IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI

If we genuinely trust scripture, our own experience, and our own sanity, we can only conclude that God has a sense of humor, and a robust and sneaky one at that. Where’s the evidence?

A generation ago, Peter Berger wrote a remarkable little book entitled, A Rumor of Angels. Unlike Aquinas, Anselm, Descartes and a number of renowned philosophers, he didn’t try to “prove” the existence of God through logic and argumentation. Rather, he simply examined a number of very ordinary human experiences and pointed to what’s hidden inside and behind the walls of those experiences. For instance, when a mother soothes and calms a frightened child at night, assuring the child that there is nothing to fear, she does this in good faith only because at some deep level she intuits that ultimately everything is all right. In effect, unconsciously, she is praying a Creed.

Now, one of the experiences Berger highlights is the experience of humor. Here’s his thesis: no matter how oppressive and dire the circumstance, human beings always have the capacity to make light of it, to view it through the prism of irony and humor. For example, martyrs have joked with their executioners and, no doubt, there was some banter, sarcasm, irony and bitter humor at times inside extermination camps. The fact that people can do this, and do in fact do it, shows that there is always something transcendent inside us, something over which no human oppression has power, something that sets us above any situation within which we find ourselves. Our sense of irony and humor manifests that something in our soul sets us above anything that can beset us.

And this can have its source in only one place, inside of the Creator who made us. Thus, not only must God have a sense of humor, humor must be something inherent within the nature of God, since humor is good, and God is the author of all that is good.

There’s a school of classical philosophy that believes God has four transcendental properties. God, it teaches, is One, True, Good and Beautiful – to this we can add, Humorous. Moreover, this can be inferred from more than just the fact that sometimes we sense that humor manifests our transcendence within a given situation. More importantly, we can infer that humor has some godliness from examining the component parts of love. God is love, and humor is undeniably an important part of love.

When the classical Greek philosophers defined love, they highlighted a number of components within it, namely, erotic attraction, obsession, friendship, pragmatic arrangement and altruism. However, they also highlighted another component, playfulness/banter/humor. How insightful. Humor along with healthy banter and playful teasing are part of the grease that enables us to sustain relationships long term, despite the inevitable over-familiarity, hurt, disappointment and boredom that beset even the most loving relationships. Humor helps make it all work. Thus, since it is an innate part of love, it is an innate part of God.

Sadly, we don’t often picture God that way. Christianity, Judaism and Islam have this in common. We all picture God as male, celibate, solemn – and humorless. How might we picture God differently?

If you were to draw up a composite face representing God, whose face would you include in this picture? The pious face of the gentle, blond-haired Jesus with a lamb on his shoulder we see in our holy pictures? Images of a serenely composed and quiet Mary that we see depicted in our statues of her? The face of Mother Teresa? The face of Therese of Lisieux? The face of Dorothy Day? Of Martin Luther King? Of Oscar Romero? Of Billy Graham? Of Henri Nouwen? Of Rachel Held Evans? The face of your mother or father? Would you also include the face of your favorite comedian or favorite wit? Jerry Seinfeld? Bette Midler? Rowan Atkinson? The mischievous face of your colorful uncle telling a joke?

Any picture of God’s face needs to manifest an inner soul that is One, True, Good, Beautiful, but also Humorous and Mischievous. Funny, while I believe that God is the author of humor, I’ve never been enamored by the various artistic depictions of Jesus as laughing uproariously. Good idea, good intention, good theology, but to my taste, lacking the right nuance. That kind of laughing face has an ephemeral quality that too easily gives way to something else after it’s had its moment. God’s face, I suspect, has a quieter, sneakier, more permanent mischievousness to it.

If this is true, if God not only has a sense of humor but is also the author of humor itself, then humor is an important quality within sanctity and holiness. What makes for wholeness, maturity, holiness, love and for the kind of person you want beside you at the table, here and at the eternal one in heaven? Certainly, you want someone who manifests the qualities that Jesus asked for in the Sermon on the Mount – along with a warm, playful and mischievous sense of humor.

(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 friend of mine, somewhat cynical about the church, recently remarked: “What the institutional church today is trying to do is to put its best face on the fact that it’s dying. Basically, it’s trying to manage a death.”

