IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
Recently, at an academic dinner, I was sitting across the table from a nuclear scientist. At one point, I asked him this question: Do you believe that there’s human life on other planets? His answer surprised me: “As a scientist, no, I don’t believe there’s human life on another planet. Scientifically, the odds are strongly against it. But, as a Christian, I believe there’s human life on other planets. Why? My logic is this: Why would God chose to have only one child?”
Why would God choose to have only one child? Good logic. Why indeed would an infinite God, capable of creating and loving beyond all imagination, want to do this only once? Why would an infinite God, at a certain point, say: “That’s enough. That’s my limit. These are all the people I can handle and love! Anything beyond this is too much for me! Now is the time to stop creating and enjoy what I’ve done.”
Put this way, my scientist friend’s hunch makes a lot of sense. Given that God is infinite, why would God ever stop doing what God is doing? Why would God favor just us, who have been already been given life, and not give that same gift endlessly to others?  By what logic, other than the limits of our own mind, might we posit an end to creation?
We struggle with this because what God has already created, both in terms of the immensity of the universe and the number of people who have been born in history, is already too much for our imagination to grasp. There are billions and billions of planets, with trillions of processes happening on each of these every second. Just on our planet, earth, there are now more than seven billion people living, millions more have lived before us, and many more are being born every second. And inside of each of these persons there is a unique heart and mind caught-up in an infinite and complex array of joys, heartaches, and moral choices.
Moreover, all of these trillions of human and cosmic processes have been going on for millions and billions of years. How can we imagine a heart and a mind somewhere that knows and loves and cares intimately about every individual person, every individual joy, every individual heartache, every individual moral choice, and every individual planet, star, and grain of sand, as if it were an only child?
The answer is clear: It cannot be imagined! To try to imagine this is to end up either in atheism or nursing a false concept of God. Any God worth believing in has to be able to know and love beyond human imagination, otherwise the immensity of our universe and the uniqueness of our lives are not being held inside the loving care of anyone’s hand and heart.
But how can God know, love, and care for all of this immensity and complexity? Moreover, how will all these billions and billions of people go to heaven, so that all of us end up in one body of love within which we will be in intimate community with each other?
That’s beyond all imagination, at least in terms of human capacity, but my hunch is that heaven cannot be imagined not because it is too complex but because it is too simple, namely, simple in the way Scholastic philosophy affirms that God is simple: God so embodies and encompasses all complexity so as to constitute a reality too simple to be imagined.
It seems too that the origins of our universe are also too simple to be imagined: Our universe, in so far as we know it, had a beginning and scientists believe (The Big Bang Theory) that everything originated from a single cell of energy too tiny to measure or imagine. This single cell exploded with a force and an energy that is still going on today, still expanding outward and creating billions and billions of planets in its wake. And scientists believe that all of this will come back together again, involute, sometime in a future which will take billions of more years to unfold.
So here’s my hunch: Maybe the billions and billions of people, living and dead and still to be born, in both their origins and in their eventual destiny, parallel what has happened and is happening in the origin, expansion, and eventual involution of our universe, that is, just as God is creating billions and billions of planets, God is creating billions and billions of people. And, just as our physical universe will one day come back together again into a single unity, so too will all people come together again in a single community within which God’s intimate love for each of us will bring us together and hold us together in a unity too simple to be imagined, except that now that union with God and each other will not be unconscious but will be known and felt in a very heightened, self-conscious gratitude and ecstasy.
(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, SVD
“Do you take time out to meditate every day?”
The question came from longtime friend Carolyn “Mikki” Ghavam, a Jackson, Mississippi, transplant now living aside a river flowing into Chesapeake Bay.
No, I do not have a time set aside for meditation, because meditation is an integral, natural part of every day, every hour. As far back as the early 1950s, I recall sitting for hours on the seawall of the backwaters of Bay St. Louis, in front of our summer camp that we called “Sunnybank,” watching thunderheads form under the broiling summer sun. There was something far greater than I gathering its might, churning black, then live gray-green rainclouds bursting with lightning and water.
