Relating To Our Loved Ones After They Die

October 5, 2026

In nineteen seventy-nine, Sheldon Vanauken published a book entitled A Severe Mercy; in it he tells the story of the death of his wife, Davey. The book is an account of an extraordinary romance, cut short while still in full bloom by Davey’s premature death.

This story has intrigued many people, both because of the extraordinary relationship between Sheldon and Davey before her death and because of the relationship between them after her death.

Vanauken describes how after her death he still felt her presence strongly and vividly. She was gone, in that brutal and irrevocable way death takes loved ones away, but he still felt her presence—as real as he had before she died.

In the early months after her death, her presence to him was constant, guiding, sure, consoling, the same as it had been while she was alive. She had died, but inside himself he felt her present – as wife, lover, best friend, soulmate. And during those months he always carried her wedding ring in his pocket, which he fingered tenderly many times each day. Touching it helped keep him aware of her presence.

One day, while on a ship crossing the Atlantic, he felt her presence change. In the silence of his heart and soul, he felt her speaking to him, telling him that, up to now, they had needed that kind of presence with each other, but that this now needed to change. They needed to move to a different plane in their relationship. She was telling him that she needed to “let him go” in the way she had been present to him until now and she needed to ask him to “let her go” in the way they were now present to each other. It was a difficult moment, but Sheldon understood its meaning. He took the ring from his pocket and quietly dropped it into the ocean.

From then onward, Davey was still present to him, but now in a new way. Her presence now was less explicit, though not more distant. Now her presence was less that of the earthly wife, soulmate, and best friend, and more the presence of a person who loves you and holds you in a way that’s harder to describe.

Thousands of persons who have lost loved ones to death, including myself, can identify with that story, both in terms of feeling the presence of a deceased loved one inside ourselves, and in terms of feeling this relationship, at a point, develop and move to a new plane.

In my own case, I lost both parents when I was twenty-three years old. For nearly two years, like Sheldon Vanauken, I felt their presence as sure, guiding, and parental (they were still very much my mom and dad, still very much with me); though, in my case, it was not always a consoling and warm presence. The pain of their loss would occasionally bring me feelings and tears that were not warm. My mom and dad were still with me, but at this early stage their deaths still left a cold scar.

However, sometime between the first and second year after their deaths this changed. For me, unlike for Vanauken, there wasn’t a clear moment when this happened. It happened gradually and imperceptibly, their presence to me and within me changed.

But, parallel to Vanauken’s experience, what I experienced was a shift in presence from one plane to another. I still felt their presence, just as before, but now something had let go, even as something else took its place.

I felt their presence now as a deep consolation and their loss no longer hurt as before. I no longer felt a need to pray for them. Instead, now I felt a need (which I still feel today) to pray to them.

They were still my parents, but something had changed. I hesitate to use words to describe this because they might sound vague and wishful, but what I felt can only be characterized this way: They were still my parents—alive, deeply concerned for me, and more present in my life than they ever could be while still in this life. But now I felt that presence as something higher, more universally shared with others, and more tied to God’s love and presence to me. It became harder to differentiate their presence from the general feeling of divine providence that I sense in my life,

I come from a large family. Basically, all my siblings had a similar experience. Moreover, many people have shared similar stories concerning how they continue to feel their relationships with their deceased loved ones change and grow even after their deaths.

Vanauken’s story of an ongoing, developing relationship with a loved one who has died is paralleled everywhere. Relationships continue to grow and develop even after death. Exotic stuff? No! Tis the stuff of dogma. One of the essential articles of our faith teaches that death doesn’t end a relationship.

An Anniversary

September 28, 2026

In telling his faith story, C.S. Lewis shares that at the moment of his conversion, he was “the most reluctant convert in the history of Christianity”, but that he gave himself over to Christ because “God’s compulsion is our liberation”.

That phrase spoke to me recently when, on September 8^th, I celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of making my first vows as a Missionary Oblate of Mary Immaculate. I was eighteen years old then, far too young by today’s assessment to be making that kind of commitment.

But I wasn’t too young. Intuitively, I knew what I was signing up for. I wasn’t starry-eyed and unaware that taking religious vows is a serious business. The decision I made to enter religious life with the hope of becoming a priest was the most difficult decision I have ever made in life and wasn’t predicated on a natural attraction to that vocation. The opposite. That was something I didn’t want, but something I felt called to and not morally free to resist. I was a reluctant novice, but there because of God’s compulsion. Here’s the story.

Until one month before I entered novitiate as a novice, I resisted the call, planning instead to go to university to become psychologist. I made the decision to pursue religious life and the priesthood during the summer immediately after my high school graduation. During that summer I worked on a farm and spent long hours alone on a tractor working in fields. During those long hours alone, a tension that I had long suppressed began to build up in me, namely, one between my natural desire regarding my choice in life and a call, a compulsion, inside me that simply would not go away, calling me to the priesthood. Eventually I gave in. I said yes to that call.

So, at the tender age of seventeen, I made the most difficult (but paradoxically, the clearest, freest, and most life-giving) decision I have ever made. And as I look back on it now, sixty-one years later, I see it as pure grace. There have been some difficult times, but there have been no regrets. From day one, I knew that this was right for me. All these years later, I have only deep gratitude for the grace to have made that decision and the ocean of grace that has surrounded me throughout these sixty years.

The renowned novelist Morris West published his autobiography sometime after his seventieth birthday. It’s a slim little volume entitled A View From the Ridge and begins with these words: When you reach the age of seventy there should only be three phrases left in your vocabulary: Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

I’m over seventy years of age now and were I to write an autobiography, like Morris West, I would begin with the words: Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

And I remember clearly that day of my vows, sixty years ago. My mother and father were there, proud of me. I have a cherished photo of them with me, made even more precious because both of them, still young, died within the next six years. As well, I have sixty years of cherished friendship with some of my fellow novices – a couple of them who were even younger than I was.

And so, in celebrating this anniversary, I want to say thank you.

First, to the Oblates of Mary Immaculate for accepting me and through sixty years providing me with support, good community, friendship, exceptional educational opportunities, and with grace-filled, life-giving ministries. In these sixty years, I estimate that I have lived in community with over four hundred different men. That wasn’t always without its tensions, but it was aways supportive and life-giving – and full of the kind of healthy banter that breathes oxygen into a room.

As well, a huge thanks to my family, a large amorphous tribe, now spanning three generations. We have managed to stay close, despite distance, and I have always felt their unfailing support. They are still an anchor, a home, which helps steady me when things get confusing.

Next, and no superlative is up to the task here, a huge thank you to the untold number of people, friends and others, whom I have met in ministry through these sixty years. I was ordained sacramentally by a bishop but have been continually re-ordained by the people in my life. They’ve shown me what priesthood means. The highlights in my priesthood have been hearing the word “thank you” from people with whom I have had the privilege of being with.

Finally, the biggest thank you of all to God. Thank you for calling me. Thank you for the compulsion and the persistence in that call, for knowing what was best for me. Thank you for sustaining me during some difficult, obsessive, and depressive periods in my ministry. Thank you for staying with me all these years.

Indeed, God’s compulsion is our liberation – and pure grace.

The Original Sin

September 21, 2026

I once had the privilege of taking a course from James Mackey. In class one day he shared this story.