What he’s suggesting is that the church today, like a person struggling to accept a terminal diagnosis, is trying to reshape its imagination to eventually accommodate itself to the unthinkable, its own dying.

He’s right in suggesting that the church today is trying to reshape its imagination, but he’s wrong about what it’s trying to manage. What the church is trying to manage today is not a death, but an ascension. What needs reshaping in our imagination today is the same thing that needed reshaping in the imagination of the first disciples in the forty days between the resurrection and the ascension. We need to understand again how to let go of one body of Christ so that it can ascend and we can again experience Pentecost. What’s at stake here?

Among the elements within the paschal mystery, the ascension is the least understood. We are clearer about the meaning of the death and resurrection of Christ and the descent of the Spirit at Pentecost. We have less understanding of the ascension.

The forty days between the resurrection and the ascension were not a time of unadulterated joy for the first disciples. It was a time of some joy, but also of considerable confusion, despondency and loss of faith. In the days before the ascension, the disciples were overjoyed whenever they recognized again their risen Lord, but most of the time they were confused, despondent, and full of doubt because they were unable to recognize the new presence of Christ in what was happening around them. At one point, they gave up completely and as John put it, went back to their former way of life, fishing and the sea.

However, during that time Jesus slowly reshaped their imaginations. Eventually they grasped the fact that something had died but that something else, far richer, had been born and that now they needed to give up clinging to the way Jesus had formerly been present to them so that he could be present to them in a new way. The theology and spirituality of the ascension is essentially contained in these words: Refuse to cling to what once was, let it go so that you can now recognize the new life you are already living and receive its spirit. The synoptic gospels teach this to us in their pictorial rendering of the ascension, where a bodily Jesus blesses everyone and then rises physically out of their sight. John gives us the same theology but in a different picture. He does this in his description of the encounter on Easter morning between Jesus and Mary Magdala when Jesus says, “Mary don’t cling to me!”

Today, the church is trying to manage an ascension, not a death. I can easily see where my friend can be confused because every ascension presupposes a death and a birth, and that can be confusing. So where, really, is the church today?

Edward Schillebeeckx once suggested that we are living in that same despondency that was felt by the early disciples between Jesus’ death and their realization of his resurrection. We are feeling what they felt, doubt and confusion on the road to Emmaus. The Christ we once knew has been crucified and we cannot yet recognize the Christ who is walking with us, more alive than before, though in a new way. Hence, just as those first disciples on the road to Emmaus, we also frequently walk with faces downcast, in a confused faith, needing Christ to appear in a new guise to reshape our imaginations so that we can recognize him as he is now present to us.

I think Schillebeeckx is right about this, except that I would put it in another way. The church today is in that time between the resurrection and the ascension, feeling considerable despondency, with its imagination attuned to a former understanding of Christ, unable to recognize Christ clearly in the present moment. For many of us who grew up in a particular understanding of the faith, our former understanding of Christ has been crucified. But Christ is not dead. The church is not dead. Both Jesus and the church are very much alive, walking with us, slowly reshaping our imaginations, reinterpreting the scriptures for us, telling us again: Wasn’t it necessary that the Christ (and the church) should so suffer. …
For many of us today, to live in faith is to be in that time between the death of Christ and the ascension, vacillating between joy and despondency, trying to manage an ascension.

On the road of faith, there’s always bad news and good news. The bad news is that invariably our understanding of Christ gets crucified. The good news is that Christ is always very much alive, present to us still, and in a deeper way.

(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 it takes an outsider to help you to see the beauty and depth of something you have never fully appreciated. I suspect this true for many of us, myself no exception, regarding the celebration of the Eucharist in our churches.

David P. Gushee, an Evangelical, recently published a book entitled After Evangelicalism, within which he describes his decades-long struggle to make peace with some issues inside his own church. He has remained in his church, though now on Sundays he also goes (with his wife who is a Roman Catholic) to a Catholic Mass. Here’s his description of what he sees there.

