← The Spiritual Life with Fr. James Martin, S.J.
The Spiritual Life with Fr. James Martin, S.J.
Ron Rolheiser’s unique approach to praying through suffering
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Welcome to the Spiritual Life. I'm Fr. Jim Martin. On this podcast, we reflect on how people experience God in their prayer and in their daily lives. And I'm joined by my excellent producer, Maggie Van Dorn. Maggie, good to be back with you.
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Good to be with you, Jim. And I'm so excited because the guest we have on today, I know, is a personal hero of yours and mine. And that, of course, is the great.
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Ron Rolehiser, one of my favorite all time spiritual authors.
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Yeah, so Father Ron Rolheiser is a Catholic priest, a theologian, and an author known for his profound spiritual insight and accessible writing. He is a member of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate and he has served as the president of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, Texas. Ron has written many books on Christian spirituality, at least 16 by my count, including the Holy Longing and Forgotten among the Lilies. Those are two classics that I read in college and Sacred Fire, A Vision for Deeper Human and Christian Maturity, which you talk about at great length with Ron in this conversation. Also domestic Creating a Spiritual Life at Home. When Ron is not crafting brilliant books. He is an in demand and well known speaker.
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So happy to have him. I'm really excited.
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So we'll get to that conversation in just a minute, but first we have a question from our audience. This comes from Marston, and the question is, what spiritual practices do you think will be useful to young men in particular as they navigate changing and often unhealthy visions for what masculinity should look like today?
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Thanks, Marsten. I had this question a couple days ago and I've been thinking about it because it's a tough question, but actually maybe it's not so tough. Ron gives a great answer later in the podcast. I would say, look to Jesus, right? So if you're thinking about what a healthy male spirituality might look like, look to Jesus. Now, of course, we're not the Son of God. We're not the second person of the Trinity, we're not the Messiah. But you know, I think sometimes masculinity is framed only as, you know, being strong, being tough, being macho. But you know, Jesus is a strong person, physically strong. I mean, he was a carpenter. He's also someone with obviously a strong character, but he's also gentle and tender. His heart is moved with pity, we're told many times in the Gospels. So we have all sorts of ways of understanding Jesus. But one way to understand Jesus is as a healthy example of what a man is like. You can also look to other saints like St. Joseph. We don't know much about him, but we know a little bit about St. Joseph. There's lots and lots of examples in the Christian tradition of healthy masculinity. And take your pick, Francis of Assisi, St. John Paul II. I think there's so many wonderful models, but really it all sort of starts from Jesus. So if you want a healthy model of masculinity, come to know Jesus Christ. So thanks, Marston. Such a great question.
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Yeah, that was a great answer, Jim.
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Thanks.
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If any of you would like to ask Father Jim a question, you can write to us at the spiritual lifemericamedia.org.
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And now a word from our sponsor. Looking for a simple way to deepen your own spiritual life? Give Us this Day is a superb resource that helps Catholics stay rooted in scripture and in prayer wherever you are, no matter how busy you are. It features reliable and relatable spiritual reflections, the daily readings, essays on the lives of the saints, and, of course, prayers to accompany you throughout the day. I'm honored to be an editorial advisor. And I've been writing a monthly essay called Teach Us to Pray about how to pray from the very beginning. And I use Give Us this Day all the time. And here's a great offer. Right now, listeners of the Spiritual Life can get 10% off their new print subscription. And let me tell you, the booklets are beautiful. Just visit giveusthisday.org spiritual life and join this community of Catholics praying together again. That's give us this day.org spirituallife and now onto our conversation with one of my favorite spiritual masters, Ron Rolheiser. So, Father Ron Rolheiser, one of my favorite spiritual authors of all time, welcome to the Spiritual Life.
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C
Thank you. Thanks for having me, Jim.
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Yeah, I've really been looking forward to this as much for the audience as for me because I love talking to you about all this. So just to start off with what is spirituality that can really feel like an amorphous or imprecise term. And it, you know, people seem to use it to mean whatever people want it to mean. How do you define spirituality?
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C
Okay, good question. No, first of all, the word spirituality in English is kind of a new word. You know, if you go to a library before into the 70s, you're not going to find books with that title in you will, in French. But, you know, we always talk, remember, about the devotional life, the spiritual life, you know, so we had other words for this. Okay. Protestants almost have the word discipleship and so on. But let me give you an analogy theology. You know, I make a distinction in theology and spirituality. Imagine the game of soccer. You have rules or baseball. There are rules. Those are the rules of the game, but it's not the game. So theology, you've done all these years of theology that teaches you boundaries, but that's not your discipleship. Then how do you live that out? How are we playing the game of discipleship? How do you live your life so that you're trying to move higher and become a better person and put on, as Jesus said, the metanus, the metanoia, you had a higher mind and so on. So spirituality, Jim, I'll leave you with the analogy. It's how we are playing or doing the game of discipleship.
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So it's living out, you would say, your Christian discipleship in the world. Is that how you would define spirituality?
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Yeah. And so we defined it now much wider. We used to be devotional. Were you saying the rosary? What were your devotional practice? What's your whole practice? What's happening in your marriage, what's happening, your vocation and so on.
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Now, one of the things we use to define our podcast is we say that we talk about people's experience of God in their prayer and in their daily lives. Do you make a distinction in the spiritual teaching that you do, prayer and daily life, or is it more combined?
