IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
Darkness is only bad because there is light. Sin can only happen if first there is love.

Karl Rahner makes a very insightful comment about the text in the Gospels where Jesus is being crucified and says of his executioners: “Forgive them Father for they know not what they do!”

Rahner suggests that they knew exactly what they were doing. They knew they were putting an innocent man to death, that they were shedding innocent blood. So why does Jesus say what he said?

What was their innocence? What was their naivete?

Rahner’s answer: They didn’t know what they were doing because they didn’t know how much they were loved. And that can make for a naivete of the heart. How so?

There’s a place inside us, a place of which we are rarely consciously aware, where each of us is being held unconditionally in love by God. The people who crucified Jesus didn’t know what they were doing because they weren’t aware of that. That was their blindness, their ignorance. Despite what it looks like on the surface, they didn’t know what they were doing.

This is also true for us. Far too often we crucify others and ourselves because of this ignorance: we don’t know how much we are loved. Consequently, we’re sometimes cruel in our judgments and prone to do things which compromise our dignity. We struggle not to be one of the executioners at the crucifixion because, at the end of the day, we are acting out of ignorance. We don’t know any better, like the naivete of the child who hurts herself in ignorance.

But this isn’t a new insight.

Theology has classically drawn a distinction between culpable and inculpable ignorance. The latter, also called invincible ignorance, was seen to excuse one from sin and responsibility. Hence, there was the teaching that you could do things that were wrong but not sinful because you were acting in ignorance. This was predicated on the belief that you could act morally and responsibly only if you actually knew what you were doing. To sin, you had to act “knowingly.” Granted, that’s a tricky caveat.

However, looking at our world today, I would risk saying that in a number of important moral matters, we are acting in invincible ignorance. Simply put, we don’t know any better. Only the type of ignorance that allowed sincere people to crucify Jesus can explain why we, good and sincere people, can be so massively blind, communally and individually, to the poor, to the economic and social demands made by our faith. The real reason we can live so comfortably as the gap between the rich and the poor widens is not because we are bad and without conscience, but rather, as Rahner says, we don’t know how much we are loved.

The same holds true for our attitude towards sex. We have been able to trivialize sex, split it off from the sacredness of marriage, and turn it into an extension of dating (or simply recreational sex) only because of a certain invincible ignorance. We don’t know any better, not because we lack conscience, but because we lack any real sense of the deep love of God and the dignity it gives us.
Like Jesus’ executioners, we have an astounding capacity to rationalize, trivialize and compensate precisely because we don’t know what we’re doing. We don’t have a conscious sense of God’s love for us. Hence, it’s easy to lose perspective, feel excluded, and do things that we would never do if we were more aware of our full dignity.

Small wonder we settle for second-best or for most anything that promises comfort and security. Jesus, no doubt, is looking at us and saying: “Forgive them Father for they know not what they do!”

But is that true? Can we really plead ignorance and innocence and say that we don’t know any better?

I say yes, though it’s not that we’re stupid or lack intelligence. This is a naivete of the heart. We are inculpably unaware of how much God loves us.

Too few of us, at any existential level, have ever heard God say to us: “I love you!” Too few of us have ever heard felt what Jesus must have felt at his baptism when he heard his Father say: “You are my beloved child; in you I take delight!” Indeed, too few of us have ever heard another person, soul to soul, say to us, I love you unconditionally! In you I take delight! Is it a surprise then that, like Jesus’ executioners, we have an amazing capacity, in good conscience, to sometimes be blind and not true to ourselves?

Darkness is only bad because there is light. Sin can only happen if first there is love. Betrayal is only possible if first one has heard the words: “I love you.” Jesus’ executioners acted in a darkness that came from never having heard that. The same, I suspect, is true for many of us.

(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser is a professor of spirituality at Oblate School of Theology and award-winning author.)

REFLECTIONS ON LIFE
By Melvin Arrington
Several weeks ago the U.S. government began releasing previously classified documents concerning unidentified flying objects, or UFOs, a move that has sparked renewed interest in the question of whether there is intelligent life beyond the planet we call home.

