IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
Simone Weil once commented that it’s not enough today to be merely a saint; rather “we must have the saintliness demanded by the present moment.”
She’s surely right on that second premise; we need saints whose virtues speak to the times.
What kind of saint is needed today? Someone who can show us how we can actually forgive an enemy? Someone who can help us come together across the bitter divide within our communities and churches? Someone who can show us how to reach out to the poor? Someone who can teach us how to actually pray? Someone who can show us how to find “Sabbath” inside the bombardment of ten thousand television channels, a million blogs and a billion tweets? Someone who can show us how to sustain our childhood faith amidst the sophistication, complexity and agnosticism of our adult lives? Someone who, like Jesus, can go into singles’ bars and not sin? Someone who radiates a full-bodied humanity, even as he or she is, by faith, set apart? Someone who’s a mystic, but with a robust sense of humor? Someone who can be both chaste and healthily sexual at the same time?
The list could go on. We’re in pioneer territory. The saints of old didn’t face our issues. They had their own demons to conquer and aren’t rolling over in their graves, shaking their fingers in disgust at us in our struggles and infidelities. They know the struggle, know that ours is new territory with new demons to conquer and new virtues asked for. The saints of old remain, of course, as essential templates of Christian discipleship, living gospels, but they walked in different times.
So what kind of saints do we need today?
We need saints who can honor the goodness of the world, even as they honor God. We need women and men who can show us how to walk with a living faith inside a culture which believes that world here is enough and that the issues of God and the next life are peripheral. We need saints who can walk with a steady, adult faith in the face of the world’s sophistication, its pathological restlessness, its over-stimulated grandiosity, its numbing distractions and its overpowering temptations. We need saints who can empathize with those who have drifted away from the church, even as they themselves, without compromise, hold their own moral and religious ground. We need young saints who can romantically re-enflame the religious imagination of the world, as once did Francis and Clare. And we need old saints, who have walked the gamut and can show us how to meet all the challenges of today and yet retain our childhood faith.
As well, we need what Sarah Coakley calls “erotic saints,” women and men who can bring chastity and eros together in a way that speaks of the importance of both. We need saints who can model for us the goodness of sexuality, who can delight in its human joys and honor its God-given place within the spiritual journey, even as they never denigrate it by setting it against spirituality or cheapen it by making it simply another form of recreation.
Then too we need saints today who can, with compassion, help us to see our blind complicity with systems of all kinds which victimize the vulnerable in order to safeguard our own comfort, security and historical privilege. We need saints who can speak prophetically for the poor, for the environment, for women, for refugees, for those with inadequate access to medical care and education and for all who are stigmatized because of race, color or creed. We need saints, lonely prophets, who can stand as unanimity-minus one, who can wage peace and who can point our eyes to a reality beyond our own shortsightedness.
And these saints need not be formally canonized; their lives need simply be lamps for our eyes and leaven for our lives. I don’t know who your present-day saints are, but I find have found mine among a very wide range of persons, old, young, Catholic, Protestant, Evangelical, liberal, conservative, religious, lay, clerical, secular, faith-filled and agnostic. Full disclosure, the names I mention here are not persons whose lives I know in any detail. Mostly, I know what they’ve written, but their writings are a lamp which lights my path.
Among those of my own generation, I’m indebted to are Raymond E. Brown, Charles Taylor, Daniel Berrigan, Jean Vanier, Mary Jo Leddy, Henri Nouwen, Thomas Keating, Jim Wallis, Richard Rohr, Elizabeth Johnson, Parker Palmer, Barbara Brown Taylor, Wendy Wright, Gerhard Lohfink, Kathleen Dowling Singh, Jim Forest, John Shea, James Hillman, Thomas Moore and Marilynne Robinson.
Among the younger voices whose lives and writings speak as well to a generation younger than mine, I would mention Shane Claiborne, Rachel Held Evans, James Martin, Kerry Weber, Trevor Herriot, Macy Halford, Robert Barron, Bryan Stevenson, Robert Ellsberg, Bieke Vandekerckhove and Annie Riggs.
Maybe these aren’t your saints, fair enough. So lean on those who help light your path.

(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX.)

ON ORDINARY TIMES
By Lucia A. Silecchia

Late July brings one of my favorite celebrations in the Church year: the July 26 Memorial of Saints Ann and Joachim, the parents of Mary, the Mother of God.

I had some early biases toward this feast. I grew up in a New York parish named for St. Ann. My parents gave me that moniker for my middle name when I was baptized and I took it again when I was confirmed. My family always celebrated our patron saints’ feast days and I was competitively (but uncharitably) pleased that I had two celebrations rather than one because I was the only one of my siblings to be baptized with a middle name.

However, what I liked the most about this celebration was the thought that Christ – God Himself – had grandparents. I remember my own grandparents with much love and joy. These elders of my family were my roots, my heritage and a cherished center of my early life.

Most pictures I see of St. Ann (and the oft-neglected St. Joachim) show her, or them, in their role as parents to Mary. They are often depicted teaching Mary to read, celebrating her presentation or witnessing her wedding. Occasionally, they are added to portraits of the Holy Family, gazing with love and awe from the corner of a painting of their daughter and her family.

Yet, I also like to think of them as the grandparents of God. I wonder whether, in that extraordinary role, they experienced any ordinary times.