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Well, I think we make a distinction because we have to, theoretically. But, you know, ideally, they shouldn't be. Let me give you a great story I got from John Shea. He said he belonged to this prayer group in Chicago, you know, where everybody has a practice, mindfulness centering prayer, this kind of prayer, you know. So they asked, one woman said, what's your practice? She said, my practice is raising my kids. Okay, so if you're familiar, maybe your listeners don't have Carlo Caretto, the great Italian monk who went to the Sahara Desert for 24 years, lived as a monk there, you know, prayed up a storm, wrote these books. He's living in the desert. Said, I came back to Italy, visited my mother, said, who raised 11 kids, who went through years of her life when she didn't have time to go to the bathroom. She was more contemplative than I was. Not that there's something wrong with being in the desert. There's something very right about living our life, that where your life is a prayer. I wrote the book Domestic Monastery with kind of that thing in mind, you know. But I love the story from Shay, you know, what's your practice? My practice? Raising my kids.
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You know, That's a great, that's a great segue because we in the Jesuits as you know, talk about being contemplatives in action. And, and so let's say a mother asks you that question. You know, how do I live a monastic life or a mystical life in my everyday life? What, what does that consist of for people? What, what kinds of advice do you give them to make it more contemplative?
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I'll give you chapter one from the book.
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Good.
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You know Benedict who wrote the rules of monasticism and he says a monks life has to be ruled by the bell, by the monastic bell. So when the bell rings, you go to the next exercise, not because you want to, but because it's time. And time is not your time, it's God's time. In fact, he has a famous line in there, Jim, you'll recognize where he said, if a monk is writing a letter and he still needs to cross the a T or not an I, the bell rings, you don't do it. You go to the next exercise because it's God's time. Now I've lived with the trapless a couple of summers writing books and they do that, they have wristwatches, but they run the monastery by the monastic bell. Okay, and now what does that mean for somebody who's not a monk? Well, your monastic bell, first of all, it's your alarm clock that goes off in the morning. You get up, not because you want to, because it's time. And then all that, the duties of your life, you go to work, you're doing this, you're paying mortgage, you're raising kids. That's all. The monastic bell, you know, notice you're being called out of what you'd like to be doing or like to be resting. The monastic bell calls you out. See, so that in a certain sense, if you look at it, a home is a monastery, a rectory is a monastery and so on. Your BAAL is a little different than the monk's, but it's a bowel. This morning when the alarm clock went off, the monk in the east said, oh darn, I gotta get up. Not because I want to, because it's time and time isn't our time. You know. See, my parents generation were an older generation, but they had a Catholic thing at the time where they called your duties of state. They said if you follow your duties of state, they'll take you into sanctity. So Jim and I are priests. Our duties of state are different than somebody who's a married woman who's raising kids, but said, just be faithful and that'll take you where. God will take you where you want, where you need to go.
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Well, let me ask you something, because I think this is so interesting. You know, my novice director used to say, you know, avoid the extreme, which is to say, my work is my prayer. Right. And so where does prayer fit into this? And how do you respond to that line? When people say, my work is my prayer, I don't have to pray.
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Jim, I think we have the same novice master.
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Well, he used to say the full quote was, if your work is your prayer, then you're doing neither one.
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Well, yeah, no, but they're calling for a balance. For instance, if I'm a professional contemplative, my work is my prayer trap is thither to pray for the world. You're an active religious or, you know, or people raising kids and so on, you're not a professional contemplative. Now, you have to balance that. It'll be a different balance. But in order for you to stay healthy as an active priest, you also better be praying the same as a template, but stay healthy. They also need to be doing community stuff and so on. So it calls you to balance. One of the things our novice master said, which I still remember along the same lines, he said, like, if you make your work, your prayer say, I'm too busy, I'm doing all this to praise it. But then when you aren't busy, if you don't pray, there's something like that. So when you aren't busy, do you pray? And that calls us to balance, you know, so that there's some dangerous saying, just my work is my prayer. The danger is we can lose balance there.
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Yeah, that's a great insight. I think it was Francis de Sales who said, you know, someone asked him, how often should I pray? And he said, half an hour a day. Except when you're busy, then you pray an hour a day.
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I like that. You know, a thing on that, Jim. If I can make some of the great classic spiritual writers, you know, and they'd always say, and I'm sure you got that, and others have, you know, you're supposed to pray an hour a day or whatever, and so on, or you go to church, you know, daily or weekly and so on. But, you know, we've always interpreted that literally, but they mean habitually, so it means as a habit. So, for instance, if. Suppose you say, I'm going to exercise. I have an exercise program. And you may only hit five days a week but that's an habitual practice. If you're hitting one day a week, it's not a habit. You say, well, I'm committed to doing centric prayer every day. Some days you're not going to get there. Something happens, but you better be getting there habitually.
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And how do you introduce those habits into people's lives? I mean, you know, I'm a spiritual director, as you are, and I have so many people that say, you know, I struggle with prayer. I'm too busy for prayer. I can't, you know, endless. I can't pray. My prayer is dry. It's boring. What do you do to help people habituate themselves to prayer?
