IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
In a remarkable book, The Inner Voice of Love, written while he was in a deep emotional depression, Henri Nouwen shares these words: “The great challenge is living your wounds through instead of thinking them through. It is better to cry than to worry, better to feel your wounds deeply than to try to understand them, better to let them enter into your silence than to talk about them. The choice you face constantly is whether you are taking your hurts to your head or to your heart. In your head you analyze them, find their causes and consequences, and coin words to speak and write about them. But no final healing is likely to come from that source. You need to let your wounds go down into your heart. Then you can live them through and discover that they will not destroy you. Your heart is greater than your wounds.”

He’s right; your heart is greater than your wounds, though it needs caution in dealing with them. Wounds can soften your heart; but they can also harden you heart and freeze it in bitterness. So what’s the path here? What leads to warmth and what leads to coldness?

In a remarkable essay, The Drama of the Gifted Child, the Swiss psychologist, Alice Miller, tells us what hardens the heart and what softens it. She does so by outlining a particular drama that commonly unfolds in many lives. For her, giftedness does not refer to intellectual prowess but to sensitivity. The gifted child is the sensitive child. But that gift, sensitivity, is a mixed blessing. Positively, it lets you feel things more deeply so that the joys of living will mean more to you than to someone who is more callous. That’s its upside.

Conversely, however, if you are sensitive you will habitually fear disappointing others and will forever fear not measuring up. And your inadequacy to always measure up will habitually trigger feelings of anxiety and guilt within you. As well, if you are extraordinarily sensitive, you will tend to be self-effacing to a fault, letting others have their way while you swallow hard as your own needs aren’t met and then absorb the consequences. Not least, if you feel things deeply you will also feel hurt more deeply. That’s the downside of sensitivity and makes for the drama that Alice Miller calls the “drama of the gifted child,” the drama of the sensitive person.

Further, in her view, for many of us that drama will only begin to really play itself out in our middle and later years, constellating in frustration, disappointment, anger and bitterness, as the wounds of our childhood and early adulthood begin to break through and overpower the inner mechanisms we have set up to resist them. In mid-life and beyond, our wounds will make themselves heard so strongly that our habitual ways of denial and coping no longer work. In mid-life you realize that your mother did love your sister better than you, that your father in fact didn’t care much about you and that all those hurts you absorbed because you swallowed hard and played the stoic are still gnawing away bitterly inside you. That’s how the drama eventually culminates, in a heart that’s angry.

So where does that leave us? For Alice Miller, the answer lies in grieving. Our wounds are real and there is nothing we can do about them, pure and simple. The clock can’t be turned back. We cannot relive our lives so as to provide ourselves with different parents, different childhood friends, different experiences on the playground, different choices and a different temperament. We can only move forward so as to live beyond our wounds. And we do that by grieving. Alice Miller submits that the entire psychological and spiritual task of midlife and beyond is that of grieving, mourning our wounds until the very foundations of our lives shake enough so that there can be transformation.

A deep psychological scar is the same as having some part of your body permanently damaged in an accident. You will never be whole again and nothing can change that. But you can be happy again; perhaps more happy than ever before. But that loss of wholeness must be grieved, or it will manifest itself in anger, bitterness and jealous regrets.

The Jesuit music composer and spiritual writer, Roc O’Connor, makes the same point, with the added comment that the grieving process also calls for a long patience within which we need to wait long enough so that the healing can occur according to its own natural rhythms. We need, he says, to embrace our wounded humanity and not act out. What’s helpful, he suggests, is to grieve our human limitations. Then we can endure hunger, emptiness, disappointment and humiliation without looking for a quick fix – or for a fix at all. We should not try to fill our emptiness too quickly without sufficient waiting.
And we won’t ever make peace with our wounds without sufficient grieving.

