IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI

Does God have sense of humor?

This may seem a frivolous or impious question, it’s anything but that. It’s an important question and a reverent one as well. Why? Because healthy humor and playful banter help bring joy, lightness of heart, and healthy perspective into our lives. Can we imagine all that wonderful lightness of heart having no connection to God?

Does God have a sense of humor? For sure! Without doubt! Jesus teaches that God is the author of all good things. Humor, playfulness and healthy banter are good, healthy things. They can have their ultimate origin only in God.

Why are they good things? What positive role do they play in our lives?

Freud once suggested that sometimes we can understand things more clearly by looking at their opposites. What are the opposites of humor, playfulness and banter? We see their opposite in three things: over-seriousness, needless irritation and pomposity (none of which are healthy).
Consider this example: I have lived almost my entire adult life within a religious community of men, and by and large it has been positive and life-giving. But among the (literally) hundreds of men with whom I have shared community over more than fifty years, there have sometimes been confreres who were over-serious and their presence in the community room or at table could sometimes effectively rob the room of joy.

I recall one such incident at table where someone shared a rather earthy joke (spicy, though not in bad taste). Most of us responded with a hearty laugh, but as soon as the laughter died down, one of our confreres in a heavy and overly pious tone, asked: Would you tell a joke like that in front of the Blessed Sacrament? That not only ended the laughter in the room and injected a certain heaviness into our gathering, it also effectively drained the oxygen out of the room.

Over-seriousness, while not a moral deficiency, can leave us too raw before the demands of family and community to which we can never perfectly measure up. On the other hand, playfulness, humor and banter, when healthy, can provide some important “grease” for family and community life.

For example, when you join a religious congregation you take a vow to live within a community (of men, in my case) for the rest of your life. Moreover, you don’t get to choose with whom you get to live. You are simply assigned to a community, which invariably will include some members whose temperament is very different from yours and with whom you would not normally choose to live.

Well, I have lived in this type of religious community for nearly sixty years and, with very few exceptions, it has been life-giving and enjoyable; mostly because I have been blessed nearly always to live in a community where part of our very ethos has been the daily exchange of humor, playfulness and banter. Prayer and a common mission of course have been the main glue that held us together but humor, playfulness and banter have been the grease that have kept petty tensions and the occupational hazard of pomposity at bay.

It’s interesting to note that the classical Greek philosophers understood love as having six components: eros – infatuation and attraction; mania – obsession; asteismos – playfulness and banter; storge – care; philia – friendship; and agape – altruism. When we define love, we generally make room for most of those components, except asteismos, playfulness and banter. We pay a price for that.

My oblate novice master, a wonderful French-Canadian priest, once shared with us (a group of young novices) a joke with a purpose. It runs this way: a family was planning the wedding of their daughter but were unable to afford a venue for the festivities after the church service. So, the priest made them an offer: “Why don’t you use the entrance, the foyer, of the church? There’s enough room for a reception. Bring in a cake and have your reception there.” Things were fine, until the father of the bride asked the priest if they might bring liquor to the reception. The priest replied most emphatically, “Absolutely not! You may not have liquor in a church!” The father of the bride protested, “but Jesus drank wine at the wedding feast of Cana.” To which the priest replied, “But not in front of the Blessed Sacrament!”

This joke can serve as a parable, cautioning us vis-à-vis stripping God of humor and playfulness.
God has a sense of humor, a sense of playfulness, and a talent for banter far beyond that of our best comedians. How could it be otherwise? Can you imagine spending eternity in heaven without laughter and playfulness? Can you imagine a God who is perfect love, but with whom you would be afraid to joke and banter?

Is the last laugh before we die to be our last laugh forever? No. God has a sense of humor which will without doubt be for all of us a delightful surprise.

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

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
The main character in T.S. Eliot’s play “Murder in the Cathedral” is Thomas Becket, a bishop, who from every outward appearance is saint. He is scrupulously honest, generous to a fault and a defender of the faith who dies as a martyr. Yet, at a certain point in his life, prior to his martyrdom, he recognizes that he might not be distinguishing between temptation and grace.
Many of us are familiar with how he famously expressed this:

The last temptation is the greatest treason:
To do the right deed for the wrong reason. …
For those who serve the greater cause
May make the cause serve them.

