Kneading Faith
By Fran Lavelle

Twenty-four years ago, the theme for Mississippi State’s Catholic Student Association Fall retreat, now known as Cowbell Catholic, was “Open Wide the Doors to Christ.” It was my first retreat with the Catholic college students at State. I was thinking about that retreat recently when I discovered the tee shirt in the bottom of a dresser drawer. It brought great comfort in remembering a cherished part of my past ministry, and it also provoked a realization that we, perhaps, more now than ever, need to open wide the doors to Christ.

The statement comes from St. Pope John Paul II’s inauguration of his pontificate in October 1978. He stated, “Do not be afraid. Open wide the doors for Christ. To his saving power open the boundaries of States, economic and political systems, the vast fields of culture, civilization and development. Do not be afraid.” The then Pope John Paul II was asking us to put aside our differences, to let go of conventions of power, and be open to the transformational power of Christ without fear.

In a similar way Pope Francis at the opening Mass for the Synod on Synodality in October implored the faithful to help build the church by first being welcoming to everyone (tutti). He used the word tutti three times in his exhortation to be an open and welcoming church. In his own way, Pope Francis is asking that we move beyond the conventions of the world and open our doors and hearts to everyone. What would it look like if we all carried a sense of welcoming in our hearts at church and in our ordinary lives?

I have been saying for over a year that we as Catholics have a real opportunity to lead this country away from dualistic, vitriolic and divisive rhetoric. This kind of change must first, however, start with our own conversion. All around the globe people are allowing fear to dominate the political and religious narrative. Fear based narrative divides people “us against them.” A house divided will not stand. St. Pope John Paul II was right in saying, “Do not be afraid.” Pope Francis is right in saying that everyone is welcome. Everyone. What do we have to fear in the Body of Christ? That one may think or pray differently?

One of my favorite quotes in a homily by my former pastor and dear friend, Father Mike O’Brien was, “this is not your holy country club.”

We do not have an elevated social status because we go to Mass weekly. We are not more holy, pious or all around better. We are not called to congregate within our social circle. We are called to the margins. We are called to the periphery. If faith is a gift, we are called to selflessly share it with others. It takes hard work to seek out those who are different than us to ensure that everyone is welcome. There are people who rub us the wrong way. It is easy to dismiss them as weirdos. But those so-called weirdos were made in the image and likeness of God too.

Our Synod on Synodality synthesis revealed a great desire for unity and healing. Building unity and advancing healing takes a lot of work. We should be willing to listen to and consider the viewpoints of those who don’t think like us even if we may disagree with them. If not, the discussion around unity is window dressing that might make us feel good but achieves little in the end. So how do we move from “I” to “we”, the bigger “we” and not the “holy country club” kind?

The Pastoral Reimagining Process that all parishes and missions are undertaking right now will aid us in defining how we are engaging and transforming our communities. In this current phase parishes/missions are asked to look at what are areas of growth that may require resources or a new focus. Likewise, they are being asked to look at areas of ministry that are diminishing and discern the viability of the ministry in question.

Every aspect of parish life is to be examined. It is precisely this kind of reflection and examination that fuels change. It wakes us up from the routine and presents us with an opportunity to dream, problem solve and collaborate. The work of the church is to be shared by all of its members. We all have a gift or talent that we are called to share. We take away from Mass the Word and the Eucharist to be leaven for the world in the ordinary places we work and live. Our faith is not lived out at Mass. It is fortified there.
When the congregation is fed spiritually, when we open wide the doors to Christ, when everyone, everyone, everyone is welcome nothing can divide us.

(Fran Lavelle is the Director of Faith Formation for the Diocese of Jackson.)

FROM THE HERMITAGE
By Sister alies therese

If you are awaiting a new adventure, then now is just the time to explore. Often, we get stuck in our routines and simple paths, ministries and works of hope – things we are sure we have to do. Advent, however, is a time of awaiting something new…something that will prick our hearts and open us up for a new and deepening relationship.

