Inviting Each Other to Our Better Selves

June 1, 2026

I grew up in a rural area where most everyone was either a first or second-generation immigrant. Most of us were just above the poverty line, struggling economically and struggling to speak English properly. We were also struggling to access higher education, both because a lot of my peers had to end their schooling after the eighth grade to help support the family and because the idea of university education was not yet part of most families’ ethos.

In our community there was one family for which this wasn’t true. They were comfortable economically and a number of them had gone on to higher education and were now professionals in different fields. They were a privileged family.

But they wore it well. There was no snobbishness, flaunting, or superiority complex. The opposite. They used their gifts to try to help the community. One of their sons became a teacher and taught in one of the local schools, and for a number of years the family set up a curling rink every winter for the community. They were both admired and respected.

One day one of their sons was sitting with a group of young men who were sharing a beer, sharing stories, and enjoying some healthy banter, when the son of this much respected family made a blatantly racist remark. There was an awkward silence. Then one of men, in a gentle voice, said this to him: “You know, it surprises me that you would say something like that. Your family is so classy. We all look up to you. This doesn’t sound like you.”

The man’s reaction was immediate and contrite: “You’re right. I’m sorry. I don’t know why I say things like that. That was stupid.”

I can imagine a very different reaction had he been challenged with hard words like: “You’re a racist! How can you say something like that!”

When we challenge each other in harsh words, the effect often serves to make us more defensive and freeze us in our view. We are being scolded, rebuked, shamed, and that can work just as easily to re-entrench as to persuade. It also serves to harden the space between us rather than invite us to what’s best and highest in ourselves.

We need to invite and challenge each other to what’s best and higher inside us.

And what is best and higher inside us?

Some of our early Christian writers (the Church Fathers) suggested that each of us has a double personality and heart. In each of us, they submit, there is a big, generous, noble, altruistic heart. But, inside each of us too, there is a wounded, petty, and selfish heart; and at any given time, we can be operating out of one heart or the other. We can be big-hearted and we can be petty, and this can change from one hour to the next depending on what’s meeting us in life.

Here’s an example: Imagine you wake up some morning feeling altruistic and noble of heart. At that moment, you have the mind and heart of Jesus. In that holy frame of mind, you go to work and there someone is cold and sarcastic with you. In one minute, everything can switch; you no longer have the mind and heart of Jesus, nor the mind and heart of what’s best in you. The wounded petty heart in you trumps the big heart, warmth and understanding leave you, and you now feel cold and bitter.

Now imagine this in reverse: You wake up some morning feeling paranoid, misunderstood, and nursing old wounds. At that moment you don’t have the mind and heart of Jesus, nor are you attuned to what’s better and higher in your own mind and heart. You go to work in that unholy state and there, unexpectedly, some co-worker greets you warmly and shares how much she appreciates your work and your friendship. In one minute, the noble mind in you trumps the petty mind and all that’s best and generous in you rises to the surface and you want to be a better person. You flip from bitterness to graciousness in one minute.

We live in a polarized world today where so many issues bitterly divide us and invite us not to what’s noble and best in us, but rather to what’s wounded, paranoid, and defensive. We need a new tone in our discourse, one of invitation and respect, one that recognizes what’s noble and big-hearted in the other and then challenges the other to own what’s best in him or her.

Instead of name-calling and assaulting each other with slogans, we need to say to each other: “You know, it surprises me that you would say something like that. You’re so classy! We all look up to you. This doesn’t sound like you.” That kind of invitation can help thaw some of the coldness that for all kinds of reasons perennially besets the human heart.

Feeding Off Sacred Fire

May 25, 2026

There’s a lyric in a song by Gordon Lightfoot which tries to interpret the struggle going on in the heart of Miguel de Cervantes’ mythical hero, Don Quixote. His goodness separates him from the world, even as he understands that wickedness has the same source, namely, that both “the wise and wicked feed upon life’s sacred fire.”

