Category Archives: Columnists

God’s closeness

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IN EXILE

Father Ron Rolheiser

By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
There’s a growing body of literature today that chronicles the experience of persons who were clinically dead for a period of time (minutes or hours) and were medically resuscitated and brought back to life. Many of us, for example, are familiar with Dr. Eben Alexander’s book, Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife. More recently Hollywood produced a movie, Miracles from Heaven, which portrays the true story of a young Texas girl who was clinically dead, medically revived, and who shares what she experienced in the afterlife.
There are now hundreds of stories like this, gathered through dozens of years, published or simply shared with loved ones. What’s interesting (and consoling) is that virtually all these stories are wonderfully positive, irrespective of the person’s faith or religious background. In virtually every case their experience, while partially indescribable, was one in which they felt a warm, personal, overwhelming sense of love, light and welcome, and not a few of them found themselves meeting relatives of theirs that had passed on before them, sometimes even relatives that they didn’t know they had. As well, in virtually every case, they did not want to return to life here but, like Peter on the Mountain of the Transfiguration, wanted to stay there.
Recently while speaking at conference, I referenced this literature and pointed out that, among other things, it seems everyone goes to heaven when they die. This, of course, immediately sparked a spirited discussion: “What about hell? Aren’t we judged when we die? Doesn’t anyone go to hell?” My answer to those questions, which need far more nuance than are contained in a short soundbite, was that while we all go to heaven when we die, depending upon our moral and spiritual disposition, we might not want to stay there. Hell, as Jesus assures us, is a real option; though, as Jesus also assures us, we judge ourselves. God puts no one to hell. Hell is our choice.
However it was what happened after this discussion that I want to share here: A woman approached me as I was leaving and told me that she had had this exact experience. She had been clinically dead for some minutes and then revived through medical resuscitation. And, just like the experience of all the others in the literature around this issue, she too experienced a wonderful warmth, light, and welcome, and did not want to return to life here on earth.
Inside of all of this warmth and love however what she remembers most and most wants to share with others is this: “I learned that God is very close. We have no idea how close God is to us. God is closer to us than we ever imagine!” Her experience has left her forever branded with a sense of God’s warmth, love and welcome, but what’s left the deepest brand of all inside her is the sense of God’s closeness.
I was struck by this because, like millions of others, I generally don’t feel that closeness, or at least don’t feel it very affectively or imaginatively. God can seem pretty far away, abstract and impersonal, a Deity with millions of things to worry about without having to worry about the minutiae of my small life.
Moreover, as Christians, we believe that God is infinite and ineffable. This means that while we can know God, we can never imagine God. Given that truth, it makes it even harder for us to imagine that the infinite Creator and Sustainer of all things is intimately and personally present inside us, worrying with, sharing our heartaches, and knowing our most guarded feelings.
Compounding this is the fact that whenever we do try to imagine God’s person our imaginations come up against the unimaginable. For example, try to imagine this: There are billions of persons on this earth and billions more have lived on this earth before us. At this very minute, thousands of people are being born, thousands are dying, thousands are sinning, thousands are doing virtuous acts, thousands are making love, thousands are experiencing violence, thousands are feeling their hearts swelling with joy, all of this part of trillions upon trillions of phenomena. How can one heart, one mind, one person be consciously on top of all of this and so fully aware and empathetic that no hair falls from our heads or sparrow from the sky without this person taking notice? It’s impossible to imagine, pure and simple, and that’s part of the very definition of God.
How can God be as close to us as we are to ourselves? Partly this is mystery, and wisdom bids us befriend mystery because anything we can understand is not very deep! The mystery of God’s intimate, personal presence inside us is beyond our imaginations. But everything within our faith tradition and now most everything in the testimony of hundreds of people who have experienced the afterlife assure us that, while God may be infinite and ineffable, God is very close to us, closer than we imagine.

(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX.)

Ordinary time offers opportunity in present tense

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KNEADING FAITH

Fran Lavelle is the Director of Faith Formation for the Diocese of Jackson

By Fran Lavelle
One of the things that living in the country teaches you to appreciate is daylight. In the summer months long days are a farmer’s greatest asset. My dad used to say, “You’ve got to make hay while the sun shines.” This adage reflects the reality that there is an appropriate time to do everything. It is excellent advice for all of us. It reminds me of the wisdom of Ecclesiastes 3:1, “there is an appointed time for everything, and a time for every affair under the heavens.“

I’m not sure if it is all environmental, but this time of year, as daylight hours are shorter, I find myself thinking about time. What a beautiful season of harvest, honoring the saints, remembering those who have gone before us marked with the sign of faith, and giving thanks for our many blessings. The evenings, once filled with a cacophony of sounds coming from insects, frogs, birds and coyotes have been nearly silenced. If one is lucky they can hear the fading sound of crickets.