What’s the temptation here that can look like grace?

Simply put, we can be doing a lot of good for the wrong reasons. Moreover, this can be enormously subtle; not least in those of us who serve the greater cause, because, as T.S. Eliot points out, it is easy to make the cause serve us.

How can we make the cause serve us? How can we be doing good for the wrong reasons?
Here’s an example: I can be doing a lot of good things that help others and serve God’s purpose here on earth. I can be generous to the point of martyrdom. However, what if I am doing this (serving the greater cause) mainly because it makes me look good, makes me feel moral and righteous, draws respect, earns me praise and admiration, and will leave behind me a good name?

These questions probe the difference between temptation and grace. I can be doing the right things and, while not doing them for a bad reason, I can still, for the most part, be doing them for myself. I can be making the cause serve me more so than I am serving the cause.

The late Jesuit Michael J. Buckley (one of the major spiritual mentors in my life) pushes us to make a painful examination of conscience on this. Am I doing things to serve God and others or am I doing them to make myself look and feel good?

In his book “What Do You Seek? The Questions of Jesus as Challenge and Promise,” Buckley writes this: “For, in a thousand ways, those who serve the greater cause may make the cause serve them. This can be enormously subtle. Sometimes a nuance at the initial formulation of an action or of a life can work the unexpected twist, the unrealized but profound reorientation so that zeal masks a hidden but vicious ambition; it is hidden because ambition and zeal, however profoundly contradictory, can look initially so much alike. The desire to get something achieved can mix the intrinsic worth of a project with the reflected glory of the accomplishment.”

As a priest, in ministry for more than fifty years, I find this a particularly challenging prism through which to examine myself and my fifty plus years of ministry. How much have I served the greater cause and how much have I, blind to self, made it serve me? Who is the bigger winner here: God and the church or me and my good name?

Granted, motivation is tricky to discern, and this side of eternity is rarely pure. We are a bundle of mixed motivations, some which serve others and some which serve ourselves; and, as Buckley astutely points out, initially they can look very much alike. Moreover, certain sayings of Jesus seem to suggest that sometimes explicit motivation is less important than actually doing the right thing.

For example, Jesus says that it is not necessarily those who say Lord, Lord who will enter the kingdom of heaven, but it is those who in fact do the will of the Father on earth who will enter the kingdom. (Matthew 7:21) As well, in teaching that we will ultimately be judged on the basis of how we treated the poor (whatsoever you do to the poor, you do to me), notice that neither group, those who did it right and those who did it wrong, knew explicitly what they were doing. They were rewarded or punished solely on the basis of their actions. (Matthew 25)

So, can we be doing the right things for the wrong reasons? And, indeed, if we are doing them for less than purely altruistic reasons (approval, respect, a good name, good feelings about ourselves) how bad is this? Does it denigrate or destroy the good we are doing? Is the desire for respect, a good name, and good feelings about ourselves genuinely at odds with altruism? Might the two befriend each other? Is God judging us more by our motivation than by our actions?

Am I serving the greater cause or am I having it serve me? That is a critical question for self-reflection. Why? Because it is easy to be blind to our own hypocrisy, even as it is just as easy to be too hard on ourselves.

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

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
Benedictine monk shared this story with me. During his early years in religious life, he had been resentful because he was required to ask permission from his Abbott if he wanted anything: “I thought it was silly, me, a grown man, an adult, having to ask a superior if I wanted a new shirt. I felt like a child.”

But as he aged his perspective changed: “I’m not sure of all the reasons, though I’m sure they have to do with grace, but one day I came to realize that there was some deep wisdom in having to ask permission for everything. We don’t own anything; nothing comes to us by right. Everything is a gift. So ideally everything should be asked for and not taken as if it were ours by right. We need to be grateful to God and the universe for everything that’s been given us. Now, when I need something and need to ask permission from the Abbott, I no longer feel like a child. Rather, I feel that I’m more properly in tune with the way things should be in a gift-oriented universe within which nobody has a right to ultimately claim anything.”

