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Week of May 10, 2004

Move past the now into the heart of light

In Exile

By FR. RON ROLHEISER, omi
Rome

There's a loss of heart for almost everything: for fidelity in relationships, as fewer and fewer people find within themselves the resiliency needed to live out the tensions that long-term commitment brings; for Church, as more and more people quietly or angrily leave their ecclesial communities rather than deal with their own and their Church's humanity; and for politics and the effort needed to build neighbourhood, city and country because fewer and fewer people find the time, energy, and heart to work for others.

We're losing ground most everywhere: There's a loss of heart for children, for simple freshness, for romance, for innocence, for proper aesthetics and even for manners.

Thoreau once suggested that we live lives of "quiet desperation." That may have been more true of his generation, but it's less true today. Our struggle is more with internal bleeding, though Thoreau's right about its quietness. This hemorrhaging is mostly quiet and unrecognized, perceptible mainly in its effects. In itself, it looks only like tiredness, battle-fatigue. But it's more.

There's a loss of heart for children, for simple freshness, for romance, for innocence, for proper aesthetics and even for manners.

Two major proclivities have characterized the past couple of generations in the Western world. First, an unbridled itch for sophistication has driven us out in such a way that, for good and for bad, we've ended up shattering most of our former naivet‚, debunking most of our former heroes and heroines, and wreaking havoc with most of our childhood faith and values. Second, an ever-increasing sensitivity has progressively polarized and politicized life around marriage, Church, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, culture, hierarchy and values.

While much of this was needed and is in many instances a clear intellectual and moral progress, we've been slow to admit something else. This is also slowly tiring us, gradually wounding the heart and draining away much of its strength and resiliency. To be innocent means to be "unwounded." The loss of our innocence has left us wounded in the heart. A wounded heart seeks to protect itself, to find respite from what wounded it in the first place.

Hence, more and more, we have less heart to put up with the strains and tensions of family, Church, neighbourhood, community and country. Instead we protect ourselves by surrounding ourselves with like-minded people and safe circles. We have too little heart for dealing with the tensions that arise from our differences. Like the woman in the Gospels suffering from internal bleeding, we are finding that constant internal hemorrhaging is making it impossible for us to become pregnant with new life. Like her, we need healing. How?

First, by recognizing and naming this loss of heart. Our marriages, families, homes, churches, communities, friendships and even civic communities are breaking apart because we haven't the heart to deal with their tensions. We need to ask ourselves: What do we need to do to regain some resiliency of heart?

Things looked different in the past. When I was young, society and the Church both suffered from an unhealthy naivet‚ and an unhealthy rigidity. The great social movements of that past 40 years, along with new attitudes and sweeping reforms inside the churches, have exorcized most of that naivet‚ and rigidity. A more liberal view of things has taken hold.

We live with the results: endless deconstruction of the old and an uncompromising emphasis on freedom, individual rights, social justice, gender equality, ethnic equality, multiculturalism, wider tolerance, the ending of old privilege and on the shortcomings of being naive. Part of this too, in terms of faith and the Church, has been a strong, relentless, challenge to grow beyond an infantile belief, to face the dark corners of doubt, to not hide behind false securities.

Much of this was good, needed, prophetic even; but I believe as well that it's now time for a different response, at least for a while. Another shift is needed. What's required is not a conservative or fundamentalistic turn, though that clearly seems to be the temptation for many. We can't unlearn what we've learned through these years of deconstruction.

We're not called to turn back the clock, to become arch-conservative. We're called instead, I believe, to become post-liberal, post-critical, post-modern, post-sophisticated, post-hypersensitive and post-politically-correct.

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