And there’s perplexing irony here, both the wise and wicked, saints and sinners, feed off the same sacred source. The same energy that fuels the dedicated selflessness of the saint who dies for the poor, fires the irresponsible acting out of the pop star who proudly boasts of thousands of sexual conquests. Both feed off the same energy which in the end is sacred. Godliness in this world is used for very different purposes.

For example, one of the major criticisms made of religion and the churches is that they frequently use God to justify every kind of war and violence. We commonly see terrible violence being fueled by faith and religion.

And Christianity is hardly exempt. In the Crusades and the Inquisition, we have our own history of violence in God’s name, and there is more violence than we dare to admit being justified today by Christians who draw from their faith both their motivation and their energy to justify violence, racism, and inequality in the name of Jesus. We can protest that, in these cases, their energy is misguided, perverted, or usurped for self-interest, but the point remains the same. It’s still sacred energy, even if it is being perverted.

John Lennon, in his song Imagine, famously suggested that we would move more easily towards love and peace if religion were eliminated (“Nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too”). There’s a dangerous naiveté in that, though he’s right in saying that the sacred energy found in religion often works against peace and love in this world. Misguided religious zealots also feed upon life’s sacred fire.

However misguided, misused, or perverted, religious energy does not witness against God’s existence. The opposite: The very awfulness of its power, its blind grip, its capacity to totally take over someone’s life, and its sick over-confidence, point precisely to its godliness, its awe, its sacredness, and its roots within a reality and energy that dwarfs our own.

Sick religion is so powerful precisely because it’s real, not a fantasy. It may be sick, but it’s real. That’s why religious cults are dangerous. They’re dangerous because they’re real, monstrously so. People often die in cults because the divine fire that its misguided leaders channel is as real as the electricity that burns up a body when someone sticks a knife into a high voltage electrical outlet. Metaphorically, that’s what cults do: they feed off sacred fire, off divine energy, but without the proper precautions and filters that the great spiritual traditions have taught are necessary in accessing the divine. Cults are dangerously naïve as to why scripture warns us to approach the divine with care: “No one can see the face of God and live!”

What we see in bad religion is mirrored in our personal lives. This is sometimes hard to admit, but what seems wild and wicked inside us is also fueled by life’s sacred fire. Our over restless energies for creativity, for sex, for achievement, for enjoyment, and to know and be known within human community, are often used irresponsibly, excessively, narcissistically, manipulatively, and destructively. Moreover, those with sufficient nerve and insufficient conscience, the wild and wicked ones, often simply take what they want from life, without regard for morality or consequence. Their lives are often driven by wild, powerful, creative, and erotic forces that can look like the very antithesis of sacred energy.

But, again, the very power, seeming irresistibility and wildness of this energy is not an indication that these narcissistic, sexual, and seemingly self-centered energies are secular and devoid of holiness, or, worse still, at odds with what is holy and sacred within us. The opposite is true: Their very power and seeming irresistibility lie precisely in their godliness and sacredness. Their fire is so powerful because it is sacred, divine, God’s energy inside of us.

Scripture tells us that we carry within us the image and likeness of God and that this is really our deepest identity and the source of our deepest energies. But we should not picture God’s image within us as some beautiful Andrei Rublev-like, icon stamped inside our souls. God is fire, infinite energy, infinite creativity, infinite freedom, wildness beyond our imaginations, and an energy that is boundless and fuels everything that is, that lives, that breathes, that searches for meaning, that loves.

There is only one source of energy. Sacred fire fuels all of life and infuses everyone, saint and sinner alike. And God has given us the freedom to use it as we choose, wisely or wickedly. Feeding on the same sacred fire, we can become a warmonger or a peacemaker, a killer or a martyr, a hedonist or a saint.

