RonRolheiser,OMI

Storms We Cannot Weather

March 2, 2026

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In the musical Les Miserables, there’s a particularly haunting song, sung by a dying woman (Fantine) who has been crushed by virtually every unfairness life can deal a person. Abandoned by her husband, sexually harassed by her employer, caught in abject poverty, physically ill and dying, even as her main anxiety is about what will happen to her young daughter after she dies, she offers this lament:

But there are dreams that cannot be
And there are storms we cannot weather
I had a dream my life would be
So much different from this hell I’m living
So different now from what it seemed
Now life has killed
The dream I dreamed.

For centuries, in our popular mind, despair was understood as the ultimate and unforgivable sin against God and against nature. We weren’t always sure how exactly to define despair, but we saw it as someone giving up on life, on God, on love, and on meaning. Suicide was often seen as its prime analogate, ultimate despair.

This notion needs to be radically rethought, not just for own consolation when we see loved ones collapse into seeming despair, but also because it belittles God.

The popular notion that someone who seemingly gives up on life and God and dies in that state is guilty of a sin that cannot be forgiven and is condemned to an eternity outside the community of love, is based on some serious misunderstandings. What are those misunderstandings?

First, what’s best in us doesn’t believe this at all. What’s best in us understands human weakness and the anatomy of a collapse of soul. And what’s best in us reaches out in empathy to those who collapse in this way, not least because we understand their weakness.

Second, the notion that a certain collapse of soul (seeming despair) is somehow an act against life itself and against the God who gave us life, is theologically false. It goes against the foundational principle running through all of scripture, namely, that God has a special, preferential love for the weak, for those not strong enough to stand, for those who have collapsed under the burdens of life.

Even more important, the notion that someone who collapses in this way puts himself or herself irrevocably outside of God’s mercy is an insult to God, a belittling of God’s person and God’s love. It’s predicated on the misguided belief that if we do not hang onto God, God will not hang on to us. If we give up on God, God will give up on us. That’s utterly false, and a belittling of God’s person and God’s fidelity.

At the very heart of what Jesus incarnated and revealed about the heart of God lies the truth that God does not abandon us, particularly when, crushed in body and spirit, we give up on God. God will never abandon us because we are too weak and wounded to hang on to God.

Moreover, as Christians we believe (as we affirm in the Apostles’ Creed) that Jesus descended into hell, not just once after his death on Good Friday, but forever afterwards. Whenever Christ sees someone whose circumstance and wound have landed him or her in a private hell from which he or her can see no way of escaping and instead surrenders to hopelessness, Christ never says, since you gave up on me, I give up on you! No, that’s not the God we believe in. Rather Christ descends into that hell and breathes out forgiveness and peace. There is no hell, no collapse of soul, no despair into which Christ cannot penetrate and breathe out peace. If there is anyone in hell, he or she is there because of arrogance, not because of weakness.

It’s not incidental that the Church canonizes certain people and declares them, by name, to be in heaven, whereas it has never, by name, declared anyone to be in hell, not even Judas who betrayed Jesus with a kiss and then (seemingly in despair) died by suicide.

In a book entitled Peculiar Treasures, the renowned novelist and spiritual writer Frederick Buechner reflects on the death of Judas. Buechner, who had lost his own father to suicide, speculates on the reasons Judas dies in what outwardly looks like despair. He suggests that perhaps Judas chose suicide out of hope instead of despair, that is, he felt dammed and counted on Jesus’ mercy after death, thinking that perhaps “hell might be his last chance of making it to heaven.” 

Imagining Jesus meeting Judas after death, Buechner writes: “It’s a scene to conjure with. Once again they met in the shadows, the two old friends, both of them a little worse for wear after all that had happened, only this time it was Jesus who was the one to give the kiss, and this time it wasn’t the kiss of death that was given.”

Passing strange, for someone utterly crushed by life, hell might be his or her last chance of making it to heaven.

The Meaning of Jesus’ Suffering

February 23, 2026

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I heard this story from a renowned theologian who prefers I don’t use his name in sharing this, though the story speaks well of his theology.

He was giving a lecture and at one point stated that God didn’t want Jesus to suffer like he did. A woman in the audience immediately raised her voice: “Do you mean that?” Not knowing whether this was an objection or an affirmation, he invited the woman to speak to him at the break. Approaching him at the break, she repeated her question: “Do you mean that? Do you believe that God didn’t want Jesus to suffer as he did?” He replied that indeed he meant it. God didn’t want Jesus to suffer as he did. Her response: “Good, then I can pray again. I struggle to pray to a God who needs this type of suffering to pay some kind of debt.”

Why did Jesus suffer? Was his suffering needed to pay a debt that only a divine being could pay? Was the original sin of Adam and Eve so great an offense to God that no human sincerity, worship, altruism, or sacrificial suffering could appease God? Indeed, does God ever need to be appeased?

The idea that Jesus needed to suffer as he did to somehow appease God for our sins lies deep within our popular understanding of Jesus’ suffering and death, and there are seemingly strong references in support of that in scripture and in the theology of atonement. What these suggest is that some quota of suffering was needed to pay the debt for sin, and Jesus’ suffering paid that debt. And since the debt was huge, Jesus’ suffering had to be severe.

But, how much of this is metaphorical and how much of this is to be taken literally? Here’s another take on why Jesus chose to accept suffering as he did.

He did it to be in full solidarity with us. He accepted to suffer in such an extreme way so that no one would be able to say: “Jesus didn’t suffer in a way that I have! I have suffered in more painful and humiliating ways than he ever did!”

Well, let’s examine Jesus’ suffering in the light of that challenge.

