By Father Robert Barron
I was chagrined, but not entirely surprised, when I read Woody Allen’s recent ruminations on ultimate things. To state it bluntly, Woody could not be any bleaker in regard to the issue of meaning in the universe. We live, he said, in a godless and purposeless world. The earth came into existence through mere chance and one day it, along with every work of art and cultural accomplishment, will be incinerated.
The universe as a whole will expand and cool until there is nothing left but the void. Every hundred years or so, he continued, a coterie of human beings will be “flushed away” and another will replace it until it is similarly eliminated. So why does he bother making films — roughly one every year?
Well, he explained, in order to distract us from the awful truth about the meaninglessness of everything, we need diversions, and this is the service that artists provide. In some ways, low level entertainers are probably more socially useful than high-brow artistes, since the former manage to distract more people than the latter. After delivering himself of this sunny appraisal, he quipped, “I hope everyone has a nice afternoon!”
Woody Allen’s perspective represents a limit-case of what philosopher Charles Taylor calls “the buffered self,” which is to say, an identity totally cut off from any connection to the transcendent.
On this reading, this world is all we’ve got, and any window to another more permanent mode of existence remains tightly shut. Prior to the modern period, Taylor observes, the contrary idea of the “porous self” was in the ascendency. This means a self that is, in various ways and under various circumstances, open to a dimension of existence that goes beyond ordinary experience.
If you consult the philosophers of antiquity and the Middle Ages, you would find a very frank acknowledgement that what Woody Allen observed about the physical world is largely true. Plato, Aristotle, and Thomas Aquinas all knew that material objects come and go, that human beings inevitably pass away, that all of our great works of art will eventually cease to exist.
But those great thinkers wouldn’t have succumbed to Allen’s desperate nihilism. Why? Because they also believed that there were real links to a higher world available within ordinary experience, that certain clues within the world tip us off to the truth that there is more to reality than meets the eye.
One of these routes of access to the transcendent is beauty. In Plato’s Symposium, we can read an exquisite speech by a woman named Diotima. She describes the experience of seeing something truly beautiful — an object, a work of art, a lovely person, etc. — and she remarks that this experience carries with it a kind of aura, for it lifts the observer to a consideration of the Beautiful itself, the source of all particular beauty.
If you want to see a more modern version of Diotima’s speech, take a look at the evocative section of James Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,“ wherein the narrator relates his encounter with a beautiful girl standing in the surf off the Dublin strand and concludes with the exclamation, “Oh heavenly God.”
John Paul II was standing in this same tradition when, in his wonderful letter to artists, he spoke of the artist’s vocation as mediating God through beauty. To characterize artistic beauty as a mere distraction from the psychological oppression of nihilism is a tragic reductionism.
A second classical avenue to transcendence is morality, more precisely, the unconditioned demand of the good.  On purely nihilist grounds, it is exceptionally difficult to say why anyone should be morally upright. If there are starving children in Africa, if there are people dying of AIDS in this country, if Christians are being systematically persecuted around the world … well who cares?
Every hundred years or so, a coterie of human beings is flushed away and the cold universe looks on with utter indifference. So why not just eat, drink, and be merry and dull our sensitivities to innocent suffering and injustice as best we can? In point of fact, the press of moral obligation itself links us to the transcendent, for it places us in the presence of a properly eternal value.  The violation of one person cries out, quite literally, to heaven for vengeance; and the performance of one truly noble moral act is a participation in the Good itself, the source of all particular goodness.
Indeed, even some of those who claim to be atheists and nihilists implicitly acknowledge this truth by the very passion of their moral commitments, a very clear case in point being Christopher Hitchens. One can find a disturbing verification of Woody Allen’s rejection of this principle in two of his better films, Crimes and Misdemeanors from the 1980’s and Match Point from the 2000’s.
In both movies, men commit horrendous crimes, but after a relatively brief period of regret, they move on with their pampered lives. No judgment comes, and all returns to normal. So it goes in a flattened out world in which the moral link to transcendence has been severed.
Perhaps this conviction is born of my affection for many of Woody Allen’s films, but I’m convinced that the great auteur doesn’t finally believe his own philosophy.  There are simply too many hints of beauty, truth, and goodness in his movies, and protest all he wants, these will speak of a reality that transcends this fleeting world.
(Father Robert Barron is the founder of the global ministry, Word on Fire, and the Rector/President of Mundelein Seminary. Learn more at www.WordonFire.org.)

