IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
Today, for a number of reasons, we struggle to be generous and prodigal with God’s mercy.
As the number of people who attend church services continues to decline the temptation among many of our church leaders and ministers is to see this more as a pruning than as a tragedy and to respond by making God’s mercy less rather than more accessible. For example a seminary professor whom I know shares that after 40 years of teaching a course designed to prepare seminarians to administer the sacrament of penance today sometimes the first question that the seminarians ask is “When can I refuse absolution?” In effect, how scrupulous must I be in dispensing God’s mercy?
To their credit their motivation is mostly sincere, however misguided. They sincerely fear playing fast and loose with God’s grace, fearing that they might end up dispensing cheap grace.
Partly that’s a valid motive. Fear of playing fast and loose with God’s grace, coupled with concerns for truth, orthodoxy, proper public form and fear of scandal have their own legitimacy. Mercy needs always to be tempered by truth. But sometimes the motives driving our hesitancy are less noble and our anxiety about handing out cheap grace arises more out of timidity, fear, legalism and our desire, however unconscious, for power.
But even when mercy is withheld for the nobler of those reasons we’re still misguided, bad shepherds, out of tune with the God whom Jesus proclaimed. God’s mercy, as Jesus revealed it, embraces indiscriminately, the bad and the good, the undeserving and the deserving, the uninitiated and the initiated.
One of the truly startling insights Jesus gave us is that the mercy of God, like the light and warmth of the sun, cannot not go out to everyone. Consequently it’s always free, undeserved, unconditional, universal in embrace, and has a reach beyond all religion, custom, rubric, political correctness, mandatory program, ideology and even sin itself.
For our part then, especially those of us who are parents, ministers, teachers, catechists and elders, we must risk proclaiming the prodigal character of God’s mercy. We must not spend God’s mercy, as if it were ours to spend; dole out God’s forgiveness, as if it were a limited commodity; put conditions on God’s love, as if God were a petty tyrant or a political ideology; or cut off access to God, as if we were the keeper of the heavenly gates. We aren’t. If we tie God’s mercy to our own timidity and fear, we limit it to the size of our own minds.
It is interesting to note in the gospels how the apostles, well-meaning of course, often tried to keep certain people away from Jesus as if they weren’t worthy, as if they were an affront to his holiness or would somehow stain his purity. So they perennially tried to prevent children, prostitutes, tax collectors, known sinners and the uninitiated of all kinds from coming to Jesus. However, always Jesus over-ruled their attempts with words to this effect. “Let them come! I want them to come.”
Early on in my ministry I lived in a rectory with a saintly old priest. He was older than 80, nearly blind, but widely sought out and respected, especially as a confessor. One night, alone with him, I asked him, “If you had your priesthood to live over again, would you do anything differently?” From a man so full of integrity, I fully expected that there would be no regrets. So his answer surprised me. Yes, he did have a regret, a major one, he said: “If I had my priesthood to do over again, I would be easier on people the next time. I wouldn’t be so stingy with God’s mercy, with the sacraments, with forgiveness. I fear I’ve been too hard on people. They have pain enough without me and the church laying further burdens on them. I should have risked God’s mercy more!”
I was struck by this because, less than a year before, as I took my final exams in the seminary, one of the priests who examined me, gave me this warning: “Be careful,” he said, “don’t be soft. Only the truth sets people free. Risk truth over mercy.”
As I age, I am ever more inclined to the old priest’s advice. We need more to risk God’s mercy. The place of justice and truth should never be ignored, but we must risk letting the infinite, unbounded, unconditional, undeserved mercy of God flow free.
But, like the apostles, we well-intentioned persons are forever trying to keep certain individuals and groups away from God’s mercy as it is offered in word, sacrament and community. But God doesn’t want our protection. What God does want is for everyone, regardless of morality, orthodoxy, lack of preparation, age or culture, to come to the unlimited waters of divine mercy.
George Eliot once wrote: “When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.”
(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX.)

