Harvard psychologist Robert Coles, in describing the French mystic Simone Weil, once suggested that what she really suffered from and what motivated her life was her moral loneliness. What is that?

Moral loneliness is what we experience when we ache for moral affinity, that is, for a soulmate, for someone who meets us, understands, and honors all that’s deepest and most precious inside us.  

We are lonely in different ways. We feel restlessness despite experiencing intimacy, and we feel a nostalgia for a home we can never quite find. There’s loneliness, a restlessness, an aching, a yearning, a longing, an appetite, a disquiet, a nostalgia, a timelessness inside us that never quite feels consummated.

Moreover, this dis-ease lies at the center of our experience, not at its edges. We are not restful people who sometimes get restless, serene people who sometimes experience disquiet, or fulfilled people who occasionally get frustrated. Rather we are restless beings who sometimes find rest, disquieted persons who sometimes find solitude, and dissatisfied men and women who sometimes find satisfaction.

And, among all these many yearnings, one is deeper than the others. What we ultimately long for beneath everything else is moral affinity, for a soul partner, for someone to meet us in the depth of our soul, for someone who honors all that’s most precious in us. More than we long for someone to sleep with sexually, we long for someone to sleep with in this way, morally.

What does this mean?

It might be expressed this way: Each of us nurses a dark memory of once having been touched and caressed by hands far gentler than our own. That caress has left a permanent mark, an imprint in us of a love so tender, good, and pure that its memory is a prism through which we see everything else. The old myths express it well when they tell that, before we were born, God kissed our souls and we go through life always remembering, in some intuitive way, that kiss and measuring everything else in relation to it and its original purity, tenderness, and unconditionality.

This unconscious memory of once having been touched and caressed by God creates the deepest place inside of us, the place where we hold all that’s most precious and sacred to us. When we say that something “rings true”, what we are really saying is that it honors that deep place in our hearts, that it coincides with a deep truth, tenderness, and purity that we have already experienced.

From this place issues forth all that is deepest and truest inside us – both our kisses and our tears. Paradoxically this is the place that we most guard from others, even as it is the place that we would most like someone to enter, providing that entry respects the purity, tenderness, and unconditionality of the original caress of God which formed that tender cavity in the first place.

This is the place of deep intimacy and deep loneliness, the place where we are innocent and the place where we are violated, the place where we are holy, temples of God, sacred churches of reverence, and the place we corrupt when we act against truth. This is our moral center and the aching we feel there is aptly called moral loneliness. It’s here that we long for a soulmate.

And it’s in this longing, in this unyielding ache, that we are driven outward where, like the Biblical woman in the Song of Songs, we achingly search for someone to sleep with morally.

Sometimes that longing is fixed on a certain person, and that fixation can be so obsessive that we lose all emotional freedom. As well, we can conclude, as does our culture, that this at its root is a longing for sexual union. There’s some truth in that, despite its one-sidedness. Sexual union, in its true form, is indeed the “one-flesh” consummation decreed by the Creator after the condemnation of loneliness – “it is not good for the man to be alone.” Outside of sexual union, in the end, one is always somewhat alone, single, separate, cut off, a minority of one.

But, ultimately, we are lonely at a level that sex alone cannot satisfy. More deeply than we long for a sexual partner, we long for moral affinity. Our deepest longing is for a partner to sleep with morally, a kindred spirit, a soulmate in the truest meaning of that phrase.

Great friendships and great marriages invariably have this at their root, namely, deep moral affinity. The persons in these relationships are “lovers” in the deep sense because they sleep with each other at that deep level, irrespective of whether or not there is sexual union. At the level of feeling, this type of love is experienced as a “coming home”.  

Therese of Lisieux once suggested that, as humans, we are “exiles of the heart” and we can only overcome this by moral communion with each other, that is, through sleeping with each other in charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, longsuffering, and faith.

You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.

No single line, outside of scripture, has ever spoken to me as powerfully, as persistently, and as hauntingly, as that line from St. Augustine. In essence, it’s Augustine’s life story – and the story of each of our own lives as well.

