IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI

After Jesus rose from the dead, his first appearances were to women. Why? One obvious reason might be that it was women who followed him to his death on Good Friday, while the men largely abandoned him. As well, it was women, not men, who set off for his tomb on Easter morning, hoping to anoint his dead body with spices – so it was women who were in the garden when he first appeared. But there is, I believe, a deeper and more symbolic reason. Women are the midwives. It is generally women who attend to new birth and women who are more paramount in initially nurturing new life in its infancy.

In any birth a midwife can be helpful. When a baby is born, normally the head pushes its way through the birth canal first, opening the way for the body to follow. A good midwife can be very helpful at this time, helping to ease that passage through the birth canal, helping ensure that the baby begins to breathe, and helping the mother to immediately begin to nurture that new life. A midwife can sometimes mean the difference between life and death, and she always makes the birth easier and healthier.

Jesus’ resurrection birthed new life into our world, and in its infancy that life had to be specially midwifed, both in its emergence and in the initial breaths it took in this world. The resurrection birthed many things, and these had to be midwifed; initially by the women to whom Jesus first appeared, then by the apostles who left us their eyewitness accounts of the risen Jesus, then by the early church, then by its martyrs, then by the lived faith of countless women and men through the centuries, and sometimes too by theologians and spiritual writers. We still need to midwife what was born in the resurrection.

And many things were born in that event – an event as radical as the original creation in what it gave birth to. The resurrection of Jesus was the “first day” a second time, the second time light separated from darkness. Indeed, the world measures time by the resurrection. We are in the year 2023 since it happened. (Christianity was born with that event. New time began then. But scholars calculated that Jesus was thirty-three years old when he died and so they added thirty-three years so as to begin new time with the date of his birth.)

Prominent within what the resurrection gives birth to and what needs still to be midwifed, is hope. The resurrection gives birth to hope. The women in the Gospels who first met the resurrected Jesus were the first to be given a true reason for hope and were the first to act as midwifes of that new birth. So too must we. We need to become midwives of hope. But what is hope and how is it given birth in the resurrection?

Genuine hope is never to be confused with either wishful thinking or temperamental optimism. Unlike hope, wishful thinking isn’t based on anything. It’s pure wishing. Optimism, for its part, takes its root either in a natural temperament (“I always see the bright side of things”) or on how good or bad the evening news looks on a given day. And we know how that can change from day to day. Hope has a different basis.

Here’s an example: Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a deeply faith-filled scientist, was once challenged by an agnostic colleague after making a presentation within which he tried to show how the story of salvation history fits perfectly with the insights of science regarding the origins of the universe and the process of evolution. Teilhard went on to suggest, in line with Ephesians 1:3-10, that the end of the whole evolutionary process will be the union of all things in one great final harmony in Christ. An agnostic colleague challenged him to this effect: That’s a wonderfully optimistic little schema you propose. But suppose we blow up the world with an atomic bomb. What happens to your optimist schema then? Teilhard answered in words to this effect: If we blow up the world with an atomic bomb, that will be a set-back, perhaps for millions of years. But what I propose is going to happen, not because I wish it or because I am optimistic that it will happen. It will happen because God promised it – and in the resurrection God showed that God has the power to deliver on that promise.

What the women who first met the risen Jesus experienced was hope, the kind of hope that is based on God’s promise to vindicate good over evil and life over death, no matter the circumstance, no matter the obstacle, no matter how awful the news might look on a given day, no matter death itself, and no matter whether we are optimistic or pessimistic. They were the initial midwives helping to give birth to that hope. That task is now ours.

(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

“We only live, only suspire, consumed by either fire or fire.”

T.S. Eliot wrote those words and, with them, suggests that our choice in this life is not between calm and storm, but between two kinds of storms.

He is right, of course, but sometimes it is good to vary the metaphor: We live in this world caught between two great gods, very different from each other: chaos and order.

Chaos is the god of fire, of fertility, of risk, of creativity, of novelty, of letting go. Chaos is the god of wildness, the god who brings disorder and mess. Most artists worship at his shrine. He is also the god of sleeplessness, of restlessness, and disintegration. In fact, chaos works precisely by disintegration of what is stable. Chaos is the god more worshipped by those of a liberal temperament.

Order is the god of water, of prudence, of chastity, of common sense, of stability, of hanging on. He is the god of pragma. He likes systems, clarity and a roof that doesn’t leak. He is more worshipped by those of a conservative temperament. Few artists pay him homage, but the corporate and ecclesiastical worlds more than compensate for this. By and large, he is their God. He can also be the god of boredom, timidity and rigidity. With him, you will never disintegrate, but you might suffocate. However, while he does not generate a lot of excitement, this god keeps a lot of people sane and alive.