Crisp fall air, the harvest moon, the smell of burning wood from home chimneys are all welcome reminders that the long hazy hot days of summer have passed. The call to come inside is not just literal. With shorter days and the time change it is as if God is calling us inside to do the interior work faith requires. Unfortunately, in our culture today we are addicted to busyness. We forget the latter part of that agrarian wisdom, “while the sun shines.” We don’t know how to embrace the darkness, the solitude, the quieted moments of life.

In my pursuit to appreciate “time” in a more significant way I found myself inspecting the events of my life. To my surprise, it was not the big events that I ended up focusing on. Rather, I was looking at the nooks and crannies where ordinary life is lived. I told a friend the other day that I wanted to put more living in my life. I was not exactly sure what I meant by this. After some thought, I realized that it is not that I want a more exciting life, a life of glamor or exotic travel. It occurred to me that I want to be more present to the ordinary. This became clear to me one particularly beautiful fall Saturday a few weeks ago I when was mowing the yard. I felt the warm sun on my skin, a gentle breeze was adrift, the smell of fresh cut grass filled the air and I felt so grateful and so alive. My thoughts were uplifted, my heart was full and I found peace in that moment. How could this ordinary event be the source of so much peace? How could I replicate experiences like this more often?

Every day we experience the ordinary. As a matter of fact, I am fixing dinner and have a load of laundry in the washer as I write this. And, no, I’m not floating on a cloud of fresh linens, rosemary or pumpkin spice anything. But it takes work to see gifts in the ordinary. After all, there is a season for everything. My “making hay” tonight looks a lot more like more like fish sandwiches and clean socks but in being present to the task at hand I am anchored in the now. Perhaps that’s the real lesson in this rumination. Perhaps the real challenge is to find ways to be more present, more intentional to the now, not worrying what is to come or what has passed. I recall sharing with a friend a long litany of what was going on in my life. I was focused on who and what needed my attention in the future. He looked at me and said, “I’m here right now.” He was right. I was so focused on what was to come that I did not see what was right before me.

The church in her wisdom gives us different the seasons of the liturgical year. We follow the life, death and resurrection of Jesus in these seasons. Beautifully mixed between these memorable events of the life of Christ is Ordinary time. The weeks of Ordinary time are nearly over for yet another liturgical year. Our challenge is to recognize that every season, be it in the church, nature, or our own life that we are not stringing along disjointed segments of living. If we are mindful and living in the present we find the depth and riches in all of it. The long days of summer and quieted days of winter, the abundance of life in the spring, and the bountiful harvest in the fall. Yes, even making fish sandwiches and doing a load of laundry. “Life gets mighty precious when there’s less of it to waste…” Bonnie Raitt

(Fran Lavelle is the Director of Faith Formation for the Diocese of Jackson.)

Asking for abundance this Thanksgiving

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Complete the circle

George Evans

By George Evans
I presume many of you are enjoying your Thanksgiving leftovers as your paper arrives on Friday or Saturday after the Thursday holiday. What a great secular feast to celebrate with family and friends, particularly those from out of town. Food abounds to the point of excess. Perhaps wine is chosen to help wash down and digest what is eaten.
Patriotism fills the air – pilgrims and Indians and the early days of this special country and the blessings which have seen America grow and prosper perhaps more than any other country in the world.
Because of the traditional atmosphere in America we not only thank family and friends but also the God of our belief. There may be a few less believers than in the past (at least that’s what we are told), but those who know God as their creator and friend experience a very special gratitude at Thanksgiving as they reach for one more piece of turkey or one more spoon of dressing, green bean casserole, baked sweet potato with marshmallow topping, or cranberry just to make it all better.
As we think of how blessed we are because of America’s seemingly special place in the world, the conversation around the table may divert for a while to the problems of hurricanes, floods, power outages, terrorist attacks and inconceivable mass killings. Someone may even ask God to do something about all that and remind us that we have been faithful to providing a great meal to all the homeless folks at Gateway and other soup kitchens and food banks and doubling our contributions to our favorite charities such as St. Vincent de Paul and Catholic Charities or any number of other worthwhile organizations. There may even be a strong supporter of Catholic Relief Services or Bread for the World who chimes in.
About the time pecan pie, apple pie or ice cream is served with coffee, the absolute disaster on the national political scene is broached. After some wailing and gnashing of teeth and some cries for impeachment of Trump or indictment of crooked Hillary, the group decides that’s a little too big for us to solve but it sure needs God’s help even more than hurricanes, floods and terrorists.
We end our secular feast of Thanksgiving by deciding that what we need is more spiritual. We need to ask God’s involvement to increase rather than decrease (more prayer for him to send the Spirit to make each of us better). We need to read the Gospels more receptively and to follow them, even the tough parts about reaching out to the poor, vulnerable and those who are widows, orphans and refugees. Next year maybe we should invite some folks from the highways and byways to dinner with us and see what they can add as St. Luke and Pope Francis suggest.
We love America and our family and friends so much we want to save it. To do so, I think we better embrace the whole world around us by loving as Jesus taught us to love before its too late.

