IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
“God behaves in the psalms in ways he is not allowed to behave in systemic theology.”
That quip from Sebastian Moore might be highlighted at a time when fewer people want to use the psalms as a form of prayer because they feel offended that the psalms speak of murder, revenge, anger, violence, war-making and patriarchy.
Yet for centuries the psalms have been central to both Jewish and Christian prayer. They form the very heart of the Divine Office (the church’s prayer for the world), are sung in Vespers’ services, are prayed daily by millions of men and women, and have been chanted by monks for centuries as a central part of their prayer.

Why the objection to the psalms? Some ask: “How can I pray with words that are sometimes full of hatred, anger, violence, and speak of the glories of war and of crushing one’s enemies in the name of God?” For others, the objection is to the patriarchal nature of the psalms. For yet others, the offense is aesthetic: “They’re terrible poetry!” they say.
Perhaps the psalms aren’t great poetry and they do, undeniably, smack of violence, war, hatred of one’s enemies in the name of God, and the desire for vengeance. They’re also patriarchal in character. But does that make them poor language for prayer? No, to the contrary.
One of the classical definitions of prayer suggests that “prayer is lifting mind and heart to God.” Simple, clear, accurate. Our problem is that we too seldom actually do this when we pray. Rather than lifting to God what’s actually on our minds and in our hearts, we treat God as someone from whom we need to hide the real truth of our thoughts and feelings. Instead of pouring out mind and heart, we tell God what we think God wants to hear – not murderous thoughts, desire for vengeance, or our disappointment with him.
But expressing those feelings is the whole point. What makes the psalms so apt for prayer is that they do not hide the truth from God and they express the whole gamut of our actual feelings. They give honest voice to what’s actually going on in our minds and hearts.
Sometimes we feel good and our spontaneous impulse is to speak words of praise and gratitude. The psalms give us that voice. They speak of God’s goodness – love, friends, faith, health, food, wine, enjoyment. But we don’t always feel that way. Our lives also have their cold, lonely seasons when disappointment and bitterness smolder under the surface. The psalms then give us honest voice and we can open all those angry feelings to God.
At other times, we fill with the sense of our own inadequacy, with the fact that we cannot measure up to the trust and love that’s given us. The psalms give us voice for this, asking God to have mercy, to soften our hearts, to wash us clean, to give us a fresh start. And then still there are times when we feel disappointed with God himself and need in some way to express this. The psalms give us this voice (“Why are you so silent? Why are you so far from me?”) even as they make us aware that God is not afraid of our anger and bitterness but, like a loving parent, only wants us to come and talk about it.
The psalms are a privileged vehicle for prayer because they lift the full range of our thoughts and feelings to God.
But we tend to struggle with that. First, because our age often fails to grasp metaphor and taken literally, some of the images within the psalms are offensive. Second, we are often in denial about our true feelings. It’s hard to admit that we feel some of the things we sometimes feel: grandiosity, sexual obsessions, jealousies, desire for revenge, murderous thoughts. Too often our prayer belies our actual thoughts and feelings and tells God what we think God wants to hear. The psalms have more honesty.
As Kathleen Norris puts it: If you pray regularly “there is no way you can do it right. You are not always going to sit up straight, let alone think holy thoughts. You’re not going to wear your best clothes but whatever isn’t in the dirty clothes basket. You come to the Bible’s great book of praises through all the moods and conditions of life, and while you feel like hell, you sing anyway. To your surprise, you find that the psalms do not deny your true feelings but allow you to reflect them, right in front of God and everyone.”
Feel good aphorisms that express how we think we ought to feel are no substitute for the earthy realism of the psalms which express how we actually do feel at times. Anyone who would lift mind and heart to God without ever mentioning feelings of bitterness, jealousy, vengeance, hatred and war, is better suited to write greeting cards than to give out spiritual counsel.

(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser is a professor of spirituality at Oblate School of Theology and award-winning author.)

FAITH ALIVE
By Cecilia A. Moore
From the 1920s through the 1960s more than 300,000 African-Americans across the country chose to enter into communion with the Roman Catholic Church. Their choices to become Catholic set them apart from most African-American Christians who were members of Baptist, Methodist, Pentecostal and Holiness traditions.

