IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
On the Feast of the Transfiguration in 1923, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin found himself alone at sunrise in the Ordos desert in China, watching the sun spread its orange and red light across the horizon.  He was deeply moved, humanly and religiously. What he most wanted to do in response was to celebrate Mass, to somehow consecrate the whole world to God. But he had no altar, no bread, and no wine. So he resolved to make the world itself his altar and what was happening in the world the bread and the wine for his Mass. Here, in paraphrase, is the prayer he prayed over the world, awakening to the sun that morning in China.
O God, since I have neither bread, nor wine, nor altar, I will raise myself beyond these symbols and make the whole earth my altar and on it will offer to you all the labors and sufferings of the world.
As the rising sun moves as a sheet of fire across the horizon the earth wakes, trembles, and begins its daily tasks. I will place on my paten, O God, the harvest to be won by this renewal of labor. Into my chalice I will pour all the sap which is to be pressed out this day from the earth’s fruits.  My paten and my chalice are the depths of a soul laid widely open to all the forces which in a moment will rise up from every corner of the earth and converge upon the Spirit.
Grant me, Lord, to remember and make mystically present all those whom the light is now awakening to this new day. As I call these to mind, I remember first those who have shared life with me: family, community, friends and colleagues.  And I remember as well, more vaguely but all-inclusively, the whole of humanity, living and dead, and, not least, the physical earth itself, as I stand before you, O God, as a piece of this earth, as that place where the earth opens and closes to you.
And so, O God, over every living thing which is to spring up, to grow, to flower, to ripen during this day, I say again the words: “This is my body.” And over every death-force which waits in readiness to corrode, to wither, to cut down, I speak again your words which express the supreme mystery of faith: “This is my blood.” On my paten, I hold all who will live this day in vitality, the young, the strong, the healthy, the joy-filled; and in my chalice, I hold all that will be crushed and broken today as that vitality draws its life. I offer you on this all-embracing altar everything that is in our world, everything that is rising and everything that is dying, and ask you to bless it.
And our communion with you will not be complete, will not be Christian, if, together with the gains which this new day brings, we do not also accept, in our own name and in the name of the world, those processes, hidden or manifest, of enfeeblement, of aging, and of death, which unceasingly consume the universe, to its salvation or its condemnation.  Lord, God, we deliver ourselves up with abandon to those fearful forces of dissolution which, we blindly believe, will this cause our narrow egos to be replaced by your divine presence. We gather into a single prayer both our delight in what we have and our thirst for what we lack.
Lord, lock us into the deepest depths of your heart; and then, holding us there, burn us, purify us, set us on fire, sublimate us, till we become utterly what you would have us to be, through the annihilation of all selfishness inside us. Amen.
For Teilhard this, of course, was not to be confused with the celebration of the Eucharist in a church, rather he saw it as a “prolongation” or “extension” of the Eucharist, where the Body and Blood of Christ becomes incarnate in a wider bread and wine, namely, in the entire physical world which manifests the mystery of God’s flesh shining through all that is.
Teilhard was an ordained, Roman Catholic, priest, covenanted by his ordination to celebrate Mass for the world, to place bread on a paten and wine in a chalice and offer them to God for the world. We too, all of us Christians, by our baptism, are made priests and, like Teilhard, are covenanted to offer Mass for the world, that is, to offer up on our own metaphorical patens and chalices, bread and wine for the world, in whatever form this might take on a given day. There are many ways of doing this, but you might want to try this: Some morning as the sun is lighting-up the horizon, let its red and golden fire enflame your heart and your empathy so as to make you stretch out your hands and pray Teilhard’s Eucharistic prayer over an awakening world.
(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX.)

