Relating to Both Jesus and Christ

July 10, 2023

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.

No Lasting City

July 3, 2023

Scripture tells us that in this life we have no lasting city. True enough. But, it seems, we also don’t have a lasting house, school, neighborhood, town, zip code address, or most anything else. Eventually nothing lasts.

Perhaps my case isn’t typical, but a lot of things in my life haven’t lasted. My grandparents were immigrants, Russian-Germans, moving to the Canadian prairies and being among the first farmers to break the soil there at the beginning of the 1900s. They were young, so too was life then on the prairies, and their generation planted new farms, schools, towns, and cities across the great plains of Canada and the USA. I was born into the second generation of all that – but just as urbanization and other changes were already beginning to cause the disappearance of a lot of what they had built.

So, here’s my story of having no lasting city: The elementary school I went to closed after I’d finished the sixth grade. We were bused to a bigger centralized school and our old school building was carted away. Nothing remains today to indicate there once was a school there. The new school I attended closed several years after I’d graduated. The building itself was razed and today the entire former campus is part of a farmer’s field with only a small plaque to indicate there once was vibrant life there, with hundreds of young voices filling the air with energy. That school was a couple of miles out of a small town and that town itself has now completely disappeared, without a single building left.

I went from high school to an Oblate novitiate house situated in the heart of the Qu’Appelle valley, a beautiful stately building on a lake. Several years after I’d graduated from there, the building was sold and soon afterwards was destroyed in a fire. Only an empty stretch of prairie sits there now. From there, I moved to another seminary, a magnificent old building (formerly the Government House for the Northwest Territories) and spent six wonderful years there. Again, several years after I’d graduated, the building was abandoned, and it too was eventually destroyed by a fire.

From there I moved to Newman Theological College in Edmonton where I spent the next fifteen years. Newman College had a beautiful campus on the outskirts of the city, but several years after I’d left, the campus was expropriated by the city to build a ring road and all its buildings were razed. From there, I moved to a wonderfully homey building, the Oblate Provincial residence in Saskatoon. Several years later, after I’d moved out, that building too was razed and nothing remains where it once stood. And, while all this was happening, the little town to which our family was connected (for mail, for groceries, for services, for identity) became a ghost town with no inhabitants, all its buildings shuttered.

Eventually, I moved to Oblate School of Theology in Texas to live in a welcoming little house designated for the president of the school. However, after a few years, the land it was on was needed for a new seminary and that house too was razed. Finally, most painful of all, two years ago, our family house, our home for more than 70 years, was sold and the new owners (sensitive enough to ask our family’s permission to do so) burned the old house to the ground.

That’s a lot of roots disappearing: my elementary school, my high school, the town our family was connected to, both seminaries from which I graduated, the college where I first taught, both Oblate houses I’d spent wonderful years within, and the family house – all gone, razed to the ground, nothing left to go back to.

What does that do to you? Well, there’s nostalgia, yes. How I would again love to walk into any of those buildings, feel what they once meant to me, and bask in memories. None of that can happen. Each of these is a mini death, leaving a part of my soul rootless. On the other hand, more positively, all that unwanted letting go is helping prepare me for an ultimate letting go, when I will be facing my own death, and not just some haunting nostalgia.

As well, this has taught me something else of substance. Buildings and houses may disappear, but home is not contingent on them. Rene Fumoleau, a poet among the Dene tribes, shares how he once visited a family the day after their house had been destroyed by fire and had this conversation with a young girl:

The next day I visited the burned out family.
What could I say after such a tragedy?
I tried with the ten-year old daughter:
              ‘Joan, you must feel terrible without home.’
The young girl knew better:
              ‘Oh, we still have our home,
              But we have no house to put on it.” (Home – Here I Sit)

Yes, we can still have a home even without our former house on it.

The Therapy of a Public Life

June 26, 2023

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.

Post-Sophistication

June 19, 2023

A generation ago, J.D. Salinger wrote a novel, The Catcher in the Rye, which became immensely popular, as well as becoming required reading in most undergraduate literature programs. It deserved both. It’s a great piece of literature.

Here’s the image: A man is watching children playing in a rye field with an exuberance and delight that only innocent young children can have. He thinks ahead, picturing how each of them will eventually lose the joy of that innocence and will, like the rest of us adults, become jaded and unhappy. He imagines how wonderful it would be if he could protect these children from growing up and just keep them there forever, innocent, playing in a rye field, spared of all the mess, sin, compromise, and unhappiness of adults. A fantasy which touches the heart.

It also touches something at the heart of the tension between conservatives and liberals. Conservatives and liberals disagree on most everything, except one thing: both are unhappy with the direction in which things are going.

