The Valley Catholic June 25, 2019 | Page 21

tvc.dsj.org | June 25, 2019
COMMENTARY
17
Rachel Held Evans, 1981-2019
By Rev. Ron Rolheiser, OMI
Theologian, teacher, award-winning
author, and President of the Oblate
School of Theology in San Antonio, TX
No community should botch its deaths. Mircea Eliade
wrote those words and they’re a warning: If we do not
properly celebrate the life of someone who has left us
we do an injustice to that person and cheat ourselves
of some of the gift that he or she left behind.
With this in mind, I want to underscore the loss
that we, the Christian community, irrespective of
denomination, suffered with the death of Rachel Held
Evans who died, at age 37, on May the 4 th .
Who was Rachel Held Evans? She defies simple
definition, beyond saying that she was a young re-
ligious writer who wrote with a depth and balance
beyond her years as she chronicled her struggles to
move from the deep, sincere, childlike faith she was
raised in to eventually arrive at a questioning, but
more mature, faith that was now willing to face all
the hard questions within faith, religion, and church.
And in this journey, she was beset with opposition
from within (it’s hard to courageously scrutinize your
own roots) and from without (churches generally
don’t like being pressed by hard questions, especially
from their own young). But the journey she made and
articulates (with rare honesty and wit) is a journey
that, in some way, all of us, young and old, have to
make to come to a faith that can stand up to the hard
questions coming from our world and the even harder
ones coming from inside of us.
Carl Rogers once famously said: “What is most
personal is also most universal.” The journey Rachel
Held Evans traces out from her own life is, I submit,
by and large, the universal one today, that is, the
naïve faith of our childhood inevitably meets chal-
lenges, questions, and ridicule in adulthood and that
demands of us a response beyond the Sunday School
and catechism of our youth. Not least among these
questions and challenges is the one of church, of jus-
tifying belonging to one, given the propensity within
our churches for infidelity, narrowness, judgmental
attitudes, reluctance to face doubt, and the perennial
temptation to wed the Gospels to their favored politi-
cal ideology.
Rachel Held Evans struggled to make the journey
from the naiveté of childhood, with all its innocence
and magic, where one can believe in Santa and the
Easter Bunny and take biblical stories literally, to what
Paul Ricouer calls “second naiveté”, where, through
a painful interplay between doubt and faith, one has
been able to work through the conscriptive sophisti-
cation that comes with adulthood so as to reground
the innocence and magic (and faith) of childhood
on a foundation that has already taken seriously the
doubt and disillusionment that beset us in the face
of adulthood.
The Irish philosopher, John Moriarty, whose reli-
gious story plays out along similar lines as Rachel’s,
coins an interesting expression to describe what
happened to him. At one point in his religious jour-
ney, he tells us, “I fell out of my story”. The Roman
Catholicism he had been raised into was no longer
the story out of which he could live his life. Eventu-
ally, after sorting through some hard questions and
realizing that the faith of his youth was, in the end,
his “mother tongue”, he found his way back into his
religious story.
Cyril of Alexandria
Image © public domain
376 - 444
feast – June 27
Cyril was born in Alexandria, Egypt, and was the nephew of its
patriarch, Theophilus. Classically educated, he was ordained by
his uncle, whom he succeeded as patriarch in 412. He had helped
Theophilus discredit and depose St. John Chrysostom from
Constantinople, in what may have been a rivalry between the two
ancient sees. As patriarch, he exercised his authority hastily and
violently, drawing severe criticism, and was embroiled in heretical
controversies, chiefly against Nestorius of Constantinople, who
taught that Mary was not the mother of God. Cyril’s orthodoxy
eventually was upheld by pope and emperor. This most brilliant
theologian of the Alexandrian tradition was declared a doctor of the
church in 1882; he is the patron of Alexandria.
Saints
Rachel Held Evans’ story is similar. Raised in the
Southern USA Bible Belt inside a robust Evangelical
Christianity she too, as she faced the questions of
her own adulthood, fell out of her story and, like
Moriarty, eventually found her way back into it, at
least in essence.
In the end, she found her way back to a mature
faith (which now can handle doubt), found a church
(Episcopalian) within which she could worship, and,
in effect, found her way back to her mother tongue.
The church and faith of her youth, she writes, remain
in her life like an old boyfriend. … Where, while not
together anymore in the old way, you still end up
checking Facebook each day to see what’s happening
in his life.
Many Roman Catholics and mainline Protestants,
I suspect, may not be very familiar with Rachel Held
Evans or have read her works. She wrote four best-
selling books, Inspired, Searching for Sunday, A Year of
Biblical Womanhood, and Faith Unraveled. The purpose
of this column is therefore pretty straightforward:
Read her! Even more important, plant her books in
the path of anyone struggling with faith or church: loved
ones, children, spouses, family members, friends,
colleagues.
Rachel Held Evans arose out of an Evangelical
ecclesial tradition and out of the particular approach
to Christian discipleship that generally flows from
there. She and I come from very different ecclesial
worlds. But, as Roman Catholic priest, solidly commit-
ted to the tradition I was raised in, and as a theologian
and spiritual writer for more than 40 years, reading
this young woman, I haven’t found a single line with
which to disagree. She’s trusted food for the soul.
She’s also a special person that we lost far too soon.