Reflections on Life
By Father Jerome LeDoux, SVD
“Father, I’m in town. Could a couple of my friends and I come by for confessions this afternoon?”
The phone call request had a familiar ring. Usually away for school, teenage Irish Travelers call frequently for confessions when in town. On the one hand, they are a congenial, delightful bunch of youngsters, but on the other hand they are very serious about their spiritual life. So I smiled and told them to come right over.
Three young ladies ranging from 15 to 17 came bustling in when I greeted them at the door. I can always rest assured that they will make themselves at home, raiding the unsalted, roasted pistachios and peanuts a bit, lolling around on the easy chairs and chatting nonstop about this, that and who knows what. Well disciplined, two stayed in the living room while one went to the secretary’s room for confession.
Those teenagers always give me a taste of the electronic age, sometimes using a cell phone to refresh their memory on the way of going to confession, at times just dialing up the list of DOs and DON’Ts that they can use to talk about their omissions and commissions. They might dial up the act of contrition to boot. They are quite electrified with modern gadgets, but nonetheless an electrifying group of youngsters, not allowing their cell phones to interfere with their social life.
As is customary among late-teenage Travelers, never far off is a discussion about an impending engagement or even the prospect of marriage. Despite the item of their yet-tender age, the heavy conversations on the weighty subject of the holy sacrament of matrimony invariably come up. Of course, negative experiences push me to slow down in the very young their desire to wed before they are mature.
Emotional, social and spiritual maturity in young ladies is generally achieved around their early twenties, but males usually lag years behind in achieving the same level of maturity. Keep in mind that severe immaturity is one of the main reasons marriage tribunals cite for granting the annulment of a marriage.
After the three had completed their confessions, I returned to the living room. Feet drawn up and holding their knees, two of the girls were squeezed together in one easy chair, looking for all the world like a duo of tiger cats. Yet, in spite of all that, far from being predators, they were likable and lovable teenagers.
Their mission accomplished, they socialized with me for a short while, then decided it was time to go. Hardly had I seen them out the door when I returned to the living room and spotted coins on the floor. It was an arresting sight, mainly because the youngsters had obviously left them there on display: 16 pennies, three nickels, three dimes, eight quarters, one Canadian dollar. It had to be the two tiger cats who went on a fishing expedition with their fingers down in the easy chair, discovering and extracting the unsuspected bounty lost over a period of several years.
That lineup of coins on the floor visible to anyone in the room bespoke a deep-set honesty in the trio of teenagers, any of whom could have made off with them without a trace, especially since I had no idea that the coins were there. More than any words could say, this incident bore witness to their trustworthiness.
It reminded me of my birthday two years ago when 21 of those youngsters trooped into the rectory armed with a small vegan birthday cake, candles and all. Hands down, it was the most memorable birthday I have ever experienced. Their thoughtfulness for someone five times their age was inspiring and touching.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of the teenagers was their spontaneous, unsolicited thought about making someone happy who perhaps was not being thought of much as he moved into the higher tiers of longevity. I am sure that all adults would like to see such qualities in all the teenagers in our lives.
With such thoughtfulness in their social and spiritual arsenal, it is no wonder that those teenage Travelers do not let their cell phones block their communication with those around them. Except where alert and tough-love parents intervene with prompt sternness and resolve, it is a veritable plague among youngsters – and some young adults as well – that cell phone use, texting, etc. sabotage family conversation at the table, in the living room, outside in picnic conditions and even in church.
We have a lot to learn from our teenagers, especially the Travelers. Other teenagers must learn to be alert and to learn from their inspiring peers.
(Father Jerome LeDoux, SVD, is pastor of Our Mother of Mercy Parish in Fort Worth, Texas. He has written “Reflections on Life since 1969.)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
What’s the use of an old-fashioned, hand-held lantern? Well, its light can be quite useful when it’s pitch-dark, but it becomes superfluous and unnoticeable in the noonday sun. Still, this doesn’t mean its light is bad, only that it’s weak.
If we hold that image in our minds, we will see both a huge irony and a profound lesson in the Gospels when they describe the arrest of Jesus. The Gospel of John, for example, describes his arrest this way: “Judas brought the cohort to this place together with guards sent by the chief priests and Pharisees, all carrying lanterns and torches.”  John wants us to see the irony in this, that is, the forces of this world have come to arrest and put on trial, Jesus, the Light of the world, carrying weak, artificial light, a lantern in the face of the Light of the world, puny light in the full face of the noonday sun. As well, in naming this irony, the Gospels are offering a second lesson: when we no longer walk in the light of Christ, we will invariably turn to artificial light.
