RonRolheiser,OMI

Refugees, Immigrants, and Jesus

October 7, 2024

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On borders everywhere in the world today we find refugees, millions of them. They’re easily demonized, seen as a nuisance, a threat, as invaders, as criminals fleeing justice in their homelands. But mostly they are decent, honest people fleeing poverty, hunger, victimization, and violence. And these reasons for fleeing their homelands strongly suggest that most of them are not criminals. 

Irrespective of the fact that most of them are good people, they are still seen most everywhere as a problem. We need to keep them out! They are a threat! Indeed, politicians frequently use the verb invasion to describe their presence on our borders.

What’s to be said about this? Do we just let everyone in? Do we select judiciously among them, letting some in and keeping others out? Do we put up walls and barbed wire to block their entry? What’s to be our response?

These questions need to be examined from two perspectives: pragmatically and biblically.

Pragmatically this is a huge issue. We cannot simply open all borders and let millions of people flood into our countries. That’s unrealistic. On the other hand, we may not justify our reluctance to let refugees into our countries by appealing to the bible, or to Jesus, or to the naïve rationalization that “our” countries are ours and we have a right to be here while others don’t unless we grant them entrance. Why not?

For Christians, there are a number of non-negotiable biblical principles at play here.

First, God made the world for everybody. We are stewards of a property not our own. We don’t own anything, God does, and God made the world for everybody. That’s a principle we too easily ignore when we speak of barring others from entering “our” country. We happen to be stewards here, in a country that belongs to the whole world.

Second, the Bible everywhere, in both testaments of scripture, is clear (and strong) in challenging us to welcome the stranger and the immigrant. This is everywhere present in the Jewish scriptures and is a strong motif at the very heart of Jesus’ message. Indeed, Jesus begins his ministry by telling us that he has come to bring good news to the poor. Hence, any teaching, preaching, pastoral practice, political policy, or action that is not good news for the poor is not the gospel of Jesus Christ, whatever its political or ecclesial expediency. And, if it is not good news for the poor, it may not cloak itself with the Gospel or with Jesus. Hence, any decisions we make vis-à-vis refugees and immigrants should not be antithetical to the fact that the Gospels are about bringing good news to the poor.

Moreover, Jesus makes this even clearer when he identifies the poor with his own person (Whatsoever you do to the least of my people, you do to me) and tells us that at the end of the day we will be judged by how we treat the immigrants and refugees (Depart from me because I was a stranger and you didn’t welcome me). There are few texts in scripture as raw and challenging as this one (Matthew 25, 35-40)

Finally, we also find this challenge in scripture: God challenges us to welcome foreigners (immigrants) and share our love, food, and clothing with them because we ourselves were once immigrants (Deuteronomy 10, 18-19). And this isn’t just some abstract biblical axiom, especially for us who live in North America. Except for the Indigenous nations (whom we forcefully displaced) we are all immigrants here and are challenged by our faith never to forget this, not least when dealing with hungry people on our borders. Of course, those of us who have been here for a number of generations can make the moral case that we have been here a long time and are no longer immigrants. But perhaps a more compelling moral case can be made suggesting it can be rather self-serving to close the borders after we ourselves are in.

These are biblical challenges. However, after they are affirmed, we are still left with the practical question; what realistically do we (and many countries around the world) do with the millions and millions of men, women, and children arriving at our border? How do we honor the fact that the land we live in belongs to everyone? How do we honor that fact that, as Christians, we have to think first about the poor? How will we face Jesus in judgment when he asks us why we didn’t welcome him when he was in the guise of a refugee? And how do we honor the fact that almost every one of us is an immigrant, living in a country we forcibly took from someone else?

There are no easy answers to those questions, even while at the end of the day we still need to make some practical political decisions. However, in our pragmatism, in sorting this out, we should never be confused about which side Jesus and the Bible are on.

Our Unfinished Symphony

September 30, 2024

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“In the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable we come to understand that here, in this life, all symphonies remain unfinished.”

Karl Rahner wrote those words and to not understand them is to risk letting restlessness become a cancer in our lives. What does it mean to be tormented by the insufficiency of everything attainable? How are we tortured by what we cannot have?

We all experience this daily. In fact, for all but a few privileged, peaceful times in our lives, this torment is like an undertow in everything we experience. Beauty makes us restless when it should give us peace. The love we experience with our spouse does not fulfil our longings. The relationships we have within our families seem too petty and domestic to be fulfilling. Our job is inadequate to the dream we have for ourselves. The place where we live seems boring in comparison to other places. We are too restless to sit peacefully at our own tables, sleep peacefully in our own beds, and be at ease in our own skins.

When we feel this way, our lives will forever seem too small for us and we live them in such a way that we are always waiting, waiting for something or somebody to come along and change things so that real life, as we imagine it, might begin.

I remember a story a man once shared with me. He was forty-five years old, had a good marriage, was the father of three healthy children, had a secure, if unexciting job, and lived in a peaceful, if equally unexciting neighborhood. Yet, to use his words, he was never fully inside of his own life. Here’s his confession:

“For most of my life, and especially for the past twenty years, I have been too restless to really live my own life. I have never really accepted what I am – a forty-five- year-old man, working in a grocery store in a small town, married to a good woman, aware that my marriage will never fulfil my deep sexual yearnings, and aware that, despite all my daydreaming, I’m not going anywhere, I will never fulfill my dreams, I will only be here, as I am now, in this small town, in this particular marriage, with these people, in this body, for the rest of my life. I will only grow older, balder, and physically less healthy and attractive. But what’s sad in all of this is that, from every indication, I have a good life. I’m lucky really. I’m healthy, loved, secure, in a good marriage, living in a country of peace and plenty. Yet, inside of myself I’m too restless to ever fully appreciate my own life, my wife, my kids, my job, and the place where I live. I’m always at some other place inside of myself, too restless to really be where I’m at, too restless to live in my own house, too restless to be inside of my own skin.”