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What you start with, the thing is that you have to do it. Okay, you know, if I say, I'm too busy to pray, and that can be on a given day, but not for a given season of your life, or even maybe for a young mother, had something. Birthday can be a season. But for an ordinary person, like, you know, you can go through a week. You can go through sometimes when you're too busy. But then if you say, habitually, I'm too busy, that's a sure sign that you need to pray. That means you can't slow your life down, you know, like, so that you have to do that. It's the same as if you're a medical doctor and a person says, I'm just too busy to exercise. When you're living a dangerous life, you know, like, because you're that busy, you better be exercising. You don't want to die of a heart attack at age 50. You see the analogy. I'm too busy to pray. It's dangerous. But then the second part of your question is, I'm bored. I don't like it this and so on. I handle that in a different way. I'm going to use a colorful expression here. You know, you can edit the note if you want to, but from Annie lamotte, the spiritual writer from San Francisco. So she tells a story about her own son, Samuel. Said, I raised him virtually in church. He loved going to church. He gets to be 14, comes home one day and he says, I don't want to go to church anymore. She says, why not? It doesn't mean anything to me. So this is a colorful answer. Annie lamott, at our best. She says, I couldn't give a shit whether it means anything to you. She said, that's a child's answer. It doesn't have to mean anything to you. So it's like visiting your grandmother. Don't visit your grandmother because it means she's your grandmother. You don't go to pray because it means something. That's what adults do, you know, and the great spiritual writers right down to today, people like Thomas Keating said, just go, just go, you know, or use this analogy. Suppose you have your mother in a senior's home, assisted living, and you're the dutiful son or daughter, and you happen to be living close by, and so you visit her five nights a week for an hour. How many times would you have an interesting, exciting conversation with your mother? Once or twice a year. And the other times to talk about the weather, the sports team, this, you know, those are good visits, you know, and even if you fall asleep while she's eating, you're there, you're there, you know, So I like adding the much. It doesn't have to mean anything to you. You do this because that's what adult people do. If you believe in God, you spend some time, you visit your grandmother in the senior's home.
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Well, that's a good analogy for me since I visit my mother in the nursing home often. Let me ask you something a little more personal. What's your prayer like?
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Okay, I'm German. I mean, third generation, but, you know, so I like structure. No, not because structure has to hold me. So this would be my daily prayer life. Every day, you know, as a priest, I say the office at church vespers and lauds, we pray them mostly in community, but if I'm not in community, I'll pray them. And then I've tried to go to daily Eucharist, you know, and usually five or six times a week, I'll make it. And you might miss two days a week and so on. Okay, then in terms of my own private prayer, you know, and I'm busy, and a lot of times, you know, you know, you're tired and so on. I try to do 20 minutes to half an hour of centering prayer. And centering prayer is hard for me. I'd much sooner do discursive prayer, you know, like, you know, for years I did like lectio divino on your breathe and, you know, but centering prayer, you just sit. You just sit. Am I doing this right? Like. Cause you're not even supposed to try to think holy thoughts. You're just supposed to sit. 20 minutes is a long time. Where the other night, because I was in retreat, I did 40 minutes. It was the longest 40 minutes I spent this week, you know, because time moves slow. But that's exactly the Point of it, I'm usually wound up and so on to slow down. But I do it as a discipline. And as Thomas Keating said, when you do centering prayer, you don't evaluate it the way you do discursive prayer. Did I pay attention? You just do it as a habit and then see if your life is getting better. Thomas Merton used to say, I can tell your prayer life how it is by how you're driving. There's a scary thing. Am I driving a little slower? Am I a little more patient? Am I swearing a little less when I drop something? And so on. That's the way you evaluate your prayer life, The Eucharist, when I can, again, without being scrupulous about it. Basically, it's habitual, you know, if I can't make it, I can't make it, you know. And then in terms of private prayer, I try for 20 minutes a day, sometimes a little longer in centering prayer. Because I did contemplate, like lectio divino and discursive prayer for years. I find it easy. But I'm convinced now that because of my life and everything else, I need to be doing centering prayer. I need to be pushing myself to just sift.
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So for our listeners, centering prayer would be a process where you place yourself or center yourself in God's presence. And it's wordless and, you know, you are just doing it without images.
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I want to give your listeners a wonderful image on centering prayer and descriptive prayer from Thomas Keating. So Thomas Kidney said, imagine you're a mother fish at the bottom of the ocean, three miles down or 300ft down, and your baby fish come and say, mother, where's this water everybody talks about? So I said, today, what? The mother fish. She'd set up PowerPoints and show them pictures of Niagara Falls, of a flowing tap, of this and so on. They'd be intrigued with the pictures. That is discursive prayer. At a certain point, you say, I'm going to turn off the projector. And now you just sit in the water, you know, see? And you're sitting in the water without images, you know. So centering prayer said, you just shut the projector off. No more pictures. You just sit in the water. That's centering prayer.
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That's a great image. Let me ask you something. And I. I don't normally ask our guests this, but you're someone who can answer this. So when you are praying and when you're doing centering prayer or when you're doing lectio, what happens? What's going on inside of you. Because I think for a lot of people, and I talk about this in my book Learning to Pray. One of the most confusing aspects of the spiritual life is what's supposed to happen when I close my eyes. So in your life, what kinds of things do you experience when you pray?
