Our Problems with Faith Today – A Diagnosis and a Prescription

April 13, 2026

In 2007, Charles Taylor wrote a book entitled, A Secular Age which gave us a clear and comprehensive analysis of the secular age we live in and the implications of that for our faith. More than a thousand years before that an unknown author in the fourteenth century wrote a book, The Cloud of Unknowing, that (in way that doesn’t initially leap out at you) answers the fundamental question Taylor left us with.

I had read both Taylor’s book and The Cloud of Unknowing without making a connection between the two. That connection was pointed out to me by a doctoral student whose thesis I am directing. Her thesis? She is interfacing Taylor’s analysis of secularity with the fundamental insight of the unknown author of The Cloud of Unknowing. Here’s her thesis in capsule:

One of the ways Taylor defines our secular age is this: “The shift to secularity consists of a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and unproblematic to one in which it is understood to be one option among others – and frequently not the one that is easiest to embrace.” Taylor suggests that two things are conspiring to produce this.

First, we now are what he calls “buffered persons”, that is, we have moved from “a self who is vulnerable to many religious fears and superstitions to a self that is buffered from all the ‘spirits’ within the enchanted world.” I’m old enough to have been brought up in that enchanted world where spirits, demons, and supernatural powers lived under every rock, where you sprinkled holy water around the house during a lightning storm.

Second, for Taylor, we now live inside what he calls an “immanent worldview”, where our secularized world gives us the idea that there is no other world than this one and we don’t need anything beyond this world to achieve full flourishing, meaning, and happiness.

Taylor, a devout Christian, concludes by saying that this new situation doesn’t constitute a crisis of faith, but rather a crisis of imagination. The old imaginaries within which we imagined our faith don’t serve us anymore. We need a new imagination within which to picture our faith.

And from where can we draw this new imagination?

According to my doctoral student, the new imagination we need within which to re-picture our faith can be drawn from the fundamental counsel given us in The Cloud of Unknowing. But this isn’t immediately evident.

On the surface, what this unknown fourteenth century writer advocates is a simple prayer practice, not unlike what many today call “centering prayer”, where you go to prayer without any agenda, request, or words. You just sit in silence, without expectation, simply trusting that God will give you what you really need.

However, for the author of The Cloudthis is not just a simple prayer practice, it’s a basic stance before life itself. It’s a stance of radical honesty, of radical sincerity, where you stand naked in soul before yourself, life, and God. What’s being said here?

In short, because of our buffered persons and our immanent consciousness, we are almost never fully naked in soul, almost never fully sincere (sine cere – without wax), never fully ourselves. It is rare for us to get beneath all the distractions, ideologies, cultural obsessions, traumas, daydreams, and groupthink that seemingly forever color our consciousness.

What The Cloud advocates is that we, as our habitual stance before reality, try to strip away everything that’s not true in us in an attempt to stand outside of all of our distractions and defenses, naked in soul, helpless to think or imagine, just asking life and God to give us what we cannot even imagine is best for us.

Taylor suggests that we need a new imagination within which again to picture our faith. The Cloud suggests that the new imagination we need will not be the result of intellectually thinking ourselves into a new way of imaging our faith. Rather, that new imagination will be given us when we stand before God, naked in spirit, devoid of our own imagination, and helpless to help ourselves. Then, paradoxically, when we can no longer help ourselves, we can be helped from what is beyond our buffered selves and the virtual immanent prison within which we live. Life and God can now flow into us, and flow into us in an untainted way, precisely because we are standing naked, helpless and unknowing, before the mystery of ourselves, life, and God.

John of the Cross words this invitation this way: Learn to understand more by not understanding than by understanding.

What this means is that, paradoxically, faith starts at precisely that place where we are tempted to think it stops, namely, at that place where we find ourselves naked and helpless to imagine faith and God.

What’s our real struggle for faith today? Charles Taylor gives us a diagnosis. What are we to do inside this struggle? The Cloud of Unknowing gives us a prescription.

And Time Started Over

April 6, 2026

With the resurrection of Jesus, time started over. Simply put, up until Jesus rose from the dead all things that died stayed dead. After Jesus’ resurrection, nothing stays dead anymore. Time has begun anew.

Luke’s Gospel account of the resurrection begins with the words “on the morning of the first day”. This is a double reference. He is referring to Sunday, the first day of the week, but he is also referring to the first day of a new creation. With the resurrection, time has started over. In fact, the world measures time by that day. We are in the year 2026 since that morning when Jesus rose from the dead.

From the beginning of time until Jesus’ resurrection, everything mortal died and remained in death. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, in the story of Adam and Eve and their fall from grace, we are given to believe that originally humans were not intended to die. In this view, death entered the world through the sin of our first parents. Today, for sound theological and scientific reasons, the Adam and Eve story is considered, like the other “in the beginning” stories in Genesis, to be more metaphoric and archetypal than literal. To be human is to be mortal.

Irrespective as to whether you take the Adam and Eve story literally and see death because of their sin or not, the bottom line is the same: From our first parents onward, everything that died stayed dead.

That changed with the resurrection of Jesus. When God raised him from the dead, creation was changed at its very roots. Nature changed. A dead body was brought to new life. Impossible? Yes, except that time started over! There was a new first day, a new Genesis, a second time when we can say, “in the beginning”.

And nothing stays dead now because Jesus is the “first fruit” of this new creation. What happened to him now happens to us. We too will not stay dead but will rise to new life. Moreover, this isn’t just true for us as humans. It’s also true for the earth itself and everything on it. Jesus came to save the world, not just the people living in the world.

St. Paul makes this clear in his Epistle to the Romans when he writes that all creation, physical creation, has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth and – it itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God. (Romans 8,21-23)

Our planet earth, like our human body, is also mortal. It is dying too. As we know, the sun will eventually burn out and that will spell the death of our planet. Our planet also needs to be resurrected, and scripture assures us that it will.

What all this means stretches our imagination beyond its limits. Does this mean that animals will also have eternal life? Will our beloved pets be with us in heaven? Will plants enter heaven? Will the whole cosmos and our planet earth be transformed and enter heaven?

The answer is yes, though how this will happen is beyond our imagination. Our human mind is too limited. This is impossible to imagine, except, except that God who is the Father of Jesus Christ is ineffable, beyond imagination, and can do the unimaginable, including transforming all things into new life.

The Gospel of John has a particularly poignant text which links the resurrection of Jesus to the original creation as described in Genesis. John tells us that in his first resurrection appearance to the apostles, Jesus finds them huddled in fear inside a room with the doors locked. The resurrected Jesus goes right through the locked doors, enters their midst, greets them, shows them his hands and his side, and then breathes on them. (John 20,21)

This breathing out by Jesus parallels what happened at the original creation when God breathed over the formless void, and light began to separate from darkness and creation began to take shape.

After the resurrection, Jesus breathes on his disciples and for the second time in history light begins to separate from darkness. The confusion, fear, timidity, and the weaknesses of the apostles, their “formless void”, their darkness, begins to separate from the new light brought by the resurrection, namely, the eternal light of charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, the fruits of the Holy Spirit.

So, it’s appropriate to say that with the resurrection of Jesus, time started over. There was a new first day where light again separated from darkness. The resurrection of Jesus is the most radical thing that has occurred since God originally said, let there be light! nearly fourteen billion years ago. The earth itself and everything on it, humans, animals, plants, and minerals, and the earth itself, are now given life beyond death.

Until the resurrection of Jesus, all things that died stayed dead. This is no longer true. Time has started over.