“I view design of the Catholic Mass as something like a polished gem, refined over time to a state of great beauty – if you know what you are looking at. … The movement of the Mass manages to accomplish so much in something like an hour – a processional, with the cross held high; greetings in the name of the triune God; early confession of sin, brief but compelling; an Old Testament reading read by a lay person; a sung psalm; an Epistle reading by a layperson; the Gospel reading by the priest, and the ceremony around it; a brief homily; the centering movement provided by the creed and the prayers of the people. An offertory and music. Then right to the Table – the people offer gifts that are then offered to God and come back to the people as Christ’s body and blood; the kneeling in humility; the Lord’s Prayer as an important part of the Eucharistic rite; the precious chance to pass the peace with neighbors just before the supper; more kneeling; the chance to watch the people come up for Communion and pray for them, or instead be quiet with God; the final Trinitarian blessing and recessional.”

What an insightful description of the ritual by which we celebrate the Eucharist! Sometimes when we’re inside something, we don’t see it as clearly as does someone from the outside.
Let me add two other descriptions that highlight the Eucharistic ritual in a way that we often don’t think about or meet in our usual theology and catechesis on this.

The first, like Gushee’s, also comes from a non-Catholic. A Methodist layman shares this: “I’m not a Roman Catholic, but sometimes I go to a Roman Catholic Mass just to take in the ritual. I’m not sure if they know exactly what they’re doing, but they’re doing something very powerful. Take their daily Mass, for example. Unlike their Sunday Mass, they do daily Mass more simply, with the ritual stripped down to its skeleton. What you see then, in essence, is something akin to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.” Why does he make that connection?

Here are his words. “People who go to daily Mass don’t go there to experience anything novel or exciting. It’s always the same, and that’s the point. Like people going to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, they’re going there to receive the support they need to stay steady in their lives, and the steadiness comes through the ritual. Underneath the surface, each person is saying, “My name is _ and my life is fragile. I know that if I don’t come to this ritual regularly my life will begin to unravel. I need this ritual to stay alive.” The ritual of the Eucharist functions too as a “12-Step” meeting.

Another perspective comes from Ronald Knox, a British theologian. He submits that we have never truly been faithful to Jesus. When we’re honest, we have to admit that we don’t love our enemies, don’t turn the other cheek, don’t bless those who curse us, don’t forgive those who kill our loved ones, don’t reach out enough to the poor, and don’t extend our compassion out equally to the bad as well as to the good. Rather, we cherry-pick the teachings of Jesus. But, says Knox, we have been faithful in one great way, through the ritual of the Eucharist. Jesus asked us to keep celebrating that ritual until he returns and, 2000 years later, we are still celebrating it. The ritual of the Eucharist is our one great act of fidelity, and the good news is that this ritual will ultimately be enough.

Jesus left us two things: his Word and the Eucharist. Various churches have taken different approaches as to which of these to give priory. Some churches, like Roman Catholics, Episcopalians and Anglicans have prioritized the Eucharist as the foundation on which they build and maintain community. Other churches, most Protestant and Evangelical communities, have reversed this and prioritized the Word as the foundation on which they build and maintain community. How do the Word and the Eucharist play out together?

On the Road to Emmaus when the disciples of Jesus fail to recognize him even as they are walking with him, Jesus stirs their hearts with the Word, enough so that they beg him to stay with them. Then he sits down with them for Eucharist, and the ritual does the rest.

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

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI

The early years of my adulthood and priesthood were spent teaching theology at Newman Theological College in Edmonton, Canada. I was young, full of energy, loved teaching, and was discovering the joys of ministry. For the most part, these were good years.

However, they weren’t always easy. Restlessness and inner chaos find us all. The demands of ministry, the tensions inside community, the obsessions I’m forever prone to, the not-infrequent departure of cherished friends from the community, and the constant movement of people through my life, occasionally left me in emotional chaos, gasping for oxygen, struggling to sleep, wondering how I was going to still my soul again.

But, I had a little formula to help handle this. Whenever the chaos got bad, I would get into my car and drive four hours to our family farm just across the border in Saskatchewan. My family still lived in the house I’d grown up in and I was able to eat at the same table I’d eaten at as a child, sleep in the same bed I’d slept in as a boy and walk the same ground I’d walked while growing up. Usually, it didn’t take long for home to do its work. I’d only need a meal, or an overnight stay and the chaos and heartache would subside; I’d begin to feel steady again.