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If I'm doing what I call discursive prayer, that's prayer with images, then it's easy. I'll read a scripture text or I'll read passage from a book, and thoughts will come to you. And you can kind of see, I think God has challenged me here and I need to do this and so on. That's easy for me. You know, centering prayer isn't because you go there and you make an initial intention. See, it's like when you visit your mother. I'm here, I'm here. And then afterwards, you sit. But I still struggle with. You can't have a blank mind, you know, you mind is like a barrel of monkeys. You push one thought down, 10 come up, and so on. So then I keep wondering, am I doing it right? Like, how do you just sit, you know? And Keating says, imagine your thoughts like you're sitting by a river and the boats are going by and you're just watching. And every time you grab onto one, you have to let go. But I'll be honest, I struggle with that. I do it because I know I'm supposed to do it. But it would be much easier for me to go back to discursive prayer with images and so on. Because when you're in centering prayer, I still don't know what to do with my mind.
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Well, let me ask you a question then. So I'm not your spiritual director, but. So why are you doing it? Why do you. Do you feel, in a sense, obliged to do it? In addition, why don't you just do lectio or discursive prayer?
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C
Tell you why, mainly through authors like John of the Cross, he'd say, when you reach a certain point in your life, it's important to do this and to move away from discursive prayer. I'll use an expression which I really like. I do a class on this, where he says, then the deeper things happen under the surface. He said earlier on, it's also true relationships. So imagine a couple on their honeymoon. The deep things are happening on the surface. 35 years later, they're married. They may just be sitting in the living room without talking. It's deeper. But you don't have stuff on the surface. So to complete my analogy of you're visiting your mother five days a week and you're not having deep conversations, you're talking about the weather and so on. And you have a sister who's conveniently living in Alaska, so she comes once a year for a week. They do have deep conversations, and you want to kill them both. Okay, no, no. But what she has, it's not deeper. It's surface. Let her stay there. You know, John, the cross says the further you go, the deeper things begin to happen under a surface. And you have to risk that, you know? Or back to Keating's analogy, I've watched a lot of PowerPoints about God. It's time I sat at the water.
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One of my spiritual mentors was who I'm sure you knew, Father Bill Barry. And one of his images in his book God and you and lots of his books was just what you were saying, that there's a deeper intimacy going on sometimes when it's just a presence. And he compared it to walking along the beach with a friend or a partner or a spouse. And I really like this. And he said, sometimes there's deep communication going on when you're just looking at the ocean or looking at the sky. And one of the things he said, which I found really helpful is, and in fact, words in those cases might be a distraction. So if you're going down the beach and you're just sort of maybe walking hand in hand or something, and suddenly the person says, boy, look at that dolphin or look at that bird or look at that cloud, or, you know, it actually takes away from the experience and it sort of mars sometimes the depth. So I agree. I think there's a time for kind of centering prayer and a time for, you know, as you call it, discursive prayer. We're going to pause now for a short break and we'll be back in a minute. Body, mind and spirit. We believe if one needs help, so do the others. It's part of Catholic Healthcare's holistic approach to treating the whole person. Here, people are not viewed as symptoms or insurance claims. And when we treat the body, mind and spirit, we believe the whole person will thrive. Catholic Healthcare. Learn more at wecareyouflourish.org Sponsored by the Catholic Health Association, St. Joseph's Seminary, the.
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Edu.
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A
Let me shift a little bit now, Ron, you know this. My favorite book of yours, as I've told you many times, is Sacred Fire, which I've read probably five times now, which talks about a mature Christian spirituality. And I want to read out my favorite passage. I think I've also told you on what happens when our commitments to either marriage, family, church or anything become, in a sense, a drag. And here's the quote I'm going to quote you. During those long years of maturity when boredom, the longing for a second honeymoon, midlife crisis, disillusionment, and numerous other things eat away at our fidelity like rust on iron, we can find ourselves standing like Peter before Jesus with every reason of head and heart to walk away, but knowing at a deeper place inside of us that for us, real life depends on staying the course. When we honor that deeper place inside us, real life will flow into us. I cannot tell you how often I read that and thought about my own vocation as a Jesuit or a priest. And, and I'm just really curious about that quote and that insight about staying the course. Did that come from your own life experience, or is this something that happened when you accompanied people in those situations? I'm really curious where that insight came from.
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C
All of the above, from my own life experience. But let me give you a little theoretical stuff on that. You know, we all know the famous quote of C.S. lewis when he became a Christian, and he said after all these years, he says, I knelt down the most reluctant convert in the history of Christendom. Remember that? But you should read the next line. He said, I knelt down the most reluctant convert in the history of Christendom said, because I had come to realize, they said, that the harshness of God is kinder than the softness of man. And God's compulsion is our liberation. So what is God's compulsion? So let's talk head, heart. See, your head tells you what you think is wise to do, and your heart tells you what you'd like to do. But there's a deeper thing inside of us, and that tells us what we have to do. See? So you take Peter again, standing in front of Jesus, that's right after the Bread of Life discourse where they're all disillusioned. His head isn't in it. He's telling Jesus doesn't make any sense. His heart isn't in it. He'd like to walk away, but he's going to just realize I have to stay. This is going to bring me life. I may not walk away. I want to quote a Jesuit for you here whose name you'll recognize. Daniel Berrigan.
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Sure.
