COMPLETE THE CIRCLE
By George Evans
I can’t seem to avoid Pope Francis when I sit down to write this column. That may not be bad. In fact it may be very good because he continues to have so much to say that we all need to hear.  This time his Easter sermon to 150,000 gathered in St. Peter’s Square emphasized that evangelization, the topic it seems everyone is currently talking or writing books about, “is about leaving ourselves behind and encountering others, being close to those crushed by life’s trouble, sharing with the needy, standing at the side of the sick, elderly and the outcast.”

He is not telling us to sell the catechism or to teach the creed as such.  He’s telling us to take the risen Lord with us to those who need him and will meet him in us. That’s scary, but who else is going to do it.  We are his hands and feet. Peter and all the heroes of the early church are dead.
Saints Benedict, Francis of Assisi, Ignatius, Dominic and are dead and while their religious orders are doing their part, they can’t do it alone either. He’s telling us to do what we are told at the end of each Mass, “Go and glorify the Lord by your life.” Embrace the world and its people in mercy and love and the catechism and creed will follow and will be embraced in turn.

Pope Francis prayed in his Easter message that the risen Lord would “help us to overcome the scourge of hunger, aggravated by conflict and by the immense wastefulness for which we are often responsible” and that Christians “would be given the strength to protect the vulnerable, especially children, women and the elderly, who are at times exploited and abandoned.”
He’s telling us to get out of our churches and get our hands dirty – to visit the sick and suffering, to feed the hungry and go into their homes, to teach about Jesus by letting those vulnerable see him in us.

Francis is telling us to nourish and strengthen ourselves with prayer, adoration, Eucharist and other sacraments but then to do something with it for others as Jesus did,  not to just keep it for our own sole benefit.  The tough things like affecting legislation that is desperately needed at both the state and federal level, working with  one or more of the myriad groups attempting to make Jackson and every other city in Mississippi a better and more just and caring place to live.

Giving some of our time to those in prison or just out of prison, to those struggling with mental illness or the financial disaster which so often accompanies it. Reach out and touch a family member who has been excluded or a co-worker who’s difficult or a foreign worker who doesn’t speak good English.

Pope Francis has given us all kinds of examples of what to do in his actions and in his preaching and writings. He has stripped away much of the unnecessary pomp and circumstance of the papacy that made it more difficult to see the humility and care of Jesus by living a lifestyle much more in keeping with the carpenter from Nazareth and the incarnate son of the Father and risen Lord. He has worked tirelessly to reform the Vatican and has announced two synods on the family for the fall of 2014 and 2015.  He has embraced the poor and vulnerable in almost every public outing.

He needs our help as we need his. We cannot be content with trying to shape up our own lives and stopping there. This world needs Jesus desperately and can only get Him from us.

Jesus has saved us and we have celebrated the Paschal Mystery yet again and are not only saved but strengthened by it. It is now time to do something with it and to take the risen Lord with us to the world in all its nitty-gritty reality.
(George Evans is a pastoral minister at Jackson St. Richard Parish.)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
Nature, desire, and soul – we rarely integrate these well. Yet they are so inextricably linked that how we relate to one deeply colors the others; and indeed, spirituality itself might be defined as what we each do in terms of integrating these three in our lives.
More recently notable spiritual authors such as Annie Dillard, Kathleen Norris, Bill Plotkin and Belden Lane have argued persuasively that physical nature profoundly affects the soul, just as how we manage our private desires deeply influences how we treat nature. Spirituality is naïve when it is divorced from nature and desire. In a book just released, “The Road Knows How: A Prairie Pilgrimage through Nature, Desire and Soul,” Canadian writer Trevor Herriot joins these voices in calling for a better integration between nature, desire, and soul.

The flow of the book follows its title. Herriot does a walking pilgrimage across part of Saskatchewan’s prairies, a land roamed for centuries by the buffalo, and lets nature and desire speak to his soul as he does this prairie Camino. The result is a remarkable chronicle, a deeply moral book.

As a naturalist, Herriot is involved in various conservation projects from saving grassland birds to preserving the historic grass upon which the buffalo once roamed. Thus it’s no surprise that one of his central themes is the connection he intuits between nature and spirit. “I worry about what happens when we separate spirituality from bodily life and culture, both of which are profoundly connected to soil, climate, and the other givens of place,” he writes.

And we should worry too: “These days, we watch truckloads of grain pass by and sense that something in us and in the earth is harmed when food is grown and consumed with little intimacy, care and respect. The local and slow food movements are showing us that the way we grow, distribute, prepare and eat food is important for the health of our body-to-earth exchanges.