Coming home didn’t cure the heartache but it gave the heart the care it needed. Somehow home always worked.

Today, the same kind of emotional chaos and heartache can still unsettle me on occasion and leave me unsure of who I am, of the choices I’ve made in life, and of who and what to trust. However, I cannot drive to my childhood home anymore and need to find the steadying that going home once gave me in new ways. It isn’t always apparent where to find this, even amidst a good community, a still supportive family, loving friends, and a wonderful job. Home can be elusive on a restless night. What one needs to steady the heart isn’t always easy to access. Once you’ve left home, sometimes it’s hard to find your way back there again.

So, what do I do now when I need to go home and retouch my roots to steady myself? Sometimes a trusted friend is the answer; sometimes it’s a call to a family member; sometimes it’s a family that has become family to me, sometimes it’s a place in prayer or in nature, sometimes it’s immersing myself in work, and sometimes I can’t find it at all and have to live with the chaos until, like a bad storm, it blows over.

Through the years, I’ve discovered that a special book can take me home in the same way as driving there once did. Different people find home in different places. One of the books that does this for me, almost without fail, is The Story of a Soul by Therese of Lisieux. Not surprising, it’s the story of a recessive journey, the story of Therese’s own effort at recapturing what her house, home, and family once gave her. But the recessive journey in itself is not what gives this book (which I highly recommend for anyone whose heart is aching in way that unsettles the soul) such a special power. Many autobiographies unsettle more than they settle. This one soothes your soul.

However, remembering alone doesn’t necessarily care for the heart and sometimes our memories of home and childhood carry more pathology and pain than steadying and healing. Not everyone’s home was safe and nurturing. Tragically, one’s initial home can also be the place where our trust and steadiness are irrevocably broken, as is the case often in sexual and other forms of abuse. I was fortunate. My first home gave me trust and faith. For those who were not as lucky, the task is to find a home, a place or a person, that caresses a wounded soul.

What makes for a home that caresses the soul?

Home is where you are safe. It’s also the place where you experience security and trust and where that steadiness enables you to believe in the things of faith. I used to drive four hours for a meal or a night’s sleep in order to find that. Today, I need to make that recessive journey in other ways.

It’s a journey we all need to make in times of chaos and deep restlessness in our lives, namely, to find a place, a space, a friend, a family, a house, a table, a bed, a book, or something that grounds us again in security, trust, stability, and faith.

Of course, there are headaches and heartaches for which there is no cure; but the soul doesn’t need to be cured, only properly cared for. Our task is to go home, to find those people, places, prayers, and books that caress our souls at those times when our world is falling apart.

(Partial rewrite of a column from 2006)

(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 world of the arts, they make a distinction between persons who create an artifact, an artist, a sculptor or a novelist, and persons who write about artists and their works. We have novelists and literary critics, artists and art critics; and both are important. Critics keep art and literature from bad form, sentimentality, vulgarity and kitsch; but it’s the artists and novelists who produce the substance; without them critical assessment has no function.

For example, the book The Diary of Anne Frank is a masterpiece. Countless books and articles have been written about it, but these are not the masterpiece, the substance, the artifact that so deeply touched the soul of millions. They are commentaries about the artifact. Of course, sometimes a person can be both, a novelist and a literary critic, an artist, and an art critic; still the distinction holds. These are separate crafts and separate disciplines.

That same distinction holds true within the area of theology and spirituality, though it is often not recognized. Some people write theology and others write about theology, just as some people write spirituality and others write about spirituality. Right now, I’m writing about theology and spirituality rather than actually doing theology or spirituality.

Perhaps an example can help. Henri Nouwen was one of the most popular spiritual writers in the past seventy years. Nouwen wrote spirituality; he never wrote about it, he wrote it. He was not a critic; he wrote spiritual texts. Many people, including myself, have written about Nouwen, about his life, his works, and why he influenced so many people. Strictly speaking, that’s writing about spirituality as opposed to writing spirituality as Nouwen did. Truth be told, we don’t have an abundance of spiritual writers today the caliber of Nouwen. What we do have, particularly at an academic level, is an abundance of critical writings about spirituality.