A man he knew was part of a hunting expedition in Africa. His group was camped in a jungle. One morning he left camp early, hiked a few miles into the bush by himself, and shot two wild turkeys. Buckling these to his belt, he was walking back toward camp when he heard noises and realized he was being followed. Frightened, his hands tightened on his rifle, he scanned the woods for movement.

His fear was quickly dispelled. What he saw stalking him was a young boy, about twelve years old, naked and hungry. He realized instantly that what the boy wanted was not him but food. He stopped, opened his belt, let the turkeys fall to the ground, and backed away. The young boy ran up to the turkeys but didn’t pick them up. Instead, he looked towards the man and in his native language began asking him for something. Not understanding what the boy was asking but sensing that he wanted permission to take the birds, the man began gesturing to him that it was okay. But the boy still was not at ease. He kept asking and gesturing that he wanted something more.

Finally, in desperation, the boy took several steps back from the turkeys and stood silently with his hands out, open in front of him – waiting until the man came and placed the turkeys into his hands. Then he ran off into the jungle. Despite his hunger and need, he had refused to take the birds but had waited until they were given to him.

This story, in essence, illustrates the antithesis of original sin. This young boy did what Adam and Eve didn’t do. He accepted that life needed to be given to him, that he could not take it on his own, despite his hunger.

What’s at stake here? To answer that we need to look at what constituted the original sin. What did Adam and Eve do that so badly violated God’s plan? How is their action the opposite of this young boy’s?

The story of the fall of Adam and Eve is colored throughout, especially at the end (nakedness and shame), with sexual imagery, so much so that we might conclude that their transgression was of a sexual nature. It wasn’t. The sexual motif in the story is a metaphor for rape. Adam and Eve took, as by force, something that can only be received in love.

The condition that God gave Adam and Eve might be summarized this way: “I will give you life. I will bathe you in life. But you must receive it and never take it. If you receive it, it will always be life-giving, but on the day you begin to take it rather than to receive it, your actions will begin to bring about distrust, alienation, nakedness, shame, and death.”

That single commandment summarizes the Ten Commandments.

Indeed, we might ask why God gave a commandment to Adam and Eve in the first place. Why a condition? Why not paradise without conditions? The question is a valid one; but in answering it, we must be careful not to see the commandment as a test, as some arbitrary thing that God might have asked or not asked. The condition here isn’t arbitrary. It’s something inherent within love itself. How so?

God made a love-contoured universe so that in the order of things, everything is gift. In life, nothing may be snatched, grabbed by force, or claimed by right. Life can only be received as gift, respectfully, in its own time. The same with love. Something is only love and can only give life when it is freely given and freely received. This is written into love’s DNA.

Love is not unconditional and never can be because there’s a condition innate in love itself, namely, to be love, something must be received as gift. Conversely, if love is snatched by force rather than respectfully received as gift, we have a word for that – we call it rape.

The original sin of Adam and Eve wasn’t sexual, but it was akin to rape. They wrongfully took what was intended as gift. Our culture, which rewards aggressiveness and tells us that we are foolish not to take for ourselves the good things we want, too often invites us to do the same thing.

It’s interesting to note that the story of Adam and Eve was written centuries after the Ten Commandments were given and is an attempt to summarize all of them in a single condition: “You may receive, but you may never take!”

That’s also the lesson in Jesus’ gentle correction of the rich young man: The man had asked, “How can I possess eternal life?” Jesus corrects his verb: “You can only receive eternal life” – and you must, like the young African boy, stand before life with empty hands and wait until it’s given you.

The Conspiracy of Accidents Through Which God Speaks

September 14, 2026

A woman once shared this story in one of my classes:

She had been raised in a religious home and had been a regular churchgoer. However, during her years at university her interest and practice in religion had progressively slipped so that by the time of her graduation she no longer attended church or prayed much. This indifference to prayer and church-going continued for several years after her graduation. Her story focused on how that changed.

One day, nearly four years after having given up all practice of prayer and churchgoing, she flew to Colorado to visit her sister and to do some skiing. She arrived on a Saturday evening and the next morning, Sunday, her sister invited her to come to church with her. She politely refused and went skiing instead.

On her first run down the slope, she hit a tree and broke her leg. Sporting a huge cast, she was released from hospital the following Saturday. The next morning, her sister again asked her to come to church with her. This time (“there wasn’t much else to do”) she accepted. As chance would have it, it was Good Shepherd Sunday and as chance (again) would have it, there happened to be a priest visiting from Israel. He could not see her sitting near the back with her leg in cast, and yet he began his homily this way:

“There’s a custom among shepherds in Israel that existed at the time of Jesus and is still sometimes practiced today that highlights a hidden aspect of a good shepherd. Sometimes a shepherd senses that a young lamb is going to be a congenital stray, forever drifting away from the flock. What the shepherd does then is deliberately break one of its legs so that he has to carry it until its leg is healed. By that time, the lamb becomes so attached to the shepherd that it never strays again.”

“I may be dense!” concluded this woman, “but, given my broken leg and all this chance coincidence, hearing this awoke something inside me. Fifteen years have passed since then and I have prayed and gone to church regularly ever since!”

James Mackey once suggested that divine providence is “a conspiracy of accidents through which God speaks.” What this woman experienced that Sunday was precisely the language of God, divine providence, God speaking to her through a conspiracy of accidents.

Today the concept of divine providence tends to be ignored or misunderstood. Some Christians identify it with an unhealthy fatalism (“If God wants my child to live he will not let it die. We won’t take the medical procedure”). Others connect it to an unhealthy theology of God (“God sent AIDS into the world as a punishment for our sexual promiscuity! God sends us natural and personal disasters to bring us back to true values!”)

But these are false concepts of God and of God’s providence. God does not start fires, or floods, or wars, or AIDS, or anything else of this nature to smarten us up and bring us back to true values. Nature, chance, human freedom, and human sin bring these things to pass.

However, to say that God does not initiate or cause these things is not the same thing as saying that God does not speak through them. God speaks through chance events, both disastrous and advantageous. Past generations, like my parents’ generation, more easily understood this.

For example, my parents were farmers. For them, like for Abraham and Sarah of old, there were no mere accidents; in everything there was always providence and the finger of God. If they had a good crop, God was blessing them. If they had a poor crop, well, they concluded that God wanted them to live on less for a while for some good reason. And they would always in the deep parts of their minds and hearts try to discern that reason.

When Jesus invites us to “read the signs of the times”, he is not suggesting an intellectual exercise wherein we try to articulate for ourselves how the cultural, political, social, and religious movements are shaping our times. That could indeed be a good thing, but that’s not what Jesus is inviting us to do. Rather he is inviting us to look at the events in our personal lives and in the life of the world and, as a deep form of prayer, try to discern what the finger of God is writing through those events.

In the conspiracy of accidents that make up our ordinary lives, the finger of God is writing. John of the Cross says that “the language of God is the experience God writes into our lives.” As a form of prayer, we need to look at the conspiracy of accidents in our lives and ask ourselves: “What is God saying to us in all of this?”

And hopefully it won’t take a broken leg for us to get the message.

An Irritated Melancholy

September 7, 2026

We live in a world where, as Karl Rahner says, our lives are always an unfinished symphony. In this life there is no final fulfillment. Mostly we are unconscious of that, and also unaware this creates a certain gap inside us that makes us grasp greedily at life.

