IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
All of us live with some wounds, bad habits, addictions and temperamental flaws that are so deeply engrained and long-standing that it seems like they are part of our genetic make-up. And so we tend to give into a certain quiet despair in terms of ever being healed of them.
Experience teaches us this. There’s the realization at some point in our lives that the wounds and flaws which pull us down cannot be simply be turned off like a water-tap. Willpower and good resolutions alone are not up to the task. What good is it to make a resolution never to be angry again? Our anger will invariably return. What good is it to make a resolution to give up some addictive habit, however small or big? We will soon enough again be overcome by its lure.
And what good does it do to try to change some temperamental flaw we’ve inherited in our genes or inhaled in the air of our childhood? All the good resolutions and positive thinking in the world normally don’t change our make-up.
So what do we do? Just live with our wounds and flaws and the unhappiness and pettiness that this brings into our lives? Or, can we heal? How do we weed-out our weaknesses?
There are many approaches to healing: Psychology tells us that good counseling and therapy can help cure us of our wounds, flaws and addictions. Therapy and counseling can bring us to a better self-understanding and that can help us change our behavior. But psychology also admits that this has its limitations. Knowing why we do something doesn’t always empower us to change our behavior. Sociology too has insights to contribute: There is, as Parker Palmer puts it, the therapy of a public life. Healthy interaction with family, friends, community and church can be a wonderfully steadying thing in our lives and help take us beyond our lonely wounds and our congenital missteps.
Various recovery (12-Step) programs also contribute something valuable: These programs are predicated on the premise that self-understanding and willpower by themselves are often powerless to actually change our behavior.  A higher power is needed, and that higher power is found in ritual, communal support, radical honesty, admittance of our helplessness and a turning over of ourselves to a someone or something beyond us that can do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. Recovery programs are invaluable, but they too aren’t the answer to all of our problems.
Finally, not least, there are various theories and practices of healing that ground themselves in spirituality. These range from emphasizing church-going itself as a healing, to emphasizing the sacrament of reconciliation, to recommending prayer and meditation, to counseling various ascetical practices, to sending people off to holy sites, to letting oneself be prayed-over by some group or faith-healer, to undergoing long periods of spiritual guidance under a trained director.
There’s value in all of these and perhaps the full healing of a temperamental flaw, a bad habit, an addiction or a deep wound depends upon drawing water from each of these wells. However, beyond this simple listing, I would like to offer an insight from the great mystic, John of the Cross, vis-à-vis coming to psychological, moral and spiritual healing.
In his last book, “The Living Flame of Love,” John proposes a theory of, and a process for, healing. In essence, it runs this way: For John, we heal of our wounds, moral flaws, addictions and bad habits by growing our virtues to the point where we become mature enough in our humanity so that there’s no more room left in our lives for the old behaviors that used to drag us down. In short, we get rid of the coldness, bitterness and pettiness in our hearts by lighting inside our hearts enough warm fires to burn out the coldness and bitterness.
The algebra works this way: The more we grow in maturity, generativity and generosity, the more our old wounds, bad habits, temperamental flaws and addictions will disappear because our deeper maturity will no longer leave room for them in our lives. Positive growth of our hearts, like a vigorous plant, eventually chokes-out the weeds. If you went to John of the Cross and asked him to help you deal with a certain bad habit in your life, his focus wouldn’t be on how to weed-out that habit. Instead the focus would be on growing your virtues: What are you doing well? What are your best qualities? What goodness in you needs to be fanned fan into fuller flame?
By growing what’s positive in us, we eventually become big-hearted enough so that there’s no room left for our former bad habits. The path to healing is to water our virtues so that these virtues themselves will be the fire that burns out the festering wounds, addictions, bad habits and temperamental flaws that have, for far too long, plagued our lives and kept us wallowing in weakness and pettiness rather than walking in maturity, generosity and generativity.
(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX.)

Kneading Faith
By Fran Lavelle
It’s late July and before we know it our college students will be heading off to campus. For those of you who have sent a child away to college I am certain you’ll agree there can be a lot of anxiety surrounding the event. As many of you know, I spent 15 years working as the full time Catholic campus minister at Mississippi State and from that experience have gained some insights helpful to parents of college students. Here’s my list of three things every parent should consider:

Trust God
This seems like a no brainer, but for many parents letting go of control of their son or daughter is unbearable. They feel like if they have all the cards they can prevent their child from life’s more difficult situations. I get it. Some parents might be looking back at their own track record in college. Some of us may have not always made the best choices.
