are warriors for God, truth, and morals when, in fact, we are struggling equally with our own wounds, insecurities and fears. Hence we often look at others, even whole churches made up of sincere persons trying to live the gospel, and instead of seeing brothers and sisters struggling, like us, to follow Jesus, we see “people in error,” “dangerous relativists,” “new age pagans,” “religious flakes,” and in our more generous moments, “poor misguided souls.” But seldom do we look at what this kind of judgment is saying about us, about our own health of soul and our own following of Jesus.

Don’t get me wrong: Truth is not relative, moral issues are important, and right truth and proper morals, like all kingdoms, are under perpetual siege and need to be defended. Not all moral judgments are created equal; and neither are all churches.

But the truth of that doesn’t override everything else and give us an excuse to rationalize a mean spirit. We must defend truth, defend those who cannot defend themselves, and be faithful in the traditions of our own churches. However, right truth and right morals don’t all alone make us disciples of Jesus. What does?

What makes us genuine disciples of Jesus is living inside his Spirit, the Holy Spirit, and this is not something abstract and vague. If one were searching for a single formula to determine who is Christian and who isn’t, one might look at the Epistle to the Galatians, Chapter 5. In it, St. Paul tells us that we can live according to either the spirit of the flesh or of the Holy Spirit.

We live according to the spirit of the flesh when we live in bitterness, judgment of our neighbor, factionalism and non-forgiveness. When these things characterize our lives, we shouldn’t delude ourselves and think that we are living inside of the Holy Spirit.

Conversely, we live inside of the Holy Spirit when our lives are characterized by charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, longsuffering, constancy, faith, gentleness and chastity. If these do not characterize our lives, we should not nurse the illusion that we are inside of God’s Spirit, irrespective of our passion for truth, dogma, or justice.

This may be a cruel thing to say, and perhaps more cruel not to say, but I sometimes see more charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness and gentleness among persons who are Unitarian or New Age (people who are often judged by other churches as being wishy-washy and as not standing for anything) than I see among those of us who do stand so strongly for certain ecclesial and moral issues that we become mean-spirited and non-charitable inside of those convictions. Given the choice of whom I’d like as a neighbor or, more deeply, the choice of whom I might want to spend eternity with, I am sometimes conflicted about the choice. Who is my real faith companion? The mean-spirited zealot at war for Jesus or cause, or the gentler soul who is branded wishy-washy or “new age?” At the end of the day, who is living more inside the Holy Spirit?

We need, I believe, to be more self-critical vis-a-vis our anger, harsh judgments, mean-spirit, exclusiveness and disdain for other ecclesial and moral paths. As T.S. Eliot once said: The last temptation that’s the greatest treason is to do the right thing for the wrong reason. We may have truth and right morals on our side, but our anger and harsh judgments towards those who don’t share our truth and morals may well have us standing outside the Father’s house, like the older brother of the prodigal son, bitter both at God’s mercy and at those who are, seemingly without merit, receiving it.

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

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI

All things considered; I believe that I grew up with a relatively healthy concept of God. The God of my youth, the God that I was catechized into, was not unduly punishing, arbitrary or judgmental. Granted, he was omnipresent so that all of our sins were noticed and noted; but at the end of the day, he was fair, loving, personally concerned for each of us, and wonderfully protective to the point of providing each of us with a personal guardian angel. That God gave me permission to live without too much fear and without any particularly crippling religious neuroses.

But that only gets you so far in life. Not having an unhealthy notion of God doesn’t necessarily mean you have a particularly healthy one. The God who I was raised on was not overly stern and judgmental, but neither was he very joyous, playful, witty or humorous. Especially, he wasn’t sexual, and had a particularly vigilant and uncompromising eye in that area. Essentially, he was somber, heavy and not very joyous to be around. Around him, you had to be solemn and reverent. I remember the assistant director at our Oblate novitiate telling us that there is no recorded incident, ever, of Jesus having laughed.

Under such a God you had permission to be essentially healthy. However, to the extent that you took him seriously, you still walked through life less than fully robust and your relationship with him could only be solemn and reverent.