And The Temple Veil was Ripped from Top to Bottom

March 30, 2026

There are many haunting lines in the passion narratives. Who is not stirred in the soul when the passion story is read aloud in church and we come to the part where Jesus takes his last breath and there’s that poignant minute of silence, where we all drop to our knees? No homily is ever as effective as that single line (and he gave up his spirit) and the moving silence that ensues.

Another such line that has always haunted me is the one that follows immediately after. We are told that at the moment of Jesus’ death the veil of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom.

My imagination, particularly when I was a child, always pictured that in a dark way: It grew dark in the middle of the day and then at the moment of Jesus’ death, as if by a frightening strike of lightning, the temple veil was ripped from top to bottom while everyone looked on stunned, convinced now, too late, that the person they’ve just mocked and crucified is the Christ.

What’s really meant by the phrase that the veil of the temple was torn apart at the moment of Jesus’ death?

Biblical scholars tell us that the veil of the temple was precisely a curtain in the temple that prevented the people from seeing what was going on behind it, namely, the sacred rituals being performed by the temple priests. The curtain shielded the ordinary worshipper from mystery.

Thus, when the Gospels tell us that at the moment of Jesus’ death the temple veil was torn apart from top to bottom, the point they are making is not, as my imagination would have it, that God shredded what was most precious to the those who crucified Jesus to show them how wrong they were. To the contrary.

The temple veil was understood to shield people from mystery, from seeing inside the mystery of God. In the crucifixion, that veil is torn apart so that now everyone can see inside the real Holy of Holies, the inside of God.

We now see what God really looks like, that is, as One who loves us so unconditionally that we can crucify Him and he doesn’t stop loving us for even a second. God spills his own blood to reach through to us rather than wanting us to spill ours to reach through to Him. What’s meant by this?

There’s a centuries old question that asks why Jesus had to die in so horrible a manner. Why all the blood? What kind of cosmic and divine game is being played out here? Is Christ’s blood, the blood of the lamb, somehow paying off God for the sin of Adam and Eve and for our own sins? Why does blood need to be spilled?

This is a complex question and every answer that can be given is only a partial one. We are dealing with a great mystery here. However, even great mysteries can be partially understood. One of the reasons why Jesus dies in this way, one of the reasons for the spilling of blood, is clear, with profound implications. What’s the reason?

It has precisely to do with blood. From the beginning of time until the crucifixion of Jesus, many cultures sacrificed blood to their gods. Why blood? Because blood is identified with the life-principle. Blood carries life, is life, and its loss is death. Thus, for all kinds of reasons, religious and anthropological, in many ancient cultures the idea was present that we owe blood to God, that God needs to be appeased, that offering blood is our way of asking for forgiveness and expressing gratitude, that blood is the language God really understands.

And so, sincere religious people felt that they should be offering blood to God. And they did – and for a long time this included human blood. Humans were killed on altars everywhere. Thankfully most cultures eventually eliminated human sacrifice and used animals instead.

By the time of Jesus, the temple in Jerusalem had become a virtual butchery with priests killing animals nearly non-stop. Some scholars suggest that when Jesus upset the tables of the money changers, about 90% of commerce in Jerusalem was in one way or the other connected with animal sacrifice. Small wonder Jesus’ action was perceived as a threat!

So why the blood at Jesus’ death?

As Richard Rohr aptly puts it, for centuries we had been spilling blood to try to get to God and, in the crucifixion, things reversed: God spilled his own blood to try to get to us. And this reversal strips away the old veil of fear, the false belief that God wants blood, the false belief that God is not unconditional love, and that we need to live in fear of God.

God doesn’t need blood as an appeasement. God never stops loving us for even a second. When the temple veil was ripped open, this incredible truth was revealed.

On Not Being Stingy with God’s Mercy

March 23, 2026

Shortly after my ordination, doing replacement work in a parish, I found myself in a rectory with a saintly old priest. He was over eighty, nearly blind, but widely sought out and respected. One night, alone with him, I asked him this question: “If you had your priesthood to live over again, would you do anything differently?”

From a man so full of integrity, I had fully expected that there would be no regrets. So, his answer surprised me. Yes, he did have a regret, a major one, he said: “If I had my priesthood to do over again, I would be easier on people the next time. I wouldn’t be so stingy with God’s mercy, with the sacraments, with forgiveness. You see what was drilled into me in the seminary was the phrase: The truth will set you free. So, I believed it was my responsibility always to give a hard challenge, and that can be good. But I fear that I was too hard on people. They have pain enough without me and the Church laying further burdens on them. I should have risked God’s mercy more!”

This struck me because, less than a year before, as I took my final exams in the seminary, one of the priests who examined me, gave me this warning: “Be careful,” he said, “never let your feelings get in the way. Don’t be soft, that’s wrong. Remember, hard as it is, the truth sets people free!” Sound advice, it would seem, for a young priest.

However, after fifty years in ministry, I’m more inclined to the old priest’s advice: We need to risk more God’s mercy. The place of justice and truth should never be ignored, but we must risk letting the infinite, unbounded, unconditional, undeserved mercy of God flow more freely. The mercy of God is as accessible as the nearest water tap, and so we, like Isaiah, must proclaim a mercy that has no price tag: Come, come without money, without virtue, come, drink freely of God’s mercy!

What holds us back? Why are we so hesitant in proclaiming God’s inexhaustible, prodigal, indiscriminate mercy?

Partly our motives are good, noble even. The concern for truth, justice, sound orthodoxy, proper morality, public form, proper sacramental preparation, and fear of scandal, are not unimportant. Love needs to be tempered by truth, even as truth must be moderated by love.

But sometimes our motives are less noble and our hesitancy arises more out of timidity, fear, legalism, the self-righteousness of the Pharisees, and an impoverished understanding of God. Thus, no cheap grace is dispensed on our watch!

In doing this we are, I fear, misguided, less than good shepherds, out of tune with the God that Jesus incarnated. God’s mercy, as Jesus revealed it, embraces indiscriminately, like the sun that shines equally on the good as well as the bad, the deserving and the undeserving, the initiated and the uninitiated.

One of the truly startling insights that Jesus gave us is that the mercy of God cannot not go out to everyone. It’s always free, undeserved, unconditional, universal in embrace, reaching beyond all religion, custom, rubric, political affiliation, mandatory program, ideology, and even sin itself.

For our part then, especially those of us who are parents, ministers, teachers, catechists, and elders, we must risk proclaiming the prodigal character of God’s mercy. We must not dispense God’s mercy as if it were ours to dispense; dole out God’s forgiveness as if it were a limited commodity; put conditions on God’s love as if God needs to be protected; or cut off access to God as if we were the keeper of the heavenly gates. We aren’t. If we tie God’s mercy to our own timidity and fear, we limit it to the size of our own minds. A bad game.

It is interesting to note in the Gospels how the apostles, well-meaning of course, often tried to keep certain people away from Jesus as if they weren’t worthy, as if they were an affront to his holiness or would somehow taint his purity. So, they tried to send away children, prostitutes, tax collectors, known sinners, and the uninitiated of all kinds. Always Jesus overruled their attempts with words to this effect: “Let them come to me. I want them to come.”

Things haven’t changed. Perennially, we, well-intentioned persons, for the same reasons as the apostles, continue trying to keep certain individuals and groups away from God’s mercy as it is accessible in Christian Word, Sacrament, and Community. Jesus managed things then; I suspect that he can manage them now. God doesn’t need our gatekeeping.

What God wants is for everyone, regardless of age, religion, culture, personal weakness, or lack of Christian practice, to come to the unlimited waters of divine mercy.