But certain things can help bring this to our consciousness, for example, poetry and music. Charles-Pierre Baudelaire, 1821-1867, a French poet, essayist, and art critic, once said this of poetry and music: “It is both by poetry and through poetry, by and through music, that the soul glimpses the splendor beyond the grave; and when an exquisite poem brings tears to the edge of the eyes, these tears are not the proof of an excess of enjoyment, they are rather the testimony of an irritated melancholy, of a postulation of the nerves of a nature exiled in the imperfect and which we would like to seize immediately, on this earth, a revealed paradise.”

Wow! What a different language! Poetry and music as irritating our melancholy in a way that makes us aware of the limits of our lives, even as they simultaneously trigger a sense of what heaven will be, and how we would like to be there right now.

Baudelaire uses the word “melancholy” to name what we feel because of this gap in our lives, but is that the best word for what we’re feeling? Is it melancholy? Is it sadness? Or might it be better named? Indeed, it has been given many names.

St. Augustine, for instance, would not name it as a sadness, but as longing, an aching, a restlessness. As he puts it in his famous dictum: You have made us for yourself Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you. That’s its signature expression. But there are others.

A number of French spiritual writers call it a disquiet, a dis-ease; the biblical writer Qoheleth calls it a timelessness inside us that perpetually puts us out of sync with natural rhythms of time; the young Anne Frank, writing in her diary, simply named it an energy that made her want to jump out of her own skin and want to be everywhere all at once; the wise old Ruth Burrows called it “tortured complexity”; the scientist/mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called it “an irresistible, hallowing, which makes everyone cry out: ‘Lord, make us one’”; and Frederick Buechner called it “a subterranean presence” beneath the surface that’s not like a brass band announcing itself, but is something which comes and touches and strikes in ways that leaves us free to either not even notice it or to draw back from it.

What’s its origin? Where does this come from? It is, as St. Augustine says, the ache that tells us that we are made for God and that this world is not our final home. But this is not inside us as a sadness, a melancholy, or a darkness. The opposite. It’s inside us as an excess of energy, an excess of light, a luminosity.

This is its origin: As Christians, we believe we are made in the image and likeness of God. However, too often we imagine this simplistically as some beautiful icon stamped inside our soul rather than as divine fire, a touch of infinity, an insatiable godly energy in us that lets us know we are more than our biology and more than the physics of this world. It also assures we will never find full consummation in this world. We are built for more.

Now this can be experienced as a sadness, as a melancholy, but paradoxically that’s because its excessive light makes for a dark shadow. When we speak of the shadow inside us with which we are frightened to engage, it’s really our luminosity, the image of God inside us, we are talking about. We’re afraid of the godly light inside us. It’s too much to cope with.

The poet Marianne Williamson captures this in her poem Our Deepest Fear:

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness
That most frightens us.

We ask ourselves
Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God.

Your playing small
Does not serve the world.
There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking
So that other people won’t feel insecure around you.

We are all meant to shine,
As children do.
We were born to make manifest
The glory of God that is within us.

It’s not just in some of us;
It’s in everyone.

And as we let our own light shine,
We unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.
As we’re liberated from our own fear,
Our presence automatically liberates others.

This is not exactly a sadness, but it is indeed an irritated melancholy that makes us aware of just how much light there’s inside us.

Toward an Understanding of Suicide

August 31, 2026

Every year I try to write an article on suicide because it is perhaps the most misunderstood of all deaths and it wreaks a unique havoc among the family and the loved ones left behind.

They are left with a blizzard of ambivalent and conflicting feelings: shame (What a shameful way to die); guilt (Somehow I should have done more); second-guessing (Why wasn’t I more attentive?); anger (This was an act of selfishness); and anxiety (How can this person go to heaven?) Moreover, in effect, this ruins the memory the person who died by suicide.

Throughout my articles on suicide and my book (Bruised & Wounded: Struggling to Understand Suicide) I have tried to emphasize that in most cases of suicide:

We are dealing with an extremely sensitive and wounded person, someone who at one level is too bruised to touch.
In suicide, a person dies against his or her will, akin to jumping out of a high-rise window because your clothing is on fire.
A death by suicide is the emotional and psychological equivalent of cancer, stroke, or heart-attack. For this reason we no longer use the verb “committed” suicide since we never say that someone committed cancer, or a stroke, or a heart attack. Suicide, in most cases, is not a voluntary act.
In many cases too, suicidal depression has a biochemical root.
We need not worry about that person’s eternal salvation. He or she had a good heart and God reads the heart. Sometimes a person can descend into a state into which the best of human love, medicine, and psychiatry can no longer reach, but faith assures us that there is no depressive hell that God cannot descend into and breathe out peace.
We need to give ourselves permission to feel all the ambivalent feelings we will have about our loved one and his or her manner of death. That’s a healthy grieving process that should not be short-circuited. Eventually the memory of our loved one and his or her spirit will come to us in peace and understanding.
Our task, after our grieving period, is to redeem the memory of our loved one so that our loved one’s life is not seen and judged through the prism of his or her death. Put their photos back up on the walls, no longer speak of them in hushed tones, celebrate their lives, and speak healthily of the special spirit they brought into the world.

Margaret Atwood once said that sometimes things need to be said, and said, and said again, until they don’t need to be said anymore. These points on suicide still need to be said.

Beyond these assertions, let me add two more perspectives on suicide that I have found helpful.

The first one is a lesson from nature. Here’s Elilf Shafak, a botanist, reflecting on the suicide of his friend’s mother: “When I was a young botanist, I was asked to diagnose a tree that was not doing well. It seemed to be dying. After many tests, nothing conclusive, I took a shovel and began to dig, and I learned a lesson I have never forgotten, girdlingwas happening below the surface. The tree was being strangled by its own roots. If the encircling roots are not found on time, they start putting pressure on the tree and it just becomes too much to bear. … Your mother’s death has nothing to do with the absence of love. She was blooming and thriving with your love, and I’d like to believe with mine too, but underneath something was strangling her: the past, the memories, the roots.”

Sometimes our own roots (complexity, trauma, confusion, frustration, biology) can be so overpowering that they work at killing the body. As James Hillman writes in his book Suicide and the Soul, sometimes there are deep things inside us that cannot make themselves heard and their frustration eventually works to strangle the body. Our own roots are sometimes such a complex mixture of soul and biology that we begin to asphyxiate.

The second thought comes from Jeffrey Monroe in his book Reading Buechner: Exploring the Work of a Master Memoirist, Novelist, Theologian, and Preacher. Frederick Buechner, a Christian pastor, had to deal with his dad’s suicide. As a son, as man of faith, as a pastor trying to help others understand, he searched for answers vis-à-vis his dad’s suicide. The answers didn’t come easily, or seemingly at all. Eventually, Buechner came to this understanding of his dad’s suicide.

The best pastoral answer in the face of inexplicable tragedy (his dad’s suicide) isn’t an answer at all. It’s a presence.On this side of eternity, we won’t get all the answers, not least to the question of suicide. Sometimes there is no satisfactory answer in our darkest moments, like when we lose a loved one to suicide. What matters most in those dark moments is that we can trust that God did not abandon our loved one. And what we desire more than answers is God.

When Are We Home?

August 24, 2026

More than anything else, we long for home. Our deep ache for intimacy, security, and comfort is, in the end, a longing for home, nothing more. We are forever restlessly searching for someone or something to take us home.

But what is home? A family? A house? A city? A country? A lover? A language? An ethnic group?

Home transcends all of these. We can find a home in many different families, houses, cities, countries, ethnic groups, and languages, and we can be far from home in our own family, house, city, country, and ethnic group.