(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX. He can be contacted through his website www.ronrolheiser.com. Now on Facebook www.facebook.com/ronrolheiser)

FROM THE HERMITAGE
By sister alies
“Not all who wander are lost.” I’m not sure who said that but it fits well into my life and perhaps yours. Deep in the psyche of each person is a wanderer, someone who travels, someone who is on the move. In our faith-life we also wander, partly as we mature and partly by circumstances bringing us great joy or difficulty!
Pilgrimage, wandering, on the road again is a very ancient image and is certainly formative in our Catholic Christian tradition. The Israelites wandered in the desert for 40 years over terrain taking only 11 days to walk! Monks or prisoners sitting in their cells wander many miles each day as they pray. Francis, Dominic and their mendicants wandered all over meeting the poor, never quite sure how they might make ends meet. Today a great number of sisters and brothers, refugees, wander from place to place, country to country, looking for a place of safety and welcome, a chance to start again.
Having just celebrated the feast of St. Teresa of Avila we might be reminded of other sorts of prayerful wandering … into ‘interior castles,’ ’mansions’ or ‘a palace where God dwells.’
What of repentance as a sort of wandering … since the word reminds us to ‘turn around?’ As we follow a path not set for us, God will intervene in one way or another to suggest that if we continue to go in that direction, things might not work out so well. Angelus Silesius in Cherubinic Wanderer, says on page 47: “Go where you cannot go; see what you cannot see; hear where there is no sound, you are where God does speak.” Mysterious and koan-like. The path of this wanderer would seem to be the exact opposite of what one might think is ‘right.’
Or another example, an anguished path when one is experiencing fear connected to death … how does one keep going and where is that going to? We might say quite easily, when we’re not afraid, that the path leads to heaven and we can by faith, hope it does. This path, sunk deep in our interior, has to be followed carefully and faithfully, looking at Jesus and not the fear. Remember the “devil prowls around …” (1 Peter 5:8).
“Death is our constant companion, and it is death that gives each person’s life its true meaning. But in order to see the real face of our death, we first have to know all of the anxieties and terrors that the simple mention of its name is able to evoke in any human being,” says Paulo Coelho in his book, The Pilgrimage. Imagine the winding path through Gethsemane … the path up to the Cross … the walk toward the tomb. Here is the human experience, an experience of diminishment or of apparent folly.
As the autumn falls around you, look around and see all the winding paths nearby. See the roads or the tiny traces through the under bush. Look for the flight patterns of the raptors or the few hummingbirds still around. As the leaves color and fall, one sees the mighty trees and the little paths into them, as squirrels and other little critters hide their goods for the winter. What have we put aside that will nourish us when our journey becomes difficult? What have we hidden deep in the recesses of our hearts that will help us when all seems lost? What actually matters? What gives meaning to life?
One of the classics that helps remind me of some answers to those questions is in the The Way of a Pilgrim, (translated by H. Nacovcin), a 19th century Russian work. The story is about a young Russian peasant-pilgrim with a deep question in his heart: how does one pray constantly? The text and the one that follows it, The Pilgrim Continues His Way, both challenge one to reflect on just how serious our pilgrimage is. Indeed, he travels a lot, has a spiritual father and discovers some answers. Father Walter Ciszek, S.J. wrote the forward of this edition and says: “The Pilgrim was most receptive to this valuable knowledge about prayer (the Jesus Prayer), for he had earnestly been searching for as method of prayer that would satisfy his longing for uninterrupted communion with God … he spared no effort …”
Here is the real answer … he spared no effort. If we want to discover that deep joy, establish a real faith life, live out of a hope carved in the soil of our hearts…then we must spare no effort. All who wander aren’t lost if the wandering is a search for the Living God … isn’t this the longing of every pilgrims’ heart?