Who could help but meditate at the sight? Or could then seminarians Father Armand Francis Theriault, SVD, and I do more than the terrified apostles in the storm on the lake when a sudden thunderstorm surprised us while fishing in a skiff? Knowing that we were the highest points of the surroundings, we feared that one of those blinding bolts of lightning would turn us into toast. Yes, we meditated.
In a similar way, Mother Nature sometimes drives us into meditation through the likes of a Hurricane Betsy, Camille or Katrina, overwhelming us with killer winds pushing devastating storm surges and spawning deadly tornadoes. Most of the time, we are gently coaxed to meditate by telltale signs all around us. There is a browned water oak standing 130 feet beyond the south side of St. Augustine Residence. It  appears to have no indications of what killed it unless  one looks very closely.
Close scrutiny reveals faint traces of the path of a lightning bolt that hardly disturbed the bark, unlike the bark of pine trees that is severely ripped off by the path of a lightning bolt. That water oak is a deadlier case than that of a live oak standing near the Tomb Of The Unknown Slave at St. Augustine Church in New Orleans. Part of it was electrocuted by touching high-tension wires overhead.
Other signs easing us into meditation are gentler still. Interspersed at infrequent intervals by the booming croaks of bullfrogs, the incredible imitations by a brace of mockingbirds fill the air and human hearts with joy, praise and thanks.
Riding a tram in Rome in September 1957, I was baptized into the local culture as I stood with a firm grasp on an overhead support. Suddenly, the growing crowd moved a young mother flush in front of me. With evident strength and dexterity, she, too, was holding an overhead support while she breast-fed her little baby with delight. Her face indicated that this was what mothers should always do.
Apparition that it was, it was also a supreme moment of meditation. Who could ever possibly think of bringing any harm to such a mother or her baby? And to think that her baby, barring untoward circumstances, is now about 59 years old!
A second apparition from a tram back then was a man – with his back to us to be sure – wetting the old Roman wall in the process of easing nature. It was at that time that I nicknamed the Romans “children of nature.” Surely, a meditation.
“May I?” a Dutch lady asked in 1960, holding her hand over my head.
“Of course!” I answered obligingly. Upon touching my hair, she exclaimed,
“Es ist wie baumwolle!” (It is like cotton). Meditating, now it also looks like cotton.
Powerful meditations are ancient churches, the Catacombs, the Colosseum, Roman Forum and the other ancient ruins of Rome, Herculaneum and Pompeii. And so it is almost universally with the city of man, like the huge Domus Aurea (Golden House) of Nero, vying for attention, dominance and meaning with the City of God.
Flying over the frozen Alps from Zurich to Logano, Switzerland was always a background for meditation. Likewise flying back from Europe became dramatic and heart-stopping as the plane eased away from Scotland toward the icy waters of the North Atlantic. Shortly, one or the other iceberg appeared, then dozens, hundreds and more, starkly outlined from 35,000 feet, reminiscent of the ill-fated Titanic.
Daniel 3 sets us up for praise, thanksgiving and meditation, in particular verses 57, 65, 66 and 70 with regard to winds, peaceful weather, storms, heat, icebergs and such, “Bless the Lord, all you works of the Lord… All you winds, bless the Lord… Fire and heat, bless the Lord… Hoarfrost and snow, bless the Lord.”
Mother Nature, the people around us and the rapidly changing conditions of our environment and life encourage so much meditation that all we must do is stay focused on life as it comes at us, but especially as it unfolds deep within us.
(Father Jerome LeDoux, SVD, lives in retirement at St. Augustine Seminary in Bay St. Louis. He has written “Reflections on Life since 1969.)