However, in choosing Catholicism, African-Americans were returning to the earliest Christian traditions of their ancestors. African Christians figured prominently in shaping the Catholic tradition, making their imprint on Catholic theology, doctrine and religious practices.
St. Augustine’s teachings on grace and sin, monasticism and traditions related to intercessory prayer are just three examples of African influence on Catholicism. Christian kingdoms flourished for more than four centuries in Egypt, Ethiopia and the Sudan before Christianity had durable roots in Western Europe.
And, although Muslims were successful in establishing their faith throughout North Africa and in parts of sub-Saharan Africa by the ninth century, Christianity did preserve in parts of Africa and by the beginning of the 16th century, Catholicism was reintroduced to Africa by way of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Twentieth-century African-Americans who chose to become Catholic were rich, poor, middle-class, famous, infamous, ordinary, eccentric, well-educated, poorly educated, Southern, Northern, Midwestern, Western, raised as Christian, religiously unaffiliated, politically engaged, apolitical and so much more.
No matter their individual characteristics, they had their own reasons for choosing Catholicism. Some did so to answer a call to religious life. Some felt an internal spiritual call to Catholicism. Some joined the Catholic Church because they were married to Catholics, and others were attracted to the faith because they had Catholic friends.
There were women and men who found Catholicism to be the truest expression of Christian faith, finding themselves deeply attracted to the rituals and theology of Catholicism. Many were children who learned about Catholicism while attending Catholic schools. It was not uncommon for these children to bring their entire families into the church with them.
Some became Catholic because the church reached out to them when they were in need. The Catholic stance on political and social issues drew others in. There were also 20th-century African-Americans who converted who said they experienced a sense of equality in the church that they didn’t experience in other aspects of their lives.
Whatever their reasons for were for choosing Catholicism, African-Americans changed the look and the experience of American Catholicism in the 20th century.
November is Black Catholic History Month. Use this month to learn about some of these 20th-century African-Americans who chose Catholicism and made great contributions to the American Catholic experience. Here are three that you might consider.
African-American children’s book author, Ellen Tarry, became a Catholic when she attended St. Francis de Sales, a Catholic boarding school for African-American girls run by the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament in the early 20th century. As a young woman she got involved in the Harlem Renaissance and in Catholic interracial justice work.
Tarry’s books for children featured aspects of Catholicism and African-American life. She also published frequently in Catholic publications on issues that pertained to African-Americans. Her autobiography “The Third Door: The Autobiography of an American Negro Woman” is a fine way to begin learning about her and her contributions to American Catholicism.
Several of the more famous African-Americans who joined the Catholic Church in the 20th century were in the performing arts. Mary Lou Williams is one of the most famous and interesting. Williams was a renowned jazz pianist and composer. Becoming a Catholic in 1957, Williams came to regard jazz as a gift that God gave her to give the church. Jazz inspired her composition of dozens of hymns.
Finally, an especially fitting way to celebrate Black Catholic History Month would be to read “The History of Black Catholics in the United States” by the late Benedictine Father Cyprian Davis. Father Davis’ work was integral to bringing attention nationally and internationally to the ways that people of African descent helped to develop Catholicism from the earliest days up through the middle of the 20th century.
Though trained in monastic history, Father Davis is most well-known for developing black Catholic history as a distinctive field study and scholarship around the country, but especially at the Institute for Black Catholic Studies at Xavier University of Louisiana.

(Cecilia A. Moore is associate professor of religious studies at the University of Dayton.)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
In the movie “The English Patient” there’s a very heartwarming scene.
A number of people from various countries are thrown together by circumstance in an abandoned villa in post-war Italy. Among them are a young nurse, attending to an English pilot who’s been badly burned in an air crash, and a young Asian man whose job is to find and defuse landmines. The young man and the nurse become friends and, one day, he announces he has a special surprise for her.

