Category Archives: Columnists

Carol of Christmas past

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Melvin Arrington, Jr.

Guest Column
By Melvin Arrington, Jr.
“Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that . . . Old Marley was as dead as a doornail.” What little boy with a fertile imagination would not become hooked on those opening lines?
More to the point, how could a child know that a tale about death and ghosts was really about divine mercy and metanoia (repentance and the redirection of one’s life toward Christ), if not for a big person to guide him to an understanding of the spiritual truths conveyed by the story?
I was the little boy, the guide was my daddy, the time was one Christmas in the late 1950s, probably 1958, and the book was, of course, Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. That year Santa Claus brought me, in addition to a few toys long since forgotten, a brand new edition of Dickens’ classic story published by Grosset and Dunlap and visually enhanced by sixteen unforgettable color illustrations by Libico Maraja. At that point I was just beginning to leave comic books behind. That hardcover volume was one of my first “real” books.
Almost 60 Christmases have come and gone and I still have that copy of A Christmas Carol. Considering its age, it’s still in pretty good condition. I think I can truthfully say that it has held up better than I have.
The period from Thanksgiving to year’s end was always a happy, joyful time in our family. I think my parents looked forward to Christmas almost as much as my little sister and I. Mama liked to spend time in the kitchen preparing holiday meals, and Daddy enjoyed getting everyone in the Christmas spirit by telling the story of Old Scrooge.
Why did my father take such a special interest in Scrooge? I knew that following his service in the Pacific during World War II he had returned home, married and started a family, like so many young men of his generation.
But during those post-war years he found himself moving further and further away from God, and he stopped attending church. He was never a hateful old miser like Scrooge, but he had let sin dominate his life. Then in the spring of 1957 he had a profound life-altering conversion experience. It was several years later when I came to understand that Daddy liked Dickens’ story so much because in many ways it mirrored his own transformation.
Christianity is a religion of second chances.Scrooge, in revisiting all the times in the past when he failed to be charitable eventually realized that his life was not about himself. Daddy made a similar discovery. Given a second chance he, like Scrooge, responded to the call to metanoia and became a new person.
I’m thankful that Santa Claus brought me a copy of A Christmas Carol that year. Books have been an important part of my life ever since, and that one has brought me great joy because of the wonderful memories it evokes of my daddy.

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

Proclaim Christ by witnessing to the Church’s unity this Advent

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Deacon Nick Adam

Seminarian Reflection
By Deacon Nick Adam
As we come to the end of the holy season of Advent, we remember that our third pastoral priority is to “Proclaim Jesus Christ and our Catholic Faith.” This is a vital priority in a place and time where proclaiming faith of any kind can be a source of controversy. Being a Catholic in Mississippi has always meant that we will run into misunderstandings with members of other Christian denominations, but increasingly we experience the rejection of God all together by wider society.
Many Americans would rather we keep our opinions to ourselves and allow each individual to draw their own conclusions about who God is and how God interacts with the world. These realities certainly demand a courageous willingness to share the Good News as much as possible. In order to witness to the faith most effectively, however, I contend that an even more fundamental issue needs to be addressed first.
The way we interact with one another within our own church must come to the forefront. Over the past several months I have been preparing a thesis project as my seminary formation draws to a close. My thesis focuses on the unity of the Catholic Church. We profess a common creed every Sunday, and yet often we struggle to find common ground. We can quibble about issues ranging from liturgy to Church personnel. We can place labels on one another like conservative, traditional, liberal and progressive. My thesis basically states that these labels are not helpful in unifying us as Church. These labels make the Church out to be just another social club that can be broken up into different groups who share common values. This is not what the Church is. The Church is our very life; it nurtures us, teaches us, sanctifies us and saves us.
In my five and half years of seminary formation, I have seen my own opinions on these externals move and shift. I have been inspired by the example of men and women whose expression of faith is different than mine. I have also had to allow my own expectations and opinions to be challenged and sometimes reformed when faced with the truth of the Gospel and the teachings of the Church. This is the essence of living in the Church. The Church should not be a place where our own preconceived notions are always affirmed. The Lord wants us to become better people, not stay in the same old place doing the same old things the same old way.
I am certainly not a finished product in this regard. The bottom line is that we like what we like. We are comfortable with the familiar, and when we run up against something that is different, we sometimes can feel tempted to push it away. But this is not what the Church is. Our Church is guided and unified by the Holy Spirit, not by one opinion or one perspective. As we seek to implement the pastoral plan and Proclaim Jesus Christ and our Catholic faith, we have to start in our own parishes. Our message will not be as credible to non-Catholics if they hear us speaking about parishioners and priests who share our creed as if they were in rival camps!
During Advent we prepare our parishes, our homes, our families, and our hearts for the coming of Jesus on the great feast of Christmas. You can start to unify yourself with your parish during this time of preparation, and you can do this in many ways. There will be Advent penance services offered throughout the diocese so we can receive the gift of reconciliation as a community. Sin is not just a personal failing, it has an effect on the whole body of believers. When we confess our sins as a community, this is a beautiful sign of the healing that is offered to us as members of the mystical Body of Christ.
Sharing in the sacrament of penance also prepares us for the fruitful reception of the gift of the Eucharist, remembering that Christ did not only come in the flesh 2,000 years ago, but he seeks to be united with us each time we receive communion. Christ not only unites us to him in the Eucharist, but we are truly united as Church when we celebrate this sacrament. Remember that unity the next time you see something that bothers you in the Church. Instead of bickering with, or about, that person, pray for that person, ask the Lord to bring a spirit of unity to the Church of Jackson as we await the celebration of the birth of Jesus, who came to save all of us.

