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.

Elizabeth Poreba ends a poem, No Good Company, with these words:

I’ve got no banter,

I’m all judgement and edges, an edgy white lady

Wondering what to do, what to do next

As in Jesus is coming, look busy. 

At the wedding feast in Cana, Mary tells Jesus, they have no wine, asking him to create some.What do wine and banter have in common? Both bring a needed extra into our lives.

Let’s start with wine. Wine is not a protein, something the body needs to be nourished and kept alive, part of an essential diet. It’s an extra that provides something special for one’s health. Taken with the right spirit and in moderation, wine can help lift the mood, lighten the heart, and warm the conversation, even as it helps (at least for the moment) lessen some of the tensions among us. It’s a grease that can help make a conversation, a family dinner, or a social gathering flow more pleasantly.

Banter? Well, like wine, if taken with the right spirit and in moderation, it can also lift the mood, lighten the heart, warm a conversation, and lessen tensions at a gathering. Classical Greek thought suggested that love has six components: Eros – emotional and sexual attraction; mania – emotional obsession; asteismos – playfulness and banter; storge – care and solicitousness; pragma – practical arrangement and accommodation; philia – friendship; and agape – altruism.

Normally, when we think of love, we think of each of these components, except the aspect of banter and playfulness. Our romantic selves identify love very much with emotional obsession and sexual attraction. Our religious and moral selves identify love with care, friendship, and altruism, and our pragmatic selves identify it with practical arrangement. Few speak of the place and importance of banter, or playfulness, of healthy teasing, of humor, but these are often the grease that keeps the others flowing more smoothly.

Here’s an example: For all my adult life, I’ve lived in various religious houses, in community with other vowed religious (in my case, men). We don’t get to pick with whom we live, but are assigned to a community, along with everyone else who lives there. And we come together with our different backgrounds, different personalities, and different eccentricities. This can be a formula for tension and yet, for the most part, it works, is pleasant, and provides life-giving support and fellowship. What makes it work? Why don’t we end up killing each other? How do we live (for the most part) pleasantly together beyond our differences, immaturities, and egos?

Well, there’s a common mission that keeps us working together and, most importantly, there’s regular common prayer that helps us see each other in a better light. But, very importantly, there is banter, playfulness, healthy teasing, and humor which, like wine at a table, help take the edge off things and ease the tension inherent in our differences. A community that doesn’t stay light-hearted through banter, playfulness, and healthy teasing will eventually become everything that light-hearted is not, namely, heavy, drab, full of tension, and pompous. In every healthy community I’ve lived in, one of the things that made it healthy (and pleasant to come home to) was banter, playfulness, loving teasing, and humor. These are rich wines that can enliven the table of any family and any community.

This, of course, like drinking wine, can be overdone and be a way of avoiding harder conversations that need to be had. As well, banter can keep us relating to each other in ways that actually hinder genuine community. Humor, banter, the jokester, and the prankster need to know when enough is enough and when serious conversation needs to happen. The risk of overdoing banter is real, though perhaps the greater risk lies in trying to live together in its absence.

Banter, playfulness, loving teasing, and humor don’t just help us relate to each other beyond our differences, they also help deflate the pomposity that is invariably the child of over-seriousness. They help keep our families and communities grounded and pleasant.

I grew up in a large family, with each of us having strong personalities and plenty of faults; yet, save for very few occasions, our house, which was physically too small for so large a family, was pleasant to be in because it was perennially filled with banter, playfulness, humor, and healthy teasing. We seldom had wine, but we had banter! When I look back on what my family gave me, I am deeply grateful for many gifts: faith, love, safety, trust, support, education, moderation, and moral sensitivity. But it also taught me banter, playfulness, healthy teasing, and humor. No small gift.

At the wedding feast in Cana, Jesus’ mother noticed that, even though a wedding celebration was happening, something wasn’t right. Was it a heaviness? An over-seriousness? Was it an unhealthy pomposity? Was there a noticeable tension in the room? Whatever. Something was missing, so she goes to Jesus and says: “Son, they have no banter!”

