IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
A good part of our lives are taken up with daydreams, though few of us admit that and even fewer of us would own-up to the contents of those fantasies. We’re ashamed to admit how much we escape into fantasy and we’re even more ashamed to reveal the content of those fantasies. But, whether we admit it or not, we’re all pathological daydreamers; except this isn’t necessarily a pathology.
Our hearts and minds, chronically frustrated by the limits of our lives, naturally seek solace in daydreaming. It’s an almost irresistible temptation. Indeed the more sensitive you are, perhaps the stronger will be the propensity to escape into daydreams. Sensitivity triggers restlessness and restlessness doesn’t easily find quiet inside ordinary life. Hence, the escape into daydreams.
And what about the contents of those daydreams?
We tend to have two kinds of daydreams: The first kind are triggered more by the immediate hurts and temptations within our lives; for example, a lingering hurt or anger has you fantasizing about revenge and you play out various scenes of retaliation over and over again in your mind. Or an emotional or sexual obsession has you fantasying about various kinds of consummation.
The other kind of daydream we escape into is not so much triggered by the hurts and obsessions of the present moment but takes its root in something deeper, something classically expressed by St. Augustine in the opening lines of his Confessions (a hermeneutical key for his life and our own): You have made us for yourself Lord and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.
Simply put, we are over-charged for our lives, given infinite spirits and infinite appetites and put into this world wherein everything is finite. That’s a formula for chronic dissatisfaction. What’s our escape?  Daydreams.
However these second kind of daydreams are somewhat different from the first. They aren’t so much focused on the immediate angers and temptations in our lives but rather are the habitual imaginary lives that we have interiorly fashioned for ourselves, fantasy lives that we play over and over again in our minds the way we might play and replay a favorite movie.
But there’s something interesting and important to note here. In these daydreams we are never petty or small, rather we are always noble and grand, the hero or the heroine, generous, big-hearted, immune from faults, drawing perfect respect, and making perfect love. In these daydreams we, in fact, intuit the vision of Isaiah where he foresees a perfect world, the lamb and the lion lying down together, the sick being healed, the hungry being fed, all restlessness being brought to calm, and God, himself, drying away every tear. Isaiah too fantasied about perfect consummation. His fantasy was a prophecy.  In our earthy fantasies we might not prophesize but we do intuit the Kingdom of God.
With that being said, we still need to ask ourselves: How good or bad is it to escape into daydreams?
At one level, daydreams are not just harmless but can be a positive form of relaxation and a way to steady us inside the frustrations of our lives. Sitting back in an easy chair and sinking into a daydream can be little different than sitting back and turning on your favorite piece of music. It can be an escape that takes the edge off of the frustrations within your life.
But there’s a potential downside to this: Since in our daydreams we are always the hero or the heroine and the center of attention and admiration, our daydreams can easily stoke our natural narcissism. Since we are the center of everything in our daydreams we can easily become over-frustrated with a world within which we are not much the center of anything.
And there’s more: Etty Hillesum, reflecting on her own experience, suggests another negative consequence from habitually escaping into daydreams. She affirms that because we make ourselves the center of the universe inside our daydreams we often end up not being able to give anything or anybody the simple gaze of admiration.
Rather, in her strong words, in our daydreams we take in what we should be admiring. For this reason, among others, daydreams help block us from mindfulness, from being in the present moment. When we are all wrapped-up in fantasy it’s hard to see what’s in front of us.
So where should we go with all of this? Given both the good and bad within our daydreams and given our near-incurable propensity to escape into fantasy, we need to be patient with ourselves. Henri Nouwen suggests that the struggle to turn our fantasies into prayer is one of the great congenital struggles within our spiritual lives. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin shares in his journals that when he was young he struggled a lot with fantasy but, as he grew older, he was able more and more to stand in the present moment without the need to escape into daydreams. That’s the task we need to set before ourselves.
(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 Le Doux
With prayer meeting scheduled for 7:00 Sunday evening, my battery was perhaps only 70 percent recharged from the drain of three Masses and chatter. Three good snoozes only invited a fourth. Furthermore, the acclaimed Schindler’s List was due to show on the All Heroes Channel, and I had not yet seen it.
Encountering me at the wake of Isabell Mesker’s mother, Martin Daley invited me to attend the Sunday evening prayer meeting at the St. Peter Church chapel. “Come if you can!” he pleaded. “Mostly women attend the Thursday meeting, but we men will be at the Sunday evening meeting. We would love to have you.”
He called a couple of days later, then he called again Sunday afternoon to remind me.
