Father Ron Rolheiser

Kate Bowler: There’s an ache at the center of being human, the kind that doesn’t go away with a fresh to-do list or a good night’s sleep. It’s the longing for more and the grief of what wasn’t. This is Everything Happens, and I’m Kate Bowler. I asked you all what you long for, and your answers just took my breath away. People wrote in with answers like, a mom who acts like a mom, somewhere to call home, one more moment with my son, a life untouched by regret, subtle ease, my soul dog to live forever. These longings, they tell us things. They tell us about something that we love or something that we miss or something that might be entirely out of our control to solve. So today I want to talk with someone who understands this deep sense of longing. And he might just convince us that these long things are not just like a flaw or a character deficiency. Maybe they’re a reminder that we are people with unfinished stories, and maybe our longing is fundamental to our humanity. Perhaps these longings are holy. Father Ronald Rolheiser is a Roman Catholic priest, theologian, professor, and best-selling author. He has written beautiful and important books on spirituality and systematic theology like Sacred Fire and The Holy Longing, which have sold over a quarter of a million copies. And most importantly, he is from Saskatchewan. So we must be related in a profound way. Father Ron, thank you so much for talking with me today.

Ron Rolheiser: Thank you. Good to be here.

Kate: Your book, The Holy Longing, argues something that feels both true and deeply inconvenient. That we are born with this ache, like a longing that never fully goes away. So I wondered if we could start there. What is this ache?

Ron: I think it’s the most it’s, the most basic thing inside of us, you know, if you allow me to get philosophical just for a minute, remember Descartes famous line. So Descartes said, what’s the only thing you know that’s short? I think therefore I am. Well, St. Augustine said no, it’s not true, St. Augustine said the deepest thing is I desire, therefore I am, like, even before knowledge, we wake up, we’re aching. You know, from babies wake up crying, and we never quite stop for the rest of our lives. You know, there’s always something missing. And remember Augustine’s famous line, which I think all Christians know, but he says, you’ve made us for yourself, Lord, our hearts are restless till they rest in you. You know that to me, that’s the deepest truth in my life. I think it’s the biggest truth in everybody’s lives, whether it’s recognized or not.

Kate: You’re sort of stacking up this argument for this being the most basic thing about us sounds, it certainly feels very true to me. I experience it as like a hunger. And I don’t know if I would have named that so clearly before I had a pretty terrible experience with cancer. And now it feels very obvious to me that this ache in me, it feels like this desire to swallow the whole world at the same time.

Ron: Like a lot of people, I think it’s spontaneous to think it’s something that’s like a downside to us. But in fact, as Christians, that’s the image and likeness of God in us. You know, the image of likeness God outside is not some icon stamped in union like Trinity. It’s fire. We have divine fire, we have divine appetites. Now we land on people and things and stuff we love and so on, and that’s God given too. But notice, nothing ever, it never stops. In your life, I’m sure you’ve never said, well, that’s enough. Well, maybe some night when you’re tired. But basically, in terms of your life it’s never enough. It’s always the next thing, the next thing and there’s no resting spot.

Kate: I guess that’s one of the things that irritates me most in terms of the false advertising of being a Christian. Like there’s this nothing missing, nothing broken kind of attitude. Like if you’re a Christian, you just are never supposed to feel achy again. And you define spirituality instead as what we do with the ache. I wonder if you could unpack that a bit.

Ron: One of the weaknesses in Christian spirituality, actually it’s not as pronounced in Hinduism or Buddhism, and that is that we don’t make enough place for, you know, in popular spirituality, for mourning, for sadness, and so on. We don’t give people permission to be sad, you, know? You know, an older generation like my parents, growing up Catholic, they had a prayer that they said every day, and in that prayer was a line to, for now we live mourning, weeping this valley of tears. Today, people say, that’s morbid. No, it’s not. It gave them permission to, you know, make peace with a life that’s never full, that is never complete, you know. I also have a line from Karl Rahner. Karl Rahner says, sometime, he said, you realize in life that in this life, there is no finished symphony. You just never get the complete symphony, you get beautiful things. There’s wonderful things, life is beautiful, but it’s never the complete symphony. You don’t get it, you know? And we feel it in every desire we have.

Kate: It’s true that I mean, I do think that really, that mode of argumentation, where we imagine that spirituality sort of makes us impermeable, like absolutely, it seals every crack. And I usually think of that as one of the first signs of culture warring. Like, it means that you’ve taken faith and made it into a kind of proof and made it attempt to carry water that it, that nobody can. And especially when it comes to playing show and tell with families. I mean, even like since the night, and I really blame the 1970s for a lot of things, but like ever since the 1970’s, we have really tried to make families be this performance of nothing missing, nothing broken. And I don’t know a woman, I do not know a women in her 30s and 40s who would say, oh my gosh, at least that they weren’t, that wasn’t the beginning of them realizing, oh my God, I think I may have thought this was going to be fixed by now.