What this monk came to understand is a principle which undergirds all spirituality, all morality, and every one of the commandments, namely, that everything comes to us as gift, nothing can be claimed as if owed to us. We should be grateful to God and to the universe for giving us what we have and careful not to claim, as by right, anything more.

But this goes against much in our instinctual selves and within our culture. Within both, there are strong voices which tell us that if you cannot take what you want then you’re a weak person, weak in a double way. First, you’re a weak personality, too timid to fully claim life. Second, you’ve been weakened by religious and moral scruples and are unable to properly seize the day and be fully alive. These voices tell us that we need to grow up because there is much in us that’s fearful and infantile, a child held captive by superstitious forces.

It’s precisely because of these voices that today, in a culture that professes to be Christian and moral, leading political and social figures can in all sincerity believe and say that empathy is a human weakness.
We need an important reminder.

The voice of Jesus is radically antithetical to these voices. Empathy is the penultimate human virtue, the antithesis of weakness. Jesus would look on so much that is assertive, aggressive and accumulative within our society and, notwithstanding the admiration it receives, tell us clearly that this is not what it means to come to the banquet which lies at the heart of God’s kingdom. He would not share our admiration of the rich and famous who too often claim, as by right, their excessive wealth and status. When Jesus states that it is harder for a rich person to go to heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, he might have qualified this by adding: “Unless, of course, the rich person, childlike, asks permission from the universe, from the community, and from God, for every new shirt!”

When I was a religious novice, our novice master tried to impress upon us the meaning of religious poverty by making us write inside every book that was given to us the Latin words: ad usum. Literally: for your use. The idea was that, although this book was given to you for your personal use, you didn’t own it. It was only for your use; real ownership lay elsewhere. We were then told that this was true as well of everything else given to us for our personal use, from our toothbrushes to the shirts on our backs. They were not really ours, merely given to us for our use.

One of the young men in that novitiate group who left the order is today a medical doctor. He remains a close friend and he once shared with me how today, as a doctor, he still writes those words ad usum in every one of his books. His rational is this: “I don’t belong to a religious order. I don’t have a vow of poverty, but the principle our novice master taught us is just as valid for me in the world as it is for a religious novice. We don’t own anything. Those books aren’t really mine. They’ve been given to me, temporarily, for my use. Nothing ultimately belongs to anybody and it’s best never to forget that.”

No matter how rich, strong and grown-up we are, there’s something healthy in having to ask permission to buy a new shirt. It keeps us attuned to the fact that the universe belongs to everyone, to God ultimately. Everything comes to us as gift and so we may never take anything for granted, but only as granted!

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

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI

I am sure many of you are familiar with the TV series about the life of Jesus called The Chosen. It was launched in 2019, has been in theaters and on streaming platforms since, and now has more than 200 million viewers. It has been translated into 50 languages and has 13 million social media followers, with about 30 percent of its audience being non-Christian.

It was created and produced by Dallas Jenkins, an Evangelical Christian with wide ecumenical and interfaith sympathies. Jonathan Roumie, a devout Roman Catholic, plays the role of Jesus, and the Jesus he portrays in The Chosen comes through as somewhat different from, and more relatable to, than the Jesus we have generally seen in other movies and portrayals of him. And this has had an interesting impact.

What’s the impact? Joe Hoover, a Jesuit priest writing in a recent issue of America magazine, makes this comment: “I have been a baptized Christian for 53 years, attended a Catholic Christian grade school and for more than two decades have been a member of a religious order that bears the name of Jesus … and ‘The Chosen’ television series had done things for my understanding and engagement with the life of Christ and his disciples that nothing else has. No sermon, no theological exhortation, no master’s degree, no class on John or Mark or Luke, no spirituality workshop, no 30-day biblically based retreat has brought the Gospels home and made Christ and his people real and relatable to me in quite the way ‘The Chosen’ has.”

That speaks for me as well. The Chosen has had a similar effect on me. Like Joe Hoover, I was baptized as an infant, raised a Roman Catholic, am a member of a religious order, have degrees in theology, have been to every kind of spirituality workshop, and have studied the Gospels under the guidance of some world class scholars, and yet this TV series has given a face to Jesus that I didn’t quite receive in all that past learning and has helped me in my prayer and my relationship to Christ.

