IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
At end of every Roman Catholic liturgy, there is an invitation given to the people to receive a blessing. That invitation is worded this way: Bow your heads and pray for God’s blessing. The idea behind that, obviously, is that a blessing can only truly be received in reverence, in humility, with head bowed, with pride and arrogance subjugated and silent.
A bowed head is a sign of humility and is understood, almost universally, as our proper spiritual posture. Spiritual writers have rarely questioned or felt the need to nuance the notion that spiritual health means a head bowed in humility. But is it really that simple?
Admittedly there is a lot of wisdom in that. A head bowed in reverence is a sign of humility. Moreover pride heads the list of deadly sins. Human pride is congenital, deep, and impossible to uproot. It can be redeemed and it can be crushed, but it always remains in us, necessarily so. There is no health without pride, but pride can also derail health. There is something inside of human nature, inherent in our very individuality and freedom, which does not like to bend the knee before what is higher and superior. We guard our pride fiercely and it is no accident that the archetypal image of resistance to God is expressed in Lucifer’s inflexible, pride-anchored statement: I will not serve!
Moreover we do not like to admit weakness, finitude, dependence and interdependence. Thus all of us have to grow and mature to a place where we are no longer naive and arrogant enough to believe that we do not need God’s blessing. All spirituality is predicated on humility. Maturity, human and spiritual, is most evident in someone whom you see on his or her knees praying.
But, while pride can be bad, sometimes pride and arrogance are not the problem. Rather our struggle is with a wounded and broken spirit that no longer knows how to stand upright. It is one thing to be young, healthy, strong, arrogant, and unaware of how fragile and finite we are (and that illusion can survive and stay with us into old age); but it is quite another thing to have one’s heart broken, one’s spirit crushed and one’s pride taken away. When that happens, and it happens to all of us if we are half-sensitive and live long enough, wounded pride does some very negative things in us, it cripples us so that we can no longer truly get off our knees, stand upright, raise our heads and receive love and blessing.
I remember as a child, growing up on a farm, watching something that was then called “breaking a horse.” The men would catch a young colt which had until then run completely free and they would, through a rather brutal process, force the young colt to submit to halter, saddle and human commands. When the process was finished, the colt was now compliant to human commands. But the process of breaking the horse’s freedom and spirit was far from gentle, and thus yielded a mixed result. The horse was now compliant, but part of its spirit was broken.
That’s an apt image for the journey, both human and spiritual. Life, in ways that are far from gentle, eventually breaks our spirit, for good and for bad, and we end up humble, but we also end up somewhat wounded and unable to (metaphorically) stand upright. Conscripted humility has a double effect: On the one hand, we find that we more-naturally genuflect before what is higher; but, on the other hand, because the pain of our brokenness, as is so often the case with pain, we focus more upon ourselves than on others and we end up handicapped. Bruised and fragile, we are unable to properly give and receive and are stuttering and reticent in sharing the goodness and depth of our own persons.
Spirituality and religion have, for the most part, been too one-sided on this. They have perennially been vigilant about pride and arrogance (and, admittedly, these are real and are forever the deadly sins). But spirituality and religion have been too slow to lift up the fallen. We all know the dictum that the task of spirituality is to afflict the comforted and comfort the afflicted. Historically, religion and spirituality, while not always being very successful with the former, have been too-negligent of the latter.
Pride and arrogance are the deadliest of all vices. However wounded pride and a broken spirit can equally derail us.
So, perhaps when the church blesses its congregation at the end of a liturgy, it might, instead of saying: Bow your heads and pray for God’s blessing, say instead: Those of you who think you are not in need of this blessing: Please bow your heads and pray for God’s blessing. Meanwhile those of you who feel beaten, broken and unworthy of this blessing: Raise your heads to receive a love and gift that you have long despaired of ever again receiving.
(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
Father Jerome LeDoux
Letting go of anyone, anything at any level, in any relationship, under any circumstances and at any time can be one of the most difficult of all things to learn and, finally, to do. It is also one of the most necessary things that we have to do in life, for, unless we let go at those times when it behooves us to, we can never be free of anxiety, at peace, relaxed, or enabled to be all we can be. This takes a lifetime.
Above all, there is that “Let go, let God” mandate that is so crucial to our life both material and spiritual. I first heard “Let go, let God” regularly in 1965 at Alcoholics Anonymous and Al-Anon meetings where the desperate of the desperate found the answer to a mystery disorder that had taken over their mind and body.
There are simply some things that we cannot do on our own. So we admit this to ourselves and to the rest of the world, we recognize and profess that there is a Higher Power who created everyone, and we allow God to take over our lives. We spend a lifetime learning this, making room for God to operate freely in our lives.