Then, beginning more than a generation ago, there was a strong reaction in many churches and in the culture to this concept of God. Popular theology and spirituality set out to correct this, sometimes with an undue vigor. What they presented instead was a laughing Jesus and a dancing God, and while this was not without its value, it still left us begging for a deeper literature about the nature of God and what that might mean for us in terms of a health and relationships.

That literature won’t be easy to write, not just because God is ineffable, but because God’s energy is also ineffable. What, indeed, is energy? We rarely ask this question because we take energy as something so primal that it cannot be defined but only taken as a given, as self-evident. We see energy as the primal force that lies at the heart of everything that exists, animate and inanimate. Moreover, we feel energy, powerfully, within ourselves. We know energy, we feel energy, but we rarely recognize its origins, its prodigiousness, its joy, its goodness, its effervescence, and its exuberance. Moreover, we rarely recognize what it tells us about God. What does it tell us?
The first quality of energy is its prodigiousness. It is prodigal beyond our imagination, and this speaks something about God. What kind of creator makes billions of throwaway universes? What kind of creator makes trillions upon trillions of species of life, millions of them never to be seen by the human eye? What kind of father or mother has billions of children?

And what does the exuberance in the energy of young children say about our creator? What does their playfulness suggest about what must also lie inside of sacred energy? What does the energy of a young puppy tell us about what’s sacred? What do laughter, wit and irony tell us about God?
No doubt the energy we see around us and feel irrepressibly within us tells us that, underneath, before and below everything else, there flows a sacred force, both physical and spiritual, which is at its root, joyous, happy, playful, exuberant, effervescent, and deeply personal and loving. God is the ground of that energy. That energy speaks of God and that energy tells us why God made us and what kind of permissions God is giving us for living out our lives.

God is ineffable, that is the first truth that we hold about God. That means that God cannot be imagined or ever circumscribed in a concept. All images of God are inadequate; but that being admitted, we might try to imagine things this way. At the very center of everything there lies an unimaginable energy that is not an impersonal force, but a person, a loving self-conscious mind and heart. From this ground, this person, issues forth all energy, all creativity, all power, all love, all nourishment and all beauty. Moreover, that energy, at its sacred root, is not just creative, intelligent, personal and loving, it’s also joyous, colorful, witty, playful, humorous, erotic and exuberant at its very core. To live in it is to feel a constant invitation to gratitude.

The challenge of our lives is to live inside that energy in a way that honors both it and its origins. That means keeping our shoes off before the burning bush as we respect its sacredness, even as we constantly receive permission from it to be robust, free, joyous, humorous, and playful – without feeling we are stealing fire from the gods.

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

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI

Theologians sometimes try to express the meaning of Jesus’ resurrection in one sentence: In the resurrection, God vindicated Jesus, his life, his message and his fidelity. What does that mean?

Jesus entered our world preaching faith, love and forgiveness, but the world didn’t accept that. Instead, it crucified him and by that seemingly shamed his message. We see this most clearly on the cross when Jesus is taunted, mocked and challenged: If you are the son of God, come down from there! If your message is true, let God verify that right now! If your fidelity is more than plain stubbornness and human ignorance, then why are you dying in shame?

What was God’s response to those taunts? Seemingly nothing, no commentary, no defense, no apologia, no counter challenge, just silence. Jesus dies in silence. Neither he nor the God he believed in tried to fill that excruciating void with any consoling words or explanations challenging people to look at the bigger picture or to look at the brighter side of things. None of that. Just silence.

Jesus died in silence, inside God’s silence and inside the world’s incomprehension. And we can let ourselves be scandalized by that silence, just as we can let ourselves be scandalized by the seeming triumph of evil, pain and suffering in our world. God’s seeming silence in the face of evil and death can forever scandalize us: in the Jewish holocaust, in ethnic genocides, in brutal and senseless wars, in the earthquakes and tsunamis which kill thousands of people and devastate whole countries, in the deaths of countless people taken out of this life by cancer and by violence, in how unfair life can be sometimes, and in the casual manner that those without conscience can rape whole areas of life seemingly without consequence. Where is God in all of this? What’s God’s answer?

