Fr. Ron Rolheiser
In Exile
By FR. RON ROLHEISER, omi
A common complaint about the classical Christian teachings on sexuality is that so many of these have been written by vowed celibates, unmarried priests and nuns who do not have sex. The complaint is not that these people (and I am one of them) teach something that is wrong, but that not being married, they invariably tend to over-idealize sex and encase it in unrealistic sacred romance.
No doubt there is some truth to this. But, in fairness, everyone struggles with sexuality. Every religious tradition has its struggles with sexuality and so does every culture.
No self-respecting theologian would say that Christianity or any other religion has made full peace with sexuality; just as no self-respecting analyst would say that there exists in this world a culture that has come to a healthy peace with sexuality. Religion and the world both struggle with sex, just in different ways. Everyone struggles.
RELENTLESS FORCE
This is no accident because sexuality is always partially beyond us, too powerful to always healthily contain. In this life nobody comes to full peace with it. It is too powerful and too wide. It lies at the base of everything, life and non-life alike.
Molecules are sexed, atoms are sexed, all life is sexed, and every human person is sexed in every cell, body and soul. Much of this, of course, is inchoate, dark, a longing and an aching without an explicit focus, though from puberty onwards it also has a focus and deeply colours every person’s consciousness.
Ironically it is on this point, the failure to take the centrality of sexuality seriously enough, where liberals and conservatives concur, conservatives by denying that centrality and liberals by trivializing it. Both tend to be naïve, just in different ways.
SEXUALITY‘S DICHOTOMY
Moreover, beyond the sheer, brute power of sexuality there is still its complexity. Sexuality is both the most creative and the most destructive force on the planet. It is a great force, not just for heroic love, life and blessing, but also for the worst hate, death and destruction imaginable. It is responsible for most ecstasies on the planet, but also for a lot of murders and suicides.
When healthy, it helps glue personalities together; when unhealthy, it works at disintegrating personalities. It can unite families and communities and it can also destroy them. It is a unique power to mellow the heart and produce gratitude even as it has equal power to make the heart bitter and jealous.
It is the best of all fires and the most dangerous of all fires.
This paradox is what lies at the root of so many of the tensions that surround any discussion on sex. On any given day, which aspect of sexuality should be emphasized, purity or passion, its goodness or its dangers, its power to trigger ecstasy or its power to produce murder, its sacramental power to unite or its chaotic power to divide?
CARELESS REGARD
Because these questions are not easy to answer, what we often see are two opposing tendencies: the temptation to over-idealize and the temptation to trivialize, the temptation to be too fearful and the temptation to be too casual, the temptation to be unhealthily frigid and the temptation to be unhealthily irresponsible.
We rarely get it right. Invariably the symbolic hedge is too high or too low.
How to we find a balance? Not easily. But, as with all complex issues, a good starting point is the refusal to compromise either of its paradoxical poles, to sell out any of its truths, no matter how apparently contradictory.
So its goodness must always be affirmed even as its dangers are highlighted. Its holy, sacred character should always be taught even as its earthiness should never be denigrated.
We must be clear that it is meant to be sacrament even as it is meant to be playful, that it is meant to bring children into this world even as it is meant to express love, that it is meant to be healthily enjoyed even as it needs to be carefully guarded, and that it is not something before which we should stand in unhealthy fear even as we surround it with enough taboos to properly safeguard its meaning and our own emotional safety.
Sexuality might be compared to a high-voltage electrical wire. The 50,000 volts inside of that wire can bring light and heat to a building, but there are two risks: First, we may be so afraid of its dangers that we never connect our house to it. We then deprive ourselves of its light and heat.
The second danger is the opposite: This powerful energy is safe only if its raw power is channeled through the right transformers and safely encased in proper insulation, otherwise we risk a deadly fire, inside the house and inside the psyche.
Conservatives tend to struggle with the first danger, liberals with the latter.
Like Jesus, we are known by the spirit we leave behind
In Exile
By FR. RON ROLHEISER, omi
There is a statement, generally attributed to G.K. Chesterton, which runs something like this: Catholicism is the most hated of all religions, that’s why I know that it’s the right one. That’s an intriguing comment, but it needs a lot of qualification.
In our present world, extremist Islam (not to be identified with mainstream Islam) is probably the most hated of all religions. But is that a criterion of authenticity?
Hatred is not all of one piece. We hate for different reasons. Moreover, hatred, as we know, is not the opposite of love. Indifference is. Hatred is love gone sour, love grown jealous. We can only hate someone whom we love.
WHY WAS JESUS HATED?
Jesus was hated and was the object of bitter jealousy. He was crucified because of that. But why was he hated? Why were people jealous of him?