Home is a place in the heart, not a bloodline, building, city, or ethnicity. Home is that deep, fragile place inside us where we hold and guard what’s most precious to us. It’s that place where, in some dark way, we remember that once, before we came to awareness, we were caressed by hands far gentler than any we’ve met in this life and where we were once kissed by a truth and a beauty so perfect that they are now the unconscious standard by which we measure everything. Home is where things “ring true”, where what’s most precious to us is cherished, the place of tender conscience, of intimacy.

And we know when we’re there and when we’re not. Home is a gut feeling, a resting place, a goodness, a security that we sense or don’t sense.

Sometimes people ask me: “How do I know that the love I have for a person is the kind of love that I can build a marriage on?” My answer: “Love is a mystery and there are no guarantees; but ask yourself this: Does this person bring me home? Or is this a love, irrespective of how powerful and exciting it might feel, from which I need eventually to go home?’”

There’s a huge difference between sharing powerful feelings with someone and building a life and a home with him or her. There’s a huge difference between an affair and a marriage, between having a honeymoon or building a life with someone. Many kinds of love make for a honeymoon, but only one kind takes us home.

And then, after we’ve found home, we still have the problem of staying there. This isn’t meant literally, but in a deeper way. How?

In the Gospels, immediately after he denies Jesus, we are told that Peter “went outside”. What’s being described here isn’t a simple physical movement, someone stepping through a door and going outside. What’s meant is that Peter went outside of himself, outside of who he is, outside of his conscience, outside of his normal understanding of things. He “went outside” in the way a man “goes outside” when he goes to a singles’ bar and hooks up with someone in a way that takes him “outside” of his normal moral realm.

And from that, he has to go home. Why? Because, like Peter, he has “gone outside”. What a person does in any morally schizophrenic act, in essence, takes him or her away from home (even if that act is done in his or her own house). Morally and psychologically the act is done away from home. It’s done “outside”.

There’s a crude joke that catches this. It asks: “What do promiscuous people do after they have sex?” The answer: “They go home!” That expresses a sad irony: Sex is not something from which we are ever meant to go home. It’s meant to take us home, to constitute home. Intimacy is home and if we need to go home from an experience, that’s an infallible sign that what we’ve experienced isn’t ultimately life giving.

And this has huge implications for understanding life. In the Gospels, Jesus says: “To you (those inside the circle of understanding) are revealed the secrets of the Kingdom, but to those outside everything is in riddles.” Who’s “inside” and who’s “outside” the circle of understanding? Who “gets” the secret and who doesn’t “get” it?

“Getting” or “not getting” the secret is not a question of intelligence, learning, luck, or finding the right books or teachers. Rather, we are “inside” the circle of understanding and we “get” the Gospels when we are at “at home”, when we are true to what’s deepest in us, when we are true to our consciences, when we don’t morally “go outside” (as did Peter and as we do when we do acts that morally aren’t true to who we are). When we are morally faithful, we “get” the Gospel.

Conversely, we “don’t get it” when we “go outside”, outside morally, when we “leave home” by being unfaithful as Peter was.

And we know this truth from experience: When we’re faithful, the Gospels make sense. When we’re unfaithful, almost immediately, we fill with objections, grow bitter, and begin to poke holes in truths we once believed.

T.S. Eliot once said, “Home is where we start from.” It’s also the place from which we understand what does or does not bring us life.

Reflection and Poems on Heartbreak

August 17, 2026

When I reflect on the spirituality I was raised on, I’m deeply grateful. No spirituality is perfect, but what I have been given through our rich Christian tradition stands up to the challenges of life and of faith. But if I had one criticism it would be this: For all its richness, Christian spirituality hasn’t always given us permission to own and deal with our own complexity. At least in its popular expression, it has not always taken seriously how complicated it is to be a human being.

It’s no simple task. As Nicole Krauss writes in her novel, The History of Love, we live with the “insoluble contradiction of being animals cursed with self-reflection, and moral beings cursed with animal instincts.” Yes, we are creatures of dust carrying the breath of God.

In our deepest center we bear the Image and Likeness of God, but that is not to be imagined as some beautiful icon stamped in our soul. No. It’s fire, divine fire. In each of us there is a breath of infinity which keeps us congenitally restless, gives us hungers we can never fully satisfy in this life, and, as the biblical writer Qoheleth says, keeps us forever out of sync with the seasons. As St. Augustine famously wrote: You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” As humans, we are pathologically complex and restless.

And here’s what that can look like in a life of faith.

When you read Terese of Lisieux’s The Story of a Soul, you see a paradox, a near contradiction. On the one hand, she embodies wonderfully what Christian detachment is meant to be. She’s a paradigm of selflessness. Yet, she’s also strongly attached to certain things, like her family, and could fall into a minor depression if there was a missed visit by her family. Terese was a complex woman, not a saint without struggles, and her honest sharing of those struggles is one of the reasons why her writings touch people deeply.

The same is true of the renowned scientist, spiritual writer, and mystic, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Here’s how he defined himself (in words to this effect): “I was born into this world with two great loves, love of God and love of the world. When I think of God, it takes my breath away; but when I look at the world and its pagan beauty, it also takes my breath away. My life is a struggle between genuflecting before the divine and genuflecting before the pagan.”

I give this background as a way of introducing and recommending a recent book by Maria Shriver, I Am Maria – My Reflections and Poems on Heartbreak, Healing, and Finding Your Way Home.

Many of us are familiar with Maria Shriver as a member of the famous Kennedy family and as the former First Lady of the State of California; but her memoir book introduces her to us in a very different way. This is not a celebrity writing a memoir based on her popularity. This is a book of depth, in effect, a contemporary The Story of a Soul.

Shriver articulates the struggle of a sensitive soul as she shares her own journey, both as woman of the world and as a woman of faith. Like Terese of Lisieux, she is healthily detached, even as she clings to some things in this world. Like Teilhard de Chardin, God and faith can take her breath away, even as do some earthy consolations in this world. She takes both her body and her spirit seriously and names, with honesty, the tensions she lives with because of that. She manifests a deep piety, even as she is healthily iconoclastic. She carries these tensions well.

Her journey is one of hope and of realism, all at the same time. For example, she ends her poem, My Morning Meditation, with these words:

Sure things scare me like being alone for the rest of my life

But if that’s what happens so be it

I will continue to surround myself with beauty

So I can access the beauty, the spiritual, the feminine part of me.

Carl Rogers suggests that “what is most personal is often what is most universal.” Shriver shares deep personal struggles which we immediately recognize as universal. And she is ever the artist in sharing them, deep and intimate, yet never exhibitionist. She never makes you want to turn your eyes away, the mark of a good writer.

When I first read Henri Nouwen, I had a sense of being introduced to myself: How does he know me that well? Is he writing just for me? If you are someone who struggles with a sensitive soul you will have that same experience reading Shriver’s book.

Someone once said this about the late singer Karen Carpenter. When you hear her sing you have the feeling that she is singing just for you and singing directly into your ear. Maria Shriver’s book will give you that same sensation.

Spirituality and Steadiness

August 10, 2026

Something in us is dissatisfied with the ordinary. There’s something in the ordinary that can have us think that predictable routines, domestic rhythms, and commitment to duty can weigh us down, swallow us up, and anchor us outside the more rewarding waters of passion, romance, creativity, dance, and celebration.

