God gives us our spirituality

Like it or not, everyone has a spirituality.

"The opposite of spirituality is not skipping church. It's being in a semi-vegetative state receiving beer intravenously," Fr. Ron Rolheiser told nearly 600 people Aug. 7 at St. Bernard Church, Green Bay.

Spirituality and soul mean the same thing - the principle of life or energy within us that keeps us alive, said Fr. Rolheiser, whose column on spirituality appears weekly in The Compass and 30 other Catholic newspapers in the U.S., Canada, Ireland, England, Scotland and New Zealand.

Our spirituality is a gift of God and leads to a basic restlessness within us, he said. "As St. Augustine put it, 'You've made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.'"

That restlessness is why we feel out of sync with life or the rhythms of nature, said Fr. Rolheiser, who represents Canadian Oblates of Mary Immaculate on their international council.

St. John of the Cross spoke of two purposes of the soul: energy - the spark of life that keeps us alive - and integration - the wisdom or glue that hold us together, Fr. Rolheiser said.

But instead of linking the two, we've divorced them. Thus, people look to popular culture for energy, but not for wisdom, and they go to church for wisdom, but not for energy.

"Wisdom initiates energy. Energy enlivens wisdom," he said, and both come from God.

As an example of how we need energy and wisdom, Fr. Rolheiser pointed to the family. "Children provide energy and parents provide wisdom and we shouldn't confuse the two. Parents should not behave like 13-year-olds and it's wrong to expect 13-year-olds to play the role of parents."

We need to find the ideal mix of wisdom and energy by bringing them together, he said, but not the way opposing sides meet at a negotiating table.

"Rather, they need to come together the way a high pressure and a low pressure area come together. When that happens, they create a storm, and when it settles down, we have peace," said Fr. Rolheiser, whose book, The Holy Longing, won a first place award for spirituality books this year from the Catholic Press Association.

He cited three examples of people who dealt with their spirituality in different ways: Mother Teresa, Janis Joplin and Princess Diana.

Mother Teresa, he said, is a saint who dedicated her life to God and the poor. That's hard to do, he said, because most of us want to live as saints and as sinners. "We want to pray, but not to miss whatever we want to watch on TV. We want to live a life of radical commitment to the poor, but we want luxuries and riches."

But, as St. Thomas Aquinas said, every choice includes a renunciation of something else, so we can't have it all, even though 1960s' and '70s' rock star Janis Joplin tried to. Basically, Fr. Rolheiser said, she died at age 27 when her body fell apart because she used too much energy trying to do everything.

That's why it's so important for high energy people to develop their spiritual lives, he said, to channel that energy properly.

Princess Diana tried to go halfway, he said, working with the poor alongside Mother Teresa, then going on a Mediterranean vacation.

In addition to resolving the split between energy and wisdom, we need to resolve the divorces between:

-- Spirituality and ecclesiology, illustrated by a growing interest in the spiritual, even as our churches become increasingly empty.

-- Justice and piety, so that people who champion justice also embrace personal morality, and pious people accept the Gospel challenge of justice. Dorothy Day provides us with a model of someone who combined both, he said.

"We need a new Francis of Assisi to restructure our imagination," he said. "We are not going to think-tank our way out of our problems with ecclesiology. It's going to take a wild man or woman. I think it's going to come from the younger generation. We Baby Boomers are too set in our ways."

We also need to recapture our awareness of sin and immorality and their effects on the soul.

No matter how terrible the sin, God forgives us, he said. That's not the problem. "The problem with sin is how it disintegrates the soul and affects us individually and the community."

Fr. Rolheiser's talk drew a positive response from his audience.

Geri Hall of Marinette said she liked the way he can make connections and explain how to integrate our lives.

Fr. Nathan Jaskulski, OFM, associate pastor of St. Mary of the Angels Parish, Green Bay, said he "liked the way he intertwined having a healthy soul and what a soul is."

Matt Gigot of St. Bernard Parish said he found the talk extremely interesting.

Ruth Novak of Dyckesville said the talk was "wonderful. After reading his column, I had to hear what he had to say."