IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
Going to Heaven – By Good Luck or by God’s Grace? This is a thought inside the head of Marilynne Robinson’s fictional character, Lila, in Robinson’s recent novel. Lila has reason to think that way, that is, to think outside the box of conventional religious piety because her story is not one that fits piety of any kind.
Lila had been an unwanted orphan, dying from malnutrition and neglect, when at a young age she was taken up by a woman named Dolly, herself a social outcast. Lila spends all the years of her youth with Dolly, traveling with her as the two of them live on the edges of society and hunger, working as agricultural laborers with others like themselves, more slaves than paid workers.  Living this way, Lila never learns the social skills needed to function normally in society. Everything in her background, from her abandonment as a child to her life-long marginalization, sets her up to be a loner, someone condemned by circumstance to never find normal companionship, family, intimacy or grace.
Moreover, Dolly, her surrogate mother, has her own problems, beyond her struggles to feed Lila and herself. When she took up Lila and fled from their hometown, she was fleeing domestic violence. Eventually, years later, the man from whom she was fleeing finds her; but Dolly is no passive victim. She knifes the man to death. Sometime later, she dies, orphaning Lila a second time.
But, by now, Lila is old enough to take care of herself, except, lacking social skills, she still finds herself at the margins of society, ever the loner. Luck, though, is on her side and she is eventually befriended by a Christian minister who takes care of her and eventually marries her. This new world of acceptance, love, family and religion is radically new to Lila and she struggles mightily to sort it out, especially regarding how love and grace work.
One of the problems that bother her, as she listens to her husband’s Christian sermons, is what happens to someone like Dolly, who did so much for her, and yet was a murderer. Is she forgiven? Could she have gone to heaven, even after committing murder? Lila struggles to believe in faith, love, family life, forgiveness and heaven.
Her thoughts on this, especially on how Dolly might have met her Maker, contain their own important insights into love and grace: “In eternity, people’s lives could be altogether what they were and had been, not just the worst things they ever did, or the best things either. So she decided that she should believe in it, or that she believed in it already.  How else could she imagine seeing Dolly again? Never once had she taken her to be dead, plain and simple.
If any scoundrel could be pulled into heaven just to make his mother happy, it couldn’t be fair to punish scoundrels who happened to be orphans, or whose mothers didn’t even like them, and who would probably have better excuses for the harm they did than the ones who had somebody caring about them. It couldn’t be fair to punish people for trying to get by, people who were good by their own lights, when it took all the courage they had to be good. … Eternity had more of every kind of room in it than this world did.”
As Christians, we believe that, as part of the Body of Christ, we have been given the power to forgive each other’s sins and that, because of that, indeed a mother’s love can pull her child into heaven. Our love for each other is a powerful vehicle of grace, powerful enough to actually open the gates of heaven. As Gabriel Marcel once put it: To love someone is to, in effect, say: You at least will never die! Human love, even this side of eternity, has that kind of power. That’s also why we pray for loved ones who have died. Our love has the power to reach them, even there.
But, and this was Lila’s quandary: What about those who, like Dolly and herself, are outsiders in this life and who die without anyone much caring about the fact that they’ve gone or where they’ve gone? How do grace and forgiveness work then? Is human love then purely out of the picture and we are left only with the hope that God’s love can fill in where human love is absent?
Yes, God’s love can and does fill in where human love is absent. In fact, scripture assures us that God has a special love, and tenderness, for those who find themselves outside of the circle of human love. So we need not worry about the salvation of those who, like Dolly, died in less-than-ideal circumstances, even as they “took all the courage they had to be good.” Human love, while generally directed towards very specific persons, is also a symphony whose music circles wide and ultimately embraces everyone.
(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, SVD
A 20-something lady was helping me transfer things from one car to another. Perhaps noticing that her lively pace outstepped me at every turn, she volunteered pointedly with a satisfied smile, “I am enjoying my youth!” Translated, that almost seemed to be saying, “How on earth do you old coots tolerate creeping old age?”
“You’ll enjoy your old age too, God willing,” I returned so low that she might have missed completely my hesitant effort to respond to such a pointed remark.
To get her attention, I could have said that at her age I could whistle a baseball toward the catcher well into the nineties, could break off a mean curve, could drive the ball 400-plus feet, run with the best, could snare a football pass nine feet in the air on a dead run-and-leap, could jump under a basketball rim and pop it.
“That was yesterday,” I mused, and as the song continues, “but yesterday’s gone.” One distant day a weightlifting high school seminarian at St. Augustine Seminary in Bay Saint Louis  was pressing 100 pounds. To his utter surprise, I reached down with my right hand and snatched it over my head. When he winced, for seconds I reached down again and snatched it over my head once more.