Perhaps it was during advent that Grandma Moses began painting? “If I didn’t start painting, I would have raised chickens!” (My Life’s Story) She began painting at an elderly age (like 91 or so) … and painted until she passed on. What did that adventure afford her? Notoriety of course, perhaps a bit of money but likely it opened her heart to beauty, to color, to a new kind of freedom.

Gwendolyn Brooks, an American poet wrote her song “In The Front Yard”: “I’ve stayed in the front yard all my life. I want to peek at the back where it’s rough and untended and hungry weeds grow. A girl gets sick of a rose.” How can anyone get sick of a rose you might ask? Well, despite its beauty, there may be something in the back yard that takes us to the next level.

The coming of Jesus was like that I suspect. Jewish life was such a rose. And then an adventure Mary could not have imagined, Joseph wondered about, and the rest of us have to explore in faith, perhaps a new faith. Who knew? Did every young woman dream of bearing the Messiah? Did Mary? What she was offered in the back yard was well beyond what she imagined. Yet her response to the adventurous offer was … ”I am the servant of the Lord. Let it be done to me as you say.” (Luke 1:38) Her understanding that “nothing is impossible for God” (Luke 1:37) launched her forth … seeking out Elizabeth and being a woman of God through whom God might show Divine favor to others.

Advent can also be a time of disgust, distress and discouragement. Why? Because it is in the darkness for us … a night of inconvenience. A night where there can be a lack of comfort, causing bother. (Webster’s New World Dictionary, 2003) We can be filled with illness, or financial stress or even a lack of faith. How will you replace these “D” words with some “R” words?

Advent causes us to stretch to revival, replenishment and renewal. We are called beyond to relinquish, repurpose and to receive. I’m particularly fond of the call to reconciliation and restoration. The coming of the Infant in the cold night in the cave was proceeded by and advent of centuries, not just four weeks. What was this introduction to the restoration of humanity to look like? Who was it for? Who brought it to the crowds, where would they go to understand?

Not only does the rose take time to flourish, but it is also bounded with thorns and often rather than appreciating it’s beauty, we are pricked and bleed. Those drops of blood disgust us and can cause distress and discouragement. However, if we are willing to learn to live in a more positive way we look to be revived and get on with it!

Advent brings us back to our senses if we let it. Advent brings us back to faith, hope, peace and love … as we walk those weeks of introduction.

Maybe we discover in English poet, Brian Patten’s poem “Interruption at the Opera House” (Selected Poems, page 20, 2007), just how inconvenient things can be if we are not attuned to the ‘rightful owner of the song.’

“At the very beginning of an important symphony, while the rich and famous were settling into their quietly expensive boxes, a man came crashing though the crowds, carrying in his hand a cage in which the rightful owner of the music sat, yellow and tiny and very poor; and taking onto the rostrum this rather timid bird he turned up the microphones, and it sang. ‘A very original beginning to the evening’ said the crowds, quietly glancing at the programs to find the significance of the intrusion …’”

Later in the poem he will express who the song is for and who leaves the hall disinterested and disgusted.
Advent can be a bit like this … inconvenient indeed to my desires to have things, and order my own life, and to listen to the songs that tickle my ears.

Let’s let this Advent be one of “R” words and in a new discovery of the true song in the back yard, the one asking us to take care of each other, to invite the outcast and to allow our own lives to be furnished with a deeper union of joy.

BLESSINGS.

(Sister alies therese is a canonically vowed hermit with days formed around prayer and writing.)

THINGS OLD AND NEW
By Ruth Powers

This year marks a very special anniversary. At Christmas of 1223, eight hundred years ago, the tradition of the free-standing nativity scene was born in the little hillside town of Greccio, Italy, thanks to St. Francis of Assisi.

Francis came to Greccio that year with the idea of celebrating Christmas in an entirely new way: Midnight Mass in a cave with a manger filled with hay, a real ox and donkey, and the townspeople gathered around. Francis wished to celebrate the love Jesus has for us by becoming one of us, and his humility in choosing to be born as a helpless baby, just as we are. He hoped the townspeople would see the themselves as part of the Christmas story.