Guest Column
By Sister Constance Veit, lsp
Early in our community’s history, a group of townspeople who witnessed the Sisters’ humble charity toward the elderly dubbed them the “Little” Sisters of the Poor. The name stuck. Recently, however, we have become known to some as “the HHS Sisters” due to our lawsuit against the federal government over the Contraceptive Mandate. This issue has been pursuing us for over three years – pushing us out of our quiet, hidden lives into the unwelcome glare of the public eye – and there is no end in sight as our case now heads to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Why us? When will this journey end? I recently wondered as I prepared for yet another media interview about the case. But then a prayer attributed to Archbishop Oscar Romero, who was martyred in El Salvador, came to mind: “It helps, now and then, to step back and take a long view … We lay foundations that will need further development … It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord’s grace to enter and do the rest. We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker. We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs. We are prophets of a future not our own.”
Stepping back to take the long view helped me to answer the question, “Why us?” Perhaps, among religious communities serving in the United States, we are uniquely qualified to face our nation’s current threats to religious liberty. Our foundress, Saint Jeanne Jugan, was born at the height of the radically anti-Christian French Revolution and established our congregation in its tumultuous aftermath, with virtually no resources. By the time her earthly journey ended, her young community had grown to over 2.000 Little Sisters serving the elderly in nearly a dozen countries. Today we are present in 31 nations. Saint Jeanne Jugan was undoubtedly the prophet of a future not her own.
Based on our humble beginnings, we might say that the will to persevere in serving the poor and bearing witness to the Joy of the Gospel despite seemingly insurmountable obstacles has been written into the DNA of our Congregation. Generations of Little Sisters have soldiered on through two World Wars, civil wars and government persecution of religion in numerous countries around the globe, disregarding their own personal safety in order to stand by their Residents. Others have weathered earthquakes, tsunamis and natural disasters of all sorts. By God’s grace, they faithfully remained with the elderly regardless of dangers or harsh conditions.
Looking back over our long history, I realize that I stand on the shoulders of humble giants. The witness of Saint Jeanne Jugan and the thousands of Little Sisters who have gone before me gives me the courage to do one more interview – and to trust that tomorrow will take care of itself. As Saint Jeanne Jugan often said when faced with challenges, “Give us the house; if God fills it, God will not abandon it … If God is with us, it will be accomplished.”
Taking the long view I’ve come to a new appreciation of the power of God’s Providence. He has never abandoned us and I am confident that he will not leave us orphans in this challenging moment of our history.
Could it be that God is taking our HHS journey all the way to the Supreme Court to give us the opportunity to witness to our absolute confidence in his loving Providence? Could it be that God chose us for this struggle in order to underline the dignity of every human being created in his image and likeness?
God’s modus operandi is to use the weak of this world to confound the learned and the strong. What weaker or more unlikely prophets could he have chosen to confuse the great and powerful of our contemporary culture than Saint Jeanne Jugan, her Little Sisters of the Poor and the needy elderly? God’s mercy is from age to age on those who fear him; the Almighty will do great things for us – I’m sure of it!
(Sister Constance Veit is communications director for the Little Sisters of the Poor.)

Millennial reflections
Jeremy Tobin, O.Praem
Climate change has been on the front burner for a long time. Year after year the extremes in weather patterns have people saying, “See! There is climate change.” The deniers keep up their drum beat. Congress does nothing. Massive hurricanes tear up our seacoasts. Typhoons devastate Taiwan and the coast of China. Wildfires each year are more terrible than the last, and burn up the West. A plant springs a leak of toxic chemicals, and rivers for miles are polluted, wreaking havoc all over. Mississippi is having the worst heat wave in history. Much hullabaloo. But the deniers  soothe people and its back to the usual.
Then there is the recycle movement. Reduce landfills. Push for biodegradable materials. Do we really want people five hundred years from now doing dissertations on our plastic bottles in landfills?
Some of this may sound silly. People make jokes, but it is all very serious. The scientific consensus is in. We  are putting the future of our planet at serious risk.
Pope Francis takes this very seriously. In fact he has made this a centerpiece of his papacy.
Bernie Sanders writes: “Climate change is an unprecedented planetary emergency. If we don’t act aggressively now to combat it, there will be major and painful consequences in store later: rising oceans that inundate coastal areas, bigger super storms like Hurricane Sandy, worsening droughts, out-of-control wildfires, historic floods that come year after year, rising food prices, and millions of people displaced by climate disasters.”
Pope Francis, and this encyclical are making a powerful progressive impact across the world. The Atlantic Magazine reported:
In his Encyclical, Laudato Si, On Care for Our Common Home, Pope Francis rattles off fact after fact about the pitiful state of the earth: Pesticides have contaminated farmers soil. Air pollution has poisoned cities. Man-made waste checkers landscapes. There is not enough clean water for people to drink or tropical forests to regulate carbon in the atmosphere. Whole species of animals are dying out. In one place he says we are turning the planet into a filthy dump, but this planet is our home, all we got.
It is the poorest nations in the developing world that face the brunt of these conditions.
This encyclical is addressed to everyone on our planet, to remind us that there is such a thing as the common good, that all share and have a right to. Ecological crisis is also a summons to profound interior conversion.” He says “politics and technology have failed to save the earth.” Pope Francis criticizes “greed capitalism,” profit at all cost.
I want to focus on the interior conversion part, the spirituality part. To really change the situation involves an interior change. A spiritual renewal has to be built on the interdependence we have on the world and all nature. We are custodians, not dominating rulers.
A Catholic  source reports:
The Encyclical Laudato si’ (Praised Be You) is developed around the concept of integral ecology, as a paradigm able to articulate the fundamental relationships of the person: with God, with one’s self, with other human beings, with creation. As the Pope himself explains in n. 15, this movement starts (ch. I) by listening spiritually to the results of the best scientific research on environmental matters available today, “letting them touch us deeply and provide a concrete foundation for the ethical and spiritual itinerary that follows.” Science is the best tool by which we can listen to the cry of the earth.
Pope Francis, true to his patron, says again and again that we have a relationship with the earth, all its creatures. We are called to protect this patrimony and hand it on to future generations. We are not to exploit it. He analyses Genesis correctly by saying we are not to dominate but to nurture and care for it.
Again and again he blasts those who would simply strip the earth of resources for profit only. Unbridled capitalism is a sin, and he is clear on that.
So the attitude must be one of reverence for God’s handiwork. Like St. Francis we must see the creative power of God at work and assist it by preserving its resources.
(Father Jeremy Tobin, O.Praem, lives at the Priory of St. Moses the Black, Jackson.)

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.)