Millennial reflections
Father Jeremy Tobin, O.Praem
Someone told me enthusiastically that Pope Francis made the biggest impact on his life since John XXIII. I have been having similar feelings since this “pope of compassion and mercy” came on the scene. His gifts for penetrating barriers and fostering unity are amazing in this world of labels and distinctions.
We have been needing a Pope Francis for a very long time. Today he stood up in a joint meeting of Congress and delivered. He did not disappoint. Afterwards I received several calls from “disaffected Catholics” who expressed a joy and affirmation. They resonated with his message and felt that they too, were part of us. You see that is what Pope Francis does, whether it is serving food at Catholic Charities in Washington or in a barrio in Paraguay. He brings people together. The National Mall was filled as far as the eye could see. He speaks, he lives, he demonstrates the Joy of the Gospel.
As much as he says, he lives and acts it out. Despite the massive security he reaches out to touch people. Babies are handed to him by Secret Service agents.
He stood up in Congress where President Obama stands to give the State of the Union. Pope Francis gave his “State of the Union.” He did this in perfect English with a charming Argentine accent. How many of us English speaking priests read Spanish as clearly as he reads English? (he practiced this a lot, I am sure). He nailed it.
“We the people of this continent are not fearful of foreigners, because most of us were once foreigners. I say this to you as the son of immigrants.”
He raises up four icons of what America is: Abraham Lincoln on the 150th anniversary of his assassination, Martin Luther King, Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton. These are chosen because “Men and women of good will are marking the anniversaries of several great Americans…They shaped fundamental values which will endure forever in the spirit of the American People.”
To hear the Pope say “I think of the march which Martin Luther King led from Selma to Montgomery 50 years ago as part of his ‘dream’ of full civil and political rights for African Americans,” while the camera focused on the face of Rep. John Lewis who remembers shedding blood on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, makes me proud.
Then he focuses, “in these times when social concerns are so important, I cannot fail to mention the Servant of God, Dorothy Day, who founded the Catholic Worker Movement. Her social activism, her passion for justice and for the cause of the oppressed, were inspired by the Gospel.”
Hearing the Pope at the most prestigious platform of the nation say words like these  energizes us who work for justice and equality and human rights fueled by the Gospel. They affirm that our cause is right.
He also refers to (to date his masterpiece) Laudato Si affirming that business is a noble vocation. I have heard business called many things, but the Pope raises it to a vocation because it can improve the world and create jobs as essential to the service of the common good.  He further talks about “our common home” and speaks to all people. “We need a conversation which includes everyone since the environmental challenge we are undergoing, and its human roots, concern and affect us all.”
He further says in Laudato Si “I call for a courageous and responsible effort to ‘redirect our steps’ (61), and to avert the most serious effects of the environmental deterioration caused by human activity.”
Pope Francis pulls no punches. He knows from the halls of Congress his message will go out to the nation and the world. He planned this for the great conference COP 21 in Paris in December, an international meeting to debate how to fully control climate change.
He spoke of the sacredness of life in all its stages. He urged us to really get a grip on the refugee crisis, the greatest since World War II. When he talks of immigrants he says “See their faces, hear their stories.”
He lives his message every day. He moved on to the Catholic Charities in Washington DC to practice “Compassion in Action” and feed the poor.
Our response? Go and do likewise.
(Father Jeremy Tobin, O.Praem, lives at the Priory of St. Moses the Black, Jackson.)

Kneading our faith
By Fran Lavelle
On Sept. 20, parishes around the country celebrate Catechetical Sunday. In 1935, the Vatican under the leadership of Pope Pius XI, published On the Better Care and Promotion of Catechetical Education, a document that asked every country to acknowledge the importance of the church’s teaching ministry. The church also asked that we recognize those who serve in our communities as catechists.
This ministry of teaching in the name of the church has a profound importance, which is why catechists are formally commissioned. It is, therefore, fitting that we set aside a day to highlight this ministry and invite the entire church community to think about our responsibility to share our faith with others. Be assured of my gratitude and prayers as you begin anew.