For conservatives, the present moment is seen as a falling away, from a faith, a stability, and a happiness that supposedly we once had. Their instinct is to return to what once was, to what once (in their view) held things together. What would fix things, they believe, is a certain retreat to a past innocence. At the root of that lies that exact nostalgia inside the man watching those children playing in The Catcher in the Rye, namely, that leaving behind the innocence of childhood for the sophistication of an adult, brings with it instability, mess, and unhappiness. Sophistication comes at too high a price, and so we need to be protected from certain kinds of learning and experience.

Liberals tend to have the opposite instinct and proclivity. For them, we live in a social, religious, moral, and technological milieu that sets us above the past, irrespective of the mess this sometimes brings. We are simply advanced in ways that past generations, whatever their values and sincerity, were not. Any retreat would be a regression, an intellectual and moral loss. The path towards maturity is forward, and we must have the courage to travel that road, notwithstanding the upheavals that come with it (you can’t make an omelet without scrambling an egg). The road forward leads through adult experience and learning, beyond the shelter of the rye field. That’s the road that leads to maturity and gets us beyond the narrowness, bigotry, racism, sexism, and ignorance that undergird much false fear, rigidity, injustice, and violence in the world.

Who’s right? In what direction should we be moving? What’s the way forward?

My own hunch is that we will get to where we should be going by following neither the instinct of the liberal nor that of the conservative fully. While both emanate from a healthy intuition, both have shown themselves inadequate vis-a-vis the road to maturity, peace, and happiness. Liberals are right in intuiting that moving back to the past is not the answer, just as conservatives are right in believing that simply becoming ever more sophisticated is no answer either. Both are partially right and partially wrong. Where should we be going?

We must move forward, though not in the way popular liberal ideology tends to conceive of this, that is, as salvation through sophistication alone. We must move forward, but in a way that ultimately takes us beyond sophistication to a second naivete. What is meant by this?

This: If you ask a naive child: “Do you believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny?”, she answers: “Yes.” If you ask a bright child the same question, she answers: “No.” But if you ask an even a brighter child that question, she answers: “Yes”. But for a different reason.

The task in life is to move from naivete through sophistication to post-sophistication. Both conservatives and liberals need to challenge themselves (and each other) in the light of this truth (which is found both in the Gospels and in the best insights in anthropology). God and nature do not intend for us to remain as children all our lives. We are meant to grow, to experience life, to sort out the critical questions that are inside us, to become sophisticated. Admittedly, in that process we will lose much of our innocence. And, as Adam and Eve found out after they ate the fruit, when our eyes are opened, happiness does not exactly follow.

Where is happiness found? In that place where it is possible again to believe in Santa and the Easter Bunny, in a place of post-sophistication. There are various vocabularies within which to express this, but they all point to the same thing. They all have the same progression:

Naivete – Sophistication – Second naivete

First fervor – Disillusionment – Mature love

Pre-critical – Critical – Post-critical

Innocence – Lost innocence – Revirginized

Childish – Grown Up – Childlike

Happy – Disenchanted – Peaceful

Naive fool – Sophisticated fool – Holy fool We once were naive fools. Then we became sophisticated fools. It’s time to become post-sophisticated fools.

The Taste of Banter and Wine

June 12, 2023

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!”

Blessing Others as the Endgame of Sexuality

June 5, 2023

Although not too many people might recognize this, the #MeToo movement is, in essence, a strong advocate for chastity. If chastity can be defined as standing before another with reverence, respect, and patience, then most everything about the #MeToo movement speaks explicitly of the non-negotiable importance of chastity and implicitly for what our sexuality is ultimately meant to do, namely, to bless others rather than to exploit them.

What #MeToo has helped expose is how sex is often used as power, power to force sexual consent, power to either allow or block someone from advancement in her life and career, and power to make someone’s workplace a place of comfort and safety or a place of discomfort and fear. This has been going on since the beginning of time and remains the sexual tool today of many people in positions of power and prestige: Hollywood directors, television personalities, university professors, famous athletes, employers, spiritual leaders, and persons of every kind who wield power and prestige. Too often, persons with power and prestige let themselves (however unconsciously) be taken over by the ancient archetype of the king, where the belief was that all the women in the land belonged to the king, and he had sexual privilege by divine right. The #MeToo movement is saying that this time in history is over and something else is being asked from persons in power, authority, and prestige. What’s being asked?

