IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
There are times when our world unravels. Who hasn’t had the feeling? “I’m falling apart! This is beyond me! My heart is broken! I feel betrayed by everything! Nothing makes sense anymore! Life is upside down!”

Jesus had a cosmic image for this. In the Gospels, he talks about how the world as we experience it will someday end: “The sun will be darkened, the moon will not give forth its light, stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of heaven will be shaken.” When Jesus says this, he is not talking as much about cosmic cataclysms as of cataclysms of the heart. Sometimes our inner world is shaken, turned upside down; it gets dark in the middle of the day, there’s an earthquake in the heart; we experience the end of the world as we’ve known it.

However, in this upheaval, Jesus assures us that one thing remains sure: God’s promise of fidelity. That doesn’t get turned upside down and in our disillusionment we are given a chance to see what really is of substance, permanent and worthy of our lives. Thus, ideally at least, when our trusted world is turned upside down, we are given the chance to grow, to become less selfish and to see reality more clearly.

Christian mystics call this “a dark night of the soul” and they express it as if God were actively turning our world upside down and deliberately causing all the heartache to purge and cleanse us.

The great Spanish mystic John of the Cross puts it this way: God gives us seasons of fervor and then takes them away. In our seasons of fervor, God gives us consolation, pleasure, and security inside our relationships, our prayer and our work (sometimes with considerable passion and intensity). This is a gift from God and is meant to be enjoyed. But John tells us, at a certain point, God takes away the pleasure and consolation and we experience a certain dark night in that where we once felt fire, passion, consolation and security, we will now feel dryness, boredom, disillusion and insecurity. For John of the Cross, all honeymoons eventually end.

Why? Why would God do this? Why can’t a honeymoon last forever?

Because eventually, though not initially, it blocks us from seeing straight. Initially all those wonderful feelings we feel when we first fall in love, when we first begin to pray deeply, and when we first begin to find our legs in the world. These are part of God’s plan and God’s way of drawing us forward. The passion and consolation we feel help lead us out of ourselves, beyond fear and selfishness. But, eventually, the good feelings themselves become a problem because we can get hung up on them rather than on what’s behind them.

Honeymoons are wonderful; but, on a honeymoon, too often we are more in love with being in love and all the wonderful energy this creates than we are in love with the person behind all those feelings. The same is true for faith and prayer. When we first begin to pray seriously, we are often more in love with the experience of praying and what it’s doing for us than we are in love with God. On any honeymoon, no matter how intense and pure the feelings seem, those feelings are still partly about ourselves rather than purely about the person we think we love. Sadly, that is why many a warm, passionate honeymoon eventually turns into a cold, passionless relationship.

Until we are purified, and we are purified precisely through dark nights of disillusionment, we are too much still seeking ourselves in love and in everything else. Therese of Lisieux used to warn: “Be careful not to seek yourself in love, you’ll end up with a broken heart that way!” We’d have fewer heartaches if we understood that. Also, before we are purified by disillusionment, most of the tears we shed, no matter how real the pain or loss, often say more about us than they say about the person or situation we are supposedly mourning.

In all this, there’s both bad news and good news: The bad news is that most everything we sense as precious will someday be taken from us. Everything gets crucified, including every feeling of warmth and security we have. But the good news is that it will all be given back again, more deeply, more purely, and even more passionately than before.

What dark nights of the soul, cataclysms of the heart, do is to take away everything that feels like solid earth so that we end up in a free-fall, unable to grab on to anything that once supported us. But, in falling, we get closer to bedrock, to God, to reality, to truth, to love, to each other, beyond illusions, beyond selfishness and beyond self-interested love that can masquerade as altruism.

Clarity in eyesight comes after disillusionment, purity of heart comes after heartbreak and real love comes after the honeymoon has passed.

(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

I have a habit of trying to learn new words every few days. I am not always successful, but here are two I learned on an art app: polloglyphs and pareidolia. The first means hidden images and the second is seeing patterns in randomness. Though they were used to describe an ongoing argument amongst art critics about Jackson Pollock’s work and whether he had things hidden beneath his famous drips, I think they are words that will ‘preach!’