In a poem entitled, Is/Not, Margaret Atwood suggests that when a love grows numb, this is where we find ourselves:

We’re stuck here
on this side of the border
in this country of thumbed streets and stale buildings

where there is nothing spectacular to see
and the weather is ordinary

where love occurs in its pure form only
on the cheaper of the souvenirs

Love can grow numb between two people, just as it can within a whole culture. And that has happened in our culture, at least to a large part. The excitement that once guided our eyes has given way to a certain numbness and resignation. We no longer stand before life with much freshness. We have seen what it has to offer and have succumbed to a certain resignation: That’s all there is, and it’s not that great!  All we can try for now is more of the same, with the misguided hope that if we keep increasing the dosage the payoff will be better.

They talk of old souls, but old souls are actually young at heart. We’re the opposite, young souls no longer young at heart. Wonder has left the building.

What’s at the root of this? What has deprived us of wonder? Familiarity and its children: sophistication, intellectual pride, disappointment, boredom, and contempt. Familiarity does breed contempt, and contempt is the antithesis of the two things needed to stand before the world in wonder: reverence and respect.

G.K. Chesterton once suggested that familiarity is the greatest of all illusions. Elizabeth Barrett Browning gives poetic expression to this: Earth’s crammed with heaven. And every common bush afire with God. But only he who sees, takes off his shoes. The rest sit round and pluck blackberries and daub their natural faces unaware. That aptly describes the illusion of familiarity, plucking berries while carelessly stroking our faces, unaware that we are in the presence of the holy. Familiarity renders all things common.

What’s the answer? How do we recover our sense of wonder? How do we begin again to see divine fire inside ordinary life?  Chesterton suggests that the secret to recovering wonder and seeing divine fire in the ordinary is to learn to look at things familiar until they look unfamiliar again. Biblically, that’s what God asks of Moses when Moses sees a burning bush in the desert and approaches its fire out of curiosity. God says to him, take off your shoes, the ground you are standing on is holy ground.

That single line, that singular invitation, is the deep secret to recover our sense of wonder whenever we find ourselves, as Atwood describes, stuck on this side of the border, in thumbed streets and stale buildings, with nothing spectacular to see, ordinary weather, and love seemingly cheapened everywhere.

One of my professors in graduate school occasionally offered us this little counsel: If you ask a naïve child, do you believe in Santa and the Easter Bunny, he will say yes. If you ask a bright child the same question, he will say no. But if you ask yet still a brighter child that question, he will smile and say yes.

Our sense of wonder is predicated initially on the naivete of being a child, of not yet being unhealthily familiar with the world. 0ur eyes then are still open to marvel at the newness of things. That changes of course as we grow, experience things, and learn. Soon enough we learn the truth about Santa and the Easter Bunny and with that, all too easily, comes the death of wonder and the familiarity that breeds contempt. This is a disillusionment which, while a normal transitional phase in life, is not meant to be a place in which we stay. The task of adulthood is to regain our sense of wonder and begin again, for very different reasons, to believe in the reality of Santa and the Easter Bunny. We need to bring wonder back into the building.

I once heard a wise man share this vignette: Imagine a two-year-old child who asks you, “where does the sun go at night?” For a child that young, don’t pull out a globe or a book and try to explain how the solar system works. Just tell the child the sun is tired and is taking a sleep behind the barn. However, when the child is six or seven years old, don’t try that anymore. Then, it’s time to pull out books and explain the solar system. After that, when the child is in high school or college, it’s time to pull out Steven Hawking, Brian Swimme, and astrophysicists, and talk about the origins and make-up of the universe. Finally, when the person is eighty years old, it’s enough again to say, “the sun is tired and is taking a sleep behind the barn.”

We have grown too familiar with sunsets! Wonder can make the familiar unfamiliar again.

