IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI

As a Lutheran priest, Dietrich Bonhoeffer would frequently offer this advice to a couple when he presided at their wedding: Today you are in love and believe your love will sustain your marriage, but it can’t. Let your marriage sustain your love.

Wise words, but what exactly do they mean? Why can’t love sustain a marriage?

What Bonhoeffer is highlighting is that it is naïve to think that feelings will sustain us in love and commitment over the long haul. They can’t, and they wouldn’t. But ritual can. How? By creating a ritual container that can keep us steady inside the roller coaster of emotions and feelings that will beset us in any long-term relationship.

Simply put, we will never sustain a long-term relationship with another person, with God, with prayer, or in selfless service on the basis of good feelings and positive emotions. This side of eternity, our feelings and emotions mostly come and go according to their own dictates and are not given to consistency.

We know the inconsistency of our emotions. One day we feel affectionate toward someone and the next day we feel irritated. The same is true for prayer. One day we feel warm and focused and the next day we feel bored and distracted.

And so, Bonhoeffer suggests we need to sustain ourselves in love and prayer by ritual, that is, by habitual practices that keep us steady and committed within the flux of feelings and emotions.

For example, take a couple in a marriage. They fall in love and commit themselves to love each other and stay with each other for the rest of their lives, and at root they fully intend that. They respect each other, are good to each other, and would die for each other. However, that’s not always true of their emotions. Some days their emotions seemingly belie their love. They are irritated and angry with each other. Yet, their actions toward each other continue to express love and commitment and not their negative feelings. They ritually kiss each other as they leave the house in the morning with the words, “I love you!” Are those words a lie? Are they simply going through the motions? Or is this real love?

The same holds true for love and commitment inside a family. Imagine a mother and a father with two teenage children, a boy of sixteen and a girl of fourteen. As a family they have a rule that they will sit together at dinner for forty minutes every evening, without their cellphones or other such devices. Many evenings when the son or daughter or one of the parents comes to the table (without their cellphone) out of dram duty, bored, dreading the time together, wanting to be somewhere else. But they come because they have made that commitment. Are they simply going through the motions or showing real love?

If Bonhoeffer is right, and I submit he is, they are not just going through the motions, they are expressing mature love. It’s easy to express love and be committed when our feelings are taking us there and holding us there. But those good feelings will not sustain our love and commitment in the long-term. Only fidelity to a commitment and ritual actions that undergird that commitment will keep us from walking away when the good feelings go away.

In our culture today, at most every level, this is not understood. From the person caught up in a culture addicted to feelings, to a good number of therapists, ministers of religion, prayer leaders, spiritual directors, and friends of Job, we hear the line: If you aren’t feeling it, it’s not real; you’re just going through the motions! That’s empty ritual!

Indeed, it can be an empty ritual. As scripture says, we can honor with our lips even as our hearts are far away. However, more often than not it is a mature expression of love because it is now a love that is no longer fueled by self-interest and good feelings. It’s now a love that’s wise and mature enough to account for the human condition in all its inadequacy and complexity and how these color and complicate everything – including the one we love, our own selves, and the reality of human love itself.

The book we need on love will not be written by passionate lovers on their honeymoon, just as the book we need on prayer will not be written by a religious neophyte caught up in the first fervor of prayer (nor by most enthusiastic leaders of prayer). The book we need on love will be written by a married couple who, through ritual, have sustained a commitment through the ups and downs of many years. Just as the book we need on prayer will be written by someone who has sustained a life of prayer and church going through seasons and Sundays when sometimes the last thing he or she wanted to do was to pray or go to church.

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

FROM THE HERMITAGE
By sister alies therese
I read this somewhere … truth without grace is mean, grace without truth is meaningless. Very similar to how Buddhist writer Pema Chodron cites it this way, “Without clarity and honesty, we don’t progress. We just stay stuck in the same vicious cycle. But honesty without kindness makes us feel grim and mean, and pretty soon we start looking like we’ve been sucking on lemons.” (When Things Fall Apart, Heart Advice for Difficult Times, Shambhala Classics, Boston, 2000).

The 8th commandment: you shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. Our CCC 2464 (pages 591-600) reminds us, “The 8th commandment forbids misrepresenting the truth in our relation with others … offenses against the truth expressed by word or deed are a refusal to commit oneself to moral uprightness: they are fundamental infidelities to God and undermine the foundations of the covenant.”

Compendium to CCC:

521. every person is called to sincerity and truthfulness in acting and speaking
522. the 8th forbids false witness, perjury, and lying … the gravity of which is measured by the truth it deforms, the circumstances, the intentions of the one who lies, and the harm suffered by its victims.
523. The 8th requires respect for the truth accompanied by the discretion of charity in the field of communication and the imparting of information…

We have it clearly … in these two sources, indeed in the Scriptures where we are challenged to believe that Jesus is the ‘way, truth, and life’. Yes, you say, but in political campaigns everybody lies in order to get voted in. No one is going to do what they say once they are in office. Really? One way to check that is to listen carefully not only to what they say … but how they say it. CCC 2505 reminds us, “…show oneself true in deeds and words guarding against duplicity, dissimulation and hypocrisy.”