God’s answer is the resurrection, the resurrection of Jesus and the perennial resurrection of goodness within life itself. But resurrection is not necessarily rescue. God doesn’t necessarily rescue us from the effects of evil, nor even from death. Evil does what it does, natural disasters are what they are, and those without conscience can rape even as they are feeding off life’s sacred fire. Normally, God doesn’t intervene. The parting of the Red Sea isn’t a weekly occurrence. God lets his loved ones suffer and die, just as Jesus let his dear friend Lazarus die, and God let Jesus die. God redeems, raises us up afterwards, in a deeper, more lasting vindication. Moreover, the truth of that statement can even be tested empirically.

Despite every appearance to the contrary at times, in the end, love does triumph over hatred. Peace does triumph over chaos. Forgiveness does triumph over bitterness. Hope does triumph over cynicism. Fidelity does triumph over despair. Virtue does triumph over sin. Conscience does triumph over callousness. Life does triumph over death, and good does triumph over evil, always. Mohandas K. Gandhi once wrote: “When I despair, I remember that all through history, the way of truth and love has always won. There have been murderers and tyrants, and for a time they seem invincible. But in the end they always fall. Think of it, always.”

The resurrection, most forcibly, makes that point. In the end, God has the last word. The resurrection of Jesus is that last word. From the ashes of shame, of seeming defeat, failure and death, a new, deeper and eternal life perennially bursts forth. Our faith begins at the very point where it seems it should end, in God’s seeming silence in the face of evil.

And what does this ask of us?

First, simply that we trust in the truth of the resurrection. The resurrection asks us to believe what Gandhi affirmed, namely, that in the end evil will not have the last word. It will fail. Good will eventually triumph.

More concretely, it asks us to roll the dice on trust and truth, namely, trusting that what Jesus taught is true. Virtue is not naïve, even when it is shamed. Sin and cynicism are naïve, even when they appear to triumph. Those who genuflect before God and others in conscience will find meaning and joy, even when they are deprived of some of the world’s pleasures. Those who drink in and manipulate sacred energy without conscience will not find meaning in life, even when they taste pleasure. Those who live in honesty, no matter the cost, will find freedom. Those who lie and rationalize will find themselves imprisoned in self-hate. Those who live in trust will find love. God’s silence can be trusted, even when we die inside of it.

We need to remain faithful in love, forgiveness, and conscience, despite everything that suggests they are naive. They will bring us to what is deepest inside of life. Ultimately, God vindicates virtue. God vindicates love. God vindicates conscience. God vindicates forgiveness. God vindicates fidelity. Ultimately, God vindicated Jesus and will vindicate us too if we remain faithful.

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

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI

Sometimes there’s nothing as helpful as a good metaphor.

In his book, The God Instinct, Tom Stella shares this story: A number of men who made their living as porters were hired one day to carry a huge load of supplies for a group on safari. Their loads were unusually heavy and the trek through the jungle was rough. Several days into the journey they stopped, unshouldered their loads and refused to go on. No pleas, bribes or threats, worked in terms of persuading them to go on. Asked why they couldn’t continue, they answered: “We can’t go on; we have to wait for our souls to catch up with us.”

That also happens to us in life, except mostly we never wait for our souls to catch up. We continue without them, sometimes for years. What this means is that we struggle to be in the present moment, to be inside our own skin, to be aware of the richness of our own experience. Too often our experiences aren’t very soulful because we aren’t present to them. I cite myself as an example:

For the past twenty-five years, I’ve kept a journal, a diary of sorts. My intent in keeping this journal is to record the deeper things that I’m aware of throughout each day; but mostly what I end up actually writing down is a simple chronology of my day, a daybook, a bare, no-frills, recounting of what I did from hour to hour. My diaries don’t much resemble Anne Frank’s diary, Dag Hammarskjold’s Markings or Henri Nouwen’s Genesee Diary. My journals resemble more what you might get from a schoolboy describing his day at school, a simple chronology of what happened. Yet when I go back some years later and read an account of what I did on a given day, I’m always amazed at how rich and full my life was on that day, except that I wasn’t much aware of it at the time. While actually living through those days, mostly I was struggling to get my work done, to stay on top of things, to meet expectations, to carve out some moments of friendship and recreation amid the pressures of the day, and to get to bed at a reasonable hour. There wasn’t a lot of soul there, just routine, work and hurry.

