IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
Our bodies and our souls each have their separate aging process, and they aren’t always in harmony. T.E. Laurence, in “The Seven Pillars of Wisdom,” makes this comment about someone: “He feared his maturity as it grew upon him, with its ripe thought and finished art, but which lacked the poetry of boyhood to make living a full end of life … his rangeful, mortal soul was aging faster than his body, was going to die before it, like most of ours.”
I suspect that all of us, at some level, fear growing into maturity. It’s not so much that we don’t want to give up the habits of our youth or that we fear that the joys of maturity are second-best to the pleasures of youth. I believe there is a deeper reason. We fear, as Laurence puts it, that our maturity will strip us of the poetry of our youth and make us old before time. What does that mean?
We sometimes speak of an old soul inside a young person, and this is meant both as a compliment and a criticism, perhaps more the latter. We sometimes look at a young person whose body is full of life and overfull with energy and see a precociousness of soul that belies that youth and energy and we can’t help wondering whether that premature maturity isn’t inhibiting the life-principle. And so we have a mixed reaction: What a mature young person! But is his or her life too-grey and sterile before its time?
Reflecting on this, I was reminded of a comment that Raymond Brown once made in a class. The context of his remark is important. This was not the comment of a young man still looking to leave a mark on life, but rather the comment of a very mature, successful and respected man who was the envy of his peers. Nearly 70 years old, wonderfully mature, universally respected for everything from his scholarship to his personal integrity, he was a mature soul. And still his comment betrayed the subtle fear that perhaps his maturity had stripped him of some of the poetry of his boyhood. His comment was something to this effect:
You know when you reach a certain age, as I have now, and you look back on what you’ve done, you’re sometimes embarrassed by some of the things you did in your youth, not immoral things, just things that now, from your present perspective, seem immature and ill thought-out, things that you are now too wise to ever risk doing. Recalling them, initially you are a little embarrassed.
But then, in those moments where you feel your age and your present reticence, you sometimes look back and say: “That’s the bravest thing I ever did! Wow, I had nerve then! I’m much more afraid of things now!”
Jane Urquhart, the Canadian novelist, echoes this sentiment. Rereading one of her own books which she had written twenty years before, she comments: “It is tremendously satisfying to be able to reacquaint myself with the young woman who wrote these tales, and to know that what was going on in her mind intrigues me still.” What’s unspoken in her comment is her present admiration (and dare I say, envy) for the poetry that once infused her younger self.
I had a similar feeling some years ago when, for a new release of my book, “The Restless Heart,” I was asked to update it. I’d written the book when I was still in my twenties, a lonely and restless young man then, partly looking for my place in life. Now, nearly 25 years later and somewhat more mature, I was sometimes embarrassed by some of the things I’d written all those years back; but, like Raymond Brown, I marveled at my nerve back then, and, like Jane Urquhart, it was refreshing to reacquaint myself with the young man who had written that book, sensing that he had a livelier poetry and more verve in him than the older person who was rereading that text.
Some of us never grow-up. The body ages, but the soul remains immature, clinging to adolescence, fearful of responsibility, fearful of commitment, fearful of opportunity slipping away, fearful of aging, fearful of own maturity, and, not least, fearful of death. This is not a formula for happiness, but one for an ever-increasing fear, disappointment, and bitterness in life. Not growing-up eventually catches up with everyone, and what judged as cute at twenty, colorful at 30, and eccentric at 40, becomes intolerable at 50. At a certain age, even poetry and verve don’t compensate for immaturity. The soul too must grow-up.
But for some of us, the danger is the opposite, we grow old before our time, becoming old souls in still young bodies, mature, responsible, committed, able to look age, diminishment and mortality square in the eye, but devoid of the poetry, verve, color and humor which are meant to make a mature person mellow and alive, like a finely-aged old wine.
(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX.)

Reflections on life
By Father Jerome LeDoux, SVD
Watching the evening news several days ago, I flashed a big smile when I saw more than 50 commuters in Perth, Australia, rush up and swarm a subway car. It took mere moments for the crowd to merge as one, slamming their bodies into the car and pushing it sideways with all their might, widening by just a smidgen the 2-inch gap between the platform and the subway coach.