Needless to say, if I tried anything close to that now, I would need both an osteopath and a chiropractor. “Flights of fancy,” we call such memories we all have. Such was the case as I topped the hill of four score and five on February 26. And how is life in the mid-eighties? So far, I can hardly tell the difference from one year ago.
Nevertheless, there are some pointed items of interest. Never too cool to school, I notice that the tendency to shuffle is trying to grow stronger. This means that, unless he exerts extra caution, an older person compensates for a decrease in physical strength by dragging his feet instead of lifting them, especially on turns.
When one drags his feet in making a sudden turn to the left or right, the sole of the sandal/shoe grabs the rug or uneven surface, setting up a serious stumble or trip. In this maneuver, the body turns before the feet do, causing an entanglement of the feet that can easily trigger a painful fall that may result in some kind of injury.
A hazardous carryover from dragging one’s feet can happen when one moves to go around a chair, table or other object. The slouchiness resulting from weakened muscles inclines one to take shortcuts, and that causes one to clip the edges of objects instead of moving cleanly around them. That in turn can end in a crash. In spite of this ever-looming threat, I must continually remind myself to move wide.
This same awareness and caution of movement holds doubly strong for vertical travel up and down steps or hills. Weakening muscles also try to avoid the labor of lifting one’s feet high enough above a stair step to avoid tripping. More and more, a conscious effort must be made to assure one of stepping high enough.
For decades, all the way into my late forties, I literally streaked up and down flights of stairs, often mounting the flight in two bounds. In all those years I had one harmless slip on a flight of stairs, one slip on a landing and one interesting stumble halfway down a 22-step staircase. Flying through the air with the greatest of ease, I hit the deck with a crash and roll, no worse for the wear. So hard is a young body.
Nowadays, the very thought of such a stumble and rough landing steadies my every move around stairs, high precipices and uneven surfaces. For the young, the key to sureness and safety of movement is the combination of power, balance and dexterity of motion. Eventually eroded by time and usage, that great combination can be salvaged only partially by meticulous attention to one’s environs.
In a blast from the past, every now and then, I catch myself striding with near abandon, although running with abandon is out of the picture. I invariably smile as I walk that special walk, remembering the way it was so many summers ago.
It still startles me that I live free of any dependence on reading or magnifying glasses, reading a computer screen for many hours with no signs of strain, reading books or annoyingly-small texts of food ingredients or signs in the ambient world.
Since April 30, 1996, forgoing all meats, seafood, dairy, salt, sugar and caffeine has served me well, normalizing all my body organs and fluids to the point where I live free of pain and medications, except for the baby aspirin daily regimen.
No day is a work day, because every day is a bonus, a vacation, a special gift of God that brings with it more joy, more rewards, more thanks for all the relatives, friends and others in my life. How long will I live? Till I die. That’s enough for me.
(Father Jerome LeDoux, SVD, is pastor of Our Mother of Mercy Parish in Fort Worth, Texas. He has written “Reflections on Life since 1969.)

Forming our future
By Jennifer Henry
While I was having lunch with my daughter, Mary, a couple came up to our table and said to me, “ I just want to thank you for taking such good care of my granddaughter at the daycare.” The grandmother went on to say that she had met me when her daughter came to take a tour of our early learning center.  I remembered her and could see in her eyes the resemblance to her granddaughter, Lilly Claire.  An overwhelming feeling of gratitude came over me! What a gift I have been given!  The opportunity to love and watch the 107 young children at St. Paul Early Learning Center grow and learn is a blessing and a privilege.
I said to my daughter what I had said when she and her siblings were growing up – “it takes a village to raise a child.”  You need lots of people to love your children!  We fondly  remembered  “Ms. Faye,” “Ms. Carolyn,” “Mrs. Lamar,” “Mrs. Wilcox” and how much a part of our lives these wonderful teachers and caregivers were.
I have been a principal leader at the elementary and high school level but now, as director of an early learning center, I feel even more passionate that our students’ first experience in education be rich in language and reading, music and song, play and fun, delivered by teachers sharing God’s love through their care.  As expert in Catholic education, Thomas Groome, says, “It is a sacred privilege and an awesome responsibility to be an educator.”
What do children need most though in those early years to succeed? Is it learning through play, or learning the ABC’s, colors, pushing forward and preparing them to pass the tests that lie ahead?  Have we forgotten what Friedrich Froebel, the German educator, who coined the name “kindergarten” originally meant – “a garden of children” – a place where each child is nurtured with the same love and care given to a seedling. Our modern day expert Mister Rogers might have said it best about early childhood learning, “Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning.  But for children, play is serious learning.”