In essence, this is what The Chosen has done for me. It has presented a Jesus whom I actually want to be with. Shouldn’t we always want to be with Jesus? Yes, but the Jesus who is often presented to us is not someone, if we are honest with ourselves, we would want to spend a lot of one-on-one time with, with whom we could be at ease and comfortable without affectations.

For instance, the Jesus who has often been presented to us in movies is generally lacking in human warmth, is distant, stern, other-worldly, over pious, and whose very gaze makes you feel guilty because your sin caused his crucifixion. That Jesus is also humorless, doesn’t ever seem to bring God’s smile to the world, and never brings any lightness into a room. He is not a Jesus with whom you are at ease.

Unfortunately, that is often the Jesus who has been presented to us in our preaching, catechesis, Sunday schools, theological classes and in popular spirituality. The Jesus we meet there, for all the truth and revelation he brings into the world, is generally still too divine and overly pious for us to be at ease with humanly. He is a Jesus we admire, perhaps even adore, and whom we trust enough to commit our lives to (no small thing). But he is also a Jesus with whom we are not much at ease, whom we wouldn’t pick to sit next to at table, with whom we wouldn’t pick to go on vacation, and who is so distant and distinct from us that it is easier for us to have him as an admired teacher than as an intimate friend, let alone as a lover to whom we want to bear our soul.

This is not a plea to humanize Jesus (as is sometimes in fashion today) by making him just a nice man who preaches love but doesn’t at the same time radiate God’s non-negotiable truth. This is not what The Chosen does. Far from it.

The Chosen presents us with a Jesus whose divinity you never doubt, even as he appears as warm and attractive, with a humanity that puts you at ease in his presence; indeed, it lures you into his presence. Watching The Chosen, one never doubts for an instant that Jesus is specially and inextricably linked to his Father and that he brings us God’s truth and revelation without compromise. But this Jesus also brings God’s smile, God’s warmth and God’s blessing upon our lives which too often suffer from a lack of these.
The great mystic Julian of Norwich once described God is this way: God sits in heaven, completely relaxed, his face looking like a marvelous symphony.

Among other things, The Chosen shows us this relaxed face of God, which to our own detriment we too seldom see.

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

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI

Where might we experience Jesus today in a world that is seemingly too crowded with its own concerns to allow a space for him?

The renowned spirituality writer Tomas Halik, in a recent book entitled The Afternoon of Christianity, makes this suggestion. As the world makes less and less explicit space for Jesus, we need to search for him more and more in those places where he is “anonymously present.” Halik’s counsel: “Let us search for him ‘by his voice’ like Mary Magdalene; let us search for him in strangers on the road like the disciples on the road to Emmaus; let us search for him in the wounds of the world like the apostle Thomas; let us search for him whenever he passes through the closed doors of fear; let us search for him where he brings the gift of forgiveness and new beginnings.”

The invitation here is to better respond to the signs of the times, given that we are living now in what he calls “the afternoon of Christianity.”

What is the afternoon of Christianity?

He distinguishes three periods in the history of Christianity. He sees the morning of Christianity as the time before 1500 AD, the pre-modern period, the time before secularization. The noonday of Christianity, for him, is the time of secularization and modernity, basically from the 19th century until our own generation. The afternoon of Christianity, for him, is our time today, the post-modern world, where we are witnessing a breakdown of much of the world as we once knew it with the effects of this on faith and religion. And for Halik, the effect of all of this is that the Christian faith has now outgrown previous forms of religion.

Wow! That’s quite a statement! However, what Halik is proposing is not that the faith is dying, that Christianity is dying, or that the churches are dying. Rather, for him, Christianity today finds itself in a certain cultural homelessness, in a time where so many social structures that once supported it are collapsing, so that the Christian faith is now needing to seek a new shape, a new home, new means of expression, new social and cultural roles, and new allies.

