Millennial Reflections
By Father Jeremy Tobin, O.Praem
This column has been percolating with me for some time as events in the Middle East grow consistently worse for Christians. In the West our understanding of Islam, much less Eastern Christianity, fails to grasp the seventh century split between Muslims: Shia and Sunni. With the disintegration of a pan-Arabic nationalism, after the American invasion of Iraq, these ancient religious animosities resurfaced. Christians and other minorities are suffering persecution from this regional religious war.
Our faith is a Middle Eastern religion. We sometimes forget that Jerusalem, not Rome, was the first center of our faith. It was from Jerusalem that the Apostles reached out to the world around them. Rome was the capital of the world. It was also the place where Christians were later fed to the lions.
It was in Antioch, in Syria, that we were first called ‘Christian.’ In Syria they celebrate Mass in Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke. Christianity spread both East and West from Jerusalem. Babylon, in what is now Iraq, was still a functioning city and both Jews and Christians lived there. The Jews composed the Babylonian Talmud while living there. The Talmud is a collection of commentaries on Scripture and Jewish law written by rabbis. Christians, too had a strong presence in the region, including thousands of monasteries. Basra, for instance, was a monastic city in Christian times. There was all this, and more, in the centuries before Mohamed.
When the Muslims came to power, they granted protection to the “religions of the book,” that is Jews and Christians. Jews and Christians had to pay a tax, but were allowed to run their institutions, churches and monasteries. The history of Eastern Christians to the present has been a history of generally amiable coexistence with the Muslim rulers. With the fall of the Ottoman Empire, and the creation of modern Arab and non-Arab states in the region, and especially after WWII, a pan-Arabism brought people together, both Christian and Muslim. While this lasted, it was a time of peace for Christians. That is all gone now.
The region is rife with religious and tribal warfare. Ancient hatreds came to the surface. Fanatics kill Christians, seize everything they have, and destroy centuries-old churches, monasteries and shrines. As one Chaldean Christian reported, “For 1,600 years Christians have been in Mosul, now they are driven out!”  By the way, Chaldeans are under the jurisdiction of the Pope.
History has a way to create new memories and new realities. Our religious history separated Eastern and Western Christians. With the consolidation of the Muslim caliphates and the split between Rome and Constantinople, we in the West, disconnected ourselves from the fate of our Eastern brothers and sisters. Now is a good time to reclaim that history and remember we are all united in Christ, no matter where we live.
The Crusades were a total disaster for Eastern Christians, Muslims and Jews, and centuries later, the fallout lingers throughout the Middle East. In the West, more concerned by what separates us, we became oblivious of what unites us. We are at a point where Christianity could be eradicated from the place of its birth. That is a horrible thing to think of, that the religion of Jesus is no more in the region we read of daily in the Scripture.
Further, the Western powers who could do something do not have the fate of Christians at the top of their list. Pope Francis has been speaking out, pleading, calling for prayers to save “our brothers and sisters in the Middle East.” He continues to call world leaders to reach out with humanitarian aid to help the Christians in the Middle East. As I say, “They are us and we are them.”
We must continue to pray for peace and call upon world leaders to create lasting structures to establish and support peace between the three faiths who all claim that region as their birthplace.
(Father Jeremy Tobin, O.Praem, lives at the Priory of St. Moses the Black, Jackson.)