As I read and study, I am often struck by a powerful line in some author which I immediately underline and copy. I have a whole booklet of quotes from Shakespeare, Aristotle, Plato, Aquinas, Teilhard, Einstein, Albert Camus, Steve Hawkings, Doris Lessing, Milan Kundera, John Steinbeck, Karl Rahner, John of the Cross, Ruth Burrows, James Hillman, Anne Frank, and Ivan Illich, among others. Yet, Augustine’s haunting line stands out among all these. 

What he asserts is that there is an incurable restlessness inside each of us that keeps us perpetually dis-eased. I have always felt this strongly in my own life and, while still in my twenties, wrote a book, The Restless Heart, in which I tried to articulate a spirituality for the restless (and perhaps mostly for myself) on the basis of this line from Augustine. Through the years, I have kept my eyes open for comparable and complementary expressions of Augustine’s famous axiom. Here are some:

Karl Rahner, a renowned theologian of the late 20^th century, in writing to a friend who feared he was missing out on too much in life, offered this counsel: In the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable, we learn that in this life there is no finished symphony.

The biblical author, Qoheleth, expresses it this way. In a passage familiar to most of us (“there is a season for everything”) helays out for us the rhythm of nature as God set it up. He tells us there’s a beautiful rhythm to time and nature and that everything has its proper time and place. However, he then ends with this stunning statement: God has made everything beautiful in its own time, but God has put timelessness into the human heart so that we are out of sync with time and the seasons from the beginning to the end. We never peacefully fit into the rhythm of things because something inside us is outside of time.

And who can forget the haunting words of Anne Frank, writing as a teenager locked away in an attic, hiding from the Nazis, jumping out of her skin with the restlessness of an adolescent and the anxiety of an artist, sharing that she simply can never be fully in the moment because I want to be everywhere all at the same time.  

Doris Lessing, the British novelist, asserts that inside each of us there’s a powerful, relentless energy (“1000 volts”) which keeps us perpetually dis-eased. Writing outside of a faith perspective, she asks, what is this energy for? Her answer: For everything and for anything – creativity, love, sex, justice. Nobel prize winning writer, Albert Camus, also writing outside of any faith perspective, had this interesting way of understanding the human spirit. He compared being inside human nature to being a prisoner trapped inside a medieval prison. Medieval prisons were designed to break the prisoner’s spirit by putting him in a room too small for him to ever fully stand up or to ever fully stretch out. The ceiling was too low and the room was too narrow. The intent was that eventually this would break a prisoner’s spirit. For Camus, that’s how we experience ourselves inside our own nature. The world is simply too small for us to ever really stand up or to ever really stretch out, and this wears away on our spirit.

These are some poignant expressions of this dis-ease, but there are expressions of it everywhere. Hinduism speaks of a certain “nostalgia for the infinite”inside us; Plato speaks of a “divine madness” at the center of the soul; Shakespeare speaks of our “immortal longings; Ruth Burrows opens her autobiography by confessing that she was born with a pathological complexity which has made her life a struggle; James Hillman, in a brilliant book, Suicide and the Soul, submits that most suicides occur because the soul is not being heard and consequently kills the body; and Philip Roth speaks of the blizzard of details that constitute the confusion of human biography.

Literature, philosophy, poetry, art, psychology, biography, theology, and spirituality are replete with expressions of this insatiability inside the human soul which ultimately cannot come to full peace with anything in this world. But this is as it should be. For Augustine, writing some 1700 years ago, this restlessness, this timelessness, this homesickness, this divine madness, these 1000 volts of energy inside us, this pathological complexity, and this confusion of human biography which keeps us perpetually restless, is at the end of the day, our greatest attribute; it’s God’s gift to us of immortality and divinity as a constitutive part of our soul.

Someone once asked Therese of Lisieux if it was wrong to fall asleep while in prayer. Her answer: Absolutely not. A little child is equally pleasing to her parents, awake or asleep – probably more when asleep!