The Complex Mystery of Suffering

May 18, 2026

Sometimes it is hard to tell sickness from health. When we’re suffering, is it an indication that there’s something wrong with us or might it be that the suffering is the healthy result of living faithfully? When we are anxious, are worrying God’s kingdom into birth or are we simply worrying ourselves to death? Suffering is complex and ambiguous. Here’s an example.

Henri Nouwen, one of our generation’s most renowned and respected spiritual guides was, as he shared so honestly in his writings, a complex and often tortured individual. He was a saint, but one who struggled mightily at times to keep his life true to his commitments and his vows. His commitment was solid, but his emotions were not.

He was a Roman Catholic priest, vowed to celibacy, but prone to fall in love at times. In one such instance, he fell in love obsessively. Having a vow of celibacy, recognizing that this relationship could never include the special intimacy he craved, and getting a clear signal from the other that the obsession wasn’t mutual, he fell into a depression which landed him in a clinic for a number of months. Eventually he regained his health and balance, and from that new space, wrote The Return of the Prodigal Son, his signature book which has become a spiritual classic.

Most of the commentaries on Nouwen’s life treat this incident as a pathology, as a period in his life where he was not healthy, as certain downfall from grace. They point to a number of things that seemingly indicate this: He was gay and had fallen in love with a heterosexual man who did not have romantic feelings toward him; his seminary training had ill-prepared him for the experience of falling in love in this way; he was by temperament an emotionally complex and often times tortured individual; and there are questions about how healthy his relationship with his mother was as he was growing up.

All of these factors no doubt played a role in his depression; but, looked at more deeply, this incident can be viewed in a very different way, that is, not as a pathology, a sickness, or an immaturity (albeit these are always a factor for all of us), but rather as a crisis that ultimately gives profound witness to Nouwen’s deep spiritual health, to his fidelity to the Gospel, to his commitments, and to his willingness to, like Jesus, sweat blood in Gethsemane.

Whatever else, Nouwen accepted this crushing pain in his life with honesty and integrity and, like Jesus, accepted to be personally broken rather than to break his vows.

That’s the deep challenge, one given to us by Jesus and one that was given to me and my siblings by my dad, who would tell us: “Unless you’re willing to sweat blood, you will not be able to keep your commitments.” Jesus tells us the same thing and we see that he had to precisely do that, sweat blood to remain faithful to his mission. Moreover, it is significant to note where he sweated blood, namely, in a “garden”.

In both Old and New Testaments, the word “garden” does not refer to a place to grow vegetables. Biblically, the “Garden” is the place of love; it’s where lovers go. Note that Jesus doesn’t sweat blood in the temple, or on a mountain, or in a boat on the sea. Rather, he sweats blood in a garden, the place of love,as one whose heart is breaking in love. Henri Nouwen sweated blood in a clinic, as one whose heart was breaking. That clinic was his “garden”, his Gethsemane, the place where he was undergoing paschal transformation more so than succumbing to an illness.

Whatever his weaknesses, his temptations, his emotional crises, Nouwen always shared these openly and with a disarming honesty. For all his complexities and the seeming contradictions in his life, he was always transparent, almost in a childlike manner. He kept little under the surface. Moreover, the argument that this crisis was ultimately a healthy experience for him can be based too on the fruits it bore in his life.

By their fruits you will know them!

Henri Nouwen, despite his immense popularity, struggled his entire adult life to simply receive love and to believe that he was lovable. He was changed radically by undergoing this breakdown. After leaving the clinic and returning to his normal life, he had for the rest of his life an abiding sense of being loved and of being lovable. Out of that transformed space he wrote his spiritual masterpiece, The Return of the Prodigal Son, which has helped thousands of us to receive love more deeply and accept that we are (despite our haunting congenital doubts to the contrary) lovable.

Sometimes it’s hard to tell when suffering is a sign of sickness or of fidelity. However, it’s usually a sign of fidelity, when, like Nouwen, we accept to be personally broken rather than break our vows.