At a recent workshop presented by Christ United Methodist Preschool Program Director, Terre Harris, my staff and I were introduced to a book called, “Their Name is Today – Reclaiming Childhood in a Hostile World” by Johann Christoph Arnold.  The title of the book comes from Nobel Laureate, Gabriela Mistral:
“We are guilty of many errors and many faults, but our worst crime is abandoning the children, neglecting the fountain of life. Many things can wait. Children cannot. Right now their bones are being formed, their blood is being made, and their senses are being developed.  To them we cannot answer, “Tomorrow.” Their name is today.”
Terre talked about the importance of play, how tired parents are, how distracting cell phones are in raising children, the importance of reading and talking to young children, affirming the role of the teacher/caregiver and how it is critical to seize the time we have with our children. Terre’s presentation confirmed and energized the St. Paul’s staff’s focus on play, and learning through doing.
At St. Paul Early Learning Center we have enrolled in Quality Stars – Mississippi’s Quality Rating and Improvement System (QRIS). The QRIS is a tiered block system. Programs must meet all criteria at one level before advancing to the next level. The program is administered by the Mississippi State University Early Childhood Institute through a competitive grant process from the Mississippi Department of Human Services Division of Early Childhood Care and Development. The requirements go above and beyond basic licensure requirements. Participating centers must meet all licensure requirements to participate.
My staff and I have found the Quality Stars program to be quite challenging. We are a 1 STAR but have great aspirations to improve and progress to at least a 3 or 4 STAR in the next year.  I believe the program provides an outstanding framework to achieve the important things in early childhood education: protection of health and safety, building relationships with children, family and community and opportunities for learning by doing.  Using this framework with our own Catholic school mission to teach the whole child – mind, body and spirit, brings a rich curriculum to our early learners.
We have great hope in successfully meeting our goal. We ask the readers of Mississippi Catholic to keep all Catholic educators and our programs in your prayers. Children are fragile like young seedlings and “their name is today.”
Carl Jung said it well, “One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.”
(Jennifer Henry is the director of  Flowood St. Paul Early Learning Center)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
Numerous groups and individuals today are challenging us in regards to our relationship to mother-earth. From Green Peace, various environmental groups, various Christian and other religious groups and various individual voices, comes the challenge to be less-blind, less-unthinking and less-reckless in terms of how we relate to the earth.
Every day our newscasts point out how, without much in the way of serious reflection, we are polluting the planet, strip-mining its resources, creating mega-landfills, pouring carbon dangerously into the atmosphere, causing the disappearance of thousands of species, creating bad air and bad water and thinning the ozone layer.
And so the cry goes out: live more simply, use fewer resources, lessen your carbon footprint, and try to recycle whatever you’ve used as much as you can.
That challenge, of course, is very good and very important. The air we breathe out is the air we will eventually inhale and so we need to be very careful about what we exhale. This planet is our home and we need to ensure that, long-term, it can provide us with the sustenance and comfort of a home.
But, true as this is, there’s still another very important reason why we need to treat mother-earth with more caution and respect, namely, Christ himself is vitally bound-up with nature and his reasons for coming to earth also include the intention of redeeming the physical universe. What’s implied here?
Let me begin with an anecdote which captures, in essence, what’s at stake: The scientist-theologian, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, in conversation with a Vatican official who was confused by his writings and doctrinally-suspicious of them, was once asked “What are you trying to do in your writings?”
Teilhard’s response, “I am trying to write a Christology that is wide enough to incorporate the full Christ because Christ is not just an anthropological event but he is also a cosmic phenomenon.”  Simply translated, he is saying that Christ didn’t just come to save people. He came for that yes, but he also came to save the planet, of which people are only one part.
In saying that, Teilhard has solid scriptural backing. Looking at the scriptures we find that they affirm that Christ didn’t just come to save people, he came to save the world. For example, the Epistle to the Colossians (1, 15-20) records an ancient Christian hymn which affirms both that Christ was already a vital force inside the original creation (“that all things were made through him”) and that Christ is also the end point to of all history, human and cosmic.
The Epistle to the Ephesians, also recording an ancient Christian hymn, (1, 3-10) makes the same point; while the Epistle to the Romans (8,19-22) is even more explicit in affirming that physical creation, mother-earth and our physical universe, are “groaning” as they too wait for redemption by Christ. Among other things, these texts affirm that the physical world is part of God’s plan for eventual heavenly life.