In a word, blessing. What God and nature ask of power is that it bless rather than exploit, use privilege to enhance rather than harass, and create a space of security rather than a place of fear. Imagine, for example, if in every one of those high profile instances where a Hollywood producer, a television personality, a star athlete, or a spiritual leader was indicted for harassing, exploiting, and assaulting women, those men, instead of wielding power and prestige, had used that power instead to help those women gain more access to security and success rather than (pardon the terminology) hitting on them. Imagine if they had used their power to bless those women, to simply admire their beauty and energy, make them feel safer, and help them in their careers. How different things would be today both for those women and for those men. Both would be happier, healthier, and have a deeper appreciation of sex. Why? What’s the connection between blessing and sex?

To bless a person is to do two things: First, it is to give that person the gaze of non-exploitive admiration, to admire him or her without any angle of self-interest. Next, to bless someone is to use your own power and prestige to help make that other person’s life safer and secure and help that person flourish in his or her dreams and endeavors. To bless another person is to say to him or her: I delight in your beauty and energy. Now, what can I do for you that helps you (and isn’t in my self-interest)? To bless another in this way is the highest expression of sexuality and of chastity. How so?

Sexuality is more than having sex and chastity is more than abstinence. Sexuality is the drive inside us for community, friendship, wholeness, family, creativity, play, transpersonal meaning, altruism, enjoyment, delight, sexual fulfilment, being immortal, and everything that takes us beyond our aloneness. But this has developmental stages. Its earlier stages focus on having sex, on emotional intimacy, and on generativity, on giving birth and nurturing. Its later stages focus on blessing, on admiration, and on giving away so that others might have more.

Dare I say this? The most mature expression of sexuality on this planet is not a couple making perfect love, wonderful and sacred though that is. Rather, it is a grandparent looking at a grandchild with a love that is purer and more selfless than any love he or she has ever experienced before, a love without any self-interest, which is only admiration, selflessness, and delight. In that moment, this person is mirroring God looking at the initial creation and exclaiming: It is good; it is very good! What follows then is that this person, like God, will try to open paths, even at the cost of death, so that another’s life may flourish.

God and nature intended sex for many purposes – intimacy, delight, generativity, community, and pleasure – but this has many modalities. Perhaps its ultimate expression is that of admiration, of someone looking at another person or at the world with the sheer gaze of admiration, with everything inside of that person somehow saying: Wow! I delight in you! Your energy enriches this world! How can I help you? The higher integrates and cauterizes the lower. There are no temptations to violate the beauty and dignity of the other when we can give her or him the sheer gaze of admiration.

Admiration and blessing are the endgame of sexuality. Would that those in power indicted by #MeToo had admired rather than exploited.

Wonder Has Left the Building

May 29, 2023

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.

Praying as a Christian

May 22, 2023

There are four distinct kinds of Christian prayer: There is Incarnational prayer, Mystical prayer, Affective prayer, and Priestly prayer. What are these? How are they different from each other?

Incarnational Prayer. St. Paul invites us to “pray always”. How is this possible? We can’t always be praying – or can we? What Paul is inviting us to do is what Jesus asks of us when he tells us to “read the signs of the times”. In asking this, Jesus is not suggesting we read every political, social, or economic analysis we can find. Rather, he is inviting us to look for the finger of God in every event in our lives. My parents’ generation called this being attuned to “divine providence”, that is, looking at every event in our lives and the major events of our world, and asking ourselves: “What is God saying in this event?”

One must be careful in doing this. God doesn’t cause accidents, sickness, heartbreak, wars, famine, earthquakes, global warming, or pandemics; neither does God cause lottery wins or our favorite sports team to win a championship, but God speaks through them. We pray incarnationally when we pick up that voice.

Mystical Prayer. Praying mystically is not a question of having extraordinary spiritual experiences – visions, raptures, ecstasies. Mysticism is not about these things. Mystical experience is simply being touched by God in a way that is deeper than what we can grasp and understand in our intellect and imagination, a knowing beyond head and heart. Mystical knowing works this way: Your head tells you what you think is wise to do; your heart tells you what you want to do; and your mystical center tells you what you have to do. For example, C.S. Lewis, in describing his conversion experience, tells us that the first time he knelt down and acknowledged Christ, he didn’t do it with enthusiasm. Rather, in his famous words, he knelt down “as the most reluctant convert in the history of Christendom.” What compelled him to do that? His words: “God’s harshness is kinder than human gentleness, and God’s compulsion is our liberation.” We pray mystically whenever we hear and listen to the most compelling voice of all inside us, the one that tells us where God and duty call us.