Ron: I think sometimes we just fall into the prosperity gospel, where you put on Jesus and you’re not going to suffer. And that’s not Christianity. That’s not what Jesus talks about, you know. Jesus doesn’t save us from the pains of life, gives us meaning inside of that. But you know, like the prosperity Gospel, you know like, if you had believed in Jesus, you wouldn’t have got cancer. Incidentally, Kate, I also have four stage of colon cancer, and I’ve had it for 11 years and so on. I guess I didn’t believe in Jesus enough, you know.

Kate: Thank you for telling me that, I didn’t know that. That is, living with chronic cancer, it does, I imagine, you have to keep answering the same questions over and over again. Like what exactly are we promised? How good does this get? How does it feel to be loved and does that help me at 2 a.m., when I feel scared and actually tired of whatever my body’s doing and not doing?

Ron: You know, Kate, what it’s done for me, because I’ve been stage four for the last 10 years.

Kate: Yeah.

Ron: And so that human, the doctor parcels out your life in six months, the say come back in six months. And then I enjoy those six months. There’s something wonderful about, you know, having a, you know you’re getting six good months, you know, then you go back and, you know, you can get a different sentence and another six months and so on. And I find it’s a good way to live because you can’t take anything for granted.

Kate: I totally agree. I used to have these two month scan intervals and then three months and then eventually six months. And I got really good at the intensity of that sprint feeling and like good at feeling like then the plans I could make inside of that felt really, they had to be important. They couldn’t just be another like garbage faculty meeting, no offense, faculty meetings. I did find actually a lot of my questions about this achiness though and part of why I was looking for your work was, I guess there was a satisfaction though that I started to get into when I felt like I was trying to pour my life into these measuring cups and then when my scan interval became 12 months then it sort of started to get fuzzy again with like what do you do with all this want then? Like how do balance the need to have like a sustainable, sustainable life, sustainable spiritual life, sustainable commitments, like be a nice, boring person. And yet you feel the like urgency to make everything matter in every way.

Ron: Yeah, you know, I think that you see sometimes when when we panic, for instance, you look at what your next scan is going to be like, and then you panic and then also they say, well, Kate, you’re good for the next five years. And all of a sudden, it’s like, it opens up and life becomes ordinary. You know, you don’t have the sharpness. There’s a goodness in that because also the there’s a danger that we fall asleep a little bit. I guess that’s what I’m trying to say with scans every six months, it keeps you alert. You don’t let your guard down. And not just so much with Jesus and church and so on, but with friendships, with health, with enjoying everything. You have a good glass of wine, say, this is good. I mean, where you just get up in the morning and the fact that you’re walking around, you’re healthy, you have wonderful work to do, and so on, you say, what a privilege, isn’t that wonderful?

Kate: Getting to that place of like, deepest gratitude. I’ve struggled a lot with how to manage that push pull feeling. Like to be totally honest. That’s why when I was describing what I was struggling with, it was like, oh, have you read Father Ron? So I’m really glad we’re talking. Because I was better at the short term everything you have to only do everything that matters. I have found it harder to feel the regularness of the aches of living in ordinary. For me, in my life right now, it’s school pickups and grocery lists and managing wanting to be ambitious and have a job and blah blah blah. But there is this feeling sometimes that you feel the accumulated disappointment of all the things that can’t be true. All the paths you can’t take, all the things that aren’t possible. And they usually aren’t possible because of good things, because people you love need you. And yet there’s all the incompleteness of it that I think that so much of your descriptions about like the ache really points to. I find that a lot of the answers sometimes about faith are so simplistic, like praying in a certain way, just being a good person is supposed to somehow diminish that. But you have this argument about how you think that channeling our spirituality in a certain direction might actually help us process, not live with quite so much disappointment or resentment or embitteredness.

Ron: We’re going to die with a lot of unfulfilledness. If you mourn it, you can live with it. If you don’t mourn, it’s going to harden you. See, there’s some deep spiritual and psychological genius in our mind that says, I need to mourn this. I can die without being fulfilled, but I can’t die with the unfulfillment not being mourned, you know? See, you’ve got to mourn the unfinished symphony. The other part I want to bring in is, the ordinariness. You’re not walking on water all the time. You can’t live in intensity all the time. You’d go crazy. Plus, it’s impossible. We have a lot of evangelicals who come and take our programs now, ministers, and that’s part of what they’re looking for. You see, I want a church where we expect people to be high all the time. You can’t do that, you know like the holy thing of dark nights and boredom and flatness so on and desert, you know desert spirituality wilderness, that’s a deep part of our spirituality and again in pop spirituality, you’re not given that permission. You’re supposed to be high and intense all the time

Kate: Instead of bored and irritated.