The renowned naturalist John Muir once challenged Christians with these words: Why are Christians so reluctant to let animals into their stingy heaven?

We are also, I fear, stingy with God’s prodigal mercy.

All Lives Matter

March 16, 2026

Theodore Roethke begins his poem In a Dark Time, with these words: “In a dark time, the eye begins to see.”

We live in a dark time, one beset with hatred, bitter divisions, and wars that, daily, are bringing death and incalculable trauma to millions of people. But are our eyes beginning to see?

Sometimes in a dark time, irreverent humor can help us see. Here’s an example: Recently I was leading a retreat at a renewal center near a beach. Taking a walk on the beach during one of our breaks, I saw three young men sitting on the back of a pickup truck. The truck’s stereo was blasting music that could be heard for hundreds of yards, and the three young men, their baseball caps turned backwards, were joyously hoisting beer cans and happily waving to everyone around them. And above the truck flew a large flag which read: Drunk lives matter! Their joyous irreverence lifted my spirits, as it did too for the retreatants when I shared the story with them.

Yes, sometimes we see that even drunk lives matter. All lives matter.

That all lives matter needs to be highlighted right now because today we are being given the strong impression from some of our top government officials and others that some lives don’t matter, at least not as much as our own and those of our loved ones. Here’s the point:

During the past weeks, the USA and Israel have been at war with Iran, a war that has destabilized millions of lives. During these weeks there have been 15,000 bombing strikes in Iran and Lebanon, and Iran has retaliated with countless strikes directed against USA and Israeli interests.

A number of American and Israeli lives have been lost and several hundred Americans and Israelis have been injured. And we have properly mourned those deaths and injuries, mourned that these precious lives were lost or injured. Our empathy let us see that these lives were precious and that some irreplaceable oxygen left the planet when each of them died. We recognized that their lives mattered. And that’s to our credit.

However, during this time, more than 2000 lives have been lost in Iran and Lebanon and hundreds of thousands have had their lives ripped apart irrevocably, and (at least publicly) we have not awarded them the same empathy that we gave to our own. For us, it seems, their lives were not as precious as our own.

Perhaps this can be excused (or at least understood) by the fact that we don’t see these other lives firsthand. They’re far from us, abstract, faceless, nameless, Iranians and Lebanese.

However, what’s not excusable is the very cavalier and callous way this war and those deaths are being talked about by some government leaders and others around them. Their language in the face of all these deaths and the dislocation of millions is the language of celebration; what one might hear at a football game when your home team is humiliating a hated foe. We’re beating them! We’re humiliating them! We’re bombing them into oblivion! Yay!

Where is our empathy for their suffering, for their dead, for the millions of lives that are now being torn apart by death, dislocation, and heartbreak? It’s as if Iranian and Lebanese deaths aren’t real, like the virtual killings in a video game. Even the title of this war smacks of a video game: Epic Fury! But this isn’t a video game. Real people are dying. Hundreds are dead and millions are living with hearts that are breaking or in despair.

We are called by what’s best in us is to touch that part of our heart where we care for more than only our own. We need to touch that deeper empathic part inside us that can say (and say out loud): Iranian lives matter! Lebanese lives matter! All lives matter! Every life is as precious as my own.

Of course, we also need to keep saying that American lives and Israeli lives matter.

All human lives are equally precious in God’s eyes. As St. Paul says in his Letter to the Galatians (3,28): “There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Jesus Christ.” In effect, that’s saying that in Christ there is no American or Iranian, no Israeli or Lebanese, no lives that don’t matter or matter less than other lives.

War is war and there can even be just wars, and understandably people die in wars. That can be accepted.

But, we have better hearts than falling into selective empathy. We have better hearts than to celebrate the death and the destruction of lives as we would celebrate the triumph of our favorite sports team demolishing a hated rival. We have better hearts than seeing the deaths and the destruction of countless lives as not fully real, like the dead in video games.

We’re better than that!

Reality’s Immune System

March 9, 2026

Thomas Moore, the author of Care of the Soul, teaches that our most important spiritual task is to listen to the promptings of our own soul. If listened to in honesty, it will guide us, protect us, and keep us healthy.

I heard him present this to an audience in a church setting and after he had finished his presentation, someone voiced this strong objection: “I’m a married man, what if my soul tells me to have an affair?” Moore responded to this effect: Your soul will never tell you that. Your soul is your moral and spiritual immune system. Just as your physical immune system will never prompt you to do things that are bad for your physical health, so too your soul will never prompt you to do things that are bad for your moral and spiritual health. Your soul, just like your body, has an immune system that protects your health.

What Moore says of the individual soul is also true for the soul of this world. Reality has an immune system, a moral arc, which protects our health and lets us know when it is violated.

This has various expressions. For example, Jesus teaches this clearly: The measure you measure out is the measure that you will receive. (Mark 4, 24) What’s implied here is that reality has a moral structure, ultimately grounded on love that cannot be violated without consequence. It gives back in kind, rewarding goodness with goodness and malice with malice. The air we breathe out is the air we will re-inhale (even true literally).

In Buddhism and Hinduism this takes expression in what they call the Law of Karma. In street language, the Law of Karma teaches that what goes around comes around. Reality is so structured that we always eventually reap the consequences of our own actions. When we act altruistically, good things will come to us, and when we act selfishly we will reap some unhappy consequences. In essence no one gets away with anything, and no virtuous deed goes unrewarded.

What both Jesus and the Law of Karma teach is that just as our physical bodies have an immune system that guides and protects us and that can never be ignored or violated without consequence, reality too has an immune system, an inviolable moral structure, that cannot be ignored or violated without consequences. Ultimately, we reap what we sow, with no exceptions. Virtue is its own reward, sin its own punishment.

However, this doesn’t always appear to be true on the surface of things. Sometimes it looks like sin is being rewarded and virtue is being punished. But that is mostly at the level of our emotions. Emotionally, it’s natural to envy the amoral. Nikos Kazantzakis puts this rather colorfully: “Virtue sits completely alone on the top of a desolate ledge. Through her mind pass all the forbidden pleasure which she has never tasted – and she weeps!”

We see this kind of envy in the older brother of the Prodigal Son. He resents the fact that his younger brother gave himself over to sensuous hedonism, while he himself stayed the moral course. To him it seemed his younger brother had grasped life, while he, in timidity, had missed out on it.

However, his father’s words to him are meant to dispel his (and our) envy of the amoral. The Prodigal Father, God, tells the older brother not to envy his younger brother’s promiscuity and hedonism. From outward appearance it may have looked like life, but in the father’s words: Your brother was dead!

There is a moral arc inside all created reality, a moral immune system, that is meant to protect the universe and all of us in it. Virtue is its own reward, sin its own punishment. Both the Law of Karma and Jesus assure us that the measure you measure out is the measure that you will receive. No good deed goes unrewarded and no selfish deed enhances one’s life.

I did my doctoral thesis on the proofs for the existence of God. I examined Thomas Aquinas’ famous Five Ways, Anselm’s intriguing Ontological Argument, Descartes’ take on this,and numerous commentaries on these various arguments that attempt to prove the existence of God. In the end, I concluded that we cannot prove the existence of God, as one might prove a truth through a mathematical equation or a strict scientific hypothesis.

But this doesn’t mean that these proofs aren’t helpful. They work in another way. They point you to a certain way of living, namely, where you don’t look to find the reality of God at the end of an equation, but where you look to experience the reality of God through living in an honest, moral way.

There’s a moral arc inside all of reality, an immune system, that, I believe, is a clear proof for the existence of God, for it tells us that a personal, altruistic love lies at the basis of everything and it may never be violated.

