IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI

Fifty years ago, on an overcast, cold, fall day in the gymnasium of the local public high school, I was ordained to the priesthood. Beyond the grey sky, another thing marked the event. This was a tender season for my family and me. Both our parents had died (and died young) within a year and a half just prior to this and we were still somewhat fragile of heart. In that setting, I was ordained a priest.

Within the few words allowed in a short column, what do I most want to say as I mark the fiftieth anniversary of that day? I will borrow from the novelist Morris West, who begins his autobiography this way: When you reach the age of seventy-five, there should only be three phrases left in your vocabulary, thank you, thank you, and thank you!

I just turned seventy-five and reflecting on fifty years of priesthood, many thoughts and feelings come to mind; life, after all, has its seasons. However, the feeling that overrides all others is that of gratitude, thank you, thank you, and thank you! Thank you to God, to grace, to the church, to my family, to the Oblates, to the many friends who have loved and supported me, to the wonderful schools I have taught in, and to the thousands of people I have encountered in those fifty years of ministry.

My initial call to the priesthood and the Oblate congregation was not the stuff of romance. I didn’t enter religious life and the seminary because I was attracted to it. The opposite. This was not what I wanted. But I felt called, strongly and clearly, and at the tender age of seventeen made the decision to enter religious life. Today, people may well raise questions about the wisdom and freedom of such a decision at age seventeen, but looking back all these years later, I can honestly say that this is the clearest, purest, and most unselfish decision that I have yet made in my life. I have no regrets. I wouldn’t have chosen this life except for a strong call that I initially tried to resist; and, knowing myself as I do, it is by far the most life-giving choice that I possibly could have made. I say this because, knowing myself and knowing my wounds, I know too that I would not have been nearly as generative (nor as happy) in any other state in life. I nurse some deep wounds, not moral ones, but wounds of the heart, and those very wounds have been, thanks to the grace of God, a source of fruitfulness in my ministry.

Moreover, I have been blessed in the ministries that have been assigned to me. As a seminarian, I dreamed of being a parish priest, but that was never to be. Immediately after ordination, I was sent to do graduate studies in theology and then taught theology at various seminaries and theology schools for most of these fifty years, save for twelve years that I served as a provincial superior of my local Oblate community and on the Oblate General Council in Rome. I loved teaching! I was meant to be a religious teacher and religious writer and so my ministry, all of it, has been very satisfying. My hope is that it has been generative for others.

In addition, I have been blessed by the Oblate communities within which I lived. My ministry usually had me living in larger Oblate communities and through these fifty years, I estimate that I have lived in community with well over three hundred different men. That’s a rich experience. Moreover, I have always lived in healthy, robust, caring, supportive, and intellectually challenging communities that gave me the spiritual and human family I needed. There were tensions at times, but those tensions were never not life giving. Religious community is unique, sui generis. It isn’t family in the emotional or psychosexual sense, but family that is rooted in something deeper than biology and attraction – faith.

There have been struggles of course, not least with the emotional issues around celibacy and living inside a loneliness which (as Merton once said) God, himself, condemned. It is not good for someone to be alone! It is here too where my Oblate religious community has been an anchor. Vowed celibacy can be lived and can be fruitful, though not without community support.

Let me end with a comment that I once heard from a priest who was celebrating his eighty-fifth birthday and his sixtieth anniversary of ordination. Asked how he felt about it all, he said, “It wasn’t always easy! There were some bitter, lonely times. Everyone in my ordination class left the priesthood, every one of them, and I was tempted too. But I stayed and now, looking back after sixty years, I’m pretty happy with the way my life turned out!”

That sums up my feelings too after fifty years – I’m pretty happy with the way it has turned out – and deeply, deeply grateful.

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

THINGS OLD AND NEW
By Ruth Powers
Rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus. –1 Thessalonians 5:16-18
During the month of November, we in the United States traditionally focus on the virtue of gratitude, looking back to that feast celebrated by the Pilgrims as they gave thanks for a good harvest after the first terrible winter they spent in the New World. However, as Catholics and as Christians, we are called to make gratitude one of the central virtues in our lives. We are, first, called to gratitude by the Scriptures. Both the Old and the New Testament speak of the importance of giving thanks to God in all things and all circumstances. The psalms contain many beautiful hymns of thankfulness and praise, that God is the source of all things and that when we recognize this truth, we are moved to thanksgiving. St. Paul teaches about the virtue of Christian thankfulness in many of his letters even when the communities to whom he writes are undergoing trials. Gratitude is also a theme in the writings and teachings of too many saints to enumerate.

Often, though, we are more likely to forget that all we have we owe to God, and to become distracted by the concerns of our daily lives and forget to give God the thanks He deserves for all He gives to us. We are much more likely to complain about what is going wrong in our lives than to focus on the gifts we have been given. True gratitude (and not mere politeness) flows out of humility. It begins with the realization that we lack something that has been freely supplied by another because at that time we could not get or do it for ourselves.
As people of faith, we also know that God is the ultimate source of “life, the universe and everything” and so must be the ultimate object of our gratitude. It’s easy to think of doing this when all is well, but St. Paul reminds us that we are to give thanks in all circumstances, not just the good ones, because we never know what part even seemingly bad or uncomfortable things may have in God’s plan for us.
There is a passage in Corrie Ten Boom’s The Hiding Place where she and her sister give thanks for the fleas that infest the bunkhouse where they are living in Ravensbruck Concentration Camp. Later they realize that the guards have not searched their bunks and found their contraband Bibles because of the fleas.
At the end of his life, St. Francis of Assisi was blind and in constant pain; yet in these seemingly terrible circumstances, he wrote his most famous prayer, which was a hymn of thanks: “Praise be my Lord for Brother Sun…, Sister Moon and the stars…, Sister Water …, Brother Fire…, our Sister Mother Earth…, Praise and bless my Lord and give him thanks.” We are reminded to cultivate gratitude even when it seems things are going badly for us.
The other issue that cultivating the virtue of gratitude will help to combat is the culture of entitlement that seems to permeate our society. Many people seem to feel that the world owes them preferential treatment for no other reason than an inflated vision of their own importance. Gratitude teaches us that our own labors, important as they may be, have their source in gifts given to us by God and thus should be sources of humility and gratitude toward the one who loves us enough to give us those gifts. We run into immeasurable trouble when we begin to give ourselves credit for what we have rather than giving thanks to the one who is the true source of all.
Although November may be the time culturally when we think about giving thanks, gratitude needs to be nurtured and expressed daily. A very wise retreat master once challenged a group of retreatants to this meditation: “Think about what your life would be like if you woke up one morning and all you had left in your life was what you had thanked God for the day before.” We would do well to meditate on this frequently.