A Mini Treason

May 11, 2026

Thomas Merton once said that what he feared in his own life was not so much a massive betrayal of his vocation, but a series of mini treasons that lead to a different kind of death. And that’s the peril that I fear too, for myself and for our culture.

Sixty years ago Kay Cronin wrote a book entitled, Cross in the Wilderness, chronicling how, in 1847, a small band of Oblate Missionaries of Mary Immaculate came from France to the American Pacific Northwest and, after some bitter setbacks in Washington State and Oregon, moved up the coast into Canada and helped found the Roman Catholic Archdiocese in Vancouver and the Roman Catholic Church in significant parts of British Columbia’s mainland.

She describes these men, no doubt with some over-idealization and hagiography, as tough, totally dedicated, and completely without concern for their own comfort and health. They left their beloved France while still young, knew they would probably never see their loved ones again, and accepted to live constantly in danger both from the harsh elements of their frontier environment and from the threat of death from various Native tribes and various government forces and mercenary soldiers who distrusted them.

They were threatened many times, chased out of various missions, some were kidnapped for periods of time, and a number of their houses and missions were burnt down. They lived perennially on the edge of danger, never secure, never free from threat.

Moreover, they had very little in terms of creature comforts. They lived in log or mud hovels and ate bad food. They had virtually no access to doctors, little access to what might make for good hygiene, and often, while travelling, had to sleep outside without proper shelter from rain and cold, causing many of them to develop rheumatism and other such illnesses at an early age. As well, they were never able to sink roots, to get comfortable at any place, to make the kinds of friends and contacts who could be a comfort and support to them. They had faith in God and each other, and little else.

But they were able to take all of this in stride without undue self-pity or complaint. They wrote positive and idealistic letters to their motherhouse in France and to their families and kept journals in which they expressed mostly joy about their modest successes in the ministry, seldom uttering a complaint about the bad housing, bad food, and instability in their lives.

As an Oblate missionary myself, as a member of the same religious family, I am proud of what these men did, and rightly so. They were selfless to the point of death.

However, that being said, reading their story is also humbling. Looking at their radical sacrifice of all comfort is for me a mirror that I peer into with considerable trepidation and shame. I look at my own life and see far too much in the way of an addiction to comfort and safety. I don’t want what they had: I want healthy food, clean water, proper hygiene, regular rest, access to good doctors, access to news and information, access to travel, regular contact with family and friends, opportunities for retreats and vacations, access to ongoing education, and, not least, I want safety. I want to be a good missionary, but I want to be comfortable and safe.

I take some consolation in the fact that today times are much different than they were when these French missionaries landed in the Pacific Northwest. I couldn’t do the work I do today, at least not for a very long, without proper housing, proper food, proper hygiene, access to education and information, regular rest, and healthy recreational outlets. My life and my ministry are a marathon, not a sprint, and proper self-care is a virtue not a vice.

Still, it’s easy to rationalize and become addicted to comfort and safety. St. Paul, reflecting upon his own missionary life, once wrote that he was comfortable with whatever was dealt to him – much or little. I like to believe that too for my own life; but, and this is true for most of us, the more we live with plenty, the more we tend to protect ourselves inside that cocoon.

As children of our culture, I believe we can easily become addicted to comfort and safety. Once we have grown used to safety, good food, clean water, proper hygiene, access to good doctors and proper medicine, access to constant entertainment, access to instant information, regular connection with our loved ones, boundless educational and recreational opportunities, and wonderful creature comforts of all sorts, the danger looms large that we will not easily, or at all, be able to let go of any of these. Consequently, we can end up as good people, no big betrayals, though no big self-sacrifices either, good but not great, admiring the greatness of others from the comfort and safety of a snug armchair.

Science and Christian Faith – Friends Not Foes

May 4, 2026

During most of the two thousand years that Christianity has existed it has not been friends with science, and science has not been friends with it. From the Church condemning Galileo, to the Enlightenment thinkers declaring faith “a spent project,” science and Christian faith have been more foe than friend. Happily, this has changed.