(Deacon Nick Adam is set to be ordained to the priesthood in May of 2018.)

The Christ-Child of the Year

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Father Ron Rolheiser

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
Every year Time magazine recognizes someone as “Person of the Year.” The recognition isn’t necessarily an honor; it’s given to the person whom Time judges to have been the newsmaker of the year – for good or for bad. This year, instead of choosing an individual to recognize as newsmaker of the year, it recognized a category of persons, the Silence Breakers, namely, women who have spoken out about having experienced sexual harassment and sexual violence.
Part of the challenge of Christmas is to recognize where Christ is being born in our world today, where two thousand years after the birth of Jesus we can again visit the stable in Bethlehem, see the new-born child, and have our hearts moved by the power of divine innocence and powerlessness.
For Christmas this year, I suggest we honor refugee children as the “Christ-Child of the Year.” They bring as close to the original crib in Bethlehem as we can get within our world today because for them, as for Jesus two thousand years ago, there is no room at the inn.
Jesus’ birth, like his death, comes wrapped in paradox: He came as God’s answer to our deepest desire, badly wanted, and yet, both in birth and in death, the outsider. Notice that Jesus is born outside the city and he dies outside the city. That’s no accident. He wasn’t born a “wanted” child and he wasn’t an accepted child. Granted, his mother, Mary, and those with genuine religious hearts wanted him, but the world didn’t, at least not on the terms on which he came, as a powerless child. Had he come as a superstar, powerful, a figure so dominant that knees would automatically bend in his presence, a messiah tailored to our imagination, every inn door would have opened to him, not just at birth but throughout his whole life.
But Christ wasn’t the messiah of our expectations. He came as an infant, powerless, hidden in anonymity, without status, invited, unwanted. And so Thomas Merton describes his birth this way: Into this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for Him at all, Christ has come uninvited. But because He cannot be at home in it, because He is out of place in it, and yet He must be in it, His place is with those others for whom there is no room.
There was no room for him at the inn! Biblical scholars tell us that our homilies and imaginings about the heartlessness of the innkeepers who turned Mary and Joseph away on Christmas Eve miss the point of that narrative. The point that the Gospels want to make here is not that the innkeepers in Bethlehem were cruel and calloused and this singular, poor, peasant couple, Joseph and Mary, were treated unfairly. The motif of “no room at the inn” wants rather to make a much larger point, the one Thomas Merton just highlighted, namely, that there’s never room in our world for the real Christ, the one who doesn’t fit comfortably into our expectations and imaginings. The real Christ generally shocks our imagination, is a disappointment to our expectations, comes uninvited, is perennially here, but is forever on the outside, on the periphery, excluded by our imaginations and sent packing from our doors. The real Christ is forever seeking a home in a world within which there’s no room for him.
So who best fits that description best today? I suggest the following: Millions of refugee children. The Christ-Child can be seen most clearly today in the countless refugee children who, with their families, are being driven from their homes by violence, war, starvation, ethnic cleansing, poverty, tribalism, racism and religious persecution. They, and their families, best fit the picture of Joseph and Mary, searching for a room, outsiders, powerless, uninvited, no home, no one to take them in, on the periphery, strangers, labeled as “aliens.” But they are the present-day Holy Family and their children are the Christ-Child for us and our world.
Where is the crib of Bethlehem today? Where might we find the infant Christ to worship? In many places, admittedly in every delivery room and nursery in the world, but “preferentially” in refugee camps; in boats making perilous journeys across the Mediterranean; in migrants trekking endless miles in hunger, thirst and dangerous conditions; in people waiting in endless lines to be processed in hope of being accepted somewhere, in persons arriving at various borders after a long journey only to be sent back; in mothers in detention centers, holding their young and hoping; and most especially, preferentially, in the faces of countless refugee children.
The face of God at Christmas is seen more in the helplessness of children than in all the earthly and charismatic power in our world. And so today, if we want, like the shepherds and wise men, to find our way to the crib in Bethlehem we need to look at where, in this demented inn, the most helpless of the children dwell.
(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX.)

