IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
It is not enough merely to have saints; we need saints for our times! An insightful comment from Simone Weil. The saints of old have much to offer; but we look at their goodness, faith, and selflessness and find it easier to admire them than to imitate them. Their lives and their circumstances seem so removed from our own that we easily distance ourselves from them.
So, I would like to propose a saint for our times, Stanley Rother (1935-1981), an Oklahoma farm boy who became a missionary with the poor in Atitlan, Guatemala, and eventually died a martyr. His life and his struggles (save perhaps for his extraordinary courage at the end) are something to which we can easily relate.

Who is Stanley Rother? He was a priest from Oklahoma who was shot to death in Guatemala in 1981. He has been beatified as a martyr and is soon to become the first male born in the United States to be canonized. Here, in brief, is his story.
Stanley Rother was born to a farming family in Okarche, Oklahoma, the oldest of four children. He grew up helping work the family farm and for the rest of his life and ministry he remained forever the farmer more than the scholar. Growing up and working with his family, he was more at home tilling the soil, fixing engines and digging wells than he was reading Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. This would serve him well in his work with the poor as a missionary, though it served him less well when he first set out to study for the priesthood.
His initial years in the seminary were a struggle. Trying to study philosophy (in Latin) as a preparation for his theological studies proved a bit too much for him. After a couple of years, the seminary staff advised him to leave, telling him that he lacked the academic abilities to study for the priesthood. Returning to the farm, he sought the advice of his bishop and was eventually sent to Mount St. Mary’s Seminary in Maryland. While he didn’t exactly thrive there academically, he thrived there in other ways, ways that impressed the seminary staff enough that they recommended him for ordination.
Back in his own diocese, he spent the first years of his priesthood mostly doing manual work, redoing an abandoned property that the diocese had inherited and turning it into a functioning renewal center. Then, in 1978, he was invited to join a diocesan mission team that had begun a mission in Guatemala. Everything in his background and personality now served to make him ideal for this type of work and, ironically, he, who once struggled to learn Latin, was now able to learn the difficult language of the people he worked with (Tz’utujil) and become one of the people who helped develop its written alphabet, vocabulary and grammar. He ministered to the people sacramentally, but he also reached out to them personally, helping them farm, finding resources to help them and occasionally giving them money out of his own pocket. Eventually he became their trusted friend and leader.
However, not everything was that idyllic. The political situation in the country was radically deteriorating, violence was everywhere and anyone perceived to be in opposition to the government faced the possibility of intimidation, disappearance, torture and death. Stanley tried to remain apolitical, but simply working with the poor was seen as being political. As well, at a point, a number of his own catechists were tortured and killed and, not surprisingly, he found himself on a death list and was hustled out of the country for his own safety. For three months, back with his family in Oklahoma, he agonized about whether to return to Guatemala, knowing that it meant almost certain death. The decision was especially difficult because, while clearly he felt called to return to Guatemala, he worried about what his death there would mean to his elderly parents.
He made the decision to return to Guatemala, fired by Jesus’ saying that the shepherd doesn’t run when the sheep are in danger. Four months later, he was shot to death in the missionary compound within which he lived, fighting to the end with his attackers not to be taken alive and made “to disappear.” Instantly, he was recognized as a martyr and when his body was flown back to Oklahoma for burial, the community in Atitlan kept his heart and turned the room in which he was martyred into a chapel.
A number of books have been written about him and I highly recommend two of them. For a substantial biographical account, read Maria Ruiz Scaperlanda, The Shepherd Who Didn’t Run. For a hagiographical tribute to him read Henri Nouwen, Love in a Fearful Land.
We have patron saints for every cause and occasion. For whom or for what might Stanley Rother be considered a patron saint? For all of us ordinary people of whom circumstance at times asks for an exceptional courage.

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

ON ORDINARY TIMES
By Lucia A. Silecchia

She was selling her wares at a rural autumn festival – the hand-knitted scarfs, sweaters, baby clothes and blankets that she made to sell to those of us gathered around her table to admire her creations.

I had purchased a few things from her last year – for myself and for loved ones. So, I was glad to see that she was back. Patience is not a strong suit of mine. Hence, my admiration for those who take so much time to make something beautiful by hand is particularly great. This year, I bought a blanket knitted with some favorite colors in a joyful design.

There was a fortunate, brief lull in the activity around the table – interrupted only by a young woman who stopped by to buy a dinosaur hat that, somehow, she managed to wear with style. The chill in the air, perhaps, prompted this otherwise unlikely fashion choice.

In that interlude, I asked how long it took to make a scarf, or a baby blanket, or, yes – a dinosaur hat. The friendly artisan gave me her best estimates. But then she told me that it could take much longer because sometimes she found herself in the midst of a project, would look at it honestly, decide it was not right, unravel it and begin again.