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When I was a young priest, and again, I got to apologize about a colorful word, but this is Berrigan. Somebody was interviewing him, this woman, and she says, father, where does your faith reside? Your head or your heart? And you know Daniel, he says. They said, ma', am, he said, faith is rarely where your head is at. He said, and faith is even less rarely where your heart is at. I said, faith is where your ass is at. He said, what are your commitments? He said, you know, anybody who's been in a commitment for any length of time, there'll be days or there'll be seasons when your head isn't in it, your heart isn't in it, but you're in it. And not only that, you mean it. So give me an example. Imagine a couple, before they leave in the morning, they kiss each other and say, I love you. Okay? Some days, on that particular day, that's pretty empty. They don't mean it effectively, but they mean it deeper down. You know, the heart isn't in it, but they're in it. They realize, this is my spouse, and I'm lucky to have met this person. This is my life, see? So I think when we talk about faith and commitment, it's so important to push to that level. You know, it's not so much in my own life, Jim, even becoming a priest. I didn't become a priest because I wanted to. I became a priest because I had to. This was a call that's kind of, you're asked to do this, and I'm going to do it, you know.
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Now what does that mean? I completely agree. I'm curious. What did that mean for you in your life? How did that work itself out? Because I would imagine some people say, oh, I really want to be a priest. I really feel drawn to this and my vocation, my desire. You know, we're told to pay attention to our desires. How do you distinguish between something that is kind of surface and something you have to do? And how did that work in your own life?
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Yeah, you know, because I don't want to rule out. For instance, I had an older brother who was a priest, who was a great missionary. He wanted to be a priest. I didn't. You know, for me, it was a call. And I was a, you know, an old Catholicism, which he may have just got part of, you know, because you're younger, where Every young man or woman had to ask themselves, do I have a religious vocation, Sister? Am I meant to be a sister? And my mother put that out to me, which I resented. Or you may be called to be a priest. Now this is going to sound very out of step today. I graduated from high school at age 17, okay, because that was a late, you know, October birthday and I didn't want to go to the seminary and I went because I thought I'm called to do this. And you know, when I look back now say, how do you make a decision at 17? That's still the clearest and most unselfish decision I've ever made in my life and the most life giving one. This has turned out well. I thank God every day and I probably messed up my life in a thousand ways. And I look back, I did it at 17. I'm 77, so it was a lot of years back. You know, it's a. The clearest decision I've ever made and the most life giving one. And no regrets. Rough years in between, but no regrets.
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Did that question, what do I have to do here? Sustain you in those rough years?
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It held me there. But okay, I think I can say this. You're a priest, but there's a lot of years and you're young, you fall in love with people and the attraction of leaving and marrying and so it's powerful. Or sometimes you, you can fall in love or somebody falls in love with you. It's almost obsessional. You say, how am I going to get through the next season? You know, let's say no. But it was always no, I'm called to do this, you know, so that there were some hard things to work through, particularly in my case to do with celibacy. You know, just we fall in love with people, you know, like Henry Nouwen was one of my saints. Henry Nouwen. A couple times he fell in love with somebody and as a celibate, couldn't process, had to go to, he had a breakdown, had to go to, you know, for clinical therapy, you know, but there was an honesty there. But notice with him, I can't leave, I can't leave the priesthood, you know, the compulsion, it's a hook.
- [31:20]
A
Yeah. What do I have to do now you brought up celibacy and chastity and as I've told you, also your writing on that has really helped me a lot. Lot. One of my favorite quotes from you is, chastity is proper respect and proper patience, not just for how we stand before sex but for how we stand before all of life, how do you explain chastity or celibacy? I know they're slightly different to people who don't understand it. And what would it mean in your life?
- [31:48]
C
See, chastity, first of all, isn't primarily even a sexual thing. It's powerful. But chastity is how we stand before life. The biblical image I use, which is powerful, which is Moses before the burning bush, and God says, take off your shoes. The ground you're standing on is holy ground. I believe that all sins are ultimately sins of irreverence. You're somehow violating boundaries, your own boundaries, somebody else's boundaries and so on, that all sins are sins of irreverence. And chastity, basically, is another word for reverence, respect. You know, what I say in the book, for instance, a contemporary, the Me Too movement of women today, that's a movement for chastity. It's. Women are saying, like, you know, I'm not being properly respected here, you know, and that's why I believe it's one of the most important virtues there is, you know. And yet, you know, our society has this whole negativity around it, you know, like during says, can anybody say the word chastity without a cringe? You know?
- [32:55]
A
Now, all of us, of course, are called to chastity in different ways. Some of us take vows of chastity. What about celibacy? You know, which is. Which is not being married. That's part of priestly life and religious life. How do you explain that?
