IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
When all is said and done, our lives are not all that serene and peaceful. In a manner of speaking, we are always somewhat pathetic. That shouldn’t scare us. Pathetic is not a pejorative term. The word comes from the Greek, pathos, which means pain. To be pathetic is to live in pain, and we all do because of the very way we are made.
You might say that doesn’t sound right. Aren’t we made in the image and likeness of God so that each of us, no matter how messed up our lives might be, carry a special dignity and a certain godliness within us? We do carry that special dignity. However, despite that and largely because of it, our lives tend to be so complex as to be pain filled. Why?

Godliness isn’t easy to carry. The infinite inside us doesn’t easily fit itself into the finite. We carry too much divine fire inside to find much peace in this life.
That struggle begins early in life. To create a self-identity as a very young child, we need to make a series of mental contractions which ultimately limit our awareness. First, we need to differentiate ourselves from others (That’s mom – I’m me); then, we need to differentiate between what is living and what is not (the puppy is alive – my doll isn’t); next, we need to differentiate between what is physical and what is mental (this is my body – but I think with my mind). Finally, and critically, as we are doing all this, we need split off as much of our luminosity we can consciously handle from what is too much to consciously handle. With that we create a self-identity – but we also create a shadow, namely, an area inside us which is split off from our consciousness.
Notice that our shadow is not first of all a looming darkness. Rather, it’s all the light and energy inside us that we cannot consciously handle. Most of us, I suspect, are familiar with the words of Marianne Williamson made famous by Nelson Mandela in his inauguration speech: Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.
Our light frightens us because it is not easy to carry. It gives us great dignity and infinite depth, but it also makes us pathologically complex and restless. Ruth Burrows, one of the foremost spiritual writers of our time, begins her autobiography with these words: I was born into this world with a tortured sensitivity and my life has not been an easy one. You wouldn’t expect those words from a mystic, from someone who has been a faithful nun for more than seventy-five years. You wouldn’t expect that her struggle in life was as much with the light within herself as with the darkness within and around her. That’s also true for each of us.
There’s a famous passage in the Book of Qoheleth where the sacred writer tells us that God has made everything beautiful in its own time. However, the passage doesn’t end on a peaceful note. It ends by telling us that, while God has made everything beautiful in its own time, God has put timelessness into the human heart so that we are congenitally out of sync with time and the seasons from beginning to end. Both our special dignity and our pathological complexity take their origins in that anomaly in our nature. We are overcharged for life on this planet.
St. Augustine gave this classic expression in his famous line: You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you. There is an entire anthropology and spirituality in that single line. Our dignity and our perpetual restlessness have one and the same source.
Thus, you need to give yourself sacred permission for being wild of heart, restless of heart, insatiable of heart, complex of heart and driven of heart. Too often, where both psychology and spirituality have failed you is in giving you the impression that you should be living without chaos and restlessness in your life. Admittedly, these can beset you more acutely because of moral inadequacy, but they will beset you no matter how good a life you are living. Indeed, if you are a deeply sensitive person, you will probably feel your complexity more acutely than if you are less sensitive or are deadening your sensitivity with distractions.
Karl Rahner once wrote to a friend who had written to him complaining that he wasn’t finding the fulfillment he longed for in life. His friend expressed disappointment with himself, his marriage and his job. Rahner gave him this counsel: In the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable, we ultimately learn that in this life there is no finished symphony.
There can be no finished symphony in this life – not because our souls are defective, but because they carry godliness.

(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

In the days of apartheid in South Africa, Christians there used to light candles and place them in their windows as a sign to themselves and others that they believed that someday this injustice would end. A candle burning in a window was a sign of hope and a political statement. The government didn’t miss the message. It passed a law making it illegal to place a lit candle in a window, the offense being equal to owning a firearm; both were considered equally dangerous. This eventually became a joke among the kids: “Our government is afraid of lit candles!”

And well they should be! Lit candles, more than firearms, overthrew apartheid. Hope, not guns, is what ultimately transforms things. To light a candle as an act of hope is to say to yourself and to others that, despite anything that might be happening in the world, you are still nursing a vision of peace and unity that’s based upon something beyond the present state of things and upon deeper realities and powers than what the world admits. To light a candle is to state publicly that you believe that, at the end of the day, more than what you see on the evening news will shape the final outcome of things. There are other powers also at work. To light a candle is an act of political defiance and an act of hope.