Complete the circle
By George Evans
Elsewhere in this issue of Mississippi Catholic you will find coverage of educational opportunities offered by the Office of Faith Formation of the diocese covering all aspects of lay ministry and lay formation.  One does not need to have a title in the local parish, be a teacher in a Catholic school, an employee on the parish staff or have any designation whatsoever other than being an adult Catholic to participate in many of the offerings. In fact, by baptism we are all called to formation throughout our life by the Gospel of Jesus.
Many if not most Catholics have sold themselves short for years with the understanding that what they learned from their parents and families or the good Sisters in the parochial schools was and is enough for their spiritual formation for life. When we think about it and compare that understanding to what we do in every other aspect of our lives something doesn’t compute.
The lessons, prayers and devotionals we learned in our youth are invaluable. Without them it is likely that there is no foundation on which to build further spiritual formation. However, if we quit our spiritual growth, devotional life and understanding at 12, 18, 25 or whatever age, is there any reason we shouldn’t get bored, disinterested or turned off by our religious experience as the rest of our life continues to grow, develop, and mature?
We complain a lot about the consumerism, secularism, self-indulgence and selfishness of our current society. If we quit meeting God in a progressively adult way always being formed in our knowledge and spirituality as we are in our other education, work, social development and skills are we not responsible, at least in part, for the darkness of which we complain?  How can an education which stops in our youth serve our religious and spiritual development needed as a parent, head of a household, spouse and teacher?
Pope Francis in his extraordinary exhortation “Joy of the Gospel” admonishes us that the new evangelization he calls for not only requires a faithful acceptance  of the kerygma, the first proclamation that Jesus loves us, saves us and lives at our side, but “also calls for ongoing formation and maturation.” (Par. 160)  “Education and catechesis are at the service of this growth.” (Par. 163)  Our pope understands and challenges us to be prepared to impact and challenge a world more diverse, technological, sophisticated and multicultural than ever before. We cannot effectively do this with a lack of knowledge and spiritual formation.  He makes it clear:
It would not be right to see this call to growth exclusively or primarily in terms of doctrinal formation.  It has to do with “observing” all that the Lord has shown us as the way of responding to his love.  Along    with the virtues, this means above all the new commandment, the first and the greatest of the commandments, and the one that best identifies us as Christ’s disciples: “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you”(Jn 15:12). Clearly, whenever the New Testament  authors want to present the heart of the Christian moral message, they present the essential requirement of love for one’s neighbor: “The one who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the whole law…therefore love of neighbor is the fulfilling of the law”(Rom 13:8,10) (Par 161)
Again, it’s up to us to be the Lord’s hands and feet, his messengers to those who have not heard his word and to a world aching for the love, peace and joy which only He can bring. First, as the pope tells us we need to be as formed and transformed as we can be in order to do the best job possible.  Does not the Lord deserve this if he entrusts evangelization to us?  Do we not owe it to ourselves to know the Lord as fully and as intimately as we can?
The diocese and many parishes offer great opportunities for “formation and maturation” as Pope Francis calls it in his challenge. May we all take full advantage so that we grow in faith and love to better love and serve our Lord and neighbor.
(George Evans is a pastoral minister at Jackson St. Richard Parish.)

Reflections on Life
By Father Jerome LeDoux, SVD
The earthy, mercenary lust for gold, silver and precious stones drove prospectors to the California Forty-niners gold rush and the Klondike gold rush, and it pushed conquistadores from the Old World to risk everything – even life – in their quest for cities of gold in the New World.
It made no difference that mushrooming gold rush towns were rife with crime and immorality.
Changed only in venue and outer appearance, the gold rush syndrome lives today and thrives in virtually every corner of the planet. Mercenaries of every stripe abound in every nation and in all human activities. We have come to expect the gold rush multimillions routinely tossed about in negotiations and contracts of the National Basketball Association, the National Football Association, Major League Baseball, professional golf, hockey, soccer and entertainment.
Oddly, those outsized salaries are frequently dwarfed by multimillion-dollar endorsements made by famous athletes like Michael Jordan who continue raking in the megabucks decades after their heyday as athletes and retirement from the battlefield of world-class competition.
“What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas!” is the chant that describes but a small part of all that goes on in the erstwhile dusty townlet of the western desert that became Glitter City built on the human hunger and thirst to derive great profit from as little outlay as possible. But, lo, in magic Atlantic City and thereabouts, big names like Showboat Atlantic City and Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino are set to close within two months, mainly due to tough regional competition.