We often vilify the ordinary. I remember a young woman, a student of mine, who shared in class that her greatest fear in life was to succumb to the ordinary, “to end up content, a little housewife and mother, happily doing laundry commercials!”

If you’re an artist or have an artistic temperament, you’re prone to this kind of feeling. That’s one of the propensities of an artist. Doris Lessing, for example, once made the comment that George Eliot could have been a better writer “if she hadn’t been so moral.” What Lessing is suggesting is that Eliot kept herself too anchored in the ordinary, too safe, too secure, too far from the edges.

Kathleen Norris, in her biographical work The Virgin of Bennington, shares how as a young writer she fell victim to this kind of ideology: “Artists, I believed were much too serious to live sane and normal lives. Driven by inexorable forces in an uncaring world, they were destined for an inevitable, sometimes deadly, but always ennobling wrestle with gloom and doom.”

An ennobling wrestle with gloom and doom! That does have a seductive sound to it, particularly for those of us who fancy ourselves as artistic, intellectual, or spiritual. That’s why on a given day any of us can feel a certain condescending pity for those who achieve simple happiness. Easy for them, we think, but they’re selling themselves short! That’s the artist inside of us speaking. You’ve never seen an artist doing a laundry commercial!

Don’t get me wrong. Not all of this is bad. Jesus, himself, said that we do not live by bread alone. No artist needs that explained. He or she knows that safe routine, dram duty, and a mortgage that’s been paid, alone do not necessarily make for heaven. We need bread, but we also need beauty, color, and celebration.

Doris Lessing, who was a great artist, joined the communist party as a young woman but later left it after she’d matured. Why did she leave? One phrase says it all. She left the communist party, she says, “because they didn’t believe in color!”

Life, Jesus assures us, is not meant to be lived in black and white, that is, as simply an endless cycle of rising, showering, going off to work, responsibly doing a job, coming home, having supper, getting things set for the next day, and then going back to bed.

And yet, there is much to be said for that seemingly dram routine. The rhythm of the ordinary is, in the end, the deepest wellspring from which to draw joy and meaning. Kathleen Norris, after telling us about her youthful temptation to side-step the ordinary to engage in the more ennobling battle with gloom and doom, shares how a wonderful mentor, Betty Kray, helped steer her clear of that pitfall. Kray encouraged her to write out of her joy as well as her gloom and to “dismiss the romance of insanity as a sham.” As Norris puts it: “She tried hard to convince me of what her friends who had been institutionalized for madness knew all too well: that the clean simple appreciation of ordinary, daily things is a treasure like none on earth.”

Sometimes a different mentor teaches us this. When we regain our health and energy after having been ill, off work, and out of our normal routines and rhythms, nothing is as sweet as returning to the ordinary – our work, our routine, the normal stuff of everyday life. Only after it has been taken away and then given back, do we realize that the clean, simple appreciation of daily things is the ultimate treasure.

Artists, though, are still partially right. The ordinary can weigh us down, and keep us outside the deeper waters of creativity, of romance, of color, and of the wildness that lets us dance. But, that being admitted, anchors and weight also have a positive function. They keep us from being swept away. They anchor our sanity. They keep us steady. The rhythm of the ordinary is perhaps the most powerful anchor of all to hold us in sanity.

Paul Simon, in a 1970s song entitled, An American Tune, sings about coping with confusion, mistakes, betrayal, and other events that shatter our innocence. And he ends that rather sad ballad quite peacefully with the words: “Still tomorrow’s gonna be another working day, and I’m trying to get some rest. That’s all I’m trying, is to get some rest.”

Obedience to that imperative helps anchor our sanity. There’s much to be said about being a contented, ordinary person, anchored in the rhythms of the ordinary, trying at the end of the workday to get some rest.

When the Bloom Has Left the Rose

August 3, 2026

There’s a difference between being in bloom and being fruitful. Take a flower for example.

It begins as a wee bud, hardly noticeable, and eventually in full bloom grows into a beautiful flower. In full bloom it’s very noticeable. This is its optimal moment of beauty, of being admired, of glory. But this isn’t its final purpose nor indeed its fully mature moment. At this point it is not yet fully fruitful, albeit it’s bloom is beautiful, and is giving something special to the world. But it only becomes fully fruitful later, when its bloom has withered as it is dying. That’s when the flower gives off its seed and spreads its seeds for new life.

There’s a life lesson in this which we struggle to understand and accept. We understand the bloom, but not the withering. We accept the bloom, but not the withering. We find it almost impossible to believe that our most life-giving moments might come after the bloom, in the withering of the bloom.

We can see the primal example of this in Jesus. During the peak of his ministry when he is very popular, doing miracles, drawing crowds of thousands, and people are pressing round just to touch him, his ministry is in full bloom. He is fruitful and is already giving life to others, but not nearly in as deep a way as when his ministry withers, when the crowds abandon him, when he is humiliated and scorned in his passion, and when he dies helpless, abandoned by most everyone.

Like a flower, in his dying he spread the seeds for new life in a deeper way than he could when, metaphorically, he was in full bloom.

The renowned mystic John of the Cross employs this metaphor at the heart of his spirituality. He writes: “The deepest center of an object we take to signify the furthest point attainable by that object’s being and power and operation and movement.” For him, unlike how we normally conceive of this, our deepest center is not the virgin spot inside our heart and soul. No. For John of the Cross our deepest center is the furthest point of natural growth (aided by grace) that anything or anybody can reach in this life.

For a flower, as we saw, this is not its bloom, rather it’s when the flower gives off its seed in its withering. The same is true for us as humans; our deepest center is not our bloom, namely, the beauty and energy of our youth. Rather, our deepest center is the fullest maturity our soul can attain in this life, and normally we reach this sometime after our physical bloom has begun to wither. This may sound somewhat morbid, but viewed in a deeper way, it’s anything but that. Allow me an example:

Take our normal human sexual development. What’s its deepest center?

Its deepest center is not its bloom, namely, that time in our lives when our bodies are most attractive and our desire for sexual intercourse is the strongest. Nor is it even after we have given birth to new life through sexual union, albeit that is a wonderful fruitfulness and one of the ultimate intentions of God and nature in creating us as sexual beings. That’s a deep center though not sexuality’s deepest center.

It is not good for the man to be alone! Our sexuality is meant to take us beyond our aloneness. Thus, our sexuality relentlessly drives us outward, beyond ourselves, towards community of life with others. But aloneness is not easy to overcome. We can be very lonely, even while having sex. As a married colleague once shared with me: “What’s lonelier than sleeping alone? Sleeping alone when you’re not sleeping alone.” Also, when we are still developing in our sexuality, sexuality’s spontaneous urge is to possess beauty rather than admire it – and this still leaves us alone.

What takes us beyond our aloneness? Standing before beauty and giving it the pure gaze of admiration. At that moment our ego no longer separates us from union with others, and for that moment we are no longer alone. We have reached our deepest center.

Our deepest center as a sexual person is when we can look at someone else (for example, a child or a grandchild) and give him or her the pure gaze of admiration. It is when we can look at energy and beauty in full bloom and admire and bless them by seeing them as God saw creation at its origins: It’s good! It’s very good! In the gaze of admiration, we bless creation in the same manner as God blessed Jesus at his baptism with the words: “This is my beloved child in whom I take delight!”

When we are in full bloom we are admired; but we only fully overcome our aloneness when we stand in admiration of the energy and beauty of others and of creation and spontaneously utter words of blessing.