Thinking back to our own behavior can be helpful in that we know the temptations and pitfalls awaiting young people in college. Peer pressure is as real as it’s ever been. We need only to look to the Old Testament for the consequences of temptation. We all know what choice Eve made in the garden. We are not all that different. But knowing the reality that temptations and pressures are part of college life means we need to trust God all the more.
We need to allow our young adult children to make mistakes. We need to let them fail, fall down, get their hearts broken and stand back up on their own two feet knowing they survived and have learned from each experience. We need to trust that they will learn and appreciate a greater dependence on God as they struggle with their newly minted role of young adults.

Trust yourself
Yes, trust yourself that you have raised a good person. You have given them opportunities to learn, grow and succeed. You have provided the necessary infrastructure for them to grow in their faith, their studies and hopefully their life skills. You have to trust that the foundation you have put in place is sturdy and durable.
Yes, there will be challenges that your child faces in college that will seem like an assault to the foundation you have provided, but you must trust that the foundation you built is solid. Who remembers the wisdom of this 38 Special song, “Just hold on loosely, but don’t let go. If you cling too tightly, you’re gonna lose control”? Sure, this song is about a lost love interest, but the wisdom rings true.
Hold on, loosely. By doing so you are there to help them navigate life when they really need your help. The loosely part means you let them handle the non-life threatening stuff. Allow your child to grow trusting you have done your job and done it well.

Trust your child
As a parent you know your child’s gifts and you know their challenges. They need to feel the freedom that this new stage in life offers them. They need to know you are there, but they need to learn to trust their own discernment and decision making. Second Corinthians 5:7 teaches us, “We walk by faith, not by sight.”
College is the perfect time to grow in our faith walk. They will not see the road ahead but in walking by faith and not sight deepens our dependence on God. Allowing our children to trust their own judgement gives them confidence to make increasingly more important decisions. So too it will increase their dependence on God and hopefully be strengthened and enriched by their prayer life.
After the last box is unpacked, a semester of learning, growing and experiencing life awaits your college-aged child. Let us take comfort in the words of the prophet Jeremiah, “Blessed are those who trust in the LORD; the LORD will be their trust.”
(Fran Lavelle is Director of the Department of Faith Formation.)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
Today we no longer understand the value and power of ritual. This is more than an individual failing. It’s the cultural air we breathe. In the words of Robert L. Moore, we’ve gone “ritually tone-deaf.”  The effects of this can be seen everywhere: Allow me two examples:
First, we see this today in the failure by so many couples to grasp the need to formalize their relationship in a ceremony of marriage. They make a private commitment to live together but feel no need to formalize this before a civil authority or inside a church. Their belief is that their love and private commitment to each other is all that’s needed. What does a formal ceremony or a church blessing add to that commitment? The prevalent feeling is that a formal ceremony, ideally even in a church, is nice as a celebration and as something to please others, but, beyond that, it adds little or nothing in terms of anything important. What does ritual contribute to actual life?
We see this same view in many current attitudes towards church-going, prayer, and the sacraments. What’s the value of participating in something when seemingly our hearts aren’t in it? What’s the value of going to church when we feel it’s meaningless? What’s the value of praying formally when, today, our hearts are a million miles away from what our words are saying?  Further still, what’s the value in going to church or in saying prayers at those times when we feel a certain positive repugnance to what we’re doing? Indeed these questions are often expressed as an accusation: People are just going through the motions of church and prayer, parroting words that aren’t really meaningful to them, going through an empty ritual! What’s the value in that? The value is that the ritual itself can hold and sustain our hearts in something deeper than the emotions of the moment.
Matthew Crawford, in his recent book, “The World Beyond Your Head,” suggests that ritual acts positively even when our feelings are negative. His words:  “Consider as an example someone who suffers not from some ragging emotion of lust, resentment, or jealousy … but rather sadness, discontent, boredom, or annoyance. A wife, let us say, feels this way about her husband. But she observes a certain ritual: she says “I love you” upon retiring at night. She says this not as a report about her feelings – it is not sincere – but neither it is a lie. What it is is a kind of prayer. She invokes something that she values – the marital bond – and in doing so turns away from her present discontent and toward this bond, however elusive it may be as an actual experience.
It has been said that ritual (as opposed to sincerity) has “subjunctive” quality to it: one acts as if some state of affairs were true, or could be. … It relieves one of the burden of ‘authenticity’.  …  “The ritual of saying ‘I love you’ … alters somewhat the marital scene; it may not express love so much as to invoke it, by incantation. One spouse invites the other to join with her in honoring the marriage, something one could honor. It is an act of faith: in one another, but also in a third thing, which is the marriage itself.”
