IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
Recently in a radio interview, I was asked this question: “If you were on your deathbed, what would you want to leave behind as your parting words?” The question momentarily took me aback. What would I want to leave behind as my last words? Not having time for much reflection, I settled on this. “I would want to say: Don’t be afraid. Live without fear. Don’t be afraid of death. Most of all, don’t be afraid of God!”

I’m a cradle Catholic, born to wonderful parents, catechized by some very dedicated teachers, and I’ve had the privilege of studying theology in some of the best classrooms in the world. Still it took me fifty years to rid myself of a number of crippling religious fears and to realize that God is the one person of whom you need not be afraid. It’s taken me most of my life to believe the words that come from God’s mouth over three hundred times in scripture and are the initial words out of the mouth of Jesus whenever he meets someone for the first time after his resurrection: Do not be afraid!
It has been a fifty-year journey for me to believe that, to trust it. For most of my life I’ve lived in a false fear of God, and of many other things. As a young boy, I had a particular fear of lightning storms which in my young mind demonstrated how fierce and threatening God could be. Thunder and lightning were portents which warned us, religiously, to be fearful. I nursed the same fears about death, wondering where souls went after they died, sometimes looking at a dark horizon after the sun had set and wondering whether people who had died were out there somewhere, haunted in that endless darkness, still suffering for what they’d had not gotten right in life. I knew that God was love, but that love also held a fierce, frightening, exacting justice.

Those fears went partially underground during my teenage years. I made my decision to enter religious life at the age of seventeen and have sometimes wondered whether that decision was made freely and not out of false fear. Looking back on it now however, with fifty years of hindsight, I know that it wasn’t fear that compelled me, but a genuine sense of being called, of knowing from the influence of my parents and the Ursuline nuns who catechized me, that one’s life is not one’s own, that one is called to serve. But religious fear remained unhealthily strong within me.

So, what helped me let go of that? This doesn’t happen in a day or year; it is the cumulative effect of fifty years of bits and pieces conspiring together. It started with my parents’ deaths when I was twenty-two. After watching both my mother and father die, I was no longer afraid of death. It was the first time I wasn’t afraid of a dead body since these bodies were my mother and father of whom I was not afraid. My fears of God eased gradually every time I tried to meet God with my soul naked in prayer and came to realize that your hair doesn’t turn white when you are completely exposed before God; instead you become unafraid. My fears lessened too as I ministered to others and learned what divine compassion should be, as I studied and taught theology, as two cancer diagnoses forced me to contemplate for real my own mortality, and as a number of colleagues, family, and friends modeled how one can live more freely.

Intellectually, a number of persons particularly helped me: John Shea helped me realize that God is not a law to be obeyed, but an infinitely empathic energy that wants us to be happy; Robert Moore helped me to believe that God is still looking on us with delight; Charles Taylor helped me to understand that God wants us to flourish; the bitter anti-religious criticism of atheists like Frederick Nietzsche helped me see where my own concept of God and religion needed a massive purification; and an older brother, a missionary priest, kept unsettling my theology with irreverent questions like, what kind of God would want us to be frightened of him? A lot of bits and pieces conspired together.

What’s the importance of last words? They can mean a lot or a little. My dad’s last words to us were “be careful,” but he was referring to our drive home from the hospital in snow and ice. Last words aren’t always intended to leave a message; they can be focused on saying goodbye or simply be inaudible sighs of pain and exhaustion; but sometimes they can be your legacy.

Given the opportunity to leave family and friends a few last words, I think that after I first tried to say a proper goodbye, I’d say this: Don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid of living or of dying. Especially don’t be afraid of God.

(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, Texas. He can be contacted through his website www.ronrolheiser.com.)

GUEST COLUMN
By Reba J. McMellon, M.S., LPC

If you have felt all sorts of crazy in the past six months, join the crowd. COVID-19 seemed to start gradually then hit us like a tsunami.