That’s more than a warm, cute answer. There’s a wisdom in her reply that’s generally lost to us, namely, that God understands the human condition and gives us sacred permission to be human, even in the face of our most important human and spiritual commitments.

This struck me recently while listening to a homily. The preacher, a sincere and dedicated priest, challenged us with the idea that God must always be first in our lives. So far so good. But then he shared how upset he gets whenever he hears people say things like: “Let’s go to the Saturday evening mass, to get it over with.” Or, when a celebrant says: “We will keep things short today, because the game starts at noon.” Phrases like that, he suggested, betray a serious weakness in our prayer lives. Do they?

Maybe yes, maybe no. Comments like that can issue out of laziness, spiritual indifference, or misplaced priorities. They might also simply be an expression of normal, understandable human fatigue – a fatigue which God, the author of human nature, gives us permission to feel.

There can be, and often is, a naïveté about the place of high energy and enthusiasm in our lives. For example, imagine a family who, with the best of intentions, decides that to foster family togetherness they agree to make their evening meal, every evening, a full-blown banquet, demanding everyone’s participation and enthusiasm and lasting for ninety minutes. Wish them luck! Some days this would foster togetherness and there would be a certain enthusiasm at the table; but, soon enough, this would be unsustainable in terms of their energy, and more than one of the family members would be saying silently, let’s get this over with, or can we cut it a little short tonight because the game is on a 7:00.  Granted, that could betray an attitude of disinterest; but, more likely, it would simply be a valid expression of normal fatigue.

None of us can sustain high energy and enthusiasm forever. Nor are we intended to. Our lives are a marathon, not a sprint. That’s why it is good sometimes to have lengthy banquets and sometimes to simply grab a hotdog and run. God and nature give us permission to sometimes say, let’s get it over with, and sometimes to rush things so as to not miss the beginning of the game.

Moreover, beyond taking seriously the normal ebb and flow of our energies, there is still another, even more important angle to this. Enthusiastic energy or lack of them don’t necessarily define meaning.  We can do a thing because it means something affectively to us – or we can do something simply because it means something in itself, independent of how we feel about it on a given day. Too often, we don’t grasp this. For example, take the response people often give when explaining why they are no longer going to church services, “it doesn’t mean anything to me.” What they are blind to in saying this is the fact that being together in a church means something in itself, independent of how it feels affectively on any given day. A church service means something in itself, akin to visiting your aging mother. You do this, not because you are always enthusiastic about it or because it always feels good emotionally. No. You do it because this is your aging mother and that’s what God, nature, and maturity call us to do.

The same holds true for a family meal together. You don’t necessarily go to dinner with your family each night with enthusiasm. You go because this is how families sustain their common life. There will be times when you do come with high energy and appreciate both the preciousness of the moment and the length of the dinner. But there will be other times when, despite a deeper awareness that being together in this way is important, you will be wanting to get this over with, or sneaking glances at your watch and calculating what time the game starts.

So, scripture advises, avoid Job’s friends. For spiritual advice in this area, avoid the spiritual novice, the over-pious, the anthropological naïve, the couple on their honeymoon, the recent convert, and at least half of all liturgists and worship leaders. The true manual on marriage is never written by a couple on their honeymoon and the true manual on prayer is never written by someone who believes that we should be on a high all the time. Find a spiritual mentor who challenges you enough to keep you from selfishness and laziness, even as she or he gives you divine permission to be tired sometimes. A woman or man at prayer is equally pleasing to God, enthusiastic or tired – perhaps even more when tired.

A colleague of mine, a clinical therapist, shares this story: A woman came to him in considerable distress. Her husband had recently died of a heart attack. His death had been sudden and at a most inept time. They’d been happily married for thirty years and, during all those years, had never had a major crisis in their relationship. But, on the day her husband died, they had gotten into an argument about something very insignificant and it had escalated to where they began to hurl some mean and cutting words at each other. At a point, agitated and angry, her husband walked out of the room, told her he was going shopping, then died of a heart attack before he got to the car. Understandably, the woman was devastated, both by the sudden death of her spouse but by that last exchange. “All these years,” she lamented, “we had this loving relationship and then we have this useless argument over nothing and it ends up being our last conversation!”