At that point, something wonderful happens. Out of our weakness, the power of God breaks through, just as we read in the epic life struggle of St. Paul sharply described to us in 2 Corinthians 12. In order that Paul might not be tempted to pride because of his mystical experiences, “whether in the body or out of the body,” “a thorn in the flesh was given to me, an angel of Satan… Three times I begged the Lord about this, that it might leave me, but he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.’
“Therefore, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions and constraints, for the sake of Christ; for when I am weak, then I am strong.”
Paul was slipping into early middle age by the time he learned this. “Let go, let God” is basically allowing God to supply whatever is lacking in our weaknesses. It consists in doing what hardly any of us cares to do: relinquish control and step aside, get out of God’s way, letting God work the magic Jesus always did.
And Jesus worked those wonders because he was all about doing his Father’s will for his Father’s glory, always declaring, as in John 14:13, “Whatever you ask in my name, I will do, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son.”
We definitely spend our whole life acquiring the most intimate and most important knowledge of life: self-knowledge. Over the decades, this is a topic that I have revisited in writing a half dozen times or more because it is so indispensable, so seminal and so critical in the rooting and formation of who and what we are and hope to become someday in our bodies, minds, emotions and souls.
But will-o’-the-wisp that it is, self-knowledge is as slippery as an eel, as elusive as a wild goose and as untouchable as a phantom. Just when we think we are getting to know ourselves, we are startled by some new surprise or wrinkle within. And, while no one can know us from without, we do well to listen to their criticisms.
Unless we are very careful and vigilant, much of our life can be an illusion because at times we so willingly allow, maybe even invite illusion into our personal, private world. The greatest illusion is that it is easier to deal with illusion than with reality. That is the last step before insanity, crippling our ability to discern fantasy from reality by denying the good, the bad and the ugly in our everyday living. Step by step, living in denial will cost us peace, joy and, at some juncture, our sanity.
Today’s savants give great discourses and write books about self-knowledge, treading and retreading the same ground trod by the ancients such as the Greeks who had much to say about self-knowledge as the most basic thing in life. They thumbnailed it in γνῶθι σαὐτόν (Temet nosce in Latin): Know yourself!
Γ Ν Ω Θ Ι   Σ Α Υ Τ Ο Ν (Greek in caps) is the same precept set in gold letters over the portico of the temple at Delphi. So powerful is it that its authorship has been ascribed to Pythagoras, to several of the wise men of Greece, and to Phemonoe, a mythical Greek poetess. According to Juvenal, this precept descended from heaven.
We can safely say that this is a precept that has heavenly overtones. It is akin to the poet Alexander Pope’s famous line: “To err is human; to forgive, divine.” Pope improved the dictum of Seneca the younger: “To err is human; to persist, diabolical.” So difficult are both of these that, when the discussion comes down to the degree of difficulty, self-knowledge and true forgiveness run a mighty tight race. Yes, it takes a hard-fought lifetime to come to know ourselves fully as God alone knows us.
“God is love, and all who abide in love abide in God and God in them.”   (1 John 4:16)
(Father Jerome LeDoux, SVD, lives in retirement at the Sacred Heart Residence in Bay St. Louis. He has written “Reflections on Life since 1969).

Guest Column
By Carol Glatz
VATICAN CITY (CNS) – For a spiritual leader who denounces a world divided by walls, a church shuttered by cliques and hearts hardened to compassion, opening wide the Holy Door for the Year of Mercy is a significant and symbolic moment for Pope Francis.
In Catholic tradition, the Holy Door represents the passage to salvation – the path to a new and eternal life, which was opened to humanity by Jesus.
It also symbolizes an entryway to God’s mercy – the ultimate and supreme act by which he comes to meet people. Mercy is “the bridge that connects God and humanity, opening our hearts to the hope of being loved forever despite our sinfulness,” the pope wrote in “Misericordiae Vultus” (“The Face of Mercy”), instituting the Holy Year of Mercy.
Doors have always had a special meaning for the Catholic Church, according to the late-Cardinal Virgilio Noe, the former archpriest of St. Peter’s Basilica.
“The door of a church marks the divide between the sacred and profane, separating the church’s interior from the outside world. It is the boundary defining welcome and exclusion,” he wrote in the book, “The Holy Door in St. Peter’s” in 1999.
The door is also a symbol of Mary – the mother, the dwelling of the Lord – and she, too, always has open arms and is ready to welcome the children of God home. Pope Francis opened the door Dec. 8, the feast of Mary’s Immaculate Conception.
