IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
Growing up in a Roman Catholic home, devotions were always a vital part of our religious diet. While our family saw the Eucharist as more important than devotions, we nourished our spiritual lives a lot on devotions, as did many Roman Catholics back then.

Among other things, we prayed the rosary every day, prayed the Angelus daily, prayed special litanies (St. Joseph in March, Mary in May and October, and the Sacred Heart of Jesus in June), prayed the Stations of the Cross each Friday in Lent, were anxious to attend Eucharist on First Fridays and First Saturdays to obtain special promises from God, and said special prayers to obtain indulgences.

As well, there were pilgrimages to Marian shrines for those who could afford them and most everyone wore medals from Lourdes or Fatima and had a special devotion to those shrines (with a special devotion in my own family and parish to Our Lady of the Cape, at Cap De Madeleine, Quebec). Devotions were a big part of our spiritual lives.

What’s to be said about devotions from a theological view and from the view of a culture that mostly distrusts them?

We might begin with the reaction of Martin Luther and the great Protestant reformers. They were fearful of two things in devotions. First, at that time, some devotions were too unbridled and were simply bad theology (famously, selling indulgences). Second, they saw devotions, not as necessarily bad in themselves, but as often displacing Jesus and God’s Word as our center and main focus. And so, they distanced themselves from basically all Roman Catholic devotions, the unbridled as well as the healthy.

For the most part that Protestant and Evangelical distrust of Roman Catholic devotions has come down right to our own day. While that distrust is breaking down today in some non-Roman churches today, it is still the prevalent attitude inside most Protestant and Evangelical circles. In brief, they distrust most devotions because they are seen not just as deflecting our focus from the centrality of Jesus and the Word, but also as potentially unhealthy contaminates, as junk food in our spiritual diet.

What’s to be said about that?

It’s a fair and needed warning to Roman Catholics (and others) who nourish their spiritual lives with devotions. Bottom line, devotions can easily ground themselves on shaky theology and can be a junk food contaminating our spiritual diet: where devotions replace scripture, Mary replaces Jesus as center, and certain ritual practices make God seem like a puppet on a string.

However, that being admitted, as Goethe once said, the dangers of life are many and safety is one of those dangers. Yes, devotions can be a danger, but they can also be a rich healthy supplement in our essential diet of Word and Eucharist.

Here’s how Eric Mascall (the renowned Anglican theologian at Oxford with C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Dorothy Sayers, and Austin Ferrar) spells out both the danger of devotions and the danger of not having devotions as part of your spiritual life: The protestant reformers (Luther, Calvin, Zwingli) were so afraid of contamination by Roman Catholic devotions, that they put us on a diet of antiseptics. When you’re on a diet of antiseptics, you won’t suffer from food poisoning, but you can suffer from malnutrition.

That’s an equal challenge to both those who practice devotions and those who fear them. The theology undergirding certain devotions admittedly can be sloppy (for example, Mary is not a co-redeemer with Jesus). However, inside many devotions (to Mary, to the saints, to Eucharist adoration, to the Sacred Heart) there can be a rich nutrition which helps nourish the center, namely, God’s Word and the Eucharist.

The late Wendy Wright in her book “Sacred Heart: Gateway to God” makes a wonderful apologia for Catholic devotional practices, particularly devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. For her, Catholic devotional practices are a tradition of the heart. While Jesus remains central and his resurrection remains the real anchor for our faith, devotions can give us something beyond just this raw essential.

Using devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus as an example, she writes: “In this devotion, we, and Jesus and the saints, exist in some essential way outside the chronology of historical time. The tradition of the heart makes this vividly, even grotesquely, clear. The divine–human correspondence is intimate. It is discovered in the flesh. Our fleshy hearts are fitted for all that is beyond flesh by conforming to the heart of Jesus. That divine–human heart is the passageway between earth and heaven. That heart is the tactile tracings of divine love on the created order. That heart is the widest, wildest longing of humankind’s own love.”

The dangers of life are many and safety is one of those dangers. Devotions can deflect us from what’s more central and can take their root in some questionable theology, but they can also, in Wendy Wright’s words, be a blessed passageway for the heart between heaven and earth.

(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser is a theologian, teacher and award-winning author. He can be contacted through his website www.ronrolheiser.com.)