Storms We Cannot Weather

March 2, 2026

In the musical Les Miserables, there’s a particularly haunting song, sung by a dying woman (Fantine) who has been crushed by virtually every unfairness life can deal a person. Abandoned by her husband, sexually harassed by her employer, caught in abject poverty, physically ill and dying, even as her main anxiety is about what will happen to her young daughter after she dies, she offers this lament:

But there are dreams that cannot be
And there are storms we cannot weather
I had a dream my life would be
So much different from this hell I’m living
So different now from what it seemed
Now life has killed
The dream I dreamed.

For centuries, in our popular mind, despair was understood as the ultimate and unforgivable sin against God and against nature. We weren’t always sure how exactly to define despair, but we saw it as someone giving up on life, on God, on love, and on meaning. Suicide was often seen as its prime analogate, ultimate despair.

This notion needs to be radically rethought, not just for own consolation when we see loved ones collapse into seeming despair, but also because it belittles God.

The popular notion that someone who seemingly gives up on life and God and dies in that state is guilty of a sin that cannot be forgiven and is condemned to an eternity outside the community of love, is based on some serious misunderstandings. What are those misunderstandings?

First, what’s best in us doesn’t believe this at all. What’s best in us understands human weakness and the anatomy of a collapse of soul. And what’s best in us reaches out in empathy to those who collapse in this way, not least because we understand their weakness.

Second, the notion that a certain collapse of soul (seeming despair) is somehow an act against life itself and against the God who gave us life, is theologically false. It goes against the foundational principle running through all of scripture, namely, that God has a special, preferential love for the weak, for those not strong enough to stand, for those who have collapsed under the burdens of life.

Even more important, the notion that someone who collapses in this way puts himself or herself irrevocably outside of God’s mercy is an insult to God, a belittling of God’s person and God’s love. It’s predicated on the misguided belief that if we do not hang onto God, God will not hang on to us. If we give up on God, God will give up on us. That’s utterly false, and a belittling of God’s person and God’s fidelity.

At the very heart of what Jesus incarnated and revealed about the heart of God lies the truth that God does not abandon us, particularly when, crushed in body and spirit, we give up on God. God will never abandon us because we are too weak and wounded to hang on to God.

Moreover, as Christians we believe (as we affirm in the Apostles’ Creed) that Jesus descended into hell, not just once after his death on Good Friday, but forever afterwards. Whenever Christ sees someone whose circumstance and wound have landed him or her in a private hell from which he or her can see no way of escaping and instead surrenders to hopelessness, Christ never says, since you gave up on me, I give up on you! No, that’s not the God we believe in. Rather Christ descends into that hell and breathes out forgiveness and peace. There is no hell, no collapse of soul, no despair into which Christ cannot penetrate and breathe out peace. If there is anyone in hell, he or she is there because of arrogance, not because of weakness.

It’s not incidental that the Church canonizes certain people and declares them, by name, to be in heaven, whereas it has never, by name, declared anyone to be in hell, not even Judas who betrayed Jesus with a kiss and then (seemingly in despair) died by suicide.

In a book entitled Peculiar Treasures, the renowned novelist and spiritual writer Frederick Buechner reflects on the death of Judas. Buechner, who had lost his own father to suicide, speculates on the reasons Judas dies in what outwardly looks like despair. He suggests that perhaps Judas chose suicide out of hope instead of despair, that is, he felt dammed and counted on Jesus’ mercy after death, thinking that perhaps “hell might be his last chance of making it to heaven.”

Imagining Jesus meeting Judas after death, Buechner writes: “It’s a scene to conjure with. Once again they met in the shadows, the two old friends, both of them a little worse for wear after all that had happened, only this time it was Jesus who was the one to give the kiss, and this time it wasn’t the kiss of death that was given.”

Passing strange, for someone utterly crushed by life, hell might be his or her last chance of making it to heaven.

The Meaning of Jesus’ Suffering

February 23, 2026

I heard this story from a renowned theologian who prefers I don’t use his name in sharing this, though the story speaks well of his theology.

He was giving a lecture and at one point stated that God didn’t want Jesus to suffer like he did. A woman in the audience immediately raised her voice: “Do you mean that?” Not knowing whether this was an objection or an affirmation, he invited the woman to speak to him at the break. Approaching him at the break, she repeated her question: “Do you mean that? Do you believe that God didn’t want Jesus to suffer as he did?” He replied that indeed he meant it. God didn’t want Jesus to suffer as he did. Her response: “Good, then I can pray again. I struggle to pray to a God who needs this type of suffering to pay some kind of debt.”

Why did Jesus suffer? Was his suffering needed to pay a debt that only a divine being could pay? Was the original sin of Adam and Eve so great an offense to God that no human sincerity, worship, altruism, or sacrificial suffering could appease God? Indeed, does God ever need to be appeased?

The idea that Jesus needed to suffer as he did to somehow appease God for our sins lies deep within our popular understanding of Jesus’ suffering and death, and there are seemingly strong references in support of that in scripture and in the theology of atonement. What these suggest is that some quota of suffering was needed to pay the debt for sin, and Jesus’ suffering paid that debt. And since the debt was huge, Jesus’ suffering had to be severe.

But, how much of this is metaphorical and how much of this is to be taken literally? Here’s another take on why Jesus chose to accept suffering as he did.

He did it to be in full solidarity with us. He accepted to suffer in such an extreme way so that no one would be able to say: “Jesus didn’t suffer in a way that I have! I have suffered in more painful and humiliating ways than he ever did!”

Well, let’s examine Jesus’ suffering in the light of that challenge.

First, in his life before his passion and death, he suffered the pain of poverty, misunderstanding, hatred, betrayal, plus the loneliness of celibacy. As well, on the cross he suffered a dark night of faith. But these are ordinary human sufferings. It’s in his passion and death that his sufferings become more extraordinary.

Jesus was crucified. Crucifixion was designed by the Romans as more than just capital punishment. It was also designed to inflict the optimum amount of pain that a person could absorb. That’s why they would sometimes give morphine or some other drug to the one being crucified, not to dull his pain, but to keep him conscious so that he would suffer longer.

Worse still, crucifixion was designed to utterly humiliate the one being crucified. Crucifixions were public events, and the one being crucified was stripped naked so his genitals would be exposed and in the spasms as he was dying, his bowels would loosen. Utter humiliation. This is what Jesus suffered.

Moreover, scholars speculate (albeit there is no direct evidence for this) that on the night between his arrest and his execution the next day he was sexually assaulted by the soldiers who had him in their custody. This speculation grounds itself on two things: a hunch, since sexual assault was common in such situations; and to suffer this kind of humiliation would be Jesus’ ultimate solidarity with human suffering.

Perhaps no humiliation compares with the humiliation suffered in sexual assault. If Jesus suffered this, and the hunch is that he did, that puts him in solidarity with one of the deepest of all human pains. Everyone who has suffered this humiliation has the consolation of knowing that Jesus may have suffered this too.

Why did Jesus accept to suffer as he did? Why, as the Office of the Church puts it, did he become sin for us?

Whatever the deep mystery and truth that lie inside the motif of paying a debt for our sins and atoning for human shortcomings, the deeper reason Jesus chose to accept suffering as he did was to be in full solidarity with us, in all our pain and humiliation.

Jesus came from our ineffable God, brought a human face to the divine, and taught us what lies inside God’s heart. And in doing this, he took on our human condition completely. He didn’t just touch human life, he entered it completely, including the depth of human pain.