Join revolution of tenderness

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Sister Constance Veit

Little Sisters
By Sister Constance Veit
TED is a media organization that posts online talks under the slogan “ideas worth spreading.” Earlier this year Pope Francis surprised the world by digitally giving his own “TED Talk” at the organization’s annual conference in Vancouver. In his nearly 20 minute talk, our Holy Father challenged his listeners to ignite a much-needed revolution of tenderness in our world.
Tenderness, the Holy Father suggested, “is the love that comes close and becomes real. It is a movement that starts from our heart and reaches the eyes, the ears and the hands. Tenderness means to use our eyes to see the other, our ears to hear the other, to listen to the children, the poor, those who are afraid of the future. To listen also to the silent cry of our common home, of our sick and polluted earth. Tenderness means to use our hands and our heart to comfort the other, to take care of those in need.”
What better time could there be to launch a revolution of tenderness than during the Advent and Christmas season? After all, the heart of Christmas is the story of God’s coming among us as a helpless baby – this is the epitome of tenderness. As Pope Francis shared, “God himself descended into Jesus to be on our level. This is the path that Jesus himself took. He lowered himself, he lived his entire human existence practicing the real, concrete language of love. Tenderness is the path of solidarity, the path of humility.”
Imagine what Christmas would be like if we opted out of the commercialism of the season in favor of tenderness! If we didn’t have to be on the lookout for the next sale or the latest decorating ideas, we could better use our eyes to see the lonely and the misfit. If we chose silence over the 24-hour Christmas carol station once in a while, we would grow more attuned to the cry of the poor and the deepest hopes and fears of our children. And if our arms weren’t so full of packages, we could more easily reach out to others with the caress of God himself.
But we can choose tenderness over materialism and consumerism this Christmas! It’s a matter of slowing down, putting Christ at the center and prioritizing people over things. Reaching out to serve those on the peripheries and cherishing those who are close to us will bring us deeper fulfillment and more precious memories than all those material gifts we don’t really need. Tenderness is its own reward!
Meeting with a group of young people last Advent, Pope Francis invited them to welcome the joy of the season as a gift and to witness to it in their families, schools and parishes. He specifically encouraged them to share it with their grandparents by talking to them, asking them questions and learning from their memories and experiences. He also told grandparents that they should make an effort to understand their grandchildren, and to listen to their aspirations and hopes.
As a Little Sister of the Poor, I can think of no better way to launch the revolution of tenderness than for families to strengthen intergenerational bonds this Christmas. If you are young, reach out to your grandparents or elder aunts and uncles. And if you are older, shower the kids in your extended family with the unconditional love and attention that only elders know how to give.
I have one last suggestion this Christmas – and it springs directly from our Holy Father’s TED Talk. “Quite a few years of life have strengthened my conviction that each and everyone’s existence is deeply tied to that of others,” Francis told his audience. And then, incredibly, he asked for a little tenderness for himself: “We all need each other. And so, please, think of me as well with tenderness, so that I can fulfill the task I have been given for the good of the other, of each and every one, of all of you, of all of us.”
So, as you help ignite the revolution of tenderness this Christmas, don’t forget to say a little prayer for the man who inspired it!

(Sister Constance Veit is director of communications for the Little Sisters of the Poor.)