(George Evans is a retired attorney and pastoral minister. He lives in Madison and attends Jackson St. Richard Parish.)

Neutrality threatens our decency

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IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI

Father Ron Rolheiser

Jesus tells us that in the end we will be judged on how we dealt with the poor in our lives, but there are already dangers now, in this life, in not reaching out to the poor
Here’s how Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy, teases out that danger: “I’ve come to believe that the true measure of our commitment to justice, the character of our society, our commitment to the rule of law, fairness and equality cannot be measured by how we treat the rich, the powerful, the privileged and the respected among us. The true measure of our character is how we treat the poor, the disfavored, the accused, the incarcerated and the condemned. We are all implicated when we allow other people to be mistreated. An absence of compassion can corrupt the decency of a community, a state, a nation. Fear and anger can make us vindictive and abusive, unjust and unfair, until we all suffer from the absence of mercy and we condemn ourselves as much as we condemn others.”
What needs to be highlighted here is what we do to ourselves when we don’t reach out in compassion to the poor. We corrupt our own decency. As Stevenson puts it: An absence of compassion corrupts our decency – as a state, as a church, as family and as individuals. How so?
St. Augustine teaches that we can never be morally neutral, either we are growing in virtue or falling into vice. We never have the luxury of simply being in some neutral, holding state. There’s no moral neutrality. Either we are growing in virtue or sliding into virtue’s opposite. That’s true for all of life. A thing is either growing or it’s regressing.
So too with our attitude towards justice and the poor: Either we are actively reaching out to the poor and being more drawn into concern for them or we are unconsciously hardening our hearts against them and unknowingly sliding into attitudes that trivialize their issues and distance ourselves from them. If we are not actively advocating for justice and the poor, it is inevitable that at a point we will, with completely sincere hearts, downplay the issues of poverty, racism, inequality and injustice.
It’s interesting to note that in the famous text on the final judgment in the Gospel where Jesus describes how God will divide the sheep from the goats on the basis of how they treated the poor, neither group, those who did it correctly and those who didn’t, actually knew what they were doing. The group who did it right state that they didn’t know that in touching the poor they were touching Christ; and the group who got it wrong protest that had they known that Christ was in the poor, they would have reached out. Jesus assures us that it doesn’t matter. Mature discipleship lies simply in the doing, irrespective of our conscious attitude.
And so we need to be alert not just to our conscious attitudes but to what we are actually doing. We can, in all sincerity, in all good conscience, in all good heart, be blind towards justice and the poor. We can be moral men and women, pious church-goers, generous donors to those who ask help from us, warm to our own families and friends and yet, blind to ourselves, though not to the poor, be unhealthily elitist, subtle racists, callous towards the environment and protective of our own privilege. We are still good persons no doubt, but the absence of compassion in one area of our lives leaves us limping morally.
We can be good persons and yet fall into a certain hardness of heart because of kindred, ideological circles that falsely affirm us. Within any circle of friends, either we are talking about ways that we can more effectively lessen the gaps between rich and poor or we are talking, however unconsciously, about the need to defend the gaps that presently exist. One kind of conversation is stretching our hearts; the other is narrowing them. Lack of compassion for justice and the poor will inevitably work at turning a generous heart into a defensive one.
We all have friends who admire us and send us signals that we are good, big-hearted, virtuous persons. And no doubt this is substantially true. But the affirmation we receive from our own kind can be a false mirror. A truer mirror is how those who are politically, racially, religiously and temperamentally different from ourselves assess us. How do the poor feel about us? How do refugees assess our goodness? How do other races rate our compassion?
And what about the mirror that Jesus holds up for us when he tells us that our goodness will be judged by how we treat the poor and that the litmus test of goodness consists is how well we love our enemies?
An absence of compassion in even one area subtly corrupts the decency of a community, a state, a nation and that eventually turns our generosity into defensiveness.

