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April 2, 2019 | The Valley Catholic
COMMENTARY
Our Struggle for Proper Celebration
By Rev. Ron Rolheiser, OMI
Theologian, teacher, award-winning
author, and President of the Oblate
School of Theology in San Antonio, TX
We don’t know how to celebrate things as they’re
meant to be celebrated. We want to, but mostly we
don’t know how. Generally we celebrate badly. How
do we normally celebrate? By overdoing things; by
taking a lot of the things we ordinarily do, drinking,
eating, talking, singing, and humoring, and bringing
them to excess. For most of us, celebration means eat-
ing too much, drinking too much, singing too loudly,
telling one joke too many, and hoping that somewhere
in all that excess we will find the secret to make this
occasion extraordinary.
We have this odd idea that we can find special joy
and delight by pushing things beyond their normal
limits. But there’s precious little real delight in this.
Heightened enjoyment is found in connecting with
others more deeply, in feeling our lives expanded,
and in experiencing love and playfulness in a special
way. But that doesn’t happen in a frenzy. Hence our
celebrations are mostly followed by a hangover, physi-
cal and emotional. Why? Why is genuine celebration
so hard to do?
Perhaps the main reason is that we struggle con-
genitally to simply enjoy things, to simply take life,
pleasure, love, and enjoyment as gracious and free
gifts from God, pure and simple. It’s not that we lack
this capacity for this. God has given us this gift. More
at issue is the fact that our capacity to enjoy is often
mixed with inchoate feelings of guilt about experienc-
ing pleasure (and the greater the pleasure, the deeper
our feeling of guilt.) Among other things, because of
this, we often struggle to enjoy what’s legitimately
given us by God because, consciously or uncon-
sciously, we feel that our experience of pleasure is
somehow “stealing from God.” This is an uneasiness
that particularly afflicts sensitive and moral souls.
Somehow, in the name of God, we struggle to give
ourselves full permission to enjoy, and this leaves us
prone to excess (which is invariably a substitute for
genuine enjoyment).
Whatever the reasons, we struggle with this and
thus many of us go through life deprived of a healthy
capacity to enjoy and, since nature will still have its
way, we end up alternating between rebellious enjoy-
ment (“pleasure we steal from God”, but feel guilty
about) and dutiful discipline (which we do without
a lot of delight). But we’re rarely able to genuinely
celebrate. We rarely find the genuine delight we are
looking for in life and this pushes us into pseudo-
celebration, namely, excess. Put simply, because
we struggle of give ourselves permission to enjoy,
ironically we tend to pursue enjoyment too much and
often not in the right ways. We confuse pleasure with
delight, excess with ecstasy, and the obliteration of
consciousness with heightened awareness. Because
we cannot simply enjoy, we go to excess, burst our
normal limits, and hope that obliterating our aware-
ness will heighten it.
And yet, celebrate we must. We have an innate
need to celebrate because certain moments and events
of our lives (e.g., a birthday, a wedding, a graduation,
a commitment, an achievement, or even a funeral)
simply demand it. They demand to be surrounded
with rituals which heighten and intensify their
meaning and they demand that they be shared in a
special, highlighted way with others. What we cease
to celebrate we will soon cease to cherish.
The same is true of some of our deeper loving,
playful, and creative moments. They too demand to
be celebrated: highlighted, widened, and shared with
others. We have an irrepressible need to celebrate,
that’s good. Indeed the need for ecstasy is hardwired
into our very DNA. But ecstasy is heightened aware-
ness, not obliterated consciousness. Celebration is
meant to intensify our awareness, not deaden it. The
object of celebration is to highlight certain events and
feelings so as to share them with others in an extraor-
dinary way. But, given our misunderstandings about
celebration, we mostly make pseudo-celebration, that
is, we overdo things to a point where we take our own
awareness and our awareness of the occasion out of
the equation.
We have a lot to overcome in our struggle to come
to genuine celebration. We still need to learn that
heightened enjoyment is not found in excess, deeper
community is not found in mindless intimacy, and
heightened awareness is not found in a frenzied dead-
ening of our consciousness. Until we learn that lesson
we will still mostly trudge home hung-over, more
empty, more tired, and more alone than before the
party. A hangover is a sure sign that, somewhere back
down the road, we missed a sign post. We struggle to
know how to celebrate, but we must continue to try.