Into Lent, we are confronted with the pain and reality of the Passion of Jesus and our passion. Perhaps we can look for hidden images and some patterns of randomness in suffering, ours and the world.
A few weeks ago, in our readings at Mass, we explored Sirach, a book not found in non-Catholic Bibles and not included in the Hebrew Bible either after the first century. It has always been considered divinely inspired and canonical by Catholics. I have always found it soothing and reassuring. It was written somewhere between 200-175 BCE in Hebrew by Jesus, son of Eleazar, son of Sirach, primarily to present moral teaching to catechumens and the faithful.

The opening strophe, “All wisdom comes from the Lord and with God remains forever,” (1:1) suggests there are things to uncover. “True wisdom is God’s external revelation of Himself. Throughout the book, Sirach describes in great detail just what wisdom is: sometimes it is divine, sometimes a synonym for God’s law; sometimes it is human. But the author makes clear that even human wisdom, properly understood, comes from God.” (footnote, 1:1, NAB)

The revelation of God permeates all things … nature that surrounds us, the universe and the myriad of artistic galaxies, the faces of children, the workers and entertainers, and even ourselves have many hidden images, woven daily as we journey, as we cast off the false self. One of the ways our false self is put away and our transformed true selves emerge is through friendship. Sirach has a bit to say about that. Consider chapter 6.

For Lent you may have given up chocolate, TV, beer, or scanning your phone every three seconds, … consider giving in, giving more, giving, and in that giving, changing … establishing a new friendship! You might discover hidden images; possibly experience pareidolia, those patterns in the randomness of the human condition. Friendship can begin in many ways. Look about when you attend church or a ballgame or an art class. Consider the folks there. Who would I like to get to know? Who would I choose to become friends with? What are your criteria? What are you willing to risk?

That’s one way. But what if you first prayed and asked God to put a new person in your path? What if you asked God to open your heart to folks who are not like you? Oh my. Where would I meet such a person, you wonder, when the church I go to is all the same, as is my grocery store, school or golf course. Where can I meet someone of another faith, ethnic background or age? Where can I learn something new or be challenged in my well-organized heart?

The art argument I mentioned implied that Pollock painted things under his drips, and that if you stared long enough, you would see them. If you paid enough attention, you would see the randomness hidden beneath. If we go with that, how about what happens when we meet a new person … a person so unlike us in gender, color, education or marital status? What wisdom do we need to explore a new relationship?

One difficulty is perhaps that we already have an imagination or thoughts about ‘those kind of people’ … and now when we meet x or y we find those ideas challenged. Those very ideas cause us to review how open or closed our hearts are. Sirach reminded us that all wisdom comes from God. Wisdom is needed in friendship; how do we move in this new way? How do we eat new food, appreciate different clothing, or listen to political or religious differences, and gain wisdom, our growth goal? How do we learn to love?

Perhaps you read Judy Blume’s books? In “Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret,” she writes, “I like long hair, tuna fish, the smell of rain and things that are pink. I hate pimples, baked potatoes, when my mother’s mad, and religious holidays.” This may be her wisdom as an eight- or nine-year-old, but will she stay stuck to those notions or be able to go beyond them and discover what is hidden within?

Lent offers so many opportunities to shed false selves and to allow our true-Godly self to emerge. We can splash around or sit in a puddle and need a time out, or we can be reminded that others and their wisdom and generosity can help us grow. We can indeed learn to love in a whole new way. In John 15:15ff Jesus makes this clear: “This is My command: Love one another the way I have loved you. … put your life on the line for your friends. You are My friends because I’ve let you in on everything I’ve heard from the Father. You didn’t choose Me; I chose you and put you in the world to bear fruit.” (Peterson, “The Message”) So, choose.

BLESSINGS.

(Sister alies therese is a vowed Catholic solitary who lives an eremitical life. Her days are formed around prayer, art and writing. She is author of six books of spiritual fiction and is a weekly columnist.)

FOR THE JOURNEY
By Effie Caldarola

So, a random guy walks into a bar. No, this isn’t the beginning of a joke. For me, it’s a Lenten meditation.
A friend of mine tends bar in a neighborhood tavern. It’s a small place where “regulars” gather. Once, on the rare occasion I visited, I asked for red wine. My friend shook her head. “I wouldn’t order wine here,” she said. Apparently, a bottle of Merlot can sit open for weeks. This is a beer drinker’s haven.