(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX.)

We’ll all have plenty in the land of no more

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REFLECTIONS ON LIFE

 

By Father Jerome LeDoux, SVD

By Father Jerome LeDoux, SVD
While we have looked for more all our lives, the most wonderful thing God has promised us to possess and enjoy forever, aside from the Beatific Vision of God, is The Land of No More. Only God could make so stupendous an offer – and deliver it! Imagine searching all our lives and striving all our lives to reach The Land of No More. As futile as it may sound, the Land of No More is where everyone good as well as everything good resides. Once we are safely there, we need look no more to escape all the negative and hurting people and turmoils of our lives on earth.
Revelation 21:3-4 exults, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with people, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the former things have passed away.”

As the old Negro Spiritual says of The Land of No More,
Soon I will be done with the troubles of the world,
troubles of the world,
troubles of the world.
Soon I will be done with the troubles of the world,
Goin’ home to live with God

No more weeping and awailing,
No more weeping and awailing,
No more weeping and awailing,
I’m goin’ home to live with God.

There will be no more angst, no more negative stress that we identify as public enemy number one in the world. The peace of mind, peace of heart, peace of soul that we all seek, often in vain, are destroyed by angst and negative stress.
We think so often, “How can I remove angst, anxiety, negative stress, worry and fear from my mind, family, church and community?” In The Land of No More, there will be no more anxiety, worry and fear, who are the first cousins of angst
The Land of No More will never allow us to thirst again, for as Jesus told the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4:14, “Whoever drinks of the water I will give will never be thirsty again.” Somehow, I wonder whether this lack of thirst excludes the desire to enjoy the pleasure of swimming in heaven. Also, I dare venture the opinion that the Beatific Vision of God does not preclude our being able and free to cruise the galaxies instantaneously through the gift of agility in our glorified bodies unfettered and enjoy forever “a new heaven and a new earth” as in Revelation 21.
No hunger is another casualty of the Land of No More, with the promise of Jesus in John 6:30, “I am the Bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger.” So, will the world’s best chefs – professional or homespun – be out of work/play?
After the many painful, often bitter separations from our dear ones here on earth, we will be so happy and proud to enter The Land of No More, where all our heartbreaking separations from and deprivations of the company of our dear ones are no more. Such abject loneliness, separation, deprivation and abandonment were suffered to the full as Jesus was about to die on his cross on Good Friday, as we read in Matthew 27:46, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” that is, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Some scholars think Jesus lost the Beatific Vision momentarily.
Very importantly and very interestingly, The Land of No More is a place with no strangers. As we have never known anyone here on earth, we’ll know the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Mary, the mother of Jesus, his foster father Joseph, his cousin John the Baptist, Saint Peter, Saint Paul, the Little Flower, all the saints, all our relatives, our friends, our erstwhile enemies, and, hugely, by far most of the 108 billion people (cf. Population Reference Bureau) who have ever lived on earth. Yes, I believe that by far most souls will be saved through the blood of Jesus Christ. And, somehow, we will even get to know the angels, those pure spirits always with God.
“May they rest in peace,” we pray for the dead, but in The Land of No More:
One of these mornings, won’t be very long,
You will look for me and I’ll be gone;
I’m going to a place where I’ll have nothing, nothing to do
But just walk around, walk around heaven all day.
God is love, and all who abide in love abide in God and God in them.” (1 John 4:16)

(Father Jerome LeDoux has written Reflections on Life since 1969.)

Ancient tradition lends strength to modern advocacy

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Millennial reflections

 