Complete The Circle
By George Evans
I am writing this after recently returning from what has become my annual retreat at Manresa Retreat House in Convent, Louisiana, located on the River Road between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. Manresa is a Jesuit retreat house on the banks of the Mississippi with great facilities including an antebellum main residence building, a beautiful chapel, and wonderful new conference center, not to mention several avenues of oaks. It is a magnificent retreat setting on many acres.
Being a Jesuit institution, our retreat was based on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola, the Jesuit founder. Although these kinds of retreats have been conducted for 500 years, there always seems to be something new or different in the annual sojourn, at least by way of emphasis. This year was no different for me among the 16 from St. Richard Parish who joined the 95 from Baton Rouge for the retreat.
The retreat master was terrific. One of the distinguishing things he stressed was truly pondering different scriptural passages in the manner of lectio divina and putting oneself in the scene of particular gospel passages. St. Ignatius stressed this exercise, and though I had previously been encouraged to do so it had always been difficult for me to benefit from it. For some reason, perhaps the Holy Spirit, it worked better this time.
Let me share a couple of scenes we entered into on retreat and see if they are meaningful to you. Be with Jesus as he walks into the Jordan river to be baptized by John the Baptist. Feel the chill and wetness of the water. Sense the Spirit descend upon you with Jesus and hear the Father tell Jesus and you that you are His beloved Son along with Jesus in whom He is well pleased.  When we leave with Jesus we are ready to follow him. (Mt 3:13-17)
We then go into the desert with Jesus and become hot and hungry and we withstand, with Jesus, the devil’s temptation to do it his way and the world’s way by pleasing the crowd, grasping at political rule or by seeking religious power. We resist our culture’s enticement to greed, to things, to rampant pleasure and luxury. (Lk 4:1-13)
We go back home with Jesus to Nazareth where he stands  up in the Synagogue and reads from Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring glad tidings to the poor.  He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.”( Lk4:16-19) Jesus has set forth his mission and his father’s will for him and therefore for us as his followers.  He has given his inaugural address and asked us to help him complete his work.
We later go with Jesus when he sees Zacchaeus, a short man who had climbed a tree in order to see Jesus in the pressing crowd. We experience Jesus reaching out to this rich, sinful, hated tax collector asking, to the astonishment of everyone in the crowd, to stay in his house. We see and hear Zacchaeus’ conversion and promise to give half his possessions to the poor and repay four times over anything he has extorted. We are excited about the celebration we will experience with Jesus at Zacchaeus’s house that night.(Lk 19:1-10)
As time goes by we hear many parables and stories from Jesus. One is the Last Judgment in which Jesus separates the sheep on the right from the goats on the left and we hear him tell those on his right that they will inherit the kingdom prepared for them from the foundation of the world and those on his left to depart from him into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. And like those on the right and left we are anxious to know the reason and he tells us along with the others there:
For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, a stranger and you welcomed me, naked and you clothed me, ill and you cared for me, in prison and you visited me. When asked about doing or not doing these things he replied, ‘Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me…..what you did not do for one of these least ones, you did not do for me.’ (Mt 25:31-46)
We leave this scene struck by its directness and simplicity. We resolve to act in accord with what we have heard. We ask to be forgiven. We go to confession at the retreat. We experience a freedom and liberation. We understand its not enough just to pray and go to Mass. We have to reach out to others in charity and justice by making the system better.  We ask for the grace to enter gospel scenes with Jesus again in the future. We invite you to join us. We go home in peace and with joy.
(George Evans is a pastoral minister at Jackson St. Richard Parish.)
Editor’s note: see retreats on page 6