FROM THE HERMITAGE
By sister alies therese
Imagine, if you can, a huge pot of bright red paint – another of yellow. Now picture a pot entirely of orange made by mixing the two. A third space – the coming together of two separate things to make something brand new.

Or see a neighborhood full of people from Peru. Nearby is a neighborhood of people from Appalachia. Two miles away is a neighborhood full of folks from Appalachia and Peru, living side by side, sharing in most things. That becomes a third space – overlapping into a completely new neighborhood.

Some of the characteristics of a third space are people coming together for social connection, creativity and belonging. The concept of “third space” is attributed to sociolinguist Homi K. Bhabha, expressing a theory of identity and community realized through language, though its application has expanded over the years. Sociologist Ray Oldenburg popularized the phrase in 1989 in his book “The Great Good Place,” where he emphasized “their crucial role in civic engagement and social interaction.” In an article for the UNESCO Courier, he defined them as “informal public places where people can gather, socialize and maintain a democracy.”

We can look back in history and discover these spaces, such as trading posts, Greek agoras, Roman forums, medieval taverns or your favorite pub.

What is first or second space, you might ask? First is home; second, work or school. These are the spaces in which you live the most and hopefully find comfort, have your responsibilities and success. But a third space is critical for your well-being, especially your mental health.

These are the overlapping places where what you come from – your routines and practices – lessen, and you enter into another world, so to speak. Here, you socialize with folks unknown to you, who you would consider different from yourself. Alternative spaces are explicitly created to address unmet needs, so local community engagement at a coffee shop (often regularly) or a library lessens loneliness and encourages all people to experience a new sort of connectedness.

There are opportunities to grow in any number of ways, to experience laughter, as well as to listen to others. Community gardens or river walks – all third spaces. Parks, support groups or hairdressers are among the many different types of third places. There are running groups (or walking), book clubs, or my favorites – my place of worship, Sacred Heart Catholic Church; Koty Earl’s, where I frequently eat breakfast; and GIRLFRIENDS, where I engage in art and devotion with other women weekly.

There is, I think, yet another sort of third place, and we see it expressed in the Scriptures. It is not a physical place but a turning of the heart. Consider the stories of the Good Samaritan (Lk 10:25ff) and the tender moment where Jesus from the cross invites John to take Mary into his home (Jn 19:26ff). Both of these bring us into a world of compassion from a world of hurt and challenge us to live differently.

We know both these stories and the worlds of anguish they represent; do we hear the unmet cry for compassion where all is new? Marcel Proust said, “Love is space and time measured by the heart.”

Compassion is a third place we all need to travel to, to learn to live in. We can look about in the other worlds we inhabit, those of social media and political chatter. We can become as brittle as the priest or Levite and pass by the opportunity to grow or be of service, or we can bend down like the Samaritan and discover a neighbor in distress. We can open our homes like John and at the same time receive the gift Mary has to bring.

So, what’s your favorite third space? Is it physical, digital or like compassion, from the heart? Maybe you need to create one. Where will you help connect folks so that compassion might be lived out? What are your unmet needs? What is unmet when you carefully look around?

“Compassion is another name for community. It is the mirror of relatedness that accepts the pain and weakness of another as one’s own. It is an expression of love that says, ‘You belong to me,’” wrote Sister Ilia Delio, OSF, in her book “Compassion.”

Blessings.

REFLECTIONS ON LIFE
By Melvin Arrington

Our world today seems overpopulated with fictional superheroes of all sorts. Humans, animals, aliens, robots – even something that looks like a monster may, in fact, be a superhero. They appear not only in comics, but also on TV shows, and on the big screen. The various media are saturated with them. What is it about these strange characters that has so captured the public imagination?

When I was a kid growing up in the 1950s, only one superhero captured my imagination, and that was Superman. In addition to being a devoted reader of comic books about the Man of Steel, I was also a huge fan of the popular TV show “The Adventures of Superman,” starring George Reeves. Whenever that program came on, you could always find me glued to the TV set. I was simply enchanted with that “strange visitor from another planet with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men.”

Like many boys my age, I wanted to be like Superman; actually, to be honest, I wanted to be Superman because he could do all kinds of amazing things: he was “faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.” He could also “change the course of mighty rivers” and “bend steel in his bare hands.” But most importantly, he could fly!