And how will that turn out? We don’t know. But here’s Halik’s hunch: Christianity will not, as many fear, lose its identity and become a non-religious faith. It will not disintegrate into some vague, doctrineless, boundaryless, privatized spirituality. Rather, the hope is that (paradoxically) the very dynamism and diversity that frightens many Christians is the incubation phase of the Christianity of the future.

For him, the challenges that Christianity faces today invite us to bring faith into a new space, like Paul did when he brought Christianity out of the confines of the Judaism of his day. Here is how Halik puts it: “I believe that the Christianity of tomorrow will be above all a community of a new hermeneutic, a new reading, a new and deeper interpretation of the two sources of divine revelation, scripture and tradition, and especially of God’s utterance in the signs of the times.

How is this all to happen? That’s the thesis of the book. Chapter after chapter lays out possibilities of how we might more courageously read the signs of the times and rather than water down any of the substance of the Christian faith, let the signs of the times lead us to a deeper understanding of both scripture and tradition, especially so that we might bring together in better harmony the Christ of cosmic evolution with the Resurrected Jesus; and then recognize that they are both not just present in what is explicit in our Christian faith and worship, they are also anonymously present in the evolution of our culture and society.

Consequently, we need to search for Jesus Christ not just in our scriptures, our churches, our worship services, our catechetical classes, our Sunday schools, and our explicit Christian fellowship, though of course we need to search there. But, like Mary Magdalene, we need to recognize his voice in the caretaker at the cemetery; like the discouraged disciples on the road to Emmaus, when we no longer have the answers, we need to recognize his presence in strangers whose words make our hearts burn inside us; like the doubting Thomas, we need to overcome our doubts about his resurrection by touching his wounds as they are now manifest in the poor and the suffering; like Jesus’ first community who barricaded themselves behind a locked door out of fear, we need to recognize him whenever, inside our huddled fear, something expectedly breathes peace into us; and we need to recognize his presence inside us every time we receive forgiveness and are empowered to begin again.

This isn’t a time of dying, it’s a time of kairos, a time when we are being invited to open our eyes in a new way so as to recognize the Christ who is walking with us in some unfamiliar forms.

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

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
There is an incident in the Gospels where the disciples of Jesus were unable to cast out a particular demon. When they asked Jesus why, he replied that some demons can only be cast out by prayer. The particular demon he was referring in this instance had rendered a man deaf and mute.

I want to name another demon which seemingly cannot be cast out except by prayer, namely, the demon that forever fractures our personal relationships, families, communities and churches through misunderstanding and division, making it forever difficult to be in life-giving community with each other.
What particular prayer is needed to cast out this demon? The prayer of a shared silence, akin to a Quaker Silence.

What is a Quaker Silence?

A tiny bit of history first: Quakers are a historically Protestant Christian set of denominations whose members refer to each other as Friends but are generally called Quakers because of a famous statement once made by their founder, George Fox (1624-1691). Legend has it that in the face of some authority figures who were trying to intimidate him, Fox held up his Bible and said: This is the word of God, quake before it!

For the Quakers, particularly early on, their common prayer consisted mainly in sitting together in community in silence, waiting for God to speak to them. They would sit together in silence, waiting on God’s power to come and give them something that they could not give themselves, namely, real community with each other beyond the divisions that separated them. Though they sat individually, their prayer was radically communal. They were sitting as one body, waiting together for God to give them a unity they could not give themselves.

Might this be a practice that we, Christians of every denomination, could practice today in the light of the helplessness we feel in the face of division everywhere (in our families, in our churches, and in our countries)? Given that, as Christians, we are at root one community inside the Body of Christ, a single organic body where physical distance does not really separate us, might we begin as a regular prayer practice to sit with each other in a Quaker Silence, one community, sitting in silence, waiting together, waiting for God to come and give us community that we are powerless to give ourselves?

Practically, how might this be done? Here’s a suggestion: each day set aside a time to sit in silence, alone or ideally with others, for a set period of time (fifteen to twenty minutes) where the intent, unlike in private meditation, is not first of all to nurture your personal intimacy with God, but rather to sit together in community with everyone inside the Body of Christ (and with all sincere persons everywhere) asking God to come and give us communion beyond division.