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
My youth had both its strengths and its weaknesses. I grew up on a farm in heart of the Canadian prairies, a second-generation immigrant. Our family was a large one and the small farm we lived on gave us enough to live on, though just enough. There were never any extras. We were never hungry or genuinely poor, but we lived in a conscriptive frugality. You were given what you needed, but rarely anything extra.
You got just one portion of the main course at a meal and one dessert because these had to be measured out in a way that left enough for everyone. And I lived happily inside that, taking for granted that this was the way life was meant to be, assuming that all resources are limited and you shouldn’t ever be asking for or taking more than what’s necessary.
And such a background has its strengths: You grow into adulthood with the sense that there’s no free lunch, you need to earn what you eat. You know too that you shouldn’t be taking more than your share because the goods of this world are limited and meant to be shared with everyone. If you take more than your share, than there won’t be enough for everyone. Resources are limited, so if anyone gets too much, someone gets too little.
But such an upbringing also has its downside: When everything has to be measured out to ensure that there’s enough for everyone and you live with the underlying fear that there might not be enough, you can easily end-up with a sense of scarcity rather than of abundance and an inclination towards stinginess rather than generosity.
A mindset of scarcity rather than of abundance debilitates us in several ways: First, it tends to leave us standing before life’s abundance too timid to celebrate life with any exuberance. Life is too equated with frugality and you are forever haunted by guilt in the face of life’s goodness and especially before any experience of luxury, not unlike the discomfort felt by Jesus’ disciples when they are face to face with a prodigal woman lavishly anointing Jesus’ feet with expensive perfume.
Inside a mindset of scarcity there’s the perennial temptation to falsely idealize suffering and poverty and have them replace grace and abundance as God’s real gift to us. More crippling still is the fact that a sense of scarcity too often gives us a concept of a God who is limited and who is frugal rather than prodigal. But that isn’t the God of Jesus.
Allow me just one, rather pointed, illustration: a seminary professor whom I know shares this story. He’s been teaching seminarians for many years and in recent years, when teaching about the sacrament of penance, is frequently asked this question, often as the first question in the class: “When can I refuse absolution? When do I not grant forgiveness?” The anxiety expressed here is not, I believe, triggered by a need for power but by a very sincere fear that we have to be rather scrupulous in handing out God’s mercy, that we shouldn’t be handing out cheap grace. And, undergirding that fear, I believe, is the unconscious notion that God too works out of a sense of scarcity rather than of abundance, and that God’s mercies, like our own resources, are limited and need to be measured out very sparingly.
But that’s not the God whom Jesus incarnated and revealed. The Gospels rather reveal a God who is prodigal beyond all our standards and beyond our imagination. The God of the Gospels is the Sower who, because he has unlimited seeds, scatters those seeds everywhere without discrimination: on the road, in the ditches, in the thorn bushes, in bad soil, and in good soil.
Moreover that prodigal Sower is also the God of creation, that is, the God who has created and continues to create hundreds of billions of galaxies and billions and billions of human beings. And this prodigal God gives us this perennial invitation: Come to the waters, come without money, come without merit because God’s gift is as plentiful, available, and as free as the air we breathe.
The Gospel of Luke recounts an incident where Peter, just after he had spent an entire night fishing and had caught nothing, is told to cast out his net one more time and, this time, Peter’s net catches so many fish that the weight of the catch threatens to sink two boats. Peter reacts by falling on his knees and confessing his sinfulness.
But, as the text makes clear, that’s not the proper reaction in the face of over-abundance. Peter is wrongly fearful, in effect, wanting that over-abundance to go away; when what Jesus wants from him in the face of that over-abundance is to go out to the world and share with others that unimaginable grace.
What God’s over-abundance is meant to teach us is that, in the face of limitless grace, we may never refuse anyone absolution.
(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX.)

