Living Well
By Maureen Pratt (Catholic News Service)

An unexpected visit from a friend who lives quite a distance away became a blessing in many respects. Of course, it was delightful to see someone in person after a long span of being apart, even with masks and social distancing.
The visit also prompted me to pick up the pace (and items that needed to be returned to shelves, etc.) of tidying up more “lived in” spaces.

Yet another aspect of the visit has had spiritually profound effects. A renewed sense of eager anticipation energized my activity as the time for the visit drew near.

Much like the hallway that suddenly became brighter when I replaced an old bulb, the thought of extending hospitality overshone the long months of pandemic isolation and drew me into a more profound realization for this holiday season and, especially, Advent:

How we prepare to welcome has a deep impact on what happens when we welcome.

For example, I realized early into preparations for my friend’s visit that I could not do everything in one day. Instead, I made up a schedule, breaking up the tasks into smaller periods of time. I actually think I accomplished more this way, and I certainly wasn’t as tired.

Advent devotions can be approached in much the same way: Instead of thinking of long readings or prayer time, smaller segments can build one on the other, to bring us forward throughout the season.

Observing my surroundings through my guest’s eyes was a good way to notice details that needed attention and put my preparations in the context of wanting to do the best for a good friend. I found the semi-hidden plant leaves that needed pruning, the catalogue I’d meant to discard – some of the “littler” things.

During our soul-searching in Advent, if we try to see ourselves as God sees us – as created in God’s likeness and image, as being so precious to God that we are known by name – we might be able to identify and improve on details of our faith, for example, finding more quiet or better focus, without being so critical or judgmental that we lose sight of God’s love.

The preparations for my friend’s visit made me realize that welcome is work, but need not be toilsome, if we look beyond the “pain.” The bending and stretching and balancing (as in, changing the lightbulb) benefited me as much as it would reflect my care for my friend and was pleasant, good exercise – another unexpected blessing!

So, too, each act of faith between now and Christmas can build our relationships with God and one another, sharing the “reason for the season” in a world where it is sometimes lost.

By the day of the visit, I’d made good progress on many things, but some things remained to be done. Those plants needed more than pruning, some could have used new pots. Another light went out just as the one I’d replaced was installed. The tea I’d have liked to have offered wasn’t available at the store.

I started to play “should have …”

I should have started sooner, I should have anticipated, I should have …

Then, I remembered Luke’s Gospel passage (10:38-42) about Jesus’ visit with Mary and Martha. We hear about Mary sitting at Jesus’ feet, listening, and Martha still distracted (10:40), working away beyond the time of Jesus’ arrival. What a contrast! And how helpful for all who work hard to prepare.

There will undoubtedly always be things left to be done. Yet, once the guest of honor arrives, as with Christmas, it’s time to put aside the work and enjoy!

(Maureen Pratt writes for the Catholic News Service. Her website is www.maureenpratt.com.)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI

In the summer of 1854, U.S. President Franklin Pierce sent Isaac Stevens to be governor of Washington Territory, a tract of land controlled by the federal government. Governor Stevens called for a meeting of Native chiefs to discuss the tension between the U.S. government and the Natives. One of the tribes, the Yakima, was stubbornly rebelling, led by their chief, Kamiakin. The Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate (the religious order to which I belong) were working with the Yakima nations. Their chief, Kamaikin, turned to one of our Oblate priests, Charles Pandosy, for advice, asking him how many Europeans there were and when they would stop coming. Sadly, the advice that Pandosy gave him was of no consolation to the chief.

In a letter to our Oblate founder in France, Saint Eugene de Mazenod, Pandosy summed up his conversation with the Yakima chief. He told Kamiakin: “It is as I feared. The whites will take your country as they have taken other countries from the Indians. I came from the land of the white man far to the east where the people are thicker than the grass on the hills. Where there are only a few here now, others will come with each year until your country will be overrun with them. … It has been so with other tribes; it will be so with you. You may fight and delay for a time this invasion, but you cannot avert it. I have lived many summers with you and baptized a great number of your people into the faith. I have learned to love you. I cannot advise you or help you. I wish I could.” (Quote from Kay Cronin, Cross in the Wilderness, Mission Press, Toronto, c1960, p. 35.)

One hundred and seventy years later the situation is the same, only the players are different. In 1854, Europeans were coming to America for a myriad of reasons. Some were fleeing poverty, others persecution, others saw no future for themselves in their homeland, others were searching for religious freedom, and others were immigrating because they saw huge possibilities here in terms of career and fortune. But, this was the problem. There were people already living here and these indigenous peoples resisted and resented the newcomers, perceiving their coming as a threat, an unfairness and a seizure of their country. Even before they fully realized how many people would land on their shores, the indigenous nations had already intuited what this would mean, the end to their way of life.