What is hope?

First, it’s not wishful thinking. I can wish to win a lottery, but that wish, in itself, contains no real power to make it happen. Second, hope is not simply temperamental optimism, an upbeat temperament that always sees the bright side of things. An unwavering optimism about things can sometimes be helpful, but it’s no basis for hope; like wishful thinking it lacks the power to make its own dream come true. Finally, hope is not simply shrewd observation and common sense, a talent for sorting out the real from the fluff. Useful as this is, it’s still not hope. Why not?

Because hope doesn’t base itself upon a shrewd assessment of the empirical facts, but upon belief in a deeper set of realities: God’s existence, God’s power, God’s goodness and the promise that flows from that.

There’s a story told about Pierre Teilhard de Chardin that helps illustrate this. Teilhard wasn’t much given to wishful thinking or even to an optimistic temperament; he tended rather toward a lonely realism. Yet he was a man of real hope. For example, on one occasion, after giving a conference where he laid out a vision within which ultimately unity and peace will be achieved on earth in a way that parallels the vision of scripture, he was challenged by some colleagues to this effect: “That’s a wonderful, idealistic vision of things, but suppose we blow up the world with a nuclear bomb, what happens to your vision then?” Teilhard replied, “that would set things back some millions of years, but this will still come to fruition, not because I say so or because the facts right now indicate that it will, but because God promised it and in the resurrection of Jesus has shown that He is powerful enough to deliver on that promise.”

Hope, as we can see from this, requires both faith and patience. It works like yeast, not like a microwave oven. Jim Wallis, the founder of Sojourners, expresses this colorfully: “All politicians are alike,” he says, “they hold a finger up and check which way the wind is blowing and then make their decisions in that direction. That will never change, even if we change politicians. So, we must change the wind! That’s hope’s task – to change the wind!”

When we look at what has morally changed this world – from the great religious traditions coming out of deserts, caves, and catacombs and helping leaven whole cultures morally, to apartheid being overthrown in South Africa – we see that it has happened precisely when individuals and groups lit candles and hoped long enough until the wind changed.

We light Advent candles with just that in mind, accepting that changing the wind is a long process, that the evening news will not always be positive, the stock markets will not always rise, the most sophisticated defenses in the world will not always protect us from terrorism, and secular liberal and conservative ideologies will not rid this planet of selfishness.

However, we continue to light candles and hope anyway, not on the basis of a worsening or improving evening newscast, but because the deepest reality of all is that God exists, that the center holds, that there’s ultimately a gracious Lord who rules this universe, and this Lord is powerful enough to rearrange the atoms of the planet and raise dead bodies to new life. We light candles of hope because God, who is the ultimate power, has promised to establish a kingdom of love and peace on this earth and is gracious, forgiving and powerful enough to eventually make it happen.

(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 live on both sides of a border. Not a geographical one, but one that separates the church pew from the academic halls of theology.

I was raised a conservative Roman Catholic. Although my dad worked politically for the liberal party, most everything within my upbringing was conservative, particularly as this pertains to religion. I was a staunch Roman Catholic in most every way. I grew up under the papacy of Pius XII (and the fact that my youngest brother is named Pius will tell you how loyal our family was to that Pope’s version of things). We believed that Roman Catholicism was the one true religion and that Protestants and Evangelicals needed to convert and return to the true faith. I memorized the Roman Catholic catechism and defended its every word. Moreover, beyond being faithful churchgoers, my family was given over to piety and devotions: we prayed the rosary together as a family every day; had statues and holy pictures around our house; wore blessed medals around our necks; prayed litanies to Mary, Joseph and the Sacred Heart during certain months; and practiced a warm devotion to the saints. And it was wonderful. I will forever be grateful for that religious foundation.

I went from my family home to the seminary at the tender age of seventeen and my early seminary years reinforced what my family had given me. The academics were good, and we were encouraged to read great thinkers in every discipline. But this higher learning was still set solidly within a Roman Catholic ethos that honored my religious and devotional background. My initial university studies were still friends with my piety. My mind was expanding, but my piety remained intact.