I suspect that this is not atypical. Most of us live most of our days not very aware of how rich our lives are, forever leaving our souls behind. For example, many is the woman who gives ten to fifteen years of her life to bearing and raising children, with all that entails, tending constantly to someone else’s needs, getting up at night to nurse a child, spending 24 hours a day on constant alert, sacrificing all leisure time, and putting a career and personal creativity on hold. And yet often that same woman, later on looks back on those years and wishes she could relive them – but now, in a more soulful way, more consciously aware of how privileged it was to do precisely those things she did within so much tedium and tiredness. Years later, looking back, she sees how rich and precious her experience was and how because of the burden and stress how little her soul was present then to what she was experiencing.

This can be multiplied with a thousand examples. We’ve all read accounts wherein someone shares what he or she would do differently if he or she had life to live over again. Mostly these stories rework the same motif. Given another chance, I would try to enjoy it more, that is, I would try to keep my soul more present and more aware.

For most of us, I fear, our souls will only catch up with us when, finally, we are in retirement, with diminished health, diminished energy, and no opportunity to work. It seems we need to first lose something before we fully appreciate it. We tend to take life, health, energy and work for granted, until they are taken away from us. Only after the fact do we realize how rich our lives have been and how little of those riches we drank in at the time.

Our souls eventually do catch up with us, but it would be good if we didn’t wait until we were in assisted living for this to happen. Like the porters who dropped their loads and stopped, we need to stop and wait for our souls to catch up.

Early on in his priesthood, when Pope Francis was principal of a school, he would at a certain point each day have the public address system cut in and interrupt the work that was going on in each classroom with this announcement: Be grateful. Set your horizon. Take stock of your day.

We all need, regularly, to lay down our burdens for a minute so our souls can catch up with us.

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

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI

God behaves in the psalms in ways that God is not allowed to behave in theology.
That quip comes from Sebastian Moore and should be highlighted at a time when fewer people want to use the psalms in prayer because they feel offended by what they sometimes find there. More and more, we see people resisting the psalms as a way to pray (or desire to sanitize them) because the psalms speak of murder, revenge, anger, violence, war-making, and patriarchy.

Some ask, how can I pray with words that are full of hatred, anger, violence, speak of the glories of war, and of crushing one’s enemies in the name of God? For others, the objection is to a patriarchal coloring in the psalms – where the divine is masculine and the masculine is too-much deified. For yet others, the offense is aesthetic. Their objection: “They’re bad poetry!”

Perhaps the psalms aren’t great poetry and undeniably do smack of violence, war, hatred of one’s enemies, and the desire for vengeance, all in the name of God. Admittedly, they’re also patriarchal in character. But does that make them a bad language for prayer? Let me suggest something to the contrary.

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

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

Sometimes we feel good and our spontaneous impulse is to speak words of praise and gratitude, and the psalms give us that voice. They speak of God’s goodness in everything – love, friends, faith, health, food, wine, enjoyment. But we don’t always feel that way. Our lives also have their cold, lonely seasons when disappointment and bitterness simmer or rage under the surface. The psalms give us honest voice where we can open up all those simmering feelings to God. Also, there are times when we are filled with the sense of our own inadequacy, with the fact that we cannot measure up to the trust and love that’s given us. Again, the psalms give us voice for this, asking God to be merciful and to soften our hearts, wash us clean, and give us a new start.

As well, there are times when we feel bitterly disappointed with God and need some way to express this. The psalms give us voice for this (“Why are you so silent?” “Why are you so far from me?”) even as they make us aware that God is not afraid of our anger and bitterness; but, like a loving parent, only wants us to come and talk about it. The psalms are a privileged vehicle for prayer because they lift the full range of our thoughts and feelings to God.