Ron: Everything, yeah..

Kate: That would be, I mean, a more realistic, like devotional book would be like, God is totally there when you’re very bored with this whole thing. God is definitely there while you’re extremely irritated.

Ron: Well, you know, like, I’m sure you’ve heard, like the, you know this pretty popular centering prayer, but it’s the whole idea of centering prayers. You just go there and you sit, you’re there with God. You know, I use the image of, you imagine your mother is in a senior’s home and you’re the dutiful daughter. You’re living five miles away, you go and you go and see her every night for an hour during the course of the year. How many times you’ll have an exciting conversation? Most of the time I talk about the weather, the sports team, what happened, the politics. Now I will say, compare that to you have a sister in Alaska who comes home once a year for a week. They do have deep conversations. They’re hugging and crying and you want to kill them both. But see what she has, that’s not deeper. That’s just the novice. That’s the initiatory stuff. See you’re at a deeper level, during the process at a certain time in your maturity set, the deep things happen under the surface. See, prior to that, they happen on the surface. Then they begin, and with God, you just have to show up. These mystics say, the one rule about spirituality, just show up, and some days you’re gonna be consummately bored, you’re looking at your wristwatch and so on, it’s like visiting your mother in a senior’s home.

Kate: I like that so much.

Ron: It’s like the novice who goes into church and is crying. It’s just a wonder to see Jesus, you know. Keep going back for a while.

Kate: You’re a terrible marketer, by the way. This is horrible marketing for the church. I love it. It’s like you see what happens when you come back the 20th time. Boredom. Also death. We’re going to be right back after a break to hear from our sponsors. Don’t go anywhere. There was something in your book that made me so angry. You were referring to an article that had been very popular about the, it’s called the drama of the gifted child. It was a description of the child who is sensitive, who maybe achieves out of knowing what people want, and then perhaps grows up to be an embittered adult. I really thought that was quite the super highway I have noticed recently of people who I know who feel very sympathetic and empathetic and are the person who shows up the 20th time and yet are struggling a lot with, I guess, like the burden of who that has made them.

Ron: Okay, let me get back to, you know, actually I’m a great fan of that book by Alice Miller. You see, what she talks about the hidden trauma of the sensitive child. And because you’re sensitive and you’re not, as the British say, thick as a plank, you know, you’re absorbing some hurts. And then she’s, you know Freudian, and she said once you get to 35, your neurosis overpowers some of your, your, eros and energy. And I always tell students, when you’re 40 years old, you realize your mother did love your sister better than you. No, but you don’t necessarily get hard. See, that whole book said, but that has to be mourned. She says, see, then the drama of the gifted child is, you know, all the sensitivities and everything you’ve been hurt in starts to stir up, you now? But she says, the task of midlife and beyond, psychologically and spiritually is mourning your losses, you know, and then it’ll soften. If you don’t mourn your losses then they’ll harden. You’re going to go to your deathbed saying my mother did love my sister better than me. If you’ve grieved that you can let it go. Basically, it’s an invitation to grieve your hurts.

Kate: Yeah.

Ron: And she said if you mourn them, they’ll turn soft and you’ll turn soft. If you don’t mourn them, then they’re going to stay with you.

Kate: One thing that’s been hard for me to land on is a level of honesty about my own, like really just, not just like needs and wants, but like really in a way, the willingness to go against the grain and like break a cultural script about, you know, our culture believes, for instance, that emotional self-mastery looks like a person that’s happy all the time. A person that is happy all of the time must be the best Christian, must be a capitalist winner, must be a wonderful, you know, wife and mom, et cetera. So I’ve really become more and more invested into trying to figure out what a grace-filled honesty looks like as opposed to just me running around confronting everyone. And it reminds me of something my friend Nadia Bolz-Weber said one time about her experience in AA, that she didn’t learn to be honest until she started practicing the kinds of honesty that people were doing in church basements as opposed church sanctuaries. I feel like you have a pitch for honesty, spiritual honesty.