When Mary and Joseph were planning to marry, did her parents eagerly anticipate becoming grandparents, as do so many parents-of-the-bride? When Mary told them of the Annunciation, how much did they understand? Was their joy about their grandson mixed with fear? Did they worry, as parents do, when their pregnant daughter traveled to visit her cousin Elizabeth in the “hill country of Judea” or accompany Joseph to Bethlehem while carrying their grandson in her womb? Did they visit their infant grandson at His birth or His presentation and give their daughter, a new mother, advice on caring for Him? Did they ever watch Him play as a toddler and hear His first words or see His first steps? Did they ever make a special food He liked as a treat or tuck Him into bed at night? In those “hidden” years of Christ’s youth, did they watch Him grow in strength and knowledge? Did they ever have the chance to tell Him childhood stories of His mother’s life as a young girl? Did they speak of Him to their friends and pray for Him when they worshipped at the temple?

Were they still living when their daughter feared for her lost 12-year old and rejoiced when He was found? Was their grandson their final thought and last joy when, after their holy lives, they closed their eyes on this world? I will never know. But I do know the importance of grandparents. As parents to our parents, they shape the lives of those who most shape our own. They are so often the link to a distant time, a foreign land and a different life. They are the elders who guard the heritage of a family and who, so often, hold it together in difficult times. When Pope Francis visited Philadelphia in 2015, he said, “Grandparents are a family’s memory. They are the ones who gave us the faith, they passed the faith on to us.”

I am so grateful for the inheritance of faith and memories I received from my own grandparents. I am also so grateful that in the extraordinary way in which Christ dwelt among us, he had the gift of grandparents – one of the greatest blessings of ordinary times.

(Lucia A. Silecchia is a Professor Law at the Catholic University of America. “On Ordinary Times” is a biweekly column reflecting on the ways to find the sacred in the simple. Email her at silecchia@cua.edu.)

FROM THE HERMITAGE
By Sister alies therese
Many of you will be going on retreat, vacation or an adventure this summer and might wonder how to overcome being overwhelmed . . . especially if your normal routine includes a lot of silence. Or it might be the other way around . . . what to do with too much silence?
Have you ever considered artistically representing your Lectio Divina, spiritual reading or even your prayer?
Take some reflection time and pull out a sketchbook, maybe some markers and a good permanent micro-fine pen. Or maybe you’d prefer watercolors or pencils . . . whatever works for you. Even the pasting of pictures or words from magazines; gluing and taping that ‘psalm’ or reading into a new format. The very fact that you have deepened your focus, away from yourself and away from external noise, supports the silence within and the joy that follows.
As a doodler/artist I find that this discipline frees my heart. I love color. I love to explore lines this way and that way, much like the life we live, both in the known and unknown. For many, many years, I have done at least one page every day as a part of my first morning prayer. Over the years this has taken the form of different sizes, colors, places, styles of handwriting and printing . . . even becoming a lefty after breaking my shoulder! I ask myself one quick question while reflecting: what might this look like? . . . and then I proceed to be surprised. Sometimes the page is my all-time favorite. Other times it seems like random scribbles and not very appealing artistically (a bit like life). Other times I discover the wealth of simplicity in the art and I am full of a secret laughter.
You probably know this: there is the silence of solitude and that it is an ancient tradition. One can be silent, not just not speaking, but actually filled with silence, in a crowded room, among many folks bustling about, in the car going here or there . . . in the presence of great natural beauty. No, not always external silence, but the discipline of inner silence carved out over years of practice so that when one is in unfamiliar or challenging situation, silence, the resting place, can be entered into. Laughter often emerges and we won’t miss God’s voice.
Most people do not live in solitude. Some people try to convince themselves they are living such a life when they are really living an ego-filled life that distorts both silence and solitude. A silence or solitude turned in upon itself is closed. God is about openness!
“Despite their dullness and apathy,” the Carthusians tell us, “The children of the promise paid heed to Moses and set out for the desert of Sinai. For 40 years, obedience kept them marching through the desert toward a promise land whose blessings remained elusive.” As will yours, I suspect. If we avoid the grumbling and offer that moment of suffering, so that our hearts might be transformed. What might that look like?
When you meet your ‘false self’ as you journey, or find disgust and resentments, well, these are wonderful to add to your book of sketches . . . as if they were snapshots of a moment where everything is crushed and not full of peace or harmony. Though our hearts are challenged to shout and scream, to weep and moan. We have the opportunity to enter ever more deeply and explore the truth of waiting. Waiting for God to be our silence, for God to be our solitude? No! We enter into God’s silence and God’s solitude, so that we might be nourished and set free. It is not about us. This is always the great and blest discovery . . . it really is all about God.
Also, from the Carthusian Miscellany, The Wound of Love, we find this: “True solitude . . . must trace its way back to its source. It is not obedience to an external law, nor a flight from others, nor a world closed in upon itself, but an encounter with the living God. Solitude is a gratuitous gift, destined to be received in all humility; it is not our own creation, nor that of anyone else. It does not consist in doing anything, nor in trying to become somebody: it is sharing in the solitude of God.”
Don’t forget that notebook when you go visit granny or find yourself alone on a mountain. Explore the riches of your inner artist and allow yourself the pleasure of discovery. Remember you never have to show anyone, nor speak of the adventure. What God is inviting you into is a wonderful feast of relationship, color and design, that lights up your deepening heart where God, the best artist of all, dwells!

(Sister alies therese is a vowed Catholic solitary who lives an eremitical life. Her days are formed around prayer, art and writing. She lives and writes in Mississippi.)