IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI

Sometimes there’s nothing as helpful as a good metaphor.

In his book, The God Instinct, Tom Stella shares this story: A number of men who made their living as porters were hired one day to carry a huge load of supplies for a group on safari. Their loads were unusually heavy and the trek through the jungle was rough. Several days into the journey they stopped, unshouldered their loads and refused to go on. No pleas, bribes or threats, worked in terms of persuading them to go on. Asked why they couldn’t continue, they answered: “We can’t go on; we have to wait for our souls to catch up with us.”

That also happens to us in life, except mostly we never wait for our souls to catch up. We continue without them, sometimes for years. What this means is that we struggle to be in the present moment, to be inside our own skin, to be aware of the richness of our own experience. Too often our experiences aren’t very soulful because we aren’t present to them. I cite myself as an example:

For the past twenty-five years, I’ve kept a journal, a diary of sorts. My intent in keeping this journal is to record the deeper things that I’m aware of throughout each day; but mostly what I end up actually writing down is a simple chronology of my day, a daybook, a bare, no-frills, recounting of what I did from hour to hour. My diaries don’t much resemble Anne Frank’s diary, Dag Hammarskjold’s Markings or Henri Nouwen’s Genesee Diary. My journals resemble more what you might get from a schoolboy describing his day at school, a simple chronology of what happened. Yet when I go back some years later and read an account of what I did on a given day, I’m always amazed at how rich and full my life was on that day, except that I wasn’t much aware of it at the time. While actually living through those days, mostly I was struggling to get my work done, to stay on top of things, to meet expectations, to carve out some moments of friendship and recreation amid the pressures of the day, and to get to bed at a reasonable hour. There wasn’t a lot of soul there, just routine, work and hurry.

I suspect that this is not atypical. Most of us live most of our days not very aware of how rich our lives are, forever leaving our souls behind. For example, many is the woman who gives ten to fifteen years of her life to bearing and raising children, with all that entails, tending constantly to someone else’s needs, getting up at night to nurse a child, spending 24 hours a day on constant alert, sacrificing all leisure time, and putting a career and personal creativity on hold. And yet often that same woman, later on looks back on those years and wishes she could relive them – but now, in a more soulful way, more consciously aware of how privileged it was to do precisely those things she did within so much tedium and tiredness. Years later, looking back, she sees how rich and precious her experience was and how because of the burden and stress how little her soul was present then to what she was experiencing.

This can be multiplied with a thousand examples. We’ve all read accounts wherein someone shares what he or she would do differently if he or she had life to live over again. Mostly these stories rework the same motif. Given another chance, I would try to enjoy it more, that is, I would try to keep my soul more present and more aware.

For most of us, I fear, our souls will only catch up with us when, finally, we are in retirement, with diminished health, diminished energy, and no opportunity to work. It seems we need to first lose something before we fully appreciate it. We tend to take life, health, energy and work for granted, until they are taken away from us. Only after the fact do we realize how rich our lives have been and how little of those riches we drank in at the time.

Our souls eventually do catch up with us, but it would be good if we didn’t wait until we were in assisted living for this to happen. Like the porters who dropped their loads and stopped, we need to stop and wait for our souls to catch up.

Early on in his priesthood, when Pope Francis was principal of a school, he would at a certain point each day have the public address system cut in and interrupt the work that was going on in each classroom with this announcement: Be grateful. Set your horizon. Take stock of your day.

We all need, regularly, to lay down our burdens for a minute so our souls can catch up with us.

(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 Carl E. Olson

Imagine for a moment that St. Peter, standing before the centurion Cornelius, had said, with a somewhat embarrassed grimace, “Well, it’s my personal opinion that Jesus rose from the dead – whatever that means. But that’s simply my truth – just one possible explanation.”

It sounds ridiculous. But it’s impossible to ignore that such words have often come from the lips of many modern-day Christians. Perhaps they have only a passing knowledge of what Scripture, tradition and history say about the Resurrection. Perhaps they don’t wish to offend those who scoff at such a “simplistic” acceptance of a supernatural event. Or perhaps they really feel different people can have different “truths.”

But Peter’s words were direct and bold. “We are witnesses of all that he did,” he said. “This man God raised on the third day and granted that he be visible, not to all the people, but to us, the witnesses chosen by God in advance.” Such words are, to many people today, triumphalistic, exclusive and arrogant. But, then, we live in an age in which the only firm belief given a free pass is the belief that faith is not believable. “Faith” is seen as superstitious, based (at best) on feelings and intuitions.