Jesus was hated because of his inclusivity, because of the indiscriminate, seemingly careless, character of his embrace. He reached out and embraced sinners and those deemed unworthy and he cleansed the Temple in a way that was meant to show that people no longer had to go through the established intermediaries to get to God. He made God and his love as accessible as the nearest water tap and took control of that away from the established political, social, and religious authorities.
He was hated because he challenged the normal exclusivities that surround God and religion.
And people were jealous of him because of his goodness, because of his virtue, because he radiated the kind of love that, paradoxically but invariably, spawns envy and jealousy until the person carrying it has either died or been killed.
They were jealous of Jesus because he was good and could find it in his heart to love everyone.
Extremist Islam is hated for mostly the opposite reasons. It is hated for its exclusivity, for the narrow character of its embrace, for the rigid boundaries it sets around God and religion, and for the seeming ease with which, in God’s name, it can bracket love, goodness and human compassion in favour of violence and lack of mercy.
Like Jesus, it is hated — but for different reasons.
So we must be careful not to uncritically lean on Chesterton’s little axiom when we find ourselves hated or the object of jealousy, especially if we are hated because of our religion or our moral stance on some issue.
Saints are often hated, but so too are dictators and mean-spirited people. But saints are hated in a different way than are dictators, just as authentic religion is hated in a different way than is false religion.
The hatred directed at a saint is real, real enough sometimes to lead to murder and crucifixion, as it did in Jesus’ case and in the case of many martyrs. But once the object of that hatred has died or been killed, once the hatred has had its cathartic release, the spirit that flows out of the person who was once hated often changes the hearts of the very persons who did the crucifixion — they looked upon the one whom they had pierced.
This happened after Jesus’ death and it happens in less dramatic ways in our own lives.
Have you ever had the experience of knowing a person who for all kinds of reasons irritated you and triggered a certain inchoate mix of irritation, frustration, hate and envy inside of you which you had difficulty both in describing and accepting; then, after that person dies, in the light of her going away, the irritation, hate and envy wash clean and you are left with a clear sense of the goodness and integrity of her life, along with a certain sorrow and regret about how you reacted to her during her life? Your hatred and envy have turned into respect and you realize you are a better person for having known this person you once hated.
THE HOLY SPIRIT
After the death of every person, we receive his or her spirit in a way that was not possible before he or she died. This was true too of Jesus and that is why he tells us that he must first go away before he can send the Holy Spirit.
Only after Jesus died did his followers understand fully who he was — as did some of the people who crucified him. The spirit that we receive after the death of someone clarifies the quality of his or her life in a way that we were never able to perceive before he or she died, when for every kind of reason, we reacted to him or her with admiration or irritation, graciousness or frustration, love or hatred, or various combinations of all of these.
It’s the same with the resistance and hatred that people sometimes feel towards us as they look at our religious and moral lives. Their feeling towards us, hatred or admiration, doesn’t determine whether we are good or bad, saint or fanatic.
Only the spirit we leave behind will eventually determine that.
Self doubts must be slain before we reach the Promised Land
In Exile
By FR. RON ROLHEISER, omi
At the heart of our faith lies the deep truth that we are unconditionally loved by God. We believe that God looks down on our lives and says: “You are my beloved child, in you I take delight!” We do not doubt the truth of that, we just find it impossible to believe.
Some years ago, at a workshop, a woman came up to me during the break and articulated this in these words: “God loves me unconditionally. I know that’s true, but how can I make myself believe it? I simply can’t!”
She could have been speaking for half of the human race. We know we are loved by God — we can say the words, but how do we make ourselves believe that?
Why? Why is that so difficult to believe?
SUCCESS EQUALS LOVE
For many reasons, though mostly because (unless we are extraordinarily blessed) we rarely, if ever, experience unconditional love. Mostly we experience love with conditions, even from those closest to us: Our parents love us better when we do not mess up. Our teachers love us better when we behave and perform well.
Our churches love us better when we do not sin. Friends love us better when we are successful and not needy. The world loves us better when we are attractive. Our spouses love us better when we do not disappoint them. Mostly, in this world, we have to measure up in some way to be loved.
Moreover, many of us too have been wounded by supposed expressions of love that were not love at all but were instead expressions of self-serving manipulation, exploitation or even positive abuse.
Beyond even this, all of us have been cursed and shamed in our enthusiasm by the countless times someone, either through words or through a hateful or judgmental glance, in effect said to us: “Who do you think you are?” We wither under that and become the walking wounded, unable to believe that we are loved and lovable. So, even when we know that God loves us, how can we make ourselves believe it?
THE CHILD OF GOD
At one level, we do believe it. Deep down, below our wounded parts, the child of God that still inhabits the recesses of our soul knows that it is made in God’s image and likeness and is special, beautiful and lovable.
That is why we so easily become angry and enraged whenever someone violates our dignity or puts us down.