But home is where we start from. Gradually, through the years, my world has changed. Studying at various graduate schools, teaching on graduate faculties, being in daily contact with other expressions of the faith, reading contemporary novelists and thinkers, and having academic colleagues as cherished friends has, I confess, put some strain on the piety of my youth. Truth be told, we don’t often pray the rosary or litanies to Mary or the Sacred Heart in graduate classrooms or at faculty gatherings.

However academic classrooms and faculty gatherings bring something else, something vitally needed in church pews and in circles of piety, namely, a critical theological vision and principles to keep unbridled piety, naïve fundamentalism, and misguided religious fervor within proper boundaries. What I’ve learned in academic circles is also wonderful and I am forever grateful for the privilege of being in academic circles most of my adult life.

But, of course, that’s a formula for tension, albeit a healthy one. Let me use someone else’s voice to articulate this. In his book “Silence and Beauty,” Japanese American artist, Makoto Fujimura, shares this incident from his own life. Coming out of church one Sunday, he was asked by his pastor to add his name to a list of people who had agreed to boycott the film, “The Last Temptation of Christ.” He liked his pastor and wanted to please him by signing the petition, but felt hesitant to sign for reasons that, at that time, he couldn’t articulate. But his wife could. Before he could sign, she stepped in and said: “Artists may have other roles to play than to boycott this film.” He understood what she meant. He didn’t sign the petition.
But his decision left him pondering the tension between boycotting such a movie and his role as an artist. Here’s how he puts it: “An artist is often pulled in two directions. Religiously conservative people tend to see culture as suspect at best, and when cultural statements are made to transgress the normative reality they hold dear, their default reaction is to oppose and boycott. People in the more liberal artistic community see these transgressive steps as necessary for their ‘freedom of expression.’ An artist like me, who values both religion and art, will be exiled from both. I try to hold together both of these commitments, but it is a struggle.”

That’s also my struggle. The piety of my youth, of my parents, and of that rich branch of Catholicism is real and life-giving; but so too is the critical (sometimes unsettling) iconoclastic theology of the academy. The two desperately need each other; yet someone who is trying to be loyal to both can, like Fujimura, end up feeling exiled from both. Theologians also have other roles to play than boycotting movies.
The people whom I take as mentors in this area are men and women who, in my eyes, can do both: like Dorothy Day, who could be equally comfortable, leading the rosary or the peace march; like Jim Wallis, who can advocate just as passionately for radical social engagement as he can for personal intimacy with Jesus; and like Thomas Aquinas, whose intellect could intimidate intellectuals, even as he could pray with the piety of a child.

Circles of piety and the academy of theology are not enemies. They need to befriend each other.

(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 we are the most helpful and life-giving at the very times when we are most helpless. We’ve all been there. We’re at a funeral and there’s nothing to say that will ease the heartache of someone who has lost a loved one. We feel awkward and helpless. We’d like to say or do something, but there’s nothing to be said or done, other than to be there, embrace the one nursing the grief and share our helplessness. Passing strange, but it is our very helplessness that’s most helpful and generative in that situation. Our passivity is more fruitful and generative than if we were doing something.

We see an example of this in Jesus. He gave both his life and his death for us – but in separate moments. He gave his life for us through his activity and his death for us through his passivity, that is, through what he absorbed in helplessness. Indeed, we can divide each of the Gospels into two clear parts. Up until his arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus is the active one: he teaches, he heals, he performs miracles, he feeds people. Then, after he is arrested, he doesn’t do anything: he is handcuffed, led away, put on trial, scourged and crucified. Yet, and this is the mystery, we believe that he gave us more during that time when he couldn’t do anything than during all those times he was active. We are saved more through his passivity and helplessness than through his powerful actions during his ministry. How does this work? How can helplessness and passivity be so generative?

Partly this is mystery, though partly we grasp some of it through experience. For example, a loving mother dying in hospice, in a coma, unable to speak, can sometimes in that condition change the hearts of her children more powerfully than she ever could during all the years when she did so much for them. What’s the logic here? By what metaphysics does this work?

Let me begin abstractly and circle this question before venturing to an answer. The atheistic thinkers of the Enlightenment (Nietzsche, Feuerbach, Marx and others) offer a very powerful critique of religion and of religious experience. In their view, all religious experience is simply subjective projection, nothing more. For them, in our faith and religious practices, we are forever creating a god in our own image and likeness, to serve our self-interest. (The very antithesis of what Christians believe.) For Nietzsche, for instance, there is no divine revelation coming from outside us, no God in heaven revealing divine truth to us. Everything is us, projecting our needs and creating a god to serve those needs. All religion is self-serving, human projection.