Indeed, there are particular sufferings that perhaps Jesus didn’t explicitly experience (racism, sexism, exile, physical disability) but in his dark night of faith on the cross and in his humiliation in his crucifixion, he suffered in a way that no one can say: “Jesus didn’t suffer as I have suffered!”

Finding our Vocation

February 16, 2026

Many of us are familiar with a famous line from C.S. Lewis who, when writing about his conversion to Christianity, shared that he was “the most reluctant convert in the history of Christendom.” When he first knelt down it wasn’t with enthusiastic fervor, but with the sense that this was something he had to do. What gave him this sense?

His words: [I knelt down against my resistance] because I had come to realize that God’s compulsion is our liberation.

What’s God’s compulsion? It’s the deep irrepressible moral sense we have inside that tells us what we must do rather than what we want to do. And this can be very helpful in finding our vocation and place in life.

What is a vocation, and how do we find ours? A vocation, as David Brooks suggests, is an irrational factor wherein you hear an inner voice that is so strong that it becomes unthinkable to turn away and where you intuitively know that you don’t have a choice, but can only ask yourself, what is my responsibility here?

That’s the story of my own vocation to the priesthood and religious life, and I share it here not because it is in any way special; it isn’t. It’s ordinary, one among millions. I share it with the hope that it might help someone else discern his or her vocation in life. Here’s my story.

I grew up in a Catholic culture which at that time basically asked every boy and girl to consider whether he or she was being called to the vowed religious life and/or to the priesthood. I heard this explicitly from my parents and from the Ursuline nuns who taught me in school, and I heard it in the ethos of Roman Catholic culture at the time.

But I always felt a strong resistance inside. This is not what I wanted to do with my life! I did not want to be a Catholic priest. I nursed this resistance through my high school years and graduated with the intention of going to university, ideally to become a psychologist. But a voice in me would not stay quiet.

I spent the summer after graduation from high school working on two farms, our own and one of our neighbor’s. Mostly I worked outside, often alone, on a tractor for long hours working in a field. And in those long hours God’s compulsion began to wear away at my resistance. The idea that I was called to become a priest simply would not be silenced, though I tried. I remember one particular afternoon while working alone on a tractor, I tried to push the thought out of my head by singing out loud, but God’s voice isn’t shut out that easily.

This came to a head in late summer, just two weeks before I was scheduled to go off to university. I came home one evening after working another solitary afternoon on a tractor. My parents weren’t home so I tried to distract myself by tossing a football around with my younger brother. Peace didn’t come then. It came later as I was going to bed, after I had made the decision to pursue becoming a priest. I shared my decision with my mother and father in the morning. They smiled, and took me to see our local parish priest, a Missionary Oblate of Mary Immaculate.

In fairness, the priest told me that, while he was an Oblate, there were other options for me, such as becoming a diocesan priest or a Jesuit. I chose the Oblates because they were what I knew and because I already had an older brother in the order. Two weeks later I was in the Oblate novitiate – as one of the most reluctant novices in the history of the Oblates!

But from day one, it was right. I knew it was where I was called to be. That was sixty years ago and, whatever the struggles I’ve had in my priesthood, I have never doubted that this was my vocation – the priesthood and the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate.

And God, life, ministry, and the Oblates have been life-giving beyond what I deserve. Ministry has been grace-filled beyond measure and the Oblates have given me healthy community, exceptional educational opportunities, a series of wonderful ministries, and a pride in our congregation’s charism to serve the poor.

Sixty years in this vocation and I have only this to say: Thank you God, for taking me where I didn’t want to go.

I made that choice at the age of seventeen. Today our culture would say that such a decision cannot be made with sufficient maturity and clarity at so tender an age. Well, I have never seriously doubted my choice, and I look back on it now as the clearest, most unselfish, and life-giving decision I have ever made. That’s my story, but there are many life-giving stories different from mine. God’s compulsion has an infinite variety of modalities.

The Place of Silence

February 9, 2026

Many of us could use more silence in our lives. I say this cautiously because the place of silence in our lives isn’t easy to specify.

Silence is a complex; sometimes we fear it and try to avoid it and sometimes when we are tired and over-stimulated we positively long for it.

Generally, though, we have too little of it in our lives. Work, cellphones, conversation, entertainment, news, distraction, and preoccupations of every kind tend to fill up every waking minute. We have become so used to being stimulated by words, information, and distraction that we often feel lost and restless when we find ourselves alone, without someone to talk to, something to watch, something to read, or something to do to take up our attention.

Not all of this is bad, mind you. In the past, spiritual writers were generally too one-sided in extolling the virtues of silence. They tended to give the too simple impression that God and spiritual depth were only found in silence, as if the virtues of ordinary work, conversation, celebration, family, and community were somehow second-rate spiritually.

In speaking of the place of silence, former spiritualities generally penalized extroverts and let introverts off too easily. In brief, they didn’t sufficiently take into account that all of us, extroverts and introverts alike, need the therapy of a public life. While we need silence for depth, we need interaction with others for grounding and sanity. Certain inner work can only be done in silence, but a certain grounding of our sanity depends on interaction with others. Silence can also be an escape, an avoidance of the stinging purification that often can happen only through the challenge of interacting within a family and a community.

Moreover, silence is not always the best way to deal with heartaches and obsessions. Ultimately, this is a form of overconcentration. Sometimes when a heartache is threatening our sanity, the best thing we can do is not go to the chapel but rather to the theatre or to a meal with a friend. Preoccupation with work or a healthy distraction can sometimes be just the friend you need when your heart is fighting asphyxiation.

There’s a story about the famous philosopher Hegel. Immediately after finishing his monumental work on the phenomenology of history, he realized that he was on the edge of a major breakdown because of the intensity of his concentration over so long a period. What did he do to break out of this? Go on a silent retreat? No. He went to the opera every night, dined every day with friends, and sought out every kind of distraction until, after a while, the strangling grip of his inner world finally let go and the sunshine and freshness of everyday life broke through again. Sometimes distraction, not silence, is our best cure, even spiritually.

Still, there’s a need for silence. What the great spiritual writers of all ages tried to teach on this subject can perhaps be captured in a single line from Meister Eckhart: Nothing resembles the language of God as much as silence.

In essence, Eckhart is saying that silence is a privileged entry into the divine realm. There’s a huge silence inside each of us that beckons us into itself and can help us learn the language of heaven. What’s meant by this?

Silence is a language that’s deeper, more far-reaching, more understanding, more compassionate, and more eternal than any other language. In heaven, it seems, there will be no languages, no words. Silence will speak. We will wholly, intimately, and ecstatically understand each other and hold each other in silence. Ironically, for all their importance, words are part of the reason we can’t fully do this already. Words unite but they also divide. There’s a deeper connection available in silence.

Lovers already know this, as do the Quakers whose liturgy tries to imitate the silence of heaven, and as do those who practice contemplative prayer. John of the Cross expresses this in a wonderfully cryptic line: “Learn to understand more by not understanding than by understanding.”

Silence can speak louder than words, and more deeply. We experience this already in different ways: when we are separated by distance or death from loved ones, we can still be with them in silence; when we are divided from other sincere persons through misunderstanding, silence can provide the place where we can be together; when we stand helpless before another’s suffering, silence can be the best way of expressing our empathy; and when we have sinned and have no words to restore things to their previous wholeness, in silence a deeper word can speak and let us know that, in the end, all will be well and every manner of being will be well.

Nothing resembles the language of God as much as silence. It’s the language of heaven, already deep inside of us, beckoning us, inviting us into deeper intimacy with everything, even as we still need the therapy of a public life.