She told me that one night as she stood behind the bar, she was looking at a GoFundMe page for a friend, a young woman diagnosed with very serious cancer. The woman had to quit her job to begin treatment.

A customer my friend didn’t know was sitting at the bar sipping a beer and asked what she was doing. She explained the young woman’s situation. This random guy, a stranger, pulled out two $20 bills and pushed them over to her. Add that to the GoFundMe, he said.

What does this have to do with my Lent? I’ve been thinking about generosity. More specifically, I’ve been pondering spontaneous generosity and what it says about the heart. My heart.

Spring brings two familiar rituals – one, the penitential season of Lent with its many graces. The other, tax season, with its obligations. Although ostensibly very different things, they may intersect at the point where some of us use our charitable donations as deductions.

Tax season holds us hostage to paper, and I’ve carefully recorded the donations my husband and I have made. Again, the intersection: I want a deduction, but I also use this as a time to evaluate my generosity. Were our contributions “enough?” Were they more than last year? Did they reflect our church’s preferential option for the poor? What do they say about our priorities?

But then, a random guy pushes $40 across the bar in a spontaneous act of compassion, and my receipts suddenly seem less important and a bit more calculated. Where, I wonder, is my record of everyday acts of generosity, acts which held no hidden benefit to me except the grace of a God whose generosity is boundless?

I think back to times I’ve failed at spontaneous generosity. I sometimes recall, long ago, a man loitering on the early morning street, me rushing to a coffee shop before a meeting. I had no cash to give him, but later I asked myself why I didn’t offer to buy him a coffee. Maybe a muffin? I had a credit card.

There’s nothing wrong with planned giving. Actually, it’s important. Maybe we tithe, or maybe we choose a sacrifice so that we can give more. In these troubled times, with so many people suffering and even dying because federal contracts to Catholic charities have been frozen, our charitable planning is critical.

But generosity should be a way of life, not just a budget line item. Generosity is stumbling out of bed after a sleepless night and smiling brightly at our family. It’s letting someone else have the last piece of cake. It’s spontaneous compassion on a daily basis, through our time, our words, our resources. Without payback. Just sliding a little cash across the bar.

Did that guy have a sister or mother who struggled with the same cancer? Or did he just have a generous heart? We’ll never know.

People often ask a deacon friend of mine how much they should give, almost as if his answer would justify them. He would always smile and say, “More.” That’s a good daily Lenten mantra. After all, how can we give God less?

(Effie Caldarola is a wife, mom and grandmother who received her master’s degree in pastoral studies from Seattle University.)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
During the last years of his life, Thomas Merton lived in a hermitage outside a monastery, hoping to find more solitude in his life. But solitude is an illusive thing, and he found it was forever escaping him.
Then one morning he sensed that for a moment he had found it. However, what he experienced was a surprise to him. Solitude, it turns out, is not some altered state of consciousness or some heightened sense of God and the transcendent in our lives. Solitude, as he experienced it, was simply being peacefully inside your own skin, gratefully aware of and peacefully breathing in the immense richness inside your own life. Solitude consists in sleeping in intimacy with your own experience, at peace there, aware of its riches and wonder.

But that’s not easy. It’s rare. Rarely do we find ourselves at peace with the present moment inside us. Why? Because that’s the way we are built. We are overcharged for this world. When God put us into this world, as the author of the Book of Ecclesiastes tells us, God put “timelessness” into our hearts and because of that we don’t make easy peace with our lives.

We read this, for example, in the famous passage about the rhythm of the seasons in the Book of Ecclesiastes. There is a time and a season for everything, we are told: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to gather in what is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal … and so the text goes on. Then, after listing this natural rhythm of time and the seasons, the author ends with these words: God has made everything suitable for its own time but has put timelessness into the human heart so that human beings are out of sync with the rhythms of the seasons from beginning to end.

The Hebrew word used here to express “timelessness” is Olam, a word suggesting “eternity” and “transcendence.” Some English translations put it this way: God has put a sense of past and future into our hearts. Perhaps that captures it best in terms of how we generally experience this in our lives. We know from experience how difficult it is to be at peace inside the present moment because the past and the future won’t leave us alone. They are forever coloring the present.