With all that, the gold rush fever sometimes invades, undermines and destroys our most  intimate and precious relationships in marriage, among family members, and with our friends. We even call those involved in such relationships gold diggers, because their mind is never far from lucre and gain.
Mark 8:36-37 extends the challenge of a stiff rebuke to people who drop all other interests and go all out for the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow, “What profit is there for one to gain the whole world and forfeit his life? What could one give in exchange for his life?”
A few days ago, an extraordinary rendition of “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” stopped me in my tracks and lifted my mind and emotions to a place beyond the everyday reach of our human understanding. Although it is frequently symptomatic of lazy distractions, daydreaming is a not uncommon subconscious indication of a transcendent longing of our hearts and minds.
Yearning and imagination fog the stardust and physical allures of people like Judy Garland who seem to have so much more of the good life than most of us have. But there seems to be an inverse relation of the good life to real transcendent values in perhaps most of those who are gifted with the good life. In other words, the good life does not deliver what its goods claim to embody. The more the good life is present, the less true values and happiness seem to thrive.
Whether the near mystical transport of our human being results from hallucinatory drug  accelerants or from a clear mind uncluttered by drugs of any kind, the end product is invariably a most desirable place tantalizingly beyond our mortal grasp. Thus, we have a contradictory huge attraction to the divine and simultaneously to the vanity of human longing for worldly things.
Our longing for the spiritual wonderland beyond all earthly barriers must be stronger than the terrible condition of the world summed up by St. John the Evangelist in 1 John 2:16-17, “All that is in the world, lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes and the pride of life, is not from the Father but is from the world. Yet the world and its enticement are passing away. But whoever does the will of God remains forever.” Sadly, we remain suckers for what is so obviously passing away.
However, the proverbial pot of gold may not be conventional gold at all for some blessed people whose “gold” in life is something even more precious. For instance, true friends are worth more than gold, and, of course, our relatives should be worth even more than that, although such is, tragically, not always the case. Relatives are often the gold unappreciated until they are gone.
“Somewhere over the rainbow… dreams that you dare to dream really do come true.” The lyrics go on to portray the intense desire to see clouds and troubles melt away. However, ironies demonstrate that the lack of clouds spell troubles in lands stricken by severe drought. Not every cloud is your enemy. Not every blue sky or Easy Street day is your friend. At times the hot cauldron of hardship and pain forges your mind, heart and soul into a fit instrument of service.
Our dreams must far exceed the worldly parameters of the so-called American dream. Of itself, that dream is earthy, hard limited by some decades of time, and too easily conducive to an attitude of selfishness, snobbishness, attachment to material things, and a drift away from God.
The stellar intellect of St. Augustine shares with us, “Our hearts are restless, oh God, and they will never find rest until they rest in you.” Augustine shares again, “Too late have I known you, Beauty so ancient yet so new!”
“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.)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
There are few more insightful studies into the spirituality of aging than the late James Hillman’s book, “The Force of Character.” Ironically Hillman was more critical of Christian spirituality than sympathetic to it; yet his brilliant insights into nature’s design and intent offer perspectives on the spirituality of aging that often eclipse what is found in explicitly Christian writings.
Hillman begins this book, a discourse on the nature of aging, with a question: Why would nature design things so that, as humans, just as we reach the pinnacle of our maturity and finally get more of a genuine grip on our lives, our bodies begin to fall apart? Why do we suffer such a bevy of physical ailments as we age? Is this a cruel trick or does nature have a specific intent in mind when it does this? What might nature have in mind when the ailments and physical foibles of age begin to play some havoc with our days and nights?
He answers these questions with a metaphor. The best wines have to be aged and mellowed in cracked old barrels. This image of course needs little explication. We all know the difference between a mellow old wine and a tart young one that could still use some maturation. What we don’t grasp as immediately is how that old wine became so mellow, what processes it had to endure to give up the sharp tang of its youth.
Thus Hillman’s metaphor speaks brilliantly. Our physical bodies are the containers within which our souls mellow and mature; and our souls mellow and mature more deeply when our bodies begin to show cracks than they do when we are physically strong and whole, akin to what John Updike wrote after undergoing a life-threatening illness. For Updike, there are some secrets that are hidden from health. For Hillman there is a depth of maturity that is also hidden from health.