But the door especially represents Christ himself – the one and only way to eternal life. As Jesus said, according to the Gospel of John (10:9), “I am the gate. Whoever enters through me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture.”
The Holy Year traditionally begins with the opening of the Holy Door to represent a renewed opportunity to encounter or grow closer to Jesus, who calls everyone to redemption.
Jesus knocks on everyone’s door; he yearns to accompany and nourish everyone. “If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, then I will enter his house and dine with him, and he with me,” the Book of Revelation quotes him as saying.
But doors are also narrow, Cardinal Noe wrote, and people must stoop with humility and “be brought down to size by conversion” in order to be “fit” for eternal life.
That is why passing through a Holy Door is part of a longer process of sacrifice and conversion required for receiving an indulgence granted during a Holy Year. A plenary indulgence, the remission of temporal punishment due to sin, is offered for pilgrims who also fulfill certain other conditions: reception of the sacraments of penance and the Eucharist, visits and prayers for the intention of the pope and performing simple acts such as visiting the sick.
This spiritual process of encounter and conversion is made tangible in the elaborate rituals developed over time for the opening of the Holy Door.
The symbolic ceremony of opening a Holy Door came more than a century after the first Holy Year was proclaimed in 1300.
Pope Martin V, in 1423, opened the Holy Door in the Basilica of St. John Lateran for the first time for a jubilee. Next, Pope Alexander VI called for all four Holy Doors in Rome to be opened at Christmas in 1499 for the Jubilee of 1500.
Starting in the 16th century, the ceremony to open the door in St. Peter’s Basilica included the pope reciting verses from the Psalms and striking the wall covering the Holy Door with a silver hammer three times.
Masons completed the task of dismantling the brick and mortared wall, which represented the difficulty and great effort required to overcome the barrier of sin and to open the path to holiness.
Some have found meaning in the fact that Jesus had five wounds and St. Peter’s Basilica has five doors. Opening the Holy Door recalls the piercing of Jesus’ side from which poured forth blood and water, the source of regeneration for humanity. The Holy Door of St. Peter’s, in fact, is decorated with 16 bronze panels depicting the story of Jesus, in his mercy, seeking his lost sheep.
The symbolism of the hammer in the hands of the pope represents the power and jurisdiction God gives him to cast away the stones of sin, chink open hardened hearts and break down walls separating humanity from God.
The removal of the wall also conjures up pulling away the stone that sealed the tomb of Lazarus, whom Jesus resurrected from the dead.
For the closing of the door at the end of the Holy Year, the traditional rite included the pope blessing and spreading the mortar with a special trowel and setting three bricks for the start of a new wall – a symbol of the spiritual rebuilding of the Lord’s house as well as the ever-present human temptation to put up new barriers against God with sin.
While there have been some changes to those ceremonies over time, the Holy Door is always a reminder that because of God’s mercy, any obstacles can always be removed, and the door to hope and forgiveness is always there waiting.
(Carol Glatz is a reporter for Catholic News Service.)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
The Belgian spiritual writer, Bieke Vandekerckhove, comes by her wisdom honestly. She didn’t learn what she shares from a book or even primarily from the good example of others. She learned what she shares through the crucible of a unique suffering, being hit at the tender age of nineteen with a terminal disease that promised not just an early death but also a complete breakdown and humiliation of her body enroute to that death.
Her attempt to cope with her situation drove her in many directions, initially to anger and hopelessness but eventually to monasteries, to the wisdom of monasticism, and, under its direction, into the deep well of silence, that desert that lurks so threateningly inside each of us. Away from all the noises of the world, in the silence of her own soul, inside the chaos of her raging, restless insides she found the wisdom and strength not just to cope with her illness but to also find a deeper meaning and joy in her life.
There are, as John Updike poetically puts it, secrets that are hidden from health, though, as Vandekerckhove makes evident, they can be uncovered in silence. However uncovering the secrets that silence has to teach us is not easy.
Silence, until properly befriended, is scary and the process of befriending it is the soul’s equivalent of crossing a hot desert. Our insides don’t easily become calm, restlessness doesn’t easily turn into solitude and the temptation to turn to the outside world for consolation doesn’t easily give way to the idea of quiet. But there’s a peace and a meaning that can only be found inside the desert of our own chaotic and raging insides. The deep wells of consolation lie at the end of an inner journey through heat, thirst, and dead-ends that must be pushed through with dogged fidelity. And, as for any epic journey, the task is not for the faint of heart.
Here’s how Vandekerckhove describes one aspect of the journey: “Inner noise can be quite exhausting. That’s probably why so many flee to the seduction of exterior background noises. They prefer to have the noise just wash over them. But if you want to grow spiritually, you have to stay inside of the room of your spiritual raging and persevere.