GUEST COLUMN
By Deacon John McGregor
Over the past 50 years, the Catholic Church has placed an extraordinary emphasis on the laity’s role to evangelize their everyday environment. Pope Paul VI in his encyclical, Evangelization in the Modern World, writes that “she [the Church] exists in order to evangelize.” (14) Clearly, the renewal of the missionary impulse can be seen in the documents flowing out of the Second Vatican Council and those subsequent to the Council.
However, lay Catholics often feel inadequately prepared to evangelize and in fact confuse evangelization with certain forms of apologetics, which in fact, may be useful for winning arguments but not very useful in bringing others to Christ. And bringing others to an encounter with the Person of Jesus Christ is precisely the work of evangelization. Still, many lay Catholics, themselves, have never been evangelized, making the work of sharing one’s faith in a pluralistic culture extremely difficult or nearly impossible, especially one that is largely populated by a non-Catholic prevailing religious ethos and an increasing number of secularists. The old saying, “you can’t give what you don’t have” comes to mind.
So, if evangelization is about bringing others to an encounter with the Person of Jesus Christ, then maybe what is needed is a means of inviting others into a neutral environment where they can deeply consider, possibly for the first time, the real meaning of life, the real reason we are here, how to begin anew after all that has happened in their life, and how Christ provides the answer to all of life’s enduring questions.
To this end, of creating a neutral place where a person can honestly ask questions and voice disbelief, all without anyone judging them, our parish at St. Jude Pearl has begun using the Alpha course. Our first Alpha, earlier this year, included about 34 guests, most of whom were members of St. Jude. However, our second Alpha has over 40 guests and more than a dozen are non-parishioners. Additionally, St. Jude is running a Youth Alpha with over 30 young people participating.
Alpha was developed in the 1970s by the Anglican Church as a way to help those who were unchurched or who had simply drifted away from the church to hear the fundamental message of salvation – the kerygma. Alpha has had wide success throughout the world and has been used in over 100 countries, is available in 100 different languages and has been experienced by more than 24 million people. Alpha has found great success in the Catholic Church and is lauded by such renowned Catholic figures as Father Raniero Cantalamessa, the preacher to the papal household, Father Mike Schmitz, who regularly produces podcasts for Ascension press and by many bishops and archbishops in the United States and worldwide.
So Alpha is Catholic and ecumenical, precisely because it focuses on the fundamentals of the Christian faith: God loves you, unconditionally; Jesus is the human manifestation of God; and Jesus’ death and resurrection has reconciled the world to God.
So how does an Alpha work? It begins with a meal, followed by a short video (less than 30 minutes), followed by table discussion and sharing (for about another 45 minutes). There is never any force applied, nor coercion used. Guests attending Alpha are invited to share whatever they think, to be heard without being judged and to be invited to encounter Jesus, where they are, as they are. Alpha can be run in a parish center, at a university meeting room, in someone’s home, almost anywhere. And all of the videos, discussion materials and training materials can be downloaded absolutely free at www.alphausa.org.
Alpha provides a framework and a neutral environment for inviting people to encounter Jesus Christ. Lay Catholics, who feel uncomfortable witnessing to others in their everyday environment may feel a lot more comfortable simply inviting their friends and coworkers to an Alpha. “What’s an Alpha?” they may ask. One can reply, “It’s simply a place where we share a meal, watch a video and discuss life’s most important questions, all in an environment where nobody will judge you or criticize you for your answers.” In this environment, one’s friends or coworkers will have an opportunity to encounter the Person of Jesus Christ and in doing so, we will be actively participating in the Great Commission given by Jesus to the whole Church, “Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations.” (Matthew 28:19)