Chaos and order, fire and water, don’t much like each other. However, both demand the respect accorded a deity. Unfortunately, like all one-sided deities, each wants all of us, but to give that submission is dangerous.

Allegiance to either, to the exclusion of the other, not infrequently leads to a self-destruction. When chaos reigns unchecked by order, moral and emotional disintegration soon enough unleash a darkness from which there is often no recovery. That’s what it means to fall apart, to become unglued. Conversely, when order totally dispels chaos, a certain self-annihilating virtue, posturing as God, begins to drain life of delight and possibility.

It is dangerous to worship at only the shrine. Both gods are needed. The soul, the church, practical life, the structures of society and love itself need the tempering that comes from both fire and water, order and chaos. Too much fire and things just burn up, disintegrate. Too much water and nothing ever changes, petrification sets in. Too much letting go and the sublimity of love lies prostituted; too much timidity and love shrivels up like a dried prune. No, both gods are needed – in practical life, in romantic life, in ecclesiology, in morality, in business and in government. Risk and prudence, rock music and Gregorian chant, both contain some whisperings of God. It is not by blind chance that we are caught between the two.

This should not be surprising because God, the God of Jesus Christ, is the God of both – fire and water, chaos, and order, liberal and conservative, chastity and prodigal love. God is the great stillpoint and God is also the principle of novelty, freshness, and resurrection.

Thomas Aquinas once defined the human soul as made up of two principles, the principle of energy and the principle of integration. One principle keeps us alive and the other keeps us glued together. These two principles, while in tension with each other, desperately need each other. A healthy soul keeps us energized, eager for life, but a healthy soul also keeps us solidly glued together, knowing who we are when we look at ourselves in a mirror. Our souls need to provide us with both energy and integrity, fire and glue.

God is love, and love wants and needs both order and chaos. Love wants always to build a home, to settle down, to create a calm, stable and chaste place. Something inside us wants the calm of paradise and thus love is about order. It wants to avoid emotional and moral disintegration. But love is also about chaos. There is something in love that wants to let go, that wants to be taken, that wants to surrender its boundaries, that wants the new, the foreign, and that wants to let go of its old self. That’s a fertile principle within love that has kept the human race going!

Our God hallows both of these gods, chaos and order, and that is why it is healthy that both be kept in a healthy tension. To be healthy, we need to bring them together within ourselves and we need to bring them together not as we would bring two parties to meet at a negotiating table, but as a high and a low-pressure system meet to produce a storm. After a storm, the weather is clear.

In the tempest there is life and there is God. In it we are initiated, initiated through immersion into the intense fires of desire and the ecstatic waters of surrender.

(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

The night before he died, Jesus struggled mightily to accept his Father’s will. The Gospels describe him in the Garden of Gethsemane, prostrate on the ground, “sweating blood,” and begging his Father to save him from the brutal death that awaited him. Then, after he finally surrenders his will to his Father, an angel comes and strengthens him.

This begs a question: where was the angel when, seemingly, he most needed it? Why didn’t the angel come earlier to strengthen him?

Two stories, I believe, can be helpful in answering this.

The first comes from Martin Luther King, Jr. In the days leading up to his assassination, he met angry resistance and began to receive death threats. He was courageous, but he was also human. At a point, those threats got to him. Here is one of his diary entries.

“One night towards the end of January, I settled into bed late, after a strenuous day. Coretta had already fallen asleep and just as I was about to doze off the telephone rang. An angry voice said, ‘Listen, nig.., we’ve taken all we want from you; before next week you’ll be sorry you ever came to Montgomery.’ I hung up, but I couldn’t sleep. It seemed that all of my fears had come down on me at once. I had reached a saturation point.

“I got out of bed and began to walk the floor. Finally, I went to the kitchen and heated a pot of coffee. I was ready to give up. With my cup of coffee sitting untouched before me, I tried to think of a way to move out of the picture without appearing a coward.

“In this state of exhaustion, when my courage had all but gone, I decided to take my problem to God. With my head in my hands, I bowed over the kitchen table and prayed aloud. The words I spoke to God that midnight are still vivid in my memory.

“‘I am here taking a stand for what I believe is right. Now I am afraid. The people are looking to me for leadership, and if I stand before them without strength and courage, they too will falter. I am at the end of my powers. I have nothing left. I’ve come to the point where I can’t face it alone.’ At that moment I experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never experienced Him before.” (Strive Toward Freedom)

Notice at what point in his struggle the angel appears.