This tug of war continued long enough to make me a bit late for the meeting. Upon entering, I laid eyes on a 160-seat chapel brimming with a standing room only crowd of eager, attentive folks keying in on Dan Bradley, a guitar player who sounded for all the world like a somewhat muted James Taylor. Finger work complemented his voice that led a devotional rendering of Alleluia and a medley of sacred compositions.
All was quiet, meditative singing, and, off and on, many hands were raised in thanksgiving and praise, while voices from all around reverently accompanied most of the songs. After a half dozen or so songs, a young lady named Cassie was invited up to sing and then to share a guitar piece. With her strum, strum, strum and at times a thrumpa, thrumpa thrump, she was less polished than Dan, but still good.
Very politely, a handful of folks invited me to move from my standing spot in the rear to a seat somewhere in the nave. I declined until finally I was taken almost by force to the very front right. When Cassie was done, a teen-aged lad next to me was called up to play the guitar and sing. Having accomplished both very well, he returned to his seat and introduced himself as Jim McDonald, grandson of Dan.
Obviously, he came by his musical talents honestly through his grandfather, although his grandfather later told me that he had stopped playing for 20 years until he resumed playing in order to play and sing for his grandchildren. What a loving and pleasant testimony to his grandchildren! Frankly, he sounded professional.
From his up-and-down movement and orchestration of the goings-on, Pat Gorman seemed to be master of ceremonies of the whole prayer meeting. And there I was musing, “I came for a prayer meeting, and here we have a religious concert as an added attraction. As Peter, James and John said on the mountain at the time of the Transfiguration, ‘Lord, it is good for us to be here!’”
A mature lady sang “How Great Thou Art” and Pat Gorman sang a couple of songs, one of which he himself had composed. Ted Daley, who had sung delightfully at the wake of Isabell Mesker’s mother, edified us with a baritone selection. Throughout, there were random testimonies and prayers from the congregation about the illness or other problems of relatives or friends of the Irish Travelers.
Though it is understood that all ethnic groups have problems peculiar to their group, the Irish Travelers are people of powerful, expressive faith, of loyalty to their families and friends, and of considerable generosity. It is amazing that I have yet to encounter one person who called or came to beg or borrow. Hitting my bowl of roasted peanuts is the one exception to which everyone – Irish or not – is partial.
Smiling as I say this, I assure you that I have never been enriched by so many calls for confessions, sessions of counseling and impromptu visits as from the Irish Travelers of all ages from teenagers to mature keenagers. It has been an honor to receive visits from a handful to as many as 20 teenagers at a time.
Called to speak toward the end, I noted the close bond between Irish and black music. “’Oh Danny Boy’ is the most famous example,” I told them. Backed by Dan in C, I sang “Danny Boy” a la Jackie Wilson. Then I sang Dottie Rambo’s 1967 soul lyrics to that same Londonderry melody, “Amazing Grace, shall always be my song of praise,” known also as “He Looked Beyond My Fault And Saw My Need.”
All prayer meetings are edifying and inspirational, but, by its sheer size and intensity, this one turned out to be the mother of all the prayer meetings I have attended. Holding hands in conclusion, we formed a power circle that had to be doubled in spots because of the great number. “Lead us in your Our Father!” they asked me expectantly. So, to a sea of smiling faces, we sang the popular “Echo Our Father” that keeps repeating “Hallowed Be Thy Name” after each verse.
“God is love, and all who abide in love abide in God and God in them.”   (1 John 4:16)
(Father Jerome LeDoux, SVD, is pastor of Our Mother of Mercy Parish in Fort Worth, Texas. He has written “Reflections on Life since 1969.)

Millennial Reflections
By Father Jeremy Tobin, O.Praem
Pope Francis has designated this year as the Year of Consecrated Life. Among other things, it sheds a spotlight on responding to the call to witness and serve those on the margins. In the churches I serve each week we pray for an increase in the number of priests, brothers, sisters, deacons and lay ministers.
Looking back over the years there never has been a lack of dedicated Christians who, by their lifestyle and service, have made an impact on those they reached out to. Sometimes they, and their ministry, go unrecognized. This is understandable since people on the margins are often invisible.
The initial readings for Ordinary Time stress the prophetic tradition. The Holy Spirit calls people to witness and raise the consciousness of people to rededicate themselves and live their lives authentically. The way the readings are paired up we see that John the Baptist and Jesus both come out of this tradition.
From our baptism we receive the Holy Spirit and throughout our lives we may be called to do something significant. For some of us it is religious life, for others it is a focused lifestyle and a specialized service to specific groups. Many religious congregations started out like this. For example, last week we remembered Angela Merici. She may not ring a bell with many of us, but she was an ordinary woman in her day at the end of the 15th century. Moved by the number of street children, especially girls, she got organized and with her companions started to teach these children. She founded a community dedicated to St. Ursula. The Ursuline Sisters made a huge contribution in building up the American Catholic school system. Their  convent in New Orleans is still visited by many in need of a miracle. People know of the Ursulines, but may not know about their founder.