John Allen RIP

February 2, 2026

The renowned anthropologist Mircea Eliade once issued this warning: No community should botch its deaths. He’s right. Death washes clean and only after someone is gone can we fully drink in the gift that he or she was for us and the world.

On January 22^nd the Christian community, and the Catholic Church in particular, lost someone who had been a gift to us for a long time. John Allen, the editor-in-chief of Crux, died in Rome at the age of 61. He had been battling cancer since 2022.

John Allen was one of the most prominent (and important) English journalists commenting on religious issues, particularly on ecclesial issues and the shifting demographics of religion in the world. He worked out of Rome as a Vatican correspondent and out of the USA as editor-in-chief of a news site that helped keep us abreast of what was happening religiously in the world.

A number of things made John stand out as a journalist. He had a talent for having his finger on the pulse of things, not just in what was happening in the churches, but also what (in his words) were the mega-trends in the world. For those of us who didn’t have time to scan the news every day and read the numerous articles in religious magazines and websites – well we could read John Allen.

But, even more important than his talent for having his finger on the pulse of things was his always fair-minded, balanced commentary. John Allen did not fall into either of the current ecclesial categories of liberal or conservative. He was both, and neither. He was comfortable in both liberal and conservative gatherings, comfortable with Popes John Paul II and Benedict and with Francis and Leo. He had devotees and critics on both sides of the ecclesial spectrum. That speaks well of him. If I may use a time-worn cliché, he was too conservative for some liberals and too liberal for some conservatives. He didn’t have a full home with either of them, even as he was at home with both. Moreover, he was never accused of being unfair, even by those who disagreed with him.

Then, beyond the journalist, there was John Allen the man, the friend, the one who forever brought lightness, warmth and humor into the circle. I was privileged to get to know him (and his favorite restaurants) during my years on our General Council in Rome. He befriended our Oblate community and we befriended him. Our friendship continued after my return to Canada and the USA and John accepted invitations to speak at various symposia and conferences at our school and at other Oblate sponsored events.

And he was always memorable, not just for his solid content, but also for his color and humor. He would introduce himself to the audience by sharing that he came from Hill City, Kansas, where, in his words, “there is no hill, and sure as hell no city!” The local bar there, he said, had a sign in the men’s restroom: Please don’t gut your ducks in the sink! He carried that earthiness into his presentations and no one ever left wondering what exactly he was talking about. He didn’t only bring balance and fairness, he also brought color, humor, and wit.

John carried that into his life in general: insight, balance, and color. My image of John is this: a cigarette in hand, a drink in front of him, sitting with a group who are holding forth on every kind of issue, with John providing colorful banter along with keen insights from his wide world experience. I remember a story he shared at just this kind of gathering, about how he was with his family inside a mall in Minneapolis when his phone rang. He looked at the number and then told his family he needed to step outside to take this call. It was Pope Benedict. How do you tell your family in a shopping mall in Minneapolis that you just had a phone call from the pope?

As Eliade says, no community should botch its deaths. In his discourse at the Last Supper in John’s Gospel, Jesus repeatedly tells his disciples that they will only be able to receive his spirit after he dies. Like Eliade, he is warning them not to botch his death. They didn’t.

After his death, his first disciples, for all their misunderstanding and infidelities while he was alive, didn’t botch his death. In the light of his death, they were able to grasp, fully for the first time, his person and his message.

We lost a giant in John Allen and we shouldn’t botch his death.

We need to drink in his spirit so that, among other things, we might be more fair-minded, not fall into any one-sided ecclesial ideology, and always bring warmth and wit into a room.

John Allen, RIP, you were always the good Hill City man who was far too sensible to ever gut your ducks in the sink.

The Meek Are No Longer Inheriting the Earth

January 26, 2026

It is becoming ever more acceptable today, whether in politics or in general discourse, to speak of brute human strength, force, and power as being the forces we need to guide our lives. Indeed, empathy is now sometimes named explicitly as a weakness.

It is one thing for people to say that strength, force, and power are in fact what govern the world, but it is dangerously wrong to try to throw a Christian cloak over this. In brief, this is the antithesis of Jesus, as the Gospels make clear.

Here’s how the Gospels define strength and weakness.

For centuries the chosen people, feeling oppressed, longed and prayed for a Messiah from God who would come brandishing intimidating muscle, would vanquish their enemies, bring them prosperity, and bind them together in community by a strength, force, and power that was superhuman. But that’s not what they got.

Against every one of their expectations, when their hopes and prayers were finally answered, their longed-for Messiah appeared, not as a superhuman, but as a helpless baby unable to feed himself, helpless to nurture himself into adulthood.

Granted, as an adult he performed miracles and sometimes displayed a strength and power that was supernatural. However, the power he displayed in his miracles was never political, militaristic, or physically intimidating. His miracles were always displays of God’s compassion and fidelity.

There’s an interesting play of words in the Gospels when they speak of “power” or “authority”. They use three different Greek words: Sometimes they refer to power as Energia – the type of power a star athlete can bring to a playing field; and sometimes power is referred to as Dynamis – the type of power a rock star can bring to a stage. However, whenever the Gospels refer to Jesus as powerful or as having authority, they never use these words. Instead, they use the word Exousia (for which we have no English equivalent), though we do have a concept of it.

Exousia is the paradoxical power a baby brings into a room. On the surface, it looks like powerlessness, but ultimately it’s the greatest power of all – vulnerability, the moral power to create intimacy.

Simply put, if you put three people into a room: an athlete in the prime of his physical prowess, a rock star who can electrify a stadium with energy, and a baby. Who ultimately has the most power? Jesus answers that.

We see this clearly in the manner of his death. As he hangs on the cross, suffering and humiliated, he is being taunted, if you are the son of God, come down off that cross! If you have divine power, show it! Jesus doesn’t take the bait. Instead of demonstrating the kind of power we like to believe God should be using, Jesus instead resorts to another power, a higher one. In his powerlessness, he gives over his spirit in love and empathy and, in that, shows us the place where intimacy is born.

Moreover, Jesus could not be clearer in his teaching. As he makes clear in the Sermon on the Mount (perhaps the greatest moral code ever written) human strength, force, and power are not what bring about the kingdom. What creates community and intimacy among us?

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. (Matthew 5, 3-11)

Unfortunately, today in our politics and in our civil discourse (which sadly often lacks civility) people are increasingly putting their faith in brute human power – political power, economic power, military power, social media power, historical privilege. These, as many politicians now claim, are what’s real. They decide things in the world. It’s the strong, the powerful, and the rich who will inherit the good things of this earth. Those who are poor in spirit, who mourn, who are meek, who are merciful, and who are persecuted, will miss out on life. And, undergirding this is the belief that empathy is a weakness.

What’s to be said in the face of this? What should be the Christian response?

Since the beginning of human life on this planet, brute strength and power have always made themselves felt and have often been a dominant force in shaping history. The meek haven’t always inherited the earth (at least not this earth). And, today the meek are being threatened from all sides. However, whatever its political or economic expediency, this kind of raw strength and power may not cloak itself with Jesus and the Gospels. It is the antithesis of Jesus and the Gospels.

Myrrh – The Unwanted Gift

January 19, 2026

In the Gospels we find the story of the three Magi, coming from the East and laying their gifts at the crib of the newborn Jesus. The gifts were not practical: baby food, diapers, blankets. They were symbolic. What do they symbolize?