This could also be a powerful ritual in marriage and in family life. Perhaps one of the most healing therapies inside of a marriage might be for a couple to sit together regularly in a silence, asking God to give them something that they cannot give themselves, namely, an understanding of each other beyond the tensions of everyday life. I remember as a child, praying the rosary together as a family each evening and that ritual having the effect of a Quaker Silence. It calmed the tensions that had built up during the day and left us feeling more peaceful as a family.

I use the term Quaker Silence, but there are various forms of meditation and contemplation which have the same intentionality. For example, the founder of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate (the religious order I belong to), St. Eugene de Mazenod, left us a prayer practice he called Oraison. This is its intention: as Oblates we are meant to live together in community, but we are a worldwide congregation scattered over sixty countries around the world. How can we be in community with each other across distance?

Through the practice of Oraison. St. Eugene asked us to set aside a half hour each day to sit in a silence that is intended to be a time when we are not just in communion with God but are also intentionally in communion with all Oblates around the world. Akin to a Quaker Silence, it is a prayer wherein each person sits alone, in silence, but in community, asking God to form one community across all distances and differences.

When Jesus says some demons are only cast out by prayer, he means it. And perhaps the demon to which this most particularly refers is the demon of misunderstanding and division. We all know how powerless we are to cast it out. Sitting in a communal silence, asking God to do something for us beyond our powerlessness, can exorcise the demon of misunderstanding and division.

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

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
There are times when our world unravels. Who hasn’t had the feeling? “I’m falling apart! This is beyond me! My heart is broken! I feel betrayed by everything! Nothing makes sense anymore! Life is upside down!”

Jesus had a cosmic image for this. In the Gospels, he talks about how the world as we experience it will someday end: “The sun will be darkened, the moon will not give forth its light, stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of heaven will be shaken.” When Jesus says this, he is not talking as much about cosmic cataclysms as of cataclysms of the heart. Sometimes our inner world is shaken, turned upside down; it gets dark in the middle of the day, there’s an earthquake in the heart; we experience the end of the world as we’ve known it.

However, in this upheaval, Jesus assures us that one thing remains sure: God’s promise of fidelity. That doesn’t get turned upside down and in our disillusionment we are given a chance to see what really is of substance, permanent and worthy of our lives. Thus, ideally at least, when our trusted world is turned upside down, we are given the chance to grow, to become less selfish and to see reality more clearly.

Christian mystics call this “a dark night of the soul” and they express it as if God were actively turning our world upside down and deliberately causing all the heartache to purge and cleanse us.

The great Spanish mystic John of the Cross puts it this way: God gives us seasons of fervor and then takes them away. In our seasons of fervor, God gives us consolation, pleasure, and security inside our relationships, our prayer and our work (sometimes with considerable passion and intensity). This is a gift from God and is meant to be enjoyed. But John tells us, at a certain point, God takes away the pleasure and consolation and we experience a certain dark night in that where we once felt fire, passion, consolation and security, we will now feel dryness, boredom, disillusion and insecurity. For John of the Cross, all honeymoons eventually end.

Why? Why would God do this? Why can’t a honeymoon last forever?

Because eventually, though not initially, it blocks us from seeing straight. Initially all those wonderful feelings we feel when we first fall in love, when we first begin to pray deeply, and when we first begin to find our legs in the world. These are part of God’s plan and God’s way of drawing us forward. The passion and consolation we feel help lead us out of ourselves, beyond fear and selfishness. But, eventually, the good feelings themselves become a problem because we can get hung up on them rather than on what’s behind them.

Honeymoons are wonderful; but, on a honeymoon, too often we are more in love with being in love and all the wonderful energy this creates than we are in love with the person behind all those feelings. The same is true for faith and prayer. When we first begin to pray seriously, we are often more in love with the experience of praying and what it’s doing for us than we are in love with God. On any honeymoon, no matter how intense and pure the feelings seem, those feelings are still partly about ourselves rather than purely about the person we think we love. Sadly, that is why many a warm, passionate honeymoon eventually turns into a cold, passionless relationship.

