What Ronald Rolheiser Sees Coming for the Rest of Us

I winced a little when I read Rolheiser saying that after years in leadership, nobody's asking for his opinion. Not because it's dramatic, just because it's so ordinary. So human. I've seen that ache up close, in rectories, hospital rooms, parish offices after retirement parties are over and the sheet cake is long gone.

A priest gives decades to preaching, deciding, visiting, organizing, carrying everybody else's grief for a while. Then one day the phone slows down. The meetings stop. The body starts making decisions you didn't approve. And suddenly the question isn't, "What am I doing?" It's, "Who am I if I'm not doing much at all?"

That's not an old-person question, by the way. That's everybody's question with better lighting on it.

When usefulness starts to slip

Rolheiser's latest book, Insane for the Light: A Spirituality for Our Wisdom Years, comes out of that territory. As described in his conversation on The Nonviolent Jesus Podcast, he's reflecting on what it means to let go in later life, especially anger, resentment, bitterness, control. He talks about moving toward softness, forgiveness, gratitude. I don't think that's sentimental. I think it's brutal work.

Because letting go sounds lovely until it's your turn.

I've sat with parishioners who were generous and faithful for years, and then age exposed something raw in them. Sometimes it was tenderness. Sometimes it was sharpness they had kept hidden under busyness. If I'm honest, I've seen both possibilities in myself too. When we're no longer buffered by productivity or applause or the little ego snacks of being needed, whatever's underneath can come rising up fast.

And that's why his line about repeating "let it go" lands harder than a cute spiritual slogan. Control is intoxicating. Even holy-looking control is still control. In parish life we can dress it up with words like stewardship or responsibility or standards. Fair enough. Some things do need tending. Still, there comes a point when clutching becomes its own kind of unbelief.

I'm thinking of an older man from years ago who kept trying to run every committee long after he had stepped down from formal leadership. Nice man. Good heart. Exhausting human being. One afternoon he told me, half laughing and half not, "Father, if I don't keep my hand on things, I don't know what I'm for." That sentence has stayed with me longer than a lot of polished theology.

Same.

The temptation to get hard

What struck me most is that Rolheiser connects aging with resentment and bitterness instead of pretending wisdom arrives automatically with gray hair and orthopedic shoes. Thank God somebody says it plainly. Age can ripen a person. It can also make them cranky in a spiritually dangerous way.

I've met elders whose presence feels like sitting near a fireplace in winter. You leave steadier than you arrived. I've also met people who seem to have spent twenty years rehearsing their grudges until resentment became part of their personality. That's sadder than wrinkles or weakness ever could be.

The Christian task here isn't to become vague or passive or artificially sweet. It's to become free enough that suffering doesn't calcify us. That's different.

Rolheiser also speaks about living through dark days and about how violence keeps answering violence. That part hit me too. Not because it's novel, but because we've all gotten weirdly accustomed to contempt as public language. Compassion gets mocked as softness. Mercy gets treated like naivete. People act like cruelty proves seriousness.

It doesn't. It usually proves fear.

His insistence on nonviolence and hope feels less like idealism to me and more like basic spiritual survival now. If we don't learn how to release our rage before it colonizes the soul, we'll call our hardness realism and congratulate ourselves for it.

Small tangent here, but I noticed this once after a parish finance meeting that went way too long and included one argument about carpet that felt only partially about carpet. I walked outside irritated, convinced I was defending noble principles of stewardship when in fact I was mostly hungry and annoyed. Spiritual discernment sometimes begins with admitting you've become unbearable before dinner.

Not every bitterness is profound. Some of it is low blood sugar with theological vocabulary.

Becoming beloved without a job title

The deepest question underneath all this is the one Rolheiser names directly: who am I when I stop doing? That's the nerve he touched.

We preach that our identity is rooted in being loved by God, not earned by usefulness. We say it at retreats and write it in cards and nod along when somebody else needs to hear it. Then life strips away our roles and we discover whether we believe any of it ourselves.

I'm not sure I have a good answer for this one beyond saying that discipleship keeps getting smaller and truer as we age, if we let it. Less performance. Less proving. Fewer speeches maybe. More blessing people quietly. More gratitude that doesn't need an audience.

That kind of wisdom isn't flashy enough for our culture, which likes energy more than depth and novelty more than peace. Still, when I think about the holiest older Catholics I've known, none of them were trying to stay important forever. They had lightness about them. Humor too, which Rolheiser mentions and which matters more than we admit.

A subversive sense of humor might be one of the last defenses against despair.

Not sarcasm masquerading as intelligence. Not cynicism with good timing. Actual humor, the kind that reminds us God is still God and we are still creatures and no committee meeting has ever been the axis of history.

Maybe that's part of growing old well as a Christian: learning how to loosen your grip without vanishing, how to bless without managing everything, how to become gentle without becoming small.

I don't just mean for people in their later decades either. Some of us need this spirituality long before our so-called wisdom years show up.

Maybe tonight that's the prayer... Lord, teach me what to release before I mistake holding on for faithfulness.