The next step may be to realize that the energy that brings pollen to ovary and grows the grain, once it enters our bodies, also needs to be husbanded. The way we respond to our desire to merge, connect, and be fruitful – stirrings felt so deeply, but often so shallowly expressed – determines the quality of our body-to-body exchanges.”
From there it’s a short step to his reflections on sex and desire. Herriot submits that “there is a sadness that comes of misappropriating sexual energy, a kind of functional despair that hums away in the background for most men if they stop long enough to listen to it.” In brief, for him, how we treat our bodies, our spouses and the other gender greatly helps determine how we treat nature.

And the reverse is just as true; how we treat nature will help determine how we treat our own bodies, our spouses, our lovers and the other gender: “In a world bathed in industrial and impersonal sex, where real connection and tenderness are rare, will we sense also that something in us and in the earth is being harmed from the same absence of intimacy, care, and respect? Will we learn that any given expression of our erotic energies either connects us to or divides us from the world around us and our souls?

We are discovering that we must steward the energies captured by nature in the hydrocarbons or in living plants and animals, and thereby improve the ways we receive the fruits of the earth, but we struggle to see the primary responsibility we bear for the small but cumulatively significant explosions of energy we access and transmit as we respond to our own longings to connect, merge and be fruitful.
Learning how to steward the way we bear fruit ourselves as spiritual/sexual beings with a full set of animal desires and angelic ambitions may be more important to the human journey than we fully understand.” This is not a language that’s easily digested by either the right or the left.

Like Allan Bloom’s book a generation ago, “The Closing of the American Mind,” Herriot’s book is poised to have equally strong critics on both sides of the religious and ideological spectrum. Religious conservatives will be upset about some of his views on sexuality, but I fear that many secular liberals will be just as upset by those views as their right-wing counterparts. The same holds true for some of Herriot’s views on soul, church, historical Christianity, patriarchy, feminism, gender, homosexuality and global warming.

Conservative Christians will find themselves stretched in ways that they would prefer to not think about and strident secularists will find themselves constantly incredulous that someone like Herriot, whom they consider an ally, will speak of soul, spirituality, lust and chastity in ways that they have long-considered naïve; but holding very complex truths often creates precisely this kind of tension.

James Hillman used to quip: “A symptom suffers most when it doesn’t know where it belongs.” “The Road Knows How” tells us where many, many of our symptoms belong.
(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
Recently I got a request from someone in Bangladesh urging people to sign a petition seeking full and fair compensation from two national clothing retailers for the survivors of a horrific fire that killed more than 1,100 people in a clothing factory a year ago.
The individual, Aklima Khanam, was a 20-year-old survivor. Some of you may remember the tragic Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York around the turn of the last century where almost 200 immigrant women died. They were locked in to keep them working. This galvanized the new movement for worker rights. The rest is history.

The event last year in Bangladesh dwarfs what happened 100 years ago in the United States. Here, too, survivors say they were locked in to keep them working and the cost in human life and injury was staggering.
Looking at the way workers are treated in these international sweat shops unencumbered by American labor law begins another chapter in human oppression and exploitation. It is always the most vulnerable poorest classes of people affected, especially women and children.

This came to me right after we celebrated total destruction. Jesus faced a rigged trial and was tortured and executed in the most grizzly way possible. His followers were dispersed. The Scriptures told how this was the plan of God, and Jesus did what he promised, he rose from the dead. His resurrection was the final statement that injustice of every kind would come to an end.

There will always be a push back from the kind of exploitation I just outlined, and, despite the lack of material resources, such movements will not stop. We always preach the death and resurrection of Jesus as a unit. One explains the other. It also says that no matter how much evil we encounter, people will keep getting back up to resist it.
These next two years we will celebrate the 50th anniversaries of the two major civil rights laws in our country. The struggle for civil rights and worker justice did not begin in the 1960s or 1860s, but from the first time one group exploited another.

The theological inspiration for every movement for social justice can be found in the Scriptures we read on Easter, in the Easter season and throughout Lent. The prophets are quite explicit about justice and fairness. Those who have been exploited can look to the trial and execution of Jesus. The followers of Jesus came from the exploited and marginalized.

Things we rely on as basic: food and clothes are produced all over the world by young, poor, invisible people. When we buy brand named clothes at high prices, we have no idea where they were made. Labels tell very little. Think for a moment about an $800 suit going at clearance for less than a $100, then try and figure out the real cost of its manufacture. Then think about the wages the workers get who make the clothes. No, the answer is not to react and make your own clothes. The answer is to change the system that is built on exploitation.