In her autobiography, The Long Loneliness, Dorothy shares this story. As a young woman, along with the man she loved, she had been somewhat militant in her unbelief. Indeed, their reluctance to enter the institution of marriage was meant as a statement of their non-acceptance of traditional Christian values. Then she conceived a child and its birth was the beginning of a radical conversion for her. The joy she felt holding her baby convinced her that there was a God and that life had a loving purpose. She became a Roman Catholic, much to the chagrin of the man she loved, the father of her child: he gave her an ultimatum: if you have this child baptized, our relationship is ended. She had the child baptized and lost that relationship (though they continued as friends). However, she now found herself a single mother with no job and no real vision or plan as to where to go now in life.

At one point, she became desperate. She left the child in the care of others and took a train from New York City to the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C. In her autobiography, she describes how she prayed that day, how desperate her prayer was. Like Jesus in Gethsemane and Martin Luther King in Montgomery, her prayer was one of raw need and helplessness, of an admission that she no longer had the strength to go on. Essentially, she said this to God: I have given up everything for you and now I am alone and afraid. I don’t know what to do and am lacking strength to carry on in this commitment.

She prayed this prayer of helplessness, took the train back to New York, and not long after found Peter Maurin sitting on her doorstep, telling her that he had heard about her and that he had a vision of what she should now do, namely, to start the Catholic Worker. That set the path for the rest of her life. The angel had come and strengthened her.

Notice at what point in these stories the angel makes its appearance – when human strength is fully exhausted. Why not earlier? Because up to the point of exhaustion, we don’t really let the angel in, relying instead on our own strength. But, as Trevor Herriot says, “Only after we have let the desert do its full work in us will angels finally come and minister to 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
Several weeks ago my older brother George died. His death was somewhat of a shock since he had been in relatively good health until a week before he died. His story is worth telling. No community, Mircea Eliade once said, should botch its deaths.

Although highly intelligent and motivated, George never got the chance for higher education. Our family was large and living on a small farm that could not support us. He, like other older members of our family, ended his schooling early to enter the work force to help support the family. In this, he was not unique. In the second-generation immigrant community where we grew up, a lot of his generation, both men and women, had to do the same. His story, like many others like him, was one within which he had to renounce his own dreams for the good of others.

His story is a story of dedication to faith, to family, to church and to community. For the most part, he was conscripted by circumstance. Although he was very bright, perhaps the brightest in our family, circumstances dictated that he leave school after the eighth grade to help support the family. Consequently, he never really had a chance do what he wanted in life, both in terms of a career and in terms of getting married and having a family; and for him the great sacrifice wasn’t career, but marriage.
George was never meant to be life-long bachelor, but his life and commitments never quite allowed for marriage and led instead to a life of celibacy (in much the same way as this plays out for a priest or a vowed religious). Nevertheless, as for a vowed celibate, in the end, it served him well. He ended up with a very large family, that is, with people from all over the world considering him their brother, their mentor, their trusted friend. Since his death, there has been a flood of letters, emails, texts, phone calls and messages from people everywhere expressing what George meant to them. He died celibate, but he died a loved man.

However, all of this came at a price. Those of us who were privy to his private frustrations, know the price his soul paid for his dedication. He needed, at times, simply to vent at a safe place vis-à-vis the frustrations and tensions he was carrying, times when he couldn’t fully emulate the patience and selflessness of Jesus. However, he always expressed his frustrations at a safe place, where his venting couldn’t hurt anybody. He was always bigger than his frustrations. The deepest part of him was always gracious and laced with humor. He brought laughter into every room he entered.

Moreover, he was a man of faith and of the church. The church was an integral part of what he thought of as family and he gave himself over fully, both to the little rural faith community within which he lived and to the larger church. For more than twenty years he helped lead a Lay Formation program and assisted in the youth ministry in his home diocese. The dedication and talent he brought to those programs were recognized by many. Indeed, at one point the local bishop came up to him and said, “George, I have only question for you, do I ordain you now or do you want to go to the seminary for a few years first?”

Ministry as a priest would have been a dream come true for him, but those of us who knew him also know why he turned down that invitation. He still had some commitments inside of family and community that he felt he could not abandon. That choice might be questioned; but again, it was made out of dedication and selflessness, putting the needs of others before his own.

In the Gospel of John, the author describes how, after Jesus was already dead, soldiers came and pierced his side with a lance and “immediately blood and water flowed” out of his dead body. An interesting image! Life flowing out of a dead body! After Jesus died, his followers felt themselves nourished by him in an even deeper way than during his life. From the spirit he left behind, they sensed a rich outpouring of life and cleansing.