The therapist led off with something meant in humor. He said: “How horrible of him to do that to you! To die just then!” Obviously, the man hadn’t intended his death, but its timing was in fact awfully unfair to his wife, as it left her holding a guilt that was seemingly permanent with no apparent avenue for resolution.

However, then the therapist went into a different mode. He asked her: “If you had your husband back for five minutes what would you say to him?”  Without hesitation, she answered: “I’d tell him how much I loved him, how good he was to me for all these years, and how our little moment of anger at the end was a meaningless epi-second that means nothing in terms our love.”

The therapist then said: “You’re a woman of faith, you believe in the communion of saints; well, your husband is alive still and present to you now, so why don’t you just say all those things to him right now. It’s not too late to express that all to him!”

He’s right. It’s never too late! It’s never too late to tell our deceased loved ones how we really feel about them. It’s never too late to apologize for the ways we might have hurt them. It’s never too late to ask their forgiveness for our negligence in the relationship, and it’s never too late to speak the words of appreciation, affirmation, and gratitude that we should have spoken to them while they were alive.  As Christians, we have the great consolation of knowing that death isn’t final, that it’s never too late.

And we desperately need that particular consolation, that second chance. No matter who we are, we’re always inadequate in our relationships. We can’t always be present to our loved ones as we should, we sometimes say things in anger and bitterness that leave deep scars, we betray trust in all kinds of ways, and we mostly lack the maturity and self-confidence to express the affirmation we should be conveying to our loved ones. None of us ever fully measures up. When Karl Rahner says that none of us ever have the “full symphony” in this life, he isn’t just referring to the fact that none of us ever fully realizes her dream, he’s also referring to the fact that in all our most important relationships none of us ever fully measures up. We cannot not be disappointing sometimes.

At the end of the day, all of us lose loved ones in ways similar to how that woman lost her husband, with unfinished business, with bad timing. There are always things that should have been said and weren’t and there are always things that shouldn’t have been said and were.

But that’s were our Christian faith comes in. We aren’t the only ones who come up short. At the moment of Jesus’ death, virtually all of his disciples had deserted. The timing here was also very bad. Good Friday was bad long before it was good. But, and this is the point, as Christians, we don’t believe there will always be perfect endings in this life, nor that we will always be adequate in life.  Rather we believe that the fullness of life and happiness will come to us through the redemption of what has gone wrong, not least with what has gone wrong because of our own inadequacies and weakness.

G.K. Chesterton said that Christianity is special because in its belief in the communion of saints, “even the dead get a vote”.  They get more than a vote. They still get to hear what we’re saying to them.

So, if you’ve lost a loved one in a situation where there was still something unresolved, where there was still a tension that needed easing, where you should have been more attentive, or where you feel badly because you never adequately expressed the affirmation and affection that you might have, know it’s not too late. It can all still be done!

A colleague of mine, a clinical therapist, shares this story: A woman came to him in considerable distress. Her husband had recently died of a heart attack. His death had been sudden and at a most inept time. They’d been happily married for thirty years and, during all those years, had never had a major crisis in their relationship. But, on the day her husband died, they had gotten into an argument about something very insignificant and it had escalated to where they began to hurl some mean and cutting words at each other. At a point, agitated and angry, her husband walked out of the room, told her he was going shopping, then died of a heart attack before he got to the car. Understandably, the woman was devastated, both by the sudden death of her spouse but by that last exchange. “All these years,” she lamented, “we had this loving relationship and then we have this useless argument over nothing and it ends up being our last conversation!”

The therapist led off with something meant in humor. He said: “How horrible of him to do that to you! To die just then!” Obviously, the man hadn’t intended his death, but its timing was in fact awfully unfair to his wife, as it left her holding a guilt that was seemingly permanent with no apparent avenue for resolution.