Yet St. Cyril of Jerusalem wrote that when Peter and John ran to the empty tomb they did not “meet Christ risen from the dead, but they infer his resurrection from the bundle of linen clothes” and connected that physical fact to Jesus’ words and the prophecies of Scripture. “When, therefore, they looked at the issues of events in the light of the prophecies that turned out true, their faith was from that time forward rooted on a firm foundation.”

Hans Urs von Balthasar observed that Peter represents the ecclesial office – the papacy – and John symbolizes ecclesial love. Love, not burdened by the cares of the Office, runs faster. “Yet Love yields to Office when it comes to examining the tomb, and Peter thus becomes the first to view the cloth that had covered Jesus’ head and establish that no theft had occurred.” Then Love entered, “and he saw and believed.” This indicated, von Balthasar stated, that “faith in Jesus is justified despite all the opaqueness of the situation.”

By the time Peter preached on Pentecost (Acts 2:14-36) and to the household of Cornelius, the opaqueness had completely dissolved in the light of the Risen Christ. Peter and the apostles were witnesses – and it is important to note that the Greek root word for “witness” and “testimony” (see John 21:24) is “martus,” from which comes “martyr.”

Peter, in particular, had a special role as witness. “If being a Christian essentially means believing in the risen Lord,” Pope Benedict XVI wrote in “Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week,” “then Peter’s special witnessing role is a confirmation of his commission to be the rock on which the Church is built.” This is brought home emphatically in the final chapter of John’s Gospel, where Peter’s place as head apostle was reaffirmed by Jesus and then further affirmed by the promise of martyrdom (Jn 21:15-19).

When it comes to Jesus and the resurrection, the world offers a host of opinions, most of which dismiss and deny the possibility that “this man” was “raised on the third day” by God. But, as St. John Henry Newman pointed out, “No one is a martyr for a conclusion, no one is a martyr for an opinion; it is faith that makes martyrs.”

(Carl E. Olson is editor of Catholic World Report and Ignatius Insight.)

On Ordinary Times
By Lucia A. Silecchia

This past weekend, side by side in the grocery store, lay both bags of salt to pour on icy sidewalks for winter’s last hurrahs and bags of topsoil to spread in flower beds to welcome spring’s first blooms. This juxtaposition perfectly represents the unique place of March in the cycle of the year.
Some say March goes “in like a lion and out like a lamb.” However, seeing March as the season of salt and soil captures its essence as well.

On the one hand, March still remains very much part of winter. Some infamous blizzards have buried cities with snow just as winter-weary residents let down their guard. In a single week, a warm day that beckons the start of spring can be followed by a dip in the temperature that, once again, sets furnaces humming for a week. Light spring jackets and heavy winter coats both wait in our closets. Somehow, it still seems too daring to put away winter boots.

We set our clocks forward and relish the longer nights that seem like summer. Alas, though, our mornings are dark and still tinged with winter chill. Whenever there are a few spring days in a row, we dare to believe that spring is here to stay. Yet, we remain cautiously unsure.

In many ways, March seems like the perfect metaphor for the human condition and for our journeys through this life.

We are so often torn between the shadows of our winters that hold us back and the bright joys of spring for which we hope. We know the temptations, weaknesses and faults that keep us from being who we are meant to be. We also know those things that are good and true toward which we move. Yet, just as March toggles back and forth between winter and spring, so too can human nature seem to do the same thing.

We rejoice when there are hard won victories over vices and look forward to each new day lived better than the one before. Then, sometimes, just as a string of spring days in March can disappear with a returning gust of winter, so too can come the setbacks in our own lives. We know that each day can bring us closer to God and the good, just as we know each day of March brings us, undeniably, closer to spring, Yet, sometimes, this progress can feel fragile.

In all its frustrating challenges, in all its uncertainties, and in all its tensions between victories won and setbacks endured, life can sometimes seem to be a season that looks suspiciously like a very long March!

This year, though, March is a little different. Whatever its first thirty days may hold, there is something uniquely beautiful about celebrating Easter on the very last day of March. It is joyously comforting to know that the tempestuous days of this unpredictable month will end with the joy of Easter.

When we celebrate Christ’s resurrection, it is the definitive end to the darkness of winter. It is the victory over all those things that pull us back when we ache to move forward to new life. It is the triumphant celebration of a new life that is no longer temporary and tenuous. It is not a timid warm day in March that can be easily overtaken by a returning gust of winter. It is, instead, a final victory over sin and death.

Through the roller coaster that is March, and through the highs and lows of life, there remains the beautiful hope of Easter joy. It is a hope that sustains and strengthens through our turbulent march through 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. Email her at silecchia@cua.edu.)