How true is this? One of the most influential professors I’ve studied under, Jesuit Michael Buckley, says this in face of that criticism: These thinkers are 90% correct. But they’re 10% wrong – and that 10% makes all the difference.

Buckley made this comment while teaching what John of the Cross calls a dark night of the soul. What is a dark night of the soul? It’s an experience where we can no longer sense God imaginatively or feel God affectively, when the very sense of God’s existence dries up inside us and we are left in an agnostic darkness, helpless (in head, heart and gut) to conjure up any sense of God.

However, (and this is the point, precisely because we are helpless and unable to conjure up any imaginative concepts or affective feelings about God) God can now flow into us purely, without us being able to color or contaminate that experience. When all our efforts are useless, grace can finally take over and flow into us in purity. Indeed, that’s how all authentic revelation enters our world. When human helplessness renders us incapable of making God serve our self-interest, God can then flow into our lives without contamination.

Now, this is also true for human love. So much of our love for each other, no matter our sincerity, is colored by self-interest and is at some point self-serving. In some fashion, we inevitably form those we love into our own image and likeness. However, as is the case with Buckley’s critique of the atheistic thinkers of the Enlightenment, this isn’t always the case. There are certain situations when we can’t in any way taint love and make it self-serving. What are those situations? Precisely those in which find we ourselves completely helpless, mute, stammering, unable to say or do anything that’s helpful. In these particular “dark nights of the soul,” when we are completely helpless to shape the experience, love and grace can flow in purely and powerfully.

In his classic work The Divine Milieu, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin challenges us to help others both through our activity and through our passivity. He’s right. We can be generative through what we actively do for others, and we can be particularly generative when we stand passively with them in helplessness.

(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

There are different ways of being excluded in life.

Earlier this year, one of my older brothers died. By every indication he had lived an exemplary life, one lived mainly for others. He died much loved by everyone who knew him. His was a life lived for family, church, community, and friends.

Giving the homily at his funeral, I shared that, while he almost always brought a smile, a graciousness, and some wit to every situation, underneath he sometimes had to swallow hard to always do that. Why? Because, even though through his entire adult life he gave himself to serving others, for much of his life he didn’t have much choice in the matter. Here’s his story.

He was one of the older children in our family, a large second-generation immigrant family, struggling with poverty in an isolated rural area of the Canadian prairies where educational facilities weren’t easily available at that time. So, for him, as for many of his contemporaries, both men and women, the normal expectation was that after elementary school (an eighth-grade education) you were expected to end your school days and begin to work to support your family. Indeed, when he graduated from elementary school, there was no local high school for him to go to. Making this more unfortunate, he was perhaps the brightest, most gifted mind in our family. It’s not that he didn’t want to continue his formal education. But, he had to do what most others of his age did at that time, leave school and begin working, giving your entire salary over every month to support your family. He did this with good cheer, knowing this was expected of him.

Through the years, from age sixteen when he first entered the work force until he took over the family farm in his mid-thirties, he worked for farmers, worked in construction and did everything from operating a backhoe to driving a truck. Moreover, when our parents died and he took over our farm, there were a number of years when he was still pressured to use the farm to support the family. By the time he was finally freed of this responsibility, it was too late (not radically, but existentially) for him to restart his formal education. He lived out his final years before retirement as a farmer, though as one who found his energy elsewhere, in involvement in ongoing education and lay ministries programs where he thrived emotionally and intellectually. Part of his sacrifice too was that he never married, not because he was a temperamental bachelor, but because the same things that bound him to duty also, existentially, never afforded him the opportunity to marry.

After I shared his story at his funeral, I was approached by several people who said: That’s also my brother! That’s also my sister! That was my dad! That was my mother.