Word on Fire
By Father Robert Barron
I don’t know what possesses me to watch “Real Time With Bill Maher,” for Maher is, without a doubt, the most annoying anti-religionist on the scene today. Though his show is purportedly about politics, it almost invariably includes some attack on religion, especially Christianity. Just last week, his program included a brief conversation with Ralph Reed, the articulate gentleman who used to run the Christian Coalition and who is now a lobbyist and activist on behalf of faith-related causes.
For the first three or four minutes, Reed and Maher discussed the social science concerning children raised in stable vs. unstable families, and Reed was scoring quite a few points in favor of the traditional understanding of marriage. Sensing that he was making little headway, Maher decided to pull the religion card, and from that point on things went from bad to worse.
Maher said, “Now you’re a man of faith, which means someone who consciously suspends all critical thinking and accepts things on the basis of no evidence.” Astonishingly, Reed said, “yes,” at which point, I shouted at the TV screen: “No!” Then Maher said, “And I believe that you take everything in the Bible literally,” and Reed replied, “yes,” at which point I said, “Oh God, here we go again.”
Maher then did what I knew he would do: he pulled out a sheet of paper which included references to several of the more morally outrageous practices that the God of the Bible seems to approve of, including slavery. Pathetically, Reed tried to clear things up by distinguishing the chattel slavery of the American south from the slavery practiced in the classical world, which amounted to a kind of indentured servitude. “Oh I get it,” Maher responded, “God approves of the good kind of slavery.” The audience roared with laughter; Reed lowered his head; Maher smirked; and the cause of religion took still another step backward.
I would like, in very brief compass, to say something simple about each of the issues that Maher raised. Faith, rightly understood, does not involve any surrender of one’s critical intellectual powers, nor is it tantamount to the acceptance of things on the basis of no evidence. What Bill Maher characterizes as “faith” is nothing but superstition or credulity or intellectual irresponsibility. It is an ersatz “knowing” that falls short of the legitimate standards of reason. Real faith is not infra-rational but rather supra-rational, that is to say, not below reason but above reason and inclusive of it.
It is beyond reason precisely because it is a response to the God who has revealed himself, and God is, by definition, beyond our capacity to grasp, to see, fully to understand. It involves darkness to be sure, but the darkness that comes, not from an insufficiency of light, but from a surplus of light.
If you are ever tempted to agree with Bill Maher on the nature of faith, I would invite you to read any page of Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, John Henry Newman, C.S. Lewis or G.K. Chesterton and honestly ask yourself the question, “Does this sound like someone who has suspended his critical faculties?”
As for the Bible, the moment you say, as Ralph Reed did, that you take the entirety of the Scriptures literally, you are hopelessly vulnerable to the kind of critique that Bill Maher raises. In its marvelous statement on Biblical interpretation, Dei Verbum, Vatican II says that the Bible is the Word of God in the words of men. That laconic statement packs a punch, for it clarifies why the fundamentalist strategy of Scriptural interpretation is always dysfunctional.
God did not dictate the Scriptures word for word to people who received the message dumbly and automatically; rather, God spoke subtly and indirectly, precisely through human agents who employed distinctive literary techniques and who were conditioned by the cultures in which they found themselves and by the audiences they addressed.
Thus one of the most basic moves in Scriptural exegesis is the determination of the genre in which a given Biblical author was operating. Are we dealing with a song, a psalm, a history, a legend, a letter, a Gospel, a tall tale, an apocalypse? Therefore, to ask, “Do you take the Bible literally?” is about as helpful as asking, “Do you take the library literally?”
A further implication of Dei Verbum’s statement is that there is a distinction between, as William Placher put it, “what is in the Bible and what the Bible teaches.” There are lots of things that are indeed in the pages of the Scriptures but that are not essential to the overarching message of the Scriptures, things that were in the cultural milieu of the human authors but that are not ingredient in the revelation that God intends to offer.
A good example of this would be the references to slavery that Maher cited. The institution of slavery was taken for granted in most ancient cultures and therefore it is not surprising that Biblical authors would refer to it or even praise it, but attention to the great patterns and trajectories of the Bible as a whole reveals that the justification of slavery is not something that “the Bible teaches,” which is precisely why the fight against slavery in the western culture was led by people deeply shaped by the Scriptures.
Suffice it to say the kind of conversation that Bill Maher and Ralph Reed had is decidedly not the best way forward.
(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 the recently released documentary, “Catholicism:The New Evangelization.” Learn more at www.WordonFire.org))

Complete the Circle
By By George Evans
I remember the summer of 1964 and plan to participate in some of the 50th anniversary events of Mississippi Freedom Summer at Tougaloo College on June 25-29. I was a native of Vicksburg, had finished college a year before and had just completed one year of law school and had started seminary studies at a Benedictine Monastery in Conception, Missouri. Mississippi was in an absolute turmoil.  I’m not sure we knew it at the time but a social revolution was in progress. Students, both black and white, were pouring into the state from colleges all over the country with the sole intent of registering new voters.