In much of the secularized world, we live in a climate that is somewhat anti-ecclesial and anti-clerical. It’s quite fashionable today to bash the churches, be they Roman Catholic, Protestant, or Evangelical. This is often done in the name of being open-minded and enlightened, and it’s the one bias that’s intellectually sanctioned. Say something derogatory about any other group in society, and you will be brought to account; say something disparaging about the church and there are no such consequences.

What’s the proper response?  While it’s easy to take offense at this, we must be careful not to overreact because, as a church, we should not be fundamentally threatened by this. Why?

First, because a certain amount of this criticism is good and helpful. Truth be told, we have some very real faults. All atheism is a parasite feeding off bad religion. Our critics feed off our faults and we can be grateful that our faults are being pointed out to us – even if sometimes over-generously. Criticism of the church is healthily humbling us and pushing us toward a more courageous internal purification. Besides, for too long we have enjoyed a situation of privilege, never a good thing for the church. We generally live healthier as Christians in a time of dis-privilege than in a time of privilege, even if it isn’t as pleasant. Moreover, there are some important things at stake here.

We must be careful not to overreact to the present anti-ecclesial climate because this can lead to an over-defensiveness and put us in an unhealthy adversarial position vis-à-vis the culture, and that’s not where the gospel asks us to be. Rather our task is to absorb this criticism, painful though it is, gently point to its unfairness, and resist the temptation to be defensive. Why? Why not aggressively defend ourselves?

Because we are strong enough not to, and that’s reason enough. We can withstand this without having to become hard and defensive. Current criticism of the church notwithstanding, the church is not about to go under or away any time soon. We are two and a half billion Christians in the world, stand within a two-thousand-year-old tradition, have among ourselves a universally accepted scripture, have two thousand years of doctrinal entrenchment and refinement, have massive centuries-old institutions, are embedded in the very roots of Western culture and technology, constitute perhaps the biggest multinational group in the world, and are growing in numbers worldwide. We are hardly a reed shaking in the wind, reeling vulnerably, a ship about to go under. We are strong, stable, blessed by God, an Elder in the culture, and because of this we owe it to the culture to model maturity and understanding.

Beyond that, even more important, is the fact that we have Christ’s promise to be with us, and the reality of the resurrection to sustain us. Given all this, I think it’s fair to say that we can absorb a fair amount of criticism without fear of losing our identity. Moreover, we must not let this criticism make us lose sight of why we exist in the first place.

The church exists not for its own sake or to ensure its own survival, but for the sake of the world. We can easily forget this and lose sight of what the gospel asks of us. For example, compare these two responses: At a press conference, Cardinal Basil Hume was once asked what he considered the foremost task facing the church today. He replied simply: “To need to try to save this planet.” Compare that response with that of another cardinal who, in a recent radio interview, was asked the same question (What is the foremost task facing the church today?) and replied, “To defend the faith.” Who’s right?

Everything about Jesus suggests that Hume’s view is closer to the gospel than the other. When Jesus says, “My flesh is food for the life of the world”, he is affirming clearly that the primary task of the church is not to defend itself, or ensure its continuity, or protect itself from being crushed by the world. The church exists for the sake of the world, not for its own sake. That’s why there is such a rich symbolism in the fact that immediately after Jesus was born, he was laid in a trough in a stable, a place where animals come to eat; and it’s why he gives himself up on a table in the Eucharist, to be eaten. Being eaten up by the world is largely what Jesus is about, namely, risking vulnerability over safety and trust over defensiveness. At the very heart of the Gospel lies a call to risk beyond defensiveness and to absorb unjust criticism without fighting back: “Forgive them, they know not what they do!”

The church is meant to give itself over as food for the world. Like all living bodies it needs sometimes to protect itself – but never at the cost of losing its very reason for being here.

