Father Ron Rolheiser

Some years ago I went on a weekend retreat given by a woman who made no secret about the fact that not being able to have children constituted a deep wound in her life.

It’s no secret that today we’re witnessing a massive decline in church attendance and, seemingly, a parallel loss of interest in religion. The former mindset, within which we worried, sometimes obsessively, about sin, church-going, and heaven and hell no longer holds sway for millions of people. As one parent, worried about the religious state of his children, shared with me recently, “our old religious concerns never ever darken their minds.” What’s to be said in the face of this?

We live in a culture that idealizes youth and marginalizes the old. And, as James Hillman says, the old don’t let go easily either of the throne or the drive that took them there. I know: I’m aging.

We wake up into life with the incurable sense that we’re special, that we’re the center of the universe. And, subjectively, we are! In our awareness we’re the center of the universe and life does revolve around us. Our own being is what’s most massively real to us. As Descartes famously said, the only thing that we know for sure is real is our own selves; I think, therefore, I am. We may be dreaming everything else.

The problem in the world and in the churches, Jim Wallis suggests, is that, perennialy, conservatives get it wrong and liberals (over-reacting to conservatives) then don’t get it at all. Nowhere is this truer, I believe, than in how we discern the finger of God in the events of our lives.