The summer before the freedom riders had come. That effort had been directed at integrating accommodations and bus stations. Progress in that area was on the way. This was different. These students, and those in charge, were staying here for weeks or months, not passing through or being sent to Parchman.

They were working to organize people who had never before voted and who, for the most part, had not been taught how to register to vote nor encouraged to do so. Tension ran high. A major black vote could threaten the way of life of segregation and white supremacy which prevailed.  The threat of school integration had lingered for 10 years since Brown vs. Board of Education and deep down whites knew the delay couldn’t last forever (it ended six years later in 1970).  A black vote along with the federal action being taken could mean a power shift.

The tension that built with incident after incident during the early days of June, erupted with the killing of three civil rights workers, James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael “Mickey” Schwerner on June 21-22 in Neshoba County. They were missing for weeks after being released from jail at night. National media and the best the FBI had to offer descended upon Mississippi and Neshoba County. National news reported daily.
The bodies of the three workers were found in an earthen dam in Neshoba County 44 days later, Aug. 5, 1964. The outrage over their deaths, assisted in the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Mississippi had shot itself in its foot.

Freedom Summer 1964 brought forth some leadership from churches and synagogues, particularly the Catholic and Episcopal bishops, some other church leaders and the Jewish rabbis pleading for restraint and tolerance in the name of Judeo-Christian principles. In truth, as I saw it at the time, this effort was welcomed, took courage and made me proud. But it was limited and unsupported by the vast majority of the churches and people who remained silent.
The accommodation that the churches had made for years with segregation was taking its toll. Change is never easy and for most whites, this was CHANGE IN CAPITAL LETTERS. I think we were all (even those who embraced the changes) a little afraid of what the future held because of the uncertainty that a social and cultural revolution brings. This was a change in a way of life. This was a true social/cultural revolution.

Looking back after 50 years we see great progress. Black elected officials are found all over Mississippi in great numbers. More and more black Mississippians graduate from college and professional schools and take their place in meaningful and well-paying jobs in business, education, the arts and professions. Restaurants and theaters and recreational venues of all kinds reverberate with  black patrons and couples and perhaps even more significantly with mixed race patrons and couples.  Schools and universities are well integrated.
Despite the progress enormous work still remains. The African American poverty rate in Mississippi is awful and disproportionate to that of Caucasians and Asians. The same is true for those in prisons and those born out of wedlock. The tensions of 50 years ago have abated but new fears and anxieties between races still endure and God’s command to love your neighbor as yourself still goes wanting.

Churches have made progress but until secular materialism is confronted and overcome the self absorption and narcissism it leads to will continue the need for a new social/cultural revolution as did segregation. Until we buckle down on that enormous undertaking we will not achieve that which many hoped to achieve 50 years ago – justice, peace, prosperity. There will be no further progress in race relations and no further social/cultural revolutions until we reach out and touch and embrace our neighbor, actually love our neighbor as ourself.
(George Evans is a pastoral minister at Jackson St. Richard Parish.)