That is what the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable feels like in actual life. But Rahner’s insight is more than diagnostic, it is prescriptive too. It points out how we might move beyond that torment, beyond the cancer of restlessness. How do we do that?

Precisely by understanding and accepting that here in this life all symphonies remain unfinished. By understanding and accepting that the reason we are tormented is not because we are over-sexed, neurotic, ungrateful persons who are too greedy to be satisfied with this life. Not that. The deep reason is that we are congenitally over-charged and over-built for this earth. Built that way by God. We are infinite spirits living inside a finite world, hearts made for union with everything and everybody but meeting only mortal persons and mortal things. Small wonder we have problems with insatiability, daydreams, loneliness, and restlessness! We are Grand Canyons without a bottom. Nothing, short of union with all that is, can ever fill that void.

To be tormented by restlessness is to be human. Moreover, in accepting that we are human and that therefore, for us, there can be no finished symphony this side of eternity, we can become more easeful in our restlessness. Why? Because we now know that everything comes to us with an undertow of restlessness and inadequacy, and that this is normal and true for everyone.

 As Henri Nouwen once put it: Here, in this world, there is no such a thing as a clear-cut, pure joy.  Rather, in every satisfaction, there is an awareness of limitations. Behind every smile, there is a tear. In every embrace, there is loneliness. In every friendship, distance.

Peace and restfulness can come to us only when we accept that limitation within the human condition because it is only then that we will stop demanding that life – our spouses, our families, our friends, our jobs, our vocations and vacations – give us something that they cannot give, namely, clear-cut pure joy, full consummation.

When is Fear Healthy?

September 23, 2024

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Why don’t we preach hellfire anymore? That’s a question asked frequently by a lot of sincere religious people who worry that too many churches, priests, and ministers have gone soft on sin and are over-generous in speaking about God’s mercy. The belief here is that more people would come to church and obey the commandments if we preached the raw truth about mortal sin, God’s wrath, and the danger of going to hell when we die. The truth will set you free, these folks assert, and the truth is that there is real sin and there can be real and eternal consequences for sin. The gate to heaven is narrow and the road to hell is wide. So why aren’t we preaching more about the dangers of hellfire?

What’s valid in this kind of reasoning is that preaching about mortal sin and hellfire can be effective. Threats work. I know. I grew up subjected to this kind of preaching and admit that it affected my behavior. But that effect was ambivalent: On the one side, it left me scared enough before God and life itself to fear ever straying very far morally or religiously. On the other side, it also left me religiously and emotionally crippled in some deep ways. Simply stated, it’s hard to be intimate friends with a God who frightens you and it’s not good religiously or otherwise to be overly timid and afraid before life’s sacred energies. Fear of divine punishment and fear of hellfire, admittedly, can be effective as a motivator.

So why not preach fear? Because it’s wrong, pure and simple. Brainwashing and physical intimidation are also effective, but they are antithetical to love. You don’t enter a love relationship because you feel afraid or threatened. You enter a love relationship because you feel drawn there by love.

More importantly, preaching divine threat dishonors the God in whom we believe. The God who Jesus incarnates and reveals is not a God who puts sincere, good-hearted people into hell against their will on the basis of some human or moral lapse which in our religious categories we deem to be a mortal sin. For example, I still hear this threat being preached in our churches: If you miss going to church on Sunday it’s a mortal sin and should you die without confessing it, you will go to hell.

What kind of God would underwrite this kind of a belief? What kind of God would not give sincere people a second chance, a third one, and seventy-seven times seven more chances if they remain sincere?  What kind of God would say to a repentant person in hell: “Sorry, but you knew the rules! You’re repentant now, but it’s too late. You had your chance!”

A healthy theology of God demands that we stop teaching that hell can be a nasty surprise waiting for an essentially good person. The God we believe in as Christians is infinite understanding, infinite compassion, and infinite forgiveness. God’s love surpasses our own and if we, in our better moments, can see the goodness of a human heart despite its lapses and weaknesses, how much more so will God see this. We have nothing to fear from God.

Or have we? Doesn’t scripture tell us that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom? How does that square with not being afraid of God?

There are different kinds of fear, some healthy and some not. When scripture tells us that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, the kind fear it is talking about is not contingent upon feeling threatened or feeling anxious about being punished. That’s the kind of fear we feel before tyrants and bullies. There is however a healthy fear that’s innate within the dynamics of love itself. This kind of fear is essentially proper reverence, that is, when we genuinely love someone we will fear betraying that love, fear being selfish, fear being boorish, and fear being disrespectful in that relationship. We will fear violating the sacred space within which intimacy occurs. Metaphorically we will sense we are standing on holy ground and that we’d best have our shoes off before that sacred fire.

Moreover, scripture tells us that when God appears in our lives, almost always, the first words we will hear are: “Don’t be afraid!” That’s because God is not a judgmental tyrant but a loving, creative, joy-filled energy and person. As Leon Bloy reminds us, joy is the most infallible indication of God’s presence.

The famous psychiatrist, Fritz Perls, was once asked by a young fundamentalist: “Have you been saved?’ His answer: “Saved? I’m still trying to figure out how to be spent!” We honor God not by living in fear lest we offend him, but in reverently spending the wonderful energy that God gives us. God is not a law to be obeyed, but a joyous energy within which to spend ourselves generatively.

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