- [33:08]
C
With difficulty. No, no, let me start with. Excuse me for a second with a quote from Merton. A journalist once asked Merton, she says, father, what's it like being celibate? And Merton, being Merton, said, it's hell. He said, you live in a loneliness that God himself condemned. God said, it's not good to be alone. That's for everybody. And he said, you make a vow, you can have community, but there's a certain psychosexual intimacy that you're. That you're cutting yourself out of. And he says, and that is a real issue. And he said, it's painful, but first of all, it can be very fruitful. And secondly, it's meant to be painful. So I'll tell you what I mean by meant to be painful. When I was a seminarian and we call, like this, gentlemen, you call ourselves scholastics. And we had an old priest who was our history professor. He was a cranky old man, a wonderful man. We used to have a joke, you know, you can't like him, but you have to love him. And, you know, he's always cranky and so on. But later on he got sent and he's working a commissioning role, you know. And in 1991, I became provincial of the Oblates in the west, and a classmate of mine who had studied with him, he became provincially in Toronto. So we had to go to Rome for what we sarcastically called charm school, for permission and so on. So one night we went out with this cranky old guy and this is the story of when he got on chastity or celibacy. So we're eating in a Roman restaurant and Chris, my Toronto colleague, says to him, says, father, he said, do you find your work here meaningful? And he said, not a stupid question. He said, that's a question for your generation. Meaningful work, that. Meaningful work. He says, but the answer to the question, he says, 90% of what I do is pure root. But I'm good at it. There's satisfaction. I'm doing a job, he said, and 10% is creative and it's meaningful. But he said, that's enough. He said, I'll tell you why I reacted to meaningful work. He said, my dad raised a large family and he worked for 40 years in a job where he fed cattle in a feedlot. He'd get up every morning, have breakfast, take a lunch kit, and from 7 till 5:30 at night, he fed cows. He said he wasn't looking for meaningful work, he was doing a job, he was feeding a family. He said, that's also the way I understand celibacy. Said, so when I'm doing this work and 90% isn't meaningful, he said, that's my solidarity with normal people. He said, that's also true of my celibacy. He said, I've read every book they wrote on celibacy and they don't help you go to bed alone at night. He says, but you know something? When you go to bed alone at night, he says, I'm in solidarity with the real poor of this world. The real poor don't have anybody. He said, we have the luxury of making a vow of celibacy. He said millions of women and men don't have that luxury. It's forced on them. It's not a choice. He said, they go to bed alone at night. He said, that's the true poverty. He says that's the only thing that's been meaningful to me as a settlement, he said, but it's deeply. It's kept me there. He said, we are in solidarity with the poorest of the poor. We're people who don't have anybody, see? So, like Burton says, it's painful, but it can also be fruitful.
- [36:40]
A
Now, is that the case in your life in the sense that it is seen as a kind of asceticism? Because I could also make the argument that, you know, it's. There's a positive value, which is that it's freeing. Right. It frees you up to be with other people more deeply and. Or do you experience it more as a kind of identification with the poor and people who are lonely? Is it both and for you, or both?
- [37:02]
C
Both. And, you know. And also, you know, the reason I don't often flag, you know, it's. It frees us up because, you know, I have a lot of friends who are Protestant ministers or, you know, we also pay a price by not having family or wife and kids and so on. So that I always say one of the greatest dangers of celibacy is not that I'm going to act out, is that I can become quite selfish, you know, See, you don't have a wife or a partner to call you, you know, say, you know, Jim, you shouldn't be doing this. See, So I live in a community. Community is good. But as a religious, you can get selfish. As a celibate, there's nobody to call you on it.
- [37:43]
A
Definitely.
- [37:44]
C
And I think that's the real danger inside of celibacy, you know.
- [37:48]
A
Yeah. And you become like a, you know, kind of a independent bachelor in a sense. And sometimes it's hard for the community to challenge you on things. Right. It's easy to just let the guy kind of go.
- [37:58]
C
Yeah.
- [37:59]
A
And sort of spin off a little bit. I think that's really helpful in terms of the identification with. With the poor. And your friend is right that it is a. You know, it is a. It is an asceticism, and it is difficult at times. Let me switch to something that I just read recently, Ron. I don't know if I've shared this with you, of how much it meant to me something was so interesting and almost counterintuitive. You have a fascinating insight on praying when you're suffering. I think this may be in Sacred Fire, and you mentioned that sometimes it kind of turns us in on ourselves and makes us focus even more on our own suffering. Now, you know, in kind of classic modern Christian spirituality, the idea would be, well, you. If you're suffering about something, some physical thing or some emotional or mental thing or financial thing, you would want to In a sense, focus on it and talk to God about it and be honest with God about it. But I found that what you're saying actually makes a lot more sense and it helped me more, which is that if you do focus on it too much, you can turn in on yourself. And I think you say at some point in the book that the key is to focus more on God. Right. Can you talk about that?
- [39:10]
C
Yeah. Okay. And again, I want to start with a story. I got this from a very good psychologist in graduate school in Belgium at Leuven. Anton Vergot, classy psychologist, was sitting in his class and one day he said, he's talking about depression. When people get depressed or you get obsessed, like, you know, he says, all of you are priests and so on. He says, and your kind of go to thing is you take your problems to the chapel. And he said, sometimes that's the last place they should go. Right, because they're going to go and all they're going to do is he's obsessing more and more and more. He said, you know, depression, he said, is a form of over concentration. Like basically you just can't get your mind off this thing. Said you're over concentrating, so you got to break the concentration. Remember one of my own nephews phoned me one day, this was years back, and he had broken up with his girlfriend. He was depressed, said, I'm going to leave my job for two weeks and I'm going to go to the mountains, take a cabin and think this through. I said, that's the stupidest thing you could do. You're going to go after a breakdown. I said, stay with your job, go to movies, see friends, do stuff. That is time when you need healthy distraction. You need to be with people. The last thing you need to be is to be alone because you're simply going to marinate in that. So sometimes you take your problems to the chapel and sometimes I agree with him, that's not where you want to be because you'll simply obsess with it and obsess with it and get deeper into it. So in spiritual direction, I make a difference between somebody who's. They're not in the season of depression, you can push them, go to the chapel. Sometimes when somebody's in depression, you know, it's the opposite. You need distraction, you need to be absorbed, you need to be with people.