Today Christian theology has been able to not only accept the legitimate findings of science but it has been able to integrate them healthily into a vision of salvation history. As a salient example of this we might look at the theological synthesis given us by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955).

Teilhard was a prominent scientist, a paleontologist recognized internationally for his scientific work. He was also a person of exceptional faith, a mystic, a Jesuit priest, and a gifted spiritual writer.

At the time he was doing his scientific work and writing his first theological treatises, the concept of evolution was still almost universally rejected by all the Christian churches, who saw it as in opposition to the story of creation in Genesis. Indeed, the Roman Catholic authorities forbid Teilhard to publish his theological writings, and for several decades his theological writings were circulated only privately among his Jesuit colleagues. Eventually, with the advent of Vatican II and a general (cultural and religious) softening of resistance to the concept of evolution, Teilhard’s theological treatises were allowed by Church authorities to be published; albeit they still came with a warning label as dogmatically unsafe.

What is that worldview? To my mind, it is one of the great syntheses of science and Christian faith that has yet been written. In essence, what Teilhard did was to take the findings of science, particularly the concept of evolution, and meld it with a Christian vision of salvation history to produce a framework within which to more deeply understand science, the Christian faith, and the place of Christ in history.

In brief, he fused, as a perfect fit, the scientific notion of creation and evolution (what we might today call the Big Bang hypothesis) with a Christian vision of salvation history and the place of Christ in that history.

Here, in brief, is his synthesis: God is love and fifteen billion years ago, God created the universe (ex nihilo) out of love. However, God didn’t create it as a finished product, as described in Genesis, but as a cosmic infant that would evolve and grow through some billions of years to reach maturity.

Biblically, initial creation, as described in Genesis, was a “formless void.” In an evolutionary view, it took more than six days for human beings to appear; it took fourteen to fifteen billion years. And creation unfolded this way: After the initial creation (the Big Bang), God, at the center of everything, began to draw all things to Himself through love, and through billions of years, as creation responded to that invitation, it increased continually in complexity, consciousness, and unity, moving freely in love towards God.

And this went through four stages, always with God at the center, drawing creation into the mystery of love:

First, geology, earth, rocks, and water formed (“Geogenesis”). Second, from these, eventually life comes forth (“Biogenesis”). Third, some millions of years later human beings with self-reflective consciousness and free will emerge (“Noogenesis”). But, for Teilhard, there is still a fourth stage, the coming of Christ (“Christogenesis”).

For Teilhard the birth of Christ is the penultimate culmination (spiritually and cosmically) of the evolutionary process. The unfolding of evolutionary history eventually brings us Christ, not just as the historical Jesus but also as a cosmic reality. For Teilhard, Christ is both a person and a cosmic structure within the universe which, like the person of Jesus, invites everything (humans, animals, plants, rocks, water) to an “omega point,” namely, to a community of love inside of God.

This might sound complex, but perhaps it can be explained more simply by folding Teilhard’s vision of creation into the early Christian hymn in Ephesians, 1,3-10. Here science and Christian faith (not least about the centrality of Christ) blend seamlessly:

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. … In love hepredestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ … God has given us the wisdom to understand fully the mystery, a plan he was pleased to decree in Christ. A plan to be carried out in Christ, in the fullness of time, to bring all things into one in him, in the heavens and on earth.

Salvation history and evolutionary history both point to the unfolding mystery of how God is bringing all things into unity through Christ. Teilhard wonderfully folded the cosmic history of this planet into the mystery of Christ.

Science and Christian faith are friends, not foes.

A Soul Friend

April 27, 2026

One of the saints who speaks to me is Therese of Lisieux, commonly known as the Little Flower. This wasn’t love at first sight. For years I was put off and left cold and uninterested by how her person and her image have become encrusted in an overly saccharine piety. She was too sweet, too pious. Not a saint for me! That changed, thanks to a friend who told me, “Don’t read books about her – read her!” I read her and found in her a soul friend.