What’s contained in that, if we tease out its implications? A number of very clear principles:  First, nature, not just humanity, is being redeemed by Christ. The world is not just a stage upon which human history plays out; it has intrinsic meaning and value beyond what it means for us as humans. Physical nature is, in effect, brother and sister with us in the journey towards the divinely-intended end of history. Christ also came to redeem the earth, not just those of us who are living on it. Physical creation too will enter in the final synthesis of history, that is, heaven.
Second, this means that nature has intrinsic rights, not just the rights we find convenient to accord it. What this means is that defacing or abusing nature is not just a legal and environmental issue, it’s a moral issue. We are violating someone’s (something’s) intrinsic rights.
Thus when we, mindlessly, throw a coke-can into a ditch we are not just breaking a law we are also, at some deep level, defacing Christ. We need to respect nature, not, first of all, so that it doesn’t recoil on us and give us back our own asphyxiating pollution, but because it, akin to humanity, has its own rights. A teaching too rarely affirmed.
Finally, not least, what is implied in understanding the cosmic dimension of Christ and what that means in terms of our relationship to mother-earth and the universe is the non-negotiable fact that the quest for community and consummation within God’s Kingdom (our journey towards heaven) is a quest that calls us not just to a proper relationship with God and with each other, but also to a proper relationship with physical creation.
We are humans with bodies living on the earth, not disembodied angels living in heaven, and Christ came to save our bodies along with our souls; and he came, as well, to save the physical ground upon which we walk since he was the very pattern upon which and through which the physical world was created.
(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
What do we do as we search again to make this a good Lent. Do we pray more? Yes. Do we go to daily Mass? Yes, if possible. Do we give up something? Yes, if its something that’s hard and means a lot to us like cussing, smoking or drinking. Do we treat our spouse, children or grandchildren better. Yes, and now we are getting to the God stuff because of the other stuff.
When we pray more and better in quiet and perhaps with scripture, go to Eucharist daily or at least more frequently, deny ourselves those pleasures we love or are addicted to then the God stuff all of a sudden smacks us in the face.
The reason is simple.  Prayer, sacrament, self denial and discipline purify and open us to allow the God who is always there with his voice calling and arms open to be heard by us and embraced by us. Once we hear him and embrace him then the God stuff automatically follows.
Instead of me, me, me we focus on you, you, you.  Remember Jesus healing Peter’s mother-in-law though he was tired after a long day and healing the daughter of a foreigner, a Greek woman, Syrophoenician by birth, even though he was trying to go unnoticed when he went to the district of Tyre.  He knew from prayer what his father wanted of him and he responded accordingly and this was his God stuff. And he periodically needed to hear and be touched by his father, just as we do, to keep going in his mission. Should we not do the same and serve and touch the other? Is this not what Lent is meant to be about?
From the first pages in Genesis God’s method is clear. After creating us he gave us a beautiful garden filled with all we needed, nourished and embraced us and gave us the command to take care of this world and the creation he had given us.
He didn’t tell us just to sit back  but rather to “be fertile and multiply,” “to have dominion over all the living creatures.” He used the Cain and Abel story in the best cross examination in Scripture to make it clear that YES, we are “our brother’s keeper.” He repeatedly blessed his covenant people, Abraham, Joseph, Moses, Isaiah and the other prophets and after forming them sent them to do the great things in the Hebrew scriptures. It is always His way to love and form his people and then to send them to do the great leads of the Covenant. It always is a matter of coming to him and then going from him to bring him to others, to the world.
Jesus comes from the Godhead itself formed from all eternity in his relationship to his Father and brings to us the very life of that relationship.  Jesus goes from the Father and touches as many people as possible in his relatively short time on earth. But he touches them in such an extraordinary way by his life and Resurrection that the world is forever changed.
Time and dates are based on his short life. His disciples came to him after being called, and formed by him proceeded to bring him to the ends of the earth as commanded in the Great Commission, “Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations.”
Lent then is that special time when  we come again to Jesus and the Father with renewed emphasis on prayer, sacrament, self denial and openness to the Spirit who is the love of the Father and Son, and touched as we will be by their embrace then we go to bring them to all nations starting with every person we meet in day to day life.  We go to spouse, children, grandchildren, co-workers, friends and even enemies. And we take Christ with us to all.  And when we do, the great surprise is that we see Christ in each of them.
We go to the poor, homeless, beggars, widows, orphans, aliens – we go to all and we meet them in our  everyday life, not in some foreign country, and we serve them. We take Jesus with us because we have been formed by him and have been made strong enough by him to serve and we let him act through us as his hands and feet.
And finally our serving brings us  great peace and union with him, maybe for the first time. With the resurrection on Easter as we are touched with a glimpse of eternity arm and arm with our brothers we have served.