I offered the example of a contemporary spirituality writer, Henri Nouwen, but the distinction is perhaps even clearer when we look at classical spiritual writers. We have in fact created a certain “canon” of spirituality writers whom we deem as classics: the Desert Fathers and Mothers, the Pseudo-Dionysius, Julian of Norwich, Nicholas of Cusa, Francis of Assisi, Dominic, Ignatius, John of the Cross, Theresa of Avila, Francis de Sales, Vincent de Paul and Therese of Lisieux, among others. None of these wrote works of criticism in se, they wrote spirituality. Countless books have been written about each of them, critically assessing their works. As valuable as these books are, they are in the end not spirituality books, but books about spirituality.

The same is true for theology. We have infinitely more books written about theology than we have books that are actual theology. The word “theology” comes from two Greek words, Theos (God) and logos (word). Hence, in essence, theology is “words about God.” Most theology books and courses on theology contain some “words about God,” but these are generally dwarfed by “words about words about God.”

This is not a criticism, but a clarification. I have taught and written in the area of theology and spirituality for nearly fifty years and am blissfully unaware of this distinction most of the time, mainly because we need both and the two simply flow in and out of each other. However, there is a point where it becomes important not to confuse or conflate the critical assessment of an artifact with the artifact itself, and in our case to recognize that writing about theology and spirituality is not the same thing as actually doing theology and doing spirituality. Why? Why highlight this distinction?

Because we need the artist and the critic to speak to different places inside of us and we need to recognize (explicitly at times) where we need to be fed or guided. The artist speaks to the soul with one kind of intent, namely, to inspire, to inflame, to deepen, to bring new insight and to move us affectively. The critic speaks with a different intent: to guide, to keep us balanced, sane, robust, clear-headed, and within the bounds of decency, community, proper aesthetics, and orthodoxy. Both are important. One saves the other from unbridled sentimentality and the other saves the other from simply being an empty exercise. In a vast over-simplification, we might put it this way. Critics define the rules of the game and hold the players to the rule; but art, theology and spirituality are the game. Games need to be refereed or they quickly degenerate.

In our churches today there is often a tension between those who are trying to create new insight, generate new enthusiasm, and speak more affectively to the soul; and those who are guarding the castles of academia, orthodoxy, liturgy and good taste. Academic theology is often in tension with devotional life; liturgists are often in tension with pastors, and popular spiritual writers are often in tension with critics. One or the other may irritate us, but each is ultimately a friend.

(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
No one is an island; indeed, no one is ever really alone. If you are a person of faith or even just someone with a highly attuned intuitive sense, you will know that there is no such thing as a truly private act, for good or bad. Everything we do, no matter how private, affects others. We aren’t isolated monads whose private thoughts and acts have no effect on anyone else. We know this, and not just from our faith. We know it intuitively by what we sense in our lives.

How do we sense what lies hidden in the privacy of other people’s lives? Conversely, how does what happens in the privacy of our own lives affect others?

We don’t have a metaphysics, a phenomenology, or a science through which we can tease this out explicitly. We just know it is true. What we do in the private recesses of our hearts and minds is in some ways sensed by others. Every religion worthy of the name teaches this, namely that we are all in some real, mystical, symbiotic communion with each other where ultimately nothing is truly private. This belief is shared by basically all the great world religions – Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Taoism, and American and African Native religions. No religion allows for a private sin that does not affect the whole community.

This explains some of Jesus’ teachings. Jesus teaches that it’s not only our outward actions that help or hurt others; it’s also our innermost thoughts. For him, not only may we not do harm to someone we hate, we may not even think hateful thoughts about him in our private thoughts. Likewise, it not enough to discipline ourselves sexually so as to not commit adultery, we have to even discipline the erotic thoughts we have about others.

Why? What’s the harm in private thoughts? It is more than the danger that if we think certain bad thoughts about others, we will eventually act them out (true though this may be). What is at issue is something deeper, something contained explicitly in the Christian notion of the Body of Christ.