George also left behind that kind of a spirit. Everyone who knew him will continue to drink from his spirit – his selflessness, his sacrificing his dreams for family and church, and his willingness to carry frustration and tension for the sake of others. Not least, we will be nourished by his humor and the lightness he brought into a room, a quality that manifested both his intelligence and his zest for life.

He lived a good life. He died a loved man. He will be remembered fondly by a large family – for whom he sacrificed his own chance for marriage and having a family of his own.

(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

More than a half century ago, Flannery O’Connor wrote a short story, A Good Man is Hard to Find. One of the main characters in the story is an elderly woman who is a difficult, stubborn and not a particularly happy person. Traveling to Florida with her family, she is constantly whining and complaining. Then, thanks to some carelessness on her part, they get in a traffic accident and while their car is stalled, an escaped convict (the Misfit) chances on them and executes the whole family. Just before she is shot, the unhappy elderly woman, fearing for her life, reaches out and touches the Misfit and has a gentle moment with him. After killing her, he says, she would have been a good woman, if there had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.

I suspect we would all be better persons if there were someone there to shoot us every minute of our lives. At least I know that I would because I once had someone there to shoot me and it made me a better person at least during the time when the threat was there. Here’s my story.

Twelve years ago, I was diagnosed with cancer. The initial prognosis was good (surgery and chemotherapy and the cancer should be stopped). For a while it was. However, three years later it again made an unwelcome reappearance. This time the prognosis was not good. My oncologist, whom I trust, shared that situation was grave. Chemotherapy would be tried again; but he assured me, that barring the exceptional, this treatment would not be effective for long and would be more for palliative purposes than for any real hope of remission or cure. He felt it his duty to deliver that message clearly. I was facing the shooter. You have about thirty months to live!
As you can guess, this wasn’t easy to accept and process. I struggled mightily to make peace with it. Eventually, through prayer, I wrote a creed for myself as to how I would try to live out those two years. Here’s the creed:

I am going to strive to be as healthy as I can for as long as I can.
I am going to strive to be as productive for as long as I can.
I am going to make every day and every activity as precious and enjoyable as possible.
I am going to strive to be as gracious, warm, and charitable as possible.
I am going to strive to accept others’ love in a deeper way than I have up to now.
I am going to strive to live a more-fully “reconciled life.” No room for past hurts anymore.
I am going to strive to keep my sense of humor intact.
I am going to strive to be as courageous and brave as I can.
I am going to strive, always, to never look on what I am losing, but rather to look at how wonderful and full my life has been and is.
And, I am going to, daily, lay all of this at God’s feet through prayer.

For some months I prayed that creed intensely every day, trying to live out its every tenet. However, the chemotherapy treatments were, surprisingly, very effective. After five months of treatment, all the indications of cancer were gone, I was healthy again, and my oncologist was optimistic that, perhaps, his diagnosis had been too dire and that with some maintenance chemo, I might enjoy many more years of life. And, indeed I did for the next seven years.

However, during those seven years of remission, feeling healthy and optimistic, with no one there to shoot me every day, I now prayed my creed less frequently and with less intensity. And even though its challenges were now more ingrained in me, my old habits of taking life for granted, of praying St. Augustine’s prayer (Make me a better Christian, Lord, but not yet!), of losing perspective, of impatience, of self-pity, of nursing grievances, and of not appreciating fully the richness of life, began to seep back into my life.

The “shooter” reappeared two years ago with another reoccurrence of the cancer. Initially the prognosis was dire (thirty months and chemotherapy for the rest of my life) and the creed again took a central place in my life. However, a new treatment unexpectedly offered a much longer future and, with no one there to shoot me every day, the creed again began to lose its power and my old habits of impatience, ingratitude and self-pity began again to mark my days.

I am deeply grateful for all the post-cancer years that God and modern medicine have given me. Cancer has been a gift that has taught me a lot. Having my life parceled out in six months chunks has me appreciating life, others, health, nature, the simple joys of life and my work like never before. I’m a better person when there is someone there to shoot me every day!

(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

To fall in love! We use the expression to cover many things. You can fall in love with a baby, a sports team, a city, a job or another person. However, we reserve the prime analogate for this expression for one thing, emotional infatuation, that intoxicating feeling we first get when we meet someone who we sense as a soulmate.

Iris Murdoch once wrote that the world can change in fifteen seconds because that’s how quickly you can fall in love with someone. She’s right, and falling in love emotionally can literally paralyze us with a grip so strong that even death seems preferable to losing the one with whom we have fallen in love. Countless heartaches, broken hearts, depressions, clinical breakdowns, suicides, murders and murder-suicides testify to this. Emotional infatuation can be a deadly addiction, the most powerful cocaine on the planet. Where does it come from? Heaven or hell? And, what’s its meaning?