A wealthy supporter of Francis and the Friars agreed to let him use a cave about a mile above the town and placed a manger and the animals in it. An altar was constructed above the manger for the Mass. Thomas of Celano, Francis’ biographer, gives this description of Christmas Eve as the townspeople carrying torches and lanterns approach the cave:

Francis was a deacon, not a priest, so he did not celebrate the Mass himself but rather read the gospel and preached. One of the bystanders, a knight of Greccio named John of Velita, told of a vision of the infant Jesus in the manger as Francis preached. Once again, Thomas of Celano writes:

The people attending took away pieces of the hay. Soon there were reports of animals cured of various illnesses when they ate the hay. In addition, many sick people were cured when pieces of the hay were placed on or near them. A small chapel was built on the site of the cave, which has expanded over the centuries into a large sanctuary with an attached Franciscan Friary.

For Francis, the Incarnation at Christmas was inextricably tied to the Passion, as both were the signs of God’s outpouring of love for his creations. In Jesus, God reveals his willingness to empty himself (Philippians 2:5-11) in order to take on our humanity and all that entails, even including suffering and death. Through the grace of the Incarnation, God shows us how precious our humanity is. He delights in us so much that he chose to become one of us so that we might be drawn to Him. As we contemplate the nativity scenes set up in our homes and churches during this season, let us also consider the great love of God manifested in the tiny, helpless baby in the straw of the manger and remind ourselves of the command that Jesus gave us later on in His life to “love one another as I have loved you.” (John 13:34)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Senior Standing
By Lisa M. Hendey

“Waiting has never been my strong suit. I tend to associate long waits with a childhood tradition that I’m certain my mother invented. Each Christmas when I was young, Leroy and Bessie, Mom’s parents, would make the annual drive from their home in Fort Wayne, Indiana to ours in Westminster, California. We always knew the day of their scheduled arrival. But in those pre-GPS, non-cell-phone-toting days, we had no idea of the exact hour.

Sometime after breakfast, Mom would send my younger siblings and me to the front yard where we would dutifully “wait for Grandma and Grandpa” on the street curb. In retrospect, I realize it’s likely that Mom knew better, and that we were only out there for a matter of minutes, but to me, the wait felt endless.

But that first sight of my grandparents as they stepped out of their car was well worth the wait on that hard curb. Perhaps the unknown of their arrival time, those hours of anticipation, made the payoff all the greater when we wrapped them in hugs and kisses. Now, as a grandmother myself, I can relate to how they must have felt.

“Are we almost there?” Grandma Bessie must certainly have asked Leroy. For she was waiting too.
I experience a similar impatience each year when the violet, rose and green hues of our family’s Advent wreath emerge from my Christmas bins. Those wreaths and their candles, and our daily devotionals, help us to mark the days until the Nativity of Our Lord. But it seems the more I age, the more childlike and impatient I become for the “big day” to be upon us.

Catholics celebrate liturgical seasons rather than singular days for a reason, though, and so this year, I have decided to focus on lingering in the waiting – sacrificing my own excitement as I try to make my anticipation something holy.

If we are living Advent mindfully, we are preparing our hearts and minds for something even more remarkable than Christ’s birth: his second coming in salvation. Advent, at its best, can be for us a time of intense spiritual training – to make straight our paths toward our ultimate goal: an eternity in God’s presence.

I realize that sanctifying the waiting does not simply happen as I slide open the doors on my glitter-gilded calendar. This year, I hope to be doing all of my usual Advent-y things. I’ll light the candles and send out the cards. I’ll seek the perfect gifts and ponder over the O Antiphons. I’ll bake the cookies and will probably burn a few of them.