With that fundamental insight as his ground, Hillman then goes on in each chapter of the book to take up one aspect of aging, one aspect of the loss of the wholeness of our youth, and show how it is designed to help mellow and mature the soul. And since he is dealing with various lapses in our bodies and our health, we can expect that what follows will be pretty earthy and far from glamorous.
Thus, for instance, he begins one chapter with the question: Why does it happen that, as we age, we find it more difficult to sleep uninterrupted through the night but instead are awakened with the need to go to the bathroom and heed a call of nature? What is nature’s wisdom and intent in that?
Hillman answers with another insightful analogy: In monasteries, monks get up each night while it is still dark and do an exercise they call “Vigils.” If you asked them why they don’t do this prayer during the day so as to save themselves getting up in the middle of the night, they would tell you that this particular exercise can only be done at night, in the dark, in the particular mood that the night brings. The night, the dark, and the more somber angels this brings cannot be artificially replicated during the day, in the light. Light brings a sunnier mood and there are certain things we will not face in the light of day, but only when the dark besets us.
So what happens when our aging bodies make us get up at night to heed nature’s call? We heed nature’s call but then often are unable to fall back into sleep immediately. Instead we lie in our beds trying to will ourselves back to sleep when something unwanted and unintended happens.
We receive a visit from the mythical goddess of night, Nyx. And she doesn’t come alone; she brings along her children: unresolved bitterness, lingering grudges, unwanted paranoia, frightening shadows and a bevy of other dark spirits whom we can normally avoid and whom we refuse to face when the lights are on. But now, in the dark, unable to sleep, we must deal with them, and dealing with them, making our peace with Nyx and her children, helps mellow our souls and helps us grow to a deeper maturity.
Monks already know this and so, each night, they schedule a session with the goddess of night. They don’t call it that of course and might even be offended by the reference to their Vigil prayer as a visit with this mythical goddess, but their spiritual wisdom mirrors that of nature. Both nature and monks know that a certain work inside the soul can only be done in the darkness of night.
Monks have secrets worth knowing and nature eventually teaches them to us, whether we want the lesson or not. Nature eventually turns us all into monks: Our aging bodies eventually become a monastic cell within which our souls deepen, mellow and mature, like wines being seasoned in cracked old barrels.
(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
On the first day of my vacation last week, I perused N.T. Wright’s latest book, a collection of essays on contemporary issues in light of the Bible. A point that Wright makes in a number of the articles is that modernity and Christianity propose fundamentally different meta-narratives in regard to the meaning and trajectory of history. Modernity — at least in its Western form — is predicated on the assumption that history came to its climax in the mid- to late-eighteenth century, with the definitive victory of empirical science in the epistemological arena and liberal democracy in the political arena.
Basic to this telling of the story is that modernity emerged victorious only after a long twilight struggle against the forces of obscurantism and tyranny and that the matrix for both of these negative states of affairs was none other than the Christian religion, which enforced a blind dogmatism on the one hand and an oppressive political arrangement on the other. For an extreme but very clear expression of this point of view, consider Diderot’s famous remark: “Men will not be free until the last king is strangled on the entrails of the last priest.”
For a more benign expression of the modern myth of origins, Wright suggests, take a dollar bill out of your wallet and turn it over. You will see a pyramid topped by a single human eye, and at the base of that structure, you will notice the motto novus ordo seclorum (the new order of the ages). This represents the founders’ extraordinary conviction that they were launching, not simply a new political arrangement, but an entirely new way of seeing the world.
Now Christianity proposes a completely different account of how history comes to a climax and what precisely constitutes the new order of the ages — which helps to explain why so many of modernity’s avatars, from Diderot to Christopher Hitchens, have specially targeted Christianity.
On the Christian reading, history reached its highpoint when a young first century Jewish rabbi, having been put to death on a brutal Roman instrument of torture, was raised from the dead through the power of the God of Israel.
The state-sponsored murder of Jesus, who had dared to speak and act in the name of Israel’s God, represented the world’s resistance to the Creator. It was the moment when cruelty, hatred, violence, and corruption — symbolized in the Bible as the watery chaos — spent itself on Jesus. The resurrection, therefore, showed forth the victory of the divine love over those dark powers. St. Paul can say, “I am certain that neither death nor life, neither angels nor principalities, nor any other creature can separate us from the love of God,” precisely because he lived on the far side of the resurrection.