Ultimately, God and nature are its author and that tells us that it is a good thing. We are built for this to happen to us. Moreover, it is a healthy thing, if properly understood, both in its intoxicating power and in its innate failure to be a sustaining power in love.

What happens when we fall in love so powerfully with someone? Are we really in love with that person or are we more in love with being in love and the feelings this brings us? As well, are we really in love with that person or are we in love with an image of him or her we have created for ourselves, one that projects a certain godliness on to that other?

Let me risk some answers. Imagine a man falling deeply in love with a woman. Initially, the feelings can be overpowering and literally paralyze him emotionally. However, inside of all this, a certain question begs to be asked: with whom or with what is he really in love? His feelings? The archetype of femininity the woman is carrying? His image of her? She herself?

In reality, he is in love with all of these: his feelings, his image of her, she herself and the divine feminine she is carrying. All of that is of one piece inside of his experience. As well, all of this can be healthy at this stage of love.

God invented emotional infatuation, just as God invented honeymoons. We are not meant to be drawn to each other by cold analytics alone. But, this kind of falling in love is an initiatory stage in love (albeit a delightful one) that needs to be understood exactly for what it is, an initiatory stage, nothing more, one that invites us into something deeper. Emotional infatuation is not yet a mature stage in love.

Unless one dies in its grip, as did Romeo and Juliet, it will one day lose its hold on us and leave us disillusioned. When Iris Murdoch said that we can fall in love in fifteen seconds, she might also have added that, sadly, we can also fall out of love in fifteen seconds. Emotional infatuation can be that ephemeral, both in its birth and in its dying.

So falling in love (in this emotional way) comes fraught with certain dangers. First, there is the adolescent proclivity to identify this with deep love itself. Consequently, when the powerful emotional and psychosexual feelings let go, the person easily concludes that he or she is no longer in love and moves on. Next, more subtly, there is this danger. When we are in this initial gripping stage of love, our image of the other carries with it a certain godliness. What’s meant by that?

St. Augustine coined this timeless dictum: You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you. Hence, nothing in life can ever really be enough for us. We are always restless, always yearning for something more. However, in this initial phase of love, when we have fallen into the grip of emotional infatuation, for a time the other is enough for us. That’s why Romeo and Juliet could die happy. At this stage of love, they were enough for each other.

However, the hard truth is that infatuation does not last. The other person, no matter how wonderful he or she might actually be, is not God and can never be enough (and we are unfair to him or her when we unconsciously expect them to be enough). For a while, they are able to carry that godliness for us, but that illusion of godliness will eventually break and we will realize that this is just a person, one person, wonderful perhaps, but finite, limited and not divine. That realization (which is ultimately meant to be the ground for mature love) can, if not understood, jeopardize or sour a relationship.

God invented falling in love! In it, we get a little foretaste of heaven, though, as experience tells us that is not without its dangers.

(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 homily, Karl Rahner once commented that in the Beatitudes in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus makes a rather stunning statement. He says, ‘blessed are you who are now weeping, for you shall laugh.’ Rahner suggests that Jesus is teaching that our final state of happiness in heaven will not just lift us out of our sadness and dry away our tears, it will bring us to laughter, to “an intoxication of joy.” Laughter is integral to the final ecstasy.

Further still, if laughter constitutes the final happiness in heaven, then it should follow that whenever we are laughing, we are on good terms with reality. Laughter, Rahner submits, is part of the eternal praise of God at the end of time.

However, this can be glib and misleading. Not all laughter gives God praise and not all laughter suggests that we are on good terms with reality. Laughter can also be cheap, glib and wrong. The final joy of heaven is not always found at that place in a room where folks are cracking up with laughter.

There are many kinds of laughter and not all of them are healthy or godly. There is the laughter of drunkenness, of deadening your senses and jettisoning your moral compass and normal sensitivity. That kind of laughter will not be heard in some noisy little corner of heaven. Then there is the laughter of sarcasm, laughter that belittles others, that delights in others’ problems, and sees itself as superior. That too won’t be heard in heaven. Then there is the laughter that’s predicated on being insensitive and blind to the pain of others, that can enjoy itself even while Lazarus is starving just outside the door. The Gospels are clear as to where that kind laughter lands us. As well, there is the laughter of pure superficiality, laughter that comes easy because it really doesn’t care about anything. Such laughter, though harmless, speaks of nothing.