But how do we make ourselves believe that we are unconditionally loved in a way that would make us less insecure in our attitude and our actions? How do we live in a surer confidence that we are unconditionally loved so as to let that radiate in the way we treat others and ourselves?
There are no easy answers. For a wounded soul, like for a wounded body, there are no magic wands for quick easy healings.
IT’S AN ARCHETYPE
Biblically, however, there is an image that, while confusing on the surface, addresses this: When God gives Joshua instructions on how to move into the Promised Land he tells him that, once there, he must “kill” everything there, all the men, women, children and even the animals.
Taken literally, this text is horrible and speaks about everything that God is not. But this is not a literal text but an archetypal one. It is an image, a metaphor.
I suspect that someone in an Alcoholics Anonymous program will more easily get its message: Killing all the inhabitants of Canaan means precisely giving away all the bottles in your liquor cabinet — the scotch, the wine, the cognac, the gin, the beer, the vodka and everything else that’s there.
You can’t take the Promised Land and still keep a few “Canaanites” on the side or you will soon lose the Promised Land.
TRUE SELF-IMAGE
That image also tells us what we must do to enter our true self-image, the deep truth that God loves us unconditionally. In great mythical literature we see that usually before the great wedding where the young prince and the young princess are to be married so as to live happily ever after, there first has to be an execution, the wicked older brothers and the wicked stepsisters have to be killed off.
Why? Because they would eventually come and spoil the wedding.
Who are those wicked older brothers and wicked stepsisters? They are not different people from the young prince or princess getting married. They are their older incarnations.
They are also inside of us. They are the inner voices from our past that can, at any given moment, ruin our wedding or our self-image by dragging in our past humiliations and saying: “Who do you think you are? Do you really think that you can marry a prince or princess? Do you really think that you’re lovable? We know you, we know your past, so don’t delude yourself.”
To actually believe that we are unconditionally loved, we first have to kill a few “Canaanites.”
The Eucharist's healing embrace dissolves loneliness
In Exile
By FR. RON ROLHEISER, omi
There are different kinds of loneliness and different kinds of intimacy. We ache in many places.
When I was a young priest, newly ordained and barely beyond the loneliness of adolescence, certain words at the Eucharist touched me deeply. I was young and lonely and words about being drawn together inside one body and one spirit would incite feelings in me to do with my own loneliness.
To become one body in Christ triggered, in me, an image of an embrace that would put an end to my personal loneliness, my endless aching and my sexual separateness. Unity in Christ, as I fantasized it then, meant overcoming my own loneliness.
That is a valid understanding. The Eucharist is an embrace meant to take away personal loneliness, but, as we get older, a deeper kind of loneliness can and should begin to obsess us. This deeper loneliness makes us aware how torn and divided is our world and everything and everyone in it. There is a global loneliness that dwarfs private pain.
A FRACTURED WORLD
How separate and divided is our world! We look around us, watch the world news, watch the local news, look at our places of work, our social circles and even our churches, and we see tension and division everywhere. We are far from being one body and one spirit.
So many things, it seems, work to divide us: history, circumstance, background, temperament, ideology, geography, creed, colour and gender. Then there are our personal wounds, jealousies, self-interest and sin. The world, like a lonely adolescent, aches too in its separateness. We live in a world deeply, deeply divided.
The older I get, the more I despair that there can be a simple solution, or perhaps even a human solution at all, to our divisions. Life slowly teaches us that it is naive to believe that all we need is simple optimism, good will and an unfailing belief that love will conquer.
FACADE OF LOVE
Love can and will conquer, but it doesn’t happen like in a Hollywood picture, where two people who really have no business ever being together fall in love and despite having nothing in common, despite being deeply wounded, despite being immature and selfish, and despite having no shared faith or values, are able to rise above all their differences to sustained embrace and ecstasy, simply because love conquers all.
At a certain point, we know that real life doesn’t work like that, unless we die in that initial embrace, as did Romeo and Juliet. Our differences eventually have their say, both inside of our personal relationships and inside the relationships between countries, cultures, ethnic groups and religions. At a certain point our differences, like a cancer that cannot be stopped, begin to make themselves felt and we feel helpless to overcome that.
CRY FOR HELP
But this isn’t despair. It’s health. As anyone who has ever fought an addiction knows, the beginning of a return to health lies in the admission of helplessness. It’s only when we admit that we can’t help ourselves that we can be helped.
We see in the Gospels where so many times, immediately after finally grasping a teaching of Jesus, the apostles react with the words: “If that’s true, then it’s impossible for us, then there’s nothing we can do.” Jesus welcomes that response (because in that admission we open ourselves to help) and replies: “It is impossible for you, but nothing is impossible for God.”
Our prayers for unity and intimacy become effective precisely when they issue from this feeling of helplessness, when we ask God to do something for us that we have despaired of doing for ourselves.