“Liars are not believed even when they tell the truth.” So says Aesop.

In an African proverb we hear, “A lie comes back sooner or later.”

How are you going to decide who has lied? Or maybe just expanded the truth? CCC 2489: “Charity and respect for the truth should dictate the response to every request for information or communication. The good and safety of others, respect for privacy, and the common good are sufficient reasons …” What are the offenses against truth? Well, begin with false witness and perjury. Move on to respect for the reputation of another, rash judgment, detraction (tells another’s faults), and calumny. CCC 2480 goes on to say, “Every word or attitude which by flattery, adulation, or complaisance, encourages and confirms another in malicious and perverse conduct.” What about those lies?

US author Bertrand Brinley says, “That’s one of the troubles with a lie. You’ve got to keep adding to it to make it believable.”

“A good many lies, there are at least two sides to them and you can take a point of view. But this was a flat lie. You couldn’t get around it”. Joseph Krumgold, US author, in Onion John.

St. Augustine, “A lie consists in speaking a falsehood with the intention of deceiving.” Is that the game of politics…deception? Or is there some responsibility for candidates to tell the truth and leave it up to the voter to select? Who will serve the people? Who will govern? To lie is to purposefully lead a neighbor into error … failures of justice and charity, to allow others to become unsafe. In Elfsong by Ann Turner, a US author, “Elves cannot lie. A lie stinks on our skin, like rotten meat. Anyone can smell it.

”What is stinky around this election? As citizens, we have to find it and then decide. I appreciate FDR, past President, who remarked on a radio show in 1939, “repetition does not transform a lie into truth.” It’s that old story … even if you sit in your garage by the hour … it does not make you a car!

Finally, Peterson (The Message, 2003), “Summing it all up, friends, I’d say you do best by filling your minds and meditating on things true, noble, reputable, authentic, compelling, gracious – the best, not the worst; the beautiful, not the ugly; things to praise, not things to curse, … God who makes everything work together, will work you into His most excellent harmonies.” (Phil 2:8-9)

DO VOTE.

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

LIGHT ONE CANDLE
By Father Ed Dougherty, M.M

October 28 marks the Feast of Saints Simon and Jude, Apostles. Tradition holds they were martyred together in the first century while preaching the Gospel in Persia and that their remains were later moved to St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, where a single tomb commemorates them to this day.

St. Bridget of Sweden and St. Bernard of Clairvaux both had visions where God identified St. Jude as the Patron St. of the Impossible, and for centuries, pilgrims to his grave have reported powerful intercessions. Today, Catholics throughout the world invoke the intercession of St. Jude in the most desperate circumstances, and the Prayer to St. Jude is credited with bringing much relief in times of trial.

As for St. Simon, history tells us little about him other than the story of his mission of evangelization with St. Jude that led to martyrdom for them both. But he is named as one of the twelve Apostles in all three Synoptic Gospels and in the Book of Acts.

St. Simon is referred to as “Simon called Zelotes” in the Synoptic Gospels to distinguish him from Simon Peter, which led to his being called “Simon the Zealot” as it is believed he was a former member of the Zealots, a revolutionary political party of the time. However, these fragments of information bring into focus the life of a man who underwent a profound conversion. The Zealots were committed to overthrowing the Roman occupation through violent revolution. So, if Simon was a member of the Zealots, then following Christ would have affected within him a radical change of heart.

The very fact of being one of the twelve, and then later an evangelist, traveling from town to town and through the nations of the region speaks to this conversion. And his path in many ways represents the universal Christian conversion to turn from worldly power to the power found only in the love of Christ.
As for the life of St. Jude, we hear only a bit more about him in the New Testament than we hear about St. Simon. He was the disciple who asked Christ at the Last Supper, “Lord, how is it that You will manifest Yourself to us, and not to the world?”

Christ’s answer to this question was, “If a man loves Me, he will keep My word, and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make our home with him.”

It’s an interesting exchange considering St. Jude’s role as patron of the impossible because our prayers for help must contain the same kind of faith Christ speaks of here. We must have faith even when we don’t see Him, and even when the things we ask for aren’t answered in exactly the way we expect.

St. Jude also wrote an epistle, which is the second to last book of the New Testament, where he encourages the faithful to persevere through trying circumstances. This is yet another interesting consideration in light of Jude’s role as intercessor for the impossible because sometimes the first help God gives us is strength to persevere through that which seems impossible to face. So, we might see in these two key parts of the bible why St. Jude is such a powerful intercessor, and also why it is so fitting that he is paired with St. Simon for a single feast day, because they both point us towards renunciation as the ultimate way to follow Christ.

(For a free copy of The Christophers’ Lift Up Your Hearts, e-mail: mail@christophers.org)