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.)

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.)