Ron: First of all, I’m sympathetic. It’s hard, you know, because our culture, you’re not given permission to be honest. And I also agree that probably what we can learn reading our culture spiritually is from 12 step programs, you Know because they are completely predicated on honesty and honesty is the healing. As long as you’re that honest and as long as your in denial or lying, there’s no there’s no help, and the therapy comes from the honesty. But I want to make a point here which is something that’s heavy on my mind right now talking about honesty. And that is our culture, you know. See, we are coming into a culture of lies. And you know, lying biblically with Jesus is the most dangerous sin of all. You know, Satan is not the prince of sex or the prince pride, Satan is the prince lies. The danger with lies is we eventually believe our own lies. Like I always say, if there’s somebody in hell, they’re not there regretting their lives. They’re feeling sorry for these idiots in heaven. You get there by distortion, by lying, so that I think when they write the history of spirituality, America’s contribution is going to be 12-step programs, because they basically say that there is only one single thing you need, you need to stop lying. You need to. Our culture isn’t giving that permission. You get permission to go to an AA meeting or to a 12-step meeting, otherwise, we’re lying, we are lying.

Kate: I love the idea that one of the great contributions could be, especially in our culture of rampant disinformation, like, what if we double down on being a culture of grace-filled truth-telling, that we just we worry that it’ll take our souls apart if we don’t practice telling the truth?

Ron: This is pointed out by a novelist, he said, you know, like, when you look at the original sin in quotation marks, no, notice, he says, how it could have been different if Adam and Eve had owned it after the fact, instead of saying, well, it was her fault. And I got tempted, it seemed like a good idea at the time. We could have a little different history. Right back to the first man and woman, we can’t quite own our weakness and tell the truth and so on. So Adam and Eve already, you know, deny all, well, it’s not my fault. It’s not fault, you know. I like that line. If they could have said, it seemed like a good idea at the time. I mean, that was pretty stupid, but you know, I’m convinced that… And also, that’s true in John’s Gospel. In John’s gospel, Jesus said, you just don’t lie. And if you don’t, lie. If you’re honest, God’s gonna find you. God’s going to find you, and if you lie, you’re slipping away. I think that’s the great insight that was brought to us spiritually by AA and those kinds of programs. You know, in any AA, it’s clear, until you’re telling the raw, honest, naked truth, you’re not going anywhere. You can’t be healed. Or you can’t be helped.

Kate: I do like that, because it does seem to align, there’s been good things and bad things about the fact that we live in an overwhelmingly therapeutic culture. I mean, I think people imagine it’s only good things, but there’s been some tough things, too. Or people, for instance, don’t know that they’re arguing something because they begin every sentence with I feel. That sounds like that’s just a really good argument, where we can agree therapeutically and spiritually that honesty can be at the foundation of building or rebuilding who we are. And if we’re in the wrong place, it could be the start of who we want to be. We’re going to take a quick break to tell you about the sponsors of this show. We’ll be right back. You have this really helpful framework for talking about how we could reconstitute a spiritual life that doesn’t maybe feel so exhausting or dissonant. And it starts with actually making time to pray. It sounds funny to be like, Father Ron, can you pitch me on praying? But can you pitch me? What’s so lovely about praying?

Ron: Some days it doesn’t feel lovely at all. You know, Annie Lamont?

Kate: Yes.

Ron: In one of her books,  I love this. So she tells this story about her, she, her son, Samuel, when he was a young kid, I took him to church and he loved it. And the people fussed over him. And then it gets to be like 14, 15. And he comes and says, Mom, I don’t want to go to church anymore. And she says, Why not? It doesn’t mean anything to me. I love the answer she gave. He says, it doesn’t mean anything. She said, I couldn’t give a shit whether it means anything to you. She said, that’s a child’s answer. She said, it doesn’t have to mean anything to you, it means something itself. She said it’s like visiting your grandmother. You don’t visit your grandmother because it means something. You know, that is a pretty good definition of maturity. See, in the same with prayer, I don’t go to prayer a lot of times because it feels good. You don t visit your mother because she’s your mother. These things, they mean something in themselves. You know, one of the old classic definitions of prayer, which I still like, they say, prayer is lifting mind and heart to God. But you know something? We seldom do that. We try to lift what we think God wants. So if you’re a church, you’re born sick, that’s your mind and your heart. You lift that to God, if you have a sexual temptation, you’re lifting mind and heart to God if you are angry with somebody, you lift mind and heart to God, that’s why for instance the Psalms, you read the Psalms, they bring in every emotion. I want to take my neighbor’s kids and hit their heads against a rock, you know? See, for instance, you see the Psalms, they have every emotion in play. You want to murder somebody, you know? Some days you want to praise, you now, so, so I like the prayer. Prayer is lifting mind and heart to God. Whatever is in your mind when you go to church next, that’s what you lift to God, and sometimes it’s praise and wonderful, and sometimes I want to kill somebody.