We were just beginning to hear about it, learn to spell and pronounce it, discuss it among family and friends when bam! – a “shelter at home” order was issued.

Businesses were shut down, re-opened then shut down again. Initially all the masks looked like those blue medical things that portend some sort of medical procedure involving pain or discomfort. Now we’re use to people looking like they are going to a robbery. Facial expressions are blocked. Tension doesn’t begin to describe what we all felt and are still feeling in the atmosphere “out there.” In the beginning, every time I heard shelter in place or shelter at home, I pictured a chihuahua shivering with his nose in a corner waiting for a thunderstorm to pass. But this is no thunderstorm. It hasn’t passed. Does that leave some of us shivering in place?

Then comes the debate: What is this? Is it blue, is it red, does “it” have ties to being liberal or conservative, does it have left wings or right wings, can it fly through the air, does it make you really sick or not sick at all, do people die from it? It’s something we can’t see, touch or taste. It’s also something we can’t control. We Americans do not like things we can’t control.
It’s a type of sickness that will physically separate you from your loved ones, especially those in the margins of life. No. Uh huh, that just isn’t acceptable. A pandemic that hits the United States?

We thought we, as a society, were way past that sort of thing. We’re used to having fast paced control. Just look at what our cell phones can do. Technology is the way of the world, not some viral outbreak no one has heard of. This sort of thing might happen across the pond but not in our country. We tend to be vague about our world geography and ignore all things not in our backyard, so let it be something that happens somewhere else.

But here “it” is, all up in our backyard. This leads to a little bit of acceptance that went something like this: “Ok, I’ll accept a couple weeks of disruption that could lead to a month or two but that’s it. Then we’ll move back to normal.”

When two weeks turned into two months and now six months with no end in sight, family and friends began to splinter in how they chose to cope. Conspiracy theories of fake tests, clandestine financial motives, political gain or loss, election plans, medical financing-you name it. Anger at not being able to bargain our way through “this” gave rise to anxiety, fear and irritably. Sometimes extreme irritability. When this stage started to wane, a sadness-like depression rolled around. Lethargy, giving up, giving in, preoccupation with health, fear of routines that previously brought comfort, finding new comfort in numbing out, giving up and giving in.
Life as we knew it is, well, over. This leads to a new level of acceptance. Acceptance of a life and lifestyle previously unfamiliar to most. One of much less doing and much more being. Living more simply and present in the moment can be extremely uncomfortable for a society that values doing over being. A society that equates busy with important. Depending on your personal value system and level of spiritual maturity, this could be asking you to rework your whole system of thinking.

Just when you think you’re over the anger, irritability, shock, anxiety, denial and bargaining, a sense of new peace flows down and you feel as though you’ve arrived at acceptance.

But, just like the stages of grief, the feeling may roll back around and play out again and again. The good news is, the more you lean into acceptance, the shorter the other stages will last. We, as a society, have a lot of strengths. Patience and trust don’t tend to be our top two. We are a nation that gets to work and fixes things. Natural disasters? No problem. We show up and rebuild. But COVID-19 is intangible. Most of us can’t show up anywhere and fix any of it.

We are, as a nation, hardheaded. Hardheaded but not hopeless.
The five stages of grief (loss) are: shock, denial, bargaining, anger, depression, testing and acceptance.

If you find yourself stuck in one stage for more than two weeks, it’s a red flag. Check in with yourself on a regular basis. Write on a calendar or in a journal so you can keep up with your moods and thought processes, as well as the days of the week, the change in seasons, the months that pass by.
If your mood causes you to lose your perspective, your ability to love your neighbor, family or friends and your ability to find joy or humor in something every day, talk to somebody! Not just anybody, talk to someone who really listens. You may need to see your medical doctor or mental health counselor. If you didn’t need extra support to see you through this COVID-19 crazy, you are in the minority. Needing a little extra help is a normal response to an abnormal situation.