Father Jeremy Tobin

By Father Jeremy Tobin, O. Praem
Before every general chapter of the Norbertine Order there is a fraternal visitation by the head of our order to all the houses throughout the world. The Priory of St. Moses the Black and its motherhouse, St. Norbert Abbey in De Pere Wisconsin, will have completed the visitation before the next General Chapter at Rolduc in the Netherlands in 2018. Here, at the Priory, at the opening address of his visit here, Abbot General Thomas quoted Pope Francis saying that religious must be prophetic. They must be the prophetic voice of the church, and speak out for those who have no voice. Pope Francis has said that being prophetic can be messy, but urged us to be courageous.
Religious by their nature are the prophetic dimension of the Church. Looking at the lives of various founders of religious communities you find them responding to a call to do something new, to meet situations that demand attention. Pope Francis tells us to go to the margins, reach out to the peripheries. Go where the need is. Be with the suffering, the poor, the scapegoated.
Look at Jesus in the Gospels. His friends were the marginalized, the outcast, the labeled. For that he was condemned. Down the centuries that is what religious do. Whether priests, brothers or sisters, their character comes from the charism of their community. How they respond to current situations is largely within the frame of their community’s charism. The ancient orders often are more flexible because they have survived so much. Their charisms are more generic leaving the possibility open to respond to any need the times call them to meet.
I begin with this to say that my community, the Norbertines, has begun celebrating more than nine centuries of existence. We were just a little more than a hundred years old when we faced and survived the Mongol invasions of Europe. Places we built our monasteries ended up in two countries when borders were drawn. We have survived a lot since then, but continue to respond to the needs of the times.
Since the Second Vatican Council we have responded in many ways to issues of social justice. One our priests in Wisconsin helped found the American Indian Movement (AIM) that still works for human rights for native Americans.
In Peru we confronted massive poverty and lack of health care by establishing mini parishes in Lima and a string of clinics, that still operate on the Rio Napo, a tributary of the Amazon. We came to Mississippi to respond to the spiritual and material needs of African Americans. We are still involved at Christ the King on in South Jackson. Our local founder retired from a career at Jackson State University. Another one is involved in advocacy and writing about human rights and promoting fair and just legislation.
Pope Francis has reawakened the original spirit of Vatican II when he described the Church as a field hospital, a MASH unit that meets the people where they are, in whatever shape, and responds with mercy and compassion and a listening ear. The people with no voice need a voice and we are that voice. We collaborate with our fellow Christians, whatever denomination, addressing issues of inequality and justice. Pope Francis is asking religious to push the barriers further to speak out for issues that confront the world. He has given us a new image of what it is to evangelize, to bring good news, not bad news, to the poor. He calls us to address climate change head on. It isn’t that we don’t have issues to address, they are all around us.
Religious, by our vocation, are called to take risks, to say what must be said, to speak truth to power. That is what prophecy is. It is conveying the vision of justice and mercy welling up inside to bring hope to those who have little hope. It is taking risks.
Even ancient, monastic orders like mine are called to go out and be with the people who need to hear the good news of the Gospel, of deliverance and hope. Some need to take greater risks and follow their call. In these perilous times the poor and marginalized, the discriminated and oppressed need to hear the Gospel message of deliverance of redemption and of hope. Social justice is at the heart of the Gospel and we must bring that message home.
(Father Jeremy Tobin, O.Praem, lives at the Priory of St. Moses the Black, Raymond.)

Plea for the soul

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IN EXILE

Father Ron Rolheiser

By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
It’s hard to find your soulmate in someone who doesn’t believe you have a soul.
Recently on “The Moth Radio Hour” a young woman shared the story of her breakup with her boyfriend, a young man for whom she had deep feelings. The problem was that she, a person with a deep faith, a Mormon, struggled with the radical materialism of her boyfriend. For him, there were no souls; the physical world was real, and nothing else. She kept asking him if he believed he had a soul. He couldn’t make himself believe that. Eventually, not without a lot of heartache, they broke up. Why? In her words: It’s hard to find your soulmate in someone who doesn’t believe you have a soul.
Her frustration is becoming more universal. More and more our world is ignoring and denying the existence of soul, becoming soulless. It wasn’t always like this. Up until modern times, often it was the physical and the body that weren’t properly honored. But things have changed, radically.
It began with Darwin, who rooted our origins more in the history of our bodies than in the origins of our souls; it took more shape in the mechanistic philosophies of the last century, which understood both our universe and ourselves as physical machines; it became more firm as modern medicine and experimental psychology began more and more to explain the brain primarily in terms of carbon complexification and biochemical interactions; it seeped into our higher educational systems as we produced more and more technical schools rather than universities in the deeper sense; and it culminated in popular culture where love and sex are spoken of more in terms of chemistry than in terms of soul. It is not surprising that for most pop singers today the mantra is: I want your body! I want your body! We’re a long ways from Shakespeare’s marriage of true minds and Yeats’ love of the pilgrim soul in you.
Religion of course has always lodged its protests against this but often its understanding of the soul was itself too narrow to have much power to lure a materialistic culture back into wanting to rediscover and listen to the soul. Ironically, it took a non-religious figure, Carl Jung, to speak of soul again in a way that is intellectually intriguing. And it was in the sick, the insane, the suicidal and others whose lives were broken that Jung began to hear the cry of the soul (whose demands are sometimes very different from those of the body and whose needs are for much more than simple comfort and the prolonging of life).
Much of Jung’s teaching and that of his followers can be seen as a protest for the soul. We see this, for example, in the writing of James Hillman. It’s ironic that as an agnostic he was able to speak about the soul in ways that we, who are religious, might envy and emulate. Like Jung, he also drew many of his insights from listening to the soul cry out its meaning and pain through the voices of the sick, the insane, the broken, and the suicidal. Religion, medicine and psychology, he believes, are not hearing the soul’s cry. They’re forever trying to fix the soul, cure the soul or save the soul, rather than listening to the soul, which wants and needs neither to be fixed nor saved. It’s already eternal. The soul needs to be heard, and heard in all its godly goodness and earthy complexes. And sometimes what it tells us goes against all common sense, medical practice and the over-simplistic spiritualities we often present as religion.
To be more in touch with our souls we might examine an older language, the language that religion, poets, mythologists, and lovers used before today’s dominant materialism turned our language about the soul into the language of chemistry and mechanism. We cannot understand the soul through any scientific description but only by looking at its behavior, its insatiability, its dissatisfactions, and its protests. A soul isn’t explained, it’s experienced, and soul experience always comes soaked in depth, in longing, in eros, in limit, in the feeling of being pilgrim in need of a soulmate.
Happily, even today, we still do spontaneously connect the soul to things beyond chemistry and mechanism. As Hillman points out: “We associate the word ‘soul’ with: mind, spirit, heart, life, warmth, humanness, personality, individuality, intentionality, essence, innermost, purpose, emotion, quality, virtue, morality, sin, wisdom, death, God. As well, we speak of a soul as ‘troubled,’ ‘old,’ ‘disembodied,’ ‘immortal,’ ‘lost,’ ‘innocent,’ ‘inspired.’ Eyes are said to be ‘soulful,’ for the eyes are ‘the mirror of the soul;’ and one can be ‘soulless’ by showing no mercy.”
Soullessness: We understand the make-up of something best when we see it broken. So perhaps today we can best understand our soullessness in the growing acceptance of pornography and hook-up sex, where the soul is intentionally and necessarily excluded from what is meant to be the epitome of all soulful experience.

