Entering This World

by Chris Koellhoffer, IHM    April 27, 2025

Don’t you just love it when your heart and mind make associations for you, seemingly without any effort on your part, and then later present clear connections in ways that surprise you? I recently had the privilege of spending a precious four days with my older brother who lives in Florida and my sister and her husband who were visiting nearby. During dinner on my first night, we reminisced over stories of how our parents found one another. Mom, who grew up in the coal mining region of Northeast Pennsylvania and had a serious boyfriend there, moved to New Jersey with her sisters after high school to find work. There she met our Dad, and as she told us, “he was a lot more fun than my boyfriend back home.” So it was that all of us grew up in the suburbs of northern New Jersey.

We might call that Providence. Or grace at work. Or an accident of birth. But the reality of that landscape has so clearly shaped me and all my siblings. It invited us to freely explore the wilds of the natural world around us. It led us to embrace what today we might call creation spirituality: a profound knowing that every flower, every bit of greening, every furry, finned, and feathered neighbor is our kin, and we relate to them as such. Those formative years are responsible for the reality that we pray best, yes, we’re at our most contemplative, when we’re next to a body of water, preferably the salty and wave-tossed kind. The seeming accident of the place where we were born and raised gave us a childhood that wasn’t perfect, of course, but that was largely peaceful and absent of fear, a beginning that encouraged curiosity and cultivated beauty. I grew up owning that privilege and praying, “I want everyone to have what I have.”

After my few days in Florida, I spent Easter with another sister and her family. As we sat around and gazed at the deeply loved little toddler among us, I thought of the tribe of nieces, nephews, grandnieces and grandnephews I love dearly. Yes, I was oozing Easter joy and gratitude from every happy pore, remembering the promise of the empty tomb, the impossible good news, the incredulity of the disciples finding confirmation in the appearance of a risen Jesus.

Then I drove home and watched the evening news. My return to this practice was as sudden a jolt as listening to the Nativity Scriptures followed three days later by the abrupt and brutal Gospel account of slaughtered, innocent boys two years and under: Rachel weeping for her children. The contrast between what I was born into and where so many of the world’s fragile little ones are trying to survive looked back at me as if written in boldface and with exclamation points. Toddlers in Gaza crushed under rubble. Babies in South Sudan whom famine has robbed of the energy to cry. Both globally and closer to home, little ones struggling to escape abuse. I gaze on the suffering of the innocent, now deeply aware of the blessings of being born into my time and place, and once again I pray, “I want everyone to have what I have.”

Our place of birth is a mystery over which we have no control. I weep for every child whose life is untouched by love, who is constantly wounded by words or actions, whose only experience is the terror of war or the uncertainty of conflict. I wonder aloud to the Holy One: why them and not me? What I hear in response is that we’re called to fall on our knees in profound gratitude for whatever undeserved gifts have come into our lives because of our early beginnings. To recognize and name grace at work if we’ve known a catalog of caring parents, thoughtful teachers, faithful mentors who never gave up on us. To give our lives over in love and service to help move the Holy One’s dream of abundant life for all a bit closer to fulfillment. To be engaged in “good trouble,” working towards a more just and inclusive world for those who do not have what we had. To be people of resurrection who desire to be about all things rising, the rising of everyone, everywhere, with no exceptions, as Jan Richardson prays:

For all things rising
out of the hiddenness of shadows
out of the weight of despair
out of the brokenness of pain
out of the constrictions of compliance
out of the rigidity of stereotypes
out of the prison of prejudice;
for all things rising
into life, into hope
into healing, into power
into freedom, into justice;
we pray, O God,
for all things rising.

Blessings of this season! What might you hope to see rising in yourself or in our world at this time?

Takeaway

Sit in stillness with the Holy One.
In your imagination or with a photo, revisit the place of your birth and childhood.
What memories present themselves to you?
For all that raises up joy, give thanks. For all that rises as wounds, ask for healing.
Entrust to the Holy One whatever is in need of rising to new life in you and in our world.

Featured Images: Robin Lyon, Unsplash; Salah Darwish, Unsplash

NOTE:
Please join me in prayers of profound thanksgiving for the life and witness of Pope Francis. May his memory inspire us to care for all creation, especially the most fragile and vulnerable among us.

April 26 – May 2

Please hold in your prayer my safe travel and all who will be part of a guided retreat I’ll be leading for the Dominican Sisters of Grand Rapids, MI. Thank you.

To automatically subscribe to receive new posts from Mining the Now:

Go to the Home Page of Mining the Now (chriskoellhofferihm.org)* In the left-hand column above the section marked “Archives,” you’ll see the words, “Subscribe to blog via email.”

Enter your email address in the space provided and then click on “Subscribe” and follow any prompts: when you receive an email asking you to confirm that you wish to subscribe, be sure to confirm. Otherwise, you won’t be subscribed. After you confirm, you’ll automatically receive any future blog posts from Mining the Now.

NOTE: If you are trying to subscribe while using a mobile phone, you may have to take another step. As you look at the blog post, there should be 3 horizontal lines at the top right of the page. Click on these lines and you’ll be taken to what’s on the left hand column (on a laptop or PC). Scroll down and follow the directions at * above.

Thank you for following!