This is also why Paul and so many of his Christian colleagues can speak of “new creation” and “a new heavens and a new earth.” For all of Paul’s spiritual descendants, therefore, the eighteenth century might indeed signify a leap forward in science and political arrangements, but it can be by no stretch of the imagination construed as the climax of history. I believe that N.T. Wright is correct when he maintains that this “battle of narratives” is far more crucial for the Church today than any of our particular arguments about sex and authority, but that’s an article for another day.
All of this was swimming in my mind when, on the evening of the first day of my vacation, I went to see the new cinematic iteration of the Hercules story, starring Dwayne Johnson (aka The Rock). Now don’t get me wrong: I don’t think this summer popcorn entertainment is trading in grand ideas. However, it does represent in its own surprising way a telling of the modern metanarrative.
In classical mythology, of course, Hercules is the son of Zeus, and his grand exploits are a function of his supernatural status. But in the current film, Hercules is an ordinary man around whom a legend has been cynically built, and his “mythic” opponents are frauds and deceptions. Hence Cerberus the three-headed dog is just three rather fierce wolves that have been leashed together; the many-headed Hydra is just a group of soldiers with a clever disguise; the centaurs are ordinary mounted warriors who have been misperceived, etc.
At the climax of the film, a “seer” tells Hercules that, though he is not divine, he will find sufficient strength to save the day if only he “believes in himself.” Moreover, as he utters his last “prediction,” the seer mutters with a shrug, “but what do I know?”
In a word, everything has been flattened out, rendered mundane, any reference to the properly supernatural expunged or explained away. And the political part of the modern myth is not forgotten, for the kings over whom Hercules triumphs are tyrants, who have been using religion to cover up their own criminal machinations.
Again, I don’t think the makers of “Hercules” have particularly high intellectual ambitions, but their film joins a long line of recent movies—“300,” “Agora,” the various reboots of “Star Trek” and “Clash of the Titans”—which tell the story of the triumph of “reason” over “mysticism” and the natural over the supernatural. If N.T. Wright is correct about the battle of narratives, we Christians should be sensitive to the many and very effective ways that the popular culture tends to out-narrate us.
(Father Robert Barron is the founder of the global ministry, Word on Fire, and the Rector/President of Mundelein Seminary. Learn more at www.WordonFire.org.)

Word On Fire
By Father Robert Barron
John Green’s novel “The Fault in Our Stars” has proven to be wildly popular among young adults. A one-time divinity school student and Christian minister, Green is not reluctant to explore the “big” questions, though he doesn’t claim to provide anything like definitive answers. In this, he both reflects and helps to shape the inchoate, eclectic spirituality that holds sway in the teen and 20-something set today.
The story is narrated by Hazel Grace Lancaster, a teenager suffering from a most likely terminal form of cancer. At her mother’s prompting, Hazel attends a support group for young cancer patients that takes place at the local Episcopal Church. The group is presided over by a well-meaning but nerdy youth minister who commences each meeting by rolling out a tapestry of Jesus displaying his Sacred Heart. “We are gathering, literally, in the heart of Jesus,” he eagerly tells the skeptical and desultory gaggle of teens. At one of these sessions, Hazel rises to share her utterly bleak, even nihilistic philosophy of life: “There will come a time when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. […] There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that’s what everyone else does.”
At one of these meetings, Hazel meets a handsome, charming cancer-survivor named Augustus Waters, and the two fall almost immediately in love. Though they both consider the support group fairly lame, there is no denying that they were brought together over the heart of Christ. Kind, encouraging, funny, and utterly devoted, Augustus (Gus) draws Hazel out of herself and lures her into a more active engagement with life. They both love a novel called “An Imperial Affliction,” written by a reclusive author named Peter Van Houten. After establishing e-mail contact with Van Houten, they arrange to fly to Amsterdam to commune with their literary hero. Just before the encounter, Gus says that he believes in God and in some sort of life after death; otherwise, he argues, “What is the point?” Still clinging to her bleak materialism, Hazel retorts, “What if there is no point?”
The next day, the young couple, filled with enthusiasm, comes to Van Houten’s home only to find that their hero is a depressed alcoholic who has no interest in talking to them. When they press him for answers about mysteries in his novel, he comments on the meaninglessness of life, effectively mirroring Hazel’s nihilism back to her. Just after this awful conversation, the two teenagers make their way to the attic where Anne Frank hid from the Nazis. In that room, evocative of both horrific, meaningless violence and real spiritual hope, Hazel and Gus passionately kiss for the first time. It is as though their love, which began in the heart of Jesus, asserted itself strongly even in the face of darkness.