By Father Robert Barron
Lois Lowry’s 1993 novel “The Giver” has garnered a very wide audience over the past two decades, since it has become a standard text in middle schools and high schools across the English-speaking world. The movie version of “The Giver” was produced by Jeff Bridges and stars Bridges and Meryl Streep. Having never even heard of the novel, I came at the film with no expectations, and I confess I was quite surprised both by the power of its societal critique and by its implicit Christian themes.
The story is set in the near future, in a seemingly utopian city, where there is no conflict, no inequality and no stress. The streets are laid out in a perfectly symmetrical grid, the domiciles and public buildings are clean, even antiseptic, and the people dress in matching outfits and ride bicycles so as not to pollute the environment. The “elders,” the leadership of the community, artificially arrange families and carefully assign vocations, all for the sake of the common good. In order to eliminate any volatile emotions that might stir up resentment or compromise the perfect equilibrium of the society, each citizen is obligated to take a daily injection of a kind of sedative.
Most chillingly, the elderly and unacceptable children are eliminated, though the people have been conditioned not to think of this as killing but only as a peaceful transition to “elsewhere.” The calm “sameness” of the city is maintained, above all, through the erasing of memory: no one is permitted to remember the colorful but conflictual world that preceded the present utopia. No one, that is, except the Giver, an elder who retains memories of the previous world for the sole purpose of consulting them in case an emergency arises and specialized knowledge is needed.
Utopian societies, maintained through totalitarian control, have been dreamed about at least since the time of Plato, and, to be sure, many attempts have been made over the centuries to realize the dream. The twentieth century witnessed quite a few of them: Mao’s China, Stalin’s Soviet Union, Hitler’s Third Reich, Pol Pot’s Cambodia. Indeed, there are echoes of all of these social arrangements in “The Giver’s” version of utopia, but I think what The Giver’s city most readily calls to mind is modern liberalism, especially in its European incarnation.
We find the fierce enforcement of politically correct speech, the manic attempt to control the environment, coldly modernist architecture, the prizing of equality as the supreme value, the rampant use of drugs, the denial of death and the wanton exercise of both euthanasia and abortion. Will all of this produce a balanced and peaceful society? Well, it might bring about a kind of equilibrium, but at a terrible cost.
The plot of The Giver centers on a young man named Jonas who was chosen by the elders to become the sole recipient of the suppressed memory of the previous world. Through a sort of telepathy, the Giver communicates to Jonas all of the richness, color, drama and joy of the pre-Utopian society. The most beguiling image he receives is of himself sledding down a snowy hill and coming upon a cottage from which he hears emerging the strains of a song he had never heard before (in fact, both snow and music had been excluded from his world).
In time, the Giver fills out the picture, communicating to the young man the pain and conflict of the previous world as well. Though at first he is horrified by that experience, Jonas realizes that the colorful world, even with its suffering, would be preferable to the bloodless and inhuman dystopia in which he had been raised. As the story moves to its climax, Jonas escapes from the city and ventures out into the forbidden wilderness. The weather turns fiercely cold and he wanders through the snow until he comes to a clearing where he spies the sled that he had previously seen in memory. Following the prompts of the recollection, he rides the sled down a snowy hill, comes to the quaint cottage, and listens to the song. It is only then that we hear that they are singing the best-known and best-loved Christmas hymn, “Silent Night.”
And now we see that what makes the society in “The Giver” most like contemporary Europe is precisely the forgetfulness of Christianity. What the story suggests, quite rightly, is that suppression of the good news of the Incarnation is in fact what conduces to dysfunctional and dangerous totalitarianism. The source of the greatest suffering throughout human history is the attempt to deal with original sin on our own, through our political, economic, military or cultural efforts. When we try to eliminate conflict and sin through social reform, we inevitably make matters worse.
As Pascal said long ago, “He who would turn himself into an angel, turns himself into a beast.” The key to joy at the personal level and justice at the societal level is in fact the conviction that God has dealt with original sin, by taking it on himself and suffering with us and for us. This belief allows us to embrace the world in both its beauty and its tragedy, for we see salvation as God’s project, not our own. It is the Incarnation — the event celebrated by the singing of “Silent Night” — that frees us from our self-importance and gives the lie to our programs of perfectibility.
I can’t help but think that the recovery of this lost memory — so key to the authentic renewal of contemporary society — is what “The Giver” is finally about.
(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.)

By Sister Constance Veit, lsp
The month of September begins and ends with a focus on the elderly. Since 1978 the first Sunday after Labor Day has been celebrated as National Grandparents Day; this year’s observance falls on Sept. 7.

Later in the month, senior citizens will gather in Rome for a special celebration in their honor at the invitation of Pope Francis. The meeting, entitled “The Blessing of a Long Life,” will take place in Saint Peter’s Square on Sunday, Sept. 28.

In announcing the event, Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, president of the Pontifical Council for the Family, stated, “The day is based on the assumption that old age is not a shipwreck but a vocation.” A shipwreck?

I suspect what Archbishop Paglia meant was not that advanced age itself is a disaster, but that society’s response to this stage of life is sadly adrift. He suggested that neither politics, economics, nor culture has developed an adequate approach to the contemporary individual needs of older persons or the growing population of seniors as a whole.

The inadequacy of society’s response to the needs and problems of the elderly is nothing new. In 1982, Saint John Paul II suggested that society needed to be “jerked into awareness” with regard to the elderly in order to foster “a vision of the old which is genuinely human and Christian, a vision of old age as a gift of God to the individual, the family and society.”