What Crawford highlights here is precisely, “a third thing,” that is, something beyond the emotions of a given moment and our faith in each other, namely, the institution of marriage itself as a ritual container, as a sacrament that can hold and sustain a relationship beyond the emotions and feelings of the moment. Marriage, as an institution, human and divine, is designed to sustain love inside of and beyond the emotional and affective fluctuations that inevitably occur inside of every intimate relationship. Marriage allows two people to continue to love each other despite boredom, irritation, anger, bitterness, wound, and, in some cases, even infidelity.  The ritual act of getting married places one inside that container.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, when preaching at marriage ceremonies, would frequently give this counsel to couples: Today you are much in love and you feel that love will sustain your marriage. It wouldn’t. But marriage can sustain your love. Being ritually tone-deaf, we struggle to understand that.
The same holds true for church-going, the sacraments, and private prayer. It’s not a question of going through the motions on days when the feelings aren’t there. Rather it’s going through the ritual as an incantation, as an honoring of our relationship to God, and as an act of faith in prayer.
If we only said “I love you” when we actually felt that emotion and if we only prayed when we actually felt like it, we wouldn’t express love or pray very often. When we say “I love you” and when we do formal prayer at those times when our feelings seem to belie our words, we aren’t being hypocritical or simply going through the motions, we’re actually expressing some deeper truths.
(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
By Father Jerome LeDoux
For the purpose of discussing, analyzing and understanding, love is broken down into types (kinds) of love and styles of loving. In his book, “The Four Loves,”C.S. Lewis speaks of the Greeks’ modes. Storge, or empathy bond that likes someone through the fondness of familiarity, such as family members in gift-love, or people bonded by chance in such a way that there is a need-love.
Storge has great potential for good or bad. Of this love we say, “It’s a thin line between love and hate,” whether through jealousy, envy or smothering, for “familiarity breeds contempt,” since familiar folks are so sensitized to each other.
Philia, or friend bond, is the strong bond that exists between people, usually equals, who share common values, interests or activities. This kind of love does not have romantic features, but it is a great foundation for romantic love between man and woman. In fact, without it, romantic love can be dangerous, relying on erotic emotions that may have an all-too-short shelf life in everyday love. Love is much more enduring if it begins with friendship, with like instead of love.
Eros is the emotional expression of sexual love, of the desire to be as close together as possible through our sense of touch, taste, smell, sight and hearing. Erotic love glories in and is expressed through our five senses. One who is in love cannot get enough of love’s enhancement through the five senses. Perhaps the greatest danger to us is that we will love without first liking the person we love. Again, friendship – like – is the human foundation for lasting agape.
Agape is the highest kind of love, good will, benevolence that is predicated of God and secondarily of us. This benevolence or well-wishing derives directly from the Latin bene volens, the radical theme of the song of the angels over the hills of Bethlehem Christmas morning, “Peace on earth, good will to humans.”
The way kinds or types of love are expressed in our life is further explained by styles of loving. Based on and akin to the kinds of love, styles of loving, or love styles, actually track the types of love while adding three other types. In his 1973 book, “Colours of Love,” researcher John A. Lee uses six Greek words to explain six distinct styles of loving, even assigning colors to each style: eros, red; ludus, blue; storge, yellow; pragma, green; manic, violet; agape, orange.
Naturally, just as in the case of kinds of love, descriptions of the styles of loving overlap what the Greeks had to say about love. Added to this overlap are insights arising from John Lee’s personal experiences and conversations with others about the subject of love. What we have said about the kinds of love remains true as we discuss the styles of loving. There are but a few specific additions to make.
Ludus, or ludic love (Latin ludus or game) is a playful form of love that can have a good purpose, such as people in love teasing each other, or a harmful bent, such as a man or woman playing the field and not becoming serious about anything. Pragma, pragmatic love, has a shopping list of qualities and assets desirable in a prospective partner. This, obviously, has an upside and downside.
Mania is self-explanatory, driven by possessiveness and jealousy too painful to live with and extremely destructive of any human love relationship. Minus this one, a wise blend of the other kinds and styles of loving is desirable for us.
Apart from individuals in relatively small enclaves of cynics or emotionally scarred victims of childhood/adolescent/adult physical and/or sexual abuse, all of us feel a strong attraction to love. But love is so gripping and euphoric that we must constantly choose the best blends of love. Though of spurious origin, the saying, “Love makes the world go round” is true at home, at school, at church, everywhere.