Having grown up where this was true of a number of my older siblings, today, whenever I see people working in service jobs such as cooking in cafeterias, cleaning houses, mowing lawns, working in construction, doing janitorial work and other work of this kind, I am often left to wonder, are they like my brother? Did they get to choose this work or are they doing it because of circumstances? Did this person want to be a doctor, or writer, a teacher, an entrepreneur, or a CEO of some company, and end up having to take this job because of an economic or other circumstance? Don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing demeaning or less-than-noble in these jobs. Indeed, working with your hands is perhaps the most honest work of all – unlike my own work within the academic community where it can be easy to be self-serving and mostly irrelevant. There’s a wonderful dignity in working with your hands, as there was for my brother. However, the importance and dignity of that work notwithstanding, the happiness of the person doing it is sometimes predicated on whether or not he or she had a choice, that is, whether or not he or she is there by choice or because factors ranging from the economic situation of their family, to their immigrant status, to lack of opportunity, have forced them there.

As I walk past these folks in my day-to-day life and work, I try to notice them and appreciate the service they are rendering for the rest of us. And sometimes I say to myself: This could be my brother. This could be my sister. This could be the brightest mind of all who was not given the opportunity to become a doctor, a writer, nurse, a teacher or a social worker.

If in the next life, as Jesus promised, there’s to be a reversal where the last shall be first, I hope these people, like my brother, who were deprived of some of the opportunities that the rest of us enjoyed, will read my heart with an empathy that surpasses my understanding of them during their lifetime.

(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

In a book, The Book of Hope, which he co-authored with Jane Goodall, Douglas Abrams makes this statement: Creating the human race may be the single biggest mistake evolution ever made.

He says this tongue-in-cheek since he recognizes that the emergence of the human race was clearly intended by the evolutionary process and that rather than being a colossal mistake it is the apex of the process. Nonetheless, today, the human race is a huge threat to planet earth. Simply put, there are now over seven billion people on the planet and already in many places we have used up nature’s limited resources faster than nature can replace them. By the year 2050 there will probably be 10 billion of us. If we carry on with business as usual, the planet simply cannot sustain us, at least if we continue in our present lifestyle.

And the lifestyle referred to here is not, first of all, the lavish lifestyle of the rich who can be reckless and consume more than their share of resources. They, of course, contribute to the problem and unduly influence the rest us in our own habits of consumption; but the lifestyle referred to here is what you and I, conscientious consumers, are living, even as we conserve, recycle, compost, drive electric cars and try to live simply.

I can take myself as an example. I’m trying to be sensitive to what my own consumption is doing to mother earth. By comparison to those who have a luxurious lifestyle, I can claim to live pretty simply. I don’t buy what I don’t need, have a very small wardrobe, and am cautious about the amount of electricity and water I use. I drive a second-hand compact car and try to drive it only when necessary. I help assure that the thermostat in our house is set so as to ensure the minimal use of electrical energy, and I live in a relatively small house, recycle and try to use as little plastic as possible.

But, on the other hand, I have two computers, a desktop in my office and a laptop at home. I have a cellphone which, through the years, has had to be updated four different times in terms of buying a new model and junking the old one. I shower daily and, depending upon physical work and exercise, sometimes take a second shower. I drive a car. I get on an airplane at least once a month for conferences and meetings and I fly internationally several times a year to visit family. I don’t have a lot of clothes, but my ministry and work require a certain standard of dress (which I meet minimally).

I think I can claim a simple lifestyle, given where I live and the work I do. However, realistically, if all seven (plus) billion people in the world lived as I do, there wouldn’t be enough resources to sustain us. Bottomline, the world cannot support eight billion people if everyone lives as I do, and as most of us do in the more affluent parts of our world. What’s the answer?

We can lay a guilt trip on ourselves and on others, though this isn’t necessarily helpful. What can be helpful? There’s no easy answer. Those of us living in the more affluent parts of our world can make changes, but can we simply stop using computers and mobile phones? We can conserve water, but can we abandon our present standards of hygiene? We can conserve electricity, but can we simply stop driving our cars and darken all our city buildings at night? We can be more scrupulous on how much we travel on airplanes, but can we live without airplane travel? We can cut back on what we buy in terms of excess food, excess clothing, and excess luxuries and entertainment. We can recycle, compost and not use plastic bags – and all of this, cumulatively, will make a difference. Indeed, all of this needs to be done. However, helpful though this is, it alone will not solve the problem.

