Desert Chaos

Sticking with the Rolheiser theme, I thought I would give you an excerpt from his column this week that was particularly apt for Ash Wednesday:

One of the images for [Lent] is the biblical idea of the Desert. Jesus, we are told, in order to prepare for his public ministry, went into the desert for forty days and forty nights during which time he fasted and, as the Gospel of Mark tells us, was put to the test by Satan, was with the wild animals, and was looked after by the angels.Lent has always been understood as a time of us to imitate this, to metaphorically spend forty days in the desert like Jesus, unprotected by normal nourishment so as to have to face "Satan" and the "wild animals" and see whether the "angels" will indeed come and look after us when we reach that point where we can no longer look after ourselves.

For us, "Satan" and "wild animals" refer particularly to the chaos inside of us that normally we either deny or simply refuse to face - our paranoia, our anger, our jealousies, our distance from others, our fantasies, our grandiosity, our addictions, our unresolved hurts, our sexual complexity, our incapacity to really pray, our faith doubts, and our moral secrets. The normal food that we eat, distracted ordinary life, works to shield us from the deeper chaos that lurks beneath the surface of our lives.

Lent invites us to stop eating whatever protects us from having to face the desert that is inside of us. It invites us to feel our smallness, to feel our vulnerability, to feel our fears, and to open ourselves up the chaos of the desert so that we can finally give the angels a chance to feed us. That's the Christian ideal of lent, to face one's chaos.

You may read the entire column here.

Rolheiser on Delight

I am reading a book called, The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality by Ronald Rolheiser. Rolheiser is a Roman Catholic priest and member of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate. He is president of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, Texas. He writes a weekly column that appears in numerous Catholic newspapers, and his website contains numerous videos and podcasts that I have found to be very interesting.
I am impressed with his simple, straightforward language and incredible perception. To give you a sense for what I mean, consider this passage from the second chapter of The Holy Longing talking about depression and delight:

The opposite of depression is delight, being spontaneously surprised by the goodness and beauty of living. This is not something we can ever positively crank up and make happen in our lives. It is, as every saint and sage has told us, the by-product of something else. It is something that happens to us and which we can never, on our own, make happen to us. As C. S. Lewis suggests in the title of his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, delight has to catch us unaware, at a place where we are not rationalizing that we are happy. The famous prayer of Francis of Assisi, with its insistence that it is only in giving that we receive, suggests the same thing.
This is what it would mean to not be depressed: Imagine yourself on some ordinary weekday, walking to your car, standing at a bus stop, cooking a meal, sitting at your desk, or doing anything else that is quite ordinary. Suddenly, for no tangible reason, you fill with a sense of the goodness and beauty and joy of just living. You feel your own life -- your heart, your mind, your body, your sexuality, the people and things you are connected to -- and you spontaneously fill with the exclamation: "God, it feels great to be alive!" That's delight, that's what it means not to be depressed.

This description reminded me of a book I had read while at Notre Dame. That book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard, described this same feeling, but called it "the present":

I step outside, followed by a puppy. Before me extends a low hill trembling in yellow brome, and behind the hill, filling the sky, rises an enormous mountain ridge, forested, alive and awesome with brilliant blown lights. I have never seen anything so tremulous and live. Overhead, great strips and chunks of cloud dash to the northwest in a gold rush. At my back the sun is setting — how can I not have noticed before that the sun is setting? I smell loam on the wind; I pat the puppy; I watch the mountain. Shadows lope along the mountain’s rumpled flanks; they elongate like root tips, like lobes of spilling water, faster and
faster. A warm purple pigment pools in each ruck and tuck of the rock; it deepens and spreads, boring crevasses, canyons. As the purple vaults and slides, it tricks out the unleafed forest and rumpled rock in gilt, in shape-shifting patches of glow. These gold lights veer and retract, shatter and glide in a series of dazzling splashes, shrinking, leaking, exploding. The ridge’s bosses and hammocks sprout bulging from its side; the whole mountain looms miles closer; the light warms and reddens; the bare forest folds and pleats itself like living protoplasm before my eyes, like a running chart, a wildly scrawling oscillograph on the present moment. The air cools; the puppy’s skin is hot. I am more alive than all the world.
This is it, I think, this is it, right now, the present. I am patting the puppy, I am watching the mountain. And the second I verbalize this awareness in my brain, I cease to see the mountain or feel the puppy.
Catch it if you can. The present is an invisible electron; its lightning path traced faintly on a blackened screen is fleet, and fleeing, and gone.
Experiencing the present purely is being emptied and hollow; you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.
You don’t run down the present, pursue it with baited hooks and nets. You wait for it, empty-handed, and you are filled. You’ll have fish left over. It is, by definition, Christmas, the incarnation. This old rock planet gets the present for a present on its birthday every day.

Going back to Rolheiser, his discussion of delight is meant as a diagnosis of something wrong with modern society, at least for adults:

But how often do we feel like that? For most adults, this experience is rare. We can go for years and, for all that time, be loving, dedicated, generous, positive, contributing, compulsive adults -- good spouses, good parents, trusted employees, giving friends, prayerful, churchgoers -- and never once during all those years enjoy a thimbleful of genuine delight. It happens all the time. Delight is rare for adults, though not for children. If you want to see what delight looks like, go by any school yard sometime when kids, little kids, kindergartners and first graders, come out for their recess break. They simply run around and shriek. Now that's delight.

I'm still reading the rest of the book, which is basically an answer for this problem. Take a look at Rolheiser's website and see if it interests you.

Andy Burner to Retire

One of our long-time club members, Andy Burner, just announced his imminent retirement from his job as Deputy Assistant City Manager for the City of Piqua. He served Piqua for 32 years and is set to retire on June 30.

There are two very nice articles about his retirement that are striking in their praise of Andy. We thought the following comment from the City Manager was particularly impressive:

I know of no one more caring and compassionate as Andy Burner. I greatly respect and rely on his sense of right and wrong, and his judgment of the fair thing to do.
Andy is the most dedicated and loyal city employee I have had the pleasure of working with. We here at the City of Piqua are grateful for all that he has done for the City and will miss the pride and passion he feels for the City and brought to the job.

Please congratulate Andy when you see him at our next club event!