I have many wonderful childhood memories of playing with friends on swings. We would all try to see how high we could go. At the highest point I would bail out and, at least for a moment, fly through the air like my hero. Somehow I survived all those “flights” without any broken bones.

Back in those days the City of Jackson also afforded me an opportunity to pretend that I could fly. Do they still send trucks into neighborhoods to spray for mosquitoes? In the 1950s, it was a regular summertime occurrence. Some would ride their bicycles behind the truck, but whenever I saw it coming down our street, I would go get a towel (my makeshift cape), tie it around my neck, dash outside, and run through all that fog with my arms extended in front of me, like I was Superman flying through the clouds. Cumulatively, over several summers, I must have breathed in a truckload of that toxic spray (it was DDT back then). It’s surely a miracle that I made it to adulthood!

So why all this fascination with flying like Superman? Perhaps it’s because that famous superhero fulfills a desire in all of us for the supernatural, a longing to reach for something beyond our grasp. We yearn to escape our earthly limitations and soar upward to God, to the Source of our being. Whether we acknowledge it or not, we all have a hunger for the spiritual, for the infinite, for God; that’s the way the Creator made us. As St. Augustine said, “Our hearts were made for Thee, O Lord, and they are restless until they rest in Thee.” It’s not difficult to see how Superman can serve as a remedy for some of this restlessness. He can satisfy these cravings because he’s a kind of messianic figure, a Christ-like figure.

Superman was created by two 18-year-old Jewish boys in Cleveland, Ohio, in the late 1930s. During that decade Hitler would come to power, establish the Third Reich, and attempt to exterminate the Jews from the face of the earth. At the same time, our country (and the rest of the world) found itself mired in the depths of the Great Depression. The Jews needed a messiah, a savior, to rescue them from annihilation, and Americans needed a heroic figure, if only a fictional one, to lift our spirits. Superman satisfied both needs.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the parallels between Jesus and Superman. We know that the divine Son of God, is omnipotent; there are no limits to what He can do. We also know that the Man of Steel is a “strange visitor from another planet who came to Earth with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men.” Also, Jesus has a human nature and a divine nature, while Superman likewise has two identities: he is Clark Kent, “mild-mannered reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper,” as well as a superhero.

Jor-El is Superman’s father (“El” in Hebrew means “God”). Superman’s real name is Kal-El, and since he is Jor-El’s son, he serves as a type of the Son of God, Jesus, who is also God, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity. Moments before the planet Krypton is destroyed, Jor-El places his only son, baby Kal-El, in a small capsule and sends it out into space headed for the planet Earth. The space ship crashes in farmland in the state of Kansas. Jonathan Kent and his wife, Martha, discover the strange little boy in the wreckage, become his adoptive parents, name him Clark, and raise him in the American heartland.

In the 1978 film “Superman,” Clark is tempted to show off in front of a few kids from his high school by demonstrating some of the marvelous things he can do, but Mr. Kent advises caution, explaining to Clark that there’s a reason he has amazing powers. Clark eventually rises above these temptations, and when he becomes an adult, he leaves the farm, discovers why he was sent to Earth, and goes off to the crime-ridden city of Metropolis to fulfill his purpose: to save people everywhere from the forces of evil.

Similarly, God the Father sent His only Son, Jesus, from heaven to earth to be our redeemer. Our Lord grew up with Mary and his foster father, Joseph, in the backwater town of Nazareth.When it was time to begin His ministry, Jesus left home and went into the wilderness to fast and pray. There, Satan came and offered Him three temptations, but Our Lord refused each one because He had to accomplish the purpose for which He was sent. In Jerusalem, after overcoming another great temptation in the Garden of Gethsemane, He went to Calvary and carried out His mission: to save us from our sins by dying on the Cross, and to defeat death by rising again on the third day.

We, too, should be on a mission. But what is our task? The 4th-century theologian St. Athanasius of Alexandria said, “the Son of God became man so that we might become God.” At first glance that sounds impossible, even though we know that we came from God, and one day we hope to return to Him. Perhaps our mission has something to do with Superman. If children can pretend to be the Man of Steel, why can’t we as adults try to be more like the Son of God?