Affective Prayer. All devotional prayers (adoration of Christ, litanies, rosaries, prayers asking for the intercession of Mary or a saint, and the like) are ultimately affective prayer, as are all forms of meditation and contemplation. They all have the same intentionality. What is that? In the Gospel of John, the first words out of Jesus’ mouth are a question. People are looking at him in curiosity, and he asks them, “What are you looking for?” That question remains throughout the rest of the gospel as an undergirding. A lot of things are happening on the surface, but underneath, there remains always the one nagging, restless question: “What are you looking for?”

Jesus answers that question explicitly at the end of the gospel, on the morning of the resurrection. Mary of Magdala comes looking for him, carrying spices with which to embalm his dead body. Jesus meets her, but she does not recognize him. He then repeats the question with which he had opened the gospel: “What are you looking for?” and gives us its real answer. He pronounces her name in love: “Mary”. In doing this, he reveals what she and every one of us are forever looking for, namely, God’s voice, one-to-one, speaking unconditional love, lovingly saying our name. At the end of the day, that’s what we all are looking for, to hear God pronounce our name in love. All devotional prayer, whether it be for ourselves, for others, or for the world, has this as its ultimate aim.

Priestly Prayer. Priestly prayer is the prayer of Christ through the church for the world. The Christian belief is that Christ is still gathering us together around his word and the Eucharist. And we believe that whenever we come together, in a church or elsewhere, to gather around the scriptures or to celebrate the Eucharist, we are entering into that prayer. This is generally called liturgical prayer; this kind of prayer is Christ’s prayer, not our own. Moreover, it’s not a prayer first of all for ourselves or even for the church, but one for the world – “My flesh is food for the life of the world”.

We pray liturgically, priestly prayer, whenever we gather to celebrate the scriptures, the Eucharist, or any sacrament. As well we pray in this way when, in community or privately, we pray what is called the Liturgy of the Hours or the Divine Office (Lauds and Vespers). We are asked to pray regularly for the world in this way by virtue of the priesthood conferred on us in our baptism.

A mature, spiritually healthy Christian prays in these four ways, and it can be helpful to distinguish clearly among these kinds of prayers so as to be praying always and praying with Christ.

On Not Being Defensive

May 15, 2023

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.

Quiet Prophecy

May 8, 2023

Christian discipleship calls all of us to be prophetic, to be advocates for justice, to help give voice to the poor, and to defend truth. But not all of us, by temperament or by particular vocation, are called to civil disobedience, public demonstrations, and the picket lines, as were Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King, Daniel Berrigan, and other such prophetic figures. All are asked to be prophetic, but for some this means more wielding a basin and towel than wielding a placard.

There is a powerful way of being prophetic that, while seemingly quiet and personal, is never private. And its rules are the same as the rules for those who, in the name of Jesus, are wielding placards and risking civil disobedience. What are those rules, rules for a Christian prophecy?

First, a prophet makes a vow of love, not of alienation. There is a critical distinction between stirring up trouble and offering prophecy out of love, a distinction between operating out of egoism and operating out of faith and hope. A prophet risks misunderstanding, but never seeks it, and a prophet seeks always to have a mellow rather than an angry heart.

Second, a prophet draws his or her cause from Jesus and not from an ideology. Ideologies can carry a lot of truth and be genuine advocates for justice. But, people can walk away from an ideology, seeing it precisely as an ideology, as political correctness, and thus justify their rejection of the truth it carries. Sincere people often walk away from Greenpeace,from Feminism, or Liberation Theology, from Critical Race Theory, and many other ideologies which in fact carry a lot of truth because those truths are wrapped inside an ideology. Sincere people will not walk away from Jesus. In our struggle for justice and truth, we must be ever vigilant that we are drawing our truth from the Gospels and not from some ideology.

Third, a prophet is committed to non-violence. A prophet is always seeking to personally disarm rather than to arm, to be in the words of Daniel Berrigan, a powerless criminal in a time of criminal power. A prophet takes Jesus seriously when he asks us, in the face of violence, to turn the other cheek. A prophet incarnates in his or her way of living the eschatological truth that in heaven there will be no guns.

Fourth, a prophet articulates God’s voice for the poor and for the earth. Any preaching, teaching, or political action that is not good news for the poor is not the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Jesus came to bring good news to the poor, to “widows, orphans, and strangers” (biblical code for the most vulnerable groups in society). As Pastor Forbes once famously said: Nobody goes to heaven without a letter of reference from the poor. We are not meant to be the church compatible.

Fifth, a prophet doesn’t foretell the future but properly names the present in terms of God’s vision of things. A prophet reads where the finger of God is within everyday life, in function of naming our fidelity or infidelity to God and in function of pointing to our future in terms of God’s plan for us. This is Jesus’ challenge to read the signs of the times.