More than 30 years later, the ship seems to have completely lost direction! Pope Francis has deplored our “throw-away culture” and a “hidden euthanasia” which silences and marginalizes the old. “A nation that does not respect grandparents,” he said, “has no future because it has no memory.”

Pope Francis often evokes the memory of his own paternal grandmother, whom he visited each day as a child and to whom he credits his early spiritual formation. The Pope feels that we live in a time when the elderly do not count.

Yet, he asserts, “the elderly pass on history, doctrine, faith and they leave them to us as an inheritance. They are like a fine vintage wine; that is, they have within themselves the power to give us this noble inheritance.”

In a homily about the elderly Eleazar, who accepted death rather than give bad example to the young (Maccabees 6:18-31), our Holy Father related the following story he heard as a young child and never forgot: “There was a father, mother and their many children, and a grandfather lived with them. He was quite old, and when he was at the table eating soup, he would get everything dirty: his mouth, the napkin … it was not a pretty sight. One day the father said that given what was happening to the grandfather, from that day on, he would eat alone.

“So he bought a little table, and placed it in the kitchen. And so the grandfather ate alone in the kitchen while the family ate in the dining room.

After some days, the father returned home from work and found one of his children playing with wood. He asked him, ‘What are you doing?’ to which the child replied, ‘I am playing carpenter.’ ‘And what are you building?’ the father asked. ‘A table for you, papa, for when you get old like grandpa.’”

Although each of us alone may be powerless to influence policies or economic decisions regarding the elderly, we can change the culture in our own families.

To begin, do not let the month of September pass without pausing to reflect and thank God for the precious legacy you have received from grandparents or other significant elders in your life.

And then, be sure to set a place at your table for the elderly, regardless of their limitations. Teach your children to reverence the old and one day you will be considered fine vintage wine in the heart of your own family. You will experience the blessing of a long life!

(Sister Constance Veit is director of communications for the Little Sisters of the Poor.)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
Our bodies and our souls each have their separate aging process, and they aren’t always in harmony. T.E. Laurence, in “The Seven Pillars of Wisdom,” makes this comment about someone: “He feared his maturity as it grew upon him, with its ripe thought and finished art, but which lacked the poetry of boyhood to make living a full end of life … his rangeful, mortal soul was aging faster than his body, was going to die before it, like most of ours.”
I suspect that all of us, at some level, fear growing into maturity. It’s not so much that we don’t want to give up the habits of our youth or that we fear that the joys of maturity are second-best to the pleasures of youth. I believe there is a deeper reason. We fear, as Laurence puts it, that our maturity will strip us of the poetry of our youth and make us old before time. What does that mean?
We sometimes speak of an old soul inside a young person, and this is meant both as a compliment and a criticism, perhaps more the latter. We sometimes look at a young person whose body is full of life and overfull with energy and see a precociousness of soul that belies that youth and energy and we can’t help wondering whether that premature maturity isn’t inhibiting the life-principle. And so we have a mixed reaction: What a mature young person! But is his or her life too-grey and sterile before its time?
Reflecting on this, I was reminded of a comment that Raymond Brown once made in a class. The context of his remark is important. This was not the comment of a young man still looking to leave a mark on life, but rather the comment of a very mature, successful and respected man who was the envy of his peers. Nearly 70 years old, wonderfully mature, universally respected for everything from his scholarship to his personal integrity, he was a mature soul. And still his comment betrayed the subtle fear that perhaps his maturity had stripped him of some of the poetry of his boyhood. His comment was something to this effect:
You know when you reach a certain age, as I have now, and you look back on what you’ve done, you’re sometimes embarrassed by some of the things you did in your youth, not immoral things, just things that now, from your present perspective, seem immature and ill thought-out, things that you are now too wise to ever risk doing. Recalling them, initially you are a little embarrassed.
But then, in those moments where you feel your age and your present reticence, you sometimes look back and say: “That’s the bravest thing I ever did! Wow, I had nerve then! I’m much more afraid of things now!”
Jane Urquhart, the Canadian novelist, echoes this sentiment. Rereading one of her own books which she had written twenty years before, she comments: “It is tremendously satisfying to be able to reacquaint myself with the young woman who wrote these tales, and to know that what was going on in her mind intrigues me still.” What’s unspoken in her comment is her present admiration (and dare I say, envy) for the poetry that once infused her younger self.
I had a similar feeling some years ago when, for a new release of my book, “The Restless Heart,” I was asked to update it. I’d written the book when I was still in my twenties, a lonely and restless young man then, partly looking for my place in life. Now, nearly 25 years later and somewhat more mature, I was sometimes embarrassed by some of the things I’d written all those years back; but, like Raymond Brown, I marveled at my nerve back then, and, like Jane Urquhart, it was refreshing to reacquaint myself with the young man who had written that book, sensing that he had a livelier poetry and more verve in him than the older person who was rereading that text.
Some of us never grow-up. The body ages, but the soul remains immature, clinging to adolescence, fearful of responsibility, fearful of commitment, fearful of opportunity slipping away, fearful of aging, fearful of own maturity, and, not least, fearful of death. This is not a formula for happiness, but one for an ever-increasing fear, disappointment, and bitterness in life. Not growing-up eventually catches up with everyone, and what judged as cute at twenty, colorful at 30, and eccentric at 40, becomes intolerable at 50. At a certain age, even poetry and verve don’t compensate for immaturity. The soul too must grow-up.
But for some of us, the danger is the opposite, we grow old before our time, becoming old souls in still young bodies, mature, responsible, committed, able to look age, diminishment and mortality square in the eye, but devoid of the poetry, verve, color and humor which are meant to make a mature person mellow and alive, like a finely-aged old wine.
(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
Watching the evening news several days ago, I flashed a big smile when I saw more than 50 commuters in Perth, Australia, rush up and swarm a subway car. It took mere moments for the crowd to merge as one, slamming their bodies into the car and pushing it sideways with all their might, widening by just a smidgen the 2-inch gap between the platform and the subway coach.