Until we are purified, and we are purified precisely through dark nights of disillusionment, we are too much still seeking ourselves in love and in everything else. Therese of Lisieux used to warn: “Be careful not to seek yourself in love, you’ll end up with a broken heart that way!” We’d have fewer heartaches if we understood that. Also, before we are purified by disillusionment, most of the tears we shed, no matter how real the pain or loss, often say more about us than they say about the person or situation we are supposedly mourning.

In all this, there’s both bad news and good news: The bad news is that most everything we sense as precious will someday be taken from us. Everything gets crucified, including every feeling of warmth and security we have. But the good news is that it will all be given back again, more deeply, more purely, and even more passionately than before.

What dark nights of the soul, cataclysms of the heart, do is to take away everything that feels like solid earth so that we end up in a free-fall, unable to grab on to anything that once supported us. But, in falling, we get closer to bedrock, to God, to reality, to truth, to love, to each other, beyond illusions, beyond selfishness and beyond self-interested love that can masquerade as altruism.

Clarity in eyesight comes after disillusionment, purity of heart comes after heartbreak and real love comes after the honeymoon has passed.

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

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
During the last years of his life, Thomas Merton lived in a hermitage outside a monastery, hoping to find more solitude in his life. But solitude is an illusive thing, and he found it was forever escaping him.
Then one morning he sensed that for a moment he had found it. However, what he experienced was a surprise to him. Solitude, it turns out, is not some altered state of consciousness or some heightened sense of God and the transcendent in our lives. Solitude, as he experienced it, was simply being peacefully inside your own skin, gratefully aware of and peacefully breathing in the immense richness inside your own life. Solitude consists in sleeping in intimacy with your own experience, at peace there, aware of its riches and wonder.

But that’s not easy. It’s rare. Rarely do we find ourselves at peace with the present moment inside us. Why? Because that’s the way we are built. We are overcharged for this world. When God put us into this world, as the author of the Book of Ecclesiastes tells us, God put “timelessness” into our hearts and because of that we don’t make easy peace with our lives.

We read this, for example, in the famous passage about the rhythm of the seasons in the Book of Ecclesiastes. There is a time and a season for everything, we are told: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to gather in what is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal … and so the text goes on. Then, after listing this natural rhythm of time and the seasons, the author ends with these words: God has made everything suitable for its own time but has put timelessness into the human heart so that human beings are out of sync with the rhythms of the seasons from beginning to end.

The Hebrew word used here to express “timelessness” is Olam, a word suggesting “eternity” and “transcendence.” Some English translations put it this way: God has put a sense of past and future into our hearts. Perhaps that captures it best in terms of how we generally experience this in our lives. We know from experience how difficult it is to be at peace inside the present moment because the past and the future won’t leave us alone. They are forever coloring the present.

The past haunts us with half-forgotten lullabies and melodies that trigger memories about love found and lost, about wounds that have never healed, and with inchoate feelings of nostalgia, regret and wanting to cling to something that once was. The past is forever sowing restlessness into the present moment.

And the future? It impales itself into the present as well, looming as promise and threat, forever demanding our attention, forever sowing anxiety into our lives and forever stripping us of the capacity to simply rest inside the present.

The present is forever colored by obsessions, heartaches, headaches and anxieties that have little to do with people we are actually sitting with at table.

Philosophers and poets have given various names to this. Plato called it “a madness that comes from the gods”; Hindu poets have called it “a nostalgia for the infinite”; Shakespeare speaks of “immortal longings,” and Augustine, in perhaps the most famous naming of them all, called it an incurable restlessness that God has put into the human heart to keep it from finding a home in something less than the infinite and eternal – “You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”

And so, it’s rare to be peacefully present to our own lives, restful inside of our own skins. But this “torment,” as T.S. Eliot, once named it, has a God-given intentionality, a divine purpose.

Henri Nouwen, in a remarkable passage both names the struggle and its purpose: “Our life is a short time in expectation, a time in which sadness and joy kiss each other at every moment. There is a quality of sadness that pervades all the moments of our life. It seems that there is no such thing as a clear-cut pure joy, but that even in the most happy moments of our existence we sense a tinge of sadness. In every satisfaction, there is an awareness of limitations. In every success, there is the fear of jealousy. Behind every smile, there is a tear. In every embrace, there is loneliness. In every friendship, distance. And in all forms of light, there is the knowledge of surrounding darkness. But this intimate experience in which every bit of life is touched by a bit of death can point us beyond the limits of our existence. It can do so by making us look forward in expectation to that day when our hearts will be filled with perfect joy, a joy that no one shall take away from us.”