For Jane Goodall, beyond these individual things, we need to do some collective things to solve the existential threat to this planet. Goodall names three: First, we must alleviate poverty. If there are people living in crippling poverty, it is understandable that they will cut down the last tree to grow food or catch the last fish because they are desperate to feed their families. Second, we must eliminate government corruption and corporate greed. Without good government and concern for the common good in business, it is impossible to solve our enormous social and environmental problems. Moreover, those who for their own benefit refuse to face the problem will go on unchallenged. Finally, collectively too, we must realistically face up to the tension between our lifestyle and the ever-growing population on this planet.
Thoughtless consumers are part of the problem – but so are the rest of us, me included, who fancy ourselves as living simply.

(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

Perhaps all of Jesus’ invitations to us can be summarized in one word – surrender. We need to surrender to love.

But why is that difficult? Shouldn’t it be the most natural thing in the world? Isn’t our deepest desire a longing to find love and surrender to it?

True, our deepest longing is to surrender to love, but we have some deep innate resistances to give ourselves over in surrender. Here are a couple of examples:

At the Last Supper in John’s Gospel when Jesus tries to wash Peter’s feet, he meets a stiff resistance from Peter – Never! I will never let you wash my feet! What’s ironic here is that, perhaps more than anything else, Peter yearned precisely for that kind of intimacy with Jesus. Yet, when it’s offered, he resists.
Another example might be seen in the struggles of Henri Nouwen. Nouwen, one of the most gifted spiritual writers of our generation, enjoyed immense popularity. He published more than 50 books, was a much sought-after professor (tenured at both Harvard and Yale), received invitations daily to give talks and lectures around the world, and had many close friends.

And yet, inside all that popularity and adulation, surrounded by many friends who loved him, he was unable to let that love give him any real sense of being loved or of being lovable. Instead, through most of his life he labored inside a deep anxiety which had him believe that he wasn’t lovable. On occasion this even landed him in clinical depression. And so, through most of his adult life, surrounded by so much love, he was haunted by a sense that he wasn’t loved, nor worthy of being loved. Moreover, he was a deeply sensitive person who more than anything else wanted to surrender to love. What held him back?

In his own words, he was crippled by a deep wound he couldn’t quite name and whose grip he couldn’t shake. This was true for most of his adult life. Eventually, he was able to free himself from his deep wound and surrender to love. However, it took a traumatic “death” experience for that to happen. Standing too close to the highway at a bus-stop one morning, he was struck by the mirror of a passing van which sent him flying. Rushed to a hospital, for some hours he hovered between life and death. While in that state, he had a very deep experience of God’s love for him. He returned to full consciousness and normal life as a profoundly changed man. Now, after experiencing God’s love for him, he could finally also surrender to human love in a way he had been incapable of previous to his “death” experience. All his subsequent books are marked by this conversion in love.

Why do we fight love? Why don’t we surrender more easily? The reasons are unique to each of us. Sometimes we are dealing with a deep wound that leaves us feeling unlovable. But sometimes our resistance has less to do with any wound than it has to do with how we are unconsciously fighting the very love we so painfully seek. Sometimes, like Jacob in the Bible, we are unconsciously wrestling with God (who is Love) and consequently unconsciously fighting love.

In the Bible story where Jacob wrestles all night with a man, we see that in this struggle he has no idea that he is wrestling with God and with love. In his mind, he is wrestling with a foe he needs to conquer. Eventually, when the darkness of the night gives way to more light, he sees what he is wrestling with – and it is a surprise and shock to him. He realizes he is fighting love itself. With that realization, he gives up struggling and instead clings to the very force he had been previously fighting, with the plea: “I will not let you go, until you bless me!”

This is the final lesson we need to learn in love: We wrestle for love with every talent, cunning and strength inside us. Eventually, if we are fortunate, we have an awakening. Some light, often a crippling defeat, shows us the true face of what we have been wrestling with and we realize that it’s not something to be conquered, but it’s the very love to which we have been longing to surrender.

For many of us, this will be the great awakening in our lives, a waking up to the fact that in all our ambitions and schemes to show the world how worthwhile and lovable we are, we are in unconscious ways fighting the very love to which we ultimately want to surrender. And, usually, as with Jacob in the biblical story, it will take the defeat of our own strength and a permanent limp before we realize what we are fighting against is really that to which we most want to surrender.

And this is surrender, not resignation, something we give ourselves over to rather than something that defeats us.

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