I suppose it should not have surprised me that someone who created such beautiful things would have a bit of the perfectionist in her. Yet, it also struck me that it must be difficult to look at something that had taken so much time and effort to make and be willing to unravel it all and start anew.

I wonder, though, if there is great wisdom in having the strength to do just that. To make a change and to unravel errors, misplaced values and mistaken priorities takes grace and strength. To start afresh without clinging to the false starts of the past is a gloriously difficult challenge.

Perhaps, as the days shorten and another year is winding down, the knitter’s wisdom may have a place. When we start to look back at the year that is drawing to a close and prepare for the excitement of a new year with its fresh starts and resolutions, it is easy to tinker around the edges of things and make some small adjustments to the patterns of everyday life.

Yet, sometimes in life, there can be an invitation to do more and to make more radical new beginnings.
I suppose that I would never have noticed if the blanket I bought had defects in it. “Pretty good” would have been good enough for me. Yet, it would not have been good enough for the talented woman who knitted it together. She knew that sometimes starting over was the best way to move beyond “pretty good.”

Maybe in this season of joyful hope and new plans, a prayer for the grace to unravel the old and begin again is a prayer worth praying.

A blanket, hat or sweater created from the unraveling of imperfect ones are beautiful things. Yet, we have also been promised that “whoever is in Christ is a new creation.” 2 Cor. 5:17. I have to think that a newly created son or daughter of God is far more beautiful.

So, with gratitude for the good example of a knitter willing to unravel the old and reweave the new, I hope she is an inspiration to do the same and remake our ordinary times.

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

FOR THE JOURNEY
By Effie Caldarola (CNS)

My great-grandfather, a refugee from the devastating famine in Ireland, came to Nebraska to farm. Generations later, I grew up on that farm.

I have roots – literal and figurative – in the land he purchased, a very small acreage of which I still own.
These roots help me to identify with the farming images of the Gospel. Jesus lived in a largely agrarian economy.

Sowing, reaping, noticing weeds along the roadside – this was Jesus’s world. He saw sheep grazing on hillsides, fishing boats plying the waters, full measures of grain being pressed into laps.
He knew the familiar smells of manure, and the fishy odor of a catch being unloaded. Jesus lived in an earthy, messy, tactile world.

So, the other day when the Gospel reading was about the man who was harvesting so much grain that he decided to tear down his barns and build bigger ones, I could identify.

I’m familiar with the language of grain prices, yields (how many bushels did an acre produce), the perennial worries about hail and drought.

And I certainly know people who have built bigger barns. We might call that success or business acumen, and sometimes it is.

But in the reading from Luke 12, Jesus couches his story about the rich man who built bigger barns as a story of greed. Why?

First of all, notice how often Jesus rails against hypocrisy and greed. These are the social sins he cares deeply about.

Jesus lived among the poor, in a society that offered no “safety net.” The rich grew richer without fair taxation, a story familiar in America today.

So what’s the problem with the successful farmer? I don’t think his ample harvest is what Jesus decries.

No, instead it’s his attitude toward wealth and his inability to see the bigger picture of his own life.

In Jesus’ parable, the rich farmer dies and is called to account for his life that very night, after his big barns are built and he’s feeling flush. What good is his wealth to him now? All of us will face that day.

Jesus says, “Thus will it be for the one who stores up treasure for himself but is not rich in what matters to God.”

He adds, “Take care to guard against all greed, … for one’s life does not consist of possessions.”

Stuff. We Americans have an enormous amount of stuff, and yet we always want more. We rent millions of storage units for our possessions, and yet we want more.

It’s a spiritual challenge, especially with the excess and consumerism of an American Christmas approaching.

It’s normal to save and plan for retirement. And yet, how often do we obsess about it?

Like the greedy farmer, we yearn to eat, drink and be merry – when we have “enough.” But what is “enough”?

Our church proclaims a “preferential option for the poor.” This term was first used by Father Pedro Arrupe, leader of the Jesuits, in 1968. St. John Paul II wrote of an “option for the poor” in his 1991 social encyclical “Centesimus Annus.” This concept runs throughout Hebrew and Christian Scripture.

Does it run through our lives? Do we vote with this concept in mind? Do we give, not just from our excess, but sacrificially, to the Lord through his poor, first? Do we feed the hungry? Welcome the refugee, like my great-grandfather? Clothe the naked?

When Jesus tells us to “take care,” I think he wants us to understand how short life is and how much better our lives and world could be if we lived simpler, more generous lives in every way.

(Effie Caldarola writes for the Catholic News Service.)