IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI

Sometimes we are the most helpful and life-giving at the very times when we are most helpless. We’ve all been there. We’re at a funeral and there’s nothing to say that will ease the heartache of someone who has lost a loved one. We feel awkward and helpless. We’d like to say or do something, but there’s nothing to be said or done, other than to be there, embrace the one nursing the grief and share our helplessness. Passing strange, but it is our very helplessness that’s most helpful and generative in that situation. Our passivity is more fruitful and generative than if we were doing something.

We see an example of this in Jesus. He gave both his life and his death for us – but in separate moments. He gave his life for us through his activity and his death for us through his passivity, that is, through what he absorbed in helplessness. Indeed, we can divide each of the Gospels into two clear parts. Up until his arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus is the active one: he teaches, he heals, he performs miracles, he feeds people. Then, after he is arrested, he doesn’t do anything: he is handcuffed, led away, put on trial, scourged and crucified. Yet, and this is the mystery, we believe that he gave us more during that time when he couldn’t do anything than during all those times he was active. We are saved more through his passivity and helplessness than through his powerful actions during his ministry. How does this work? How can helplessness and passivity be so generative?

Partly this is mystery, though partly we grasp some of it through experience. For example, a loving mother dying in hospice, in a coma, unable to speak, can sometimes in that condition change the hearts of her children more powerfully than she ever could during all the years when she did so much for them. What’s the logic here? By what metaphysics does this work?

Let me begin abstractly and circle this question before venturing to an answer. The atheistic thinkers of the Enlightenment (Nietzsche, Feuerbach, Marx and others) offer a very powerful critique of religion and of religious experience. In their view, all religious experience is simply subjective projection, nothing more. For them, in our faith and religious practices, we are forever creating a god in our own image and likeness, to serve our self-interest. (The very antithesis of what Christians believe.) For Nietzsche, for instance, there is no divine revelation coming from outside us, no God in heaven revealing divine truth to us. Everything is us, projecting our needs and creating a god to serve those needs. All religion is self-serving, human projection.

How true is this? One of the most influential professors I’ve studied under, Jesuit Michael Buckley, says this in face of that criticism: These thinkers are 90% correct. But they’re 10% wrong – and that 10% makes all the difference.

Buckley made this comment while teaching what John of the Cross calls a dark night of the soul. What is a dark night of the soul? It’s an experience where we can no longer sense God imaginatively or feel God affectively, when the very sense of God’s existence dries up inside us and we are left in an agnostic darkness, helpless (in head, heart and gut) to conjure up any sense of God.

However, (and this is the point, precisely because we are helpless and unable to conjure up any imaginative concepts or affective feelings about God) God can now flow into us purely, without us being able to color or contaminate that experience. When all our efforts are useless, grace can finally take over and flow into us in purity. Indeed, that’s how all authentic revelation enters our world. When human helplessness renders us incapable of making God serve our self-interest, God can then flow into our lives without contamination.

Now, this is also true for human love. So much of our love for each other, no matter our sincerity, is colored by self-interest and is at some point self-serving. In some fashion, we inevitably form those we love into our own image and likeness. However, as is the case with Buckley’s critique of the atheistic thinkers of the Enlightenment, this isn’t always the case. There are certain situations when we can’t in any way taint love and make it self-serving. What are those situations? Precisely those in which find we ourselves completely helpless, mute, stammering, unable to say or do anything that’s helpful. In these particular “dark nights of the soul,” when we are completely helpless to shape the experience, love and grace can flow in purely and powerfully.

In his classic work The Divine Milieu, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin challenges us to help others both through our activity and through our passivity. He’s right. We can be generative through what we actively do for others, and we can be particularly generative when we stand passively with them in helplessness.

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

Senior Standing
By Lisa M. Hendey

“Waiting has never been my strong suit. I tend to associate long waits with a childhood tradition that I’m certain my mother invented. Each Christmas when I was young, Leroy and Bessie, Mom’s parents, would make the annual drive from their home in Fort Wayne, Indiana to ours in Westminster, California. We always knew the day of their scheduled arrival. But in those pre-GPS, non-cell-phone-toting days, we had no idea of the exact hour.

Sometime after breakfast, Mom would send my younger siblings and me to the front yard where we would dutifully “wait for Grandma and Grandpa” on the street curb. In retrospect, I realize it’s likely that Mom knew better, and that we were only out there for a matter of minutes, but to me, the wait felt endless.

But that first sight of my grandparents as they stepped out of their car was well worth the wait on that hard curb. Perhaps the unknown of their arrival time, those hours of anticipation, made the payoff all the greater when we wrapped them in hugs and kisses. Now, as a grandmother myself, I can relate to how they must have felt.

“Are we almost there?” Grandma Bessie must certainly have asked Leroy. For she was waiting too.
I experience a similar impatience each year when the violet, rose and green hues of our family’s Advent wreath emerge from my Christmas bins. Those wreaths and their candles, and our daily devotionals, help us to mark the days until the Nativity of Our Lord. But it seems the more I age, the more childlike and impatient I become for the “big day” to be upon us.

Catholics celebrate liturgical seasons rather than singular days for a reason, though, and so this year, I have decided to focus on lingering in the waiting – sacrificing my own excitement as I try to make my anticipation something holy.

If we are living Advent mindfully, we are preparing our hearts and minds for something even more remarkable than Christ’s birth: his second coming in salvation. Advent, at its best, can be for us a time of intense spiritual training – to make straight our paths toward our ultimate goal: an eternity in God’s presence.

I realize that sanctifying the waiting does not simply happen as I slide open the doors on my glitter-gilded calendar. This year, I hope to be doing all of my usual Advent-y things. I’ll light the candles and send out the cards. I’ll seek the perfect gifts and ponder over the O Antiphons. I’ll bake the cookies and will probably burn a few of them.

But I hope to approach my waiting – especially for those waits that challenge me so greatly – with greater intentionality, and here is how. Sometimes the waiting keeps us looking for resolution. We may have experienced the loss of a job, the further explanation of a pending diagnosis, or the outcome of a hoped-for plan or dream. When that happens, we understandably focus on the state of our incompleteness. In our crises of confidence, may we remember to pray for a greater acceptance of God’s perfect will for our lives.

Some of us await reconciliation. We may deeply feel the loss of relationships with loved ones that have dimmed or grown dark completely. As the world around us plays out various Hallmark moments of family gatherings, we lament the empty seat at our holiday table. In the absence of our loved one’s physical presence, may we remember to pray unceasingly for their well-being.

Some of us await peace. We may be overwhelmed by despair at the profound divides in our world that seem to further separate us with each passing day. Embroiled in our own traumas and those of nations around us, we may lose sight of hope. As we tune into the daily news (and the state of our own souls), may we remember in our waiting to invoke the lasting love of the Christ Child, our Prince of perfect peace.

(Lisa M. Hendey is the founder of CatholicMom.com, a bestselling author and an international speaker. “Senior Standing” appears monthly at OSV News)