However, then the therapist went into a different mode. He asked her: “If you had your husband back for five minutes what would you say to him?”  Without hesitation, she answered: “I’d tell him how much I loved him, how good he was to me for all these years, and how our little moment of anger at the end was a meaningless epi-second that means nothing in terms our love.”

The therapist then said: “You’re a woman of faith, you believe in the communion of saints; well, your husband is alive still and present to you now, so why don’t you just say all those things to him right now. It’s not too late to express that all to him!”

He’s right. It’s never too late! It’s never too late to tell our deceased loved ones how we really feel about them. It’s never too late to apologize for the ways we might have hurt them. It’s never too late to ask their forgiveness for our negligence in the relationship, and it’s never too late to speak the words of appreciation, affirmation, and gratitude that we should have spoken to them while they were alive.  As Christians, we have the great consolation of knowing that death isn’t final, that it’s never too late.

And we desperately need that particular consolation, that second chance. No matter who we are, we’re always inadequate in our relationships. We can’t always be present to our loved ones as we should, we sometimes say things in anger and bitterness that leave deep scars, we betray trust in all kinds of ways, and we mostly lack the maturity and self-confidence to express the affirmation we should be conveying to our loved ones. None of us ever fully measures up. When Karl Rahner says that none of us ever have the “full symphony” in this life, he isn’t just referring to the fact that none of us ever fully realizes her dream, he’s also referring to the fact that in all our most important relationships none of us ever fully measures up. We cannot not be disappointing sometimes.

At the end of the day, all of us lose loved ones in ways similar to how that woman lost her husband, with unfinished business, with bad timing. There are always things that should have been said and weren’t and there are always things that shouldn’t have been said and were.

But that’s were our Christian faith comes in. We aren’t the only ones who come up short. At the moment of Jesus’ death, virtually all of his disciples had deserted. The timing here was also very bad. Good Friday was bad long before it was good. But, and this is the point, as Christians, we don’t believe there will always be perfect endings in this life, nor that we will always be adequate in life.  Rather we believe that the fullness of life and happiness will come to us through the redemption of what has gone wrong, not least with what has gone wrong because of our own inadequacies and weakness.

G.K. Chesterton said that Christianity is special because in its belief in the communion of saints, “even the dead get a vote”.  They get more than a vote. They still get to hear what we’re saying to them.

So, if you’ve lost a loved one in a situation where there was still something unresolved, where there was still a tension that needed easing, where you should have been more attentive, or where you feel badly because you never adequately expressed the affirmation and affection that you might have, know it’s not too late. It can all still be done!

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 out. And it worked. The last ten years 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 this was the effect of all that. 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”. Ten and twenty years ago, he would, I’m sure, have given Jesus and Peter some advice as to how they might run the pearly gates more efficiently.

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. 

Why is that so important? Because we are not God and we become wise and more loving when we realize and accept that. Classical Christian theologians defined God as self-sufficient being, and highlight that onlyGod is self-sufficient. God alone has no need of anything beyond Himself. Everything else, everything that is not God, is defined as contingent, as not self-sufficient, as needing something beyond itself to bring it into existence and to keep it in existence every second of its being.

That can sound like abstract theology, but ironically it’s little children who get it, who have an awareness of this. Thy know that they cannot provide for themselves and that all comes to us as gift. They know they need help. However, not long after they learn to tie our own shoelaces this awareness begins to fade and as they grow into adolescence and then adulthood, particularly if they are healthy, strong, and successful, they begin to live with the illusion of self-sufficiency. I provide for myself!

And, that in fact serves them well in terms of making their way in this world. But it doesn’t serve truth, community, love, or the soul. It’s an illusion, the greatest of all illusions. None of us will enter deeply into community as long as we nurse the illusion of self-sufficiency, when we are still saying, I don’t need others! I choose who and what I let into my life!

G.K. Chesterton once wrote that familiarity is the greatest of all illusions. He’s right, and what we are most familiar with is taking care of ourselves and believing that we are sufficient onto ourselves. As we know, this serves us well in terms of getting ahead in this life. However, fortunate for us, though painful, God and nature are always conspiring together to teach us that we are not self-sufficient. The process of maturing, aging, and eventually dying is calibrated to teach us, whether we welcome the lesson or not, that we are not in charge, that self-sufficiency is an illusion. Eventually for all of us there will come a day when, as it was with us before we could tie our own shoelaces, we will have to reach out for a hand and say, “help me”.