This image, I believe, can serve as a penetrating metaphor for how the criticism that the Enlightenment has made of our Christian belief in God stands before what it is criticizing. That criticism has two prongs.
The first prong is this: The Enlightenment (Modernist Thought) submits that the God that is generally presented by our Christian churches has no credibility because that God is simply a projection of human desire, a god made in our own image and likeness, and a god that we can forever manipulate to serve self-interest. Belief in such a god, they say, is adolescent in that it is predicated on a certain naiveté, on an intellectual blindness that can be flushed out and remedied by a hard look at reality. An enlightened mind, it is asserted, sees belief in God as self-interest and as intellectual blindness.
There is much to be said, positively, for this criticism, given that much of atheism is a parasite off of bad theism. Atheism feeds off bad religion and, no doubt, many of the things we do in the name of religion are done out of self-interest and intellectual blindness. How many times, for instance, has politics used religion for its own ends? The first prong of the criticism that the Enlightenment makes of Christian belief is a healthy challenge to us as believers.
But it’s the second prong of this criticism that, I believe, stands like a lantern, a weak light, dwarfed in the noonday sun. Central to the Enlightenment’s criticism of belief in God is the assertion (perhaps better called prejudice) that faith is a naiveté, something like belief in Santa and the Easter Bunny, that we outgrow as we mature and open our minds more and more to knowledge and what’s empirically evident in the world.  What we see through science and honest observation, they believe, eventually puts to death our belief in God, exposing it as a naiveté. In essence, the assertion is that if you face up to the hard empirical facts of reality without blinking, with honesty and courage, you will cease to believe in God. Indeed, the very phrase “the Enlightenment” implies this. It’s only the unenlightened, pre-modernist mind that still can believe in God.  Moving beyond belief in God is enlightenment.
Sadly, Christianity has often internalized this prejudice and expressed it (and continues to express it) in the many forms of fear and anti-intellectualism within our churches. Too often we unwittingly agree with our critics that faith is a naiveté. We do it by believing the very thing our critics assert, namely, that if we studied and looked at things hard enough we would eventually lose our faith.
We betray this in our fear of the intellectual academy, in our paranoia about secular wisdom, in some of our fears about scientific knowledge, and by forever warning people to protect themselves against certain inconvenient truths within scientific and secular knowledge. In doing this, we, in fact, concede that the criticism made against us is true and, worse still, we betray that fact that we do not think that the truth of Christ will stand up to the world.
But, given the penetrating metaphor highlighted in Jesus’ arrest, there’s another way of seeing this: After we have conceded the truth of the legitimate findings of science and secular wisdom and affirmed that they need to be embraced and not defended against, then, in the light of John’s metaphor (worldly forces, carrying lanterns and torches, as they to arrest the Light of world to put it on trial), we should also see how dim are the lights of our world, not least, the criticism of the Enlightenment.
Lanterns and torches are helpful when the sun is down, but they’re utterly eclipsed by the light of the sun. Worldly knowledge too is helpful in its own way, but it is more-than dwarfed by the light of the Son.
(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is president of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, Texas.)

millennial reflections
Jeremy Tobin, O.Praem.
This being the year dedicated to religious life and a  Holy Year of Mercy, both initiated by Pope Francis, we need to look at religious at the cutting edge of human misery serving the marginalized, the periphery, that Pope Francis speaks of in “The Joy of the Gospel.”
Religious life enables people to take risks and witness the Gospel in freedom of convictions, from the depth of faith. They make real, and concrete what we read daily in the Scriptures.
“When I was in prison you visited me… When I was homeless you took me in… When I was naked you clothed me…”   These paraphrases from Matthew 25 are actively changing people’s lives and healing families, and restoring hope, right now, today.
Two Sisters of Mercy, JoAnn Persch and Pat Murphy, like many other religious, inspired by the reforms of Vatican II, saw a need crying for help right under their noses in Chicago. They began the Interfaith Committee for Detained Immigrants.
They formed this interfaith committee after going to the Immigration Processing Center in nearby Broadview, Ill., in 2007. Each Friday morning buses filled  with shackled detainees leave for Chicago’s airport to be deported.
Their story is reported in the Global Sisters Report sponsored by the National Catholic Reporter. It states that according to the Transactional Records Clearinghouse, a data research group at Syracuse University, immigration judges issued nearly 79,000 removal orders last year. Only 23,000 people were granted relief to stay.
“We felt a strong call to do something about what we see,” said Sister Persh, executive director. “Families with men and women ripped from their arms.”
Here is what sets religious apart from lay social workers. They are grounded in a spiritual relationship with God, through community, directing them to meet human needs. Often people like them, who respond to a call, may have no professional training other than their religious formation and reading the signs of the times.
