IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
All of us live with some wounds, bad habits, addictions and temperamental flaws that are so deeply engrained and long-standing that it seems like they are part of our genetic make-up. And so we tend to give into a certain quiet despair in terms of ever being healed of them.
Experience teaches us this. There’s the realization at some point in our lives that the wounds and flaws which pull us down cannot be simply be turned off like a water-tap. Willpower and good resolutions alone are not up to the task. What good is it to make a resolution never to be angry again? Our anger will invariably return. What good is it to make a resolution to give up some addictive habit, however small or big? We will soon enough again be overcome by its lure.
And what good does it do to try to change some temperamental flaw we’ve inherited in our genes or inhaled in the air of our childhood? All the good resolutions and positive thinking in the world normally don’t change our make-up.
So what do we do? Just live with our wounds and flaws and the unhappiness and pettiness that this brings into our lives? Or, can we heal? How do we weed-out our weaknesses?
There are many approaches to healing: Psychology tells us that good counseling and therapy can help cure us of our wounds, flaws and addictions. Therapy and counseling can bring us to a better self-understanding and that can help us change our behavior. But psychology also admits that this has its limitations. Knowing why we do something doesn’t always empower us to change our behavior. Sociology too has insights to contribute: There is, as Parker Palmer puts it, the therapy of a public life. Healthy interaction with family, friends, community and church can be a wonderfully steadying thing in our lives and help take us beyond our lonely wounds and our congenital missteps.
Various recovery (12-Step) programs also contribute something valuable: These programs are predicated on the premise that self-understanding and willpower by themselves are often powerless to actually change our behavior.  A higher power is needed, and that higher power is found in ritual, communal support, radical honesty, admittance of our helplessness and a turning over of ourselves to a someone or something beyond us that can do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. Recovery programs are invaluable, but they too aren’t the answer to all of our problems.
Finally, not least, there are various theories and practices of healing that ground themselves in spirituality. These range from emphasizing church-going itself as a healing, to emphasizing the sacrament of reconciliation, to recommending prayer and meditation, to counseling various ascetical practices, to sending people off to holy sites, to letting oneself be prayed-over by some group or faith-healer, to undergoing long periods of spiritual guidance under a trained director.
There’s value in all of these and perhaps the full healing of a temperamental flaw, a bad habit, an addiction or a deep wound depends upon drawing water from each of these wells. However, beyond this simple listing, I would like to offer an insight from the great mystic, John of the Cross, vis-à-vis coming to psychological, moral and spiritual healing.
In his last book, “The Living Flame of Love,” John proposes a theory of, and a process for, healing. In essence, it runs this way: For John, we heal of our wounds, moral flaws, addictions and bad habits by growing our virtues to the point where we become mature enough in our humanity so that there’s no more room left in our lives for the old behaviors that used to drag us down. In short, we get rid of the coldness, bitterness and pettiness in our hearts by lighting inside our hearts enough warm fires to burn out the coldness and bitterness.
The algebra works this way: The more we grow in maturity, generativity and generosity, the more our old wounds, bad habits, temperamental flaws and addictions will disappear because our deeper maturity will no longer leave room for them in our lives. Positive growth of our hearts, like a vigorous plant, eventually chokes-out the weeds. If you went to John of the Cross and asked him to help you deal with a certain bad habit in your life, his focus wouldn’t be on how to weed-out that habit. Instead the focus would be on growing your virtues: What are you doing well? What are your best qualities? What goodness in you needs to be fanned fan into fuller flame?
By growing what’s positive in us, we eventually become big-hearted enough so that there’s no room left for our former bad habits. The path to healing is to water our virtues so that these virtues themselves will be the fire that burns out the festering wounds, addictions, bad habits and temperamental flaws that have, for far too long, plagued our lives and kept us wallowing in weakness and pettiness rather than walking in maturity, generosity and generativity.
(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX.)

Kneading Faith
By Fran Lavelle
It’s late July and before we know it our college students will be heading off to campus. For those of you who have sent a child away to college I am certain you’ll agree there can be a lot of anxiety surrounding the event. As many of you know, I spent 15 years working as the full time Catholic campus minister at Mississippi State and from that experience have gained some insights helpful to parents of college students. Here’s my list of three things every parent should consider:

Trust God
This seems like a no brainer, but for many parents letting go of control of their son or daughter is unbearable. They feel like if they have all the cards they can prevent their child from life’s more difficult situations. I get it. Some parents might be looking back at their own track record in college. Some of us may have not always made the best choices.
Thinking back to our own behavior can be helpful in that we know the temptations and pitfalls awaiting young people in college. Peer pressure is as real as it’s ever been. We need only to look to the Old Testament for the consequences of temptation. We all know what choice Eve made in the garden. We are not all that different. But knowing the reality that temptations and pressures are part of college life means we need to trust God all the more.
We need to allow our young adult children to make mistakes. We need to let them fail, fall down, get their hearts broken and stand back up on their own two feet knowing they survived and have learned from each experience. We need to trust that they will learn and appreciate a greater dependence on God as they struggle with their newly minted role of young adults.

Trust yourself
Yes, trust yourself that you have raised a good person. You have given them opportunities to learn, grow and succeed. You have provided the necessary infrastructure for them to grow in their faith, their studies and hopefully their life skills. You have to trust that the foundation you have put in place is sturdy and durable.
Yes, there will be challenges that your child faces in college that will seem like an assault to the foundation you have provided, but you must trust that the foundation you built is solid. Who remembers the wisdom of this 38 Special song, “Just hold on loosely, but don’t let go. If you cling too tightly, you’re gonna lose control”? Sure, this song is about a lost love interest, but the wisdom rings true.
Hold on, loosely. By doing so you are there to help them navigate life when they really need your help. The loosely part means you let them handle the non-life threatening stuff. Allow your child to grow trusting you have done your job and done it well.

Trust your child
As a parent you know your child’s gifts and you know their challenges. They need to feel the freedom that this new stage in life offers them. They need to know you are there, but they need to learn to trust their own discernment and decision making. Second Corinthians 5:7 teaches us, “We walk by faith, not by sight.”
College is the perfect time to grow in our faith walk. They will not see the road ahead but in walking by faith and not sight deepens our dependence on God. Allowing our children to trust their own judgement gives them confidence to make increasingly more important decisions. So too it will increase their dependence on God and hopefully be strengthened and enriched by their prayer life.
After the last box is unpacked, a semester of learning, growing and experiencing life awaits your college-aged child. Let us take comfort in the words of the prophet Jeremiah, “Blessed are those who trust in the LORD; the LORD will be their trust.”
(Fran Lavelle is Director of the Department of Faith Formation.)