The philosopher Eric Mascall has an axiom that says we are neither wise nor mature as long as we take life for granted. We become wise and mature precisely when we take it as granted – by God, by others, by love.

In a 1990s movie, City Slickers, there’s a scene that sheds light on the importance of private integrity. Three men, New Yorkers, close friends, have gone off together for a summer to ride on a cattle drive in the hope that this experience will help them sort through their respective mid-life issues.

At one point, riding along on the trail, they are discussing the morality of having a sexual affair. Initially their conversation focuses mostly on the fear of getting caught, and two of them agree that an affair isn’t worth the risk. You’re too likely to get caught. But their friend poses the question again, this time asking them if they would have an affair if there was the absolute assurance that they wouldn’t be caught:

“Imagine,” he says, “that a spaceship touches down. A beautiful woman emerges from the spaceship. You make love and she returns to Mars. There are no consequences. Nobody can possibly know. Would you do it?”

Billy Crystal, who plays the lead role, answers that he doubts that this is ever possible. “You always get caught,” he submits, “people smell dishonesty on you.” “But,” his friend protests, “what if it was really possible to have an affair and not get caught. What if nobody would know? Would you do it?” Billy Crystal’s answer: “But I’d know, and I’d hate myself for it!”

His answer highlights an important truth. What we do in private, in secret, has consequences that are not dependent upon whether or not our secret leaks out. The damage is the same. What we do in secret molds our character and influences how we relate to others in more ways than we suspect. There is no such a thing as a secret act. One person always knows. We know. And we hate ourselves for it, hate ourselves for having to lie. And this gives off its own scent.

What we do in secret ultimately shapes what we look like in public. Dishonesty changes the way we look because it changes who we are. That’s the reason why so often those around us will intuit the truth about us, smell the lie, even when they don’t have any hard evidence on which to suspect us.

Doing something in secret that we can’t admit in public is the very definition of hypocrisy, and that forces us to lie. And, among all sins, lying is the most dangerous. Why? Because we hate ourselves for it, stop respecting ourselves, and when we stop respecting ourselves we will, all too soon, notice that other people stop respecting us too. That’s the intuitive place where we “smell” each other’s lies.

Worse still, lying forces us to harden ourselves so that we can live with our lie. Sin doesn’t always make us humble and repentant. We have the all-too-easy, popular image of the honest sinner, like the sinners in Gospels who more easily accepted Jesus than did the religiously upright. That’s sometimes the case, but not always.

The biblical image of the honest sinner humbly turning towards God is predicated on honesty, on a sinner not hiding or lying about his or her sin. But sin can have a very different effect on us. When we don’t honestly admit our sin, we move in the opposite direction, namely, towards rationalization, hardness of attitude, and cynicism. Moreover, it’s the lying, not the original weakness, that then becomes the real canker and constitutes the real danger. When we hide a sin, we are forced to lie, and with that lie we immediately begin to harden and reshape our souls. There’s a moral axiom that says: You can do anything as long as you don’t have to lie about it. That’s quite different than saying that you can do anything as long as nobody finds out about it.

The quality of our person depends upon the degree of our private integrity. We are as sick as our sickest secret, and we are as healthy as our most hidden virtue. We cannot be doing one thing in private and radiate something else in public. It doesn’t matter whether others know our secrets or not. We know and, when those secrets are unhealthy, we hate ourselves for them and our hearts harden so to live with our lie.

We should never delude ourselves into thinking that the things we do in private, including very small actions of infidelity, self-indulgence, bigotry, jealousy, or slander, are of no consequence since no one knows about them. Inside the mystery of our interconnectedness as a human family and as a family of faith predicated on trust, even our most private actions, good or bad, like invisible enzymes inside the blood stream, affect the whole. Everything is known, felt, in one way or another. There is no such thing as a private act, inside the family of humanity or inside the body of Christ. Others know us, even when they don’t exactly know everything about us. They smell our vices, just as they smell our virtues.