You have to continue to sit silently and honestly in God’s presence until the raging quiets down and your heart gradually becomes cleansed and quieted. Silence forces us to take stock of our actual manner of being human. And then we hit a wall, a dead point. No matter what we do, no matter what we try, something in us continues to feel lost and estranged, despite the myriad ways of society to meet our human needs. Silence confronts us with an unbearable bottomlessness, and there appears no way out. We have no choice but to align ourselves with the religious depth in us.”
There’s a profound truth: Silence confronts us with an unbearable bottomlessness and we have no choice but to align ourselves with the religious depth inside us. Sadly, for most of us, we will learn this only by bitter conscription when we have to actually face our own death. In the abandonment of dying, stripped of all options and outlets we will, despite struggle and bitterness, have to, in the words of Karl Rahner, allow ourselves to sink into the incomprehensibility of God.
Moreover, before this surrender is made, our lives will always remain somewhat unstable and confusing and there will always be dark, inner corners of the soul that scare us.
But a journey into silence can take us beyond our dark fears and shine healing light into our darkest corners. But, as Vandekerckhove and other spiritual writers point out, that peace is usually found only after we have reached an impasse, a “dead point” where the only thing we can do is “to pierce the negative.”
In her book, The Taste of Silence, Vandekerckhove recounts how an idealistic friend of hers shared his dream of going off by himself into some desert to explore spirituality.
Her prompt reaction was not much to his liking: “A person is ready to go to any kind of desert. He’s willing to sit anywhere, as long as it’s not his own desert.” How true. We forever hanker after idealized deserts and avoid our own.
The spiritual journey, the pilgrimage, the Camino, we most need to make doesn’t require an airline ticket, though an experienced guide is recommended. The most spiritually rewarding trip we can make is an inner pilgrimage, into the desert of our own silence.
As human beings we are constitutively social. This means, as the bible so bluntly puts it, that it is not good for the human person to be alone. We are meant to be in community with others. Heaven will be a communal experience; but, on the road there, there’s a certain deep inner work that can only be done alone, in silence, away from the noise of the world.
(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX.)

Guest Commentary
Sister Constance Veit, lsp
During a recent family reunion my elderly mother and I were the only ones at the table without smart phones. We felt left out. A few days later I read that Pope Francis advised parents to ban mobile devices from the dinner table to help restore the quality of family relationships.
These two occurrences reminded me of the life of our foundress, Saint Jeanne Jugan. In her time the poor were essentially swept aside in the wake of the French Revolution and rapid industrialization. Today we are experiencing a different type of revolution as digital technologies evolve nearly every day.
New modes of social communication, it is claimed, foster unimagined levels of human connectedness. But just as the poor and elderly were marginalized in Saint Jeanne Jugan’s day, they are often left behind in the communications revolution of today when they lack the means or the know-how to keep up with the latest technology. Consider these statistics from the Pew Internet and American Life Project:
•    While 95 percent of millennials own cell phones, less than half of those over 75 own one. Only 18 percent of seniors own a smart phone.
•    Only 10 percent of those belonging to the G.I. Generation own a laptop, compared with 70 percent of Millennials and 65 percent of Baby Boomers.
•    Only 27 percent of older adults engage in online social networking.
•    Younger, higher-income and more highly educated seniors use the internet more than those who are older or of more modest means. For both groups, usage drops off dramatically after age 75.
Regardless of age, users of social networking say they interact more with other digitally connected people than with those who do not use digital communication. These new forms of technology, with their rapid changes, have created a new generation gap.
Recently I was shocked to read that more than one million older people in the United Kingdom go a month without talking to another human being. This figure would surely be comparable in our own country. Such loneliness is deadly! Studies show that inadequate social interaction is linked to premature death. The increased mortality risk associated with loneliness is comparable to smoking, and twice as great as the risk associated with obesity!
I hope you find this data as startling as I do. Through Pope Francis’ repeated calls for a culture of encounter I believe God is asking us to do something to relieve the social isolation of the elderly and poor. During this Jubilee Year of Mercy he is inviting us to practice the corporal and spiritual works of mercy; among these are visiting the sick and imprisoned and comforting the afflicted.
So what can we do? If you know an older person, who has the means but not the know-how to access digital media, then practice mercy by teaching them how to use the technology they already own.
For those unable to afford computers and smart phones, as well as those whose physical or cognitive limitations prevent them from being able to use them, visit them with your laptop on a regular basis and facilitate their connection to long-distance loved ones via Skype or a similar platform.