(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX.)

Close the distance not the gate

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IN EXILE

Father Ron Rolheiser

By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
Nobel-prizing winning author, Toni Morrison, assessing the times, asks this question: “Why should we want to know a stranger when it is easier to estrange another? Why should we want to close the distance when we can close the gate?” Except this isn’t a question, it’s a judgment.
It’s a negative judgment on both our society and our churches. Where are our hearts really at? Are we trying more to close the distance between us and what’s foreign or are we into closing gates to keep strangers estranged?
In fairness, it might be pointed out that this has always been a struggle. There hasn’t been a golden age within which people wholeheartedly welcomed the stranger. There have been golden individuals and even golden communities who were welcoming, but never society or church as a whole.
Much as this issue is so front and center in our politics today, as countries everywhere struggle with their immigration policies and with what to do with millions of refugees and migrants wanting to enter their country, I want to take Morrison’s challenge, to close the distance rather than close the gate, to our churches: Are we inviting in the stranger? Or, are we content to let the estranged remain outside?
There is a challenging motif within Jesus’ parable of the over-generous vineyard owner which can easily be missed because of the overall lesson within the story. It concerns the question that the vineyard owner asks the last group of workers, those who will work for only one hour. Unlike the first group, he doesn’t ask them: “Do you want to work in my vineyard?”
Rather he asks them: “Why aren’t you working?” Their answer: “Because no one has hired us!” Notice they don’t answer by saying that their non-employment is because they are lazy, incompetent or disinterested. Neither does the vineyard owner’s question imply that. They aren’t working simply because no one has given them the invitation to work!
Sadly, I believe this is the case for so many people who are seemingly cold or indifferent to religion and our churches. Nobody has invited them in! And that was true too at the time of Jesus. Whole groups of people were seen as being indifferent and hostile to religion and were deemed simply as sinners. This included prostitutes, tax collectors, foreigners and criminals. Jesus invited them in and many of them responded with a sincerity, contrition and devotion that shamed those who considered themselves true believers. For the so-called sinners, all that stood between them and entry into the kingdom was a genuine invitation.
Why aren’t you practicing a faith? No one has invited us! Just in my own, admittedly limited, pastoral experience, I have seen a number of individuals who from childhood to early or late mid-life were indifferent to and even somewhat paranoid about, religion and church. It was a world from which they had always felt excluded. But, thanks to some gracious person or fortunate circumstance, at a moment, they felt invited in and they gave themselves over to their new religious family with a disarming warmth, fervor and gratitude, often taking a fierce pride in their new identity.
Witnessing this several times, I now understand why the prostitutes and tax collectors, more than the church people at the time, believed in Jesus. He was the first religious person to truly invite them in.
Sadly, too, there’s a reverse side to this is where, all too often, in all religious sincerity, we not only don’t invite certain others in, we positively close the gates on them. We see that, for example, a number of times in the Gospels where those around Jesus block others from having access to him, as is the case in that rather colorful story where some people are trying to bring a paralytic to Jesus but are blocked by the crowds surrounding him and consequently have to make a hole in the roof in order to lower the paralytic into Jesus’ presence.
Too frequently, unknowingly, sincerely, but blindly, we are that crowd around Jesus, blocking access to him by our presence. This is an occupational danger especially for all of us who are in ministry.
We so easily, in all sincerity, in the name of Christ, in the name of orthodox theology and in the name of sound pastoral practice set ourselves up as gatekeepers, as guardians of our churches, through whom others must pass in order to have access to God. We need to more clearly remember that Christ is the gatekeeper and the only gatekeeper and we need to refresh ourselves on what that means by looking at why Jesus chased the moneychangers out of the temple in John’s Gospel. They, the moneychangers, had set themselves up as a medium through which people has to pass in order to offer workshop to God. Jesus would have none of it.
Our mission as disciples of Jesus is not to be gatekeepers. We need instead to work at closing the distance rather than closing the gate.

