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Spiritual Life

New evangelization, fanning the flame

Columns

Saturday, 18 May 2013 03:01

Recently a new expression has made its way into our theological and ecclesial vocabulary. There’s a lot of talk today about the New Evangelization. Indeed the pope has called for a Synod to meet this year for a month in Rome to try to articulate a vision and strategy for such an endeavor.

What is meant by New Evangelization? In simple terms: Millions of people, particularly in the Western world, are Christian in name, come from Christian backgrounds, are familiar with Christianity, believe that they know and understand Christianity, but no longer practice that faith in a meaningful way. They’ve heard of Christ and the Gospel, even though they may be overrating themselves in their belief that they know and understand what these mean. No matter. Whatever their shortcomings in understanding a faith they no longer practice, they believe that they’ve already been evangelized and that their non-practice is an examined decision. Their attitude toward Christianity, in essence, is: I know what it is. I’ve tried it. And it’s not for me!

And so it no longer makes sense to speak of trying to evangelize such persons in the same way as we intend that term when we are speaking of taking the Gospel to someone for the first time. It’s more accurate precisely to speak of a new evangelization, of an attempt to take the Gospel to individuals and to a culture that have already largely been shaped by it, are in a sense over-familiar with it, but haven’t really in fact examined it. The new evangelization tries to take the Gospel to persons who are already Christian but are no longer practicing as Christians.

How to do that? How do we make the Gospel fresh for those for whom it has become stale? How do we, as G. K. Chesterton put it, help people to look at the familiar until it looks unfamiliar again? How do we try to Christianize someone who is already Christian?

There are no simple answers. It’s not as if we haven’t already been trying to do that for more than a generation. Anxious parents have been trying to do this with their children. Anxious pastors have been trying to do that with their parishioners. Anxious bishops have been trying to do that with their dioceses. Anxious spiritual writers, including this one, have been trying to do that with their readership. And an anxious church as a whole has been trying to do that with the world. What more might we be doing?

My own view is that we are in for a long, uphill struggle, one that demands faith in the power and truth of what we believe in and a long, difficult patience. Christ, the faith, and the church will survive. They always do. The stone always eventually rolls away from the tomb and Christ always eventually re-emerges, but we too must do our parts. What are those parts?

The vision we need as we try to reach out to evangelize the already evangelized will, I believe, need to include these principles:

1. We need to clearly name this task, recognize its urgency, and center ourselves in Jesus’ final mandate: Go out to the whole world and make disciples.

2. We need work at trying to re-inflame the romantic imagination of our faith. We have been better recently at fanning the flames of our theological imagination, but we’ve struggled mightily to get people to fall in love with the faith.

3. We need to emphasize both catechesis and theology. We need to focus both on those who are trying to learn the essentials of their faith and those who are trying to make intellectual sense of their faith.

4. We need a multiplicity of approaches. No one approach reaches everyone. People go where they are fed.

5. We need to appeal to the idealism of people, particularly that of the young. We need to win people over by linking the Gospel to all that’s best inside them, to let the beauty of the Gospel speak to the beauty inside of people.

6. We need to evangelize beyond any ideology of the right or the left. We need to move beyond the categories of liberal and conservative to the categories of love, beauty and truth.

7. We need to remain widely “Catholic” in our approach. We are not trying to get people to join some small, lean, purist, sectarian group, but to enter a house with many rooms.

8. We need to preach both the freedom of the Gospel and its call for an adult maturity. We need to resist preaching a Gospel that threatens or belittles, even as we preach a Gospel that asks for free and mature obedience.

9. We need today, in an age of instability and too-frequent betrayal, to give a special witness to fidelity.

10. We need, today more than ever, to bear down on the essentials of respect, charity, and graciousness. Cause never justifies disrespect.

We need to work at winning over hearts, not hardening them.

Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser is president of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, Texas. He can be contacted through his website www.ronrolheiser.com

Loving as Jesus did, beyond naiveté and romance

Columns

Saturday, 18 May 2013 03:01

Several years ago, a Presbyterian minister I know challenged his congregation to open its doors and its heart more fully to the poor. The congregation initially responded with enthusiasm and a number of programs were introduced that actively invited people from the less-privileged economic areas of the city, including a number of street-people, to come their church.

But the romance soon died as coffee cups and other loose items began to disappear, some handbags were stolen, and the church and meeting space were often left messy and soiled. A number of the congregation began to complain and demand an end to the experiment: “This isn’t what we expected! Our church isn’t clean and safe anymore! We wanted to reach out to these people and this is what we get! This is too messy to continue!”

But the minister held his ground, pointing out that their expectations were naïve, that what they were experiencing was precisely part of the cost of reaching out to the poor, and that Jesus assures us that loving is unsafe and messy, not just in reaching out to the poor but in reaching out to anyone.

We like to think of ourselves as gracious and loving, but, the truth be told, that is predicated on an overly-naïve and overly-romanticized notion of love. We don’t really love as Jesus invites us to when he says: Love each other as I have loved you! The tail-end of that sentence contains the challenge: Jesus doesn’t say, love each other according to the spontaneous movements of your heart; nor, love each other as society defines love, but rather: Love each other as I have loved you!

And, for the most part, we haven’t done that:

— We haven’t loved our enemies, nor turned the other cheek and reached out to embrace those who hate us. We haven’t prayed for those who oppose us.

— We haven’t forgiven those who hurt us, nor forgiven those who have murdered our loved ones. We haven’t, in the midst of being hurt, asked God to forgive the very people who are hurting us because they are not really cognizant of what they are doing.

— We haven’t been big-hearted and taken the high-road when we’ve been slighted or ignored, nor at those times have we let understanding and empathy replace bitterness and our desire to withdraw. We haven’t let go of our grudges.

— We haven’t let ourselves be vulnerable to the point of risking humiliation and rejection in our offers of love. We haven’t given up our fear being misunderstood, of not looking good, of not appearing strong and in control. We haven’t set out barefooted, to love without security in our pockets.

— We haven’t opened our hearts enough to imitate Jesus’ universal, non-discriminating embrace, nor have we been able to stretch our hearts to see everyone as brother or sister, regardless of race, color, or religion. We haven’t stopped nursing the silent secret that our own lives and the lives of our loved ones are more precious than those of the rest of the world.

— We haven’t made a preferential option for the poor, haven’t brought the poor to our tables, and haven’t yet abandoned our propensity to be with the attractive and the influential.

— We haven’t sacrificed ourselves fully to the point of losing everything for the sake of others. We haven’t ever really laid down our lives for our friends — nor, especially, for our enemies. We haven’t been willing to die for the very people who oppose us and are trying to crucify us.

— We haven’t loved with pure intention in our hearts, without somehow seeking ourselves within our relationships. We haven’t let our hearts be broken rather than, however subtly, violate someone else.

— We haven’t walked in patience, giving others the full space they need to relate to us according to their own inner dictates. We haven’t been willing to patiently sweat blood in order to be faithful. We haven’t waited in patience, in God’s good-time, for God’s judgment on right and wrong.

— We haven’t resisted our natural urge to judge others, to not impute motives. We haven’t left judgment to God.

— Finally, not least, we haven’t loved and forgiven own selves, knowing that no mistake we make stands between us and God. We haven’t trusted God’s love enough to always begin anew inside of God’s infinite mercy.

— We haven’t loved as Jesus loved.

After his wife, Raissa, died, Jacques Maritain edited a book of her journals. In the preface of that book he describes her struggle with the illness that eventually killed her. Severely debilitated and unable to speak, she struggled mightily in her last days. Her suffering both tested and matured Maritain’s own faith. Mightily sobered by seeing his wife’s sufferings, he wrote: Only two kinds of people think that love is easy: saints, who through long years of self-sacrifice have made a habit of virtue, and naïve persons who don’t know what they’re talking about.

Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser is president of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, Texas. He can be contacted through his website www.ronrolheiser.com

Life and love are precious, on both sides of eternity

Columns

Saturday, 18 May 2013 03:01

When I was 22 years old, a seminarian, I was privileged to have a unique kind of desert experience. I sat with my siblings in a palliative care room for several weeks, watching my father die.

My father was young still, 62, and in good health until being struck with pancreatic cancer. He was a man of faith and he brought that to his final struggle. He wasn’t afraid of God, whom he had served all his life, nor of the afterlife, which his faith assured him was to be joy-filled. Yet he couldn’t let go of life easily, struggling almost bitterly at times to surrender. There was a deep sadness inside him, ultimately more soft than bitter, during his last weeks of life. He didn’t want to die.

But his sadness was not rooted in a fear of death, of God or of the afterlife. His sadness had to do with leaving this world, leaving his wife, his family, his community, his dreams for his retirement years, and with his own enjoyment of life. He was sad at the bitter fact that he was dying while the rest of us and the rest of life were continuing on, without him.

I was reminded of this recently while reading an article in America Magazine by Sidney Callahan within which she shares about her own fear of dying. Here’s the salient part of her text:

But less severe losses also seep into my fear of dying. Intense sadness arises over giving up one’s part in the ongoing drama of one’s daily life and one’s times. The familiar local round and love of one’s own family and people (including my adored dog) strongly bind us to our specific and beautiful world. To have this story interrupted is a painful prospect when we could go on forever. When your life is a blessed Sabbath banquet given by God here and now, leaving your place at the table can be hard — even for a more glorious celebration. In dying we will inevitably be entering into an unimaginable, novel existence, like a fetus being born. Despite the promised wonders in the world to come, I am afraid I identify with the happy, contented fetus in the warm womb who does not want to come out.

Before dismissing this as an immature or less-than-a-holy feeling, we might want to examine Jesus’ own fear of dying. The Gospels present his agony, his “sweating blood,” as a moral drama rather than as a physical one. It’s Jesus in his humanity, as lover, who is sweating his death. The Gospels make this clear. In describing his death they highlight his intense loneliness, his isolation, his being “a stone’s throw away from everyone,” and his feeling of abandonment. The pain he expresses in the Garden isn’t fear about impending physical pain, it’s fear about impending abandonment, about his losing his place at the table, about the moral and emotional isolation of dying, of dying alone, of dying misunderstood, of dying as unanimity-minus-one.

It can be helpful to contemplate this for a number of reasons.

First, a deeper understanding of this can help us recognize and deal more openly with some of our own fears about dying. We need to give ourselves permission to be sad at the thought of death. As well, a deeper understanding of this can help us prepare ourselves for the loneliness we will one day all have to face. As Martin Luther put it: You are going to die alone. You had better believe alone.

Next, a deeper understanding of this can save us from making simplistic judgments about how other people deal with death. Too common is the simplistic belief that if a person has real faith, he or she should be able to let go of life easily and die peacefully. There’s truth in this, but it needs tons of qualification: As Iris Murdoch once wrote: “A common soldier dies without fear, Jesus died afraid!” Jesus, as the account of his death in the Gospel of Mark makes clear, did not go through the death-process, the process of letting go, serenely. He faced his death with faith and courage, but he also faced it with deep sadness, intense struggle, near bitterness, and seeming darkness at the center of his faith. Healthy people, people who love life, find it hard to give up their place at this world’s tables. Small wonder that Jesus struggled!

Finally, a deeper understanding of this can, paradoxically, help us to enter life more deeply. Jesus tells us that we must lose our lives in order to find them. Among other things, this means accepting that one day we will lose our place at this world’s tables. And that acceptance can give us a deeper appreciation for the tables of family, community, and enjoyment that we sit at now in this specific and beautiful world.