Another example I will cite is Elizabeth Ann Seton, who founded the Sisters of Charity. She was married, raised a family, widowed and wanted to do more. Many, like these two, were ordinary people whose calling evolved into a religious congregation. Not all do.
Dorothy Day is an example. The Catholic Worker Movement, through witnessing a distinct lifestyle, is still a group made up of lay people. The point I am making is that our baptism is the source of our vocation. When you are baptized you become an active member of Christ’s body, and are called to do what he did. The acronym made popular a few years ago, WJJD, (what would Jesus do?) expresses something about our call as Christians, baptized into the death and resurrection of Christ.
Several people close to me died in the last two months, and all were exceptional Christians. Recently I was at the funeral of one whose whole life reflected her Christian faith and passion for social justice. For her, what happened in the community is as important as what happens in the church. She focused her energy on education, and the rights of students in school. She saw the direct link between dropping out of school and going to prison, so she co-founded a local group that affiliated with a national movement to break the cycle of the school-to-prison pipeline. She was particularly focused on policies that pushed kids out rather than kept them in school. She believed that human rights belong to everyone and are rooted in the Gospel.
She was a fighter for children’s rights in school, a parent advocate on Mississippi Families as Allies for Children’s Mental Health Inc. Board and for 12 years she was on the Holmes County School Board. All of this was driven by her Christian faith, her passion for children being treated fairly and her commitment to enacting policies that protected them and improved the schools.
The organizations and coalitions that she founded or cooperated with were strengthened by her unselfish passion for justice. All the money in the world could not make her do what she did. It was a calling, a vocation. She will be sorely missed, but leaves a powerful legacy.
When we look at vocations, how God calls people to do what they do, we need a wide lens. The Holy Spirit is calling people every day, and many answer the call. We need to support, encourage and pray that more hear the call of God and answer it. I will have more to say on this topic as the year progresses.
“The harvest is ripe, pray the Lord to send laborers into the harvest.”
(Father Jeremy Tobin, O.Praem, lives at the Priory of St. Moses the Black, Jackson.)

By Karla Luke
In St. Paul’s letter to the Philippians, he reminds the citizens of Philippi to be united in mind, faith and love. Think about it, he wouldn’t have had to remind them unless they had forgotten! The young church in Philippi, after Paul’s departure, had suddenly encountered grave deficiencies such as selfish ambition, conceit, and self-interest. Sound familiar? No matter where we look today, we can find a plethora of examples of selfish ambition, conceit and self-interest. They occur in the political realm, in social and economic arenas and yes, even in the Church.
The good news is that we can all benefit from Paul’s words, “…complete my joy by being of the same mind, with the same love, united in heart, thinking one thing. Do nothing out of selfishness or out of vainglory; rather, humbly regard others as more important than yourselves, each looking out not for his own interests, but also, everyone, for those of others” (Phil 2:2-4).
Notice how these setbacks relate to self. What a peaceful world we would have if we were all able to put aside our own selfish ambitions, conceitedness, and self-interests. It would be peaceful and ideal, but unfortunately because of our humanity, not very realistic. When we all try to take care of self, and value self-interest above all else, it is likely to cause conflict.
Pope Francis, in his simple and yet humble manner states in paragraph 226 of Evangelii Gaudium, The Joy of the Gospel, that “Conflict cannot be ignored or concealed. It has to be faced. But if we remain trapped in conflict, we lose our perspective, our horizons shrink and reality itself begins to fall apart.” At times, conflict, whether global, local or personal can be so overwhelming, that we lose our perspective which makes it extremely difficult to be “of the same mind, with the same love, united in heart, thinking one thing.”
He notes three ways in which conflict is treated: ignore it, embrace it or the best way, face it. By inviting the Holy Spirit into our conflict, we are able to resolve it and become the peacemakers Jesus teaches us about in the Beatitudes in Matthew’s Gospel.
We are being challenged as a church to go beyond our conflicts to recognize the deepest dignity of others, whether Christians or not, as sons and daughters of God.  We must believe that our similarities as children of God which unite us are more powerful than the differences that we allow to divide us. “In this way it becomes possible to build communion amid disagreement, but this can only be achieved by those great persons who are willing to go beyond the surface of the conflict and to see others in their deepest dignity. This requires acknowledging a principle indispensable to the building of friendship in society: namely, that unity is greater than conflict.” (Evangelii Gaudium P. 228)
Pope Francis spoke to the general audience in Vatican City on June 19, 2013, saying: “There is communion and unity: all are in relation to one another and all combine to form a single vital body, profoundly connected to Christ. Let us remember this well: being part of the church means being united to Christ and receiving from him the divine life that makes us to live as Christians.