(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX.)

What happens during Mass?

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(Editor’s note: Bishop Joseph Kopcaz’ travel schedule kept him from writing an article in time for this publication. He is working on an article, which will be posted to Mississippi Catholic’s website in the next few days. Bishop Kopacz will return to these pages in the next issue.)

Bishop Robert Barron

By Bishop Robert Barron
As many Catholics know, the Second Vatican Council famously referred to the liturgy as the “source and summit of the Christian life.” And following the prompts of the great figures of the liturgical movement in the first half of the twentieth century, the Council Fathers called for a fuller, more conscious, and more active participation in the liturgy on the part of Catholics.
That the Vatican II dream of a revived liturgical awareness and practice has, at least in the West, largely remained unrealized goes without saying. In the years following the Council, Mass attendance in Europe, North America, and Australia has plummeted. The numbers of Catholics who regularly attend Mass in those parts of the world hover between 10 and 25 percent Therefore, it is not surprising that an extraordinary number of those who self-identify as Catholics in the West have very little idea what the Mass actually is. My 31 years of priestly ministry convince me that, even for a great number of those who attend Mass, the liturgy is a kind of religiously-themed jamboree.
So what is the Mass? What happens during this paradigmatic prayer? Why is it the beginning and culmination of what it means to be a Christian? In the course of this brief article, I will share just a couple of basic insights.
First, the Mass is a privileged encounter with the living Christ. Christianity is not a philosophy, ideology, or religious program; it is a friendship with the Son of God, risen from the dead. There is simply no more intense union with Jesus than the Mass. Consider for a moment the two major divisions of the Mass: the liturgy of the Word and the liturgy of the Eucharist. When we meet with another person in a formal setting, we typically do two things. We get together and talk, and then we eat. Think of the first part of Mass as an exchange, a conversation, between the Son of God and members of his mystical body. In the prayers and interventions of the priest, and especially in the words of the Scriptures, Jesus speaks to his people, and in the songs, responses, and psalms, the people talk back. There is, if you will, a lovely call and response between the Lord and those who have been grafted onto him through baptism. In the course of this spirited conversation, the union between head and members is intensified, strengthened, confirmed. Having talked, we then sit down to eat, not an ordinary meal, but the banquet of the Lord’s body and blood, hosted by Jesus himself. The communion that commenced with the call and response during the first part of Mass is now brought to a point of unsurpassed intensity (at least this side of heaven), as the faithful come to eat the body and drink the lifeblood of Jesus.
A second rubric under which to consider the Mass is that of play. We tend quite naturally to think of play as something less than serious, something frivolous and far less important than work. But nothing could be further from the truth. Work is always subordinated to an end beyond itself; it is for the sake of a higher good. So I work on my car that I might drive it; I work at my place of employment that I might make money; I work around the house so that it might be a more pleasant place to live, etc. But play has no ulterior motive, no end to which it is subordinated. Hence, I play baseball or watch golf or attend a symphony or engage in philosophical speculation or get lost in a sprawling novel simply because it is good so to do. These activities are referred to in the classical tradition as “liberal,” precisely because they are free (liber) from utility. When I was teaching philosophy years ago in the seminary, I would gleefully tell my students that they were engaging in the most useless study of all. Invariably they laughed — revealing the utilitarian prejudice of our culture — but I always reminded them that this meant the highest and most noble kind of study.
The Mass, as an act of union with the highest good, is therefore the supreme instance of play. It is the most useless and hence sublimest activity in which one could possibly engage. Recently, I had the privilege of attending the Mass for the installation of new members of the Knights and Ladies of the Holy Sepulcher. For the solemn liturgy, the Knights wore dashing capes emblazoned with the Jerusalem cross and jaunty black berets, while the ladies donned elegant black gowns, gloves, and lace mantillas. Two bishops, in full Mass vestments and tall mitres, welcomed the new members into the order by dubbing them on both shoulders with impressively large swords. As I watched the proceedings, I couldn’t help but think of G.K. Chesterton’s remark that children often dress up when they engage in their “serious play.” Capes, hats, ceremonial gloves, vestments, and swords for dubbing are all perfectly useless, which is precisely their point. So all of the colorful accouterments and stately actions of the Mass are part of the sublime play.
Why is the Mass so important? Why is it the “source and summit” of the Christian life? I could say many more things in answer to these questions, but suffice it to say for the moment that it is the most beautiful encounter between friends and that it is an anticipation of the play that will be our permanent preoccupation in heaven.