- [40:57]
A
That's a great insight. That's very helpful for me to hear. So the distinction would be someone who's maybe struggling with depression or even despair. Because I can hear people, you know, pushing back and saying, oh, well, you know, I need to talk about these problems with God. So you're saying at some time, sometimes it's appropriate, but sometimes it can lead to this over focus. Correct?
- [41:16]
C
Yeah. You know, I make a distinction between three kinds of spirituality when I call, for instance, spirituality, the ascent. Sometimes, you know, we have to push others ourselves. Can you do it higher? Can you be a better person? And then we have spirituality of the descent. You know, that's like length and stuff. Can you face your shadow? Can you face darkness? Can you face chaos? And so on? What are you afraid of? And then I have spirituality of maintenance set. Can you get a foot in front of the next one? Can we get you stabilized enough that you can either ascent or descent? I think spiritual directors sometimes make a mistake that you're pushing people who shouldn't be pushed. You're pushing people. They should be embraced in therapy. Basically. This is not a time to reach higher. It's not a time to face your shadow. You're ready to. This is a time. Can we get you walking steady, one foot in front of the next, and then we'll get you to chapel.
- [42:14]
A
That's very insightful. Thank you for sharing that. I think we're going to go to our audience question now. Ron, this has been such a great conversation. I could talk to you for another three hours. But we take questions from our audience as a way of wrapping up. And this is from someone named Marston. He asks what. What spiritual practices do you think would be useful to young men in particular as they navigate changing and often unhealthy visions of what masculinity should look like today?
- [42:45]
C
Well, let me start with the question of images of unhealthy masculinity. You know, and I think you. You can get this in two ways. One of them is, you know, kind of what some people maybe unfairly call toxic masculinity. The masculine. You got to be strong. You got to reassert yourself that feminism has softened the masculine soul and so on. No, don't go there. And that's not the true men's movement. On the other hand, to say all we need to do is to feminize ourselves more. I was part of the original men's movement, which was more anthropological. You had Robert Blythe, Robert Moore, you know, James Hillman. And I was impressed with them. Their idea was, they say feminism catalyzed the men's movement, but it's not a reaction to feminism. You know, they said, you know, Why a lot of men are macho and, you know, unhealthy. Said it's because it's not that they're in touch with the feminine. They're not in touch with their true masculine soul. That's the paradox, you know, you have to be in touch with what's truly masculine inside of you. So, like, for instance, Robert Bly, who began the men's movement, the anthropological men's movement, he said, you know, what started this? I had a bad father, dysfunctional father. And he says, and I started going to feminist seminars. You know, some of them were pretty radical. And he said, what happened is, he said, I noticed this, that the women who were leading, they were strong. He said, if the devil had come into the room, they'd have torn em up and throw them through the window. He said, and the men who were there were sensitive, wonderful men, but they were depressed, that there was a depression. There was no masculine energy. So he said what he did, he said, I'd go to feminist seminars and during the break, I'd pull men into a room. He said, I just told him the story about my own father. He said, and half of them were crying, which spoke volumes about their alienation from their masculinity. You know, See, so the, the original men's movement wasn't to put men in touch with their femininity, you know, in touch with their masculinity. When I am macho and toxic, it's because I'm not a true man. And now that's been seconded where today, you know, there's a powerful men's movement that I'm not associated with, you know, and their idea is, you gotta be strong. The man's the man, the head of the household. In fact, one of our major government leaders said this recently. Empathy is a sign of weakness, you know, that's toxic as you can get, you know, now what spiritual practices, I think to somehow be with other men where you can talk some of this through. I'd say talk to friends, talk to therapists, join a healthy men's group.
- [45:48]
A
Ron Rolheiser, I want to thank you on behalf of our audience for your time, for your many writings. We haven't even talked about the Holy Longing, which is another fantastic book. But I want to thank you personally for your friendship, but also for that incredible book, Sacred Fire, which I go back to usually once a year. So thank you for that. Thank you for your time and bless you on your wonderful work.
- [46:09]
C
And I'd like to thank you, Jim, for your work and Also, for the Jesuits who have been in my life, I've had some. Some most powerful mentors in my life, have been Jesuits, and I nurture an inner Jesuit.
- [46:21]
A
Well, thank you, Ron, and God bless. If you enjoyed this conversation on the spiritual life, I encourage you to head over to to America magazine.org where you'll find an article written by me and some of my spiritual takeaways from this podcast. Each conversation we have is so rich and complex that it's important to continue to reflect on these themes and how they apply to our daily lives. So head over to americamagazine.org or click in the link in the description to get started. See you there. Well, Maggie, so you and I are both fans. I think you are more of a fan of Holy Longing, and I'm more of a fan, as I said, of Sacred Fire, but only because I haven't.
- [47:47]
B
Read Sacred Fire yet.
- [47:48]
A
You'll love it, and I'm so glad you got a chance to meet him.
- [47:52]
B
Yeah, me too. You know, you both covered a lot of ground in your conversation, and one thing that you actually brought up was around staying the course. And there's this sense of, like, there's what your head wants to do, there's what your heart wants to do, and then there's what we have to do. Why did you bring that up? Why did that quote, you know, arise for you in this conversation?