Does any of this sound strangely familiar? I recall a comment I read on the sports pages several years ago which spoke volumes. A baseball player in New York City to play the Yankees shared how, going to the stadium on the subway, he was taken aback by what he saw and heard: There were people of different colors, speaking different languages, and I asked myself, who let all these people into our country? That could have been Chief Kamaikin of the Yakima nation, a hundred and seventy years ago.

Today our borders everywhere are crowded with people trying to enter our Western countries and they are fleeing their homelands for the same reasons as did the original Europeans who came to America. Most of them are fleeing persecution or a hopeless future for themselves in their own countries, even as others are seeking a better career and fortune for themselves. And, like the indigenous peoples, we who now live here have the same concerns that Chief Kamaikin had a hundred and seventy years ago: When will this stop? How many of those people are there? What will this mean for our way of life, for our ethnicity, our language, our culture, our religion?

Whatever our personal feelings about this, the answer to those questions cannot be much different from the answer Father Pandosy gave Chief Kamaikin all those years ago. It’s not going to stop – because it can’t. Why not?

Globalization is inevitable because the earth is round, not endless. Sooner or later, we have no other option but to meet each other, accept each other, and find a way to share space and life with each other. Because the Earth is round, its space and resources are limited, not endless. Moreover, there are millions of people who are unable to live where they are presently living. They will do what they have to for themselves and their families. What’s happening cannot be stopped. In the words of Father Pandosy, we may try to fight and delay this invasion for a time, but we cannot avert it.

Today, we, former immigrants ourselves, are beginning (at least a little) to understand what the indigenous peoples must have felt when we showed up, uninvited, on their shores. It’s our turn now to know what it feels like when a country we consider as ours is progressively filling up with people who are different from us in ethnicity, language, culture, religion and way of life.

What goes around comes around.

(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.)

GUEST COLUMN
By Sister Constance Veit, l.s.p.

I do a lot of outreach to the young on behalf of my religious congregation, so I try to be aware of trends in vocations work and the common traits of emerging generations.

Recently I took some time to review the latest Study on Religious Vocations, co-sponsored by the National Religious Vocation Conference and the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, hoping that it would give me an “aha moment” on how to interest young women in our community of Little Sisters of the Poor.

I was struck by a section of the report entitled Intergenerational Living. According to the 2020 NRVC/CARA study, a mere 13 percent of perpetually professed members of religious communities are younger than 60, while the same proportion are at least 90 years of age.

These are pretty sobering statistics!

I was consoled to read the following testimony from a young religious: “It is beautiful to have all different generations and ethnicities in one community, in one house, if we allow ourselves to see that beauty.”

What a hope-filled attitude on the part of a young religious! It really inspired me to stop bemoaning the aging of our religious communities and start seeing the beauty.

So, as we observe National Vocations Awareness Week, I would like to address a message of hope to my fellow women and men religious who, like me, are not so young anymore!

May you too take heart in realizing that young people seeking religious life are not as deterred by the older demographics of most of our communities as we thought. They don’t seem to mind that many of us are older – but they do hope that we will live simply, in solidarity with the poor, and that we will live and pray together in a spirit of joy.

So how do we connect with the young? Let’s take a few cues from Pope Francis!

We might begin by striving to become young again. The pope has suggested that we seek to renew our youthfulness at every stage of life.

“As we mature, grow older and structure our lives,” he wrote, “we should never lose that enthusiasm and openness to an ever greater reality.”

In Christus Vivit, our Holy Father encouraged us to let ourselves be loved by God, for he loves us just as we are.

A young friend and former FOCUS missionary told me that this is the essential message we need to communicate to young people. They need to know that they are loved as they are, even though God wants to give them more.

God “values and respects you,” we might say to them, borrowing from the pope’s words “but he also keeps offering you more: more of his friendship, more fervor in prayer, more hunger for his word, more longing to receive Christ in the Eucharist, more desire to live his Gospel, more inner strength, more peace and spiritual joy.”

This joy is something about which the pope very often speaks, and it is something that speaks deeply to young people in their vocational discernment.

It is something they see in the quality of a gaze or a smile, in the serenity with which a consecrated person embraces trials or suffering, and in the generous gift of self to the poor day after day.

Pope Francis insisted on joy in a recent speech to Discalced Carmelites, “It is ugly to see consecrated men and women with a long face. It is ugly, it is ugly. Joy must come from within: that joy that is peace, an expression of friendship.”