Reflections On Life
By Father Jerome LeDoux, SVD
“There’s a 911 going off all around the Catholic Church, especially in the black part of the Church. But few people seem to be listening to the 911. It is noted that one in three Catholics is no longer practicing. Former altar boys or altar girls, former Eucharistic ministers and lectors are now part of some megachurch, Pentecostal church or no church. Amazingly, the number of former Catholics is sufficient to form the third-largest U.S. denomination.
“Most distressing of all, late-teenage and young adult Catholics are those most conspicuous for their absence. We are losing them at an alarming rate because we are not breaking the Word open to them. Our prayers, worship and life are not filled with the driving power of the Holy Ghost, so that people leave church in the same sad shape they entered it.
“Before walking out of church on Sunday, all of us need an attitude adjustment and a greater quickening of the Holy Ghost. But some of us need a transfusion, minor surgery or varying degrees of medical care, while others need open-heart surgery or, in some cases, a heart transplant. Serious head adjustment, nerve and/or emotional treatment is in order for many before they casually walk out the door as if everything were all right with them and the world.”
These words came pouring out of the mouth of evangelist/revivalist Msgr. Ray East, pastor of St. Teresa of Avila Church in Washington, D.C. He was busy bringing the fire of the Holy Ghost to St. Anthony Parish, housed in a smallish church in Dallas. Six of us from Our Mother of Mercy Church in Fort Worth had motored there to join in the revival. He observed that few churches are catching the fire of the Holy Spirit, and, without that fire, they will be lifeless, purposeless failures.
With an almost continuous smile, his eyes, ivories and his striking demeanor showed clearly that he was enjoying, savoring each greeting, every word, each prayer, every reading of the liturgy, rocking, gesturing and clapping to the beat and lyrics of each song rendered by the dynamic, powerful blended choir of St. Anthony and Holy Cross Churches.
Wearing Texas boots, Monsignor Ray removed them ostentatiously in the midst of his homily and placed them standing next to the pulpit. He did not put them on again until shortly before the Consecration. Wandering over much of the church like a peripatetic preacher, he made certain that he engaged as many individuals as he could.
Later, he explained that removing ones shoes before entering a house is common in the East, but especially when entering an area that is considered a holy place, much as when Moses approached the burning bush.
And, not surprisingly, I had that familiar feeling during the progression of the liturgy, music and homily that we were indeed standing on holy ground. As he spoke, the words of the song came to mind, “We are standing on holy ground, and I know that there are angels all around. Let us praise Jesus now.”
Yes, and the Holy Spirit was indeed moving and hard at work. In their now smiling, now pensive, now troubled, now joyful, now explosive demeanor, the sisters and brothers throughout the church resonated Msgr. East’s infectious presence and spirited proclamation of the Word, his on-fire sharing of the Word in his homily, and his highly personal rendition of each segment of the liturgy. It was an obvious reenactment of the legendary Last Supper.
“In order to reach our St. Teresa of Avila Church in D.C., many of our church members have to pass by megachurches and a number of Catholic parishes. They have to WANT to come to our church service! And that is what all of us must do. We must so conduct our lives and our church service that people will WANT to come to us and be a part of our Faith Family.”
The afterglow, of course, and the follow-up by the folks attending a church service are the proof whether the action and interaction of the service have been faith-driven, Spirit-filled and live to the point where minds and hearts are changed for the better, negative stress is relieved or removed, pain and sorrow are more bearable and our lives become more livable.
That afterglow and follow-up were evident as we repaired to the hall for a light repast. The happy, buzzing beehive atmosphere was that of the Agape gatherings of the early Christians.
“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
The lusts of the flesh reveal the loneliness of the soul. Dag Hammarskjold, the former Secretary-General of the United Nations, wrote those words and they highlight part of the deeper intentionality of sexual desire. And this insight was more than just a theoretical one for Hammarskjold. He knew loneliness and unfulfilled desire.
As more and more of his journals are published in English, we are becoming more aware that Dag Hammarskjold was both a man of extraordinary moral integrity and extraordinary spiritual depth. And he came by it legitimately. His father, at one time the Prime Minister of Sweden, had been a great statesman of uncompromising integrity and his mother had been a woman of great warmth and spiritual depth. Hammarskjold inherited the best of both, and it made him both a rare statesman and a great spiritual writer. However not everything was whole in his life.
While in his professional life he dealt with issues of world importance and was taxed for every ounce of his energies, the rest of his life was not nearly so complete. As a young man, he had lost a woman he deeply loved to another man, and this was a wound that never left him. He never dated or pursued marriage again. He longed to be married, but, for all kinds of reasons, as is the case for millions of people, it just never happened. He was, in the words of his biographer, Walter Lipsey, “checkmated rather than mated.”
Hammarskjold, in his journals, often reflects on this “checkmate” and upon the lacuna it left in his life. There’s a searing honesty about its pain and about how he tries to grapple with it. On the one hand, he is clear that this is a pain that cannot be denied and which never goes away; on the other hand, he is able to redirect it somewhat, sublimating it into a wider embrace, into a different kind of marriage bed:
“I feel pain, a longing to share in this embrace [of a husband and wife], to be absorbed, to share in this encounter. A longing like carnal desire, but directed toward earth, water, sky, and returned by the whispers of the trees, the fragrance of the soil, the caresses of the wind, the embrace of water and light.”  Was this satisfying? Not quite, but it brought a certain peace: “Content? No, no, no – but refreshed, rested, while waiting.”
In this, both in how he experienced the pain of his inconsummation and in how he tried to redirect those longings, his feelings parallel those of Thomas Merton. Merton was once asked by a journalist how he felt about celibacy. Merton replied that “celibacy was hell”, that it condemned one to live in a loneliness that God himself condemned (“It is not good for the man to be alone”), and that it was in fact a dangerous way to live since it was an abnormal way of living. But Merton then went on to say that, just because it was anomalous and dangerous, didn’t mean that it couldn’t be wonderfully generative and life-giving, both for the one living it as well as for those around him or her. And that was no doubt true in Merton’s own case, just as it was true for Hammarskjold. Both infused more oxygen into the planet.
Moreover, Merton tried to sublimate his desire for a marriage bed in much the same way as Hammarskjold did: “I had decided to marry the silence of the forest. The sweet dark warmth of the whole world will have to be my wife. Out of the heart of that dark warmth comes the secret that is heard only in silence, but it is the root of all the secrets that are whispered by all the lovers in their beds all over the world.”
Both Hammarskjold and Merton longed for that deep, highly individualized, intimate and sexual, one-to-one embrace which was denied them by their place in life and which is denied to millions of us by every sort of circumstance and conscription. Merton chose to forego sexual consummation deliberately, to embrace religious vows; Hammarskjold had it chosen for him, by circumstance. At the end of the day the effect was the same. Both then tried to sublimate that need and desire for congenital intimacy by, in their own words, somehow marrying the world and making love in a less-particularized way.
Many married persons who enjoy that unique depth of one-to-one intimacy that Hammarskjold and Merton longed for, must, I suspect, inchoately also long to find within their sexual intimacy that wider embrace of which Hammarskjold and Merton speak, knowing that they want that too in their sexual embrace.
Thinkers have forever mulled-over the problem of the one and the many, the interrelationship between the particular and the universal, because this isn’t just a theoretical issue in metaphysics, something to entertain philosophers, it’s also something that lies inextricably entangled within the powerful pressure of sexuality in lovers in their beds all over the world.
(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX.)