(Deacon John McGregor of St. Jude Pearl is the director of the permanenat diaconate and director of operations for the Diocese of Jackson.)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
Some years ago I went on a weekend retreat given by a woman who made no secret about the fact that not being able to have children constituted a deep wound in her life. So she offered retreats on the pain of being unable to have children. Being a celibate and not having my own children, I went on one of these retreats, the only man to venture there. The rest of the participants were women, mostly in their 40s and 50s, who had not borne children of their own.
Our leader, using scripture, biography, poetry and psychology, examined the issue of barrenness from many points of view. The retreat came to a head on Saturday evening with a ritual in chapel in which various participants went up to a huge cross and spoke out their pain for Jesus and everyone else to hear. That was followed by us watching, together, the British movie, Secrets and Lies, within which one woman’s heartache at being unable to conceive a child is powerfully highlighted. Afterwards there was a lot of honest sharing of feelings – and lots and lots of tears! But after that painful sharing of pain and the over-generous tears which accompanied it, the entire atmosphere changed, as if some dark storm had just done its thing but left us still intact. There was relief and plenty of laughter and lightheartedness. A storm had indeed passed us over and we were safe.
“All pain can be borne if it can be shared.” Art Schopenhauer is credited with saying that, but irrespective of who said it first, it captures what happened at that retreat. A deep pain was made easier to bear not because it was taken away but because it was shared, and shared in a “sacramental” way. Yes, there are sacraments that don’t take place in a church, but still have sacramental power. And we need more of these.
For example, Rachel Held Evans writes: “Often I hear from readers who have left their churches because they had no songs for them to sing after the miscarriage, the shooting, the earthquake, the divorce, the diagnosis, the attack, the bankruptcy. The American tendency toward triumphalism, of optimism rooted in success, money, and privilege, will infect and sap of substance any faith community that has lost its capacity for holding space for those in grief.”
She’s right. Our churches aren’t creating enough space for holding grief. In essence: In the everyday, practical spirituality of community, prayer, liturgy and Eucharist within our churches we don’t lean sufficiently on the fact that Christ is both a dying and a rising reality. We generally don’t take the dying part of Christ as seriously as we should. What are the consequences?
Among other things, it means that we don’t create enough communal, ritual celebrations in our churches within which people can feel free to own and express their brokenness and grief communally and in a “sacramental” way. Granted our churches do have funeral rites, sacraments of the sick, reconciliation services, special prayer services after a tragedy within a community and other rituals and gatherings that are powerful spaces for holding grief and brokenness. However (with the exception of the sacrament of reconciliation which though is generally a private, one-to-one ritual) these are generally tied to a special, singular circumstance such as a death, a serious sickness or an episodic tragedy within a community. What we lack are regular ecclesially-based communal rituals, analogous to an Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, around which people can come, share their brokenness and experience a grace that can only come from community.
We need various kinds of “sacramental” celebrations in our churches within which, to use Rachel Held Evans’ terminology, we can create and hold space for those who are grieving a broken heart, a miscarriage, an abortion, a dire medical diagnosis, a bankruptcy, the loss of a job, a divorce, a forced retirement, a rejection in love, the death of a cherished dream, the movement into assisted living, the adjustment to an empty nest within a marriage, barrenness and frustrations of every kind.
What will these rituals look like? Mostly they don’t exist yet so it is up to us to invent them. Charles Taylor suggests that the religious struggle today is not so much a struggle of faith but a struggle of the imagination. Nobody has ever lived in this kind of world before. We need some new rituals. We’re pioneers in new territory and pioneers have to improvise. Admittedly, pain and brokenness have always been with us, but past generations had communal ways of creating space for holding grief. Families, communities and churches then had less of a struggle with the kind individualism that today leaves us mostly alone to deal with our brokenness. Today there’s no longer a sufficient communal and ecclesial structure to help us accept that, here in this life, we live “mourning and weeping in a valley of tears.”
We need to imagine some new, sacramental rituals within which to help hold our grief.