Sixth, a prophet speaks out of a horizon of hope. A prophet draws his or her vision and energy not from wishful thinking nor from optimism, but from hope. And Christian hope is not based on whether the world situation is better or worse on a given day. Christian hope is based on God’s promise, a promise that was fulfilled in the resurrection of Jesus, which assures us that we can entrust ourselves to love, truth, and justice, even if the world kills us for it. The stone will always roll back from the tomb.

Seventh, a prophet’s heart and cause are never a ghetto. Jesus assures us that in his Father’s house there are many rooms. Christian prophecy must ensure that no person or group can make God their own tribal or national deity. God is equally solicitous vis-à-vis all people and all nations.

Finally, a prophet doesn’t just speak or write about injustice, a prophet also acts and acts with courage, even at the cost of death. A prophet is a wisdom figure, a Magus or a Sophia, who will act, no matter the cost in lost friends, lost prestige, lost freedom, or danger to his or her own life. A prophet has enough altruistic love, hope, and courage to act, no matter the cost. A prophet never seeks martyrdom but accepts it if it finds him or her.

This last counsel is, I believe, the one most challenging for “quiet” prophets. Wisdom figures are not renowned for being on the picket lines, but in that lies the challenge. A prophet can discern at what time to park the placard and bring out the basin and towel – and at what time to lay aside the basin and towel and pick up the placard.

Of Innocence, Purity and Chastity

May 1, 2023

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.

Generous Orthodoxy

April 24, 2023

There’s a saying attributed to Attila the Hun, a 5^th century ruler infamous for his cruelty, which reads this way: For me to be happy, it’s not just important that I succeed; it’s also important that everyone else fails. I suspect that Atilla the Hun was not the author of that, but, no matter, there’s a lesson here.

The Gospels tell us that God’s mercy is unlimited and unconditional, that God has no favorites, that God is equally solicitous for everyone’s happiness and salvation, and that God does not ration his gift of the Spirit. If that is true, then we need to ask ourselves why we so frequently tend to withhold God’s Spirit from others in our judgments – particularly in our religious judgments. We are blind to the fact that sometimes there’s a little of Attila the Hun in us.

For example, how prone are we to think this way? For my religion to be the true, it’s important to me that other religions are not true! For my Christian denomination to be faithful to Christ, it’s important that all the other denominations be considered less faithful. For the Eucharist in my denomination to be valid, it’s important that the Eucharist in other denominations be invalid or less valid. And, since I’m living a certain sustained fidelity in my faith and moral life, it’s important to me that everyone else who isn’t living as faithfully does not get to heaven or is assigned to a secondary place in heaven.

Well, we aren’t the first disciples of Jesus to think this way and to be challenged by him in our Attila the Hun proclivities. This is in fact a large part of the lesson in Jesus’ parable regarding an over-generous landowner who paid everyone the same generous wage no matter how much or little each had worked.

We are all familiar with this story. A landowner goes out one morning and hires workers to work in his fields. He hires some early in the morning, some at noon, some in mid-afternoon, and some with only an hour left in the workday. Then he pays them all the same wage – a generous one. The people who worked the full day understandably became resentful, upset that (while their wage was in fact a generous one) they felt it was unfair to them that those who had worked a lot less should also receive an equally generous wage. The landowner in response says to the complainant, “Friend, I am not being unjust to you. Didn’t you agree to this wage? Why are you envious because I am generous?” (Matthew 20, 1-16)

Notice that Jesus addresses the one making the complaint as ‘friend”. That’s a designation for us, we, the ones who are faithfully doing the full day’s work. Note his tone is warm and soft. However, his challenge is less warm and soft: Why are you jealous because God is overly generous? Why is it important to us that because we are doing things right, that God should be hard on those who aren’t? Full disclosure: sometimes I imagine myself, after having lived a life of celibacy, entering heaven and meeting there the world’s most notorious playboy and asking God, “How did he get in here?”, and God answering, “Friend, isn’t heaven a wonderful place! Are you envious because I am generous?” Who knows, we might even meet Attila the Hun there.

One of the core values held by a certain group of Quakers is something they call generous orthodoxy. I like the combination of those two words. Generosity speaks of openness, hospitality, empathy, wide tolerance, and of sacrificing some of ourselves for others. Orthodoxy speaks of certain non-negotiable truths, of keeping proper boundaries, of staying true to what you believe, and of not compromising truth for the sake of being nice. These two are often pitted against each other as opposites, but they are meant to be together. Holding ground on our truth, keeping proper boundaries, and refusing to compromise even at the risk of not being nice is one side of the equation, but the full equation requires us to be also fully respectful and gracious regarding other people’s truth, cherished beliefs, and boundaries.