(George Evans is a pastoral minister at Jackson St. Richard Parish.)

Word on Fire
By Father Robert Baron
Many atheists and agnostics today insistently argue that it is altogether possible for non-believers to be morally upright.  They resent the implication that the denial of God will lead inevitably to complete ethical relativism or nihilism.  And they are quick to point out examples of non-religious people who are models of kindness, compassion, justice, etc. In point of fact, a recent article has proposed that non-believers are actually, on average, more morally praiseworthy than religious people.
In this context, I recall Christopher Hitchens’ remark that, all things considered, he would be more frightened of a group of people coming from a religious meeting than a group coming from a rock concert or home from a night on the town. God knows (pun intended) that during the last twenty years we’ve seen plenty of evidence from around the world of the godly behaving very badly indeed.
Though I could quarrel with a number of elements within this construal of things, I would actually gladly concede the major point that it is altogether possible for atheists and agnostics to be morally good. The classical Greek and Roman formulators of the theory of the virtues were certainly not believers in the Biblical God, and many of their neo-pagan successors today do indeed exhibit fine moral qualities. What I should like to do, however, is to use this controversy as a springboard to make a larger point, namely that Christianity is not primarily about ethics, about “being a nice person” or, to use Flannery O’Connor’s wry formula, “having a heart of gold.” The moment Christians grant that Christianity’s ultimate purpose is to make us ethically better people, they cannot convincingly defend against the insinuation that, if some other system makes human beings just as good or better, Christianity has lost its raison d’etre.
Much of the confusion on this score can be traced to the influence of Immanuel Kant, especially his seminal text Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone. Like so many of his Enlightenment era confreres, Kant was impatient with the claims of the revealed religions. He saw them as unverifiable and finally irrational assertions that could be defended, not through reason, but only through violence. Accordingly, he argued that, at its best, religion is not about dogma or doctrine or liturgy but about ethics. In the measure that the Scriptures, prayer, and belief make one morally good, they are admissible, but in the measure that they lead to moral corruption, they should be dispensed with. As religious people mature, Kant felt, they would naturally let those relatively extrinsic practices and convictions fall to the side and would embrace the ethical core of their belief systems.  Kant’s army of disciples today include such figures as John Shelby Spong, John Dominic Crossan, James Carroll, Bart Ehrman, and the late Marcus Borg, all of whom think that Christianity ought to be de-supernaturalized and re-presented as essentially a program of inclusion and social justice.
The problem with this Kantianism both old and new is that it runs dramatically counter to the witness of the first Christians, who were concerned, above all, not with an ethical program but with the explosive emergence of a new world. The letters of St. Paul, which are the earliest Christian texts we have, are particularly instructive on this score. One can find “ethics” in the writings of Paul, but one would be hard pressed indeed to say that the principal theme of Romans, Galatians, Philippians, or first and second Corinthians is the laying out of a moral vision.
The central motif of all of those letters is in fact Jesus Christ risen from the dead. For Paul, the resurrection of Jesus is the sign that the world as we know it — a world marked by death and the fear of death — is evanescing and that a new order of things is emerging. This is why he tells the Corinthians “the time is running out” and “the world in its present form is passing away;” this is why he tells the Philippians that everything he once held to be of central importance he now considers as so much rubbish; this is why he tells the Romans that they are not justified by their own moral achievements but through the grace of Jesus Christ; and this is why he tells the Galatians that neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything; what counts is the “new creation.” The new creation is shorthand for the overturning of the old world and the emergence of a new order through the resurrection of Jesus, the “first fruits of those who have fallen asleep.”
The inaugural speech of Jesus, as reported in the Gospel of Mark, commences with the announcement of the kingdom of God and then the exhortation to “repent and believe the good news.” We tend automatically to interpret repentance as a summons to moral conversion, but the Greek word that Mark employs is metanoiete, which means literally, “go beyond the mind you have.”
On Mark’s telling, Jesus is urging his listeners to change their way of thinking so as to see the new world that is coming into existence.  It is indeed the case that Buddhists, Hindus, Christians, Muslims, Jews, atheists, and agnostics can all be “good people.” In terms of what we privilege today, they can all be tolerant, inclusive, and just.  But only Christians witness to an earthquake that has shaken the foundations of the world and turned every expectation upside down. A key to the new evangelization is the rediscovery of this revolutionary message.
(Father Robert Barron is the founder of the global ministry, Word on Fire, and the Rector/President of Mundelein Seminary. He is the creator of the award winning documentary series, “Catholicism”  and “Catholicism:The New Evangelization.” Learn more at www.WordonFire.org.)