We can turn to food and those who grow and harvest the crops. That leads us to the broken immigration system. We just saw pictures of Bishop Gerald Kicanas of Tucson  reaching through the border fence trying to give someone communion during the Mass for unity the bishops had at the Mexico-Arizona border.

The point is the endless push back for justice. They can build fences. They can build sweat shops, but people will always fight for justice. This is the power of resurrection over death. Real Christians know that our religion is built on optimism. Easter is the great feast that anything resembling despair, weakness, misery, etc. will be overcome by the power of justice, the joy of freedom and the peace that comes out of the empty tomb.
(Father Jeremy Tobin, O.Praem, lives at the Priory of St. Moses the Black, Jackson)

Reflections on Life
By Father Jerome LeDoux, SVD
At a fundraising dinner for a school that serves children with learning disabilities, the father of one of the students delivered a speech all who attended will never forget. After extolling the school and its dedicated staff, he offered a question.
“When not interfered with by outside influences, everything nature does is done with perfection. Yet my son, Shay, cannot learn things as other children do. He cannot understand things as other children do. Where is the natural order of things in my son?”
The audience was stilled by the query. The father continued. “I believe that when a child like Shay, who was mentally and physically disabled, comes into the world, an opportunity to realize true human nature presents itself, and it comes in the way other people treat that child.” Then he told the following story.

“Shay and I had walked past a park where some boys Shay knew were playing baseball. Shay asked, ‘Do you think they’ll let me play?’ I knew that most of the boys would not want someone like Shay on their team, but as a father I also understood that if my son were allowed to play, it would give him a much-needed sense of belonging and some confidence to be accepted by others in spite of his handicaps.
“I approached one of the boys on the field and asked – not expecting much – if Shay could play. The boy looked around for guidance and said, ‘We’re losing by six runs and the game is in the eighth inning. I guess he can be on our team and we’ll try to put him in to bat in the ninth inning.’

“Shay struggled over to the team’s bench and, with a broad smile, put on a team shirt. I watched with a small tear in my eye and warmth in my heart. In the bottom of the eighth inning, Shay’s team scored a few runs but was still behind by three.
“In the bottom of the ninth inning, Shay’s team scored again. Now, with two outs and the bases loaded, the potential winning run was on base and Shay was scheduled to be next at bat. At this juncture, do they let Shay bat and give away their chance to win the game? Surprisingly, Shay was given the bat. Everyone knew that a hit was all but impossible because Shay didn’t even know how to hold the bat properly, much less connect with the ball.

“However, as Shay stepped up to the plate, the pitcher, recognizing that the other team was putting winning aside for this moment in Shay’s life, moved in a few steps to lob the ball in softly so Shay could at least make contact. The first pitch came and Shay swung clumsily and missed. The pitcher again took a few steps forward to toss the ball softly towards Shay. As the pitch came in, Shay swung at the ball and hit a slow ground.
“The game would now be over. The pitcher picked up the soft grounder and could have easily thrown the ball to the first baseman. Instead, the pitcher threw the ball right over the first baseman’s head.

“Everyone from the stands and both teams started yelling, ‘Shay, run to first! Run to first!’ Never in his life had Shay ever run that far, but he made it to first base.  Everyone yelled, ‘Run to second, run to second!’ Shay awkwardly ran towards second, gleaming and struggling to make it to the base.

“By the time Shay rounded towards second base, the right fielder had the ball. He could have thrown the ball to the second baseman for the tag, but he understood the pitcher’s intentions. So he, too, intentionally threw the ball high and far over the third baseman’s head. Shay ran toward third base deliriously as the runners ahead of him circled the bases toward home.

“All were screaming, ‘Shay, Shay, Shay, all the way, Shay!’ Shay reached third base because the opposing shortstop ran to help him by turning him in the direction of third base, and shouted, ’Shay, run to third!’ As Shay rounded third, the boys from both teams, and the spectators, were on their feet screaming, ‘Shay, run home! Run home!’ Shay ran to home, stepped on the plate, and was cheered as the hero who hit the grand slam and won the game for his team.”

“That day,” the father said softly with tears now rolling down his face, “the boys from both teams helped bring a piece of true love and humanity into this world.
“Shay didn’t make it to another summer. He died that winter, having never forgotten being the hero and making me so happy, and coming home and seeing his mother tearfully embrace her little hero of the day!”

If you are anything like me, this curious little episode did to you what it did to me, causing mist in my eyes, a tightness in my throat, and stiffness in the hairs of my skin. Deep down, we want everyone to be a winner in this life and in our glorious life to come.
“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.)