Since the early 1970s the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) has had a role in preparing materials, including a theme, for Churches in the U.S. to focus our attention on a particular subject.  This year’s theme is “Safeguarding the Dignity of all Human Persons.”
Not so jingoistic, nor does it roll off the tongue like a slick Madison Avenue advertising slogan, but don’t let that stop you from really discovering the richness and significance of this statement. When we move beyond slogans and really open ourselves up to the challenge this theme presents, the gifts and graces for each of us are untold. If people of faith, especially Catholics, took seriously the call to safeguarding the dignity of humanity, coupled with Pope Francis’ Jubilee Year of Mercy we could transform the face of the Earth. These two directives simultaneously and intentionally practiced have the power to end war, defeat hatred, create lasting peace and transform societies.
Safeguarding the dignity of each human person comes from Genesis and is the primary foundation for all human understanding of self. Genesis 1:26-27 teaches us that all people of all lands, of all languages, of all faiths and all time are made in God’s image and likeness.  We, despite our best efforts to act in the contrary, cannot assume that in God’s eyes our own worth is greater than the worth of any other people, culture, or generation.  Sadly for many of us, we never come to know the reality of our own creation in God’s likeness and image.
The concept is overwhelming. Psalm 149:14 reminds us, “I praise you, because I am wonderfully made; wonderful are your works! My very self you know.” Let us take up the challenge to see ourselves as wonderfully made and allow ourselves to see others as wonderfully made as well.
It is a high order and difficult task especially in light of the hatred we witness around the globe and in our own neighborhoods on a daily basis. The challenge is to remain at once centered on your own dignity while recognizing that “the other” was created in God’s likeness too. I was reminded of a 1985 song by Sting entitled, “Russians.” In it he says, “We share the same biology, regardless of ideology. What might save us, me, and you, is that the Russians love their children too.” Isn’t that still true today? Replace Russians with whomever the other is in our lives and the reality is still the same. We do share the same biology, but more than that we were all born imprinted with the perfect love of God. Yes, all of us.
Our Catholic faith tradition is rich with examples of mercy. The Catechism of the Catholic Church instructs us in Part Three: Life in Christ:
2447. “The works of mercy are charitable actions by which we cosme to the aid of our neighbor in his spiritual and bodily necessities. Instructing, advising, consoling, comforting are spiritual works of mercy, as are forgiving and bearing wrongs patiently. The corporal works of mercy consist especially in feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, clothing the naked, visiting the sick and imprisoned, and burying the dead. Among all these, giving alms to the poor is one of the chief witnesses to fraternal charity: it is also a work of justice pleasing to God.
What must we do as members of the Body of Christ to inspire, uphold, encourage and engage ourselves and others to take seriously these directives?  If not us, who?
In 1972, Dorothy Law Nolte wrote, “Children Learn What They Live.” My favorite axioms of this piece are:
If children live with hostility, they learn to fight.
If children live with fear, they learn to be apprehensive.
If children live with tolerance, they learn patience.
If children live with acceptance, they learn to love.
If children live with honesty, they learn truthfulness.
We cannot give what we do not possess. Let us then learn to embrace our own dignity so that we may defend it in others and may we know mercy that we may show mercy. It is an exciting opportunity to transform these words into action.  Amen? Amen!
(Fran Lavelle is Director of the Department of Faith Formation.)

Complete the Circle
By George Evans
I recently celebrated the 50th reunion with other participants of a six week summer service project at St. Francis Center and St. Francis of Assisi Parish in Greenwood during June and July 1965. At the time I was a seminarian at a Benedictine Monastery in Conception, Missouri. I came with nine other seminarians to Greenwood and lived in a Boy Scout hut in the woods behind St. Francis of Assisi Parish and volunteered to help two Franciscan priests, Fathers Nathaniel and Daniel, in their work during that turbulent fascinating time of change in Mississippi.