(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX. He can be contacted through his website www.ronrolheiser.com. Now on Facebook www.facebook.com/ronrolheiser)

GUEST Column
By Melvin Arrington
In one of the most famous sports calls of all time, Al Michaels, counting down the closing seconds of the 1980 U. S. Olympic hockey team’s upset victory over the mighty Soviet Union team, shouted at viewers, “Do you believe in miracles? YES!”
Well, of course, Catholics believe in miracles but, unfortunately, our modern culture does not. Those who subscribe to the prevailing secular philosophies of our day believe the natural world is all there is: no heaven or hell, no angels and certainly no miracles. In short, our culture pounds it into us on a daily basis that the miraculous simply does not exist and anything remotely considered supernatural is nothing more than superstition or a fraud.
Enter Bonnie Engstrom, popular Catholic blogger and speaker from central Illinois and mother of eight. She and her husband Travis beg to differ. In her recently published volume, 61 Minutes to a Miracle: Fulton Sheen and a True Story of the Impossible (Our Sunday Visitor, 2019), Engstrom relates the gripping facts of how her son James, who was delivered stillborn, suddenly came back to life 61 minutes after his birth.
All the while James was cold and blue and without a pulse or a heartbeat, Engstrom continually invoked the name of the famous Catholic radio and TV evangelist Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen (1895-1979) and asked for his intercession for her son. Sheen, a native of central Illinois whose cause for sainthood is currently moving forward, went to school in Peoria and was ordained to the priesthood there one hundred years ago.
The long, winding road to Sheen’s canonization began in 2002 with the opening of his “cause,” at which time he was given the title “Servant of God,” the first step along the way. Then, in June of 2012, following years of investigation into Sheen’s life, writings and broadcasts, Pope Benedict XVI declared that the Archbishop had lived a life of “heroic virtue” and named him “Venerable” (Step two).
Since the Congregation for the Causes of Saints and the Pope have already given their approval for the cause to go forward, at some point in the not-too-distant future, God willing, the Diocese of Peoria will celebrate Sheen’s beatification, at which time he will be declared “Blessed,” leaving him one step away from sainthood.
Engstrom’s personal devotion to Sheen developed slowly. Oddly enough, her first impression of the pioneer Catholic televangelist was not a positive one. On one occasion when she was back home from college watching television in her parent’s living room, she came across a rerun of one of Sheen’s programs. There was something mesmerizing about his overly dramatic style, his long, flowing cape and the penetrating gaze of those deep-set eyes that led her to ask her mother, “Who is that man? He looks like a vampire.”
However, as Bonnie and Travis uncovered more information about Sheen and watched his videos, they became fascinated with this future saint who was born and grew up only twenty miles from their house. When choosing baby names, the one they settled on for a boy was James Fulton.
This book is difficult to put down, not only because of Engstrom’s captivating, fast-paced narrative but also because of her brutally honest account of her thoughts and emotions. Especially poignant is the chapter where she reveals a deeply troubling dream, she had eight months into her pregnancy, a nightmare that would soon become reality.
During the 61 minutes and the aftermath, when the doctors told her that, if James lived, he would be severely handicapped, she experienced moments of questioning and doubting her faith. But through it all she remained steadfast in prayer, asking for Archbishop Sheen’s intercessory prayers. Meanwhile, James began to reach his developmental milestones. When an MRI showed that the child had no brain damage, it was clear that a second miracle had occurred. And now, at age nine, he is a happy, healthy boy.
Engstrom provides many spellbinding details that add to the compelling nature of this story, details that, because of space limitations, must be omitted from this brief review. And those are what make reading 61 Minutes to a Miracle so enthralling. Because of Sheen’s upcoming beatification, this is a timely read but its subject matter of a miraculous healing is timeless.
And so, each reader, after finishing the book must answer one question. It’s the same question that everyone sooner or later has to answer: Do you believe in miracles?
YES!

(Melvin Arrington is a Professor Emeritus of Modern Languages for the University of Mississippi and a member of Oxford St. John Parish.)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
Imagine this: A man, entirely careless of all moral and spiritual affairs, lives his life in utter selfishness, pleasure his only pursuit. He lives the high life, never prays, never goes to church, has numerous sexual affairs and has no concern for anyone but himself. After a long life of this, he’s diagnosed with a terminal illness and, on his deathbed, tearfully repents, makes a sincere confession, receives the Eucharist and dies inside the blessing of the church and his friends.