First, in his life before his passion and death, he suffered the pain of poverty, misunderstanding, hatred, betrayal, plus the loneliness of celibacy. As well, on the cross he suffered a dark night of faith. But these are ordinary human sufferings. It’s in his passion and death that his sufferings become more extraordinary.

Jesus was crucified. Crucifixion was designed by the Romans as more than just capital punishment. It was also designed to inflict the optimum amount of pain that a person could absorb. That’s why they would sometimes give morphine or some other drug to the one being crucified, not to dull his pain, but to keep him conscious so that he would suffer longer.

Worse still, crucifixion was designed to utterly humiliate the one being crucified. Crucifixions were public events, and the one being crucified was stripped naked so his genitals would be exposed and in the spasms as he was dying, his bowels would loosen. Utter humiliation. This is what Jesus suffered.

Moreover, scholars speculate (albeit there is no direct evidence for this) that on the night between his arrest and his execution the next day he was sexually assaulted by the soldiers who had him in their custody. This speculation grounds itself on two things: a hunch, since sexual assault was common in such situations; and to suffer this kind of humiliation would be Jesus’ ultimate solidarity with human suffering.

Perhaps no humiliation compares with the humiliation suffered in sexual assault. If Jesus suffered this, and the hunch is that he did, that puts him in solidarity with one of the deepest of all human pains. Everyone who has suffered this humiliation has the consolation of knowing that Jesus may have suffered this too.

Why did Jesus accept to suffer as he did? Why, as the Office of the Church puts it, did he become sin for us?

Whatever the deep mystery and truth that lie inside the motif of paying a debt for our sins and atoning for human shortcomings, the deeper reason Jesus chose to accept suffering as he did was to be in full solidarity with us, in all our pain and humiliation.

Jesus came from our ineffable God, brought a human face to the divine, and taught us what lies inside God’s heart. And in doing this, he took on our human condition completely. He didn’t just touch human life, he entered it completely, including the depth of human pain.

Indeed, there are particular sufferings that perhaps Jesus didn’t explicitly experience (racism, sexism, exile, physical disability) but in his dark night of faith on the cross and in his humiliation in his crucifixion, he suffered in a way that no one can say: “Jesus didn’t suffer as I have suffered!”

Finding our Vocation

February 16, 2026

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Many of us are familiar with a famous line from C.S. Lewis who, when writing about his conversion to Christianity, shared that he was “the most reluctant convert in the history of Christendom.” When he first knelt down it wasn’t with enthusiastic fervor, but with the sense that this was something he had to do. What gave him this sense?

His words: [I knelt down against my resistance] because I had come to realize that God’s compulsion is our liberation.

What’s God’s compulsion? It’s the deep irrepressible moral sense we have inside that tells us what we must do rather than what we want to do. And this can be very helpful in finding our vocation and place in life.

What is a vocation, and how do we find ours? A vocation, as David Brooks suggests, is an irrational factor wherein you hear an inner voice that is so strong that it becomes unthinkable to turn away and where you intuitively know that you don’t have a choice, but can only ask yourself, what is my responsibility here? 

That’s the story of my own vocation to the priesthood and religious life, and I share it here not because it is in any way special; it isn’t. It’s ordinary, one among millions. I share it with the hope that it might help someone else discern his or her vocation in life. Here’s my story.

I grew up in a Catholic culture which at that time basically asked every boy and girl to consider whether he or she was being called to the vowed religious life and/or to the priesthood. I heard this explicitly from my parents and from the Ursuline nuns who taught me in school, and I heard it in the ethos of Roman Catholic culture at the time.

But I always felt a strong resistance inside. This is not what I wanted to do with my life! I did not want to be a Catholic priest. I nursed this resistance through my high school years and graduated with the intention of going to university, ideally to become a psychologist. But a voice in me would not stay quiet.

I spent the summer after graduation from high school working on two farms, our own and one of our neighbor’s. Mostly I worked outside, often alone, on a tractor for long hours working in a field. And in those long hours God’s compulsion began to wear away at my resistance. The idea that I was called to become a priest simply would not be silenced, though I tried. I remember one particular afternoon while working alone on a tractor, I tried to push the thought out of my head by singing out loud, but God’s voice isn’t shut out that easily.

This came to a head in late summer, just two weeks before I was scheduled to go off to university. I came home one evening after working another solitary afternoon on a tractor. My parents weren’t home so I tried to distract myself by tossing a football around with my younger brother. Peace didn’t come then. It came later as I was going to bed, after I had made the decision to pursue becoming a priest. I shared my decision with my mother and father in the morning. They smiled, and took me to see our local parish priest, a Missionary Oblate of Mary Immaculate.

In fairness, the priest told me that, while he was an Oblate, there were other options for me, such as becoming a diocesan priest or a Jesuit. I chose the Oblates because they were what I knew and because I already had an older brother in the order. Two weeks later I was in the Oblate novitiate – as one of the most reluctant novices in the history of the Oblates!

But from day one, it was right. I knew it was where I was called to be. That was sixty years ago and, whatever the struggles I’ve had in my priesthood, I have never doubted that this was my vocation – the priesthood and the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate.

And God, life, ministry, and the Oblates have been life-giving beyond what I deserve. Ministry has been grace-filled beyond measure and the Oblates have given me healthy community, exceptional educational opportunities, a series of wonderful ministries, and a pride in our congregation’s charism to serve the poor.

Sixty years in this vocation and I have only this to say: Thank you God, for taking me where I didn’t want to go.

I made that choice at the age of seventeen. Today our culture would say that such a decision cannot be made with sufficient maturity and clarity at so tender an age. Well, I have never seriously doubted my choice, and I look back on it now as the clearest, most unselfish, and life-giving decision I have ever made. That’s my story, but there are many life-giving stories different from mine. God’s compulsion has an infinite variety of modalities.

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