The past haunts us with half-forgotten lullabies and melodies that trigger memories about love found and lost, about wounds that have never healed, and with inchoate feelings of nostalgia, regret and wanting to cling to something that once was. The past is forever sowing restlessness into the present moment.

And the future? It impales itself into the present as well, looming as promise and threat, forever demanding our attention, forever sowing anxiety into our lives and forever stripping us of the capacity to simply rest inside the present.

The present is forever colored by obsessions, heartaches, headaches and anxieties that have little to do with people we are actually sitting with at table.

Philosophers and poets have given various names to this. Plato called it “a madness that comes from the gods”; Hindu poets have called it “a nostalgia for the infinite”; Shakespeare speaks of “immortal longings,” and Augustine, in perhaps the most famous naming of them all, called it an incurable restlessness that God has put into the human heart to keep it from finding a home in something less than the infinite and eternal – “You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”

And so, it’s rare to be peacefully present to our own lives, restful inside of our own skins. But this “torment,” as T.S. Eliot, once named it, has a God-given intentionality, a divine purpose.

Henri Nouwen, in a remarkable passage both names the struggle and its purpose: “Our life is a short time in expectation, a time in which sadness and joy kiss each other at every moment. There is a quality of sadness that pervades all the moments of our life. It seems that there is no such thing as a clear-cut pure joy, but that even in the most happy moments of our existence we sense a tinge of sadness. In every satisfaction, there is an awareness of limitations. In every success, there is the fear of jealousy. Behind every smile, there is a tear. In every embrace, there is loneliness. In every friendship, distance. And in all forms of light, there is the knowledge of surrounding darkness. But this intimate experience in which every bit of life is touched by a bit of death can point us beyond the limits of our existence. It can do so by making us look forward in expectation to that day when our hearts will be filled with perfect joy, a joy that no one shall take away from us.”

Our restless hearts keep us from falling asleep to the divine fire inside us.

(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
Not long until we purple-up and turn our attention more intentionally to the Passion of Jesus. In our tradition, we fast, pray, and give alms and are convinced that we shall make progress, and our improvement will bring holiness. Really? An earlier tradition taught this:
Baal Shem Tov (Poland, d. 1760) (a Hasid or ‘pious one’) taught, “A person of piety complained to the Master, saying, ‘I have labored hard and long in the service of the Lord, and yet I have received no improvement. I am still an ordinary and ignorant person.’ And the Master answered, ‘Ah, yes, but you have gained the realization that you are ordinary and ignorant and that in itself is a worthy accomplishment, is it not?’”

Will I ever be ‘meeked?’ A horse is not meeked to take away its power … no, it is to harness it, moving the animal’s heart from independence to loyalty. In 2019 Maleah (internet) wrote, “Meekness is a superpower developing a focused deliberate center.” This center is our place of prayer and an attitude of meekness reminds us of who our center is.

“To pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself. Whenever one so concentrates attention … and completely forgets the ego, they are praying.” (W.H. Auden, Prayer the Nature of, A Certain World, 1970)

‘Meeking a horse’ comes from Old English and Old Norse. Injukr means gentle … and way back to the Greek praus meaning strength under control. Focused and deliberate. Strong under control.

Behavioral aspects give us a few clues as to how we are doing and though we may remain ignorant and ordinary we can check our tempers, hold back a bad word, or show an engaging smile rather than a wrinkly frown. Aristotle remarked a “praus person has the virtue of the mean between two extremes. The person submits or constrains power for greater effect on self and others.”

Prayer is essential, for to lower oneself before the magnificence of God is to allow ourselves to be meeked into wholesome submission, being transformed moment by moment into the gentleness of God. Another way we express this deliberate and controlled behavior is to let others speak … you listen, and as Carnegie remarked, “do what’s needed.” Sometimes we do not pay attention to what is needed, thinking we can be holy our way. A Sufi story teaches, “There are those in winter who, calling themselves religious say, ‘I shall not wear warm clothes. I shall trust in God’s kindness to protect me from the cold.’ But these people do not realize that the God who created cold has also given human beings the means to protect themselves from it.’”