The Incarnation and the birth

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Sister alies therese

from the hermitage
By Sister alies therese
Many of you will be familiar with the works of St. John of the Cross, OCD,: The Dark Night, The Ascent of Mt. Carmel, Spiritual Canticle, Living Flame of Love and so on. However, have you read his other poetry? Particularly the Romances? Of these I am particularly fond and for our purposes would like to share Romances 7-9, “The Incarnation and the Birth.”
St. John of the Cross, OCD, (1542-1591) was not only a writer of spiritual works but he was considered one of Spain’s finest poets. A graduate of the Jesuit College in Medina del Campo, John received a solid formation in the humanities. In 1559-63 that meant six hours a day devoted to grammar, rhetoric, Greek, Latin, and religion. He then went on to study for the priesthood and took the Carmelite habit in1563. In 1567 he was ordained in the spring and sang his first Mass in his hometown of Medina del Campo in September. It was here he met Madre Teresa of Avila, OCD, who was setting up her second foundation for her nuns of the Reform. She was 52 and he was 25. John had wanted to transfer to the Carthusian Order for a deeper life of prayer and solitude. She offered it to him in her plan to restore the Primitive Rule.
The following summer he finished theological studies and became an assistant professor at the Monastery of Santa Ana in Medina. He met with Madre Teresa and became convinced, that the Reform was where he needed to be. Soon there were six men in Duruelo who formed the first community. Because they were barefoot they were soon referred to as Discalced Carmelites.
However, by 1577 the Calced and the Discalced friars were deeply at odds. They demanded that John renounce the Reform and he declined. The tribunal called him rebellious and contumacious and ordered imprisonment. He remained in a closet 6’x10’, no window, cold, and extremely hot in summer. They took away his hood and scapular; his food only bread, sardines and water; and three evenings a week he had to eat kneeling on the floor in the middle of the refectory. It was here he wrote, in his head, the Dark Night and other poems that would make him so famous. After six months in that little prison, he was assigned another warder who showed him some compassion. He received a change of clothes and paper and ink. He, however, took advantage of the new jailer and in 1578 he escaped to the Discalced nuns in Toledo who hid him.
He would be elected to this and that as he grew and matured the Discalced vocation. But it was later in life he somehow found time to write things down. In 1591, however, there were great difficulties and he was not elected to any post. John felt free and commented in a letter to Madre Ana de Jesus: “…this life is not good if it is not an imitation of His life.” Efforts were made to expel John from the Reform. This horrible process was never completed as John died in Ubeda, at 49, in the odor of sanctity without agony or struggle. His prayers seemed to be answered: “not to die as a superior; to die in a place where he was unknown; and to die after having suffered much.”
He wrote the Romances probably in 1578 in Toledo in prison. This little bit of historical context is important. A beautiful way to use these Romances is to read them aloud to one another. There are several translations. I like this one.
Romance 7. The Incarnation
Now that the time had come when it would be good To ransom the bride Serving under the hard yoke
Of that law Which Moses had given her, The Father, with tender love, spoke in this way:
Now You see, Son, that Your bride Was made in Your image, And so far as she is like You she will suit You well;
Yet she is different, in her flesh Which Your simple being does not have. In perfect love this law holds:
That the lover become Like the one he loves; For the greater their likeness The greater their delight.

Surely Your bride’s delight Would greatly increase Were she to see You like her, In her own flesh.
My will is Yours, the Son replied, and My glory is That Your will be Mine.
That is fitting, Father, what You the Most High, say; For in this way Your goodness will be the more seen,
Your great power will be seen And Your justice and wisdom. I will go and tell the world, Spreading the word Of Your beauty and sweetness And of Your sovereignty.
I will go seek My bride And take upon Myself Her weariness and labors In which she suffers so;
And that she may have life I will die for her, and, lifting her out of that deep, I will restore her to You.
Romance 8. The Incarnation (cont.)
Then He called The archangel Gabriel And sent him to The virgin Mary,
At whose consent the mystery was wrought, In whom the Trinity clothed the Word with flesh
And though Three work this, It is wrought in the One: And the Word lived incarnate In the womb of Mary.
And He who had only a Father Now had a Mother too, But she was not like others Who conceive by man.
From her own flesh He received His flesh, So He is called Son of God and of man.
Romance 9. The Birth
When the time had come for Him to be born He went forth like the bridegroom From his bridal chamber,
Embracing His bride, Holding her in His arms, whom the gracious Mother laid in a manger
Among some animals That were there at that time. Men sang songs And angels melodies
Celebrating the marriage Of Two such as these. But God there in the manger Cried and moaned;
And these tears were jewels The bride brought to the wedding. The Mother gazed in sheer wonder On such an exchange:
In God, man’s weeping, And in man, gladness, To the one and the other things usually so strange.
Many blessings during this Christmas season.

(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. She lives and writes in Mississippi.)

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.)