He takes her to an abandoned church in which he has set up a series of ropes and pulleys that will lift her to the ceiling where, hidden in darkness, are beautiful mosaics and wonderful works of art that cannot be seen from the floor. He gives her a torch as a light and pulls her up through a series of ropes so that she swings like an angel with wings, high above the floor and is able with the help of her torch to see beautiful masterpieces hidden in the dark.

For her, the experience is one of exhilaration; she has the sensation of flying and of seeing wonderful beauty all at the same time. When she’s finally lowered back to the floor she’s flushed with excitement and gratitude and covers the young man’s face with kisses, saying over and over again: “Thank you, thank you, thank you for showing this to me!”

And from her expression, you see too that she is expressing a double thanks: “Thank you for showing me something that I could never have come to on my own and thank you for trusting me enough to think that I would understand this, for trusting that I would get it!”

There’s a lesson here?

The church needs to do for the world exactly what this young man did for his nurse friend; it needs to show the world where to look for a beauty it would not find on its own, a beauty that is hidden in darkness. And it needs to trust that people will “get it,” will appreciate the richness of what they are being shown.

Where might the church find such hidden beauty? In the deep rich wells of its own history, and in nature, in art, in science, in children, in the energy of the young, and in the wisdom of the old. There are treasures of beauty hidden everywhere. The church’s task is to point these out to the world. Why?

Because beauty has the power to touch and transform the soul, to instill wonder and gratitude in a way that few things have. Confucius understood this. That’s why he suggested that beauty is the greatest of all teachers and why he based his philosophy of education on beauty. People can doubt almost anything, except beauty.

Why can’t beauty be doubted? Because beauty is an attribute of God. Classical Christian philosophy and theology tell us that God has four transcendental properties, namely, God is “One, True, Good and Beautiful.” If this is true, then to be touched by beauty is to be touched by God; to admire beauty is to admire God; to be shown beauty in hidden places is to be shown God in hidden places; to be in awe of beauty is to be in awe of God; and to feel that awe is to feel a homesickness for heaven.

The renowned theologian Hans Urs Von Baltasar highlighted how beauty is a key component in how God speaks to us and how that should color how we speak about God to the world.

However, we shouldn’t be naïve in our understanding of this. Beauty isn’t always pretty in the way that popular culture perceives it. Granted, beauty can be seen in the spectacular colors of a sunset, or in the smile and innocence of a child, or in the perfection of a Michelangelo sculpture, but it can also be seen in the wrinkles of an old woman and in the toothless smile of an old man.

God speaks through beauty and so must we. Moreover, we must believe enough in people’s sensitivity and intelligence to trust that they, like the nurse in “The English Patient,” will appreciate what they are being shown.

In a famous line (often quoted by Dorothy Day) Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky writes: The world will be saved by beauty.

What’s the logic here? How might beauty cure the many ills which beset us?

Here’s Dostoevsky’s algebra: In the face of brutality, what’s needed is tenderness; in the face of hype and ideology, what’s needed is truth; in the face of bitterness and curses, what’s needed are graciousness and blessing; in the face of hatred and murder, what’s needed are love and forgiveness; in the face of the kind of familiarity that breeds contempt, what’s needed are awe and wonder; and in the face the ugliness and vulgarity that pervades our world and our evening news, what’s needed is beauty.

(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser is a professor of spirituality at Oblate School of Theology and award-winning author. He can be contacted through his website www.ronrolheiser.com.)

ON ORDINARY TIMES
By Lucia A. Silecchia
Pope Leo XIV recently released the first extensive document of his papacy, “Dilexi Te,” an apostolic exhortation on love for the poor.

Almost immediately, pundits responded – some thoughtfully and others with partisan “hot takes” that pulled a mere line or two from the document to illustrate how it aligned perfectly with their viewpoints. Others turned immediately to critique, while some praised provisions they liked and ignored those they did not.

This did not surprise me. I have taught courses in Catholic social teaching and understand the instinct and temptation to view this teaching through political frameworks, ordering it to the “sides” we are used to taking.

Yet this exhortation warrants more. As an apostolic exhortation, “Dilexi Te” is less formal than an encyclical letter. Yet “exhortation” is an interesting term. Its root means “to encourage” or “to urge.” “Dilexi Te” is, therefore, encouragement or a summons to action. It is, in Pope Leo’s words, a summons to “appreciate the close connection between Christ’s love and his summons to care for the poor.”