- [48:18]
A
Well, that quote has always been really meaningful to me, ever since I read it about, you know, Jesuit life, life in general. Jesuit life can be hard. Life as a priest can be hard. You know, life in general can be hard for everybody. Right? And. And this idea, these three questions. What is the wisest thing to do? What would I most like to do? And he compares it to, you know, like, gosh, you know, if you're married and you want to have, you know, run off with somebody, right? It sounds exciting and it sounds like fun, Right? But it would be ruinous. So what do I have to do? And I think that's just so compelling for people in a certain stage of life, right, where you have commitments, you've made commitments, you've made promises, you've made vows in some cases, right? And so what I want to do sometimes is really has nothing to do with what I have to do, what I'm called to do. And he tied it, really, to this sense of vocation. I've rarely heard priests speak so clearly about, you know, their call, you know, being so unmistakable. Usually there's kind of wrestling, but I just think that that's such an adult question, right?
- [49:15]
C
It is, yeah.
- [49:16]
A
You sort of put away childish things and say, here's what I have to do, even though it may not be what I feel like I want to do at the moment. So I've just found that really profound. And that's one of the reasons I really love that book so much.
- [49:29]
B
And we as a society usually don't ask that question, what, what do we have to do? I mean, Maybe we did 100 years ago, 200 years ago, but that is not a common question today. And if I detected this correctly from the both of you, it's not as though what I have to do always leads to kind of a slavish commitment to something. There's often life at the other end of that, too. Right?
- [49:54]
A
Yeah. And I think that's the end of the quote. Real life will flow into us when we honor that deep place inside us. Absolutely. Because we believe if we have a vocation to whatever it is, that God's going to be with us. And frankly, you know, often doing what you want to do. Let's take the example of someone who wants to run off with somebody, you know, when they're married, would be a disaster. Right. So it's not life giving, but I think it's just a very mature question. What do I have to do in this situation? And, you know, it does sound, you know, almost like duty and kind of stultifying, but ultimately it's freeing, you know, because the. I think what he's writing about is all about freedom.
- [50:30]
B
Yeah. The other thing that he said that I thought was a little counterintuitive was that sometimes thinking too much about something that over concentration can feed depression, or if we're struggling in our lives and we only bring those struggles to God in prayer, and we don't concentrate our energy in any other way, especially in relationship to God, that. That can actually intensify the suffering.
- [50:56]
A
That's something else I found really kind of unique to him and unique to his writing. Because obviously, I mean, as you know, the normal thing to do to suggest to someone is if they're struggling, well, talk to God about that in prayer. Right. And you know, and I think that's important. Right. We've talked about being honest with God in prayer. Right. As part of developing intimacy. You know, if you have something that's terrible, some terrible medical diagnosis or some financial problem or some relationship problem, you don't want to just kind of hide it from God because then your relationship becomes cold and stale and a little distant. But his Point, which is really interesting, is that if you continue to talk about it and do nothing but talk about it and focus on it, particularly if you're in a state of depression, it can really exacerbate it and it can really kind of mire you in it. And frankly, that's the first time I'd seen that addressed in that way, because I find that in my own life, I'm not depressed. I've never had sort of state of depression. And people have those things, they go to psychologists. It's really, you know, important to take it seriously. But, you know, I think you can kind of navel gaze a bit and there's almost no answer. So I found that sort of tension between being honest with God and not focusing on your problems obsessively, really healthy. And the shift there for him was, you know, is a person able to do it right if they're in depression? That's telling them to focus on it like that in prayer might be counterintuitive. So I really found that very helpful and extremely refreshing from him.
- [52:26]
B
Yeah. Jim, when you have gone through a particularly hard period in your life, what are some of the healthy distractions that you've turned to?
- [52:34]
A
Well, I think of something like, you know, I've had different medical problems, as we all have operations, things like that. And if. If you do nothing but think about that in prayer, you know, that can be your whole life. And I think, frankly, anything that sort of gets you out of that mindset and also reminds you that your life is bigger than that. I remember I asked a spiritual director once about this, and he said, are you being honest with God in prayer about this? And I said, yeah, I'm praying about it the time, you know, about this particular problem. And he said, well, that's not being honest with God, because your life is about more than that. Oh, yeah, Isn't that interesting? It's about more than just that problem. Right. So, in fact, if you're only focusing on your problems, you're not being honest with God in prayer, you might be honest about that particular problem, but the totality of your life is really what you want to present to God.
- [53:20]
B
So that is so beautiful.
- [53:21]
A
It, isn't it? Yeah, it's been really helpful. That was, by the way, from Father Damien o', Connell, who was my spiritual director for a long time. So we want to thank our viewer and listening audience for joining us. We want to thank Ron for his wonderful insights and also Marston for his great question. The spiritual life with Father James Martin is a production of American Media. It's produced by Maggie Van Doren and our executive producer, Sebastian Gomes. We recorded in the William J. Loshert Studio in New York City with the production assistance of Kevin Christopher Robles, Grace Linehan and Grace Copps. Our audio engineer is Noah Levinson. Adam Buckmuller edited the video of this episode, which is available on America Media's YouTube channel. The theme score is courtesy of Teddy Abrams and Nate Farrington. You can follow me across social media. Amesmartinsj. Also, please help us grow the show by leaving a five star review on your favorite favorite podcast platform. If you love the spiritual life, then we have even more to offer you on America Magazine's website. Keep informed and inspired about our Catholic faith. Become a subscriber today@amera magazine.org subscribe or click the link in the show notes. Thanks so much and God bless you.
- [54:44]
C
Sam.