However, there are a number of reasons why we struggle with that. First, because our age tends to eschew metaphor and taken literally, some of the images in the psalms are offensive. Second, we tend to be in denial about our actual feelings. It’s hard to admit that we feel some of the things we sometimes feel – grandiosity, sexual obsessions, jealousies, bitterness, paranoia, murderous thoughts, disappointment with God, doubts in our faith. Too often our prayer belies our actual thoughts and feelings. It tells God what we think God wants to hear. The psalms are more honest.

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

Feel-good aphorisms that express how we think we ought to feel are no substitute for the earthy realism of the psalms which express how sometimes we actually do feel. Anyone who would lift mind and heart to God without ever mentioning feelings of bitterness, jealousy, vengeance, hatred, and war, should write slogans for greeting cards and not be anyone’s spiritual advisor.

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

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI

Is this new or are we just more aware of it? Hatred and contempt are everywhere. They are in our government houses, in our communities, in our churches and in our families. We are struggling, mostly without success, to be civil with each other; let alone to respect each other. Why? Why is this happening and intensifying?

Moreover, on both sides, we are often justifying this hatred on moral grounds, even biblical grounds, claiming that the Gospel itself gives us grounds for our disrespect – My truth is so right and you are so wrong that I can disrespect you and I have biblical grounds to hate you!

Well, even a cursory look at scripture should be enough to enable us to see this for what it is; rationalization, self-interest – and the farthest thing from Jesus.

Let’s begin with something already taught long before Jesus. In the Jewish scriptures, we already find this text: “I have made you contemptible and base before all the people, since you do not keep my ways, but show partiality in your decisions. Have we not all the one Father? Has not the one God created us? Why do we break faith with one another?” (Malachi 2:8-10) Long before Jesus, Jewish spirituality already demanded that we be fair and never show partiality. However, it still gave us permission to hate our enemies and to take revenge when we have been wronged – “an eye for an eye.”

Jesus turns this on its head. Everywhere in his person and in his teaching, most explicitly in the Sermon on the Mount, he challenges us in a radically new way, telling us that, if we want to go to heaven, our virtue needs to go deeper than that of the Scribes and the Pharisees. What was their virtue?

The Scribes and Pharisees of his time were very much like the church-going Christians of our time. They were sincere, essentially honest, basically good people, who kept the commandments and practiced strict justice. But, according to Jesus, that isn’t enough. Why? If you are a sincere person who is honest, keeps the commandments, and is fair to everyone, what’s still missing? What’s still missing lies at the very heart of Jesus’ moral teaching, namely, the practice of a love and forgiveness that goes beyond hatred and grievance. What exactly is this?

In justice and fairness, you are still entitled to hate someone who hates you and to extract an appropriate vengeance on someone who has wronged you. However, Jesus asks something else of us: “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor’ and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. … If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” (Matthew 5:43-48)

This is the very essence of Christian morality. Can you love someone who hates you? Can you do good to someone who wishes you evil? Can you forgive someone who has wronged you? Can you forgive a murderer? It’s this, and not some particular issue in moral theology, which is the litmus test for who is a Christian and who isn’t. Can you love someone who hates you? Can you forgive someone who has hurt you? Can you move beyond your natural proclivity for vengeance?

Sadly, today we are failing that test on both sides of the ideological and religious spectrum. We see this everywhere – from the highest levels of government, from high levels in our churches, and in public and private discourse everywhere, that is, people openly espousing disrespect, division, hatred and vengeance – and trying to claim the moral high ground in doing this. Major politicians speak openly and explicitly about hating others and about exacting revenge on those who oppose them. Worse still, churches and church leaders of every kind are lining up behind them and giving them “Gospel” support for their espousal of hatred and vengeance.

This needs to be named and challenged: anyone who is advocating division, disrespect, hatred or revenge is antithetical to Jesus and the Gospels. As well, anyone supporting such a person by an appeal to Jesus, the Gospels, or authentic morality, is also antithetical to Jesus and the Gospels.