As Christians, we believe that we are all members of one living organism, the Body of Christ, and that our union with each there is more than metaphorical. It is real, as real as the physicality of a living body. We are not a corporation, but a living body, a living organism, where all parts affect all other parts. Hence, just as in a live body, healthy enzymes help bring health to the whole body, and infected and cancerous cells threaten the health of the whole body, so too inside the Body of Christ. What we do in private is still inside the body. Consequently, when we do virtuous things, even in private, like a healthy enzyme, we help strengthen the immune system within the whole body. Conversely, when we are unfaithful, when we are selfish, when we sin, no matter that this is only done in private, like an infected or cancerous cell, we are helping break down the immune system in the body. Both healthy enzymes and harmful cancer cells work in secret, below the surface.

This has important implications for our private lives. Simply put, nothing we think or do in private does not have an effect on others. Our private thoughts and actions, like healthy enzymes or infected cells, affect the health of the body, either strengthening or weakening its immune system. When we are faithful, we help bring health to the body; when we are unfaithful, we are an infected cell challenging the immune system within the body.

Whether we are faithful or unfaithful in private affects others, and this is not something that is abstract or mystical. For example, a spouse knows when his or her partner is unfaithful, irrespective of whether or not the affair is exposed. Moreover, the spouse knows this not just because there may be subtle betrayals of the infidelity in the other’s body language and behavior. No, she knows this at a gut level, inchoately, mystically, because in some dark inexplicable way she senses the betrayal as a strain on the health and integrity of their marriage. This may sound more metaphorical than real, but I invite you to check it out in life. We feel infidelity.

We know some things consciously and others unconsciously. We know certain things through observation and others intuitively. We know through our heads, our hearts, and our guts, and through all three of these faculties, sometimes (because inside of a body all parts affect each other) we know something because we sense it as either a tension or a comfort inside our soul. There are no private acts. Our private acts, like our public ones, are either bringing health or disease to the community.

I leave the last words to the poets: If you are here faithfully, you bring great blessing. (Parker Palmer) If you are here unfaithfully, you bring great harm. (Rumi)

(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
Recently NASA launched the James Webb Space Telescope into space, the biggest and most expensive telescope ever built. It will take six months for it to travel a million miles from the earth, find its permanent place in space, and then start transmitting pictures back to earth. Those pictures will be such as have never seen before. The hope is that it will enable us to see much further into space than we’ve ever seen before, ideally to the very ends of our still expanding universe, right to the first particles that issued forth from the original explosion, the Big Bang, that began time and our universe.

Scientists estimate that our universe began 13.7 billion years ago. As far as we know, prior to that there was nothing in existence, as we understand that today (except for God). Then, out of this seeming nothingness, there was an explosion (the Big Bang) out of which everything in the universe including our planet earth formed. As with any explosion, the parts that were the most intimately intertwined with the expelling force are those driven furthest away. Thus, when investigators try to determine the cause of an explosion they are particularly interested in finding and examining those pieces that were most closely tied to the original force of the explosion, and generally those pieces have been blown furthest away.

The force of the Big Bang is still going on and those parts of our universe that were most intimately intertwined with its beginnings are still being driven further and further into space. Scientists are investigators, probing that original explosion. What the James Webb Space Telescope hopes to see is some of the original parts from that unimaginable explosion that gave birth to our universe because these parts were there at the very beginning, at the origins of everything that exists. By seeing and examining them, science hopes to better understand the origins of our universe.

Looking at the excitement scientists feel around this new telescope and their hopes that it will show us pictures of particles from the beginning of time, can help us understand why the Evangelist, John, has trouble restraining his enthusiasm when he talks about Jesus in his first Epistle. He is excited about Jesus because, among other things, Jesus was there at the beginnings of the universe and indeed at the beginnings of everything. For John, Jesus is a mystical telescope through which we might view that primordial explosion that created the universe, since he was there when it happened.

Let me risk paraphrasing the beginning of the First Epistle of John (1:1-4) as he might have written it for our generation vis-a-vis our curiosity about the origins of our universe:

You need to understand of whom and what I am speaking:
Jesus wasn’t just some extraordinary person who performed a few miracles or even who rose from the dead.
We are speaking of someone who was there at the very origins of creation, who himself is the foundation for that creation, who was with God when “the Big Bang” occurred, and even before that.
Incredibly, we actually got to see him in the flesh, with human eyes, the God who created “the Big Bang,” walking among us!
We actually touched him bodily.
We actually spoke with him and listened to him speak, he who was there at the origins of our universe, there when “the Big Bang” took place!
Indeed, he is the One who pulled the switch to set it off, with a plan in mind as to where it should go, a plan that includes us.
Do you want to probe more deeply into what happened at our origins?
Well, Jesus is a mystical telescope to look through.
After all, he was there at the beginning and unbelievably we got to see, hear, and touch him bodily!
Excuse my exuberance, but we got to walk and talk with someone who was there at the beginning of time.

