FROM THE HERMITAGE
By sister alies therese

You might remember that I am fond of desert monastics for both inspiration and correction. Having recently left the hospital and rehab after five long months, I’m back home hoping to share with you a little nourishment.

There are all sorts of deserts that these stories might be applied to and hospitals, nursing homes, rehab, jails are among a few. Don’t forget the homebound.

Desert monastic stories might be ‘true’ or not … in any case, the messages they bring are well worth at least devotional reading. Let’s consider two for ‘correction’ and one for inspiration.

“Abba Zosimas used to say: Take away the thoughts and no one can become holy. One who avoids the beneficial temptations is avoiding eternal life. It is like I always say: inasmuch as God is good, God has given us to profit from everything. However, we become attached and misuse God’s gifts, and so we turn these very same good gifts to destruction through our evil choice and are therefore harmed.”

I learned a lot from being so sick and I offer this reflection for those of our readers who are. Even when you are sick you can profit. Even when you have lost a good deal of control over your life, you can still profit. Bitter or better? You still choose. So, when opportunities come our way to be strengthened by adversity … let’s choose God for profit. This is often worked out by how one interacts with nurses, doctors and staff. Learning to listen beyond what we think is a real challenge. Learning to give up, give in and trust strengthens our resolve to love God alone.

What we value is often brought out when we are ill or restrained. I thought many times about how fortunate I was to be where I was (five hospitals and rehab). Would I die? Would I live? Who knew? Many medics were sure of the former (a scary time), but I kept trying to choose the latter.

Mentally I was stretched so my values got mixed up. Maybe I lost my temper, got angry? Or maybe I didn’t eat or I ate everything I could find? Our values come into bright relief when we are not in charge. Would seem that the things we have identify those values … but really it is who we are (in Jesus) that says a whole lot more.

“An old man said: If you have lost gold or silver, you can find something in place of what you lost. However, if you lose time you cannot replace what you lost.” Can we profit then from everything God sends … even those things we are sure are so important? What do we value? What do we share? What do we learn from difficulties?

Finally, I love a story about judgment and how we treat each other. I saw more than I would have liked of people left behind, uncaring professionals, and wrestling with my foibles. Judging others or ourselves is a slippery slope and one who has come to love God has learned this truth.

“Some old men came to Abba Poemen and said: Tell us, when we see brothers/sisters dozing during the sacred office, should we pinch them so they will stay awake? The old man said to them, ‘Actually if I saw a brother sleeping, I would put his head on my knees and let him rest.’”

I can be quick to judge what is right or wrong in any given situation and often I am completely off base. The tenderness of this story reminds me that we are flesh, and we are bound to fail, be weak and give in to ourselves. But here is a brother who understands this well and holds in his hands, as God does with us, the very flesh that this youngest or elder seems to be withholding. Oh no, God gives to His beloved in sleep the Psalmist reminds us and the beauty of this act reminds me to treat others and myself as God would have it. It is the heart of course that makes our awesome God smile and that is a treasure we can never lose and can always profit from. At the core of this heart, we develop that love that loved us first.
Maybe this anonymous little poem helps when we try to explain how great that love is. In A Nonny Mouse Writes Again we hear: “I know you little, I love you lots, my love for you would fill ten pots, fifteen buckets, sixteen cans, three teacups and four dishpans.”

What we learn to profit from will fill all that is around us and we become willing and able to put that love everywhere. So, when you encounter someone ill or left behind, offer them your hands and your knees, and let them rest. And when fear overcomes you, remember that love drives it out. The Russian author Ivan Turgenev in The Sparrow reminds us: “Love, I felt, more than ever, is stronger than death and the fear of death.” Rest, trusting that you are loved and cherished … and pass it on!

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

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
Our own complexity can be befuddling. We are better than we think and worse than we imagine, too hard and too easy on ourselves all at the same time. We are a curious mix.

On the one hand, we are good. All of us are made in the image and likeness of God and are, as Aristotle and Aquinas affirm, metaphysically good. That’s true, but our goodness is also less abstract. We are good too, at least most of the time, in our everyday lives.