At the time Father Nathaniel was the pastor of St. Francis of Assisi Parish and the co-founder along with Miss Kate Jordan Foote of St. Francis Center in Greenwood. Together they had started Pax Christi, a lay institute for women, whose mission was to serve the needs of the black community in Greenwood.
The center was located in the middle of the black community and provided the entire spectrum of services from food and clothing to literacy and tutoring programs, financial counseling, healthcare services and anything else that might arise.
The center was staffed by the ladies of Pax Christi.   They were assisted in the summer by a score of female volunteers primarily from Catholic colleges for women in the Midwest. We seminarians worked primarily with the young boys in the neighborhood in educational and recreational activities. A benefactor had provided some undeveloped land not far out of town for the parish use.
We would load up a bus every morning and go to the property and work with the kids to help fix up a cabin on site and clear a playing field for various sports activities. After returning we would work on any of the center activities that needed us including the pharmacy, educational programs and recreational programs in the gym. We converted one comer of the gym into a teen center.
The young women worked in all the activities of the day at the center and especially with the young girls and women from the neighborhood. We all joined together for celebration of the Eucharist every afternoon before dinner. What special celebrations they were. It dawned on all of us that bringing to the altar the work and service shared during the day enriched the Mass in wonderful ways and encouraged us to return the next day fed by the Lord’s own body and blood and enriched by the strength of the united worshiping body.
The reunion was a small group. Fifty years had taken its toll in deaths, health issues and lost contact. Eight of us gathered in Jackson on Friday night for a wonderful dinner and reminiscences of the unique summer of 1965. Stories abounded and the dreams of our youth recounted. Father Nathaniel and Miss Kate were recalled for their incredible leadership and dedication to a mission still today ongoing in Greenwood though under different circumstances.
On Saturday six of us journeyed to Greenwood where we met with Father Greg Plata, OFM, at St. Francis. Memories flowed over us as he led us on a tour of the parish. Much of what we knew 50 years ago is still incorporated in a larger and more developed plant. The most nostalgic moments for the men was a journey back into the woods on the back of the property where the Boy Scout hut has been lost to the elements over the last 50 years. We tromped around in the woods until it became clear where the hut had been. We wondered how we had survived without air conditioning and only an army cot for sleeping – we were all young and doing the Lord’s work and that made it easy.
The 50 year perspective was eye opening. In 1965 everything in Greenwood was completely segregated.   The 10 seminarians were never invited to Immaculate Heart of Mary, the defacto “white” church at the time.   Today Father Greg is pastor of it and St. Francis of Assisi and white, black and Hispanic parishioners attend Mass at both churches. In 1965 many people we worked with had trouble registering to vote. Today many city and county elected officials are black.
Public schools are all integrated at every level. Many changes for the better have occurred. However, much still needs to be done. Crushing poverty is still rampant and not only in the black community. The public schools which were white are now overwhelmingly black and not very good. Good jobs are few and far between.
Problems that exist throughout the Delta are still present in Greenwood. St. Francis Center has recently closed due to changing times and St. Francis of Assisi School continues to offer great grade school education but relies on contributions and benefactors from many different places in the country plus wonderful Sisters to keep going.
We need to keep working as we did 50 years ago. The issues are different but the needs of people persist. The joy we found in service in 1965 is still available today if we serve and support St. Francis Church and School. The same can be said as we work for and serve all in need in our own parishes and communities.
Its up to each of us to find and identify the great needs of today and live the Gospel by bringing Jesus to bear on the lives of the needy by our compassion, generosity, care and concern. The happiness that will follow will be as great as the service provided. It worked for us in 1965 and will   the same in 2015.
(George Evans is a pastoral minister at Jackson St. Richard Parish.)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
God, as I understand him, is not very well understood. A colleague of mine, now deceased, was fond of saying that. It’s a wise comment.
