RonRolheiser,OMI

Vows We Don’t Choose

December 2, 2024

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As a member of a religious order, the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, I chose to make four religious vows: poverty, chastity, obedience, and perseverance.  I did this freely, with no other compulsion than a strong inner sense that this was being asked of me. That freedom to make vows with no outside pressures, is a luxury millions of men and women don’t have. On their part, they take these same vows (albeit in a different modality) because they are compelled by circumstance to do so. In effect, these are vows that someone else makes for them.

William Wordsworth once gave this poetic expression:              

My heart was full; I made no vows, but vows

Were then made for me; bond unknown to me

Was given, that I should be, else sinning greatly. 

Most of us, I suspect, have known people for which this is true, that is, persons who without ever formally professing religious vows, lived out their own version of obedience, celibacy, poverty, and perseverance. For most of their lives, circumstances conscripted them and in effect took away their freedom so that they were never able to make their own choices about where to go in life, about educational opportunities, about where to live, about what job to have, and (not least) about whether to marry or not. Rather they spend their adult years existentially unfree, bound by circumstance and duty, sacrificing their own dreams and plans in order to serve others.

Many of us still know people who because of circumstances like poverty, the death of a parent, a family situation, or personal illness have had vows made for them. Several of my older brothers fall into that category. But, and this is the point, even though those vows are not made explicitly or publicly, they are consecrated vows, sacred in the biblical sense.

What does it mean to be consecrated? What is consecration?

Sadly, today we have turned this word into a “church word”, and we speak of consecrated buildings (churches), consecrated cups (chalices), and consecrated persons (ministers in our churches and vowed religious). Why do we speak of them as consecrated? The answer lies in the original meaning of what it means to be consecrated.

To be consecrated simply means to be “set aside” – though not first of all for church purposes. Rather, imagine this scenario: You have just left work and are driving home when you come upon the scene of an accident. You are not in the accident but are first to arrive there. At that moment you lose your freedom. You are no longer free to simply drive off. People are injured and you are there! You are conscripted and have to respond simply because you are there. At that moment you become a consecrated person, consecrated by circumstance, by need. At that moment, in Wordsworth’s words, certain vows are made for you.

There’s an interesting parallel to the situation Moses finds himself in when God asks him to be the person to lead the Israelites out of slavery. Moses does not want the job, nor does he volunteer for it. He gives God various excuses as to why he isn’t the right person, and ends up by asking God, “Why me? Why not my brother?” In essence, God’s answer is this: “Because you saw the oppression of the people. Because you’ve seen it, you’re no longer free. You’re like the first person at the scene of an accident.”

That’s what it means to be consecrated, to be called, to have a vocation. While you remain radically free (you can drive away from the accident) you are no longer existentially or morally free – else, as Wordsworth says, you should sin gravely. Your choice is not whether to get on with life or to stay and help? Your only question is: what’s my responsibility here? Circumstance has made a vow for you.

It can be helpful to understand vocation, vows, and consecration through this lens. I once chose freely to give myself over to a vocation which asked me to publicly make a set of vows, that is, to live in a certain simplicity, to forego marriage and having my own family, to make myself available for the service of others, and to persevere in that for the rest of my life. Several of my own siblings (and millions of women and men) have done the same thing, without the recognition and communal support that comes with public vows. They too lived consecrated lives, though without public recognition.

In affirming this, I do not exclude married persons, except to say that, in marriage, like me, they made public vows and thus receive a certain recognition and communal support that comes with that; albeit their vows, save for celibacy, are the same.  

All of us are perennially at the scene of an accident, unfree to drive away, conscripted, bound by vows that are made for us. It’s called having a vocation.

Heaven Isn’t the Same for Everyone

November 25, 2024

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Daniel Berrigan once said: Before you get serious about Jesus, think carefully about how good you are going to look on wood!

That’s a needed caution because Jesus warned us that if we follow him, pain will flow into our lives and we will join him on the cross.

What exactly does that mean? Is pain laid on a disciple as some kind of test? Does Jesus need his followers to feel the pains he experienced? Does God want the followers of Jesus to undergo pain to help pay the price of sin? Why does accepting to carry the cross with Jesus bring pain into our lives?

It’s interesting to note that the great mystic John of the Cross uses this, the inflow of pain into our lives, as a major criterion for discerning whether or not we are authentically following Jesus. For John, you know you are following Jesus when pain begins to flow into your life. Why? Does God lay special pain on those who take Christ seriously?

No. God doesn’t apportion special pain on those who take Christ seriously. The pain that flows into our lives if we take Christ seriously doesn’t come from God. It flows into us because of a deeper openness, a deeper sensitivity, and a new depth on our part. The algebra works this way: By authentically opening ourselves up to Christ we cease being overly self-protective, become more vulnerable and more sensitive, so that life, all of it, can flow into us more freely and more deeply.

And part of what now flows into us is pain: the pain of others, the pain of mother earth, the pain of our own inadequacy and lack of altruism, and the pain caused by the effect of sin everywhere. This pain will now enter us more deeply and we will feel it in a way we never did before because previously we protected ourselves against it through insensitivity and self-focus.

Happily, this has a flip side: Just as pain will now flow into our lives more freely and more deeply, so too will meaning and happiness. Once we stop protecting ourselves through self-absorption, both pain and happiness can now flow more freely and more deeply into our hearts and we can begin to breathe out of a deeper part of ourselves.