Now, if our reaction is, “Well, the lucky fellow! He got to live a life of selfish pleasure and still gets to go to heaven!” then (according to Piet Fransen, a renowned theologian on Grace) we haven’t yet, at all, understood the workings of grace. To the degree that we still envy the amoral and wish to exclude them from God’s grace, even as we count ourselves in, we are the “older brother” of the prodigal son, standing outside the Father’s house, heaven, in envy and bitterness.

I teach in a seminary that prepares seminarians for ordination. Recently our professor of Sacramental Theology shared that he’s been teaching a course on the Sacrament of Reconciliation for more than forty years and only in the last few years have the seminarians asked: “When do we have to refuse giving someone absolution in confession?”

What’s betrayed in this concern? The seminarians asking the question are, no doubt, sincere; they’re not trying to be rigid or hard. Their anxiety is rather about grace and mercy. They are sincerely anxious about perhaps dispensing God’s mercy too liberally, too cheaply, too indiscriminately, in essence, too unfairly. Their fear is not so much that God’s mercy is limited and that there’s only so much grace to go around. Not that. Their concern is more that by giving out grace so liberally they are being unfair to those who are practicing faithfully and bearing the heat of the day. Their fear is about fairness, justice and merit.

What’s at stake here? That grace is not something we merit. After the rich young man in the Gospels turns down Jesus’ invitation to leave everything and follow him, Peter, who watched this encounter and who, unlike the rich young man, has not turned down Jesus’ invitation and has given up everything to follow him, asks Jesus what those who do give up everything are going to get in return. In response, Jesus tells him the parable of the generous land owner and the vineyard workers who all arrive at different times, wherein some work for many hours and some for virtually no time at all, and yet they all receive the same reward, leaving those who worked the full day and bore the heat of the sun bitter with sense of unfairness. But, the vineyard owner (God) points out that there is no unfairness here since everyone has in fact received an over-generous return.

What’s the deep lesson? Whenever we are protesting that it “isn’t fair” that those who are not as faithful as we but are still receiving the full mercy and grace of God we are some distance from understanding grace and living fully inside it.

My dental hygienist knows I’m a Catholic priest and likes to ask me questions about religion and church. One day she shared this story: Her mother and father had both, as far as she knew, never attended church. They had been benign enough about religion, but not interested themselves. She, their daughter, had begun practicing as a Methodist, mainly through the influence of friends. Then her mother died and as they talked about plans for a funeral, her father revealed that her mother had been baptized as a Roman Catholic, though she had not practiced since her middle-school years. He suggested they try to arrange a Roman Catholic funeral for her. Given all those years of absence, it was with some trepidation that they approached a priest at a nearby parish to ask whether they might have a Roman Catholic funeral for her. To their surprise, the priest’s response was non-hesitant, warm and welcoming: “Of course, we can do this! It will be an honor! And I’ll arrange for a choir and a reception in the parish hall afterwards.”

No price was exacted for her mother’s life-long absence from the church. She was buried with the full rites of the Church … and her father, well, he was so touched by it all, the generosity of the church and the beauty of the liturgy, that he has since decided to become a Roman Catholic.

One wonders what the effect would have been had the priest refused that funeral, asking how they could justify a church funeral when, for all these years, they weren’t interested in the church. One wonders too how many people find this story comforting rather than discomforting, given a strong ecclesial ethos today wherein many of us nurse the fear that we are handing out grace and mercy too cheaply.

But grace and mercy are never given out cheaply since love is never merited.

(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX. He can be contacted through his website www.ronrolheiser.com. Now on Facebook www.facebook.com/ronrolheiser)

KNEADING FAITH
By Fran Lavelle
I was in Vicksburg several weeks ago and was asked if I knew what the acronym HWLF stood for. I did not. I was told that it is the response to the question, “WWJD? (What would Jesus do?)” The answer, “He would love first.” In the weeks since that brief graced moment, I have had several reasons to remind myself HWLF.