We see an example of this in Quaker communities when people gather and simply sit with each other in silence, asking God to do for them what they cannot do for themselves, namely, give themselves harmony and unity. The silence is an admission of helplessness, of having given up on the naïve notion that we, as human beings, will ever finally find the right words and the right actions to bring about a unity that has forever evaded us.
The Eucharist is such a prayer of helplessness, a prayer for God to give us a unity we cannot give to ourselves. It is not incidental that Jesus instituted it in the hour of his most intense loneliness, when he realized that all the words he had spoken hadn’t been enough and that he had no more words to give. When he felt most helpless, he gave us the prayer of helplessness, the Eucharist.
Our generation, like every generation before it, senses its helplessness and intuits its need for a messiah from beyond. We cannot heal ourselves and we cannot find the key to overcome our wounds and divisions all on our own. So we must turn our helplessness into a Quaker-silence, a Eucharistic prayer, that asks God to come and do for us what we cannot do for ourselves, namely, create community.
And we must go to Eucharist for this same reason.
Faith means staying around when times are tough
In Exile
FR. RON ROLHEISER, omi
After the funeral of Martin Luther King, one of the newsmen covering the event stopped to talk to an old man standing at the edge of the cemetery. The reporter asked him: “What did this man mean to you? Why was he special to you?”
The old man, through tears, answered simply: “He was a great man because he was faithful. He believed in us when we had stopped believing in ourselves, he stayed with us even when we weren’t worth staying with.”
That is a testimony to a life well lived. If, at your funeral, someone says that of you, then you have lived your life well, even if there had been many times in your life when things weren’t going well. What this old man defines so accurately in his testimony to Martin Luther King is what faith means. To be full of faith means precisely to be faithful. That is more than a play on words.
In the end, faith is not simply the good, secure feeling that God exists.
Faith is a commitment to a way of living beyond good and secure feelings. To have faith means to sometimes live our lives independent of whatever feelings may come. Ultimately, faith is not in the head or the heart, but in the action of a sustained commitment. Faith is fidelity, nothing more but nothing less.
PROMISE OF FIDELITY
And, perhaps more than anything else, that gift is what is needed today in our families, in our churches and in our world in general. The greatest gift we can give to those around us is the promise of fidelity, the simple promise to stay around, to not leave when things get difficult, to not walk away because we feel disappointed or hurt, to stay even when we don’t feel wanted or valued, to stay even when our personalities and visions clash, to stay through thick and thin.
Too often what happens is that, in our commitments, we subtly blackmail each other: We commit ourselves inside of family, Church, community and friendship but with the unspoken condition — I will stay with you as long as you don’t seriously disappointment or hurt me. But if you do, I will move on.
No family, friendship, Church or community can survive on this premise because it is simply impossible to live or work with each other for any length of time without seriously disappointing and hurting each other.
Inside of any relationship — marriage, family, friendship, church community or even a collegial relationship at a workplace — we can never promise that we won’t disappoint others, that we won’t ever mess up, that our personalities won’t clash, or that we won’t sometimes hurt others through insensitivity, selfishness and weakness. We can’t promise that we will always be good. We can only promise that we will always be there.
In the end, that promise is enough because if we stay and don’t blackmail each other by walking away when there is disappointment and hurt, then the disappointments and the hurts can be worked through and redeemed by a faith and love that stay for the long haul. When there is fidelity in a relationship, eventually the hurts and misunderstandings wash clean and even bitterness turns to love.
Many is the man or woman who, on celebrating the anniversary of a marriage or the commitment to religious life, priesthood, friendship or work at a certain job, looks back and no longer feels the countless hurts, rejections, misunderstandings and bitter moments, that were also part of that journey. These are washed clean by something deeper that has grown up because of fidelity, namely trust and respect.
UNDERSTANDING AND RESPECT
You sometimes see this, wonderfully, in the mutual, begrudging respect that eventually develops between two people who, while both sincere and committed, are for years at odds because of differences in personality, politics, religion or history. The simple fact of having to deal with each other over many years eventually leads to a rich understanding and a respect beyond differences.
This also holds true for prayer. All the great spiritual writers give only one ultimate rule for prayer and that rule has nothing to do with method, style or content. It is simply this: Show up! Don’t ever give up. Don’t ever stop going to prayer. As long as you persevere in going to prayer, eventually God will break through. Don’t ever stop trying. That’s true for all of our relationships.
The greatest gift that we have to give is the promise of fidelity, the promise that we will keep trying, that we won’t walk away simply because we got hurt or because we felt unwanted or not properly valued.
We are all weak, wounded, sinful and easily hurt. Inside of our marriages, families, churches, friendships and places of work, we cannot promise that we won’t disappoint each other and, worse still, that we won’t hurt each other.
But we can promise that we won’t walk away because of disappointment and hurt. That’s all we can promise — and that’s enough.
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