At one level, they symbolize, as we have been classically taught: kingship, divinity, and humanity. But there are other levels of meaning as well. Gold can be seen as a gift that resources the young child for the things he will need in life; Frankincense can be seen as honoring the unique dignity of his person; and Myrrh can be seen as reminding him that he will die one day.

Now, these are three gifts which every parent needs to give a child, namely, resources for the things the child needs in order grow: a pride in the child that honors his or her dignity; and a reminder (in whatever form this might take) which makes and keeps the child aware that one day he or she will die. These are the gifts from the Magi: we are resourced, we are honored, and we are reminded that one day we will die.

As children, we yearn for the first two gifts, the gold and the frankincense, but we resist the last gift, the myrrh, a reminder that we are mortal, a reminder we don’t want but very much need.

Growing up, my father and mother gave me these three gifts: gold, the resources I needed to live and grow, frankincense, a sense of my unique dignity, and myrrh, a sense that someday I will die, that this life isn’t all there is, that youth and health don’t last forever, and that my life decisions need always to be made against that horizon.

Growing up, I always resisted that last gift. I didn’t want to look at dead bodies at wakes or at funerals, and all talk of the fragility of life sent me scurrying from the room. I didn’t want to see or hear anything about death. For me, this was morbid talk which blocked out sunshine and drained oxygen from a room.

But my parents, in all the good things they gave me and my siblings, never let us evade the myrrh. In all seasons, there were reminders of our mortality, of the fact that life was fragile and that death eventually awaited us. My father and mother weren’t cruel, sadistic, or particularly pessimistic; they just kept this awareness always in front of us, reminding us of what was real. All the while, I longed for Disneyland.

Perhaps in some of this they were not just influenced by their faith, but also from the Germanic culture from which they came, the culture that gave us Grimm’s Fairy Tales, that had a particular stoicism regarding death, and one which believed that adults weren’t doing children a favor by shielding them from the darker aspects of life. But, in the end, this particular gift did come from their faith and was healthy and very much needed.

For all my resistance and attempts to evade this gift, it slipped through and slipped through so powerfully that I can in all honesty say that all the major decisions in my life have been made against its horizon. I would never have entered a religious community and become a priest, except for what this gift kept me always aware. I would not have persevered in my religious vows, except for this gift. Who would want to live the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, if there were no awareness of the reality of our mortality? Indeed, in any walk of life, who would have the strength to be faithful if there weren’t an awareness of this bigger horizon?

As a child I wasn’t grateful for my parents (and the Catholic culture they lived in) for never letting me forget that I was mortal, for symbolically bringing myrrh to my crib. But I look back now and realize that this was one of the greatest gifts they gave me – a gift I didn’t want but desperately needed.

I remember a particularly dark period in my childhood, the summer and fall when I was thirteen. In the space of five months, three young people I knew, two neighbors and a classmate, all died suddenly – two in accidents and one by suicide. Each of these deaths which took a young healthy person out of life was an assault on my youthful energies and dreams, all of which were predicated in walking in light, in sunshine, in health, in youth, and in a world where death wasn’t real. For six months I struggled with denial, in a painful and isolated teenage loneliness, trying to make peace with the brute fact of death. And that struggle branded my soul at a depth I still feel today. That summer I was, again, given the gift of myrrh, the blessing that comes from making peace with your own mortality.

Our Struggle with Love and with God

January 12, 2026

God is love. If this is true, and it is, then why are we afraid of God, and why are we afraid to die?

We live in too much fear of God and death. From where does this come? Why should anyone be afraid of coming face to face with love?

This fear is not something that is simply the product of bad religion which can give us a distorted concept of God. Bad religion can play a role in creating an unhealthy fear of God in us, but there are more salient factors at play here.

First, unless we have been extremely blessed in how we have been loved, all of us struggle with a deep fear that we are somehow unlovable, undeserving, and unable to stand morally and psychologically naked before pure love. So, it’s understandable that we stand in some fear before a God who is pure love and not surprisingly fear facing that God when we die. I say this with compassion. For most of us this is simply our human condition, and bad religion does not lie at the deepest roots of this. What lies at its deep roots?

Our congenital struggle with love. In essence, our struggle is the struggle of the biblical Jacob who spends a night wrestling with an unknown divine force. What’s the force? An angel? God? Yes, both of these, but ultimately, he is wrestling unknowingly with love, and that’s why near the end of the struggle when it has grievously wounded him, he finally realizes what he is wrestling with and now clings to it and begs for its blessing. That’s our deep struggle with God, with love.

However, bad theology sometimes does play a role because of our misunderstanding of the biblical counsel “the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom”. (Proverbs 9.10)

The theology and catechesis of my youth (much of it very healthy) did contain however, and quite strongly, a motif of unhealthy fear. God was to be feared. God noted our sins, counted them, and kept a strict record of them in a book. We would one day have to face God, with that encounter searing our souls, and answer for those shortcomings. Moreover, there was also the fear of going to hell after death. No matter our sincerity, we might die in a state of mortal sin and be condemned to hell for all eternity. The theology and catechesis in which I was baptized and raised, despite all its other goodness, instilled an unhealthy fear of God in me. I suspect this is true for many of us.

But isn’t the fear of God the beginning of wisdom? Shouldn’t we stand before God in fear? Yes, but only in a certain type of fear.

Fear has many faces, some healthy, some not. We fear the playground bully, fear getting a serious illness, fear physical pain, fear losing someone in death, fear our own death, and fear judgment for our shortcomings. That’s one face of fear.

But there’s another, the fear of being unfaithful, the fear of betraying someone we love, the fear of being calloused and boorish and keeping our shoes on before the burning bush. That’s the type of fear which is the beginning of wisdom. That’s a healthy fear in the face of God and of love.

St. Paul, in speaking of grace, in essence puts it this way: We shouldn’t try to be good so that God loves us. Rather, we should want to be good because God loves us! For example, in a marriage, we should want to be faithful not first of all so that our partner doesn’t stop loving us. Rather we should want to be faithful because our partner loves us. That’s holy fear, fear of betraying love, the beginning of wisdom, a healthy fear of God and of love.

As well, today we have an ever-expanding literature that recounts the experience of people who had been clinically dead and then were resuscitated and brought back to life. In basically every instance, the person who had been dead and then resuscitated, didn’t want to come back to his or her earthly life. Virtually everyone describes being met by a warmth, a light, and an embrace of love that surpassed anything they had ever experienced in this life. None experienced fear.

God is never a tyrant, a bully, arbitrary, legalistic, cold, without warmth, and without full understanding and compassion. We only need to fear betraying that goodness. My image of standing before God after death is the image of a newborn baby being picked up by his mother for the first time or the image of a grandparent beaming at his or her grandchild trying to coax a smile from the toddler. We needn’t fear facing God before or after death. It will be an experience of meeting pure, unconditional love. Then, like the biblical Jacob, we can finally stop wrestling with love and cling to it instead.

Praying for Israel and Jerusalem

January 5, 2026

I once lived in community for several years with an Oblate brother who was wonderfully generous and pious to a fault. But he struggled to pick up symbol and metaphor. He took things literally. For him, what the words said is what they meant!

This caused him considerable confusion and consternation when each day praying the psalms we would pray for Jerusalem and Israeland would occasionally pray for the demise of some other nation. Coming out of prayer, he would ask: “Why are we praying for Jerusalem? For Israel? What makes those places more special in God’s eyes than other cities and other countries? Why does God hate some countries and cities?”

We would try our best to have him understand that these names were not to be taken literally, as places on a map, but rather as symbols. Wisely or unwisely, I would sometimes say, “Brother, whenever you read the word ‘Jerusalem’ or ‘Israel’, just take that to mean the ‘church’, and whenever a nation or a city is named that God seems to hate, take that to mean that God hates sin.”

