IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
I once had the privilege of visiting Holy Land. It’s a strangely different place. Soaked in history, in struggle, in religion, in blood. Virtually every inch of its soil has been soaked in blood, including the blood of Jesus. History leaps out at you from every stone.
Ancient things come to the surface there and mix with the things of today. When you stand in its sacred spots, you begin to understand why Moses was told to take his shoes off and why, through the centuries, so many wars have been fought over this small strip of desert. Aptly named the Holy Land, I walked its ground, barefoot in soul.

Of all the things I saw there, including the tomb of Jesus, few touched me as deeply as did the Church of the Visitation. It stands in sharp contrast to most of the other churches there that mark the key events in Jesus’ life.
Unlike most of the other churches, the Church of the Visitation is a very modest building. You don’t see any gold or marble. Its wooden walls and oak ceiling are plain and mostly bare. However, on the front wall, behind the altar, there is a painting that depicts the scene of the Visitation, and it was this painting that struck me deeply.
It’s a picture of two peasant women, Mary and Elizabeth, both pregnant, greeting each other. Everything about it suggests smallness, littleness, obscurity, dust, small town, insignificance.
You see two plain looking women, standing in the dust of an unknown village. Nothing suggests that either of them, or anything they are doing or carrying, is out of the ordinary or of any significance. Yet, and this is the genius of the painting, all that littleness, obscurity, seeming barrenness, and small-town insignificance makes you automatically ask the question: Who would have thought it? Who would ever have imagined that these two women, in this obscure town, in this obscure place, in this obscure time, were carrying inside of them something that would radically and forever change the whole world?
Who would have thought it? Yes. Who would have thought that what these obscure peasant women were gestating and carrying inside of them would one day change history more than any army, philosopher, artist, emperor, king, queen, or superstar ever would?
Inside them, they were gestating Jesus and John the Baptist, the Christ and the prophet who would announce him. These two births changed the world so radically that today we even measure time by the event of those births. We live in the year 2025 after that event.
There’s a lesson here: Never underrate, in terms of world impact, someone living in obscurity who is pregnant with promise. Never underestimate the impact in history of silent, hidden gestation. How can any of us have any real significance in our world when we live in obscurity, unknown, hidden away, unable to do big acts that shape history?
We can take a lesson from Mary and Elizabeth. We can become pregnant with promise, with hope, with the Holy Spirit and then, hidden from the world, gestate that into real flesh, our own. We too can reshape history.
If we can grasp this, there will be more peace in our lives because some of the restless fires inside us will torment us less. In brief, there’s a perpetual dissatisfaction inside us that can only be stilled by accepting something we might term the martyrdom of obscurity, that is, the self-sacrifice of accepting a life in which we will never have adequate, satisfactory self-expression. That acceptance can help still that pressure inside us which pushes us to be known, to make a difference, to make our lives count in terms of the big picture.
We all know the feeling of sitting inside of our own lives and feeling unknown, small time, undistinguished and frustrated because our riches are unknown to others. We have so much to give to the world, but the world doesn’t know us. We yearn to do great things, important things, things that affect the world beyond the boundaries of the small towns we live in (even when we are living in large cities).
What can help bring some peace is the image expressed in that painting in the Church of the Visitation, namely, that what ultimately changes the world is what we give birth to when, in the obscurity and dust of our small towns and in the frustration of lives that forever seem too small for us, we become pregnant with hope and, after a silent gestation process, one not advertised or known to the world, we bring that hope to full term.
When I was teaching at Newman College in Edmonton, our president then was a Holy Cross priest who brought us some Maritime color. When surprised by something, he would exclaim: “Who would have thunk it?”
Yes, two pregnant women, two thousand years ago of no status, isolated, standing in the dust, forever changing the world? Who would have thunk it?