For too many years, for me, Christ was simply Jesus’ last name: Jack Smith, Susan Parker, Jesus Christ. Intellectually, I knew better; but practically, both in my private faith and as a theologian, I functioned as if Christ were simply Jesus’ surname. Whether in prayer, writing, or preaching, I almost always used the two names together, Jesus Christ, as if there were a perfect identity between the two.

There’s not. Jesus is a divine person inside the Trinity, someone who once walked this earth as a flesh and blood individual and who now is with the Father as part of the Godhead. And although he is also the key component inside the reality of Christ, Christ is more than Jesus.

Christ is a mystery which also includes us, Jesus’ followers on earth, the sacraments, the Word (Scripture), and the church. Scripture is clear: We are the Body of Christ on earth. We don’t represent Christ, replace Christ, or are some vague mystical presence of Christ. We are the Body of Christ, as too are the Eucharist and the Word (the Christian scriptures).

That distinction has huge implications both for our private faith and for how we live out our faith in the church. To simply identify Jesus and Christ impoverishes our discipleship, irrespective of which name (Jesus or Christ) we most relate to.

Let me begin with a mea culpa: In living out my faith, I more easily and existentially relate to Christ than to Jesus. What that means is that I have a belief in and a lifelong commitment to the reality of the resurrection, to Jesus’ teaching, to the church, to the sacraments, and to the Christian scriptures. I believe that participation in the Eucharist is the single most important thing I do in life, that the Sermon on the Mount is the greatest moral code ever written, and that the church, despite all its faults, is the Body of Christ on earth.

But, unlike many of the faith-filled mystics and saints that I read, and unlike many of my Evangelical friends and colleagues, I struggle to have a real sense that Jesus is an intimate friend and lover. I struggle to be the beloved disciple in John’s gospel who has his head reclining on the breast of Jesus and for whom one-to-one intimacy with Jesus relativizes everything else. I know that Jesus is real and wants a deep one-to-one intimacy with each of us; but truth be told, I struggle to actually feel that most days and to make it the central part of my discipleship. Commitment to the Eucharist, Jesus’ teaching, and the church are, save for graced affective moments in prayer, the heart of my faith and lived discipleship. Habitually I relate more to Christ than to Jesus.

And, let me risk adding this: I believe that is also true for various Christian churches. We have churches that relate more to Christ and churches that relate more to Jesus (not that either excludes the other). For example, my own church, Roman Catholic, is a very Christ-centered church. Ecclesial community, Eucharist, the sacraments, and Jesus’ teachings are key. No true Roman Catholic can ever say that all I need is a private relationship to Jesus. That is also true of most Anglicans, Episcopalians, and mainline Protestants. It is less true for churches within the Evangelical family, where the salient mandate in the Gospel of John to have an intimate relationship to Jesus more easily becomes the central tenet within Christian discipleship.

It is not that the different churches exclude the other dimension. For example, Roman Catholicism, Anglicanism, and mainline Protestantism emphasize private prayer as a means to relate to the person of Jesus as an intimate friend and lover. To this, Roman Catholicism brings its rich (sometimes over-rich) tradition of devotional prayer. Conversely, Evangelicals, with their strong focus on Jesus, use communal services of the word and preaching as their major way to relate to the wider mystery of Christ.

We have something to learn from each other. Churches, just as individuals, must be about both, Jesus and Christ, that is, focused on a personal relationship with Jesus and participation in the historical incarnational mystery of Christ, of which each of us is part. We must be focused on Jesus, but also on the Eucharist, the Word, and the community of believers – each of which is the Body of Christ. Our faith and discipleship must be both deeply private and visibly communal.  No Christian can legitimately say, my discipleship consists wholly in a private relationship to Jesus, just as no Christian can legitimately say, I don’t need Jesus, I only need church and the sacraments.