We might smile at his piety and literalism, but I’m not sure we don’t all still struggle with our own literalism in understanding what in fact the scriptures mean by words like Jerusalem, Israel, Chosen people, and God’s elect. Indeed, as Christians, what do we mean with the words Christian, Church, and Body of Christ?

For whom are we praying when we pray for Jerusalem and Israel?

What we see in scripture is a progressive de-literalizing of names and places. Initially, Israel meant an historical nation, Jerusalem meant an historical city, the Chosen People meant a genetic race, and God’s elect was literally that nation, that city, and that genetic race. But as revelation unfolds, these names and concepts become ever more symbolic.

At least this is true for most parts of Judaism. Most parts of Judaism understand these words symbolically, though some still understand these words literally. For them, Jerusalem means the actual city of Jerusalem, and Israel means an actual strip of land in Palestine.

Christians mirror that. Mainstream Christian theology has from its very origins refused to identify those names and places in a way where (simplistically) Jerusalem means the Christian Church and Christians are the Chosen Race. However, as is the case with parts of Judaism, many Christians, while de-literalizing these words from their Jewish roots, now take them literally to refer to the historical Christian churches and to its explicitly confessing members. Indeed, my answer to my Oblate brother (“Jerusalem means the church, Israel means Christianity”) seems to suggest exactly that.

However, the words Church and Christianity themselves need to be de-literalized. The church is a reality which is much wider and more inclusive than its explicit, visible, baptized membership. Its visible, historical aspect is real, is important, and is never to be denigrated; but (from Jesus through the history of Christian dogma and theology) Christianity has always believed and taught clearly that the mystery of Christ is both visible and invisible. Partly, we can see it and partly we can’t. Partly it is visibly incarnated in history, and partly it is invisible. The mystery of Christ is incarnate in history, but not all of it can be seen. Some people are baptized visibly, and some people are baptized only in unseen ways.

Moreover, this is not new, liberal theology. Jesus himself taught that it is not necessarily those who say ‘Lord, Lord’ who are his true believers, but rather it’s those who actually live out his teaching (however unconsciously) who are his true followers. Christian theology has always taught that the full mystery of Christ is much larger than its historical manifestation in the Christian churches.

Kenneth Cragg, a Christian missionary, after living and ministering for years in the Muslim world, offered this comment: I believe it will take all the Christian churches to give full expression to the full Christ. To this, I would add, that it will not only take all the Christian churches to give full expression to the mystery of Christ, it will also take all people of sincere will, beyond all religious boundaries, and beyond all ethnicity, to give expression to the mystery of Christ.

When my pious Oblate brother who struggled to understand metaphor and symbol asked me why we were always praying for Jerusalem and Israel, and I replied that he might simply substitute the word Church and Christianity for those terms, my answer to him (taken literally) was itself over pious, simplistic, and a too-narrow understanding of the mystery of Christ. Those terms Church and Christianity, as we see in the progressive unfolding of revelation in scripture, must themselves be de-literalized. For whom are we praying when we pray for Jerusalem or for Israel? We are praying for all sincere people, of all faiths, of all denominations, of all races, of all ages. They are the new Jerusalem and the new Israel.

The Best Books that Found Me in 2025

December 29, 2025

St. Augustine famously said: Concerning taste there can be no dispute. So, with no promise that these books will do for you what they did for me, these are the books that spoke to me most deeply this past year.

Within the area of popular spirituality …

Tomas Halik, The Afternoon of Christianity, The Courage to Change. Halik is one of the major voices in Christian spirituality today, and this book won’t disappoint.

Serene Jones, Call It Grace – Finding Meaning in a Fractured World. President of Union Theological in New York, Jones gives anautobiographical account of her journey in life and in grace. A worthwhile read.
Jeffrey Munroe, Reading Buechner, Exploring the Work of a Master Memoirist, Novelist, Theologian, and Preacher. The best introduction to the work of Frederick Buechner that we have. Perhaps my favorite book of the year.
Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things, Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage. Rohr at his finest. A book that will stretch you in a healthy way. Among his many challenges:
- The saints and mystics who weep before the cross are first of all weeping universal tears for the suffering world.
- In our weakness we deserve tears more than hatred, fixing, or denial.
- The language of a prophet changes from anger at sin to pity over suffering and woundedness. Anger doesn’t allow us to make big switches, tears do.

Robert Ellsberg, Editor, Dorothy Day, On Pilgrimage, The Seventies. Dorothy Day’s letters from the nineteen seventies. Just a very good read.
Jim Wallis, The False White Gospel, Rejecting Christian Nationalism, Reclaiming True Faith, and Refounding Democracy. Jim Wallis is the Dorothy Day of our generation. This book is a strong challenge to take Jesus more seriously, and at times more literally.
- God is personal but never private.
- Who is my neighbor must extend beyond who receives official documentation. Your neighbor, as Jesus defines this, is often outside your comfort zone. Jesus says ‘Love your neighbor as yourself” no exceptions!
- We are dangerously close to expanding ideologies that don’t regard “others” as belonging. Go back to where you came from! The idea that people different from you are not your neighbors and you don’t have to love them, and you have permission to hate them. Excluding and attacking those who are different, rejecting outcasts and the outsiders, puts you at odds with Jesus.
Joseph F. Kelly, The Origins of Christmas. Kelly, a serious academic, traces out (in a very readable language) how we are to understand the Christmas stories in the Gospels.
Robert Wicks, The Art of Kindness. I endorsed this book on its cover with these words: “Robert Wicks has a unique, gifted spiritual vocabulary. Very few writers have his ability to weave together the special and the common, the academic and the street, and the depth of spiritual insight with robust common sense.” This book displays all that, complete with a healthy coloring of humor. He opens the book with this quote, when a flower doesn’t bloom, you fix the environment in which it grows, not the flower. That’s the umbrella under which he writes his stories.

A couple of academic books …

William T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry. A critical insight into the interplay between our culture and our faith. Cavanaugh argues that we aren’t, as Charles Taylor suggests, disenchanted vis-à-vis the transcendent. Rather we are re-enchanted with other gods. An important academic read.
Charles Taylor, Cosmic Connections – Poetry in an Age of Disenchantment. Spoiler alert, this book is highly academic, immensely dense, and more than six hundred pages, but Taylor is one of the prominent philosophers of our generation and in this book (somewhere jammed among all those pages) are dozens of brilliant insights. For example, on the value of poetry:
- Philosophy cannot afford to ignore poetic insight.
- Poetry can be a way of re-enchanting the world.
- Poetry is the translation of insight into subtler languages.
- And poetry is emotion recollected in tranquility.

Among novels …

Jane Urquhart, In Winter I get up at night. Sadly, this past year I didn’t read many novels as I was focused on non-fiction. I am kicking myself for that since fiction offers insights that non-fiction doesn’t. This Urquhart novel was the only novel that stood out for me. Set in Saskatchewan, it’s a slow-moving story, but it features Urquhart’s (always) brilliant prose. Read it for its prose, even if the story doesn’t catch your fancy.

And one wildcard …

Margaret Atwood, A Book of Lives – A Memoir of Sort. This book fits no genre but is, as the Latin phrase goes, sui generis, a species all its own. This is not so much an autobiography as it is Atwood simply reminiscing about her life, from childhood until today. It’s six hundred pages, but once you begin, like an addiction, you just keep turning page after page. Light, insightful, humorous, heavy. Atwood is a great writer.

Happy reading, of these books or others.