Millennial reflections
By Father Jeremy Tobin, O.Praem
There is a growing movement in the South to speak out against harsh policies that target the poor and minorities. Communication easily breaks down when politics trump policy and ideology trumps facts. Groups of clergy and other community partners try to take it to a new level, the level of morality and ethics. Rev. William Barber and the Moral Monday Movement is the classic example. This is spreading to other southern states. In Mississippi it is called the Moral Movement Mississippi.
Rev. Barber says clergy are more competent interpreting and speaking from Scripture than compete with ideologues or policy pundits. The group seeks to stress social justice as the theme of sermons.
We Catholics have a strong social justice teaching and see this demonstrated in preaching, and more so through the works of the many social service agencies throughout the world that bring hope and restore dignity to the impoverished.
This past week in the Clarion Ledger, reporter Jerry  Mitchell wrote about the deplorable conditions in the private prison in Meridian. In the series called “Hard Time” were articles and pictures showing cells as if they were from a third world country. This prison, as well as many others are run by a private company for profit.
Private prisons are a relatively new highly profitable industry. They are all over the country. Many people are unaware of their existence. They have a powerful lobby in Congress and the state houses.
Private prisons are one of the biggest lobbies against humane immigration reform. They oppose real education reform. They have a big education lobby in Washington that urges privatizing education, and under-funding public education and remedial programs. They plan for prison bed space by using the percentage of poor performing children in third grade. They blood suck off the poor. Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) is the biggest player in the game.
Private prisons have a notorious human rights record. They are a member of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) which wrote the harshest anti-immigrant legislation, especially in Arizona and Alabama. ALEC is behind these voter suppression laws, designed to disenfranchise African Americans and Latinos. The for-profit private prison lobby advocated to make certain immigration offenses felonies. Why? To fill up their prisons. They lobby legislatures to create crimes so they can fill up their prisons. They lobby for harsh sentences for non-violent drug offenses so they can fill up their prisons. Every heartbeat is cash in the bank.
It is one thing for the state to incarcerate criminals. It is the state’s duty to protect citizens from criminals. It is also the state’s duty to rehabilitate convicted felons to re-enter society.  One goal is to reduce the number of prisoners. This benefits society. For private prison companies the more people locked up the better. Crime is a profitable business. This is immoral.
To profit from human misery dehumanizes the incarcerated. It encourages crime, not to make society better, but to make money for their shareholders. Thus these huge corporations use their influence to the detriment of society, especially young people by manipulating programs that directly benefit poor people.
The goal is profit. Staff salaries are low. Many of these prisons are understaffed to make money, putting inmates and staff at risk. Many lack programs, and inmates spend long hours locked up. Why? It is cheap.
Both the people locked up and the staff that oversees them largely come from the same strata of society. Both groups are being exploited for profit.
The result of all of this is dehumanizing people.  Bluntly put, it is about greed. Greed is one of the seven deadly sins. All of this furthers the ever widening gap between the rich and everybody else.
(Father Jeremy Tobin, O.Praem, lives at the Priory of St. Moses the Black, Jackson.)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
Sometimes certain texts in the Bible make you wonder: Is this really the word of God? Why is this text in scripture? What’s the lesson here?
For example, we have verses in the Psalms, in passages that we pray liturgically, where we ask God to bash the heads of the children of our enemies against a rock. How does that invite us to love our enemies? We see passages in the Book of Job where Job is in despair and curses not on only the day he was born but the very fact that anyone was born. It’s impossible to find even a trace of anything positive in his lament.
Similarly, in a rather famous text, we hear Qoheleth affirm that everything in our lives and in the life of this world is simple vanity, wind, vapor, of no substance and of no consequence. What’s the lesson here? Then, in the Gospels, we have passages where the apostles, discouraged by opposition to their message, ask Jesus to call down fire and destroy the very people to whom they are supposed to minister. Hardly an exemplar for ministry!
Why are these texts in the Bible? Because they give us sacred permission to feel the way we feel sometimes and they give us sacred tools to help us deal with the shortcomings and frustrations of our lives.
They are, in fact, both very important and very consoling texts because, to put it metaphorically, they give us a large enough keyboard to play all the songs that we need to play in our lives. They give us the laments and the prayers we need to utter sometimes in the face of our human condition, with its many frustrations, and in the face of death, tragedy, and depression.
To give a simple example: A friend of mine shares this story: Recently he was in church with his family, which included his seven year-old son, Michael, and his own mother, Michael’s grandmother. At one point, Michael, seated beside his grandmother, whispered aloud: “I’m so bored!” His grandmother pinched him and chided him: “You are not bored!” as if the sacred ambience of church and an authoritative command could change human nature. They can’t. When we’re bored, we’re bored! And sometimes we need to be given divine permission to feel what we’re spontaneously feeling.
Some years ago, for all the noblest of intentions, a religious community I know wanted to sanitize the Psalms that they pray regularly in the Divine Office to rid them of all elements of anger, violence, vengeance, and war. They had some of their own scripture scholars do the work so that it would be scholarly and serious.
They succeeded in that, the product was scholarly and serious, but stripped of all motifs of violence, vengeance, anger, and war what resulted was something that looked more like a Hallmark card than a series of prayers that express real life and real feelings.
We don’t always feel upbeat, generous, and faith-filled. Sometimes we feel angry, bitter and vengeful. We need to be given sacred permission to feel that way (though not to act that way) and to pray in honesty out of that space.
My parents, and for the most part their whole generation, would, daily, in their prayers, utter these words: “To You do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.” Our own generation tends to view this as morbid, as somehow denigrating both the beauty and joy of life and the perspective that faith is meant to give us.
But there’s a hidden richness in that prayer. In praying that way, they gave themselves sacred permission to accept the limits of their lives. That prayer carries the symbolic tools to handle frustration; something, I submit, we have failed to sufficiently give to our own children.
Too many young people today have never been given the symbolic tools to handle frustration, nor sacred permission to feel what they are feeling. Sometimes, all good intentions aside, we have handed our children more of Walt Disney than Gospel.
In the Book of Lamentations we find a passage that while sounding negative on the surface, is paradoxically, in the face of death and tragedy, perhaps the most consoling text of all. The text simply states that, sometimes in life, all we can do is put our mouths to the dust and wait!
That’s sound advice, spoken from the mouth of experience and the mouth of faith.
The poet, Rainer Marie Rilke, once wrote these words to a friend who, in the face of the death of a loved one, wondered how or where he could ever find consolation. What do I do with all this grief? Rilke’s reply: “Do not be afraid to suffer, give that heaviness back to the weight of the earth; mountains are heavy, seas are heavy.” They are, so too is life sometimes and we need to be given God’s permission to feel that heaviness.
(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX.)