RonRolheiser,OMI

When Are We Home?

August 24, 2026

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More than anything else, we long for home. Our deep ache for intimacy, security, and comfort is, in the end, a longing for home, nothing more. We are forever restlessly searching for someone or something to take us home.

But what is home? A family? A house? A city? A country? A lover? A language? An ethnic group?

Home transcends all of these. We can find a home in many different families, houses, cities, countries, ethnic groups, and languages, and we can be far from home in our own family, house, city, country, and ethnic group.

Home is a place in the heart, not a bloodline, building, city, or ethnicity. Home is that deep, fragile place inside us where we hold and guard what’s most precious to us. It’s that place where, in some dark way, we remember that once, before we came to awareness, we were caressed by hands far gentler than any we’ve met in this life and where we were once kissed by a truth and a beauty so perfect that they are now the unconscious standard by which we measure everything. Home is where things “ring true”, where what’s most precious to us is cherished, the place of tender conscience, of intimacy.

And we know when we’re there and when we’re not. Home is a gut feeling, a resting place, a goodness, a security that we sense or don’t sense.

Sometimes people ask me: “How do I know that the love I have for a person is the kind of love that I can build a marriage on?” My answer: “Love is a mystery and there are no guarantees; but ask yourself this: Does this person bring me home? Or is this a love, irrespective of how powerful and exciting it might feel, from which I need eventually to go home?’”

There’s a huge difference between sharing powerful feelings with someone and building a life and a home with him or her. There’s a huge difference between an affair and a marriage, between having a honeymoon or building a life with someone. Many kinds of love make for a honeymoon, but only one kind takes us home.

And then, after we’ve found home, we still have the problem of staying there. This isn’t meant literally, but in a deeper way. How?

In the Gospels, immediately after he denies Jesus, we are told that Peter “went outside”. What’s being described here isn’t a simple physical movement, someone stepping through a door and going outside. What’s meant is that Peter went outside of himself, outside of who he is, outside of his conscience, outside of his normal understanding of things. He “went outside” in the way a man “goes outside” when he goes to a singles’ bar and hooks up with someone in a way that takes him “outside” of his normal moral realm.

And from that, he has to go home. Why? Because, like Peter, he has “gone outside”. What a person does in any morally schizophrenic act, in essence, takes him or her away from home (even if that act is done in his or her own house). Morally and psychologically the act is done away from home. It’s done “outside”.

There’s a crude joke that catches this. It asks: “What do promiscuous people do after they have sex?” The answer: “They go home!” That expresses a sad irony: Sex is not something from which we are ever meant to go home. It’s meant to take us home, to constitute home. Intimacy is home and if we need to go home from an experience, that’s an infallible sign that what we’ve experienced isn’t ultimately life giving.

And this has huge implications for understanding life. In the Gospels, Jesus says: “To you (those inside the circle of understanding) are revealed the secrets of the Kingdom, but to those outside everything is in riddles.” Who’s “inside” and who’s “outside” the circle of understanding? Who “gets” the secret and who doesn’t “get” it?

“Getting” or “not getting” the secret is not a question of intelligence, learning, luck, or finding the right books or teachers. Rather, we are “inside” the circle of understanding and we “get” the Gospels when we are at “at home”, when we are true to what’s deepest in us, when we are true to our consciences, when we don’t morally “go outside” (as did Peter and as we do when we do acts that morally aren’t true to who we are). When we are morally faithful, we “get” the Gospel.

Conversely, we “don’t get it” when we “go outside”, outside morally, when we “leave home” by being unfaithful as Peter was.

And we know this truth from experience: When we’re faithful, the Gospels make sense. When we’re unfaithful, almost immediately, we fill with objections, grow bitter, and begin to poke holes in truths we once believed.

T.S. Eliot once said, “Home is where we start from.” It’s also the place from which we understand what does or does not bring us life.