What do the Scriptures say about being ‘meek?’ Consider both Psalm 37 and Matthew 5:5ff. In Psalm 37 we understand that the meek are the anawim, those overwhelmed by want thus their complete dependence upon God. “Quiet down before God and be prayerful before Him. Don’t bother with those who climb the ladder, who elbow their way to the top. Bridle your anger, trash your wrath, cool your pipes — it only makes things worse.” (Peterson, Psalm 37, The Message)

When Matthew picks these notions up and includes them in the beatitudes, we hear the call of ‘slow to anger,’ ‘gentle with others’ and not striving but accepting. “You are blessed when you are content with just who you are – no more, no less. That’s the moment you find yourselves proud owners of everything that can’t be bought.” (Peterson, MT 5:5, The Message). We are patiently learning to trust and to build up nourishing connections. As with that horse, we develop a partnership.

“Pray simply. Do not expect to find in your heart any remarkable gift of prayer. Consider yourself unworthy of it. Then you will find peace. Use the empty, dry coldness of your prayer as food for your humility.” (St. Makari of Optino) We have the opportunity each day to grow in meekness as we deepen, pray and do what is needed. That is our journey, and we need to make good friends with our horses.

“Grow up gentle and good and never learn bad ways; do your work with goodwill, lift your feet up when you trot, and never bite or kick even in play.” (Anna Sewell, Black Beauty).
BLESSINGS.

(Sister alies therese is a canonically vowed hermit with days formed around prayer and writing.)

It IS GOOD
By Elizabeth Scalia
Early on, my friend Ruby absorbed the message that a “strong, independent” woman never seeks out help; she does everything all by herself, for herself.

Thus, Ruby is fast to offer help to anyone else who might need it – she’ll watch the kids and the dog; she’ll drive you to the emergency room and hold your hand while you wait; she’ll take some of the work off your desk if you’re having a bad week and complete it for you. But she’ll never ask anyone to do the same for her.

As a single mother Ruby did it all, saw to it all and carried it all on her own wee shoulders, raising a sweet-natured boy into manhood in the process. Her buzzwords were “strength” and “self-sufficiency,” even when it meant wearing shoes long in need of replacement. Challenges were risen to; personal needs brushed aside. She could look back on each day knowing she’d done her best by her world, and that any debts she’d incurred – those financial, social or personal obligations that can make a resolutely self-contained sort feel uncomfortably vulnerable – had been kept to a minimum.

And that all worked for her. Until suddenly, it didn’t.

As for so many of us, a cancer diagnosis proved to be the line – the one obstacle her strong will could not bend, nor her stiff spine break through.

Ruby put a good face on things through biopsies and MRI’s, and as cancer in one breast became cancer in both and discussions of surgical options and treatments took her diabetes into consideration. She presented a strong face to her family – the determined, extreme calm at the crux of her own private maelstrom. Then a pre-surgical stress test flagged a new concern: “It might be broken-heart syndrome,” the cardiologist mused.

And that was when she cracked.

My friend has faced the challenges of aging with grace and humor, but the whole “cancer-diabetes-wait-my-heart-is-broken-now?” trifecta did her in. For the first time since childhood, Ruby felt utterly unmoored from her own strengths.
“You need to let yourself lean on your family and friends, a little,” I advised her. “It’s okay to say, ‘I need a hug, I need someone to fuss on me a little bit.’ Let people help!”

Uncomfortable with need and dubious about the whole endeavor, Ruby eventually hinted to her family that she was scared. “So much for your good advice,” she reported back, fuming. “They just said stuff like, ‘you have to take it a day at a time!’ I’m over here, terrified, and they’re no help at all!”

Sadly, people mostly don’t know what to say in such circumstances, particularly if they’ve never been asked for support. Ruby’s sudden need for the intimacy of consolation threw them off, a bit. Unsure about saying, “We’re scared too,” they fell back on “one day at a time,” which my friend – once she’d calmed down – recognized was sound advice. Cancer is scary. Sometimes you can only deal with it an hour (or even five minutes) at a time.

“You should forgive them for having no idea how to comfort you,” I told her, “because you’ve never needed them to before. This is new territory for everyone. Even if they’re not getting the words right, believe that they want the best for you and are praying for you.”