A careless rider, who had stepped into the 2-inch crack in a distracted moment, could not extract his foot. While a car conductor waved frantically to the engineer not to start the car moving again, the coach did give way enough for the Good Samaritans to pull the errant foot out.

There is a wonderful side of us that drives us to the aid of people in distress such as the many New Orleanians trapped by the devastating water pouring through levees broken by the winds and waters of Hurricane Katrina on Aug. 29, 2005. Again, one had to smile, thrilling to the news that Good Samaritans in light and medium watercraft grabbed extra fuel and provisions and sped along the Texas and Louisiana Gulf Coast up the Mississippi River to New Orleans.

As the waters receded, New Orleans native and Vietnam veteran Armand (Sheik) Richardson and the Arabi Wrecking Crew helped with the grassroots rebuilding, handling the demolition and/or mold cleaning of buildings for several years into the regional recovery.

It is always cheering and inspiring to see videos of the selfless, fearless, generous and sometimes daring assistance and rescues of people in wrecked vehicles along our roads, some even engulfed in flames. At times it is a lone individual dashing to the scene with bare hands or with a fire extinguisher, and at other times it is two or more forcing open the doors and defying the smoke and flames with little or no regard for their own safety and physical integrity.

In these times of widespread television and social media, it is amazing how often we view such daring and generosity while it is actually happening. We have reality TV at its best, chronicling stirring events that rise above the usual and the everyday, confirming the timeless adage, “truth is stranger than fiction.”

Every tornado, hurricane, earthquake, flood or widespread disaster presents us with an opportunity for altruism, bravery, generosity and daring to sally forth despite considerable and usually dangerous obstacles that block our path toward those in peril and need. It cheers our hearts that heroes and heroines abound and willingly make themselves available to everyone.

For many of us, the most resounding composite example of all this was 9/11 when all others were streaming down the stairs in sheer panic while 343 New York firefighters and 60 police were making their way up the stairs, ostensibly rushing to stare pain and death in the face.

Yet, with our great innate kindness, there is a loathsome side of us that we are reluctant to describe as our innate meanness, as witnessed by the crowd gathered in front of a tall building with a suicidal 17-year-old threatening to jump. Derby, England, was the venue in this particular case. However, similar episodes have occurred in countries all over the world.

“Jump! Jump! Jump!” urged some from a crowd of 300 gathered below. Can you imagine what this did to the spirit of Shaun Dykes, depressed by a recent relationship breakup and teetering atop the 6-story building? At length, driven by the taunting, he hurled himself down to immediate death on the unforgiving concrete.

An offensive penchant for evil rears its ugly head in looters like the Ferguson, Missouri, lot. Chaos is their name; anarchy is their shame; plunder is their blunder. Such looting follows hot in the wake of a storm or other disaster such as the Northeast blackout of Nov. 9, 1965, when widespread looting and other mischief hit some of the darkened sections of New York. An unspoken belief in all walks of life is that, unless someone sees you, you can get away with evil.

Truth to tell, each step of our life is a medieval morality play redux in which we freely choose which role we will take and live out for the moment. While most of our days, hours and minutes are humdrum and nothing to write home about, we do have a flashy moment here and there. It must be noted that those humdrum minutes, hours, days and years are the most critical times of our lives because they comprise by far the bulk of the time allotted to us here.

Hence, flashes of heroism are not the main menu, but only a special dish, the outgrowth of our character forged in the cauldron of dull, hard, tiresome, oft dreary hours, days and years far too numerous to count. With the forging of our character must come vibrant spirituality, our indispensable link with the eternal, transcendent Being on whom we claim to be all-dependent.

“God is love, and all who abide in love abide in God and God in them.”   (1 John 4:16)

(Father Jerome LeDoux, SVD, is pastor of Our Mother of Mercy Parish in Fort Worth, Texas. He has written “Reflections on Life since 1969.)