A careless rider, who had stepped into the 2-inch crack in a distracted moment, could not extract his foot. While a car conductor waved frantically to the engineer not to start the car moving again, the coach did give way enough for the Good Samaritans to pull the errant foot out.

There is a wonderful side of us that drives us to the aid of people in distress such as the many New Orleanians trapped by the devastating water pouring through levees broken by the winds and waters of Hurricane Katrina on Aug. 29, 2005. Again, one had to smile, thrilling to the news that Good Samaritans in light and medium watercraft grabbed extra fuel and provisions and sped along the Texas and Louisiana Gulf Coast up the Mississippi River to New Orleans.

As the waters receded, New Orleans native and Vietnam veteran Armand (Sheik) Richardson and the Arabi Wrecking Crew helped with the grassroots rebuilding, handling the demolition and/or mold cleaning of buildings for several years into the regional recovery.

It is always cheering and inspiring to see videos of the selfless, fearless, generous and sometimes daring assistance and rescues of people in wrecked vehicles along our roads, some even engulfed in flames. At times it is a lone individual dashing to the scene with bare hands or with a fire extinguisher, and at other times it is two or more forcing open the doors and defying the smoke and flames with little or no regard for their own safety and physical integrity.

In these times of widespread television and social media, it is amazing how often we view such daring and generosity while it is actually happening. We have reality TV at its best, chronicling stirring events that rise above the usual and the everyday, confirming the timeless adage, “truth is stranger than fiction.”

Every tornado, hurricane, earthquake, flood or widespread disaster presents us with an opportunity for altruism, bravery, generosity and daring to sally forth despite considerable and usually dangerous obstacles that block our path toward those in peril and need. It cheers our hearts that heroes and heroines abound and willingly make themselves available to everyone.

For many of us, the most resounding composite example of all this was 9/11 when all others were streaming down the stairs in sheer panic while 343 New York firefighters and 60 police were making their way up the stairs, ostensibly rushing to stare pain and death in the face.