“And I hate myself for crying uncontrollably,” she wailed. “I really do.”

How often have we heard “strong” women say this – as if tears were a detestable fault or a sin against the perceived self? How many of us are walking around with broken hearts because we won’t permit ourselves the medicine of weeping and fully feeling the things we’ve determinedly repressed because we want that illusion of strength?

“That’s stupid,” I said, “You wouldn’t hate me, or one of your siblings, for crying; why should you hate yourself? Just stop that and let yourself feel all the things you have a right to feel. You’re allowed. I give you permission!”

At the feast of the Presentation of the Lord, we read, “But who will endure the day of his coming? And who can stand when he appears? For he is like the refiner’s fire … He will sit refining and purifying silver…” (Mal 3:2-3).

Set before all of us are weird, muddy amalgams of blessing and anxious terrors. God lives with us in the refining fires of our challenges, tempering and purifying us for something yet greater than all we know.
It is good to let ourselves acknowledge the fires, the better to endure them in trust until we are free.

(Elizabeth Scalia is editor at large for OSV. Follow her on X @theanchoress.)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
For more than a thousand years, Christians have not experienced the joy of being one family in Christ. Although there were already tensions within the earliest Christian communities, it was not until the year 1054 that there was a formal split, in effect, to establish two formal Christian communities, the Orthodox Church in the East and the Catholic Church in the West. Then, with the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century, there was another split within the Western Church and Christianity fragmented still further. Today there are hundreds of Christian denominations, many of whom, sadly, are not on friendly terms with each other.

Division and misunderstanding are understandable, inevitable, the price of being human. There are no communities without tension and so it is no great scandal that Christians sometimes cannot get along with each other. The scandal rather is that we have become comfortable, even smug, with the fact that we do not get along with each other, no longer hunger for wholeness, and no longer miss each other inside our separate churches.
In almost all our churches today there is little anxiety about those with whom we are not worshiping. For example, teaching Roman Catholic seminarians today, I sense a certain indifference to the issue of ecumenism. For many seminarians today this is not an issue of particular concern. Not to single out Catholic seminarians, this holds true for most of us in all denominations.

But this kind of indifference is inherently unchristian. Oneness was close to the heart of Jesus. He wants all his followers at the same table, as we see in this parable.

A woman has ten coins and loses one. She becomes anxious and agitated and begins to search frantically and relentlessly for the lost coin, lighting lamps, looking under tables, sweeping all the floors in her house. Eventually she finds the coin, is delirious with joy, calls together her neighbors, and throws a party whose cost no doubt far exceeded the value of the coin she had lost. (Luke 15:8-10)

Why such anxiety and joy over losing and finding a coin whose value was probably that of a dime? Well, what’s at issue is not the value of the coin; it’s something else. In her culture, nine was not considered a whole number; ten was. Both the woman’s anxiety about losing the coin and her joy in finding it had to do with the importance of wholeness. A wholeness in her life that had been fractured, and a precious set of relationships was no longer complete.

Indeed, the parable might be recast this way: A woman has ten children. With nine of them, she has a good relationship, but one of her daughters is alienated. Her nine other children come home regularly to the family table, but her alienated daughter does not. The woman cannot rest in that situation, cannot be at peace. She needs her alienated daughter to rejoin them. She tries every means to reconcile with her daughter and then one day, miracle of miracles, it works. Her daughter comes back to the family. Her family is whole again, everyone is back at the table. The woman is overjoyed, withdraws her modest savings, and throws a lavish party to celebrate that reunion.

Christian faith demands that, like that woman, we need to be anxious, dis-eased, figuratively lighting lamps, and searching for ways to make the church whole again. Nine is not a whole number. Neither is the number of those who are normally inside our respective churches. Roman Catholicism isn’t a whole number. Protestantism isn’t a whole number. The Evangelical Churches aren’t a whole number. The Orthodox Churches aren’t a whole number. No one Christian denomination is a whole number. Together we make up a whole Christian number – and that is still not a whole faith number.

And so, we are meant to be anxious around these questions: Who no longer goes to church with us? Who is uncomfortable worshiping with us? How can we be comfortable when so many people are no longer at table with us?