Generally, we are generous, often to a fault. Despite appearances sometimes, mostly we are warm and hospitable. The same is true in terms of the basic intent in both our minds and our hearts. We have big hearts. Inside everyone, easily triggered by the slightest touch of love or affirmation, lies a big heart, a grand soul, a magna anima, that’s itching to be altruistic. Mostly the problem isn’t with our goodness, but with our frustration in trying to live that out in the world. Too often we appear cold and self-centered when we’re only frustrated, hurt and wounded.
We don’t always appear to be good, but mostly we are; though often we are frustrated because we cannot (for reasons of circumstance, wound and sensitivity) pour out our goodness as we would like, nor embrace the world and those around us with the warmth that’s in us. We go through life looking for a warm place to show who we are and often don’t find it. We’re not so much bad as frustrated. We’re more loving than we imagine.

But that’s half of it, there’s another side: we’re also sinners, more so than we think. An old Protestant dictum about human nature, based on St. Paul, puts it accurately: “It’s not a question of are you a sinner? It’s only a question of what is your sin?” We’re all sinners, and just as we possess a big heart and a grand soul, we also possess a petty one (a pusilla anima). At the very roots of our instinctual make-up, there’s selfishness, jealousy, and pettiness of heart and mind.

Moreover, we are often blind to our real faults. As Jesus says, we easily see the speck on our neighbor’s eye and miss the plank in our own. And that generally makes for a strange irony, that is, where we think we are sinners is usually not the place where others struggle the most with us or where our real faults lie. Conversely, it’s in those areas where we think we are virtuous and righteous that often our real sin lies and where others struggle with us.

For example, we’ve have forever put a lot of emphasis on the sixth commandment and haven’t been nearly as self-scrutinizing in regard to the fifth commandment (which deals with bitterness, judgments, anger and hatred) or with the ninth and tenth commandments (that have to do with jealousy). It’s not that sexual ethics are unimportant, but our failures here are harder to rationalize. The same isn’t true for bitterness, anger, especially righteous anger, nor for jealousy. We can more easily rationalize these and not notice that jealousy is the only sin for which God felt it necessary to write two commandments. We are worse than we imagine and mostly blind to our real faults.

So where does that leave us? In better and worse shape than we think. If we could recognize that we’re more lovely than we imagine and more sinful than we suppose, that could be helpful both for our self-understanding and for how we understand God’s love and grace in our lives.

Aristotle says, “two contraries cannot co-exist within the same subject.” He’s right metaphysically, but two contraries can (and do) exist inside of us morally. We’re both good and bad, generous and selfish, big-hearted and petty, gracious and bitter, forgiving and resentful, hospitable and cold, full of grace and full of sin, all at the same time. Moreover, we’re generally too blind to both, too unaware of our loveliness as well as of our nastiness.

To recognize this can be humbling and freeing. We are loved sinners. Both goodness and sin make up our identity. Not to recognize this truth leaves us either unhealthily depressed or dangerously inflated, too hard or too easy on ourselves. The truth will set us free, and the truth about ourselves is that we’re both better and worse than we picture ourselves to be.

Robert Funk once formulated three dictums on grace which speak to this. He writes:

• Grace always wounds from behind, at the point where we think we are least vulnerable.
• Grace is harder than we think: we moralize judgment in order to take the edge off it.
• Grace is more indulgent than we think: but it is never indulgent at the point where we think it might be indulgent.
  We need to be both easier and harder on ourselves – and open to the way grace works.

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

FOR THE JOURNEY
By Effie Caldarola

One morning, I was half-listening to National Public Radio as I quickly prepared for an appointment. Into the shower, grab the coffee, find the toothbrush and in the midst of this, bits and pieces of the day’s news.

Then, “StoryCorps” was playing. An independent nonprofit, StoryCorps exists to let people tell their stories. According to their website, since 2003, they’ve helped “nearly 700,000 people across the country have meaningful conversations about their lives.” These stories are housed in the U.S. Library of Congress.
The people who tell their stories are ordinary people, if any child of God on this earthly pilgrimage qualifies as “ordinary.”

My ears perked up when I realized the family talking in the story was journeying through the terminal illness of the family’s husband and father, who we learned at the end had died shortly after the recording was made.