We are disciples of Jesus Christ, both the person and the mystery. We are committed to a set of teachings, a set of scriptures, the Eucharist, and to a visible community we call the church – as well as to a person named Jesus who is the heart of this great mystery and who wants to be our friend and lover.

More than fifty years ago Philip Rieff wrote a book entitled The Triumph of the Therapeutic. In it, he argued that widespread reliance upon private therapy today arose in the secularized world largely because community has broken down.

In societies where there are strong families and strong communities, he contends, there is less need for private therapy. People can more easily work out their problems through and within the community.

If Rieff is right, and I suggest he is, then it follows that the solution to many of the things that drive us to the therapeutic couch today lie as much, and perhaps more, in a fuller and healthier participation within public life, including ecclesial life, than in private therapy. We need, as Parker Palmer suggests, the therapy of a public life.

What is meant by this? How can public life help heal us?

In caption: public life (life within community, beyond our private intimacies) becomes therapeutic by immersing our fragility into a social network which can help carry our sanity, give us a certain rhythm within which to walk, and link us to resources beyond the poverty of our private helplessness.

To participate healthily in other people’s lives links our lives to something bigger than ourselves and this is its own therapy because most public life has a certain rhythm and regularity to it that helps calm the chaotic whirl of our private lives which are often racked with disorientation, depression, psychological fragility, paranoia, and a variety of obsessions.

Participation in public life gives us clearly defined things to do: regular stopping places, regular events of structure, a steadiness, a rhythm. These are commodities the psychiatric couch does not provide. Public life links us to resources that can empower us beyond our own helplessness. What we dream alone, remains a dream. What we dream with others can become a reality.

But all this is rather abstract. Let me try to illustrate with an example. While doing doctoral studies in Belgium, I was privileged to attend the lectures of Antoine Vergote, a renowned doctor of both psychology and the soul. I asked him one day how one should handle emotional obsessions, both within oneself and when trying to help others. His answer surprised me. He said something to this effect:

“The temptation you might have as a priest is to simplistically follow the religious edict: ‘Take your troubles to the chapel! Pray it all through. God will help you.’ It’s not that this is wrong. God and prayer can and do help. But most paralyzing obsessional problems are ultimately problems of over-concentration . . . and over-concentration is broken mainly by getting outside of yourself, outside of your own mind and heart, life, and room. Have the emotionally paralyzed person get involved in public things—social gatherings, entertainment, politics, work, church. Get the person outside of his or her closed world and into public life!”

He went on, of course, to qualify this so that it differs considerably from any simplistic temptation to simply bury oneself in distractions and work. His advice here is not that one should run away from doing painful inner work, but rather that doing one’s inner work is sometimes very dependent upon outside relationships. Sometimes only a community can stabilize your sanity.

As a corollary to this, I offer this example: I have been teaching theology in a number of colleges for over 40 years. Many is the emotionally unstable student, fraught with every kind of inner pain and unsteadiness, who shows up at these colleges, hangs around its classrooms, cafeteria, chapel, and social areas, and slowly gets steadier and stronger emotionally. And that strength and steadiness come not so much from the theology courses, but from the rhythm and health of the community life. These students get better not so much by what they learn in the classrooms as they do by participating in the life outside of them. The therapy of a public life helps heal them.

Further, for us as Christians, the therapy of public life also means the therapy of an ecclesial life. We become emotionally healthier, steadier, less obsessed, less a slave of our own restlessness, and more able to become who and what we want to be by participating healthily within the public life of the church.

Monks, with their monastic rhythm, have long understood this and have secrets worth knowing: Program, rhythm, public participation, the demand to show up, and the discipline of the monastic bell have kept many a man or woman sane—and relatively happy besides.

Regular Eucharist, regular prayer with others, regular meetings with others to share faith, and regular duties and responsibilities within ministry not only deeply nurture our spiritual lives, they also help keep us sane and steady.

Robert Lax, who greatly influenced Thomas Merton, suggests that our task in life is not so much finding a path in the woods as of finding a rhythm to walk in. Public life can help us find that rhythm.