It means remaining united to the Pope and bishops who are instruments of unity and communion and it also means learning to overcome selfishness and divisions, to understand one another better, and to harmonize the variety and richness of each one. In a word, loving God and the persons around us, in our families, parishes, and associations, better. Body and limbs must be united in order to live!”
God blesses and affirms unity most prominently in the Holy Trinity, the unity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the two natures of Jesus Christ, united as God and man, and the commissioning of Jesus by God to unite the scattered children into one church. So, let us continue to work for unity: unity within ourselves, our families, parishes, cultures, and countries. In working toward unity, we achieve peace.

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
Normally none of us like feeling sad, heavy, or depressed. Generally we prefer sunshine to darkness, lightheartedness to melancholy. That’s why, most of the time, we do everything we can to distract ourselves from melancholy, to keep heaviness and sadness at bay. We tend to run from those feelings inside us that sadden or frighten us.
We tend to think of melancholy and her children (feelings of loss, feelings of regret, intimations of our own morality, a sense of missing out on life, fear of what lies in the dark corners of our minds and heaviness of soul) as negative. But these feelings have their positive sides. Simply put, they help keep us in touch with those parts of our soul to which we are normally not attentive.
Our souls are deep and complex, and trying to hear what they are saying involves listening to them inside of every mood within our lives, including, and sometimes especially, when we feel sad and out of sorts. In sadness, melancholy and fear, the soul tells us things that we normally refuse to hear. Hence, it’s important to examine the positive side of melancholy.
Unfortunately, today it is common to see sadness and heaviness of soul as a loss of health, as a deficiency in our vibrancy, as an unhealthy condition. That’s both unfortunate and shortsighted. For instance, in many medieval and renaissance medical books melancholy was seen as a gift to the soul, something that one needed to pass through, at certain points in his or her life, in order to come to deeper health and wholeness. This, of course, doesn’t refer to clinical depression, a true loss of health, but to all those other depressions that draw us inward and downward. Why do we need to pass through melancholy in order to come to wholeness?
Thomas Moore, who writes with deep insight on how we need to learn to listen more carefully to the impulses and needs of our souls, offers this insight: “Depression gives us valuable qualities that we need in order to be fully human. It gives us weight, when we are too light about our lives. It offers a degree of gravitas. It was associated with the metal lead and was said to be heavy.
“It also ages us so that we grow appropriately and don’t pretend to be younger than we are. It grows us up and gives us the range of human emotion and character that we need in order to deal with the seriousness of life. In classic Renaissance images, found in old medical texts and collections of remedies, depression is an old person wearing a broad-rimmed hat, in the shadows, holding his head in his hands.”
Milan Kundera, the Czech writer, in his classic novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, echoes what Moore says. His heroine, Teresa, struggles to be at peace with life when it’s not heavy, when it’s too much lightness, sunshine, and seemingly non-mindful; when it’s devoid of the type of anxieties that hint at darkness and mortality. Thus, she feels always the need for gravitas, for some heaviness that signals that life is more than simply the present flourishing of health and comfort. For her, lightness equates with superficiality.
In many cultures, and indeed in all of the great world religions, periods of melancholy and sadness are considered as the necessary path one must travel in order to sustain one’s health and come to wholeness. Indeed, isn’t that part of the very essence of undergoing the paschal mystery within Christianity? Jesus, himself, when preparing to make the ultimate sacrifice for love, had to, painfully, accept that there was no path to Easter Sunday that didn’t involve the darkness of Good Friday. Good Friday was bad, long before it was good; or, at least, so it looks from the outside. Melancholy, sadness, and heaviness of soul mostly look the same.
So how might we look at periods of sadness and heaviness in our lives? How might we deal with melancholy and her children?
First off, it’s important to see melancholy (whatever its form) as something normal and healthy within our lives. Heaviness of soul is not necessarily an indication that there is something wrong inside us. Rather, normally, it’s the soul itself signally for our attention, asking to be heard, trying to ground us in some deeper way, and trying, as Moore puts it, to age us appropriately.
But, for this to happen, we need to resist two opposite temptations, namely, to distract ourselves from the sadness or to indulge in it.
How do we do that? James Hillman gives us this advice: What to do with heaviness of soul? “Put it into a suitcase and carry it with you.” Keep it close, but contained; make sure it stays available, but don’t let it take you over. That’s secular wording for Jesus’ challenge: If you wish to be my disciple, take up your cross every day and follow me.
(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX.)