(Melvin Arrington is a Professor Emeritus of Modern Languages for the University of Mississippi and a member of St. John Oxford.)

Ordinary Time

By Lucia A. Silecchia

As September dawned, eyes turned to Rome with joy to celebrate the canonizations of two young men – Sts. Pier Giorgio Frassati and Carlo Acutis. In a particular way, many hoped that the holy lives of these two new saints would have a special appeal to young people who would see in them examples of lives well and faithfully lived.

Merely a week later, Sept. 14 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the canonization of another young saint, Elizabeth Ann Seton. I dimly remember this event from my early childhood, and recall similar excitement that she would inspire a world hungry for good examples of faithful lives.

Elizabeth Ann Bayley Seton was the first American-born saint to be canonized, a sign that our still-young nation can be the soil from which holy lives spring forth for the glory of God.

As a native New Yorker, I am parochially proud that St. Elizabeth Seton was born in New York City. In addition, St. Kateri Tekakwitha was also born within what would become New York State. Other saints such as Frances Cabrini, Marianne Cope, Isaac Jogues and John Neumann, while not born in New York, contributed greatly to the spiritual and temporal good of my home state. Certainly, not all saints from the United States are from New York! In the past fifty years Elizabeth Seton has been joined by other saints and blessed from across her homeland.

The story of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton’s short life is well known, but worth reflecting on in this milestone year. She was born in 1774 to a prominent Episcopalian family. Her mother died when she was a mere toddler – the first of many profound losses she would experience. Elizabeth married William Magee Seton, a prominent businessman, in 1794. Together they had five children.

Sadly, their happiness was short-lived. William’s business fortunes declined, and tuberculosis took a toll on his health. Hoping that a change in climate would cure him, they sought refuge with friends in sun-soaked Italy. Alas, William died there in 1803, leaving Elizabeth a young widow with five children aged eight and under. It was in Italy, however, that Elizabeth learned about the Catholic faith and it touched her soul in a bleak season of her life. When she returned to New York, she entered the Catholic Church in 1805 – a decision with a deep cost to her in social circles hostile to Catholicism.

Four years later, Elizabeth and her children came to the Diocese of Baltimore – the premier see in the young United States – at the invitation of Bishop John Carroll. She established both a school and the first American community of religious sisters, the Sisters of Charity of St Joseph.

“Mother Seton,” as she was now known, her children, and the first of her sisters settled in the hills of Emmitsburg, Maryland to build their school and community.

I have often visited Emmitsburg to enjoy the peaceful beauty of the hills she knew and the places she dwelled. What I easily lose sight of is that the rugged beauty of this place was, two centuries ago, harsh and unforgiving. It was in those hills, in a simple graveyard, that Mother Seton buried two of her daughters, Annamaria and Rebecca, who succumbed to illness in the cold. Many of Mother Seton’s first sisters – including other members of her family – also died in those early, desolate years in Emmitsburg.

After losses like these she said, “I am satisfied to sow in tears if I may reap in joy. And when all the wintry storms of time are past, we shall enjoy the delights of an eternal spring.”

Now a saint, Mother Seton truly does “enjoy the delights of an eternal spring.” The community she gathered and the school she founded, at such great cost, continued to flourish. To her is credited the American Catholic school system that, for more than two centuries, has taught generations about both this world and the next.

I vaguely remember watching her canonization on television and discussing it in school. I remember the excitement, on the eve of the United States’ Bicentennial, that an American saint was celebrated beyond the confines of the time and the place she had lived.

As he proclaimed her a saint, Pope Paul VI said, “Elizabeth Ann Seton is a saint. St. Elizabeth Ann Seton is an American. All of us say this with special joy … Rejoice for your glorious daughter. Be proud of her. And know how to preserve her fruitful heritage.”

Fifty years have passed since then. I was blessed with many years as a student in Catholic schools and have spent my adulthood in Catholic higher education. I have read Mother Seton’s writings, inspired by the simplicity and the strength of this older sister in faith. I have wondered how willing I would or could be in saying “yes” to the labor asked of me, if I knew in advance how high the cost might be.

