IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
In a remarkable book, The Inner Voice of Love, written while he was in a deep emotional depression, Henri Nouwen shares these words: “The great challenge is living your wounds through instead of thinking them through. It is better to cry than to worry, better to feel your wounds deeply than to try to understand them, better to let them enter into your silence than to talk about them. The choice you face constantly is whether you are taking your hurts to your head or to your heart. In your head you analyze them, find their causes and consequences, and coin words to speak and write about them. But no final healing is likely to come from that source. You need to let your wounds go down into your heart. Then you can live them through and discover that they will not destroy you. Your heart is greater than your wounds.”

He’s right; your heart is greater than your wounds, though it needs caution in dealing with them. Wounds can soften your heart; but they can also harden you heart and freeze it in bitterness. So what’s the path here? What leads to warmth and what leads to coldness?

In a remarkable essay, The Drama of the Gifted Child, the Swiss psychologist, Alice Miller, tells us what hardens the heart and what softens it. She does so by outlining a particular drama that commonly unfolds in many lives. For her, giftedness does not refer to intellectual prowess but to sensitivity. The gifted child is the sensitive child. But that gift, sensitivity, is a mixed blessing. Positively, it lets you feel things more deeply so that the joys of living will mean more to you than to someone who is more callous. That’s its upside.

Conversely, however, if you are sensitive you will habitually fear disappointing others and will forever fear not measuring up. And your inadequacy to always measure up will habitually trigger feelings of anxiety and guilt within you. As well, if you are extraordinarily sensitive, you will tend to be self-effacing to a fault, letting others have their way while you swallow hard as your own needs aren’t met and then absorb the consequences. Not least, if you feel things deeply you will also feel hurt more deeply. That’s the downside of sensitivity and makes for the drama that Alice Miller calls the “drama of the gifted child,” the drama of the sensitive person.

Further, in her view, for many of us that drama will only begin to really play itself out in our middle and later years, constellating in frustration, disappointment, anger and bitterness, as the wounds of our childhood and early adulthood begin to break through and overpower the inner mechanisms we have set up to resist them. In mid-life and beyond, our wounds will make themselves heard so strongly that our habitual ways of denial and coping no longer work. In mid-life you realize that your mother did love your sister better than you, that your father in fact didn’t care much about you and that all those hurts you absorbed because you swallowed hard and played the stoic are still gnawing away bitterly inside you. That’s how the drama eventually culminates, in a heart that’s angry.

So where does that leave us? For Alice Miller, the answer lies in grieving. Our wounds are real and there is nothing we can do about them, pure and simple. The clock can’t be turned back. We cannot relive our lives so as to provide ourselves with different parents, different childhood friends, different experiences on the playground, different choices and a different temperament. We can only move forward so as to live beyond our wounds. And we do that by grieving. Alice Miller submits that the entire psychological and spiritual task of midlife and beyond is that of grieving, mourning our wounds until the very foundations of our lives shake enough so that there can be transformation.

A deep psychological scar is the same as having some part of your body permanently damaged in an accident. You will never be whole again and nothing can change that. But you can be happy again; perhaps more happy than ever before. But that loss of wholeness must be grieved, or it will manifest itself in anger, bitterness and jealous regrets.

The Jesuit music composer and spiritual writer, Roc O’Connor, makes the same point, with the added comment that the grieving process also calls for a long patience within which we need to wait long enough so that the healing can occur according to its own natural rhythms. We need, he says, to embrace our wounded humanity and not act out. What’s helpful, he suggests, is to grieve our human limitations. Then we can endure hunger, emptiness, disappointment and humiliation without looking for a quick fix – or for a fix at all. We should not try to fill our emptiness too quickly without sufficient waiting.
And we won’t ever make peace with our wounds without sufficient grieving.

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

FROM THE HERMITAGE
By sister alies
“Not all who wander are lost.” I’m not sure who said that but it fits well into my life and perhaps yours. Deep in the psyche of each person is a wanderer, someone who travels, someone who is on the move. In our faith-life we also wander, partly as we mature and partly by circumstances bringing us great joy or difficulty!
Pilgrimage, wandering, on the road again is a very ancient image and is certainly formative in our Catholic Christian tradition. The Israelites wandered in the desert for 40 years over terrain taking only 11 days to walk! Monks or prisoners sitting in their cells wander many miles each day as they pray. Francis, Dominic and their mendicants wandered all over meeting the poor, never quite sure how they might make ends meet. Today a great number of sisters and brothers, refugees, wander from place to place, country to country, looking for a place of safety and welcome, a chance to start again.
Having just celebrated the feast of St. Teresa of Avila we might be reminded of other sorts of prayerful wandering … into ‘interior castles,’ ’mansions’ or ‘a palace where God dwells.’
What of repentance as a sort of wandering … since the word reminds us to ‘turn around?’ As we follow a path not set for us, God will intervene in one way or another to suggest that if we continue to go in that direction, things might not work out so well. Angelus Silesius in Cherubinic Wanderer, says on page 47: “Go where you cannot go; see what you cannot see; hear where there is no sound, you are where God does speak.” Mysterious and koan-like. The path of this wanderer would seem to be the exact opposite of what one might think is ‘right.’
Or another example, an anguished path when one is experiencing fear connected to death … how does one keep going and where is that going to? We might say quite easily, when we’re not afraid, that the path leads to heaven and we can by faith, hope it does. This path, sunk deep in our interior, has to be followed carefully and faithfully, looking at Jesus and not the fear. Remember the “devil prowls around …” (1 Peter 5:8).
“Death is our constant companion, and it is death that gives each person’s life its true meaning. But in order to see the real face of our death, we first have to know all of the anxieties and terrors that the simple mention of its name is able to evoke in any human being,” says Paulo Coelho in his book, The Pilgrimage. Imagine the winding path through Gethsemane … the path up to the Cross … the walk toward the tomb. Here is the human experience, an experience of diminishment or of apparent folly.
As the autumn falls around you, look around and see all the winding paths nearby. See the roads or the tiny traces through the under bush. Look for the flight patterns of the raptors or the few hummingbirds still around. As the leaves color and fall, one sees the mighty trees and the little paths into them, as squirrels and other little critters hide their goods for the winter. What have we put aside that will nourish us when our journey becomes difficult? What have we hidden deep in the recesses of our hearts that will help us when all seems lost? What actually matters? What gives meaning to life?
One of the classics that helps remind me of some answers to those questions is in the The Way of a Pilgrim, (translated by H. Nacovcin), a 19th century Russian work. The story is about a young Russian peasant-pilgrim with a deep question in his heart: how does one pray constantly? The text and the one that follows it, The Pilgrim Continues His Way, both challenge one to reflect on just how serious our pilgrimage is. Indeed, he travels a lot, has a spiritual father and discovers some answers. Father Walter Ciszek, S.J. wrote the forward of this edition and says: “The Pilgrim was most receptive to this valuable knowledge about prayer (the Jesus Prayer), for he had earnestly been searching for as method of prayer that would satisfy his longing for uninterrupted communion with God … he spared no effort …”
Here is the real answer … he spared no effort. If we want to discover that deep joy, establish a real faith life, live out of a hope carved in the soil of our hearts…then we must spare no effort. All who wander aren’t lost if the wandering is a search for the Living God … isn’t this the longing of every pilgrims’ heart?