Our restless hearts keep us from falling asleep to the divine fire inside us.

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

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
For more than a thousand years, Christians have not experienced the joy of being one family in Christ. Although there were already tensions within the earliest Christian communities, it was not until the year 1054 that there was a formal split, in effect, to establish two formal Christian communities, the Orthodox Church in the East and the Catholic Church in the West. Then, with the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century, there was another split within the Western Church and Christianity fragmented still further. Today there are hundreds of Christian denominations, many of whom, sadly, are not on friendly terms with each other.

Division and misunderstanding are understandable, inevitable, the price of being human. There are no communities without tension and so it is no great scandal that Christians sometimes cannot get along with each other. The scandal rather is that we have become comfortable, even smug, with the fact that we do not get along with each other, no longer hunger for wholeness, and no longer miss each other inside our separate churches.
In almost all our churches today there is little anxiety about those with whom we are not worshiping. For example, teaching Roman Catholic seminarians today, I sense a certain indifference to the issue of ecumenism. For many seminarians today this is not an issue of particular concern. Not to single out Catholic seminarians, this holds true for most of us in all denominations.

But this kind of indifference is inherently unchristian. Oneness was close to the heart of Jesus. He wants all his followers at the same table, as we see in this parable.

A woman has ten coins and loses one. She becomes anxious and agitated and begins to search frantically and relentlessly for the lost coin, lighting lamps, looking under tables, sweeping all the floors in her house. Eventually she finds the coin, is delirious with joy, calls together her neighbors, and throws a party whose cost no doubt far exceeded the value of the coin she had lost. (Luke 15:8-10)

Why such anxiety and joy over losing and finding a coin whose value was probably that of a dime? Well, what’s at issue is not the value of the coin; it’s something else. In her culture, nine was not considered a whole number; ten was. Both the woman’s anxiety about losing the coin and her joy in finding it had to do with the importance of wholeness. A wholeness in her life that had been fractured, and a precious set of relationships was no longer complete.

Indeed, the parable might be recast this way: A woman has ten children. With nine of them, she has a good relationship, but one of her daughters is alienated. Her nine other children come home regularly to the family table, but her alienated daughter does not. The woman cannot rest in that situation, cannot be at peace. She needs her alienated daughter to rejoin them. She tries every means to reconcile with her daughter and then one day, miracle of miracles, it works. Her daughter comes back to the family. Her family is whole again, everyone is back at the table. The woman is overjoyed, withdraws her modest savings, and throws a lavish party to celebrate that reunion.

Christian faith demands that, like that woman, we need to be anxious, dis-eased, figuratively lighting lamps, and searching for ways to make the church whole again. Nine is not a whole number. Neither is the number of those who are normally inside our respective churches. Roman Catholicism isn’t a whole number. Protestantism isn’t a whole number. The Evangelical Churches aren’t a whole number. The Orthodox Churches aren’t a whole number. No one Christian denomination is a whole number. Together we make up a whole Christian number – and that is still not a whole faith number.

And so, we are meant to be anxious around these questions: Who no longer goes to church with us? Who is uncomfortable worshiping with us? How can we be comfortable when so many people are no longer at table with us?

Sadly, today, many of us are comfortable in churches that are far, far from whole. Sometimes, in our less reflective moments, we even rejoice in it: “Those others aren’t real Christians in any case! We’re better off without them, a purer, more faithful church in their absence! We’re the one true remnant!”

But this lack of solicitude for wholeness compromises our following of Jesus as well as our basic human maturity. We are mature, loving people and true followers of Jesus, only when, like Jesus, we are in tears over those “other sheep that are not of this fold.” When, like the woman who lost one of her coins, we cannot sleep until every corner of the house has been turned upside down in a frantic search for what’s been lost.

We too need to solicitously search for a lost wholeness – and may not be at peace until it is found.

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