In reading “Dilexi Te” and seeking to appreciate this “close connection,” three things challenged and – as an exhortation should – encouraged my heart most deeply.

First, the opening line, “I have loved you,” encourages prayerful reflection. It is traditional to name papal documents with the Latin translation of their opening words. Hence, “Dilexi Te” is simply the translation of the short sentence that launches the exhortation. Yet these four words (or two in Latin’s efficiency) convey a profound truth both fundamental to Christianity and largely unfathomable. To know that God says, “I have loved you,” can take a lifetime to ponder. “Dilexi Te” encourages readers to center their lives and relationships on this truth and to draw from it the inspiration for the love that should motivate care for those living with poverty.

Second, “Dilexi Te” encourages readers to see that many of our sisters and brothers live in poverty – and that this can take many different forms. Certainly, it includes material poverty. Yet “Dilexi Te” encourages a broader view. It invites readers to see that deep poverty can afflict those who suffer from many deprivations, including the sorrows of being “socially marginalized,” lacking “means to give voice to their dignity and abilities,” experiencing “moral,” “spiritual” or “cultural” poverty, being weak or fragile, or lacking “rights,” “space” or “freedom.”

Acknowledging poverty in this broader way invites and encourages us not to see “the poor” as merely “others” but to recognize that, in some way, each of us will know poverty sometime in our lives. To know this is to know deeper solidarity with those whose suffering might otherwise seem distant and easier to ignore.

Third, in what may be its most challenging yet encouraging section, “Dilexi Te” presents an extensive history of the church’s service to the suffering. The challenge embedded here is for each of us to join our ancestors in faith who lived lives in so many ways of loving service. They recognized, as Pope Leo explained, that “no sign of affection, even the smallest, will ever be forgotten, especially if it is shown to those who are suffering, lonely or in need.”

Pope Leo described the service missions of the earliest deacons of the church, who served those in need. He then pointed to some of the earliest Church Fathers – including the familiar Saints Ignatius of Antioch, Justin, John Chrysostom, Ambrose and Augustine – who taught vehemently about serving the poor and seeing how intimately intertwined are love of God and love of neighbor.

This cannot remain mere theory. Pope Leo continued by describing how care of the sick and suffering has, through the centuries, been close to the heart of the church. This has been accomplished both through the leadership of well-known saints and through the love of so many religious women who labored anonymously through the ages to offer “comfort, a listening ear, a presence, and above all, tenderness” to those in their care.

Pope Leo spoke of the generous hospitality offered by those in monastic life, under the guidance of Saints Basil the Great, Benedict of Norcia and Bernard of Clairvaux. He spoke of leaders who established religious orders to minister to those who were captured and suffering imprisonment – and of their followers, whose names may be remembered only by God. He also highlighted the ways in which religious orders such as the Franciscans, Dominicans, Augustinians and Carmelites embraced poverty for the sake of bringing others closer to God.

At length, Pope Leo spoke of orders founded in more recent centuries to offer education as a particular way of assisting those in need. He again acknowledged the often underappreciated work of women religious who devoted their lives to this, recognizing knowledge as both a “gift from God and a community responsibility.” In a similar way, he acknowledged the labors of religious orders who cared for those who migrate and those who ministered to “the poorest of the poor.” He also acknowledged those who lived lives in service to persons living with disabilities of all kinds.

This journey through the centuries is not merely a history lesson. It is an invitation to see this radical caring love as integral to our faith.

Because “Dilexi Te” is a new document from a new pope, it will get much attention. But more than attention, it deserves reflection on what it tells each of us – not others – to do. And, at its heart, it encourages us to love others as God has loved us, in all the days of our ordinary times.

(Lucia A. Silecchia is Professor of Law at the Catholic University of America’s Columbus School of Law. “On Ordinary Times” is a biweekly column reflecting on the ways to find the sacred in the simple. Email her at silecchia@cua.edu.)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
Growing up in a Roman Catholic home, devotions were always a vital part of our religious diet. While our family saw the Eucharist as more important than devotions, we nourished our spiritual lives a lot on devotions, as did many Roman Catholics back then.