However there are other kinds of laughter that speak of health and of God. There is the laughter of pure spontaneous energy, seen most clearly in the natural joyous bubbling over of the life- principle inside of a young person, like the delight you see in a toddler delighting in her first steps. This is the laughter of sheer delight, one that says, It’s great to be alive! When we laugh in this way, we are honoring God and thanking God for the gift of life and energy – since the best way to thank a gift-giver is to enjoy thoroughly the gift and delight in it.

This kind of laughter is most spontaneous is us when we are young and, sadly, generally becomes more difficult for us as the wounds, failures, pressures and anxieties of adulthood begin to depress our spontaneous energies. We still laugh, but when we stop feeling spontaneous delight in our lives, when healthy laughter dries up, we tend to turn to unhealthy kinds of laughter to try to lift ourselves out of our depression. Hence, the loud, boisterous, cranked-up laughter we hear at our parties is often really only our attempt to keep depression at bay. See how happy I am!

Peter Berger once wrote that laughter is one of the proofs for the existence of God in that our capacity to laugh in any situation shows that, deep down, we are aware that no situation ultimately binds us. Our capacity to laugh in any situation, no matter how grave or threatening, shows that on some level we are aware that we transcend that situation. That’s why a prisoner being led to his execution might still joke with his executioner and why a dying person can still enjoy a bit of irony. Healthy laughter isn’t just godly. It manifests transcendence inside us.

But, not all laughter is born equal. There is a laughter that simply bespeaks superficiality, forced lightness, insensitivity, drunkenness or a thinly disguised attempt to keep depression at bay. That is not the laughter of heaven. However, there is another kind of laughter, spoken of by Jesus in the Beatitudes, which is a laughter that simply delights in the joy of being alive and (in that delight) intuits its own transcendence. That kind of laughter is a key component in love and sanctity. It will be one of the “intoxications of joy” that we will feel in heaven.

If this is true, then the holiest person you know is not the humorless, dour, easily offended, over-pious person you deem as serious, deep and spiritual whom you do not necessarily want as your table companion. The holiest person you know is probably the person you want beside you at table.

When I was a novice in religious life, our assistant novice director, an over-serious, fearful man, frequently cautioned us against levity and humor, telling us that there isn’t a single recorded incident in the Gospels of Jesus laughing. Now deceased, I suspect the man is in heaven. I also suspect that from that vantage point, he would drop that caution.

(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 his novel, “Oscar and Lucinda,” Peter Carey offers this colorful image of gossip. The setting is a small town where there are rumors about the priest and a particular young woman. Here’s his metaphor: “The vicar of Woolahra then took her shopping and society, always feeling shopping to be the most intimate activity, was pleased to feel the steam pressure rising in itself as it got ready to be properly scandalized – its pipes groaned and stretched, you could hear the noises in its walls and cellars. They imagined he paid for her finery. When they heard this was not so, that the girl had sovereigns in her purse – enough, it was reported, to buy the priest a pair of onyx cufflinks – the pressure did not fall, but stayed constant, so that while it did not reach the stage where the outrage was hissing out through the open valves, it maintained a good rumble, a lower note which sounded like a growl in the throat of a smallish dog.”

What an apt image! Gossip does resemble steam hissing from a radiator or the growl of a small dog, and yet it’s important. For most of our lives, we form community around it. How so?

Imagine going out for dinner with a group of colleagues. While there isn’t overt hostility among you, there are clear differences and tensions. You wouldn’t naturally choose go out to dinner together, but you have been thrown together by circumstance and are making the best of it.

You have dinner together and things go along quite pleasantly. There’s harmony, banter and humor at the table. How do you manage to get on so well despite and beyond differences? By talking about somebody else. Much of the time is spent talking about others on whose faults, eccentricities, and shortcomings we all agree. Alternatively, we talk about shared indignations. We end up having a harmonious time together because we talk about someone or something else whose difference from us is greater than our differences from each other. Of course, you are afraid to leave the table because you already suspect whom they will be talking about then! Your fear is well founded.

Until we reach a certain level of maturity, we form community largely around scapegoating, that is, we overcome our differences and tensions by focusing on someone or something about whom or which we share a common distancing, indignation, ridicule, anger or jealousy. That’s the anthropological function of gossip – and it’s a very important one. We overcome our differences and tensions by scapegoating someone or something. That’s why it’s easier to form community against something rather than around something and why it’s easier to define ourselves more by what we are against than by what we are for.