Anyone who claims to understand God is deceived because the very first dogma we have about God affirms that God is ineffable. That means that we can know God, but never adequately capture God in a concept. God is unimaginable. God cannot be circumscribed and put into a mental picture of any kind. Thank goodness too. If God could be understood then God would be as limited as we are.
But God is infinite. Infinity, precisely because it’s unlimited, cannot be circumscribed. Hence it cannot be captured in a mental picture. Indeed, we don’t even have a way of picturing God’s gender. God is not a man, not a woman, and not some hybrid, half-man and half-woman. God’s gender, like God’s nature, is intellectually inconceivable. We can’t grasp it and have no language or pronoun for it. God, in a modality beyond the categories of human thought, is somehow perfect masculinity and perfect femininity all at the same time. It’s a mystery beyond us.
But while that mystery cannot be grasped with any rational adequacy, we can know it intimately, and indeed know it so deeply that it’s meant to be the most intimate of all knowledge in our lives. It’s no accident that the bible uses the verb “to know” to connote sexual intimacy. There are different ways of knowing, some more inchoate, intuitive, and intimate than others. We can know God in a radical intimacy, even as we cannot conceptualize God with any adequacy. And that’s also true of all the deep realities in life, we can know them and relate to them intimately, but we can never fully understand them.
So where does that leave us with God? In the best of places! We are not on a blind date, struggling to develop intimacy with a complete stranger, with an unknown person who could be benign or malignant. God may be ineffable, but God’s nature is known. Divine revelation, as seen through nature, as seen through other religions, and especially as seen through Jesus, spells out what’s inside God’s ineffable reality. And what’s revealed there is both comforting beyond all comfort and challenging beyond all challenge.
What’s revealed in the beauty of creation, in the compassion that’s the hallmark of all true religion, and in Jesus’ revelation of his Father, takes us beyond a blind date into a trustworthy relationship.  Nature, religion, and Jesus conspire together to reveal an Ultimate Reality, a Ground of Being, a Creator and Sustainer of the universe, a God, who is wise, intelligent, prodigal, compassionate, loving, forgiving, patient, good, trustworthy, and beautiful beyond imagination.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, once, in a mystical vision, saw all of this hidden inside the eyes of Jesus. Staring at a painting of Jesus on a church-wall one day, Jesus’ eyes suddenly became transfigured and this what Teilhard saw: “These eyes which at first were so gentle and filled with pity that I thought my mother stood before me, became an instant later, like those of a woman, passionate and filled with the power to subdue, yet at the same time so imperiously pure that under their domination it would have been physically impossible for the emotions to go astray.
And then they changed again, and became filled with a noble, virile majesty, similar to that which one sees in the eyes of men of great courage or refinement or strength, but incomparably more lofty to behold and more delightful to submit to. This scintillation of diverse beauties was so complete, so captivating, and also so swift that I felt it touch and penetrate all my powers simultaneously, so that the very core of my being vibrated in response to it, sounding a unique note of expansion and happiness.
Now while I was ardently gazing deep into the pupils of Christ’s eyes, which had become abysses of fiery, fascinating life, suddenly I beheld rising up from the depths of those same eyes what seemed like a cloud , blurring and blending all that variety I have been describing to you. Little by little an extraordinary expression of great intensity, spread over the diverse shades of meaning which the divine eyes revealed, first of all penetrating them and then finally absorbing them all.
… And I stood dumbfounded. For this final expression, which had dominated and gathered up into itself all the others, was indecipherable. I simply could not tell whether it denoted an indescribable agony or a superabundance of triumphant joy.”
God cannot be deciphered, circumscribed, or captured in human thought; but, from what can be deciphered, we’re in good, safe hands. We can sleep well at night. God has our back.  In the end, both for humanity as a whole and for our own individual lives, all will be well, and all will be well, and every manner of being will be well. God is good.
(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX.)