GUEST COLUMN
By Deacon John McGregor
Over the past 50 years, the Catholic Church has placed an extraordinary emphasis on the laity’s role to evangelize their everyday environment. Pope Paul VI in his encyclical, Evangelization in the Modern World, writes that “she [the Church] exists in order to evangelize.” (14) Clearly, the renewal of the missionary impulse can be seen in the documents flowing out of the Second Vatican Council and those subsequent to the Council.
However, lay Catholics often feel inadequately prepared to evangelize and in fact confuse evangelization with certain forms of apologetics, which in fact, may be useful for winning arguments but not very useful in bringing others to Christ. And bringing others to an encounter with the Person of Jesus Christ is precisely the work of evangelization. Still, many lay Catholics, themselves, have never been evangelized, making the work of sharing one’s faith in a pluralistic culture extremely difficult or nearly impossible, especially one that is largely populated by a non-Catholic prevailing religious ethos and an increasing number of secularists. The old saying, “you can’t give what you don’t have” comes to mind.
So, if evangelization is about bringing others to an encounter with the Person of Jesus Christ, then maybe what is needed is a means of inviting others into a neutral environment where they can deeply consider, possibly for the first time, the real meaning of life, the real reason we are here, how to begin anew after all that has happened in their life, and how Christ provides the answer to all of life’s enduring questions.
To this end, of creating a neutral place where a person can honestly ask questions and voice disbelief, all without anyone judging them, our parish at St. Jude Pearl has begun using the Alpha course. Our first Alpha, earlier this year, included about 34 guests, most of whom were members of St. Jude. However, our second Alpha has over 40 guests and more than a dozen are non-parishioners. Additionally, St. Jude is running a Youth Alpha with over 30 young people participating.
Alpha was developed in the 1970s by the Anglican Church as a way to help those who were unchurched or who had simply drifted away from the church to hear the fundamental message of salvation – the kerygma. Alpha has had wide success throughout the world and has been used in over 100 countries, is available in 100 different languages and has been experienced by more than 24 million people. Alpha has found great success in the Catholic Church and is lauded by such renowned Catholic figures as Father Raniero Cantalamessa, the preacher to the papal household, Father Mike Schmitz, who regularly produces podcasts for Ascension press and by many bishops and archbishops in the United States and worldwide.
So Alpha is Catholic and ecumenical, precisely because it focuses on the fundamentals of the Christian faith: God loves you, unconditionally; Jesus is the human manifestation of God; and Jesus’ death and resurrection has reconciled the world to God.
So how does an Alpha work? It begins with a meal, followed by a short video (less than 30 minutes), followed by table discussion and sharing (for about another 45 minutes). There is never any force applied, nor coercion used. Guests attending Alpha are invited to share whatever they think, to be heard without being judged and to be invited to encounter Jesus, where they are, as they are. Alpha can be run in a parish center, at a university meeting room, in someone’s home, almost anywhere. And all of the videos, discussion materials and training materials can be downloaded absolutely free at www.alphausa.org.
Alpha provides a framework and a neutral environment for inviting people to encounter Jesus Christ. Lay Catholics, who feel uncomfortable witnessing to others in their everyday environment may feel a lot more comfortable simply inviting their friends and coworkers to an Alpha. “What’s an Alpha?” they may ask. One can reply, “It’s simply a place where we share a meal, watch a video and discuss life’s most important questions, all in an environment where nobody will judge you or criticize you for your answers.” In this environment, one’s friends or coworkers will have an opportunity to encounter the Person of Jesus Christ and in doing so, we will be actively participating in the Great Commission given by Jesus to the whole Church, “Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations.” (Matthew 28:19)

(Deacon John McGregor of St. Jude Pearl is the director of the permanenat diaconate and director of operations for the Diocese of Jackson.)