What is Purgatory?

July 27, 2026

Most Christian denominations do not believe in purgatory. This is specifically a Roman Catholic belief. And in the popular Catholic mind, purgatory is too often mistakenly conceived of as a place distinct from heaven, a place where you are purified and made ready for heaven.

But purgatory is not a place distinct from heaven and hell. Protestants and Evangelicals are right in pointing out that scripture attests that there are only two states after death, heaven and hell. So how can Roman Catholics postulate a third state, purgatory?

Because purgatory is not a geography, a place distinct from heaven, it’s the pain of being purified by love and the pain of giving up the illusion of self-sufficiency.

Here’s an example of each.

Several years ago, I was counselling a young man who was experiencing an intense pain which was new to him. He had fallen in love with a wonderful young woman and was preparing to marry her. Prior to meeting her, he had been living irresponsibly, been sexually promiscuous, and had been comfortably smug and insensitive in that state. The woman he had fallen in love with was aware of his past but was not throwing this into his face. The opposite. She was loving and forgiving him unconditionally.

But there was the rub! Being in love with this wonderfully good, generous, and moral person made him see himself in a clearer way. Her love was a prism through which he began to see his own immaturity (which is what unconditional love always does). Her love was a light that gave him new eyesight and what he saw inside himself (his selfishness, his irresponsibility, his smugness) caused him a lot of pain. To his credit, he sought help – confession, spiritual direction, psychological counselling.

Her loving him, purely and unconditionally, caused him the deepest pains he had ever endured. It was his first taste of purgatory.

Here’s a second example: A number of years ago, I attended the funeral of a man who died at the age of ninety. From every indication, he had been a good man, solidly religious, the father of a large family, a man respected in the community, and a man with a generous heart. However, he had also been a strong man, a gifted man, a natural leader, someone to whom a group would naturally look to take the reins and lead. Hence, he held a number of prominent positions in the community. He was a man very much in charge.

One of his sons, a Catholic priest, gave the homily at his funeral. He began with these words: Scripture tells us that the sum of a man’s life is seventy years, eighty for those who are strong. Now our dad lived for ninety years. Why the extra twenty years? Well, it’s no mystery. He was too strong and too much in charge of things to die at seventy or eighty. It took God an extra twenty years to mellow him. And it worked. The last ten years of his life were years of massive diminishment. His wife died, and he never got over that. He had a stroke which put him into assisted living and that was a massive blow to him. Then he spent the last years of his life with others having to help him take care of his basic bodily needs. For a man like him, that was humbling. But it mellowed him.

In those last years, whenever you visited him, he would take your hand and say, “help me.” He hadn’t been able to say those words since he was five years old and able to tie his own shoelaces. By the time he died, he was ready. When he met Jesus and Saint Peter on the other side, I’m sure he simply reached for a hand and said, “help me.”

That’s a parable that speaks deeply and directly about a place we must all eventually come to, either through proactive choice or by submission to circumstance. We all must eventually come to a place where we accept that we are not self-sufficient, that we need help, that we need others, that we need community, that we need grace, that we need God – and the pain we experience in giving up our illusion of self-sufficiency is the pain of purgatory.

Purgatory is not a place, a geography separate from heaven. It’s the pain, metaphorically, of having the grain of wheat fall into the ground and die to come to a new fruitfulness. And it’s the lot of everyone and everything that’s mortal, not just of Roman Catholics.

When we die, unless we have so totally hardened our hearts to reject the embrace of unconditional love itself, God embraces us – fully, affectionately, passionately, and unconditionally. Inside that embrace, to the extent that we are not yet fully saints, we will, like the two men whose story I shared, experience some purgative pain.

Paradoxically, in the ecstasy of embrace comes the agony of purification.

Unfinished Business and the Communion of Saints

July 20, 2026

When I was growing up, as part of our family prayer we used to pray for a happy death. In my young mind, I had a certain conception of what that might look like. A happy death would be to die inside of grace, warmly cradled in the loving arms of family and church, fully at peace with God and others, having had time to speak some final words of love and gratitude.

Unfortunately, not everyone gets to die that way.

Accidents, unfortunate circumstances, and the complexity of human relationships sometimes conspire in nefarious ways so that people die in less-than-ideal situations: angry, compromised, unforgiving, bitter, immature, unreconciled.

Sometimes too the very cause of death speaks of a less-than-happy parting: drunkenness, an overdose of drugs, depression, recklessness, suicide. Death often catches people before they have had the chance to say and do things that make for a peaceful farewell. Invariably there’s unfinished business.

We all know examples of this: A man dead in an accident whose last words to his family were ones of anger; a woman dead of an overdose who hasn’t talked to her family in years; a colleague dead by his own hand; a friend who dies bitter, unable to forgive; or even simply the loved one who’s taken away by a sudden heart attack before he or she has had the chance to speak some last words of love and farewell. Rarely do people die without any unfinished business.

The pain of this can linger for a long time. I remember once counselling a man in his fifties who still carried pain and guilt from his mother’s death more than forty years previous. He had been taken to his mother’s bedside in the hospital; but was unaware that she was dying. She had asked him to give her a hug and he, a child, frightened and reticent in this tense situation, had backed away. The next day she died so his last memory of his mother was his refusal to hug her. Forty years later and he still hadn’t made peace with that.

Many of us have had people close to us die with whom we had unfinished business, a hurt never reconciled, an injustice never rectified, a bitterness that never softened. Death has now separated us, and the unfinished business remains precisely unfinished and we are left saying: “If only there was another chance!”

Well, there is another chance. One of our most consoling (albeit neglected) Christian doctrines is our belief in the Communion of the Saints. It’s a doctrine enshrined in the Apostle’s Creed itself and it asks us to believe that we are still in vital communication with those who have died. Moreover, it tells us that the communication we now have with them is free from many of the tensions that colored our relationship with them while they were alive.

Hence, to believe in the Communion of Saints is to believe that we can still tend to unfinished business in our relationships, even after death. Simply put, we can still talk to those who have died, and we can, even now, say the words of love, forgiveness, gratitude, and regret that ideally should have been spoken earlier. Indeed, inside the Communion of Saints the reconciliation that eluded us while that person was alive can now more easily take place. Why?

Because inside the Communion of Saints our communication with the one deceased is privileged. Death washes clean. It clarifies perspective and takes away a lot of relational tensions. Why do I say this? Because both faith and experience teach us this.

For example, all of us have experienced situations where, inside of a family, a friendship circle, a community, or a group of colleagues, a bitter tension with an individual can arise and fester so that eventually there’s an unresolvable rift. Things have happened that can no longer be undone. Then the one who has been at the source of the tenson dies and his or her death changes everything. In a strange way the death brings with it a peace, a clarity, and an understanding which, prior to it, were not possible.

Why is this? It’s not simply because the death has changed the chemistry of the group or because, as we may simplistically conclude, the source of the tension or bitterness has died. It happens because, as Luke teaches in his Passion narrative, death can wash things clean and release forgiveness in the same way as Jesus forgave the good thief upon the cross as he died.

This should be an immense consolation. If we are attentive to the Communion of Saints, what we can’t bring to wholeness and peace in this life can be completed afterwards. We still have communication, privileged communication, with our loved ones after death.

Among the marvels of that is the fact that we still have a chance to fix the things, after death, that we were powerless to mend before death took a loved one away.