There are different kinds of knowledge and different kinds of wisdom, along with different avenues for accessing each of them. Science is one of those avenues, an important one. For far too long theology and religion did not consider it a friend. That was (and remains) a tragic mistake since science has the same founder and same intent as theology and religion. Theology and religion have been wrong whenever they have sought to undercut science’s importance or its claims to truth. Sadly, science has often returned the favor and viewed theology and religion as a foe rather than as a colleague. The two need each other, not least in understanding the origins and intent of our universe.

How do we understand the origins and intent of our universe? Science and Jesus. Science is probing those origins in the interest of telling us how it happened and how it is unfolding, while Jesus (who was there when it happened) is more interested in telling us why it happened and what it means.

(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

No man is an island. John Donne wrote those words four centuries ago and they are as true now as they were then, except we don’t believe them anymore.

Today more and more of us are beginning to define our nuclear families and our carefully chosen circle of friends precisely as a self-sufficient island and are becoming increasing selective as to who is allowed on our island, into our circle of friends, and into the circle of those we deem worthy of respect. We define and protect our idiosyncratic islands by a particular ideology, view of politics, view of morality, view of gender, and view of religion. Anyone who doesn’t share our view is unwelcome and not worthy of our time and respect.

Moreover, contemporary media plays into this. Beyond the hundreds of mainstream television channels we have to choose from, each with its own agenda, we have social media wherein each of us can find the exact ideology, politics, and moral and religious perspective that fosters, protects and isolates our island and makes our little nuclear clique, one of self-sufficiency, exclusivity and intolerance. Today we all have the tools to plumb the media until we find exactly the “truth” we like. We have come a long way from the old days of a Walter Cronkite delivering a truth we all could trust.

The effects of this are everywhere, not least in the increasingly bitter polarization we are experiencing vis-a-vis virtually every political, moral, economic, and religious issue in our world. We find ourselves today on separate islands, not open to listen, respect, or dialogue with anyone not of our own kind. Anyone who disagrees with me is not worthy of my time, my ear, and my respect; this seems to be the popular attitude today.

We see some of this in certain strident forms of Cancel Culture and we see much of it in the increasing hard, inward-turned face of nationalism in so many countries today. What’s foreign is unwelcome, pure and simple. We will not deal with anything that challenges our ethos.

What’s wrong with that? Almost everything. Irrespective of whether we are looking at this from a biblical and Christian perspective or whether we are looking at it from the point of view of human health and maturity, this is just wrong.

Biblically, it’s clear. God breaks into our lives in important ways, mainly through “the stranger,” through what’s foreign, through what’s other, and through what sabotages our thinking and blows apart our calculated expectations.

Revelation normally comes to us in the surprise, namely, in a form that turns our thinking upside down. Take for example the incarnation itself. For centuries people looked forward to the coming of a messiah, a god in human flesh, who would overpower and humiliate all their enemies and offer them, those faithfully praying for this, honor and glory. They prayed for and anticipated a superman, and what did they get? A helpless baby lying in the straw. Revelation works like that. This is why St. Paul tells us to always welcome a stranger because it could in fact be an angel in disguise.

All of us, I am sure, at some point in our lives have personally had that experience of meeting an angel in disguise inside a stranger whom we perhaps welcomed only with some reluctance and fear. I know in my own life, there have been times when I didn’t want to welcome a certain person or situation into my life.

I live in a religious community where you do not get to choose who you will live with. You are assigned your “immediate family” and (but for a few exceptions when there is clinical dysfunction) like-mindedness is not a criterion as to who is assigned to live with each other in our religious houses. Not infrequently, I have had to live in community with someone who I would not, by choice, have taken for a friend, a colleague, a neighbor, or a member of my family. To my surprise, it has often been the person whom I would have least chosen to live with who has been a vehicle of grace and transformation in my life.