Freud once commented that sometimes things can be best understood by examining their opposites. That’s partially the case here. The opposite of someone who opens herself to pain, who opens herself to the pain of the cross, is a person who is callous and insensitive (in slang, someone “who is thick as a plank!”). Such a person won’t feel a lot of pain – but won’t feel much of anything else either.

A number of implications flow from this.

First, God doesn’t lay pain on us when we become followers of Jesus and immerse ourselves more deeply in the mystery of Christ and the cross. The pain that ensues is intrinsic to the cross and is felt simply because we have now ceased protecting ourselves and are letting life, all of it, flow into us more freely and more deeply. Happily, the pain is more than offset by the new meaning and happiness that are now also felt.

Second, experiencing the pain that flows intrinsically from discipleship and the cross is, as John of the Cross wisely puts it, one of the major criteria that separates the real Gospel from the Prosperity Gospel. When the pain of the cross flows into our lives, we know that we are not feather-bedding our own self-interest in the name of the Gospel.

Third, it’s worth it to be sensitive! Freud once said that neurosis (unhealthy anxiety) is the disease of the normal person. What he didn’t say, but might have, is that the antithesis of anxiety (healthy and unhealthy) is brute insensitivity, to be thick as a plank and thus protected from pain – but also protected from deeper meaning, love, intimacy, and community.

If you are a sensitive person (perhaps even an over-sensitive one, prone to depression and anxiety of all sorts) take consolation in that your very struggle indicates that you are not a calloused insensitive person, not a moral boor.

Finally, one of the implications of this is that heaven isn’t the same for everyone. Just as pain can be shallow or deep, so too can meaning and happiness. To the degree that we open our hearts to depth, to that same degree deep meaning and happiness can flow into us. A closed heart makes for shallow meaning. A heart partially open makes for some deep meaning, but not full meaning. Whereas the heart that is fully open makes for the deepest meaning.

There are different depths to meaning and happiness here on earth and, I suspect, that will be true too in the next life. So, the invitation from Jesus is to accept the pain that comes from the wood of the cross rather than being thick as a plank!

The Tower of Babel

November 18, 2024

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The opening pages of the Bible offer us a series of stories set at the beginning of history which are meant to explain why the world today is as it is. The Adam and Eve story about original sin is one of those stories. There are others. These stories, because they use imagery that might make them sound like fairy tales, can seem total fantasy to us, but they are stories that are truer than true. They happened. They happened to the first man and woman on this planet, and they continue to happen today in a way that affects every man and woman throughout history. They are stories of the heart, not meant to be taken literally, but carrying lessons for the heart.

One of these “in the beginning”, foundational, archetypal, stories is the story of the Tower of Babel. In street language, it goes like this: In the beginning (before time was like it is now) there was a town called Babel which decided it would make a name for itself by building a tower so impressive that all the other towns would have to admire it. They began building the tower, but something strange happened. As they were building it, they suddenly all began to speak different languages, were no longer able to understand each other, and scattered around the world, each now speaking in a language incomprehensible to everyone else.

What’s the lesson? Is this meant to explain the origin of the different languages of the world? No, rather it is meant to explain the deep, seemingly irreconcilable misunderstandings among us. Why do we forever misunderstand each other? What’s at the origin of this?

There are multiple ways this story can be used to shed light on the divisions in our world today. Here’s one: Writing in The Atlantic last year, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt suggested that there is perhaps no better metaphor to explain the divisions among us today than the Tower of Babel. His argument runs this way: Social media, the very thing that was meant to connect us not only to our friends and families but to people from around the globe, has in fact led to a radical fragmentation of our society and to the shattering of all that had seemed solid, the scattering of people who had been a community. Take America, for example; while we might still be speaking the same language, social media and cable news echo chambers have supplied us with different sets of facts, values, and visions that make actual conversation increasingly impossible. 

As the recent tensions around the US Presidential elections made evident, as a society we no longer speak the same language in that we can no longer understand each other on virtually every key issue – global warming, immigration, poverty, gender, health, abortion, the place of religion in the public sphere, whose side truth is on, and, most important of all, what truth is. We no longer share any common truths. Rather, we all have our own truth, our own individual language. As the popular saying goes, I have done my own research! I don’t trust science. I don’t trust any mainstream truths. I have my own sources.

And those sources are many, too many to count! Hundreds of television channels, countless podcasts and millions of persons feeding us their idiosyncratic version of things on social media so that now there is skepticism about any fact or truth. This is dividing us at every level: family, neighborhood, church, country, and world. We are all now speaking different languages and, like the original inhabitants of Babel, are being scattered around the world.

In the light of this, it is noteworthy how the original Pentecost is described in scripture. The Acts of the Apostles describes Pentecost, the coming of the Holy Spirit, as an event which reverses what happened at the Tower of Babel. At the Tower of Babel, the languages (the “tongues”) of the earth divided and scattered. At Pentecost, the Holy Spirit descends on each person as a “tongue of fire” so that, to everyone’s great surprise, everyone now understands everyone one else in his or her own language.

Again, what is being described here is not about literal human languages – where at Pentecost everyone suddenly understood Greek or Latin. Rather everyone now understood everyone else in his or her own language. All languages became one language.

What is that common language? It’s neither Greek nor Latin nor English nor French nor Spanish nor Yiddish nor Chinese nor Arabic, nor any other of the world’s spoken languages. Neither is it the less-than-fully-compassionate language of the conservatives or the liberals. It is, as Jesus and our scriptures make clear, the language of charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, long-suffering, fidelity, gentleness, faith, and chastity.

This is the only language which can bridge the misunderstandings and differences among us – and when we are speaking it, we will not be trying to build a tower to impress anyone.

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