Our Sometimes Stingy Hearts

July 13, 2026

John Muir once asked, “Why are Christians so reluctant to let animals into their stingy heaven?”

The same might be said of us as churches: why are we so reluctant sometimes to welcome others into God’s mercy and to our communion tables?

We certainly can’t use Jesus as our model in doing this. Looking at the Gospels, there is never a recorded incident where Jesus laid down some moral or religious condition to sit down at table with him.

Our model is rather the well-meaning disciples of Jesus, who, like us, tried to protect Jesus by sheltering him from various groups, including little children. But always in the face of this we hear Jesus saying clearly: Let them come me! Small wonder he sent his disciples away so he could have a meeting with the Samaritan woman who had been married five times.

What I am about to suggest is a risk since, admittedly, the issue of intercommunion is more complex than can be resolved simply by saying Jesus welcomed everyone (even as we may never ignore that).

Regarding the question of intercommunion: There is wide agreement theologically that baptism gives you access to the communion table. As Christian denominations, we recognize the validity each other’s baptisms. So why can’t any Christian go to any Christian church and be welcome at the communion table?

Because each denomination is its own family – and normally families eat at their own tables. Normally you go to your own denominational family for communion. But this is a pastoral consideration not a theological one.

However, occasionally we do eat at someone else’s home and table. Most mainline theologies of the Eucharist draw on this distinction and distinguish between “Occasional” intercommunion (funerals, weddings, faith gatherings) and “Regular” intercommunion. The former makes sense pastorally, the latter doesn’t. You only eat regularly at someone else’s table if you are a member of the family or household.

Given that pastoral concern, churches have had varied norms, ranging from wide welcome to strict exclusion, depending on how their leadership accesses the situation. For example, in the Roman Catholic Church, throughout the nineteen sixties and seventies, Roman Catholics generally welcomed others to receive communion on special occasions. Then, during the nineteen eighties and nineties, more and more, those presiding the Eucharist on those occasions were asked not to publicly invite those from other churches to receive communion. Further, after the year 2000, those presiding the Eucharist were asked to publicly disinvite those from other churches from receiving communion. More recently, there has been a growing shift back to a more welcoming stance.

What’s to be said about this shift back and forth? First, that this is a pastoral rather than a theological issue, and pastorally it can be argued legitimately in different ways. Where there is common agreement is that everyone wants the various Christian Churches to someday be one family with one communion table for all. The disagreement is on how to get there.

Some believe and argue that having to “fast” from intercommunion will make us hungrier to become one Church and will help motivate us to work more proactively for ecumenism. Others disagree and argue that being more welcoming about intercommunion will motivate us to work proactively for ecumenism. Who’s right?

There’s a logic in both arguments, but I confess that my heart lies with the latter group. In my experience, excluding each other from the Eucharist table tends to harden rather than soften our divisions, just as welcoming each other at the Eucharist table tends to soften the suspicions of each other we have nursed for the last five hundred years since the Reformation.

As well, I disagree with the belief and argument that any one church (in my case the Roman Catholic Church) is the only fully authentic expression of Church and that other denominations somehow lack authentic discipleship and therefore we would in some way cheapen the Eucharist and the real presence by allowing non-Roman Catholics to receive it at our communion table.

Here, like the well-meaning but mistaken disciples of Jesus, we are trying to protect Jesus from persons we feel are somehow not ready to have this encounter and intimacy with him. We need to remember that Jesus always met this with the words: Let them come to me! Jesus doesn’t need nor want our protection.

Moreover, the love, mercy, and embrace of God which Jesus incarnated and preached, was the antithesis of stingy. It was wide, inviting, and embracing of everyone universally. God has no favorites, except that everyone of us is God’s particular favorite. God is not a private or tribal deity, owned and controlled by any one faith, religion, denomination, or Church.

This is not to say that all faiths, religions, and Churches are equal and all the boundaries that separate them should be erased. No. But it is to say that we must not be so reluctant to incorporate others in our stingy understanding of Jesus’ universal embrace.

A Naivete of the Heart

July 6, 2026

Darkness is only bad because there is light. Sin can only happen if first there is love.

Karl Rahner makes a very insightful comment about the text in the Gospels where Jesus is being crucified and says of his executioners: “Forgive them Father for they know not what they do!”

Rahner suggests that they knew exactly what they were doing. They knew they were putting an innocent man to death, that they were shedding innocent blood. So why does Jesus say what he said?

What was their innocence? What was their naivete?

Rahner’s answer: They didn’t know what they were doing because they didn’t know how much they were loved. And that can make for a naivete of the heart. How so?

There’s a place inside us, a place of which we are rarely consciously aware, where each of us is being held unconditionally in love by God. The people who crucified Jesus didn’t know what they were doing because they weren’t aware of that. That was their blindness, their ignorance. Despite what it looks like on the surface, they didn’t know what they were doing.

This is also true for us. Far too often we crucify others and ourselves because of this ignorance: we don’t know how much we are loved. Consequently, we’re sometimes cruel in our judgments and prone to do things which compromise our dignity. We struggle not to be one of the executioners at the crucifixion because, at the end of the day, we are acting out of ignorance. We don’t know any better, like the naivete of the child who hurts herself in ignorance.

But this isn’t a new insight.

Theology has classically drawn a distinction between culpable and inculpable ignorance. The latter, also called invincible ignorance, was seen to excuse one from sin and responsibility. Hence, there was the teaching that you could do things that were wrong but not sinful because you were acting in ignorance. This was predicated on the belief that you could act morally and responsibly only if you actually knew what you were doing. To sin, you had to act “knowingly”. Granted, that’s a tricky caveat.

However, looking at our world today, I would risk saying that in a number of important moral matters, we are acting in invincible ignorance. Simply put, we don’t know any better. Only the type of ignorance that allowed sincere people to crucify Jesus can explain why we, good and sincere people, can be so massively blind, communally and individually, to the poor, to the economic and social demands made by our faith. The real reason we can live so comfortably as the gap between the rich and the poor widens is not because we are bad and without conscience, but rather, as Rahner says, we don’t know how much we are loved.

The same holds true for our attitude towards sex. We have been able to trivialize sex, split it off from the sacredness of marriage, and turn it into an extension of dating (or simply recreational sex) only because of a certain invincible ignorance. We don’t know any better, not because we lack conscience, but because we lack any real sense of the deep love of God and the dignity it gives us.

Like Jesus’ executioners, we have an astounding capacity to rationalize, trivialize, and compensate precisely because we don’t know what we’re doing. We don’t have a conscious sense of God’s love for us. Hence, it’s easy to lose perspective, feel excluded, and do things that we would never do if we were more aware of our full dignity.

Small wonder we settle for second-best or for most anything that promises comfort and security. Jesus, no doubt, is looking at us and saying: “Forgive them Father for they know not what they do!”

But is that true? Can we really plead ignorance and innocence and say that we don’t know any better?

I say yes, though it’s not that we’re stupid or lack intelligence. This is a naivete of the heart. We are inculpably unaware of how much God loves us.

Too few of us, at any existential level, have ever heard God say to us: “I love you!” Too few of us have ever heard felt what Jesus must have felt at his baptism when he heard his Father say: “You are my beloved child; in you I take delight!” Indeed, too few of us have ever heard another person, soul to soul, say to us, I love you unconditionally! In you I take delight! Is it a surprise then that, like Jesus’ executioners, we have an amazing capacity, in good conscience, to sometimes be blind and not true to ourselves?