But we are not allowed to dwell on this hopeful moment, for Gus reveals, just before they return home, that his cancer has reasserted itself and that his condition is terminal. Not long after they return, Gus dies, at the age of eighteen, and Hazel sinks into profound sadness: “Each minute,” she says, “is worse than the previous one.” Hazel just goes through the motions, pretending to find comfort, precisely for the sake of her family and friends. But some days after the funeral, she discovers that Augustus had written a note to her just before his death. It closes with the words, “Okay, Hazel Grace?”  To which the young woman responds, while gazing up into the sky, “Okay.”  With that word, the film ends.
The question that haunts the entire movie is how can there be meaning in the universe when two wonderful young kids are dying of cancer? A kind of answer can be found precisely where Hazel and Gus met, that is to say, in the sacred heart of Jesus. The central claim of Christianity is that God became one of us and that he shared our condition utterly, accepting even death, death on a cross. God entered into our suffering and thereby transformed it into a place of springs, a place of grace. I don’t think it is the least bit accidental that Waters (Gus’s last name) and Grace (Hazel’s middle name) met in the sacred heart of Christ and thereby, despite their shared suffering, managed to give life to one another. And is this why I think Hazel effectively repudiates her nihilism and materialism as she responds across the barrier of death to Gus’s “Okay.” I’m convinced that Hazel senses, by the end of the story, the central truth of Christian faith that real love is more powerful than death.
Is this film a satisfying presentation of Christianity? Hardly. But for those who are struggling to find their way to meaning and faith, it’s not an entirely bad place to start.
(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.)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
In a new book entitled, “Jesus of Nazareth,” famed German scripture-scholar, Gerhard Lohfink, describes how people in the gospels relate to Jesus in different ways. Not everyone was an apostle, not everyone was a disciple, and not everyone who contributed to Jesus’ cause even followed him. Different individuals had their own way of connecting to Jesus. Here’s how he puts it:
“We may say that the gospels, especially Mark, are aware of a great variety of forms of participation in Jesus’ cause. There were the Twelve. There was a broader circle of disciples. There were those who participated in Jesus’ life. There were localized, resident adherents who made their houses available. There were people who helped in particular situations, if only by offering a cup of water. Finally, there were the beneficiaries who profited from Jesus’ cause and for that reason did not speak against it.”
Lohfink then makes this observation: “These structural lines that run through the gospels are not accidental. …  In today’s church, because it is a shapeless mass, we can find all these forms expressed. It is a complex pattern, as complex as the human body. The openness of the gospels, the openness of Jesus must warn us against regarding people as lacking in faith if they are unable to adopt a disciple’s way of life or if it is something completely alien to them. In any event, Jesus never did.”
If what Lohfink says is true, this has implications as to how we should understand the church, both as it is conceived in the abstract and how it is understood practically within our parish structures. Simply put, the similarity to Jesus’ time is obvious. When we look at church life today, especially as we see it lived out concretely within parishes, it is obvious that it is made up of much more than only the core, committed congregation, namely, those who participate regularly in church life and accept (at least for the main part) the dogmatic and moral teachings their churches. The church also contains a wide variety of the less-engaged: people who practice occasionally, people who accept some of its teachings, guests who visit our churches, people who don’t explicitly commit but are sympathetic to the church and offer it various kinds of support, and, not least, people who link themselves to God in more-privatized ways, those who are spiritual but not religious. As Lohfink points out, these people were already around Jesus and “they were not unimportant” to his mission.
But we must be careful in how we understand this. This does not mean that there are tiers within discipleship, where some are called to a higher holiness and others to a lower one, as if the full gospel applies only to some. There were some centuries in church history where Christian spirituality suffered from exactly this misunderstanding, where it was common to think that monks, nuns, contemplatives, priests, and other such people were called to live the full gospel while others were exempt from the more demanding of Jesus’ invitations. No such exemptions. The church may never be divided into the perfect and less perfect, the better and the half-baked, full-participation and partial-participation. The full gospel applies to everyone, as does Jesus’ invitation to intimacy with him. Jesus doesn’t call people according to more or less.  Christian discipleship doesn’t ideally admit of levels, notches, layers, and different tiers of participation … but something akin to this does forever happen, analogous to what happens in a love relationship. Each individual chooses how deep he or she will go and some go deeper than others, though ideally everyone is meant to go its full depth.