And this is not an unhealthy syncretism, if what the other person holds as truth does not contradict what we hold – although it might be very different and may not in our judgment be nearly as full and rich as what we hold.

Hence, you can be a Christian, convinced that Christianity is the truest expression of religion in the world without making the judgment that other religions are false. You can be a Roman Catholic, convinced that Roman Catholicism is the truest and fullest expression of Christianity, and your Eucharist is the real presence of Jesus, without making the judgment that other Christian denominations are not valid expressions of Christ and do not have a valid Eucharist. There’s no contradiction there.

You can be right, without that being contingent on everyone else being wrong!

What Really is Despair?

April 17, 2023

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 that 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. Many of us, I suspect, are familiar with these words:

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.

Recently while giving an interview on suicide, I was asked whether I considered suicide an act of despair. I answered unequivocally in the negative, at least for most suicides, and raised this question in return: What really is despair?What does it mean to despair?

Despair comes from the Latin word meaning “to be without hope.” Dictionaries generally define despair as a verb which means to abandon hope or to lose heart in the face of a difficult situation. I have no difficulty with that definition. What I have difficulty with and what I submit needs to be radically re-examined is how this has been understood both in our churches and in society, namely, as the ultimate moral and religious failure, the ultimate sin against God and against ourselves. Despair has all too often been understood as the one unforgivable sin, the absolute worst state within which one could die. In brief, despair has been understood as the worst single thing a person could do.

This, I believe, needs a second look, both in terms of how we understand our human condition and especially in how we understand God. When someone is so crushed in spirit by circumstance, unfairness, cruelty, sickness, pain, accident, or by another person’s sin so as to be unable for find any seeds of hope inside himself or herself, is this really a moral choice? Is this a moral failure? Is this really the worst of all sins, the ultimate unforgivable blasphemy? Sadly, that has often been our view.

There’s an old saying that God doesn’t send us more than we can handle. I accept that. God never sends us more than we can handle, but circumstance, accident, oppression, and nature sometimes do. There’s a healthy iconoclasm in the title of Kate Bowler’s book, Everything Happens For a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved. We must be careful how we understand pious expressions such as, God never sends us more than we can handle.

The Psalms tell us that God is particularly close to those who are crushed in spirit and that God will save them. Jesus makes this central to his teaching and ministry. Not only does he have a special affection for those who are broken in spirit, he identifies his presence with their brokenness (Matthew 25) and assures us that they will enter the Kingdom of Heaven before the rich, the strong, and the powerful. For Jesus, the broken are God’s specially loved little ones.

Given that truth, do we really believe that God will send someone to hell who dies crushed in spirit, seemingly without hope? Do we really believe that God would send Fantine to hell? What kind of God would do this? What kind of God would look at a person so crushed in life so as to lose all hope and see this as the ultimate insult to his love and mercy? What kind of God would look at a person crushed in spirit and see him or her as blaspheming the human condition? Certainly not the God that Jesus taught us to believe in.

The same holds true for how we need to look at this from the perspective of human understanding and empathy. What kind of person looks upon someone else’s brokenness and sees terrible sin and blasphemy? What kind of person places moral blame on someone who through a series of tragic circumstances lies dying in a sea of disappointment, pain, and broken dreams? What kind of person would watch Les Miserables and suspect that Fantine went to hell?

In Mark’s Gospel, just before he dies on the cross, Jesus cries out, My God, My God, why have you forsaken me? Then he hands over his spirit to his Father. In our classic understanding of this text, we generally explain what happened there in this way. Jesus was tempted towards despair, but he found the strength to resist and instead, in hope, surrendered himself to God’s mercy. I suspect that in the end this is what most people who die (seemingly having given up hope) also do, that is, crushed in spirit, they surrender to the unknown – which is God’s embrace.

We need to be far more understanding in the judgments we make vis-a-vis despair. There are storms we cannot weather!

Struggling to Give Birth to Hope

April 10, 2023

After Jesus rose from the dead, his first appearances were to women. Why? One obvious reason might be that it was women who followed him to his death on Good Friday, while the men largely abandoned him. As well, it was women, not men, who set off for his tomb on Easter morning, hoping to anoint his dead body with spices – so it was women who were in the garden when he first appeared. But there is, I believe, a deeper and more symbolic reason. Women are the midwives. It is generally women who attend to new birth and women who are more paramount in initially nurturing new life in its infancy.

In any birth a midwife can be helpful. When a baby is born, normally the head pushes its way through the birth canal first, opening the way for the body to follow. A good midwife can be very helpful at this time, helping to ease that passage through the birth canal, helping ensure that the baby begins to breathe, and helping the mother to immediately begin to nurture that new life. A midwife can sometimes mean the difference between life and death, and she always makes the birth easier and healthier.