Ancient cultures knew this and designed certain rituals to take tension out of the community by scapegoating. For example, at the time of Jesus within the Jewish community a ritual existed that essentially worked this way: At regular intervals, the community would take a goat and symbolically adorn it with the tensions and divisions of the community. Among other things, they would drape it with a purple cloth to symbolize that it symbolically represented them and push a crown of thorns into its head to make it feel the pain of their tensions. (Notice how Jesus is draped in these exact symbols when Pilate shows him to the crowd before the crucifixion: Ecce homo … Behold your scapegoat!) The goat was then chased off to die in the desert. It leaving the community was understood as taking the community’s sin and tension away, leaving the community free of tension by its banishment.

Jesus is our scapegoat. He takes away our sin and division, though not by banishment from the community. He takes away our sins by taking them in, carrying them, and transforming them so as not to give them back in kind. Jesus takes away sin in the same way as a water filter purifies, by holding the impurities within itself and giving back only what is pure.
When we say Jesus died for our sins, we need to understand it this way: He took in hatred and gave back love; he took in curses and gave back blessing; he took in bitterness and gave back graciousness; he took in jealousy and gave back affirmation; and he took in murder and gave back forgiveness. By absorbing our sin, differences, and jealousies, he did for us what we, in a less mature and less effective way, try to do when we crucify each other through gossip.

And that’s Jesus’ invitation to us: As adults, we are invited to step up and do what Jesus did, namely, take in the differences and jealousies around us, hold them, and transform them so as not to give them back in kind.

Then won’t we need scapegoats any more, and the steam-pipes of gossip will cease hissing and the low growl of that smallish dog inside us will finally be silent.

(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

The full story of how Jesus Christ came to be born includes elements that we do not easily imagine when we sing our Christmas hymns. Jesus’ family tree and bloodline were far from perfect and this, according to the renowned biblical scholar, Raymond Brown, needs to be kept in mind whenever we are tempted to believe in Jesus, but want to reject the church because of its imperfections, scandals and bad history. Jesus may have been immaculately conceived. However, as the Gospels make clear, there is much in his origins that is as jolting as any contemporary church scandal.

For example, in giving us the origins of Jesus, the Gospels point to as many sinners, liars and schemers in his genetic and historical lineage as they do to saints, honest people, and men and women of faith.

We see, for example, in Jesus’ genealogy a number of men who didn’t exactly incarnate the love, justice and purity of Jesus. Abraham unfairly banished Ishmael and his mother, Hagar, rationalizing that God favors some people over others; Jacob, by scheming and dishonesty, stole his brother Esau’s birthright; and David, to whom Jesus explicitly connects himself, committed adultery and then had the husband of his mistress murdered to cover up an unwanted pregnancy in order to marry her.

Moreover, the women mentioned in Jesus’ background don’t fare much better. It is interesting to note, as Raymond Brown does, which women don’t get mentioned in reference to Jesus’ origins. The Gospels don’t mention Sarah, Rebekah or Rachel, all of whom were regarded as holy women. Whom do they mention?

They mention Tamar, a Canaanite woman, someone outside the Jewish faith, who seduces her father-in-law, Judah, so that she can have a child. They mention Rahab, also a Canaanite woman, and an outsider, who is in fact a prostitute. Next, they mention Ruth, a Moabite woman who is also outside the official religion of the time. Then they mention Bathsheba, a Hittite woman, an outsider who commits adultery with David and then schemes to make sure one of her own offspring inherits the throne.

All of these women found themselves in a situation of marriage or pregnancy that was either strange or scandalous, yet each was an important divine instrument in preserving the religious heritage that gave us Jesus. It is no accident that the Gospels link these women to Mary, Jesus’ mother, since she too found herself in a ritually taboo pregnancy and in a marital situation that was peculiar.

Further still, beyond these less-than-saintly characters in Jesus’ lineage, we see as well that some of the institutions that shaped the Jewish faith were also less than saintly. Institutionalized religion back then suffered from many of the same problems it has today, including the corrupt use of power.

Indeed, Israel itself (perhaps justifying the deed by referring to what Jacob had done to Esau) seized the land of Canaan from those who had a prior claim to it, claiming ownership by divine privilege.

Finally, and not insignificantly, we see too that the lineage that gave us Jesus built itself up not just on the great and the talented, but equally on the poor and insignificant. In the list of names that makes up the ancestors of Jesus, we see some that are famous but also others who can make no claim to specialness or significance. Jesus’ human blood, scripture tells us, was produced equally by the great and the small, the talented and the talentless.

What’s to be learned for all of this? Perhaps Raymond Brown captures it best. What all this tells us, he says, is that God writes straight with crooked lines, that we shouldn’t accept an overly idealized Christ, and that our own lives, even if they are marked by weakness and insignificance, are important too in continuing the story of the incarnation.