If there were ever a time for the serenity prayer, it’s now. Light your candles, use holy water, listen to God, follow the liturgy of the word. If not now, when?

Lord grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. The courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.

(Reba J. McMellon, M.S., LPC is a licensed professional counselor with 35 years of experience. She currently lives in Jackson, Mississippi and works part-time as a mental health consultant and freelance writer.)

By Sister Constance Veit, LSP
Summer is usually a lot of fun in our retirement homes. The elderly enjoy getting outdoors for picnics, gardening and community outings, especially when they include a stop for ice cream.

Not so this year! As summer wears on with no end to the pandemic in sight, the mandated social isolation is beginning to take a serious toll on our elderly residents.
In many of our homes, the residents have been living in forced isolation in their rooms since late March. Direct contact with family and friends has been forbidden for the last five months. While people from many walks of life have been incredibly generous in sending messages to our residents and helping us to provide for their physical needs, and we have been able to use technology to ensure screen contact between the elderly and their loved ones, screen time cannot fully replace person-to-person connections with loved ones and socialization with fellow residents.
The longer the pandemic lasts, the more concerned I am about the isolation of the elderly. It’s bad enough for our residents, but I can’t even begin to imagine how lonely it is for seniors who live by themselves, especially in rural areas and regions that lack adequate internet service – an estimated half of all Americans lack high-speed internet service at home – or for those unfamiliar with technologies many of us take for granted.
Since the beginning of the pandemic celebrities of all types have reached out online to lift our spirits and remind people that we are all in this together. “Alone together” has become a popular catch-phrase, but what about the 50 percent of Americans – including many seniors – who lack internet access and who are especially vulnerable to the scourge of loneliness?
I’m afraid that the marginalization of frail seniors could become the new normal. A recent study carried out by the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that both economic damages and loss of life from COVID-19 might best be limited by “a simple targeted policy that applies an aggressive lockdown on the oldest group and treats the rest of the population uniformly.”
The NBER working paper (May 2020) states that gains from “targeted policies” can be substantially increased by combining them with additional measures such as increasing the “social distance” between the oldest group and the rest of the population, reducing visits to older relatives and segregating the times when different demographic groups can go to grocery stores and pharmacies.
Such measures are referred to as a form of “protective custody” intended to protect the elderly.
After seeing our Residents suffer through five months of lockdown, concepts such as “targeted policies” and “protective custody” make me cringe. Surely our society can do better than this for our seniors!
Feeling the weight of these issues, I happened upon a recent tweet of Pope Francis. “The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed that our societies have not organized enough to make room for the elderly, with just respect for their dignity and fragility. Where you don’t care for the elderly, there’s no future for the young,” he wrote.
And then I read our Holy Father’s message to young people on July 26, the feast of Sts. Joachim and Anne, the grandparents of Jesus. He asked the young to perform “a gesture of tenderness towards the elderly, especially the loneliest, in their homes and residences, those who have not seen their loved ones for many months.”
“Dear young people,” he said, “each one of these elderly people is your grandparent! Do not leave them by themselves. Use the inventiveness of love, make telephone calls, video calls, send messages, listen to them and, where possible, in compliance with the healthcare rules, go to visit them too. Send them a hug.”
Taking up our Holy Father’s challenge, the Vatican has launched a campaign entitled “The elderly are your grandparents.” It invites young people to be inventive and do something concrete for older people who are vulnerable to loneliness. The campaign is associated with the hashtag #sendyourhug.
Let’s evaluate our own attitudes and behaviors during this difficult time, asking ourselves if we are sensitive to how our actions might adversely affect the wellbeing of others, and if we could do more to safely reach to the most vulnerable.
Let’s get inventive and find ways to make sure that our elders never feel marginalized or forgotten, no matter how long the pandemic lasts!

(Sister Constance Veit is the director of communications for the Little Sisters of the Poor.)