Jesus came and declared a wedding feast, a celebra-
tion, at the centre of life. They crucified him not for
being too ascetical, but because he told us we should
actually enjoy our lives, assuring us that God and life
will give us more goodness and enjoyment than we
can stand, if we can learn to receive them with the
proper reverence and without undue fear.
Florida Man Starts New Podcast on Catholics In Sports
By Mark Pattison
Catholic News Service
WASHINGTON -- A Florida man
with a five-year track record in podcast-
ing has started a new series on Catholics
in sports. Its title is deceptively simple:
“Catholic Sports Radio Podcast.”
Bruce Wawrzyniak has had the idea
in the back of his mind for some time,
he told Catholic News Service in a tele-
phone interview from Tampa, Florida,
where he lives.
“I had the idea a couple of years ago
and actually registered the domain
name csr.net. And then I sat on it for a
couple of years, unfortunately, I kept
renewing the domain but never doing
anything about it,” he said. “For some
reason -- it was not a New Year’s reso-
lution, but when the calendar flipped
over to Jan. 1 -- it was in my head. It was
something I passionately believed in.”
Then came the work of finding sports
figures to interview. Wawrzyniak had
been able to secure a bevy of perform-
ers, primarily from the world of music,
for his first podcast, “Now Hear This
Entertainment,” which he still does.
Wawrzyniak said he told himself, “I
know I can parlay this into success for
Catholic Sports Radio, and I can’t delay
this any longer.”
Listeners may think it’s just Waw-
rzyniak behind the microphone and a
control board, but he told CNS he has
one helper: “My Lord and Savior Jesus
Christ. It’ s me, myself and I, and a lot
of prayer. ... He really is helping me. I
wrestled for quite a while with Satan
wanting to take me down and not
wanting this project to go through, not
wanting this project to succeed.”
But through the podcast’s first eight
installments -- a new one gets posted
every Monday morning at www.Catho-
licSportsRadio.net as well as being
carried by a raft of streaming services
that include iTunes, Spotify, Google
Podcasts, Stitcher and TuneIn -- he’s
found some intriguing people. The most
notable of them is Joe DeLamielleure,
a Pro Football Hall of Fame guard for
the Buffalo Bills who was part of the
“Electric Company” offensive line that
helped O.J. Simpson accomplish some
of the greatest rushing feats the sport
has seen.
But does the podcast conversation
turn to O.J., and Simpson’s tabloid-
scarred life after football? No. Rather,
Wawrzyniak gets DeLamielleure to
talk about his growing up as one of 10
children in the small Detroit suburb of
Center Line, Michigan, in a house with
just one bathroom and one bathtub.
DeLamielleure said he was pushed
into sports by his parents because at the
Catholic school he attended, they had
athletic facilities with showers.
“To be honest with you, most of
these people find the topic (of faith)
refreshing,” Wawrzyniak told CNS. “I
think most of them are used to being
interviewed about wins and losses and
statistics. I think this is something new
to them. Twenty-five minutes on the tele-
phone, they’re more than happy to do it.”
And with each interview Wawrzyn-
iak conducts, he said he gets leads for
other potential interview subjects: “’Oh,
you’re going to interview so-and-so,
right?’ ‘You’ve already gotten a hold of
such-and-such, I imagine,’” he said he’s
often told.
Wawrzyniak is more than just a pod-
caster. A self-described cradle Catholic,
he’s been involved in sports for much
of his adult life. He worked 10 years for
the National Hockey League’s Buffalo
Sabres, then for three years after that
he was vice president for public rela-
tions for the National Lacrosse League,
and then spent 10 years as director of
communications for the International
Softball Federation, the sport’s govern-
ing body. That job earned him a trip to
the Summer Olympic Games.
“I’m just an ordinary guy who’s do-
ing these things for the glory of God,”
Wawrzyniak said. “If my podcast helps
someone, then I feel I’ve served the
kingdom of God that day.”