Who is Therese of Lisieux? She was a Carmelite nun who died from tuberculous in 1897. She was only twenty-four years old when she died, and as a Carmelite nun hidden away in a convent in rural France, she died in anonymity, probably known by fewer than a hundred people. However, during the last two years of her life, as she lay dying from tuberculous, she kept several diaries. After her death, her Carmelite sisters sent her unpublished diaries to a few other convents, intending to let a small circle of religious women know of her death and a little about her life.

The rest is history. The manuscripts were leaked to a wider public and in less than ten years, printing presses were literally having trouble meeting the demand for her autobiography. Her little convent in Lisieux was receiving more than five hundred letters a day, and people from all over the world were beginning to come to Lisieux on pilgrimage. A hundred and thirty years later, little has changed. She remains extraordinarily popular.

Why? Why this perennial intrigue about Therese? Because there is something about her that touches the soul in a particularly empathic way. How so?

Therese had an anomalous background that produced an extraordinary character. Her life as a child was in many ways tragic. Her mother got sick at the time of Therese’s birth and was unable to care for her during the crucial first year of her life. She was cared for by a nurse and an aunt. As a one-year-old she was returned to her mother, but her mother was already terminally ill and when Therese was four, her mother died. Therese then chose her older sister, Pauline, to be her new mother. Five years later, Pauline entered the convent and as a nine-year-old Therese again lost a mother.

Shortly after this she took ill and almost died. This was triggered by a visit to Pauline who was then a Carmelite nun. Together with her three other sisters and her father, she had gone to visit Pauline in her convent. After Pauline had spent some time focused on her little sister, she naturally became preoccupied in adult conversation. Left out, in sheer frustration, little Therese stood right in front of her big sister and, shaking her dress, began to cry.

“What’s the matter?” asked Pauline. “You didn’t notice!” cried Therese, “I’m wearing the dress you made me!”

She then became disconsolate and on returning home took to bed and for some weeks; despite the best efforts of various doctors and every kind of cajoling by her family, hovered between life and death. Eventually she recovered. Such was the tragedy and oversensitivity of her childhood.

Yet, and this is the great anomaly, as a child, Therese was doted on and loved in a way that few children ever are. Her father, her sisters and her extended family considered her their little queen and she was cherished and made to feel extraordinarily precious and unique. Her sister Celine photographed her every move. Few children ever grow up as nurtured in love and affirmation as did Therese.

And her personality bore out the effects of both the tragedy and the love. On the one side, she could be heavy, dark, withdrawn, and otherworldly. She made easy friends with mortality, was a mystic of darkness, the austere adult, the little girl-woman, who, wounded early, grew up fast. But, on the other side, she always remained the magical child, Cinderella, who, because she was so loved and graced, developed a very robust self-esteem, a confidence and a capacity to love as few others ever have.

So loved as child, a part of her remained ever the little girl, the puella, the incarnation of childlikeness, innocence, and gaiety. Only a Therese of Lisieux could end all her letters with the phrase: I kiss you with my whole heart!

In a soul so formed lies her mystique, that is, her unique combination of depth, insight, and other worldliness, even as she desperately clings to the tiniest gifts from her family and every small token of earthly affection. Only a soul so formed could, at age twenty-two, have the complexity and wisdom to write a mystical and theological treatise that rivals that of great theological doctors, and only a soul so formed could be both a study in hyper-sensitivity and human resilience.

A saint so pathologically complex can be a soul friend to our own complex souls.

Struggling with Our Own Complexity

April 20, 2026

Catherine de Hueck Doherty, the founder of Madonna House, once gave a particularly insightful interview. A renowned and respected spiritual figure, she acknowledged that her path wasn’t easy, that she had her fair share of inner struggles. Why? Because, like the rest of us, she was pathologically complex. Being a human being, she suggested, isn’t easy.