His wife remarked that people would tell her they were hoping for a miracle. She resisted this, because she said, “My whole life has been a miracle,” referencing her relationship with this man she loved.

That line captured my attention, and her comment infiltrated my whole day. I saw in her words the spirituality of gratitude.

Because true gratitude, a very deep well, is profoundly spiritual.

Sometimes in our contemporary culture, gratitude is portrayed as just another self-help scheme. You’ll be happier if you focus on thankfulness. At Thanksgiving, we enumerate our “thanks” at grace. We focus on family, success, “stuff.” Our consumer culture tempts us to glide over the richness and depth of real gratitude and to feel thankful for material things and the completion of our ambitions.

Years ago, I belonged to a Jesuit parish on a university campus. Our beloved young pastor, Jesuit Father Pat Malone, was quite ill. Because of treatments that had negatively affected his immune system, the day came when he could no longer celebrate Mass for us. I will never forget a Sunday morning, walking down the sidewalk to Mass, when we saw Father Malone, standing on the hill above us, alone outside the Jesuit residence, where he could wave good morning but keep a safe distance.

It wasn’t long before he died, but in my memory, he stands there still, a solitary figure wanting to be one with his flock. After his death, a compilation of his writings and homilies was published.

There was one line that I have carried with me ever since: “It is gratitude that ultimately asks one thing, but at a great price: fall extravagantly in love with what is given.”

Twenty-one words I’ve pondered. It is one thing to be thankful for a good test result, the pay raise, the healthy baby. It’s another to find gratitude in the hard things, the standing alone in illness and being able to appreciate the miracle therein.

What a great gift and challenge it is to fall extravagantly in love with that which is given.

Can I fall extravagantly in love with the absence of a loved one? Can I accept with gratitude the givenness of old age, of defeats, of loneliness, of the memory of sins for which I have expressed sorrow and contrition?

And what does it mean, “at a great price?” What is the coin of this realm of gratitude?

St. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, told us we can find God in all things. That means God is there in sorrow and joy, in loneliness and togetherness. To live into that is itself a miracle. If God is there, we are called to be thankful for God’s presence, no matter how high the price.

(Effie Caldarola is a wife, mom and grandmother who received her master’s degree in pastoral studies from Seattle University.)

On Ordinary Times
By Lucia A. Silecchia

On Memorial Day last year, an acquaintance of mine visited a parish not my own and brought home a church bulletin. I glanced through it and saw, prominently displayed, a colorful graphic wishing everyone a “Happy Memorial Day.” I found myself surprisingly angry to see this festive greeting. I have come to accept the misunderstanding of Memorial Day by secular advertisers pushing Memorial Day sales and promoting the start of the summer vacation season. Yet, Memorial Day is not a “happy” day for those who see its real purpose: to remember with gratitude and to mourn with sorrow all those who gave their lives in defense of this nation we call home.

Memorial Day has its origins in the state and local “Decoration Days,” begun in the bloody aftermath of the Civil War. On those days, loved ones would follow ancient traditions and bring flowers to decorate the graves of those who died in battle. In doing so, robust spring blooms brought a hopeful sign of life and respect to the resting places of their beloved. In 1868, General John Logan’s General Order No. 11 proclaimed that such days were a time to visit soldiers’ burial sites and “garland the passionless mounds above them with the choicest flowers of spring-time; let us raise above them the dear old flag they saved from dishonor; let us in this solemn presence renew our pledges to aid and assist those whom they have left among us a sacred charge upon a nation’s gratitude, the soldier’s and sailor’s widow and orphan.”

With the passage of decades that brought future wars and future sacrifices, Memorial Day was eventually fixed as a federal holiday celebrated on the last Monday of May. While Veterans’ Day in November expresses gratitude to all who have ever served in the military, Memorial Day has a more solemn significance. It specifically honors those who served in the military and gave to our nation what President Abraham Lincoln eloquently called “the last full measure of devotion.”

I have never spent Memorial Day kneeling with teary eyes at a grave dug too soon – or burdened with the aching angst of having no grave to visit. Since the days of World War One when my grandfather became both an American citizen and a private first class in the United States Army, multiple generations of my family have served in uniform. They came home. So many families – including, perhaps, some who saw “Happy Memorial Day” in their church bulletin – have not been as fortunate.