Darkness is only bad because there is light. Sin can only happen if first there is love. Betrayal is only possible if first one has heard the words: “I love you.” Jesus’ executioners acted in a darkness that came from never having heard that. The same, I suspect, is true for many of us.

The Narrow Gate

June 29, 2026

A priest I know shares this story. Recently, on their priests’ retreat, the retreat director began his opening presentation with these words: we take for granted that most people are going to hell. Then he tried to ground this assertion by quoting Jesus: “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the way that leads to life, and only a few find it.” (Matthew 7, 13-14)

On the surface, this would indeed seem to indicate that most people are not taking the road that leads to heaven but are taking the road that leads to hell.

Are most of us going to hell? Is this what’s implied here? No! That’s not what’s being taught. This teaching of Jesus needs some parsing.

First, when Jesus says, “but small is the gate and narrow the way that leads to life, and only a few find it,” he’s not talking so much about going to heaven or hell, but rather about our lives, here and now.

Indeed, we can all relate to his words that the gate that leads to life is narrow and few find it. How? By simply asking ourselves: How many times in our lives do we have a moment, let alone a lengthy season, where we are without any depressions, without regrets, without undue restlessness, without jealousies, without frustrations, and without any sense that we are missing something in life, but rather have a deep sense of soul that we’ve arrived at the deepest meaning of life, that we’ve found the deep secret, that there’s nothing more to strive for?

Sometimes we do have moments like this when we have passed through the narrow gate that leads to life, though mostly we are still struggling to get there.

We can experience this when we look at the lives of others. Without being judgmental, how often do we look at someone’s life at the level of soul and say: He’s found it! She’s there! That’s what a full life looks like! We say this of very few people.

Moreover, what precisely is the gate and why is it narrow?

Simply put, the gate that leads to life, to the deepest and fullest happiness of all, is the invitation Jesus gives us in the Sermon on the Mount. (Matthew 5-7) For Jesus, this is what makes for fullness of life, namely: to be poor in spirit; to be in touch with the world’s wounds and our own wounds; to be meek; to hunger for justice; to be merciful; to be pure of heart; to be peacemakers; to suffer for what is right; and especially to love those who hate us.

That’s the narrow gate leading to life, and we struggle to pass through it because most everything in our world militates against this. Our world tells us that it’s best to be rich, that meekness and empathy are weaknesses, and we may in good conscience hate those who hate us. Our natural instincts agree. Both our world and our natural instincts invite us to a wide gate where we can justly curse those who curse us and may execute murderers.

The Sermon the Mount proposes a narrow gate, and it becomes particularly narrow at the end of the Sermon when Jesus invites us to be compassionate as our heavenly Father is compassionate and spells out what that means.

God’s compassion, unlike our natural instincts, goes out equally to the bad as well as to the good, like the sun that shines indiscriminately on weeds as well as on vegetables. God loves sinners and virtuous persons equally.

And so must we. Our virtue, Jesus says, must go deeper than our natural instincts, where quite naturally we love those who love us, hate those who hate us, curse those who curse us, and refuse to forgive someone who murders our loved ones.

The narrow gate that leads to full life is the gate of wide compassion, that is, we pass through that gate which leads to the fullness of life, when we love those who hate us, bless those who curse us, and forgive those who murder us.

Sadly, much inside us and much inside our world resists that narrow gate.

However, when Jesus says: “Small is the gate and narrow the way that leads to life, and only a few find it,” he’s not saying that most of us will go to hell and only a few will go to heaven. Instead, he is speaking about our lives right now and astutely pointing out that what ultimately makes for happiness and full life here in this world, namely, living out the Sermon on the Mount, particularly the part that invites us to love those who hate us, bless those who curse us, and forgive those who murder us.

That’s a gate we struggle to pass through.

Father’s Day

June 22, 2026

What makes for a father?

Fifty-six years ago, my father died, late on a December night. As clearly as I remember his death, I remember the bitter cold. Within a day the temperature dipped to minus forty degrees Fahrenheit.

I was still young; too young (I thought, at the time) to lose a father. Later, I’d realize I was wrong. Nobody is too young to lose a father, although losing your father before certain things can be given and received can leave its scars.

We, the family of this father, were lucky enough. We had plenty of preparation for his death. He died after a yearlong battle with cancer and he died with his faith, generosity, and humor intact; and he had given us his blessing. Moreover, he died without bitterness, grateful, blessing life. There are worse ways to die and there are worse ways to lose one’s father. In our family prayers we had always prayed for a happy death. Some months after his death, after some warmer weather, I realized he had died a happy death.

But this reminiscence on Father’s Day more than fifty years after that bitterly cold day, is not meant as a eulogy (something he would be uncomfortable with), nor as a homily on what constitutes a happy death. It’s intended as a reflection on what constitutes a father, a dad, and how we are connected, formed, and sometimes deformed by such a figure.

What is a father? What is a father meant to do, beyond simply being a biological partner in bringing us to birth? How does his care or neglect, his love or his indifference, affect us?

Various schools of psychology and anthropology suggest that your father and your mother have very different roles in the formation of your person. It’s the mother who is your symbiotic link to life and it’s from her, much more so than from your father, that you get your sense of being loved, wanted, cradled, and cherished. Among all mammals, it’s the mother who must metaphorically lick the newborn and free it from whatever constricts it at birth. The mother, after birth, opens your body to life. It’s she who gestates, carries, and then cradles and nourishes the child. No child or adult at some level of consciousness ever forgets this and our sense of being loved or not is very much linked to our mothers.

But it’s the father who gives the child both the permission to enjoy life and the challenge to discipline. It’s the father who must, especially by the way he himself lives, model for the child the correct combination of pleasure and renunciation. It’s from him, more so than from the mother, that the child learns the combination of release and control, submission to constraints and the freedom to walk one’s own path.

And this task is key in initiating us into adulthood, in helping to lead us beyond being the little boy or the little girl, towards becoming the adult, the man or the woman. A father must do this, first of all, by showing us in his own life how one’s energy for love and one’s energy to confront and protect should form a harmony so that the chaotic energies inside us are contained, focused, blended, and creatively opened for the service of God and others. A father must show how enjoyment and creativity blend with necessary self-renunciation and how our energy for love and our energy to fight to protect community (especially its weakest members) can work in tandem so that they are not enemies. A father must teach us how to be both a lover and a fighter.

My own father, imperfect like all human fathers, didn’t always find, nor radiate, the perfect balance between enjoyment and discipline, lover and fighter, enjoyment and self-abnegation. As one of his sons, I then also do not always know how to walk that tightrope, and sometimes there’s a sloppiness in my life between laziness and overwork, love and anger, self-indulgence and masochism. Sometimes I can protect community and sometimes I can’t even protect myself.

However, most times I have my father’s steadiness, beyond the slopping around. I had a good dad. He both loved and fought, though sometimes he was too hard on himself and sometimes he thoroughly enjoyed his life.

I’m more than fifty years after that minus forty degrees temperature day when he died and sometimes my spirit still feels the cold of that day and then I’m a little boy, a pre-adult, alone, waiting for my father to lead me to adulthood, unsure of how to integrate enjoyment and discipline.

But, when I search for my father, for his spirit, not among the bones of ancestors, but among the communion of saints, I find him walking still the delicate tightrope he walked in life, and his spirit reaches back to help me in my struggle with love and confrontation, with enjoyment and renunciation, and then I feel a little more steady as an adult.