And, given human history and human freedom, this is not surprising. There will always be a great variation in both depth and participation. Each of us has his or her own history of being graced and wounded, formed and deformed, and so we all come to adulthood with very different capacities to see, understand, love, accept love, and give ourselves over to someone or something beyond us. None of us is whole and none of us is fully mature. All of us are limited in what we can do. Hence, religiously, no one can be expected to respond to something that is completely outside of his or her sphere of possibility and so we will inevitably gather around Jesus in very different ways, depending upon our capacity to see and to give ourselves over. Jesus, it seemed, was okay with that.
In his view, there was no such category as a Cafeteria-disciple or a Disciple-light.  There shouldn’t be such categories either in our understanding. We are all around Jesus in our different ways and we must be careful not to judge each other, given that Donatism and her adopted children are forever on the prowl.
(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX.)

Millennial reflections
By Father Jeremy Tobin, O.Praem
There are thousands of children crossing the border, fleeing inhumane conditions in their home countries especially El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras as well as Mexico. This was not entirely unexpected by those who advocate for immigrants and who push for reform.
What is unusual is the age of these refugees, some very young. They tell of no hope back home. This was the last desperate attempt by their parents to try at least get some of the family to survive.
For years some Guatemalans that we serve told me there is no meaningful work in Guatemala.
The same could be said for much of Central America and Mexico. Much of this has its roots in American trade policy. There will be no substantial immigration reform until we rethink and redo our trade policies with Latin America. They insure vast importation of American grain and other goods which drive out local farms and businesses.
The governments of these countries and the wealthy benefit, but the people suffer. Some years back they were rioting in Mexico over the price of tortillas after NAFTA was fully felt in Mexico.  This woke up some people, but had little effect. Every time things go bad south of the border the only hope is migrate to “El Norte.” Nothing changes that. We have got to stop exploiting Latin America.
The Dignity Campaign, among other things, advocates a revision of trade policies. It emphasizes fair trade, not just free trade. It emphasizes the local producer over corporate interests. Unless conditions improve in Mexico and Central America there can be no real immigration reform. We need to hold hearings about the effects of CAFTA and NAFTA and collect evidence about the way those agreements displace people.
Now we have a humanitarian disaster. The Catholic bishops have asked the White House and Congress to protect unaccompanied children from other countries and respond to the root causes of poverty.
Bishop Eusebio Elizondo, Auxiliary Bishop of Seattle and head of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) Committee on Migration, urged the government to protect these children from the dangers of human trafficking, smugglers, gangs and organized crime. The bishops stress this as a humanitarian issue and not one to be used to make political points.
Further, a delegation from the USCCB Committee on Migration visited Mexico and Central America to examine factors driving child migration to the United States. Bishop Elizondo said, “It is truly a humanitarian crisis which requires a comprehensive response and cooperation between the branches of the U.S. government. Young lives are at stake.”
A draft memo from Homeland Security said that 90,000 children could be arrested trying to illegally cross the Mexican border. This is more than three times the number of children apprehended last year. They declare this a “crisis.”
“People that live north have no idea what’s going on down here, and if they did, they would be appalled by what the government is letting happen,” said Chris Cabrera, vice president of the National Border Patrol Council in the Rio Grande Valley, a U.S. Border Patrol Workers Union. They are overwhelmed. Needed resources are lacking. There are not enough immigration court judges to do the work. These children have rights.
The word we need to incorporate into this discussion is ‘compassion.’ We need to treat these children and their families with compassion.
Relief agencies are reaching out, but they need more help. The Catholic Church is speaking up. We can do better. No church in the country has more Latino members than we do. It is imperative that every way we can, we raise consciences to this problem.
First, by reaching out to the children to ensure that they are treated in a fair, just and legal manner, and receive fair due process. Second, support efforts to reunite families. Third, lobby the government to provide legal relief. Fourth, to push for fair and just immigration reform that goes beyond what is called comprehensive.
The bills in the works today do not really address a meaningful path to citizenship. Workers are not fully protected. The underlying causes, like those mentioned in the beginning, are not addressed.
(Father Jeremy Tobin, O.Praem, lives at the Priory of St. Moses the Black, Jackson.)