Yet, with our great innate kindness, there is a loathsome side of us that we are reluctant to describe as our innate meanness, as witnessed by the crowd gathered in front of a tall building with a suicidal 17-year-old threatening to jump. Derby, England, was the venue in this particular case. However, similar episodes have occurred in countries all over the world.

“Jump! Jump! Jump!” urged some from a crowd of 300 gathered below. Can you imagine what this did to the spirit of Shaun Dykes, depressed by a recent relationship breakup and teetering atop the 6-story building? At length, driven by the taunting, he hurled himself down to immediate death on the unforgiving concrete.

An offensive penchant for evil rears its ugly head in looters like the Ferguson, Missouri, lot. Chaos is their name; anarchy is their shame; plunder is their blunder. Such looting follows hot in the wake of a storm or other disaster such as the Northeast blackout of Nov. 9, 1965, when widespread looting and other mischief hit some of the darkened sections of New York. An unspoken belief in all walks of life is that, unless someone sees you, you can get away with evil.

Truth to tell, each step of our life is a medieval morality play redux in which we freely choose which role we will take and live out for the moment. While most of our days, hours and minutes are humdrum and nothing to write home about, we do have a flashy moment here and there. It must be noted that those humdrum minutes, hours, days and years are the most critical times of our lives because they comprise by far the bulk of the time allotted to us here.

Hence, flashes of heroism are not the main menu, but only a special dish, the outgrowth of our character forged in the cauldron of dull, hard, tiresome, oft dreary hours, days and years far too numerous to count. With the forging of our character must come vibrant spirituality, our indispensable link with the eternal, transcendent Being on whom we claim to be all-dependent.