Jesus’ resurrection birthed new life into our world, and in its infancy that life had to be specially midwifed, both in its emergence and in the initial breaths it took in this world. The resurrection birthed many things, and these had to be midwifed; initially by the women to whom Jesus first appeared, then by the apostles who left us their eyewitness accounts of the risen Jesus, then by the early church, then by its martyrs, then by the lived faith of countless women and men through the centuries, and sometimes too by theologians and spiritual writers. We still need to midwife what was born in the resurrection.

And many things were born in that event – an event as radical as the original creation in what it gave birth to. The resurrection of Jesus was the “first day” a second time, the second time light separated from darkness. Indeed, the world measures time by the resurrection. We are in the year 2023 since it happened. (Christianity was born with that event. New time began then. But scholars calculated that Jesus was thirty-three years old when he died and so they added thirty-three years so as to begin new time with the date of his birth.)

Prominent within what the resurrection gives birth to and what needs still to be midwifed, is hope. The resurrection gives birth to hope. The women in the Gospels who first met the resurrected Jesus were the first to be given a true reason for hope and were the first to act as midwifes of that new birth. So too must we. We need to become midwives of hope. But what is hope and how is it given birth in the resurrection?

Genuine hope is never to be confused with either wishful thinking or temperamental optimism. Unlike hope, wishful thinking isn’t based on anything. It’s pure wishing. Optimism, for its part, takes its root either in a natural temperament (“I always see the bright side of things”) or on how good or bad the evening news looks on a given day. And we know how that can change from day to day. Hope has a different basis.

Here’s an example: Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a deeply faith-filled scientist, was once challenged by an agnostic colleague after making a presentation within which he tried to show how the story of salvation history fits perfectly with the insights of science regarding the origins of the universe and the process of evolution. Teilhard went on to suggest, in line with Ephesians 1, 3-10, that the end of the whole evolutionary process will be the union of all things in one great final harmony in Christ. An agnostic colleague challenged him to this effect: That’s a wonderfully optimistic little schema you propose. But suppose we blow up the world with an atomic bomb. What happens to your optimist schema then? Teilhard answered in words to this effect: If we blow up the world with an atomic bomb, that will be a set-back, perhaps for millions of years. But what I propose is going to happen, not because I wish it or because I am optimistic that it will happen. It will happen because God promised it – and in the resurrection God showed that God has the power to deliver on that promise.

What the women who first met the risen Jesus experienced was hope, the kind of hope that is based on God’s promise to vindicate good over evil and life over death, no matter the circumstance, no matter the obstacle, no matter how awful the news might look on a given day, no matter death itself, and no matter whether we are optimistic or pessimistic. They were the initial midwives helping to give birth to that hope. That task is now ours.

Easter Light

April 3, 2023

The earth was dark twice. Once at the original creation before God first created light. But later there was an even deeper darkness, on Good Friday, between the 6^th and 9^th hour, when we were crucifying God, and as Jesus dying on the cross cried out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me!”. Utter darkness. In response to that, God created the most staggering light of all – the resurrection.

It is interesting to look at how scripture describes the creation of original light. The Bible opens with these words: “In the beginning God created heaven and earth. Now the earth was a formless void and God breathed over the waters. God said, ‘Let there be light’ and there was light.” A combination of God’s breath and God’s word produced the first light. The ancients identified God’s presence very much with light. For them, God was the antithesis of all darkness and, indeed, the symbol of God’s fidelity was the rainbow, namely, refracted light, light broken open to reveal its spectacular inner beauty.

But it got dark a second time! The Gospels tell us that as Jesus hung on the cross, though it was midday, darkness beset the whole land for three hours. We don’t know exactly what occurred here historically. Was the entire earth plunged into darkness? Perhaps. After all, the earth was crucifying God, and God is light! Irrespective of how literally or not we take this, what happened on Good Friday triggered a different kind of darkness, a moral one – the darkness of godlessness, hatred, paranoia, fear, misguided religion, cruelty, idolatry, ideology, and violence. This is the most blinding darkness of all.

What was God’s response? God’s response to the darkness of Good Friday was to say a second time, Let there be light! The resurrection of Jesus is that new light, one which at the end of the day eclipses all other lights.

It is interesting to compare how scripture describes God creating the new light of the resurrection with how God created the original light at the origins of creation. The Gospel of John has a wonderfully revealing passage that describes Jesus’ first appearance to the whole community after his resurrection. It tells us that on the evening of Easter Sunday the disciples (representing here the church) were gathered in a room with the doors locked because of fear. Jesus comes to them, passing right through their locked doors, and stands in the middle of their huddled fearful circle and says to them, “Peace be with you!” And after saying this, he breathes on them and says: “Receive the Holy Spirit.”