Here’s how she described herself. I paraphrase:

“Inside me,” she said, “it seems that there are three people. There’s someone I call the ‘Baroness’. The ‘Baroness’ is the one who’s spiritual, efficient, and given over to prayer and asceticism. She’s the religious person inside me. She’s the one who founded a religious community, who writes spiritual books, challenges others, and has dedicated her life to God and the poor. The ‘Baroness’ reads the Gospels and is impatient with the things of this world. For her, life here and now must be sacrificed for the next world.

But, inside me too, there’s another person I call ‘Catherine’. ‘Catherine’ is a woman who would like fine things, luxuries, comfort, pleasure. She would like to enjoy idleness, long baths, fine clothes, putting on makeup, good food, and used to (while married) enjoy a healthy sex life. ‘Catherine’ enjoys this life and doesn’t like self-sacrifice. She’s not particularly religious and generally hates the ‘Baroness’. ‘Catherine’ and the ‘Baroness’ don’t always get along.

However, there’s still another person inside of me, who’s neither ‘Catherine’ or the ‘Baroness’. Inside me too there’s a little girl lying on a hillside in Finland, watching the clouds and daydreaming. This little girl doesn’t particularly like either ‘Catherine’ or the ‘Baroness’. … “and, as I get older, I feel more like the ‘Baroness’, long still for ‘Catherine’, but think maybe the real person inside me is the little girl daydreaming on a hillside.”

Had these words been uttered by someone still struggling with basic conversion, they wouldn’t pack much punch. They came however from a spiritual giant, from someone who had long ago mastered essential discipleship and had, long ago too, vowed herself to a radical discipleship of service to God and the poor.

If saints struggle in this way, what about the rest of us?

We all struggle because we’re all complex. It’s not a simple thing to be a human being and it’s even more complex if you’re striving to give yourself over beyond what comes naturally.

Like Catherine de Hueck Doherty, all of us have multiple “persons” inside us. Inside each of us there’s someone who has faith, who wants to live the Beatitudes, who wants to be attuned to truths and realities of the Gospels. Inside each of us, there’s a martyr who wants to die for others, a saint who wants to serve the poor, and a moral artist who wants to carry his or her solitude at a high level. But inside each of us there’s also someone who wants to taste life and all its pleasures. Inside each of us there’s a hedonist, a sensualist, a libertine, a materialist, an agnostic, and an egoist.

Beyond that, inside each of us there’s also a little girl or little boy, innocent, daydreaming, watching the clouds on some hillside, not particularly enamored with either the saint or the sinner inside us.

Who’s the real person? They all are. We’re all of these: saint and pleasure-seeker, altruist and egoist, martyr and hedonist, person-of-faith and agnostic, moral artist and compensating libertine, innocent child and jaded adult, and the task of life is not to crucify one for the other, but to have them make peace with each other.

And peace, as we know, is more than the simple absence of war. It’s a positive quality. What makes for peace? Two things: harmony and completeness.

Harmony. A melody is peaceful when all the different notes are strung together to make a harmony, a melody. To have peace, is to not have discord. And there’s also another part to peace, completeness. To play a complex melody, you need a full keyboard. Peace depends upon having enough keys at your disposal to play all the notes life demands.

That’s true too of human nature. Our complexity is not our enemy but our friend. All those seemingly opposites inside us demand a full keyboard. Because we’re both sinner and saint, hedonist and martyr, adult and child, we need a complete set of keys to play the various musical scores that life hands us.

The secret is to arrive at harmony, where the various aspects of our lives make a melody. Metaphorically, we need to move beyond a random stabbing at the keyboard that produces discord. We must also employ a full keyboard so that we can play all the notes life demands. We’ve all had enough experience in life to know that. Peace comes when we put all the complex pieces inside of us together in an order to make a beautiful melody. And, of course, the more varied the notes, the more complex the musical score, the richer the final melody.

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.