“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
Last month I wrote about the children at the border. As stories go their plight may get put on the back page with even more alarming news from Ukraine or the Middle East coming front and center. These children represent the least among us, and have no voice. We have to be their voice.
Even the major news networks have praised the heroic efforts Catholic Charities in the Southwest is putting forth to provide for their necessities and well being. The agency stands out as being non-political, bypassing all the rhetoric and hate talk. Their work cannot be praised enough.
The journeys of these children, some with mothers and siblings, are the last attempt for these families to survive. The economies of these countries have been wrecked by American trade policies, NAFTA and CAFTA. The lack of work fuels the illicit drug trade, as it does in the cities in the United States. The drug lords fight over turf and power. Their influence runs these governments. Corruption is rampant. Tegucigalpa, the capitol of Honduras, is the murder capitol of the world. Murders are so frequent, many go uninvestigated. Children see bodies on the street daily. They witness violence daily. They are traumatized daily.
The need for qualified attorneys in immigration law is critical in order that these children’s rights be protected. In addition, specially trained social workers are needed in order to conduct proper interviews that capture as much as possible what these children have gone through.
They and their families have an abiding belief in America. They believe what many of us were taught in grade school, that immigrants made the country what it is. This country welcomes everybody. The stories are legend. This belief is shared by people all over the world.
We are experiencing a new nativism movement, just as ugly as the nineteenth century version.
I continue to make the point, immigrants are scapegoated to insure a continuous flow of cheap labor. This steps all over human rights and what our church teaches. Whatever your views are on the immigration issue, and all points of view should be treated with respect in civil dialogue, the Catholic Church is the spiritual fortress of immigrants’ struggle for human rights.
President Obama met with the presidents of Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. They said that demand for drugs in the United States is what fuels the drug cartels in Mexico and Central America. I would add to that, the lack of legal, meaningful work creates a vacuum where the drug trade thrives, as well as the influence it has on all levels of government.
This creates a state of low-level, undeclared war and the poor are caught in it. These children are refugees, and should be accorded their full rights under the law, and treated as such.
The pressure on the White House is intense. Immigrant groups have massed in Washington under the banner “No more meetings about us, without us.” They have already met with the Center for American Progress, the National Immigration Forum, and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights before rallying in front of the White House.
They are simply asking that the people most impacted by immigration reform have a seat at the table. White House spokesman, Shawn Turner, said in an email that “Obama and his senior staff meet regularly with immigration advocates and supporters to discuss the immigration issue.”
Much more needs to be done. More voices need to be heard. The children at the border, run willingly into the arms of the border patrol. They trust them. They believe in America, that America will do the right thing. Our bishops support them.
(Father Jeremy Tobin, O.Praem, lives at the Priory of St. Moses the Black, Jackson)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
Each year I write a column on suicide Mostly I say the same thing over and over again, simply because it needs to be said. I don’t claim any originality or special insight, I only write about suicide because there is such a desperate need for anyone to address the question. Moreover, in my case, as a Catholic priest and spiritual writer, I feel it important to offer something to try to help dispel the false perception which so many people, not least many inside the church itself, have of the church’s understanding of suicide. Simply put, I’m no expert, not anyone’s savior, there’s just so little out there.
And, each year, that column finds its audience. I am constantly surprised and occasionally overwhelmed by the feedback. For the last 10 years, I don’t think a single week has gone by when I did not receive an email, a letter, or phone call from someone who has lost a loved one to suicide.
When talking about suicide, at least to those who are left behind when a loved one succumbs to this, the same themes must be emphasized over and over again. As Margaret Atwood puts it, sometimes something needs to be said and said until it doesn’t need to be said anymore.
What needs to be said over and over again about suicide? That, in most cases, suicide is a disease; that it takes people out of life against their will; that it is the emotional equivalent of a stroke, heart attack, or cancer; that people who fall victim to this disease, almost invariably, are very sensitive persons who end up for a myriad of reasons being too bruised to be touched; that those of us left behind should not spend a lot of time second-guessing, wondering whether we failed in some way; and, finally, that given God’s mercy, the particular anatomy of suicide, and the sensitive souls of those who fall prey to it, we should not be unduly anxious about the eternal salvation of those who fall prey to it.
This year, prompted by particularly moving book by Harvard psychiatrist, Nancy Rappaport, I would like to add another thing that needs to be said about suicide, namely, that it is incumbent on those of us who are left behind to work at redeeming the life and memory of a loved one who died by suicide. What’s implied in this?
There is still a huge stigma surrounding suicide. For many reasons, we find it hard both to understand suicide and to come to peace with it. Obituaries rarely name it, opting instead for a euphemism of some kind to name the cause of death. Moreover and more troubling, we, the ones left behind, tend to bury not only the one who dies by suicide but his or her memory as well.
Pictures come off the walls, scrapbooks and photos are excised, and there is forever a discreet hush around the cause of their deaths. Ultimately neither their deaths nor their persons are genuinely dealt with. There is no healthy closure, only a certain closing of the book, a cold closing, one that leaves a lot of business unfinished. This is unfortunate, a form of denial. We must work at redeeming the life and memory of our loved ones who have died by suicide.
This is what Nancy Rappaport does with the life and memory of her own mother, who died by suicide when Nancy was still a child. “In Her Wake, A Child Psychiatrist Explores the Mystery of Her Mother’s Suicide” (Basic Book, N.Y., 2009). After her mother’s suicide, Nancy lived, as do so many of us who have lost a loved one to suicide, with a haunting shadow surrounding her mother’s death.
And that shadow then colored everything else about her mother. It ricocheted backwards so as to have the suicide too much define her mother’s character, her integrity, and her love for those around her. A suicide, that’s botched in our understanding, in effect, does that, it functions like the antithesis of a canonization.
With this as a background, Nancy Rappaport sets off to make sense of her mother’s suicide, to redeem her bond to her mother, and, in essence, to redeem her mother’s memory in the wake of her suicide. Her effort mirrors that of novelist Mary Gordon whose book, “Circling my Mother,” attempts to come to grips with her mother’s Alzheimer’s and her death. Gordon, like Rappaport, is too trying to put a proper face on the diminishment and death of a loved one, redeeming the memory both for herself and for others. The difference is that, for most people, suicide trumps Alzheimer’s in terms of stigma and loss.
Few things stigmatize someone’s life and meaning as does a death by suicide, and so there is something truly redemptive in properly coming to grips with this kind of stigma. We must do for our loved ones what Nancy Rappaport did for her mother, namely, redeem their lives and their memory.
(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX.)