On Catechetical Sunday the Gospel was the parable of the prodigal son. It is a reading that has the power to speak to us in a myriad of ways depending on where we are in our own spiritual journey. The parable lesson is one I have visited and revisited on several occasions. I don’t know if you are ever at Mass and something is said that strikes you to the core of your being, but that is exactly what happened to me that Sunday. Father Cosgrove was talking about the two sons and he simply said, “The father loved them both. You know what I mean? The father loved both of his sons.” Yes, He Would Love First. Loving first means we welcome home those who have strayed and loving those who can no longer see the belovedness of the other.

All of this got me thinking about two unrelated deaths of men who were likewise loved by God, Father Al Camp and a high school friend of mine, Mickey. Father Al and I had several things in common; of great importance was our Ohio roots. When ever Father Al saw me he would say, “Hey, hey there Buckeye.” To be clear, Buckeyes are the nut bearing state tree of Ohio and Ohioans are known as Buckeyes. While I hold no hostility to the large state school in Columbus, Ohio I am not that kind of a Buckeye. I could always count on a flash of Father Al’s cheeky smile and his easy-going disposition, but I knew that below the smiles and salutations was a deeply faith filled man and true servant of God’s people. Hearing stories about Father Al at his memorial Mass underscored for me the importance of living an intentional life of authentic service. I was also reminded not to sweat the little stuff and to laugh. Father Al had a wicked dry sense of humor and loved to laugh.

Later the next week I found out that a guy I went to high school with had died a few weeks shy of his 54th birthday from an overdose. Mickey was a brilliant man with Kennedy-esque good looks. He was the only child of a well-known, well to do family in town. Mickey went to law school and spent most of his career as a prosecuting attorney. About a year ago, Mickey was indicted for federal tax fraud. He spent the past year in federal prison. On July 1, Mickey got out of prison and was sent to a halfway house. A few days after returning home from his year-long incarceration, Mickey overdosed and died. His long battle with addiction ended Mickey’s life just as his friends were hoping he would have a new beginning. I read the eulogy that one of his closest friends gave at Mickey’s funeral. It was filled with the sadness one expects when a life so full of promise tragically ends.

I found myself reflecting on these two lives, both in how they lived and how they were memorialized. The stark difference in their lives seems so apparent, one an 87-year young servant of God’s people and the other a gifted 53-year-old who struggled with addiction. But they also shared many things in common. Both were smart and handsome. Both were raised Catholic. As with all of us, both men lived with the consequences of their choices. I thought about God’s love for Father Al and Mickey. I felt a profound gratitude in knowing that they were both beloved sons of God. They were loved first.

That understanding is exactly what our broken world is in most need of. To know we are loved. Loved by God. Every single one of us. That is the central message of all catechetical formation. It is easy to fear that our catechetical programs, RCIA sessions, adult faith formation classes are watered down by relativism. It is easy to get too far into our heads and look at rubrics and rules and make black and white determinations about who is and who isn’t worthy of this or that. We want to “give them” the truth, not mince words, tell it like it is, but when we approach formation like an academic endeavor, we can turn out people who know the faith but have not experienced it.

We all have the responsibility to share the love of God and the gift of faith. We cannot approach love the same way we approach learning, although we do learn by loving. Now more than ever it is critical that we inspire others to see the belovedness of one another.

In those moments when we ask ourselves, “What would Jesus do?” may we respond, “He would love first.” And do likewise.