As Brown puts it: “The God who wrote the beginnings with crooked lines also writes the sequence with crooked lines, and some of those lines are our own lives and witness. A God who did not hesitate to use the scheming as well as the noble, the impure as well as the pure, men to whom the world harkened and women upon whom the world frowned – this God continues to work through the same mélange. If it is a challenge to recognize in the last part of Matthew’s genealogy that totally unknown people were part of the story of Jesus Christ, it may be a greater challenge to recognize that the unknown characters of today are an essential part of the sequence.”

Christianity isn’t just for the pure, the talented, the good, the humble and the honest. The story of Jesus Christ was also written and keeps being written by the impure, by sinners, by calculating schemers, by the proud, by the dishonest and by those without worldly talents. Nobody is so bad, so insignificant, so devoid of talent, or so outside the circle of faith, that he or she is outside the story of 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

My early religious training, for all its strengths, placed too heavy an emphasis on fear of God, fear of judgment, and fear of never being good enough to be pleasing to God. It took the biblical texts about God being angry and displeased with us literally. The downside of this was that many of us came away with feelings of guilt, shame and self-hatred, and understood those feelings religiously, with no sense that they might have more of a psychological than a religious origin. If you had feelings of guilt, shame and self-hatred, it was a signal that you were not living right, that you should feel some shame and that God was not pleased with you.

Well, as Hegel famously taught, every thesis eventually spawns its antithesis. Both in the culture and in many religious circles today, this has produced a bitter backlash. The current cultural and ecclesial ethos has brought with it a near-feverous acceptance of the insights from contemporary psychology vis-à-vis guilt, shame and self-hatred. We learned from Freud and others that many of our feelings of guilt, shame and self-hatred are really a psychological neurosis, and not an indication that we are doing anything wrong. Feelings of guilt, shame and self-hatred do not of themselves indicate that we are unhealthy religiously or morally or that God is displeased with us.

With this insight, more and more people have begun to blame their religious training for any feelings of guilt, shame and self-hatred. They have coined the term “Christian neurosis” and have begun speaking of “being in recovery” from their churches.

What’s to be said about this? In essence, some of this is healthy, a needed corrective, though some of it also suffers from its own naiveté. And, it has landed us here. Today, religious conservatives tend to reject the idea that guilt, shame and self-hatred are mainly a neurosis (for which our religious training is responsible), while religious liberals tend to favor this notion. Who is right?

A more balanced spirituality, I believe, combines the truth of both positions to produce a deeper understanding. Drawing on what is best in current biblical scholarship and on what is best in contemporary psychology, a more balanced spirituality makes these assertions.

First, that when our biblical language tells us that God gets angry and unleashes his fury, we are dealing with anthropomorphism. God doesn’t get angry with us when we do wrong. Rather what happens is that we get angry with ourselves and we feel as if that anger were somehow “God’s wrath.” Next, most psychologists today tell us that many of our feelings of guilt, shame and self-hatred are in fact unhealthy, a simple neurosis, and not at all an indication that we did something wrong. These feelings only indicate how we feel about ourselves, not how God feels about us.

However, that being admitted, it is too simple to write off our feelings of guilt, shame and self-hatred as a mere neurosis. Why? Because even if these feelings are completely or largely unmerited, they may still be an important voice inside us, that is, while they don’t indicate that God is displeased or angry with us, they still can be a voice inside us that won’t be silent until we ask ourselves why we are displeased and angry with ourselves.

Here’s an example. There is a wonderfully enlightening exchange in the 1990s movie, “City Slickers.” Three men are having a conversation about the morality of having a sexual affair. One asks the other, “If you could have an affair and get away with it, would you do it?” The other replies: “No, I still wouldn’t do it.” “Why not?” he is asked, “nobody would know.” His response contains a much-neglected insight regarding the question of guilt, shame and self-hatred. He replies, “I would know and I would hate myself for it!”

There is such a thing as Christian “guilt neurosis” (which incidentally is not limited to Christians, Jews, Muslims and other religious persons, but is universal among all morally sensitive people). However, not all feelings of guilt, shame and self-hatred are neurotic. Some are trying to teach us a deep moral and religious truth, that is, while we can never do a single thing to make God angry with us for one minute, we can do many things that make us angry with ourselves. While we can never do anything to make God hate us, we can do things that have us hate ourselves. And, while we can never do anything to make God withhold forgiveness from us, we can do things that make it difficult for us to forgive ourselves. God is never the problem. We are.

Feelings of guilt, shame and self-hatred do not of themselves indicate whether we have done something wrong, but they do indicate how we feel about what we have done – and that can be an important moral and religious voice inside us.

Not everything that bothers us is a pathology.

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