IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
Few things in life are as difficult as the death of a young person, particularly one’s own child. There are many mothers and fathers, with broken hearts, having lost a daughter, a son, or a grandchild. Despite time and even the consolation of faith, there often remains a wound that will not heal.

There’s a reason why this wound is so unrelenting, and it lies not so much in a lack of faith, as in a certain lack within nature itself. Nature equips us for most situations, but it does not equip us to bury our young.
Death is always hard. There’s a finality and an irrevocability that cauterizes the heart. This is true even if the person who has died is elderly and has lived a full life. Ultimately nothing prepares us, fully, to accept the deaths of those whom we love.

But nature has equipped us better to handle the deaths of our elders. We are meant to bury our parents. That’s the way nature is set up, the natural order of things. Parents are meant to die before their children, and generally that’s the way it happens. This brings its own pain. It’s not easy to lose one’s parents or one’s spouse, one’s siblings, or one’s friends. Death always exacts its toll. However, nature has equipped us to handle these deaths.

Metaphorically stated, when our elders die, there are circuits in our hardwiring that we can access and through which we can draw some understanding and acceptance. Ultimately, the death of a fellow adult washes clean, and normality returns because it’s natural, nature’s way, for adults to die. That’s the proper order of things. One of life’s tasks is to bury one’s parents.

But it’s unnatural for parents to bury their children. That’s not the way nature intended things, and nature has not properly equipped us for the task. Again, to utilize the metaphor, when one of our children dies (be it through natural disease, accident, or suicide) nature has not provided us with the internal circuits we need to open to deal with this.

The issue is not, as with the death of our elders, a matter of proper grieving, patience and time. When one of our children dies, we can grieve, be patient, give it time and still find that the wound does not get better, that time does not heal, and that we cannot fully accept what’s happened.

A hundred years ago Alfred Edward Housman wrote a famous poem entitled, To An Athlete Dying Young. At one point he says this to the young man who has died:

Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay.

Sometimes a young death does freeze forever a young person’s beauty that, given time, would eventually have slipped away. To die young is to die in full bloom, in the beauty of youth.

However, that addresses the issue of the young person who is dying, not the grief of those who are left behind. I’m not so sure they, the ones left behind, would say: “Smart lad, to slip betimes away.” Their grief is not so quick to slip away because nature has not provided them with the internal circuits needed to process what they need to process. We are more likely to feel a darkness of soul that W.H. Auden once expressed in the face of the death of a loved one:

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good. (“Twelve Songs”)

When one of our children dies, it’s easier to feel what Auden expresses. Moreover, even understanding how much against nature it is to have to bury one of your own children does not bring that child back, nor put things back to normal, because it’s abnormal for a parent to bury a child.

However, what that understanding can bring is an insight into why the pain is so deep and so unrelenting, why it is natural to feel intense sorrow, and why no easy consolation or challenge is very helpful. At the end of the day, the death of one’s child has no answer.

It’s also helpful to know that faith in God, albeit powerful and important, does not take away that wound. It’s not meant to. When one of our children dies, something has been unnaturally cut off, like the amputation of a limb. Faith in God can help us live with the pain and the unnaturalness of being less than whole, but it does not bring back the limb or make things whole again.

In effect, what faith can do is teach us how to live with the amputation, how to open that irreparable violation of nature to something and Someone beyond us, so that this larger perspective, God’s heart, can give us the courage to live healthily again with an unnatural wound.

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

Called To Holiness
By Jaymie Stuart Wolfe
Our Catholic faith doesn’t appear out of thin air, and it plays out incarnationally and across history. Faith comes from somewhere, and often, that somewhere is a someone, often visibly woven into our personal genealogies.

Everyone wants to claim some connection to our first American-born pope: Dolton, Illinois – the suburb just outside the southern limits of Chicago where the Prevost children grew up; Villanova University in Philadelphia where their youngest son went to college; St. Louis, where he entered the Augustinians; Chiclayo, Peru where Msgr. Prevost served as a missionary priest, and then bishop. Even Rome had a legitimate claim long before the name Robert Cardinal Prevost was announced from St. Peter’s loggia.
So, it comes as no surprise that there’s been a lot of Louisiana chatter about our new Holy Father’s Creole roots. The news of the pope’s ancestry flooded New Orleans news outlets within a few days of his election.

More recently, the story was published by the New York Times and Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. presented a copy of the pope’s lineage to him at the Vatican.

But locally, a well-researched and fascinating exhibit showing Pope Leo’s maternal family tree has drawn many to the Old Ursuline Convent Museum in the French Quarter. There, visitors can explore seven generations of the Holy Father’s New Orleans ancestors, leading back to the years just after the city’s founding in 1718. Supported by sacramental records still held in the cathedral archives, the story Pope Leo’s family tree tells is a uniquely Catholic and American one.

The pope’s family includes immigrants from Bohemia, France, Italy, Cuba, Haiti, Guadeloupe and Canada. Also among his predecessors are numerous men and women identified as people of color – some free and others born enslaved.

It appears, in fact, that perhaps the only woman ever buried inside St. Louis Cathedral was one of the Holy Father’s forebears: a young woman of color who died in childbirth in 1799 and was interred near the Mary altar along with her baby. Family marriages and baptisms, too, can be found in New Orleans church records, some of which may have been thrown out of the windows during the famous Good Friday fire of 1788 by Père Antoine to save them.

In any case, what Pope Leo’s family tree reveals is the largely untold history of Black Catholics in colonies that eventually became part of the United States. This information, however, leaves us all with an unanticipated gift: the opportunity to recognize that the pope so many of us are excited about would not be who he is apart from the sad history of the African Diaspora caused by transatlantic slave trade and the complex racial history that followed in the wake of it.

If the Holy Father’s great-grandparents, Eugénie Grambois and Ferdinand Baquié, had not been baptized at the font in St. Louis Cathedral, (the only part of the church that survived the 1788 fire), chances are he would not have grown up Catholic. Nor would his maternal grandparents, the Martinez family, have likely chosen to make their home in Chicago without the Great Migration of 6 million people of color who left the American South for the promise of more economic opportunity and less racism at the beginning of the 20th century.

Our family histories vary widely. But all of us share a lineage of spiritual fathers and mothers whose words and deeds also make us what we are.

This summer, we observe the 1700th anniversary of the closing of the Council of Nicaea. Called by the unbaptized Emperor Constantine, the 318 bishops who gathered in Asia Minor defined what constituted Christian faith. Perhaps even more importantly, they determined what laid beyond the boundaries of orthodoxy. If they had not done so – or if the Arians had prevailed – the past 17 centuries would have been different.

The faith we profess today in the Nicene Creed remains the dividing line between what is Christian and what isn’t. Every ecumenical council since has influenced the course of history and added to the family tree of our faith.

Our task as Catholics is not only to recognize where we have come from, but to hand on what we have received. Most of us do that in the ordinary rhythms of family life, as the Holy Father’s ancestors did. Some of us, like the Fathers of Nicaea, embrace the mission by making choices that have an impact far greater and more universal than even they imagine.

(Jaymie Stuart Wolfe is a freelance writer and editor, speaker, and loves life in New Orleans.)