I have spent time in the hills of Maryland where Mother Seton lived, worked, prayed and died at the age of forty-six, on January 4, 1821. I hope that if time and travel allows, you might find yourself in Emmitsburg someday to walk where she trod, pray where she mourned, see where she taught and pause at the tomb of this “glorious daughter.” More than that, it is a beautiful place to pray for all who serve our church and our nation. May they have the strength, faith and wisdom to “preserve her fruitful heritage” in the hard work of ordinary time.

(Lucia A. Silecchia is a Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Faculty Research at The Catholic University of America. “On Ordinary Times” is a bi-weekly column reflecting on the ways to find the sacred in the simple. Email her at silecchia@cua.edu.)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
My father died when I was twenty-three, a seminarian, green, still learning about life. It’s hard to lose your father at any age, and my grief was compounded by the fact that I had just begun to appreciate what he had given me.

Only later did I realize that I no longer needed him, though I still very much wanted him. What he had to give me, he had already given. I had his blessing.

I knew I had his blessing. My life and the direction it had taken pleased him. Like God’s voice at the baptism of his Jesus, he had already communicated to me: You are my son in whom I am well pleased. Not everyone is that lucky. That’s about as much as a person may ask from a father.

And what did he leave me and the rest of his offspring?

Too much to name, but among other things, moral steadiness. He was one of the most moral people I have ever known, allowing himself minimal moral compromise. He wasn’t a man who bought the line that we are only human and so it’s okay to allow ourselves some exemptions. He used to famously tell us: “Anyone can show me humanity; I need someone to show me divinity!” He expected you not to fail, to live up to what faith and morality asked of you, to not make excuses. If we, his family, inhaled anything from his presence, it was this moral stubbornness.

Beyond this, he had a steady, almost pathological sanity. Today we joke that moderation was his only excess. There were no hysterical outbursts, no depressions, no giddiness, no lack of steadiness, no having to guess where his soul and psyche might be on a given day.

With that steadiness, along with my mother’s supporting presence, he made for us a home that was always a safe cocoon, a boring place sometimes, but always a safe one. When I think of the home where I grew up, I think of a safe shelter where you could look at the storms outside from a place of warmth and security. Again, not everyone is that lucky.

And because we were a large family and his love and attention had to be shared with multiple siblings, I never thought of him as “my” father, but always as “our” father. This has helped me grasp the first challenge in the Lord’s Prayer, namely, that God is “Our” Father, whom we share with others, not a private entity.

Moreover, his family extended to more than his own children. I learned early not to resent the fact that he couldn’t always be with us, that he had good reasons to be elsewhere: work, community, church, hospital and school boards, political involvement. He was an elder for a wider family than just our own.

Finally, not least, he blessed me and my brothers and sisters with a love for baseball. He managed a local baseball team for many years. This was his particular place where he could enjoy some Sabbath.

But blessings never come pure. My father was human, and a man’s greatest strength is often too his greatest weakness. In all that moral fiber and rock-solid sanity, there was also a reticence that sometimes didn’t allow him to fully drink in life’s exuberance. Every son watches how his father dances and unconsciously sizes him up against certain things – hesitancy, fluidity, abandonment, exhibitionism, momentary irrationality, irresponsibility.

My father never had much fluidity or abandon to his dance step, and I have inherited that, something that can pain me deeply. There were times, both as a child and as an adult, when, in a given situation, I would have traded my father for a dad who had a more fluid dance step, for someone with a little less reticence in the face of life’s exuberance.

And that is partly my struggle to receive his full blessing. I’m often reminded of William Blake’s famous line in Infant Sorrow, where he mentions “Struggling in my father’s hands.” For me, that means struggling at times with my dad’s reticence to simply let go and drink in life’s full gift.

But, if there was hesitancy, there was no irresponsibility in his dance, even if sometimes that meant standing outside the dance. I was grieved at his funeral, but proud too, proud of the respect that was poured out for him, for the way he lived his life. There was no judgment that day on his reticence.

I’m older now than he was when he died. My earthly days now outnumber his by fifteen years. But I still live inside his blessing, consciously and unconsciously, striving to measure up, to honor what he gave me. And mostly that’s good, though I also have moments when I find myself standing outside of life’s exuberance, looking in at the dance, reticent, his look on my face, feeling a certain envy of those who have a more fluid dance step – me, ever my father’s son.

(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser is a theologian, teacher and award-winning author. He can be contacted through his website www.ronrolheiser.com.)