IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI

All things considered; I believe that I grew up with a relatively healthy concept of God. The God of my youth, the God that I was catechized into, was not unduly punishing, arbitrary or judgmental. Granted, he was omnipresent so that all of our sins were noticed and noted; but at the end of the day, he was fair, loving, personally concerned for each of us, and wonderfully protective to the point of providing each of us with a personal guardian angel. That God gave me permission to live without too much fear and without any particularly crippling religious neuroses.

But that only gets you so far in life. Not having an unhealthy notion of God doesn’t necessarily mean you have a particularly healthy one. The God who I was raised on was not overly stern and judgmental, but neither was he very joyous, playful, witty or humorous. Especially, he wasn’t sexual, and had a particularly vigilant and uncompromising eye in that area. Essentially, he was somber, heavy and not very joyous to be around. Around him, you had to be solemn and reverent. I remember the assistant director at our Oblate novitiate telling us that there is no recorded incident, ever, of Jesus having laughed.

Under such a God you had permission to be essentially healthy. However, to the extent that you took him seriously, you still walked through life less than fully robust and your relationship with him could only be solemn and reverent.

Then, beginning more than a generation ago, there was a strong reaction in many churches and in the culture to this concept of God. Popular theology and spirituality set out to correct this, sometimes with an undue vigor. What they presented instead was a laughing Jesus and a dancing God, and while this was not without its value, it still left us begging for a deeper literature about the nature of God and what that might mean for us in terms of a health and relationships.

That literature won’t be easy to write, not just because God is ineffable, but because God’s energy is also ineffable. What, indeed, is energy? We rarely ask this question because we take energy as something so primal that it cannot be defined but only taken as a given, as self-evident. We see energy as the primal force that lies at the heart of everything that exists, animate and inanimate. Moreover, we feel energy, powerfully, within ourselves. We know energy, we feel energy, but we rarely recognize its origins, its prodigiousness, its joy, its goodness, its effervescence, and its exuberance. Moreover, we rarely recognize what it tells us about God. What does it tell us?
The first quality of energy is its prodigiousness. It is prodigal beyond our imagination, and this speaks something about God. What kind of creator makes billions of throwaway universes? What kind of creator makes trillions upon trillions of species of life, millions of them never to be seen by the human eye? What kind of father or mother has billions of children?

And what does the exuberance in the energy of young children say about our creator? What does their playfulness suggest about what must also lie inside of sacred energy? What does the energy of a young puppy tell us about what’s sacred? What do laughter, wit and irony tell us about God?
No doubt the energy we see around us and feel irrepressibly within us tells us that, underneath, before and below everything else, there flows a sacred force, both physical and spiritual, which is at its root, joyous, happy, playful, exuberant, effervescent, and deeply personal and loving. God is the ground of that energy. That energy speaks of God and that energy tells us why God made us and what kind of permissions God is giving us for living out our lives.

God is ineffable, that is the first truth that we hold about God. That means that God cannot be imagined or ever circumscribed in a concept. All images of God are inadequate; but that being admitted, we might try to imagine things this way. At the very center of everything there lies an unimaginable energy that is not an impersonal force, but a person, a loving self-conscious mind and heart. From this ground, this person, issues forth all energy, all creativity, all power, all love, all nourishment and all beauty. Moreover, that energy, at its sacred root, is not just creative, intelligent, personal and loving, it’s also joyous, colorful, witty, playful, humorous, erotic and exuberant at its very core. To live in it is to feel a constant invitation to gratitude.

The challenge of our lives is to live inside that energy in a way that honors both it and its origins. That means keeping our shoes off before the burning bush as we respect its sacredness, even as we constantly receive permission from it to be robust, free, joyous, humorous, and playful – without feeling we are stealing fire from the gods.

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

Called To Holiness
By Jaymie Stuart Wolfe

If there’s one thing we can learn from those who encountered the Risen Lord during the 40 days between his Resurrection and Ascension, it’s this: Seeing Jesus isn’t the same as recognizing him. To Mary Magdalene, distraught at the tomb, Christ looked like the gardener. To the two disillusioned disciples on the road to Emmaus, he was a clueless stranger. To former fishermen returning to Galilee uncertain of what to do next, the Master was just a man hoping to cook breakfast on the shore.

The Gospel accounts are strange – maybe even troubling – to us. When we read or hear these stories at Mass, we can’t help but wonder what in the world was going on. How is it possible that the people who knew Jesus best, those who were among his closest followers, didn’t know him when they saw him?

But before we take a disparaging view of those very first Christians, perhaps there is another question we ought to ask: How many times do we see Jesus and fail to recognize him?

Based on my own experience, I’ll venture to guess that the answer is somewhere between countless and infinite. By faith, I know that Jesus keeps his promises, that he is always with me and that he never abandons me. But if I’m honest, I don’t recognize Christ’s presence with me most days – not even on the days when I go to adoration or Mass.

And yet, the Eucharistic encounter at adoration and Mass can show us how to see Jesus and know that it is Jesus when we see him. The impact of being able to say, “I have seen the Lord’’ is orders of magnitude greater than simply making a credal statement like “I believe in God” or “I follow Jesus,” or even “I’m Catholic.” It makes us far more convincing witnesses.

The faith formation we all need most can be found at the feet of the Eucharistic Lord. And like those first disciples, we also come to know him in “the breaking of the bread.” (Luke 24:35) The “school of the Eucharist,” as it were, teaches us where to look for Jesus; where we are likely to see him at work in our own lives. We see him in presence, sacrifice and communion. We experience God’s presence in creation, in Scripture, in silence, in the presence of others, most especially the poor. We see him in the sacrifices that are made for us, those we value deeply but also those we easily take for granted. And we see him in the community he gathers, those who resonate with us in shared life experience and those who don’t.

I think that’s why St. Mother Teresa of Kolkata (Calcutta) made the daily Mass and holy hour a priority for her Missionaries of Charity. The Eucharist may well have been the secret to how she herself was able to see Jesus in the poorest of the poor. It may also be the source of the prayer Mother so often shared, the one in which she recited the words “You did it to Me” on her fingers.

This much is clear: if we are to become Christ in our world, we must see him there first. That shouldn’t be as difficult as it often seems to us because he is there. In fact, he is everywhere. Christ Jesus is cultivating life among the dead and in all the cemeteries of our lives.

He is walking along with us on the road when we are confused and disappointed. He is explaining to us the truths we thought we understood, calling out to us from the shoreline, and preparing to feed us when we are hungry. He comes to us in shame and isolation, behind the locked doors we are afraid to open. He breathes peace over our souls, forgives our sins and shows us how to forgive one another. And yes, he is with us in the Most Holy Sacrament of the altar. And because he has never left us, because the Eucharist is his body, blood, soul and divinity, we can say with all those who came before us in faith: “I have seen the Lord.”

(Jaymie Stuart Wolfe is a sinner, Catholic convert, freelance writer and editor, musician, speaker, pet-aholic, wife and mom of eight grown children, loving life in New Orleans.)