Inside the rite for Christian baptism there’s a little ritual that is at once both touching and unrealistic. At one point in the baptismal rite the child is clothed in a white garment symbolizing innocence and purity. The priest or minister officiating says these words: “Receive this baptismal garment and bring it unstained to the judgment seat of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

As touching as it is to say those words to an innocent baby, one cannot help but think that unless this child dies in childhood, this is an impossible task. Our baptismal robes inevitably take some stains. Adult life sees to that. No one goes through life without losing the innocence of a baby.

But that being admitted, innocence still remains an ideal to be fostered and continually recovered. And that needs some defense today because innocence and its attendants, purity, and chastity, have fallen on hard times in a world that tends to value sophistication above all else and which generally sees innocence as naivete and prudery.

There’s a long history to this. For centuries, the churches held up innocence, purity, and chastity as salient virtues within Christian discipleship and within life in general. However, from the 17^th century, right down to our own time, major thinkers have tried to turn this on its head, suggesting that these (so-called) virtues are in fact the antithesis of virtue. For them, innocence and its counterparts, purity, and chastity, are fraudulent ideals, fantasies of the timid, symptoms of an unconscious hostility towards life. Nietzsche, for example, once wrote: “The church combats the passions with excision, in every sense of the word: its practice, its cure, is castration.” Freud suggested that in the ideals of innocence, purity, and chastity there is more than a trace of narcissism, frigid arrogance, and a fantasy of invulnerability. According to these (Enlightenment) thinkers, in idealizing innocence, purity, and chastity, humankind has agreed to make itself unhappy in that the medicine we take to purify our souls lets in the moral toxins of self-righteousness, arrogance, and insensitivity, a mischief that makes lust look benign.

Our culture, minus some of the harsh rhetoric, essentially buys in to this. There are of course a few salient exceptions within some of our churches, but our cultural ethos pretty much identifies innocence, purity, and chastity with timidity, naivete, and fundamentalism.

Where to go with all of this? Well, one isn’t quite sure where to look.

Conservatives, in their very makeup, tend to fear the breaking of taboos, not least those surrounding innocence, purity, and chastity. This has a healthy intent. This is J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye) looking at innocent young children playing and wishing they would never grow up but could always remain this innocent and joyful. Conservatives fear any kind of sophistication that destroys innocence. That’s well intended but unrealistic. We need to grow up and with that comes complexity, sophistication, mess, and stains on the purity of our baptismal robes. God did not intend for us to be children forever playing in innocence in a rye field.

Liberals have a different genetic make-up, but struggle equally (just differently) with innocence, purity, and chastity. They are less fearful about breaking taboos. For them, boundaries are meant to be stretched and most times broken, and innocence is a phase you pass through and outgrow (like belief in Santa and the Easter Bunny). Indeed, for liberals, real self-actualization begins with owning your complexity, recognizing its goodness, and accepting that complexity and lost innocence is in fact what opens us up for deeper meaning. Experience brings knowledge. When Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, their eyes were opened, not closed. To the liberal eye, naivete is not a virtue, sophistication is. Innocence is judged as unrealistic, purity as sexual timidity, and chastity as religious fundamentalism.

Both these views, conservative and liberal, wave some healthy warning flags. The conservative flag of caution can help save us from many self-destructive behaviors, while the liberal flag inviting us to more fearlessness can help save us from much unhealthy timidity and naivete. However, each needs to learn from the other. Conservatives need to learn that God did not intend for us to make an idol out of the innocence and the naivete of a child. We are meant to learn, to grow, and to become sophisticated beyond first naivete. But liberals need to learn that sophistication, like innocence itself, is not an end in itself, but a phase through which one grows.

The renowned contemporary philosopher Paul Ricoeur hints at something beyond both. He asserts that growth to final maturity goes through stages. We are meant to move from the naivete of a child, through the lost innocence, messy and often cynical sophistication of adulthood, towards a “second naivete”, a post-sophistication, a second innocence, a childlikeness which is not childish, a simplicity that is not simplistic.

In this second naivete, our baptismal robes will emerge again unstained – washed clean in the blood of a new innocence.