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

KNEADING FAITH
By Dr. Fran Lavelle, D. Min
On my recent trip to Italy, I witnessed a daily ritual every morning just outside our hotel. A small van would park across the narrow street on what was basically a wide sidewalk. Two men routinely hopped out of the van and proceeded to gather baskets of freshly baked bread, bundles of fresh herbs, and a basket of seasonal vegetables and fruit. The delivery was made around 6 a.m. And, being a lover of good bread, I was excited to note the fresh delivery every day. The scene struck me as quaint and European.
It was not until I returned home for the full impact of this daily ritual to sink in. I was reading my news feed on my phone when I saw that the board of Tesla was voting later that week to give Elon Musk a trillion-dollar, performance-based stock package. The words “trillion dollars” bounced around my brain like a thousand pingpong balls being lobbed at a wall. One. Trillion. Dollars.

Now before anyone thinks this is an anti–Elon Musk missive, it is not. He happens to be the subject of this particular absurdity. He, as the richest man on the planet, may be part of the problem, but he is not the primary problem.
I tried to wrap my head around what a trillion dollars represented – it is actually 1,000 billion. Spending $1 million per day, it would take approximately 1,148 years for Musk to exhaust his fortune. There are 8.1 billion people in the world. An estimated 808 million people, or about 1 in 10 people worldwide, are living in extreme poverty in 2025. Imagine how many people could be lifted out of poverty with a trillion dollars.
I think we can all agree that a trillion dollars is an absurd amount of money for one person to possess. For whatever reason, I saw in my mind’s eye the small delivery van and the basket of freshly baked bread. The phrase from the Our Father followed: “Give us this day our daily bread.” Our. Daily. Bread.
In light of this reality, perhaps the social commentary is not about Elon Musk or even the class of multibillionaires around the globe. The question we need to focus on, especially in this age of increased poverty, is when did we lose sight of having “enough”? Daily bread. What does enough food look like? What makes a house a home? Are our basic needs being met?
I am the first to admit that in the story of the grasshopper and the ant, I am the ant. I work diligently, storing away summer’s bounty in the freezer for the winter months to ensure we can enjoy tasty oatmeal and blueberries on cold February mornings, or that we have garden-grown bell peppers in March for a heartwarming bowl of beans. But preparing for lean times and hoarding are two different things.
Is the quest for more than enough just a part of who we are as humans? Jesus told us that we would always have the poor among us. Is that an outcome of our inability to share, or something else entirely?
Pope Leo XIII saw similar trends and in the late 1800s formalized the modern approach to Catholic social teaching. These principles have been consistently affirmed by popes over the subsequent years. Our current Pope Leo XIV, recognizing the devastating reality of poverty, once again is shining a light on the principles of Catholic social teaching, especially regarding preferential treatment of the poor.

It is no surprise, then, that care for the poor is the subject of Pope Leo XIV’s first apostolic exhortation, Dilexi te (Latin for “I have loved you”). The document was being drafted by Pope Francis at the time of his death. Thankfully, Pope Leo saw to its completion and publication. In it, the faithful are encouraged to renew our commitment to the poor by animating Christ’s love and recognizing that current global poverty goes beyond material need.
Dilexi te draws from Scripture, church teaching, and the lives of saints. Together, these three form a solid basis for exploring what it means to serve the poor.
As we continue our journey through Christmas, it is an excellent time to deepen our appreciation of exactly how Jesus came into the world. His humble beginnings remind us to lift up the lowly, to comfort the afflicted, to see each other as God’s begotten sons and daughters.
Dilexi te reminds us that Christian love calls us to go out to the margins and unite people in the love of Christ. Changing culture, economic structures, and perhaps most importantly, changing hearts will not be easy. We are being called to empty ourselves of want. We are being called to examine our needs. We are being called to care for one another. Perhaps when we are satisfied with “our daily bread,” we can begin to recognize how to share with those on the margins.

(Dr. Fran Lavelle is the director of faith formation for the Diocese of Jackson.)

REFLECTIONS ON LIFE
By Melvin Arrington
Utter darkness! The total, absolute void of space! When my wife and I toured a cave many years ago, that’s what we sensed when the tour guide led our little group into a well-lit cavern and then flipped the switch. It instantly became infinitely darker than the dim, shadowy murkiness created by any late evening power outage. This was unmitigated blackness. I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face; I couldn’t see anything at all! The guide was only trying to demonstrate what the complete absence of light was like but in so doing he was, in effect, re-creating the conditions of the primordial nothingness immediately prior to the moment of Creation. When he turned the switch back on, the cavern instantly became bright and luminous again. It was like coming back to life from the dead.

