The night of February 7, 2008, was bone-chilling, but the atmosphere inside the Priory of Dominican University in River Forest, Illinois, was warm in anticipation of Ronald Rohheiser’s Lenten lecture on “Missionaries to Our Children,” sponsored by the University’s Siena Center.

Collecting pennies for the children in China or India or Japan was and is well and good, said this writer, scholar, speaker and lover of God and his people, but it is time now to be missionaries to our children, USA., time for parents to reclaim their position as their children’s first religion teachers, time to understand that everyone is a shepherd to someone.

In the August, 2002 issue of “St. Anthony Messenger”, Kay Lagreid offers us a unique opportunity to gain insight into the life, the faith and philosophy of this great man, when his latest book, The Holy Longing had sold 75,000 copies. The entire interview is at http://www.americancatholic.org/Messenger/Aug2002/Feature2.asp. Excerpts from the interview follow:

The Holy Longing is not my most personal book, but rather my attempt to name and articulate the Christian fundamentals – Why I believe in God and why I go to church.

All of us have a holy longing. It is desire. We’re born with a divine spark inside us, longing for everything – longing for God. That’s the fire of spirituality.

I had a rural and robust upbringing as a prairie farm boy in a large immigrant family and a small community. My parents were solid and stable people – second generation pioneers – who always tried, at great lengths, to instill values in us. We had a very deep Christian formation.

My experience with the Oblates has been much the same. They work with the poor. They’re grounded.

I’m not a man for the dramatic... I’m always talking about the domestic God over the monastic God – the God of the kitchen over the God of the high mountaintop. I talk about the gradual life inside of family and community as opposed to the dramatic falling at the feet, being born again and reborn again in one minute. Not that I belittle private spiritual experience but, for me, spiritual experience is in life.

The center of the gospel, the center of the spiritual life, is to give yourself away, to find yourself. Jesus kept using different expressions, such as "If you lose your life, you’ll find it. If you try to save your life, you’ll lose it."

The great struggle for so many people is that they’re overwhelmed with rich plurality. They don’t know what to trust, and it’s easy to lose balance. They hear so many voices – secular voices and energetic voices – everything from what’s said in church to Oprah’s latest book. There’s a hunger to know what’s essential, trustworthy and important – and to sort that out from the fluff.

Another question that comes from many of the mature people in my audiences – mothers and fathers, grandparents, ministers – is one I wish I had better answers for: “How do we give our faith to our little kids?” There’s a real struggle in the Christian community today to pass on faith this generation to the next.

A third type of question has to do with handling specific kinds of pain – suicide, divorce, personal brokenness in our lives and in our families. People are looking for clarity and for help and consolation. They’re looking for someone to say, “You didn’t fail.”

The question is how to hear the contemporary voices – where the Spirit is in the color of our world – and at the same time to have boundaries, so that Christianity means something.

A second challenge is building community. Morally, the Axhilles’ heel of our culture is the individualism that makes it difficult to sustain any kind of community – marriage, family, parish, neighborhood. We’re into “bowling alone.” Religions – Christianity, Judaism and others – are about community.

A third challenge is how to retain a sense of God and faith in a culture that’s overwhelmingly distracting, where God isn’t in the marketplaces or in the everyday consciousness. How do you prevent your everyday consciousness from becoming agnostic? How do you not be overwhelmed by pragmatism, narcissism and restlessness, which are a kind of dominant consciousness of the culture?

It’s pretty hard to work the kind of days people work today and then go home and spend an hour in prayer. You’re more likely to watch a sporting event or a rerun of Seinfeld to relax.

Jesus was prescribing four things as an essential praxis for a healthy spiritual life:

a) private prayer and private morality;
b) social justice;
c) mellowness of heart and spirit;
d) community as a constitutive element of true worship.

The Church is always God hung between two thieves ...To be connected with the Church is to be associated with scoundrels, warmongers, fakes, child-molesters, murderers, adulterers and hypocrites of every description. It also, at the same time, identifies you with saints and the finest persons of heroic soul within every time, country, race and gender. To be a member of the church is to carry the mantle of both the worst sin and the finest heroism of soul...

The God of the Incarnation has real flesh on earth and speaks to us in the bread and butter of our lives, through things that have skin – historical circumstance, our families, our neighbors, our churches, and that borderline – psychotic friend who painfully reminds us that we are not God. When we look for God’s guidance, these voices on earth must complement the voice from Heaven.

Sex is a wide energy and we are healthfully sexual when we have love, community, communion, family, friendship, affection, creativity, joy, delight, humor, and self-transcendence in our lives. Having these, as we know, depends on many things and not just whether or not we sleep alone.

When we stop to consider that Rolheiser has written eight books, published numerous articles, given countless retreats and lectures, we cannot help but be impressed with the zeal of this shepherd. He’s another Paul, pressing on to the next mission.

His eyes sparkle, his smile is joyful, his handshake steady, his love for God and his people, genuine.. Through his lectures and books, we are blessed to meet him anywhere on our journey.

Lord, we ask that you bless our leader, Ronald Rolheiser, with good health, and support from our Christian community to continue his work for You and us.

Bless, also, our other brothers and sisters, who spread the Gospel in different vineyards, and at day’s end, bring us all home. Amen.

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