So, either consciously or subconsciously, we constantly scour our environs for the best templates of love. For instance, iconic basketball coach John Wooden said famously, “The best thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.” (I also heard this attributed to Father Theodore Hesburgh, longtime president of Notre Dame University)
Of course, the good coach was spot on, but only 50 percent so. The other 50 percent is, “The best thing a woman can do for her children is to love their father.” We give him a pass for omitting the 50 percent that perhaps most men would. In any case, children will imitate the template of love most immediate to them at home. We can safely say that there is nothing more important in the earliest years of a child.
(Father Jerome LeDoux, SVD, is pastor of Our Mother of Mercy Parish in Fort Worth, Texas. He has written “Reflections on Life since 1969.)

Catholic in the Countryside
GUEST COLUMN
By Bishop Paul D. Etienne
The implications of Pope Francis’ encyclical on the environment, Laudato Si, are beginning to sink in like a light rain, or even a drizzle. And like precipitation, this encyclical doesn’t discriminate who it’s aimed at: it has something to say to everyone. As the Holy Father made clear, “all of us can cooperate as instruments of God for the care of creation, each according to his or her own culture, experience, involvements and talents.”
Yet in a particular way, Laudato Si resonates with those in rural areas, those who live and work closest to God’s glorious creation.
Pope Francis takes as a starting point the goodness of God’s creation, a truth that rural Americans who work with nature see firsthand every day. God’s masterful creation is not only good, but it works like clockwork, as “everything is connected.” (#91) This harmonious connection certainly exists in nature, but a central point of Laudato Si is that human activity has an impact – and is in turn impacted – by our natural environment. In other words, there is a fundamental link between mankind and creation. (#66)
Rural people are uniquely situated at the heart of this relationship. We deal with the raw materials of nature, just as Jesus himself did, when as a carpenter he worked “in daily contact with the matter created by God, to which he gave form by his craftsmanship.” (#98) We make our homes not in concrete jungles, but in the very fields and forests that sustain earth’s life. Our livelihoods are directly tied to the integrity of creation.
As rural people, our relationship with creation is self-evident, not obscured by degrees of separation, but noticeable in immediate and tangible ways. So if Laudato Si is a call to defend God’s creation, rural men and women need to be the front line of that defense. This is a great responsibility, but it’s also a response to God’s invitation to be stewards of his creation.
So how can Catholics in the countryside live out the teachings of this encyclical?
Fundamentally, we need to reground ourselves in the truth that creation is not something for us to exploit as we see fit, but is instead a reality with which we are called to cooperate. Humility should guide our interactions with nature and her resources. We can apply this to the industries that thrive in our rural communities, from forestry to mineral extraction. Let us ask ourselves: Are we cultivating nature, or dominating it into submission? Are the choices we make made with the wellbeing of the planet and our neighbors — near and far — in mind, or are they solely motivated by a desire to turn a profit?
We may call endeavors that harvest and use natural resources “businesses,” but the reality is that they have social, ethical and environmental dimensions that are just as relevant as economic outcomes.
This is especially true of agriculture. Although there was not a dedicated section on farming in Laudato Si, Pope Francis used ag-related terminology more than 30 times. Clearly, agriculture has to do with more than just making money. Our Holy Father illustrates how certain farming techniques injure not only natural ecology – through pollution and deforestation—but also human ecology – by disrupting rural communities and forcing family and proprietary farmers out of business. He suggests alternatives that are sustainable, working in harmony not only with nature but also healthy patterns of human living.
The approach to agriculture that clearly informed Pope Francis can only be described as “vocational.” That is to say, farming is not just a way to make a living; it’s a way of life, a unique and privileged way of cooperating with God’s plan. Catholic Rural Life, a national organization of which I am currently the president, is in the midst of a project to help articulate this vocation in the 21st century. In partnership with the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, we will produce a set of resources that give faith-based, practical guidance to the next generation of food and ag leaders. I believe that this is one way of putting the teachings of Laudato Si into action in rural America.
We may not all be farmers, or have livelihoods that directly put us in touch with nature. But we all have a vocation, a call to holiness. And for all of us – but especially rural Catholics — that means respecting, cherishing and cooperating with God’s glorious creation. May Laudato Si help bring about the needed conversion in our hearts to live this truth of our faith.
(Bishop Etienne, the bishop of the Diocese of Cheyenne, is the president of Catholic Rural Life, a national organization dedicated to applying the teachings of Jesus Christ and his Church to rural America. To learn more about Catholic Rural Life, and how to become a member, visit catholicrurallife.org.)