The stark contrast between light and darkness in the cave also suggests some other opposing pairs: good and evil; warmth and cold; intelligence and ignorance; wisdom and folly; the conscious and the unconscious; spirit and matter; positives and negatives. Also, life vs. death; that’s the one that should really grab our attention. Jesus, the Light of the World, calls us and draws us to Himself and to eternal life. We are free to accept or reject Him. Those who choose the latter option evidently prefer to be as far from the source of illumination as possible, so they will get their wish and find themselves in outer darkness. The following words spoken by Jesus underscore one of the saddest realities in Scripture: “the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil” (John 3:19).
During the last few weeks we have experienced encroaching darkness as the winter solstice, the shortest day and longest night of the year, draws near. On that darkest of days, it will appear that the shadowy forces have won. But something marvelous happens around the time we celebrate the birth of Christ. By Christmas day luminosity begins to come back into the world. The days become longer and the night recedes. The old saying “it’s always darkest before the dawn” turns out to be true.
So, how do we respond to the advent of the new light? By putting up bright, shiny Christmas decorations, of course. Actually, many begin the Christmas season several weeks early. Some of those dazzling outdoor displays pop up the day after Thanksgiving. Perhaps our love for lights and our efforts to illuminate the night sky represent a deep-seated desire to drive away the darkness and negativity that pervade so many aspects of everyday life.
Children and adults alike have a special fascination with the brightness and radiance that characterize Christmas. We love the vivid colors of ornaments and trimmings, the glittery tinsel, and the sparkling bulbs along the winding cord. And let’s not forget the shining fixture atop the tree, reminding us of the wondrous star that guided the Magi to Bethlehem and the stable where the Christ Child was born.
Forty days after the Nativity, Mary and Joseph presented the infant Jesus in the Temple, where Simeon recognized Him as the long-awaited Savior, the One who would offer the light of salvation to the whole world. Taking the baby in his arms, Simeon spoke the words of the Nunc Dimittis, the canticle recited as part of the Night Prayer of the Church: “Now, Lord, you may dismiss your servant in peace, according to your word; for my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the sight of all the peoples, a light of revelation to the Gentiles and glory for your people Israel” (Luke 2:29-32). On Feb. 2 the church commemorates this event with the feast of Candlemas.
Candles have important functions in the church. Some have a prominent place on the altar while others, votive candles, can be found off to the side. There is also the large Paschal candle that glows with the new fire of Easter, and the one in the Sanctuary Lamp, signifying the presence of the Blessed Sacrament in the Tabernacle. Each of them in some way points to a link between life and light.
The secularists/materialists like to compare human life to a lighted candle. In their view, when the flame goes out, life ends and there’s nothing more. But Venerable Fulton J. Sheen says they forgot to tell us that “even when the candle has burned out, the light continues to emit itself at the rate of 186,000 miles a second, beyond the moon and stars, beyond the Pleiades, the nebulas of Andromeda, and continues to do so as long as the universe endures.” As St. Francis of Assisi reminds us, “all the darkness in the world cannot extinguish the light of a single candle.” The secularist/materialist viewpoint is in error; the soul of a person of faith, just like that candle light, lives on after death and returns to its Source.
As Christians we should be beacons of hope, pointing the way to everlasting truth, goodness, and beauty: “Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven” (Matthew 5:16). Also, we are supposed to “live as children of light, for light produces every kind of goodness and righteousness and truth” (Ephesians 5:8-9). It also produces beauty, as in these words from the popular Advent hymn, “O Come Divine Messiah”: “Dear Savior, haste!/Come, come to earth./Dispel the night and show your face,/and bid us hail the dawn of grace.”
Every time we feed the hungry, visit the sick, welcome the stranger, or contribute to worthy causes, we are doing our part to dispel the darkness. In this great time of celebration let us carry the light with us wherever we go and try to bring some sunshine into the lives of all we meet, especially those who struggle during the holidays.
May the Light of the World fill you with joy, love, hope, and peace during this Christmas season and all throughout the coming year!

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