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Reflection and Poems on Heartbreak

August 17, 2026

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When I reflect on the spirituality I was raised on, I’m deeply grateful. No spirituality is perfect, but what I have been given through our rich Christian tradition stands up to the challenges of life and of faith. But if I had one criticism it would be this: For all its richness, Christian spirituality hasn’t always given us permission to own and deal with our own complexity. At least in its popular expression, it has not always taken seriously how complicated it is to be a human being.

It’s no simple task. As Nicole Krauss writes in her novel, The History of Love, we live with the “insoluble contradiction of being animals cursed with self-reflection, and moral beings cursed with animal instincts.” Yes, we are creatures of dust carrying the breath of God.

In our deepest center we bear the Image and Likeness of God, but that is not to be imagined as some beautiful icon stamped in our soul. No. It’s fire, divine fire. In each of us there is a breath of infinity which keeps us congenitally restless, gives us hungers we can never fully satisfy in this life, and, as the biblical writer Qoheleth says, keeps us forever out of sync with the seasons. As St. Augustine famously wrote: You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” As humans, we are pathologically complex and restless.

And here’s what that can look like in a life of faith.

When you read Terese of Lisieux’s The Story of a Soul, you see a paradox, a near contradiction. On the one hand, she embodies wonderfully what Christian detachment is meant to be. She’s a paradigm of selflessness. Yet, she’s also strongly attached to certain things, like her family, and could fall into a minor depression if there was a missed visit by her family. Terese was a complex woman, not a saint without struggles, and her honest sharing of those struggles is one of the reasons why her writings touch people deeply.

The same is true of the renowned scientist, spiritual writer, and mystic, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Here’s how he defined himself (in words to this effect): “I was born into this world with two great loves, love of God and love of the world. When I think of God, it takes my breath away; but when I look at the world and its pagan beauty, it also takes my breath away. My life is a struggle between genuflecting before the divine and genuflecting before the pagan.”

I give this background as a way of introducing and recommending a recent book by Maria Shriver, I Am Maria – My Reflections and Poems on Heartbreak, Healing, and Finding Your Way Home.

Many of us are familiar with Maria Shriver as a member of the famous Kennedy family and as the former First Lady of the State of California; but her memoir book introduces her to us in a very different way. This is not a celebrity writing a memoir based on her popularity. This is a book of depth, in effect, a contemporary The Story of a Soul.

Shriver articulates the struggle of a sensitive soul as she shares her own journey, both as woman of the world and as a woman of faith. Like Terese of Lisieux, she is healthily detached, even as she clings to some things in this world. Like Teilhard de Chardin, God and faith can take her breath away, even as do some earthy consolations in this world. She takes both her body and her spirit seriously and names, with honesty, the tensions she lives with because of that. She manifests a deep piety, even as she is healthily iconoclastic. She carries these tensions well.

Her journey is one of hope and of realism, all at the same time. For example, she ends her poem, My Morning Meditation, with these words:

                                  Sure things scare me like being alone for the rest of my life

                                  But if that’s what happens so be it

                                  I will continue to surround myself with beauty

                                 So I can access the beauty, the spiritual, the feminine part of me.

Carl Rogers suggests that “what is most personal is often what is most universal.” Shriver shares deep personal struggles which we immediately recognize as universal. And she is ever the artist in sharing them, deep and intimate, yet never exhibitionist. She never makes you want to turn your eyes away, the mark of a good writer.

When I first read Henri Nouwen, I had a sense of being introduced to myself: How does he know me that well? Is he writing just for me? If you are someone who struggles with a sensitive soul you will have that same experience reading Shriver’s book.

Someone once said this about the late singer Karen Carpenter. When you hear her sing you have the feeling that she is singing just for you and singing directly into your ear. Maria Shriver’s book will give you that same sensation.

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Spirituality and Steadiness

August 10, 2026

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Something in us is dissatisfied with the ordinary. There’s something in the ordinary that can have us think that predictable routines, domestic rhythms, and commitment to duty can weigh us down, swallow us up, and anchor us outside the more rewarding waters of passion, romance, creativity, dance, and celebration.