But I hope to approach my waiting – especially for those waits that challenge me so greatly – with greater intentionality, and here is how. Sometimes the waiting keeps us looking for resolution. We may have experienced the loss of a job, the further explanation of a pending diagnosis, or the outcome of a hoped-for plan or dream. When that happens, we understandably focus on the state of our incompleteness. In our crises of confidence, may we remember to pray for a greater acceptance of God’s perfect will for our lives.

Some of us await reconciliation. We may deeply feel the loss of relationships with loved ones that have dimmed or grown dark completely. As the world around us plays out various Hallmark moments of family gatherings, we lament the empty seat at our holiday table. In the absence of our loved one’s physical presence, may we remember to pray unceasingly for their well-being.

Some of us await peace. We may be overwhelmed by despair at the profound divides in our world that seem to further separate us with each passing day. Embroiled in our own traumas and those of nations around us, we may lose sight of hope. As we tune into the daily news (and the state of our own souls), may we remember in our waiting to invoke the lasting love of the Christ Child, our Prince of perfect peace.

(Lisa M. Hendey is the founder of CatholicMom.com, a bestselling author and an international speaker. “Senior Standing” appears monthly at OSV News)

FROM THE HERMITAGE
By Sister alies therese

In the Texas death house, on Nov. 9. 2023, Brent Brewer uttered these last words, “tell the family of the victim I could never figure out the right words to fix what I have broken.” And with that he was executed and died, the seventh execution this year in Texas.

In this month of November, we celebrate the dead, Dia de los Muertos, those who have gone before us, but do we pay attention, however, to every day death-dealing … wars filling the globe, hunger, abortions for inconvenience, executions, euthanasia, or the dying of those in hospital or nursing homes, fading away, cast aside?

Scars are forever things; they ache. “I thought about what death is and what loss is – a sharp pain that lessens with time but can never quite heal. A scar.” So says Maya Lin, the Chinese American creator of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC where thousands of names are beautifully inscribed to serve as reminders. Maybe we have not figured out the words or the policies that will fix what is broken? Maybe they are scars that never heal?

Recently the President told us he took his grandchildren, one at a time, when they turned 15, to Dachau in Germany to see the concentration camp and to hear his instruction: never again. Never again seems a lot like here we go again when we view the world and the savage massacres of men, women and children. Having visited Dachau myself I can tell you that the chills that ran up and down my spine will never be forgotten nor the ache when visiting a friend on death row.

November is about remembrance, yes … and rightly so. About love and about loss. It is also about service and protection. Indeed. Perhaps, however, it might also be a month of renewal? A new commitment to peace, a month where like the suffering servant in Isaiah all people across the world are not murdered for who they are … Black, Native American, Asian, Hispanic, Jew, Palestinian, gay, women?

Gary Cummins in If Only We Could See (Cascade, 2015) writes, “like the suffering servant, ‘the crucified people have no form, no comeliness, no beauty, (Is 53:2) since to the ugliness of daily poverty is added that of disfiguring bloodshed, the terror of tortures and mutilations….’ As Rauschenbusch says, ‘religiosity sharpens the steel edge of intolerance.’ As Pascal says, ‘people never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.’”

What part of these are we ignoring?

Let’s use the rest of this month to discover what death and fear bring to the human spirit, to the soul. Of our many remembrances let’s honor those who told the truth, who did not lie to us; let’s honor those who struggled to help others, who went out of their way to sacrifice themselves, especially when it was unpopular. Consider your own scars received from abuse, or hatred, or hopelessness … and then ask the Good Jesus to wash your heart with His love so that you might not pass on any resentments or fears to others. In our tradition we remind one another that life has changed not ended and so does American teacher and writer Helen Coutant, in First Snow, who says: “At this moment, Lien thought she understood what dying meant. The drop of water had not really gone; it had only changed like the snowflake into something else.”