Forming our future
By Joni House
Deciding on the best educational environment for a child is one of the most important choices a parent has to make. In our quick-paced, technology-centered culture, finding the right technological tool for one’s child can seem like the most challenging part of the process. In truth, this is only half of the challenge.
It is not until one begins to use available technology that one discovers its value as a resource in education and appreciates that having the right tool is only the first step in the success of student learning. For teachers to be truly successful at using technology in education they must have more than just the availability of technology, they must also be educated in how to use it effectively.

Imagine you have just purchased a beautiful new car. It is sleek, shiny, and includes all of the latest upgrades. You are thrilled at the possibilities available to you now that you own it. You open the door, place yourself inside, and close the door in preparation for your very first drive to the most amazing place you can imagine. Can you feel the excitement?

Now imagine that excitement dissipating as you realize that you have no idea how to start it or which pedal to push to make it go. This is the frustration teachers struggle with when faced with using modern technology in the classroom. It is a gift, but without the knowledge of how to “drive” it, the value is lost.

One of the determining factors for parents when choosing a school for their child is knowing and understanding the technology resources that a school can provide. The catch for true integration is that the technology must not only be present, but utilized to its fullest capability. For technology to be successfully integrated in school, it must be used in the classroom, but also done in such a manner that facilitates hands-on learning for students. What does this mean? Let’s take a look at the use of interactive white boards.

If not properly trained on the capabilities of an interactive white board, teachers can fall into the trap of using them as a glorified overhead projector. Although still an important use, there are countless additional interactive possibilities in interactive white board software that can assist teachers in facilitating hands-on learning for students.
Students should be out of their seats, at the board with the mouse device in hand, applying what they are learning to the lesson. They should be at the plate swinging, not sitting on the bench watching the play. Kinesthetic learning is technology’s biggest asset, but it is not as simple as handing the technology to the teacher and patting him/her on the back with a silent “good luck.”

The proper use of technology in the classroom necessitates continual professional development. Teachers must be provided ample opportunities to master the use of technology in building classroom curriculum and facilitating modern day hands-on learning.

Having the resources and utilizing them to enhance the teaching/learning process is crucial. An educational environment can have all the latest resources, but if those resources are not utilized, how is the material being taught enhanced?
In order for resources such as interactive white boards, tablets, digital cameras, document cameras, wikis, blogs, student response systems, Skype, laptops and notebooks to impact student learning, educators must be provided professional development opportunities which demonstrate how teachers can integrate technologies into classrooms.

Educators must then be given the opportunity to utilize the newly learned strategies that integrate technology into the curriculum. If technology is truly integrated into the curriculum the school community will have to learn from their challenges, celebrate their successes, and share their resources.
In many instances educators learn best from their and colleagues’ trials and errors. We are all learning, and what a great lesson to teach our students – learning never stops.
(Joni House has been the principal of Columbus Annunication School for three years.)