Kate: I like how much murder is in this podcast today. I wonder what you advise people who have been very hurt by the church. There’s so much pain involved in the reality of people, actual communities, actual disappointment, brokenheartedness. How do we navigate the messiness of actual community when it’s wounded us?

Ron: You have about three dimensions to that question, and it’s a good question. First of all, what I do sometimes, I give them an image which, and that is to give themselves a time of convalescence. Say sometimes you need to be healed from your church. You have an operation, a time with convalescence, so sometimes they can’t go to church for a while. They can’t, you know? And it’s not that you’re rejecting Jesus or something, but you need convalescence. You know, I’m sure you read this marvelous book by Rachel Held Evans, the one in search of Sundays, her and her husband for a time, they he couldn’t go to a church or we Catholics, you know, are hurt by the church or the sexual abuse crisis, a lot of times, or by patriarchy or something. I’ll say well, period of convalenscence, you know, then secondly, go where you’re fed. Find a community. Find a community that feeds you, don’t necessarily go to a community that’s going to beat you up and so on. But then with the warning to, you know, like, but be careful also to find a community that challenges you and be prepared to live with some mess. You know, when people say today, for both good and for bad, they say, I’m spiritual but not religious. You know? See, partly they’re saying, I can deal with Jesus, I am not sure I can deal with community. You know. But see, we kind of have to deal with the community at a point. But then also, you know, respect yourself, because sometimes you’re just too raw, you’re just too tender. Say, this is not a time I can go back. I call that convalescence, and there’s other times, say, like, I’m stronger. I think I can take the bumps and the bruises now again.

Kate: I like that.

Ron: But find a community, you know, Sartre, the famous atheist, he once said, he says, hell is the other person. I use that because the truth is exactly the opposite. Hell is complete aloneness. But you don’t want to be cut off from family, from community, from somebody, you stay with the group. That’s a good question. That’s an alive, that’s a real one.

Kate: Yeah, there’s so much, it’s, I mean, historically speaking, it’s just been a bit since we’ve seen really good news for like an exciting way that is gathering people. I mean it just, we’ve had a lot of X this and X that because of the disappointment that people have had. And so I think people are really looking right now in particular of a way of being energized without having to go back to some of the same kinds of patterns of like hurt and often like a certain model of charismatic authority, like just a certain kind of strong leader that actually ended up not being a leader at all. I love the way that you describe looking at the ache, looking at incompleteness, and then pulling us towards something that is deeper and truer in a way that reconstitutes us in our relationship to God and also to other people to look at it and declare it good. Thank you so much for your gentle wisdom, for your willingness to answer this many questions and just your now official acceptance of our lifelong friendship. This has been an absolute joy.

Kate Bowler: What a gift to speak with someone who doesn’t rush to fix the ache, but instead says, yes, what you are feeling is real, and yes, God is still here. Father Ron reminds us that this holy longing is not proof of something wrong with us, but instead it’s what we’re made for. That boredom and irritation, disappointment, and desire, these aren’t detours from the spiritual life. They are the spiritual life. So wherever you are right now, aching or longing, bored or buzzing with hope, may you know that you are not alone. Not in your grief, not in your questions, not in you unfinishedness. God is not outside your ache. God sits with you in it, in the waiting and the wandering and the wanting. And may that be enough for today. Father Ron had one of my very favorite responses to people who’ve been hurt by the church. So if that describes you, man, thank you for sticking with this episode and I am so sorry. I also just, my team and I have been thinking about you and we curated a set of resources, blessings and episodes that might be encouragement to you. And we will add the link for that in the show notes. But before I go, hey, if you wouldn’t mind, could you leave a review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts? It is crazy how much of a difference it makes for people to find the show, and we would be so grateful. A big thank you to our funding partners, Lilly Endowment, the Duke Endowment and Duke Divinity School, and to the team behind everything happening and Everything Happens, Jess Richie, Harriet Putman, Keith Weston, Baiz Hoen, Gwen Heginbotham, Brenda Thompson, Iris Greene, Hailie Durrett, Anne Herring, Eli Azario, Katherine Smith, and Megan Crunkleton. Thank you. And today’s episode comes at a special time for two of our team members, Hope Anderson and Kristen Balzer are graduating. They have worked with us for the last few years. They edit and help with the podcast and write discussion questions and they use the typewriter for us and pray and research and we’re just so grateful for their work. So in the words of my father, Gerry Bowler, he always says to me, I’ll follow your career with interest. So, Hope and Kristen, I will follow your career with interest. This is Everything Happens with me, Kate Bowler.