The fact that UFOs are once again in the news takes me back to the era of Sputnik, when rocket launches and speculation on aliens from other galaxies visiting Earth triggered the imagination of children of my generation and filled our heads with dreams of future space travel.

When I was a child, I enjoyed watching TV programs about rocket ships and alien worlds. One of my favorites was the old 1930s Flash Gordon movie serials that often ran on TV in those days. And my reading material of choice was science fiction comic books. Well into adulthood I still believed and hoped that someday, someplace, our space explorations would eventually discover other planets inhabited by scientifically advanced peoples.

However, as I got older and, I hope, wiser, my childhood notions gradually developed into more mature thinking. Now, I’m fairly confident that planet Earth is the only place in the known universe capable of sustaining higher life forms. But occasionally uncertainty creeps in, as on that afternoon a few years ago when, while driving to work, I actually saw a UFO in broad daylight.

To clarify, I saw some type of thin, oblong-shaped object moving along in the sky that I couldn’t identify, a description that seems to fit the definition of a UFO. Whatever it was, I doubt it was an alien spacecraft. It was probably just a fast-moving cloud illuminated by rays of sunlight, which would explain its unusually bright and shiny glow. Or maybe not. Who knows?

The major consideration that changed my mind about life beyond our planet was my discovery of the astonishing level of fine-tuning that went into the creation of the universe. The Great Designer has fashioned everything with such amazing precision that living things not only survive on Earth but flourish. He has arranged all the necessary elements to just the right degree and in the exact position that even the slightest variation in any one of these factors – for example, electromagnetism, the force of gravity, or the speed of light – would so disrupt this delicate balance that our planet would cease to exist.

According to Francis Collins, who headed the Human Genome Project and served as director of the National Institutes of Health, “The chance that all of these constants would take on the values necessary to result in a stable universe capable of sustaining complex life forms is almost infinitesimal. And yet those are exactly the parameters that we observe.” In other words, God made a perfect world for us to live in, the only such place throughout all the galaxies, and He created it only for us and for no one else. So, in that sense, we truly are alone in the vastness of the universe.

But just because I no longer believe in aliens traveling to Earth in UFOs doesn’t mean I think we should feel abandoned in the cosmos. God created us and placed us here to be in communion with Him and with one another. However, there are a lot of lonely elderly people who have no one to love them or even think about them. I know many nursing home residents who have been discarded by their families. In most cases, someone just dropped them off at the nursing facility the same way people leave dogs at animal shelters. To them, loneliness is the normal state of affairs, day after day, year after year.

But these precious souls are not really alone because God is never far from any of them. He is as near as a prayer or a Bible on a nightstand. And in the Eucharist He is as close to us as He can possibly be in this life.

The scriptures consistently demonstrate that God desires to be in an intimate relationship with us. Both the Old Testament and the New bear this out in verse after verse. Among the many examples are these lines from the first chapter of the Book of Joshua, where the Lord says: “I will always be with you; I will never abandon you” (v. 5), and “the Lord, your God, is with you wherever you go” (v. 9). And in Psalm 23, one of the best-loved chapters in the entire Bible, we read that in our darkest moments, when all seems hopeless, God is there accompanying us in our time of trials: “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff comfort me” (v. 4). Likewise, in Psalm 73 we find this simple phrase of reassurance: “I am always with you” (v. 23).

In a similar vein, Jesus, at the conclusion of Matthew’s Gospel, says: “I am with you always, until the end of the age” (Matt. 28:20). Also, in the fourteenth chapter of John’s Gospel, Our Lord promises to send the Holy Spirit: “I will not leave you orphans; I will come to you” (v. 18). Later, in His High Priestly Prayer, Jesus prays to the Father that all who believe in Him “may all be one, as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be in us” (John 17:21).

As we look up into the night sky and speculate on whether we are the only rational beings in the universe, whether there are any other creatures like us in this galaxy or anywhere else out there, we can be confident that we are not alone. We can take great comfort in God’s promises that He loves us, that He is always near, and that He will never abandon us. He who knows the number of hairs on our heads, He who knows when a single sparrow falls to the ground, is surely watching over us. May we always watch over and care for each other, especially for the lonely and the cast-offs and all those who have no one to call on.

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