SPIRITUAL AUTHOR SET TO SPEAK IN COCHRANE
Rolheiser to discuss challenges of life’s second half, ‘aging into gratitude’
One of North America’s most prolific and respected spiritual authors will be speaking in Cochrane this coming week.
Father Ron Rolheiser will be discussing the challenges, pitfalls and potential rewards facing anyone during the second half of their life when he speaks at St. Mary’s Church, 10 River Heights Dr., on Wednesday starting at 7 p.m.
It will be a homecoming of sorts for Rolheiser, who was born into a close-knit family of homesteaders close to the Saskatchewan and Alberta border 71 years ago. Today, he is completing a term as president of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, Texas.
“I’m very much looking forward to it. I lived for 20 years during my priesthood in Edmonton, although I have a lot of family in Calgary as well, so yes, it is a bit of a homecoming for me,” he said.
In 1982, while living and studying in Belgium, Rolheiser began to write a regular feature column in the Western Catholic Reporter, offering reflections on various theological, church and secular issues.
He called the column, In Exile, and introduced it in the following manner to a new audience, one that would grow dramatically in the years ahead: “All of us live our lives in exile. We live in our separate riddles, partially separated from God, each other, and even from ourselves. We experience some love, some community, some peace, but never these in their fullness. Our senses, egocentricity, and human nature place a veil between us and full love, full community, and full peace.
“We live, truly, as in a riddle: The God who is omnipresent cannot be sensed; others, who are as real as ourselves, are always partially distanced and unreal; and we are, in the end, fundamentally a mystery even to ourselves,” he wrote.
Today his column appears in about 80 newspapers, worldwide.
Rolheiser also began what would become another major undertaking when he penned his first book, The Loneliness Factor, in 1979. Since then he has authored close to 20 works and today is busily exploring, writing and speaking about the various challenges we all face as we get older and enter the second half of our lives.
“Someone once said that we spend the first half of our lives struggling with the Sixth Commandment — Thou shalt not commit adultery — but the second half struggling with the Fifth Commandment: Thou shalt not kill. But long before anyone is shot by a gun, they are shot by a thought.
“As we get older it is harder and harder not to get angrier and grow only in ingratitude. But instead, to learn how to let go of our wounds, becomes a very human struggle and also a spiritual one. The energy of the first half of our lives that drove us, that isn’t the struggle of the second half,” he said.
“In aging we have to grieve for our losses, our disappointments and the breakdowns we have known. Otherwise they are going to turn us hard. Elder people should age into wisdom, but so often we age into disappointment and bitterness. We become angrier when we should be aging into gratitude,” added Rolheiser.
For his talk in Cochrane, he will call upon the wisdom of the late Australian writer Morris West, author of such books as The Shoes of the Fisherman and The Salamander.
Rolheiser said West began writing his autobiography at age 75 and the opening sentences still resonate.
“He started it this way: ‘When you are 75 just three phrases should be left in your vocabulary — thank you, thank you and thank you,’ ” Rolheiser recalled.
“But it is hard to be 75 and have those three phrases as the first thing in your mind. We have our wounds and our breakups and our disappointments. But isn’t that a great line on your 75th birthday — just those three phrases? That is the test we need,” he said.
Anyone wishing to hear Rolheiser speak in Cochrane can call 403-9322012 to reserve seats or pay $20 at the door on Wednesday night.