God is love. Jesus is love enfleshed. Disrespect, hatred, division and revenge may never be preached in God’s or Jesus’ name, no matter the cause, no matter the anger, no matter the wrong. This doesn’t mean that we cannot have disagreements, spirited discussions and bitter debates. But disrespect, hatred, division and revenge (no matter how deeply they may in fact be felt inside us) may not be advocated in the name of goodness and Jesus. Division, disrespect, hatred and vengeance are the Anti-Christ.

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

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI

A sound theology and a sound science will both recognize that the law of gravity and the Holy Spirit are one in the same principle. There isn’t a different spirit undergirding the physical than the spiritual. There’s one spirit that’s speaking through both the law of gravity and the Sermon on the Mount.

If we recognized that same Spirit is present in everything, in physical creation, in love, in beauty, in human creativity and in human morality; we could hold more things together in a fruitful tension rather than putting them in opposition and having the different gifts of the God’s Spirit fight each other. What does this mean?

We have too many unhealthy dichotomies in our lives. Too often we find ourselves choosing between things that should not be in opposition to each other and are in the unhappy position of having to pick between two things which are both, in themselves, good. We live in a world in which, too often, the spiritual is set against the physical, morality is set against creativity, wisdom is set against education, commitment is set against sex, conscience is set against pleasure, and personal fidelity is set against creative and professional success.

Obviously there’s something wrong here. If one force, God’s Spirit, is the single source that animates all these things then clearly we should not be in a position of having to choose between them. Ideally we should be choosing both because the one, same Spirit undergirds both.

Is this true? Is the Holy Spirit both the source of gravity and the source of love? Yes. At least if the Scriptures are to be believed. They tell us that the Holy Spirit is both a physical and a spiritual force, the source of all physicality and of all spirituality all at the same time.

We first meet the person of the Holy Spirit in the opening line of the Bible: In the beginning there was a formless void and the Spirit of God hovered over the chaos. In the early chapters of the Scriptures, the Holy Spirit is presented as a physical force, a wind that comes from the very mouth of God and not only shapes and orders physical creation but is also the energy that lies at the base of everything, animate and inanimate alike: Take away your breath, and everything returns to dust.

The ancients believed there was a soul in everything and that soul, God’s breath, held everything together and gave it meaning. They believed this even though they did not understand, as we do today, the workings of the infra-atomic world: how the tiniest particles and energy waves already possess erotic electrical charges, how hydrogen seeks out oxygen, and how at the most elemental level of physical reality energies are already attracting and repelling each other just as people do. They could not explain these things scientifically as we can, but they recognized, just as we do, that there is already some form of “love” inside all things, however inanimate. They attributed all of this to God’s breath, a wind that comes from God’s mouth and ultimately animates rocks, water, animals and human beings.

They understood that the same breath that animates and orders physical creation is also the source of all wisdom, harmony, peace, creativity, morality and fidelity. God’s breath was understood to be as moral as it is physical, as unifying as it is creative, and as wise as it is daring. For them, the breath of God was one force and it did not contradict itself. The physical and the spiritual world were not set against each other. One Spirit was understood to be the source of both.

We need to understand things in the same way. We need to let the Holy Spirit, in all its fullness, animate our lives. What this means concretely is that we must not let ourselves be energized and driven too much by one part of the Spirit to the detriment of other parts of that same Spirit.

Thus, there shouldn’t be creativity in the absence of morality, education in the absence of wisdom, sex in the absence of commitment, pleasure in the absence of conscience, and artistic or professional achievement in the absence of personal fidelity. Not least, there shouldn’t be a good life for some in the absence of justice for everyone. Conversely, however, we need to be suspicious of ourselves when we are moral but not creative, when our wisdom fears critical education, when our spirituality has a problem with pleasure, and when our personal fidelity is over-defensive in the face of art and achievement. One Spirit is the author of all of these. Hence, we must be equally sensitive to each of them.

Someone once quipped that a heresy is something that is nine-tenths true. That’s our problem with the Holy Spirit. We’re forever into partial truth when we don’t allow for a connection between the law of gravity and the Sermon on the Mount.

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