Sister JoAnn and Sister Pat began a weekly prayer vigil with those in detention, praying with them and even praying with the deportees on the bus. This witness alone was powerful both for the immigrants and the authorities. It was powerful because it was prayer, not criticism or judgment, but compassion and mercy. As their story unfolds they even got support from the court, Immigration and Customs Control, local sheriffs, the Chicago Archdiocese, the Catholic Theological Union, and those who advocate for human rights and immigrant justice.
They enlisted the help of Viatorian Brother Michael Gosch, who now oversees their two houses of hospitality. The one for men is in a former convent in Cicero Ill., a near western suburb, and the one for families takes over an empty floor in a former residence hall at the Catholic Theological Union in Hyde Park, on Chicago’s Southside lakefront. The building, a former hotel, has bathrooms in every room. It has cooking facilities, a common room, etc.
The impact on the immigrants was profound. The sisters have volunteers helping the residents adjust to a country they can’t even fathom, simple things like how to buy a gallon of milk, social customs, etc. One man spoke five languages, was a former banker in Syria, now he’s in no man’s land. His situation could change any day.
Their story reports just how they got cooperation from the court, and government agencies. They are applying a temporary  relief effort, to people whose status can change abruptly. At this point, compassion and mercy was needed.
They have two locations, more than 200 volunteers, a budget of more than a million dollars. They say they could use many more facilities like these, but, Sister JoAnn says, “It’s in the hands of God. Pat is 86 and I’m 80, who are we to do any of this? But God keeps sending us the right people.”
This is the religious life that energizes me. This is what Pope Francis wrote so well in the Joy of the Gospel. Throughout the country, throughout the world there are men and women religious, priests, brothers, sisters and deacons, bringing the Gospel in the form of genuine mercy and compassion, affirming the dignity and human rights of all they meet. They believe that love not hate is the hope for our future.
(Father Jeremy Tobin, O.Praem, lives at the Priory of St. Moses the Black, Jackson.)

reflections on life
Jerome LeDoux, SVD
The knuckles of Tanner and his brother Chase Brownlee turned white and bloodless as they clung to their $50,000 at the car auction. Having been able to raise only $50,000, they knew that they might easily be outbid for the car they coveted. The police cruiser was a 2010 Dodge Charger with 100,000 miles on it.
It was not just any car, mind you. The car being auctioned at the Weld County’s Sheriff’s Office was WC679, the Greeley, Colorado patrol car of their father, Deputy Sam Brownlee, who had been killed in a one of those dreaded car chases in 2010. Although Tanner and Chase were dealing in dollars, the car was priceless.
Valued at $12,500, the bar was set high above that price, since the auction was all about helping a charity. As the bids quickly soared above $50,000, their hearts sank and their spirits fell. Inconsolable, they bit their lips and fought back the tears that were beginning to wet their eyes. Little did they suspect that a guardian angel was hovering over them “all night, all day” in the guise of a stranger, one of the bidders who on the surface appeared to be their archenemy.
Everything turned into a black cloud without a silver lining for Tanner and Chase as oil-land-rich local rancher Steve Wells soundly outdistanced all bidders with his bid of $60,000. Almost too heartbroken to bear it, the brothers stared in anguish as the auctioneer closed the bidding with the statement, “Sold it your way, Mr. Steve Wells. Thank you very much. $60,000!”
But that guardian angel had been busy with a special plan all along. Smiling to himself as the Brownlee brothers suffered through the terrible ordeal of being outbid, millionaire Steve Wells sprang a totally unexpected surprise. Immediately upon receiving the car keys from the auctioneer, he whipped around toward Tanner and handed him the keys with the glad tidings, “Tanner, here is your car!”
While Tanner got up to hug Wells, the room exploded with applause. Not just one, but everybody had won. Steve Wells had won the bidding, but gained infinitely more by immediately giving his prize away. Tanner, Chase and their family had won through the inspiring generosity of Steve Wells. Concerns of Police Survivors (C.0.P.S.), a charity that helps the families of fallen police officers, won by receiving $70,000 from the $60,000 Wells bid and other donations. Suffice it to say that there were no losers there, but all huge winners going forward into the future.
“This is just so huge,” Tanner told Steve Wells and the adoring crowd. “I mean, me and my dad built a fence and stuff, but having something I can use and drive around that he drove around, it just means a lot.”