Among other things, we prayed the rosary every day, prayed the Angelus daily, prayed special litanies (St. Joseph in March, Mary in May and October, and the Sacred Heart of Jesus in June), prayed the Stations of the Cross each Friday in Lent, were anxious to attend Eucharist on First Fridays and First Saturdays to obtain special promises from God, and said special prayers to obtain indulgences.

As well, there were pilgrimages to Marian shrines for those who could afford them and most everyone wore medals from Lourdes or Fatima and had a special devotion to those shrines (with a special devotion in my own family and parish to Our Lady of the Cape, at Cap De Madeleine, Quebec). Devotions were a big part of our spiritual lives.

What’s to be said about devotions from a theological view and from the view of a culture that mostly distrusts them?

We might begin with the reaction of Martin Luther and the great Protestant reformers. They were fearful of two things in devotions. First, at that time, some devotions were too unbridled and were simply bad theology (famously, selling indulgences). Second, they saw devotions, not as necessarily bad in themselves, but as often displacing Jesus and God’s Word as our center and main focus. And so, they distanced themselves from basically all Roman Catholic devotions, the unbridled as well as the healthy.

For the most part that Protestant and Evangelical distrust of Roman Catholic devotions has come down right to our own day. While that distrust is breaking down today in some non-Roman churches today, it is still the prevalent attitude inside most Protestant and Evangelical circles. In brief, they distrust most devotions because they are seen not just as deflecting our focus from the centrality of Jesus and the Word, but also as potentially unhealthy contaminates, as junk food in our spiritual diet.

What’s to be said about that?

It’s a fair and needed warning to Roman Catholics (and others) who nourish their spiritual lives with devotions. Bottom line, devotions can easily ground themselves on shaky theology and can be a junk food contaminating our spiritual diet: where devotions replace scripture, Mary replaces Jesus as center, and certain ritual practices make God seem like a puppet on a string.

However, that being admitted, as Goethe once said, the dangers of life are many and safety is one of those dangers. Yes, devotions can be a danger, but they can also be a rich healthy supplement in our essential diet of Word and Eucharist.

Here’s how Eric Mascall (the renowned Anglican theologian at Oxford with C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Dorothy Sayers, and Austin Ferrar) spells out both the danger of devotions and the danger of not having devotions as part of your spiritual life: The protestant reformers (Luther, Calvin, Zwingli) were so afraid of contamination by Roman Catholic devotions, that they put us on a diet of antiseptics. When you’re on a diet of antiseptics, you won’t suffer from food poisoning, but you can suffer from malnutrition.

That’s an equal challenge to both those who practice devotions and those who fear them. The theology undergirding certain devotions admittedly can be sloppy (for example, Mary is not a co-redeemer with Jesus). However, inside many devotions (to Mary, to the saints, to Eucharist adoration, to the Sacred Heart) there can be a rich nutrition which helps nourish the center, namely, God’s Word and the Eucharist.

The late Wendy Wright in her book “Sacred Heart: Gateway to God” makes a wonderful apologia for Catholic devotional practices, particularly devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. For her, Catholic devotional practices are a tradition of the heart. While Jesus remains central and his resurrection remains the real anchor for our faith, devotions can give us something beyond just this raw essential.

Using devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus as an example, she writes: “In this devotion, we, and Jesus and the saints, exist in some essential way outside the chronology of historical time. The tradition of the heart makes this vividly, even grotesquely, clear. The divine–human correspondence is intimate. It is discovered in the flesh. Our fleshy hearts are fitted for all that is beyond flesh by conforming to the heart of Jesus. That divine–human heart is the passageway between earth and heaven. That heart is the tactile tracings of divine love on the created order. That heart is the widest, wildest longing of humankind’s own love.”

The dangers of life are many and safety is one of those dangers. Devotions can deflect us from what’s more central and can take their root in some questionable theology, but they can also, in Wendy Wright’s words, be a blessed passageway for the heart between heaven and earth.

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