Let’s pray for a change of spirit, one of the beatitudes and especially draw to our hearts the tiny children who suffer so and if living with scars of anguish might just take that other path. May our prayer join those of St. Francis as Thomas Celano (St. Francis of Assisi, 1988) writes “The common view of Francis forgets that after his vision of Christ crucified, ‘he could never keep himself from weeping, even bewailing in a loud voice the passion of Christ. For this he allowed himself no consolation and filled his days with ‘sighs.’ “Let us weep as we work for justice, let us cry out to an awesome God who promises to hear us.
Blessings.

(Sister alies therese is a canonically vowed hermit with days formed around prayer and writing.)

By Gretchen R. Crowe

It’s been almost a year and a half since Corpus Christi Sunday 2022 — June 19 — the launch date of the ongoing National Eucharistic Revival.

At the time of the revival’s start, Bishop Andrew Cozzens of Crookston, who is leading the efforts, said the following: “It’s our mission to renew the church by enkindling in God’s people a living relationship with Our Lord Jesus Christ in the Holy Eucharist. We want everyone to encounter the love of Jesus Christ truly present in the Eucharist and to experience the life-changing effects of that love. We want to see a movement of Catholics across the United States that are healed, converted, formed and unified by an encounter with Jesus Christ in the Eucharist and sent out on mission for the life of the world.”

I’m not sure there’s a better mission than that. I’m also not sure there’s a bigger one. Following the timeline of the revival, we are currently in its second year — what is called a time for “fostering Eucharistic devotion at the parish level, strengthening our liturgical life through the faithful celebration of the Mass, Eucharistic adoration, missions, resources, preaching, and organic movements of the Holy Spirit.”

At my parish, we are having a 40 Hours Devotion at the start of Advent, where parishioners can come and spend time intimately with the Lord. I’d imagine most parishes around the country are doing something similar to foster devotion to Our Lord in the Eucharist.

Then, of course, in just eight short months, there will be the National Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis. “Every movement needs a moment,” the website says. “This is ours.” A lot of time and money and planning is going into this national event, and it’s exciting. We’re going, and I hope you go, too.

But it’s also one event. What about the in-between times? What about the times when our parishes are not bringing in a speaker, or facilitating small group discussions, or coordinating special devotions? What about the times when we will not be gathered together by the thousands, being affirmed in our faith and encountering the Lord together? It’s in these in-between times that the habits of daily life are formed, and where virtue is born.

Four Eucharistic tips
This time of year offers us a prime opportunity for getting serious about our own personal revival in the Eucharist. With the start of Advent in a few weeks, we will begin preparations to welcome the Prince of Peace into our homes. Here are a few things we could do to draw closer to him in the Eucharist:

1) Make time for some spiritual reading on the Eucharist. In particular, sit and pray with the treasure that is St. John Paul II’s encyclical on the Eucharist, “Ecclesia de Eucharistia,” available from OSV for purchase or on the Vatican’s website for free. If you’ve never read it, or read it 100 times, there’s always more to glean from it, if we make the time.

2) Speaking of making time, any personal Eucharistic revival has to start with our own commitment of time spent in the presence of the Eucharist. Maybe we’re being called to attend daily Mass for Advent, or perhaps make a weekly holy hour. Or maybe you do both of those things, and the Lord is asking you to up the ante and make a daily holy hour! Pick something and commit to it.

3) Try really paying attention to the words of the Eucharistic prayer during Mass. I’ll be the first to admit, it can be easy or tempting to lose focus during this part of the liturgy. But try to really focus. Read along if it helps. Ask Jesus to quiet your mind and center your heart on him.

4) Once we learn more about Christ, spend more time with him, and seek to better understand his saving love for us in the Mass, the natural next step is to resolve to bring Christ to others. Perhaps there’s an opportunity to bring your kids to adoration – or your parents, a friend, or a sibling. Maybe, once you’ve read and enjoyed a book on the Eucharist, you could share it with others. Most importantly, we bring our Eucharistic Lord to the world through our love of and sacrifice for others.

We’re just about halfway through with the revival, which wraps up on Pentecost 2025. Let’s embrace the opportunity for renewal this Advent.

(Gretchen R. Crowe is the editor-in-chief of OSV News.)