God forbid that any of us become ugly as we grow older!

In Christus Vivit, the exhortation he wrote following the Synod on young people in the life of the church, Pope Francis reminded us that Christ is alive and he wants us to be fully alive.

“When you feel you are growing old out of sorrow, resentment or fear,” he wrote, “he will always be there to restore your strength and your hope.”

So, let’s ask Jesus, “himself eternally young,” to give us hearts that are ever young and capable of loving, ready to welcome the new generations who knock on our doors just as Elizabeth welcomed the Virgin Mary into her home in the Visitation.

Let’s witness to these young women and men the JOY that fills our hearts, and is eager to fill theirs as well, if only they give themselves to Him!

(Sister Constance Veit is director of communications for the Little Sisters of the Poor.)

From the hermitage
By sister alies therese
In a couple of weeks, Advent will offer us a joyous opportunity to enter more deeply into a new evaluation of our broken, busted, banished, bold and brought together lives in beatitude. Beatitude, however, will be hidden if we bang into barriers set to disrupt us; barriers we keep in place to protect ourselves, or so we blindly imagine.

G.K. Chesterton wrote somewhere in What’s Wrong With the World? that: We’re all in the same boat … we’re all seasick. I dare say Advent is a bit like taking a new look at the boat (my life, the church, and/or our world), and perhaps consume some Dramamine for the seasickness in the form of prayer, almsgiving and fasting. We shall also be looking for the beatitude of the coming of Jesus, though you may also discover Him asleep in your boat.

Usually during Advent, I need to clear out my excuses, and I have many, part of my seasickness. Whatever they are and in whatever form they appear … they need to go, or the promised beatitude might be obscured. I found this anonymous little excuse from a driver on his insurance claim: the pedestrian had no idea which direction to go, so I ran over him. Oh my, quite an excuse. Made me think of all the ways I just push on when I clearly might have stopped and waited until the pedestrian (be that people, ideas, prayer or issues) found their place. No need to run right over in the pursuit of beatitude. Unlikely to emerge. Excuses need to go so I can wait in peace … not in fear. Then I will know what to do. We know what Jesus said when He arose in the boat … where is your faith? Be not afraid. No need for excuses. And the sea was calmed. What beatitude Jesus bestows in Himself.

The Catechism offers us this little definition of beatitude: “Happiness or blessedness, especially the eternal happiness of heaven, which is described as the vision of God, or entering into God’s rest by those whom God makes ‘partakers of the divine nature.’” (CCC 1024, 1721)

Do reread this a couple of times because therein lies the very good news of the arrival of Jesus, Divine Beatitude. I am always reminded when I find these immense realities a bit overwhelming that Jesus was gracious enough, thoughtful enough, and wise enough to come as a little Child … a small baby, a little fella who would need to be fed and watered, comforted and rocked, enjoyed and played with, taught and accompanied on His journey of self-discovery and vocation. Who is afraid of a little child? The beatitude of humility.

Jesus’ ministry takes the time to convince us that our final beatitude will be to see God face-to-face. Really? That sounds a bit overpowering. Fortunately, Jesus will make that transformative experience a blessing beyond all blessings. No barriers, no excuses, nothing to separate us from God. Nothing. Forever. First, however we must learn the ways of beatitude and be ready to pray and act as if we belong. That’s what we are doing here until we move on. Thus, it is no secret that Matthew or Luke’s teachings from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount are referred to as ‘The Beatitudes’ … the happinesses … the blessings … the promises, the actions and attitudes of the Christian life. (CCC 1716) When we explore our weaknesses and discover our gifts we are beginning to walk in the way of beatitude. When we discover our selfishness and the tiny Child … we are beginning a deeper journey into the humility of God. Remember though that ‘crash and burn’ is not the way to get there as our driver pointed out: When I could not avoid the collision, I stepped on the gas and crashed into the other car. Excuses must go even ones as simple as this: Sally won’t be in school a week from Friday. We must attend her funeral. Who knew?

Thus, in this season of plenty let us not only be thankful for all things, but really be thankful for all things. That challenge of gratitude will lead us to an attitude of receptivity, opening our hearts to the beatitude to come, filling us with what we need to make truthful and healthy decisions.

“The beatitude we are promised confronts us with decisive moral choices. It invites us to purify our hearts of bad instincts and to seek the love of God above all else. It teaches that true happiness is not found in riches or well-being, in human fame or power, or in any human achievement — however beneficial it may be — such as science, technology, and art or indeed in any creature, but in God alone, the source of every good and of all love.” (CCC 1723)

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