(Ruth Powers is the program coordinator for St. Mary Basilica Parish in Natchez.)

FROM THE HERMITAGE
By sister alies therese

Did you know Jackson sits on an extinct volcano 2,900 feet under the Mississippi Coliseum, having erupted 75 million years ago and unlikely to blow any time soon? Well, who knows how many Mississippi agates (usually found in volcanic material) there might be?

Maybe you’d find a three-inch thunder-egg shape of varied colors. Agates are often rust-red from the oxidizing iron or yellow, brown, black, grey, pink and even sometimes green. White bands of quartz separate the colors. The translucence of the quartz allows light to shine through and even glow. Fossils are billions of years old, and many are found in our gravel pits. The Mississippi agate is a mere 323 million years old.

Shapes are important too, how the water has formed them in the streams as they travel down from the Nashville Dome in Tennessee to the Appalachian Mountains of Alabama. All these rivers are moving toward the gulf and their deposits are still to be discovered near where I live in Northeast Mississippi. They say these ancient gravel deposits were recycled by erosion and made new bars in modern rivers like the Tombigbee. Sometimes they were embedded in floating ice!

Treasures of the heart are frequently the result of much refining and pressure, often formed by the water of tears. Have you noticed? The diamond is beautifully created under pressure; who knew when the first person discovered the magnificent geode’s insides or that a bland and ‘regular-looking- outer- rock’ had a purple amethyst encrusted within?

Consider the Great Star of Africa, (Cullinan I), part of a larger diamond discovered beneath the earth in South Africa in 1905…the largest of the Crown Jewels we learned about during the passing of the queen. It was formed over 400 miles deep in the earth. Worth millions…whose money is it? South Africans think it’s theirs. Why not, it was a gift ‘taken’ from the people’s pocket.

What are the pressures we seem to be under that shave off our rough edges and when someone looks inside, they discover such magnificence? Servant of God Sister Thea Bowman reminds me of one whose guileless splendor exploded through the pressures!

I’ve always been a bit of a rockhound and often collected a small stone from places I’ve visited…a stone from St. Kevin’s Hermitage near Glendalough in Ireland (where his slab of sleeping rock remains), finding a rock with a fossil in a Kentucky creek. A friend brought me the plainest looking rock from her refugee camp in Iraq, another from Elijah’s cave on Mt. Carmel, and another from her workplace in Alaska.

The thing about these stones is that they are indeed plain, nothing could get a big WOW! They are a perfect example of ‘what you see is what you get’. Various sorts of collections like this provide us with ‘prayer-stones,’ reminding us of just who we are praying for. I have a stone from the gravel outside the prison in New Jersey where a friend was on death row. Another stone from Helen Keller’s place in Alabama, and one from a lonely wild cliff in Scotland. Other times I’ve challenged myself to collect perfectly round stones.

Markers have always shown up biblically, sometimes as treasures, sometimes as tablets of information, and sometimes as a place to rest while on an agonizing journey. Stones were piled up for altars and places of worship, as signals of the way to go, and as weapons of destruction; five small ones for David.
Houses, fences and walkways, birdhouses, prisons and barriers, abound in various cultures. We find stone spirals or labyrinths. There is a power in the stone, stability, and a substance not easily blown over even by the strongest of storms. Jesus is our ‘cornerstone.’ That is a forever thanksgiving gift!

Of course, the gems that come from deep within are still the natural resources of the nations, looked for and often sold on markets that do not respect the miner’s work. You might remember the issues around diamonds…were they ‘blood diamonds’ or not, one would ask the jeweler…some knew what you were talking about, and others either did not or ignored the question.

These natural resources were part of what was wanted by colonizers and those who came to take the land (and gem resources) from indigenous peoples and tribes. Rubies, emeralds, agates, diamonds and sapphires are among the beauty God created under the pressure of earth and stone.

Consider this from Exodus 28:15ff: “On the breastplate of decision, you shall have made you shall mount four rows of precious stones: in the first row a carnelian, a topaz, and an emerald; in the second a garnet, a sapphire and a beryl; in the third row a jacinth, an agate and an amethyst; the fourth a chrysolite, an onyx and a jasper…each stone engraved like a seal with the name of one of the twelve tribes.”

How do you mark your breastplate of decision? Have you discovered your deep withins? Have you turned your pressures and ‘I’m going to blow up’ into something extraordinarily beautiful? Well, even though the Mississippi state stone is petrified wood, the Mississippi agate is there for you to find. Goin’ lookin’?

BLESSINGS.

(Sister alies therese is a canonically vowed hermit with days formed around prayer and writing.)