Some guardian angels are only five-years-old, as in the case of Josiah Duncan who asked his mother about a man hanging around a Prattville, Ala., Waffle House. Informed that the man was homeless with no place to stay and with a few rags and an old bicycle, Josiah begged his mother to buy him some food. But, when no one waited on him, Josiah gave the man a menu. He ordered only a cheeseburger.
“Get as much as you want!” Josiah’s mother Ava Faulk advised him. When the food came, Josiah stood across from the man and sang the blessing aloud, bringing the man and all 11 customers to tears. Going viral, the incident brought thousands of others to tears and no doubt is still reverberating endlessly over the cyberwaves.
Mary Lapkowicz has known her guardian angel since fourth grade when she and Ben Moser made a pact to attend their high school prom together. Ben watched over her throughout elementary school. A special Down syndrome student, Mary and Ben had gone to separate high schools. Mary became the equipment manager in her school, while Ben became the quarterback in his. When their schools met in a game, Mary and Ben reunited and renewed their pact for the upcoming prom. To no one’s surprise, but to the admiration of all, they were the hit of the prom.
Guardian angels appear with regularity at supermarket checkouts. With moving frequency, one sees someone struggling to find the last few dollars to complete a purchase when a voice from behind asks the cashier, “How much?”
It warms one’s heart to offer payment to a waiter or waitress, only to be informed that some unknown person has already paid the tab. On such and similar occasions, we are lifted far above all our earthly bonds of debt, and we are forced to recall that a most special Man died on Calvary that the baleful debt of all our sins and the sins of the world could be stamped once for all time, “PAID IN FULL!”
(Father Jerome LeDoux, SVD, is pastor of Our Mother of Mercy Parish in Fort Worth, Texas. He has written “Reflections on Life since 1969.)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
Evolution, Charles Darwin famously stated, works through the survival of the fittest. Christianity, on the other hand, is committed to the survival of the weakest. But how do we square our Christian ideal of making a preferential option for the weak with evolution?
Nature is evolutionary and, inside of that, we can perceive a wisdom that clearly manifests intelligence, intent, spirit and design. And perhaps nowhere is this more evident than how in the process of evolution we see nature becoming ever-more unified, complex, and conscious.
However, how God’s intelligence and intent are reflected inside of that is not always evident because nature can be so cruel and brutal. In order to survive, every element in nature has to be cannibalistic and eat other parts of nature. Only the fittest get to survive. There’s a harsh cruelty in that. In highlighting how cruel and unfair nature can be, commentators often cite the example of the second pelican born to white pelicans. Here’s how cruel and unfair is its situation:
Female white pelicans normally lay two eggs, but they lay them several days apart so that the first chick hatches several days before the second chick. This gives the first chick a head-start and by the time the second chick hatches, the first chick is bigger and stronger. It then acts aggressively towards the second chick, grabbing its food and pushing it out of the nest.
There, ignored by its mother, the second chick normal dies of starvation, despite its efforts to find its way back into the nest. Only one in ten second chicks survives. And here’s nature’s cruel logic in this: That second chick is hatched by nature as an insurance-policy, in case the first chick is weak or dies.
Barring that, it is doomed to die, ostracized, hungry, blindly grasping for food and its mother’s attention as it starves to death. But this cruelty works as an evolutionary strategy. White pelicans have survived for thirty million years, but at the cost of millions of its own species dying cruelly.
A certain intelligence is certainly evident in this, but where is the compassion? Did a compassionate God really design this? The intelligence in nature’s strategy of the survival of the fittest is clear. Each species, unless unnaturally interfered with from the outside, is forever producing healthier, more robust, more adaptable members. Such, it seems, is nature’s wisdom and design – up to a point.
Certain scientists such as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin suggest that physical evolution has reached its apex, its highest degree of unity, complexity and consciousness, inside the central nervous system and brain of the human person and that evolution has now taken a leap (just as it did when consciousness leapt out of raw biology and as it did when self-consciousness leapt out of simple consciousness) so that now meaningful evolution is no longer about gaining further physical strength and adaptability. Rather meaningful evolution is now concerned with the social and the spiritual, that is, with social and spiritual strength.
And in a Christian understanding of things, this means that meaningful evolution is now about human beings using their self-consciousness to turn back and help nature to protect and nurture its second pelicans. Meaningful evolution now is no longer about having the strong grow stronger, but about having the weak, that part of nature that nature herself, to this point, has not been able to nurture, grow strong.
Why? What’s nature’s interest in the weak? Why shouldn’t nature be happy to have the weak weeded out? Does God have an interest in the weak that nature does not?
