Ronald Rolheiser - Sacred Fire: A Vision for a Deeper Human and Christian Maturity

ALSO BY RONALD ROLHEISER

Our One Great Act of Fidelity: Waiting for Christ in the Eucharist

Secularity and the Gospel: Being Missionaries to Our Children

Forgotten Among the Lilies: Learning to Love Beyond Our Fears

The Restless Heart: Finding Our Spiritual Home in Times of Loneliness

The Holy Longing: Guidelines for a Christian Spirituality

Against an Infinite Horizon: The Finger of God in Our Everyday Lives

The Shattered Lantern: Rediscovering a Felt Presence of God

Copyright 2014 by Ronald Rolheiser

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Image, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

www.crownpublishing.com

IMAGE is a registered trademark and the I colophon is a trademark of Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rolheiser, Ronald.
Sacred fire : a vision for a deeper human and Christian maturity / Ronald Rolheiser. First Edition.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Spiritual formationCatholic Church. 2. SpiritualityCatholic Church. I. Title.
BX2350.3.R655 2014
248.482dc23

2013046344

ISBN 978-0-8041-3914-4
Ebook ISBN 978-0-8041-3915-1

Cover design by Jessie Bright
Cover photograph by Roc Canals Photography/Flickr Select/Getty Images

v3.1_r2

For my brothers,
George and Fred Rolheiser,
in gratitude.
Their generosity and sacrifice
helped provide for the rest of us,
and, after the death of our parents,
their house has always been our center.
No small thanks!

When one reaches the highest degree of human maturity, one has only one question left: How can I be helpful?

TERESA OF VILA

Some fifteen years ago, Eric Major, then the religious editor at Hodder & Stoughton, asked me to write a book on spirituality. Having taught in the area for a number of years, I seized upon the idea with enthusiasm, immediately imagining how a wide survey of contemporary spirituality might translate into a book. But Eric Major had a different idea. I dont want a book that surveys contemporary spirituality, he said. Those books are already out there. What I want is for you to write a book that I can give to my grown children that explains to them why I still believe in God and why I still go to churchand that I can read myself on days when I am not so sure why. I want a book on apologetics, but with a different bent.

The book, The Holy Longing, resulted from that conversation. And Eric Majors instincts were correct; there was a crying niche for that kind of book. The book found a huge audience, inside of all Christian denominations. But while The Holy Longing is a solid book, one that offers a certain basic foundation in Christian spirituality, it remains precisely that, a foundational book, a needed Spirituality 101 course, but not a graduate or final course. The Holy Longing is a book that is intended to help us get our lives together, to help us achieve an essential discipleship.

But where do we go from there? What lies beyond the essentials, the basics? Where do we go once some of the basic questions in our lives have been answered, or at least brought to enough peace that our focus can shift away from ourselves to others? Where do we go once the basic questions in our lives are no longer the restless questions of youthful insecurity and loneliness? Who am I? Who loves me? How will my life turn out? Where do we go once the basic questions in life become: How can I give my life away more purely, and more meaningfully? How do I live beyond my own heartaches, headaches, and obsessions so as to help make other peoples lives more meaningful?

The intent of this book is to try to address exactly those questions: How can we live less self-centered, more mature lives? What constitutes deep maturity and how do we reach that place? And, not unimportantly, what constitutes a more adult, Christian discipleship? What constitutes a truly mature following of Jesus? This book will try to answer those questions. It will try to be true to what its subtitle promises: A Vision for a Deeper Human and Christian Maturity.

And like The Holy Longing, this book too has its limits. There is still a further maturity asked of us, beyond even essential altruistic living. Beyond any degree of maturity in this life there still lies death. We are not only asked to give our lives to those whom we love, we are also asked, in a manner of speaking, to give them our deaths. How do we do that? That question will not be the focus of this book, though a chapter at the end will offer some synthetic perspectives on this. The hope is that the question of making our dying our last great gift to our loved ones will be addressed more fully in a later book.

No person is an island, and no book is a solitary effort; thus, I nurse a huge debt of gratitude to many people who helped me both to gestate these ideas and eventually to give them birth in this book. Special thanks to the many folks on whom I tested these ideas in classrooms, workshops, retreats, and in private conversations. Thanks to Gary Jansen and Doubleday for their enthusiastic reception of these ideas and their editorial suggestions. To Alicia von Stamwitz, who has given me so much creative and editorial counsel over the years and who offered these too for this project, a huge, huge thanks. To my colleague, Cliff Knighten, a deep thanks for laying a hawks eye to the final draft and especially for his undying interest in spirituality and his constant suggestions as to whom I should be listening to and reading. A deep expression of gratitude to Robert L. Moore for letting me lean on and utilize so many of his insights. His ideas and his balance have been and remain a major source of inspiration to me. Special thanks too to Abbott Joseph Boyle and the Trappist monks at Snowmass Abbey in Colorado and to Bob Beloin, Kerry Robinson, and the Catholic community at Yale University for providing me with a nurturing space within which to write.

Finally, most of all, I want to thank my two families: the Rolheisers, that large amorphous tribe of family who supports me when I dont deserve it and puts up with me; and my religious community, the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, who through more than forty years have faithfully given me trust, a community, a job, a roof, a table, and an altar.

Ronald Rolheiser
San Antonio, Texas
June 30, 2013

Tell a wise person, or else keep silent,

because the massman will mock it right away.

I praise what is truly alive,

what longs to be burned to death.

In the calm water of the love-nights,

where you were begotten, where you have begotten,

a strange feeling comes over you

when you see the silent candle burning.

Now you are no longer caught

in the obsession with darkness,

and a desire for higher love-making

sweeps you upward.

Distance does not make you falter,

now, arriving in magic, flying,

and, finally, insane for the light