Finally, enrich the lives of the elderly through real, in-person face time. What better way could there be to celebrate the Jubilee of Mercy than to commit to spending time with our elderly loved ones or homebound neighbors and sharing a meal or a memory with them?
Pope Francis inspires us to practice this form of mercy: “Sharing and knowing how to share is a precious virtue!” he said. “Its symbol, its ‘icon,’ is the family gathered around the dinner table. The sharing of meals – and in addition to food also of affection, of stories, of events – is a common experience.”
The pope added, “A family that hardly ever eats together, or that does not talk at the table but watches television, or looks at a smartphone is a ‘barely familial’ family … It is like a boarding house!”
Let’s apply the pope’s thinking to our relationships with elders. Let’s do all we can to make sure that family togetherness and intergenerational bonds grow stronger during this Jubilee Year of Mercy!
(Sister Constance Veit is the communications director for the Little Sisters of the Poor in the United States.)

Millennial reflections
By Father Jeremy Tobin, OPraem
Catholic Charities, the social service arm of the Catholic Church in Mississippi, is represented in both dioceses, Jackson and Biloxi, serving all 82 counties of the state. By far it is the largest social service agency in the state.
Catholic Charities of Jackson has a Poverty Task Force composed of members of the various parishes and other Catholics with an interest in serving the poor. Since its inception a few years ago its main project has been organizing Catholic Day at the Capitol. This year it will be February 11. In the last issue of Mississippi Catholic the schedule for the day, roughly 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., was published.
Before I go on, let me say one thing, we need your support. We need concerned Catholics from parishes all over both dioceses, from Tunica to Moss Point, all the way to the coast, to show up and be active. One other thing, all those representatives you will meet represent YOU. You have every right, and duty to tell them what you want done. Democracy is the people.
You did your first job. You elected/re-elected the current legislature. You have a new job now: speak up. Over the years of advocating for those who have no voice, I can’t say enough about how important it is for legislators to have supporters in the galleries, in the halls, encouraging, talking or criticizing what they do. We hear a lot about the power of money, but people  with  passion over an issue carry a lot of influence as well. I hope to see you there.
I have written here and in many other places about Catholic Social Justice. I have often said it is a well-kept secret. Practicing social justice can be done in innumerable ways, I am not going to give a list. It is what Pope Francis has been saying since his election. He sees it as a response to his newly begun Jubilee Year of Mercy.
It is, simply put, doing the Gospel. It is, as he says so well, going to the margins, reaching out to the poor. He tells priests don’t be distant shepherds, but “smell like the sheep.” Get out there in the slums and barrios. Hear the people tell and share their life stories. Feel their pain.
All the social justice actions you see on TV or read about, are people sharing and expressing their pain to the larger society for whom many are unaware.
As Catholics who take the Gospel seriously, we are sensitive to those who suffer for whatever reason. And we try to change it. Pope Francis says, “Go to the margins and reach out to the poor.” He preaches Liberation Theology, once suspect, now giving us hope.
Its first premise is that everything must be weighed by the preferential option for the poor that it has. A policy’s harmful impact or positive impact it has on the most vulnerable is the first critical test.
So we are focusing a lot on the tax proposals that will emerge this session. We look at their impact on mental health services, on educating our children, on vital programs. Catholic social teaching says, “The tax system should raise adequate revenues to pay for the public needs of society, especially to meet the basic needs of the poor.”
Also we teach that, “A just and equitable tax system is one in which taxes are assessed according to one’s ability to pay.”  So we promote progressive not regressive or flat tax reforms. They hurt the poorest the hardest.
We took a stand on Proposition 42 and lost. We still demand that our children’s education be fully funded, not the best go to the well off and the poor get the crumbs.
See, Catholic Social Teaching, simply put, is the Gospel. It is not some wild eyed radical upset the apple cart scheme. We hear a lot of things like that. Does it mean taking a stand? Yes.
This year’s Day at the Capitol offers all of you the opportunity to learn, to participate and take action, as Catholics with passion, to improve all our people of Mississippi.
Catholic Day at the Capitol starts at 9 a.m. at the Parish Hall of the Cathedral of St. Peter the Apostle on Thursday, Feb.11. Speakers include Warren Yoder of the Public Policy Center of Mississippi, who will give an update on the court proceedings against the foster care system in Mississippi; members of the staff at Catholic Charities who can talk about the real-life implications of public policy on the people of our state.
Father Fred Kammer, SJ, director of the Jesuit Social Research Institute out of Loyola University in New Orleans who will teach you how to be an effective advocate.
Register now at www.catholiccharitiesjackson.com.
(Father Jeremy Tobin, O.Praem, lives at the Priory of St. Moses the Black, Jackson.)