No, nature too is very interested in the survival of the weak and is calling upon the help of human beings to bring this about. Nature is interested in the survival of the weak because vulnerability and weakness bring something to nature that is absent when it is only concerned with the survival of the fittest and with producing ever-stronger, more robust and more adaptable species and individuals. What the weak add to nature are character and compassion, which are the central ingredients needed to bring about unity, complexity, and consciousness at the social and spiritual level.
When God created human beings at the beginning of time, God charged them with the responsibility of “dominion,” of ruling over nature. What’s contained in that mandate is not an order or permission to dominate over nature and use nature in whatever fashion we desire. The mandate is rather that of “watching over,” of tending the garden, of being wise stewards, and of helping nature do things that, in its unconscious state, it cannot do, namely, protect and nurture the weak, the second pelicans.
The second-century theologian, Irenaeus, once famously said: The glory of God is the human being fully alive! In our own time, Gustavo Gutierrez, generally credited with being the father of Liberation Theology, recast that dictum to say: The glory of God is the poor person fully alive!” And that is as well the ultimate glory of nature.
(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX.)

Complete the Circle
By George Evans
The only problem with Easter for the Christian is getting over the exuberance and returning to ordinary daily life. There are only so many times you can say “Alleluia, HE IS RISEN, Alleluia” before it loses its impact. Fortunately the Holy Spirit is coming and Pentecost will re-energize us once again. The liturgical year marches on with its compelling peaks and valleys, its consolations and its challenges. It’s our job to roll with it, to drink deeply of its nuances and to repeatedly meet its central figure over and over ever more deeply.
As our country, and the Western world in general, continues its precipitous slide (perhaps rush) into deeper materialism, unbridled capitalism and rampant greed to the exclusion of the common good we question where to turn for relief and fulfillment.
Where do we turn in the face of poverty, disease, violence, loneliness. What do we do about wars and threatened wars, reductions in all the safety nets for the poor from social security to food stamps, expanding human trafficking and fear of death. Where do we turn in the face of one tragedy after another, deaths and suffering everywhere even among the young, slights based on egotism and selfishness from all sorts of people close and far.
We know because we are Christians and mainly Catholics reading this, that Jesus has “saved” us by his death and resurrection. But we don’t see that this makes a real difference in the way people think or act. It may  be that we don’t accept what Jesus has done and thereby we don’t allow it to flourish so that it makes a difference  in the way we act, the things and causes we support, the love and mercy we exhibit and the very way we live our lives.
What do our leaders tell us? Pope Francis is a great place to start. Over and over since becoming pope, he has urged us to remake this world of which we so often complain. Very simply he tells us the only way to start is by renewal of our personal encounter with Christ. If we have never had this existential experience, appeal to the Holy Spirit to lead us. He will not fail. The Joy of the Gospel tells us very early in paragraph 3 that “The Lord does not disappoint those who take this risk; whenever we take a step toward Jesus, we come to realize that He is already there with open arms.” What does that mean for us?
When Jesus embraces us we cannot remain the same. We are created by God and the embrace by his Son brings us into the orbit of his love and mercy. This cannot fail to transform us. This is the heart of conversion. This is what Jesus did for us by his death and resurrection. This is what being saved really means. We are not the same. We live differently. We step into his shoes. As Pope Francis tells us, “True faith in the incarnate Son of God is inseparable from self-giving, from membership in the community, from service, from reconciliation with others.” (Par. 88). In fact, Jesus calls to us from the world, where He is present “in the faces of others, in their voices, in their pleas”. (Par.91)
I believe the difference in meeting Christ and simply believing in an abstract God or Trinity is what is life changing. We step into his shoes and become followers and not just disciples who profess belief with their minds but not with their hearts and souls. We treat people like he did.
We respect their dignity and care for their needs. We accept people as they are and work forward from there. We go out to the poor and marginalized. We visit the sick and feed the hungry. We work hard to make politics better to serve the common good not special interests to the detriment of others. We instill in our spouses, children and friends what it has meant to encounter Jesus so that we may share it with them.
The world in which we live gradually becomes better if we do these things. If we are forgiving, reconciling and gentle, we create joy and goodness as Jesus did. If we are self-giving rather than self-righteous, we change relationships for the better and our world is a slightly better place. If we do it together, think of what can happen. We wouldn’t lament the loss of our children or grandchildren. They would need to look no further than what we gave them. We wouldn’t worry about Americans defecting to ISIS. We wouldn’t have wars or threats of war in eight to 10 places at the same time.
It’s exciting to think of what a personal encounter with Christ can lead to. If only we could all try it, Pope Francis’ vision could come true. It’s worth a try. Pentecost is coming. What a great time to ask the Holy Spirit to help us encounter Christ.
(George Evans is a pastoral minister at Jackson St. Richard Parish.)