The Catholic Church knows so well how to honor, remember and pray for those who have passed from this life. She also understands the depths of grief carried by those who mourn and offers the profound hope that death does not have the final word. I hope that as Memorial Day comes again, our Catholic churches, cemeteries, nursing homes, hospitals, schools and universities will all be places that are filled with many who comfort those who grieve and pray for so many souls lost in battle since the birth of our nation. I hope, too, that all people of faith will bring to the public square a sense of grateful reverence for those we honor on Memorial Day.

Family gatherings, beach trips and much-anticipated barbecues all have their places on this national holiday. They are the good and beautiful things that were no doubt held dear by so many who lived to see so few of these celebrations.

But I hope that in the midst of this, we take time to pray for those we memorialize – and honor them by remembering them every day of our ordinary time.

(Lucia A. Silecchia is Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Faculty Research at the Catholic University of America’s Columbus School of Law. “On Ordinary Times” is a biweekly column reflecting on the ways to find the sacred in the simple. Email her at silecchia@cua.edu.)

By Sister Constance Veit, lsp

During Pentecost weekend I participated in an historic event in New Haven, Connecticut. I was not there to take part in another protest at Yale University, or even to attend any of the graduation ceremonies taking place there. Instead, I joined hundreds of other Catholics for the launch of the National Eucharistic Pilgrimage.

This four-pronged pilgrimage, which began simultaneously in New Haven, San Francisco, Brownsville, Texas and the Mississippi Headwaters in northern Minnesota, will cover 6,500 miles over the next two months.

These four routes will converge in Indianapolis in time for the National Eucharistic Congress in mid-July. The eucharistic pilgrimage is the largest procession ever attempted in the Catholic Church – the most audacious event in Christianity’s 2,025-year history!

 Although we encountered no signs of protest, I was thinking about the recent unrest in our country as we processed with the Blessed Sacrament through the Yale campus Saturday evening in light rain. I could not help thinking how different our procession was from the recent university protests.

After all, we were following Jesus, the Prince of Peace, the Good News incarnate, as he was carried in a monstrance by Father Roger Landry, the Catholic chaplain at Columbia University.

What a providential choice it was that Father Landry – so closely associated with “Ground Zero” of the protest movement – would be named as the only priest to walk an entire route of the pilgrimage!

Many other members of the clergy will participate in a portion of the trek, but Father Landry will himself carry the Blessed Sacrament along the entire eastern route of this historic journey.

In two talks over the weekend of May 18-19, Father Landry made several reflections that impacted my own eucharistic spirituality.

He spoke of Christian life itself as a eucharistic pilgrimage. We are pilgrims in a strange land he said, called to be always on the move.

This struck me in a particular way on Sunday morning as we processed through the streets of New Haven, a city just waking up to bistro brunches, dog walks and morning jogs. A few people seemed to pray with us as we passed them on the street, while others just stared with a look of curiosity.

We were walking in faith, bringing Christ out into the world, doing our part to reverse the indifference and contempt so rampant in our society.

We were trying to remind people that Jesus still lives among us and within us.

As we hastened along the streets of New Haven, I also recalled something Archbishop Christopher Coyne had said in his homily the evening before. A pilgrimage is “prayer embodied,” he suggested.

Each footstep lands both on an actual road and on the path of faith.

As Catholics I think our faith can be a bit “disembodied,” merely a private matter of the mind and heart. But this idea of prayer “embodied” became very real to me as my old legs began to tire during our fast-paced walk to the wharf in New Haven.

When we reached the dock, we saw two boats – a beautiful luxury yacht and a much smaller fishing trawler.

Jesus, who called his disciples to be fishers of men, could only have chosen the fishing boat, so we quickly boarded the humbler vessel, following Father Landry and the monstrance.

We Little Sisters felt privileged to be able to accompany the “Perpetual Pilgrims” and a few journalists on this leg of the pilgrimage.

During our two-hour boat ride on Long Island Sound, we fixed our gaze on the monstrance, prayed and sang with the Perpetual Pilgrims.

We were never in danger of sinking, nor did we try to walk on water, but we did try to imagine what it must have been like for Jesus and his disciples each time they set sail on the Sea of Galilee.