(Bishop Robert Barron is the founder of Word on Fire Catholic Ministries and Auxiliary Bishop of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. He is also the host of CATHOLICISM, a groundbreaking, award-winning documentary about the Catholic Faith, which aired on PBS.)

Be not afraid: we’re in this together

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Sister Constance Veit

Guest Column
By Sister Constance Veit
A Each October we observe Respect Life Month in dioceses around the United States. This year’s theme is “Be Not Afraid,” but of what, or whom, are we supposed to not be afraid?
Pondering this question, I recalled an experience I had while attending the Convocation of Catholic Leaders in Orlando last summer. I met a young woman and her mother from my diocese. The daughter, who had an obvious disability and was using a power wheelchair, had been chosen as a delegate to the Convocation; her mother, a college professor, was there as her assistant.
As we got acquainted, we chatted about accessibility issues in the church. The young woman told me that while most parishes have remedied architectural barriers such as curbs and restrooms, the seating area designated for wheelchairs is often still found way off to the side or at the very back of the sanctuary – evidence, she believes, that handicapped individuals are still not fully embraced as an integral part of parish life.
What she said next cut right to the heart: “It’s fine to be able to get in and out of church, but it would be nice if someone smiled at me once in a while, or spoke to me as if I actually knew what was going on.” I was stunned. All too quickly we wrapped up our conversation, traded business cards – yes, my new friend has a college education and a meaningful job – and went our separate ways. But I haven’t been able to get this conversation off my mind.
When I got home I did a bit of research on attitudes toward the disabled and was shocked by a recent study in the U.K. that found that two thirds of adults are afraid of people with disabilities and feel so awkward around them that they go out of their way to avoid them. Another study indicated that 1.4 million senior citizens in the U.K. feel lonely and cut off from society, many going for over a month at a time without talking to another human being. Since these were not American studies, it would be easy to dismiss this data, but I suspect that we have a lot in common with our British brothers and sisters.
Scholars in the field of disability studies suggest that disabled people mirror a certain kind of personal loss or death. They remind us of our own limitations and mortality – and that is what frightens us. As long as we can avoid those who are handicapped or elderly, we can keep our fears about our own fragility and eventual death at bay. But we are all broken in some way – if we were honest, we would admit that we each experience areas of weakness or disability every day, and none of us is really more than one accident or illness away from losing our cherished independence.
The church proposes a different approach. In the face of suffering and death she tells us, “Be not afraid.” With words that echo through salvation history into the depths of our hearts, the Lord says to us, “Do not fear: I am with you” (Isaiah 41:10). He speaks these words not as One who merely observes our pain, but as One who experienced intense suffering and death in his own flesh before triumphing over death itself.
Reflecting on the wounds of the Risen Christ, we see that even our most difficult trials can be the place where God manifests his victory. He is always with us. Jesus promised this when he gave the disciples the same mission he gives to each of us: Go out to all the world!
So if we run toward our most vulnerable brothers and sisters rather than running away from them, marginalizing them or excluding them from our lives, we will experience the love of God in a powerful new way as we contribute to the building up of a society that witnesses to the beautiful, profound reality that God has created each of us in his own image and likeness, that he loves us infinitely, and that he has confided each person to the love of all.
(Sister Constance Veit is director of communications for the Little Sisters of the Poor.)