Sadly, today, many of us are comfortable in churches that are far, far from whole. Sometimes, in our less reflective moments, we even rejoice in it: “Those others aren’t real Christians in any case! We’re better off without them, a purer, more faithful church in their absence! We’re the one true remnant!”

But this lack of solicitude for wholeness compromises our following of Jesus as well as our basic human maturity. We are mature, loving people and true followers of Jesus, only when, like Jesus, we are in tears over those “other sheep that are not of this fold.” When, like the woman who lost one of her coins, we cannot sleep until every corner of the house has been turned upside down in a frantic search for what’s been lost.

We too need to solicitously search for a lost wholeness – and may not be at peace until it is found.

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

Reflections on Life
By Melvin Arrington
Pope Francis has recognized 2025 as a Holy Year, a Jubilee Year of Hope. In 2025 we, as “pilgrims of hope,” are called to renew ourselves, to transform ourselves into all that God wants us to be.

As Christians we have reasons to be hopeful. First and foremost, we are made in the image of God, and He has chosen us to be His adopted children. He has given us meaning and purpose for our lives. And He has promised that we will spend all eternity in heaven if we remain faithful to Him.

According to the Catechism, hope, like faith and charity, the other two theological virtues, is “infused by God into the souls of the faithful to make them capable of acting as His children and of meriting eternal life.” (CCC 1813) “Infused,” as my handy little Catholic Dictionary states, means that God, through His grace, imparts hope to the soul; it’s not something we can acquire through our own efforts other than our willingness to receive it.

Because this connection between grace and hope in the life of Christians has interesting parallels with the growth process in plants, I’m going to examine some of these correspondences. Joseph Campbell, considered the leading authority on mythology, argues that a type of consciousness operates not just in humans but in all forms of life, including plants. For him, the vine that wraps itself around a tree and the leaf that opens and turns toward the sun, an activity we call heliotropism, illustrate the existence of a plant consciousness.

Although Campbell makes a compelling argument, I prefer a different approach to this subject. Weeks ago, a winter storm brought a record snowfall and near single-digit temperatures to our part of the state. As I was out walking, I noticed near the sidewalk a row of tiny green shoots powerfully pushing upward, just beginning to break through the rock-hard surface of the ground. How could this be, given the frozen ground? But there they were! Although revealing less than a centimeter of their tips, they were bursting forth with determination and confidence.

God has put in place all the elements plant life requires to flourish. Nurtured by these graces – sunshine, rain and nutrients in the ground – the little shoots will continue their journey upward and will fulfill their purpose by turning into full-grown plants. And before long the color green, which stands for life, growth and, ultimately, hope, will be all around us again!

Interestingly, the way vegetation emerges has a direct application to Christian life and serves as a metaphor for the Catholic view of hope. Like the green shoots, we are on an upward journey. We, too, are confident of renewal and advancement in the faith, nourished by God’s grace. We, too, have the goal of blossoming and becoming what we were intended to be: mature, Christ-like servants. And because green also signifies Ordinary Time, the long period of maturation in the spiritual life, we’ll see it more than any other color during the liturgical year as a constant reminder of what we’re striving for.

The Catechism defines hope as “the theological virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ’s promises and relying not on our own strength, but on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit.” (CCC 1817) In other words, it’s much more than just the desire or wish for something; for example, that there will be something good to watch on TV, or that my team will make the playoffs, or that my utility bills will be lower, etc. These wishes may or may not come to pass. The Catholic understanding of this virtue, however, deals with eternal things; it goes well beyond mere desire to include “the confident expectation of divine blessing.” (CCC 2090)

Hope encompasses a firm belief that God will keep His promises to us, so we have to make sure that we honor our commitment to Him and not presume on His mercy: “Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for He who promised is faithful.” (Hebrews 10:23)

What kinds of things should we as pilgrims of hope do during this Jubilee Year? I heartily recommend consulting the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) website, which contains a wealth of information for the Holy Year. But if a pilgrimage is not feasible, several other opportunities for personal renewal are readily available. Maybe this is the year for taking a deep dive into God’s Word, or for making more frequent visits to the Blessed Sacrament, or for committing to praying a nightly rosary. Whatever we pledge to do, let’s not forget to give thanks for the amazing gift of hope, which “does not disappoint us because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” (Romans 5:5)

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