When we arrived in Bridgeport, Father Landry and the small band of Perpetual Pilgrims continued on, but our participation in the National Eucharistic Pilgrimage concluded.

We returned home, grateful for having been a part of history.

If you are going to be anywhere near one of the eucharistic pilgrimage routes this summer, don’t pass up the opportunity to participate in this historic experience.

May you come to know the joy of prayer embodied and may your faith in Jesus’ personal love for you be rekindled!

Sister Constance Veit is the communications director for the Little Sisters of the Poor in the United States and an occupational therapist.

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI

What is the Ascension? The Ascension is an event in of the life of Jesus and his original disciples, a feast day for Christians, a theology, and a spirituality, all woven together into one amorphous mystery that we too seldom try to unpackage and sort out. What does the Ascension mean?

Among other things, it is a mystery that is strangely paradoxical. Here’s the paradox: there is a wonderful life-giving gift in someone entering our lives, touching us, nurturing us, doing things that build us up, and giving life for us. But there’s also a gift in the other eventually having to say goodbye to the way he or she has been present to us. Passing strange, there’s also a gift in one’s going away. Presence also depends upon absence. There’s a blessing we can only give when we go away.

That’s why Jesus, when bidding farewell to his friends before his ascension, spoke these words: “It’s better for you that I go away. You will be sad now, but your sadness will turn to joy. Don’t cling to me, I must ascend.”

How might we understand these words? How can it be better that someone we love goes away? How can the sadness of a goodbye, of a painful leaving, turn to joy? How can a goodbye eventually bring us someone’s deeper presence?

This is hard to explain, though we have experiences of this in our lives. Here’s an example: When I was twenty-two years old, in the space of four months, my father and mother died, both still young. For myself and my siblings, the pain of their deaths was searing. Initially, as with every major loss, what we felt was pain, severance, coldness, helplessness, a new vulnerability, the loss of a vital life-connection, and the brute facticity of the definitiveness of death for which there is no adequate preparation. There’s nothing warm, initially, in any loss, death, or painful goodbye.

Time, of course, is a great healer, but there’s more to this than simply the fact that we become anaesthetized by the passage of time. After a while, and for me this took several years, I didn’t feel cold anymore. My parents’ deaths were no longer a painful thing. Instead their absence turned into a warm presence, the heaviness gave way to a certain lightness of soul, their seeming incapacity to speak to me now turned into a surprising new way of having their steady, constant presence in my life, and the blessing that they were never able to fully give me while they were alive began to seep ever more deeply and irrevocably into the very core of my person. The same was true for my siblings. Our sadness turned to joy and we began to find our parents again, in a deeper way, at a deeper place of soul, namely, in those places where their spirits had flourished while they were alive. They had ascended, and we were better for it.

We have this kind of experience frequently, just in less dramatic ways. Parents, for instance, experience this, often excruciatingly, when a child grows up and eventually goes away to start life on his or her own. A real death takes place and an ascension must happen. An old way of relating must die, painful as that death is. Yet, as we know, it’s better that our children go away.

The same is true everywhere in life. When we visit someone, it’s important that we come; it’s also important that we leave. Our leaving, painful though it is, is part of the gift of our visit. Our presence depends partly on our absence.

And this must be carefully distinguished from what we mean by the axiom: Absence makes the heart grow fonder. For the most part, that’s not true. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, but only for a while and mostly for the wrong reasons. Physical absence, simple distance from each other, without a deeper dynamic of spirit entering beneath, ends more relationships than it deepens. In the end, most of the time, we simply grow apart. That’s not how the ascension deepens intimacy, presence and blessing.

The ascension deepens intimacy by giving us a new presence, a deeper, richer one, but one which can only come about if our former way of being present is taken away. Perhaps we understand this best in the experience we have when our children grow up and leave home. It’s painful to see them grow away from us. It’s painful to have to say goodbye. It’s painful to let someone ascend.

But, if their words could in fact say what their hearts intuit, they would say what Jesus said before his ascension: “It’s better for you that I go away. There will be sadness now, but that sadness will turn to joy when, one day soon, I will be standing before you as an adult son or daughter who is now able to give you the much deeper gift of my adulthood.”

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