Moreover, this has been true for my life in general. I have often found myself graced by the most unlikely, unexpected, initially unwelcome sources. Admittedly, this has not always been without pain. What’s foreign, what’s other, can be upsetting and painful for a long time before grace and revelation are recognized, but it’s what carries grace.

That is our challenge always, though particularly today when so many of us are retreating to our own islands, imagining this as maturity, and then rationalizing it by a false faith, a false nationalism, and a false idea of what constitutes maturity. This is both wrong and dangerous. Engaging with what is other enlarges us. God is in the stranger, and so we are cutting ourselves off from a major avenue of grace whenever we will not let the foreign into our lives.

(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 Walker Percy’s 1971 novel, Love Among the Ruins, his central character is a psychiatrist named Tom More. More is a Roman Catholic who is no longer practicing his faith, albeit he still believes. This is how he describes his situation: “I believe in God and the whole business but I love women best, music and science next, whiskey next, God fourth, and my fellowman hardly at all. … Nevertheless, I still believe.”

Ironically, perhaps it was persons like him, sinners who still believed, who were the ones most drawn to Jesus in the Gospels.

Reading More’s list of what he loves and in what order, I’m reminded of a conference I once attended on the theme of Secularity and the Gospel. One of the keynote speakers, a renowned social worker, made a comment to this effect: I work on the streets with the poor and I do it because I’m a Christian. But I can work on the streets for years and never mention Christ’s name because I believe that God is mature enough that he doesn’t demand to be the center of our conscious attention all the time.

As you can guess, her statement sparked some debate. It should. Does God demand to be the center of our conscious attention all the time? Is it okay habitually to be focused elsewhere? If, affectively, we in fact love a lot of other persons and things before God, is this a betrayal of our faith?

There are no simple answers to these questions because they demand a very delicate balance between the demands of the First Commandment and an overall theology of God. As the First Commandment teaches, God is primary, always. This may never be ignored; but we also know that God is wise and trustworthy. Hence, we may safely deduce that God did not make us one way and then demand that we live in an entirely different way: that is, God did not make us with powerful proclivities that instinctually and habitually focus us on the things of this world and then demand that we give him the center of attention all the time. That would be a bad parent.

Good parents love their children, try to give them sufficient guidance, and then set them free to focus on their own lives. They don’t demand to be the center of their children’s lives; they only ask that their children remain faithful to the family’s ethos and values, even as they still want them to come home regularly and not forget about their family.

This dynamic is a little more complex within a marriage. Spouses with a mature love for each other no longer demand that they be the center of each other’s conscious attention all the time. Most of the time, this is not a problem. The problem arises more when one partner is no longer the affective center for the other, when at the level of emotional attraction and focus someone else has displaced him or her. This can be emotionally painful and yet, within the context of mature love, should not threaten the marriage. Our emotions are like wild animals, roaming where they will, but they are not the real indicator of love and fidelity. I know a man, a writer, who has been lovingly and scrupulously faithful to his wife through more than forty years who, by his own admission, has a crush on a different person every other day. This hasn’t threatened his marriage. Admittedly though, but for a strong spirituality and morality, it could.

The same principles hold true for our relationship with God. First, God gave us a nature that is affectively wild and promiscuous. God expects us to be responsible as to how we act inside that nature; but, given how we are made, the First Commandment may not be interpreted in such a way that we should feel guilty whenever God is not consciously or affectively number one in our lives.

Next, as a good parent, God doesn’t demand to be the center of our conscious attention all the time. God is not upset when our habitual focus is on our own lives, so long as we remain faithful and do not culpably neglect giving God that focus when it is called for.

As well, God is a good spouse who knows that sometimes, given our innate promiscuity, our affections will momentarily be infatuated by a different center. Like a good spouse, what God asks is fidelity.

Finally, more deeply, there is still the question of what ultimately we are infatuated with and longing for when our focus is on other things rather than on God. Even in that, it is God we seek.

There are times when we are called to make God the conscious center of our attention; love and faith demand this. However, there will be times when, affectively and consciously, God will take fourth place in our lives – and God is mature and understanding enough to live with that.

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