Life and love are precious, on both sides of eternity. Our fear of losing our place inside of them is a healthy, holy fear.

Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser is president of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, Texas. He can be contacted through his website www.ronrolheiser.com

Of Nietzsche, Feuerbach, and Dark Nights of the Soul

Columns

Saturday, 18 May 2013 03:01

Few people have ever written as penetrating a critique of faith and religion as have Friedrich Nietzsche and Ludwig Feuerbach. “God is dead,” Nietzsche declared, “and we are his murderers!” And we murder God, he contends, in subtle ways to which we are entirely blind.

In a vast over-simplification, their critique might read as follows: Faith and religion are, in the end, human projections. We believe in God because we need to, pure and simple. We create God to serve our own needs. We need to believe in God because without a belief in God we cannot deal with the pain, brokenness, inadequacy, and limits within our own lives. We lack the vision and the courage to live without a god; thus the opium of faith and religion. God and religion are drugs we create for ourselves to get us through the pain of life and give us hope for something beyond.

But this accusation is not their major challenge. More challenging is their assertion that we create God because we need to rationalize our choices by putting them under a divine cloak. God isn’t just the great opium we ingest to numb our pains and disappointments, God is especially the great rationalization, the great justification, the great sacred permission we need in order to serve ourselves and still be under the illusion that we are serving a higher, sacred cause.

It doesn’t take much looking around to see why they say this. Everywhere, it seems, we are manipulating faith and religion for our own benefit. Someone once quipped that God made us in his own image and likeness and we have never stopped returning the favor. Faith and religion rarely work purely. Invariably some human element is very evident within them.

One only has to look at the role religion has played in history to see overwhelming evidence for this. Today, for example, we see every form of violence being justified in God’s name, most evident of course in extremist Islam, but hardly limited to that. And we see the same thing everywhere within our private histories. All of us tend to somehow manage to have God on our own terms, in ways mostly advantageous to us, and in ways that let us rationalize our decisions and have God and religion give their stamp of approval.

So what’s to be said about all of this? John of the Cross, I suspect, would say that Nietzsche and Feuerbach are 98% correct. Most of the time, we are manipulating God and religion to suit our own needs. But ... and this makes all the difference ... Nietzsche and Feuerbach are 2% wrong and, in that 2%, God can find the space to flow purely into our lives and religion can find the space to mediate God’s presence and truth in purity.

Admittedly, human nature being what it is, we are forever unconsciously trying to fit God to our own needs. We don’t easily or naturally let God put a rope around us and take us where we would rather not go. We want God, religion, and truth, but on our own terms. Church-wise, we have the same proclivity. Churches too find it hard to let God put a rope around them and take them to places where they would rather not go. However at a certain time God puts and end to that by plunging us, individually and sometimes as whole church communities, into what the mystics call a “dark night of a soul”. What is this?

What happens in a “dark night of the soul” is that both our imaginations and our hearts are emptied and dried of all meaningful thoughts and feelings about God. We are driven to our knees in helplessness and find ourselves in a state where all our efforts to capture God in our imaginations and in our feelings are futile. Try as we might, all of our former thoughts, feelings, and securities about God, even our feelings about God’s very existence, are now empty and dry and no longer able to serve us. We are left, at the level of thought and affectivity, feeling like an atheist or an agnostic.

But, as Jurgens Moltmann puts it, our faith begins at the exact point where atheists think it must end, in the taste of nothingness, in emptiness, in darkness, and in the complete powerless to imagine God’s existence or affectively sense God’s presence. In that emptiness and powerlessness, God can finally begin to flow into our lives purely, untainted, unaffected by our own needs, expectations, and imaginative constructs. Our very emptiness, dryness, and imaginative and affective impotence are what render us incapable of manipulating God. We are too weak to taint the inflow of God into our lives. Real faith and real religion begin there.

When we are completely down-and-out in terms of our own faith and religious securities, God can finally begin to mold us in his image and likeness and flow into our lives pure and untainted.

Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser is president of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, Texas. He can be contacted through his website www.ronrolheiser.com

Struggling to understand the pain of suicide

Columns

Saturday, 18 May 2013 03:01

Recently a friend attended the funeral of a man who had taken his own life. At the end of the service the deceased man's brother spoke to the congregation. After highlighting his brother's generosity and sensitivity and sharing some anecdotes that helped celebrate his life he went on to say something about the manner of his death. Here, in effect, are his words:

When someone is stricken with cancer, one of three things can happen: Sometimes doctors can treat the disease and, in essence, cure it. Sometimes the medical professionals cannot cure the disease but can control it enough so that the person suffering from cancer can live with the disease for the rest of his or her life. Sometimes, however, the cancer is of a kind that cannot be treated. All the medicine and treatments in the world are powerless and the person dies.

Certain kinds of emotional depression work the same way: Sometimes they can be treated so that, in effect, the person is cured. Sometimes they cannot ever really be cured, but they can be treated in such a way that the person can live with the disease for his or her whole life. And sometimes, just as with certain kinds of cancer, the disease is untreatable, unstoppable, no intervention by anyone or anything can halt its advance. Eventually it kills the person and there is nothing anyone can do. My brother’s depression was of that kind, the terminal kind.

This can be helpful, I believe, for any of us who have suffered the loss of a loved one to suicide. All death unsettles us, but suicide leaves us with a very particular series of emotional, moral and religious scars. It brings with it an ache, a chaos, a darkness, and a stigma that has to be experienced to be believed. Sometimes we deny it, but it’s always there, irrespective of our religious and moral beliefs. Indeed, as part of its darkness and stigma, suicide not only takes our loved ones away from us, it also takes away our true memory of them. The gift that they brought into our lives is now no longer celebrated. We never again speak with pride about their lives. Their pictures come off the wall, photos of them get buried deep inside drawers that we never open again, their names are less and less mentioned in conversation, and of the manner of their death we rarely speak. Suicide takes our loved ones away from us in more ways than we sometimes admit.

And there is no easy answer for how to reverse that, though a better understanding of suicide can be a start.

Not all suicides are of the same kind. Some suicides come about because the person is too arrogant and too hard-of-heart to want to live in this world. But that, I submit, is the exception not the norm. Most suicides, certainly all the cases that I have known, come about for the opposite reason, namely, the person is too bruised and over-sensitive to have the resiliency needed to continue to cope with life. In these cases, and that is the vast majority of suicides, the cause of death can pretty accurately be termed as cancer, emotional cancer. Just as with physical cancer, the person dying of suicide is taken out of this life against his or her will. Death by suicide is the emotional equivalent of cancer, a stroke or a heart attack. Thus, its patterns are the same as those of cancer, strokes and heart attacks. Death can happen suddenly or it can be the end-product of a long struggle that slowly wears a person down. Either way, it’s involuntary.

As human beings we are neither pure angels nor pure animals, but are always both body and soul, one psycho-somatic whole. And either part can break down.

This can be helpful in understanding suicide, though a better understanding will not necessarily mean that the darkness and stigma that surround it will simply go away. We will still feel many of the same things we felt before in the face of suicide: We will still feel awful. We will still feel conflicted and be given over to guilt-feelings and second-guessing. We will still feel uneasy about how this person died and will still feel a certain dis-ease in talking about the manner of his or her death. We will still feel a certain hesitancy in celebrating that person’s life in the manner we would have had the death been by natural causes. We will still go to our own graves with a black hole in our hearts. The pain of a suicide leaves its own indelible mark on the soul.

But at a different level of understanding something else will break through that will help us better deal with all those conflicted feelings, namely, empathy for and understanding of someone whose emotional immune system has broken down. And that understanding will also bring with it the concomitant consolation that God’s empathy and understanding far exceeds our own.

Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser is president of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, Texas. He can be contacted through his website www.ronrolheiser.com.