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

SPIRIT AND TRUTH
By Father Aaron Williams
People are always complimenting my vestments after Mass. Kids at the school recognize the certain vestments that I only pull out on big feasts. Parishioners like to tell me which vestment is their “favorite.” When I was preparing for ordination, I gave some time to consider what sort of vestments I was going to order or who would make them. I noticed a lot of my classmates buying matching vestments in each color from various catalogue producers—the church equivalent of off-the-rack clothing companies. I just wasn’t too excited about the idea of spending a large amount of money on standard vestments which everyone else had and honestly weren’t too impressive. So, I began to consider the directives of the Church.
The General Instruction of the Roman Missal says, “sacred vestments should contribute to the beauty of the sacred action itself” (335). This is further developed in a later paragraph reading, “It is fitting that the beauty and nobility of each vestment derive not from abundance of overly lavish ornamentation, but rather from the material that is used and from the design. Ornamentation on vestments should, moreover, consist of figures, that is, of images or symbols, that evoke sacred use, avoiding thereby anything unbecoming” (344).
So, from this we learn that the intention of the Church is that the vestments used at Mass are themselves beautiful—but that their beauty is derived not from being elaborate or lavish but their material and design. This is further explained by the fathers of the Second Vatican Council: “[Bishops], by the encouragement and favor they show to art which is truly sacred, should strive after noble beauty rather than mere sumptuous display. This principle is to apply also in the matter of sacred vestments and ornaments.”
Thus we see the Church desires a glance between sumptuous/gaudy vestments, but also vestments that are noble and beautiful. Now, God is beauty itself. St. Augustine praises this in his Confessions. “Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient ever new.” If vestments are beautiful, it is because they reveal to us the beauty of God. And, here we find the purpose of church vesture at all. We use vestments in the liturgy not to honor the minister, but to honor God—or, more explicitly, to reveal God’s beauty to humanity.
And, this was the approach that God himself used in defining the vesture and ornamentation of the liturgy in the old covenant. In commanding Moses to make vestments for Aaron, God declares, “And you shall make holy garments for Aaron your brother, for glory and for beauty” (Ex 28:2). Later in the same chapter, God described each vestment in detail—which threads will be used, which colors, how they are ornamented (cf. Ex 28:31-38).
When you consider the prescribed design of these vestments in light of the whole of the Old Testament, it’s easy to see why God demanded these figures. The colors, fabrics, styles and ornaments are all evocative of the Garden of Eden. The same was true of the decoration on the walls of the temple itself, which included designs of trees and flowers. The whole purpose of these ornaments was not “art for the sake of art,” but so that the worshiper would be drawn in to the act of worship by the beauty surrounding him, and even more so, to be taken back to the Garden—to the paradise of God.
In a similar way, the Church exhorts us to build beautiful churches, have beautiful music and wear beautiful vestments not simply because it makes the Mass more dignified, but because this beauty is meant to invoke in our minds a longing for the beauty of heaven.
Regrettably, in recent years it has not been uncommon to find sacristies which once housed beautiful and historic vestments now filled with simple and mass-produced polyester counterparts—often equally or even more expensive than vestments purchased from sellers who today are using truly noble fabrics and designs such as silks or damask fabrics with patterns of flowers, angels, crosses and crowns.
Often these catalogue vestments are bought because of a myth that they must be cheaper than the custom option. The reality is that most of the mass-produce sellers use very inexpensive fabrics but overcharge. My most expensive vestment, which was custom designed by a one-man company in Poland, was less expensive than the average vestment sold by the largest vestment seller in America—a Belgian-based company that exclusively uses factory-made artificial fabrics, many of which are simply plain polyester with printed designs, if any.
I remember one of my professors at the Liturgical Institute was speaking about the need for beauty in the liturgy today. He proposed the question of whether, in a society with such poverty, we should invest in beautiful churches or vestments. He said, “The poor today live under concrete bridges, and in parks, and see ugliness all around them both in their surroundings and in how they are treated. But, the riches of the Church are their riches. There’s a reason you find the poor at churches and not a government buildings. Everything at the church is theirs and they deserve something beautiful.”
Nobility is not the enemy of beauty. We can have beauty without becoming ornate and extravagant. “And you shall make holy garments for Aaron your brother, for glory and for beauty” (Ex 28:2).

(Father Aaron Williams is the Director of Seminarians and Parochial vicar at Greenville St. Joseph Parish)