We often vilify the ordinary. I remember a young woman, a student of mine, who shared in class that her greatest fear in life was to succumb to the ordinary, “to end up content, a little housewife and mother, happily doing laundry commercials!”

If you’re an artist or have an artistic temperament, you’re prone to this kind of feeling. That’s one of the propensities of an artist. Doris Lessing, for example, once made the comment that George Eliot could have been a better writer “if she hadn’t been so moral.” What Lessing is suggesting is that Eliot kept herself too anchored in the ordinary, too safe, too secure, too far from the edges.

Kathleen Norris, in her biographical work The Virgin of Bennington, shares how as a young writer she fell victim to this kind of ideology: “Artists, I believed were much too serious to live sane and normal lives. Driven by inexorable forces in an uncaring world, they were destined for an inevitable, sometimes deadly, but always ennobling wrestle with gloom and doom.”

An ennobling wrestle with gloom and doom! That does have a seductive sound to it, particularly for those of us who fancy ourselves as artistic, intellectual, or spiritual. That’s why on a given day any of us can feel a certain condescending pity for those who achieve simple happiness. Easy for them, we think, but they’re selling themselves short! That’s the artist inside of us speaking. You’ve never seen an artist doing a laundry commercial!

Don’t get me wrong. Not all of this is bad. Jesus, himself, said that we do not live by bread alone. No artist needs that explained. He or she knows that safe routine, dram duty, and a mortgage that’s been paid, alone do not necessarily make for heaven. We need bread, but we also need beauty, color, and celebration.

Doris Lessing, who was a great artist, joined the communist party as a young woman but later left it after she’d matured. Why did she leave? One phrase says it all. She left the communist party, she says, “because they didn’t believe in color!”

Life, Jesus assures us, is not meant to be lived in black and white, that is, as simply an endless cycle of rising, showering, going off to work, responsibly doing a job, coming home, having supper, getting things set for the next day, and then going back to bed.

And yet, there is much to be said for that seemingly dram routine. The rhythm of the ordinary is, in the end, the deepest wellspring from which to draw joy and meaning. Kathleen Norris, after telling us about her youthful temptation to side-step the ordinary to engage in the more ennobling battle with gloom and doom, shares how a wonderful mentor, Betty Kray, helped steer her clear of that pitfall. Kray encouraged her to write out of her joy as well as her gloom and to “dismiss the romance of insanity as a sham.” As Norris puts it: “She tried hard to convince me of what her friends who had been institutionalized for madness knew all too well: that the clean simple appreciation of ordinary, daily things is a treasure like none on earth.”

Sometimes a different mentor teaches us this. When we regain our health and energy after having been ill, off work, and out of our normal routines and rhythms, nothing is as sweet as returning to the ordinary – our work, our routine, the normal stuff of everyday life. Only after it has been taken away and then given back, do we realize that the clean, simple appreciation of daily things is the ultimate treasure.

Artists, though, are still partially right. The ordinary can weigh us down, and keep us outside the deeper waters of creativity, of romance, of color, and of the wildness that lets us dance. But, that being admitted, anchors and weight also have a positive function. They keep us from being swept away. They anchor our sanity. They keep us steady. The rhythm of the ordinary is perhaps the most powerful anchor of all to hold us in sanity.

Paul Simon, in a 1970s song entitled, An American Tune, sings about coping with confusion, mistakes, betrayal, and other events that shatter our innocence. And he ends that rather sad ballad quite peacefully with the words: “Still tomorrow’s gonna be another working day, and I’m trying to get some rest. That’s all I’m trying, is to get some rest.”

Obedience to that imperative helps anchor our sanity. There’s much to be said about being a contented, ordinary person, anchored in the rhythms of the ordinary, trying at the end of the workday to get some rest.

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