Note the parallels to the original creation story. For the writer of John’s Gospel, this huddling in fear behind locked doors is the darkness of Good Friday, a moral “formless void”. And Jesus brings light to that darkness in the same way light was brought to the original creation, through God’s word and God’s breath. Jesus’ words, “Peace be with you!” are the resurrected Jesus’ way of saying, “Let there be light!” Then, just as at the original creation God’s breath begins to order the physical chaos, Jesus’ breath, the Holy Spirit, begins to order the moral chaos, continually turning darkness into light – hatred into love, bitterness into graciousness, fear into trust, false religion into true worship, ideology into truth, and vengeance into forgiveness.

The staggering new light that Jesus brings into our world in the resurrection is also one of the things that our Christian creed refers to in its stunning phrase that, in the darkness of Good Friday, Jesus “descended into hell.” What’s meant by this? Into what hell did he descend? Simply put, the new light of the resurrection (unlike natural light that can be blocked out) can go through every locked door, every blocked entrance, every impenetrable cell, every circle of hatred, every suicidal depression, every paralyzing anger, every kind of darkness of the soul, and even through sin itself, and breathe out peace. This light can penetrate into hell itself.

Good Friday was bad long before it was good. We crucified God and plunged the world into darkness at midday. But God created light a second time, a light that cannot be extinguished even if we crucify God – and we have never really stopped doing that! Good Friday still happens every day. But, beyond wishful thinking and natural optimism, we live in hope because we now know God’s response to any moral darkness, God can generate, resurrection, the creation of new light, life beyond death.

The renowned mystic Julian of Norwich coined the famous phrase: In the end, all will be well, and all will be well, and every manner of being will be well. To which Oscar Wilde added, And if it isn’t well, then it is still not the end. The resurrection of Jesus has brought a new light into the world, one that proclaims against all counter claims that light still triumphs over darkness, love over hatred, order over chaos, and heaven over hell.

Choosing our own Storm

March 27, 2023

“We only live, only suspire, consumed by either fire or fire.”

T.S. Eliot wrote those words and, with them, suggests that our choice in this life is not between calm and storm, but between two kinds of storms.

He is right, of course, but sometimes it is good to vary the metaphor: We live in this world caught between two great gods, very different from each other: chaos and order.
Chaos is the god of fire, of fertility, of risk, of creativity, of novelty, of letting go. Chaos is the god of wildness, the god who brings disorder and mess. Most artists worship at his shrine. He is also the god of sleeplessness, of restlessness, and disintegration. In fact, chaos works precisely by disintegration of what is stable. Chaos is the god more worshipped by those of a liberal temperament.

Order is the god of water, of prudence, of chastity, of common sense, of stability, of hanging on. He is the god of pragma. He likes systems, clarity, and a roof that doesn’t leak. He is more worshipped by those of a conservative temperament. Few artists pay him homage, but the corporate and ecclesiastical worlds more than compensate for this. By and large, he is their God. He can also be the god of boredom, timidity, and rigidity. With him, you will never disintegrate, but you might suffocate. However, while he does not generate a lot of excitement, this god keeps a lot of people sane and alive.

Chaos and order, fire, and water, don’t much like each other. However, both demand the respect accorded a deity. Unfortunately, like all one-sided deities, each wants all of us, but to give that submission is dangerous.

Allegiance to either, to the exclusion of the other, not infrequently leads to a self-destruction. When chaos reigns unchecked by order, moral and emotional disintegration soon enough unleash a darkness from which there is often no recovery. That’s what it means to fall apart, to become unglued. Conversely, when order totally dispels chaos, a certain self-annihilating virtue, posturing as God, begins to drain life of delight and possibility.

It is dangerous to worship at only the shrine. Both gods are needed. The soul, the church, practical life, the structures of society, and love itself need the tempering that comes from both fire and water, order, and chaos. Too much fire and things just burn up, disintegrate. Too much water and nothing ever changes, petrification sets in. Too much letting go and the sublimity of love lies prostituted; too much timidity and love shrivels up like a dried prune. No, both gods are needed—in practical life, in romantic life, in ecclesiology, in morality, in business and in government. Risk and prudence, rock music and Gregorian chant, both contain some whisperings of God. It is not by blind chance that we are caught between the two.

This should not be surprising because God, the God of Jesus Christ, is the God of both—fire and water, chaos, and order, liberal and conservative, chastity and prodigal love. God is the great stillpoint and God is also the principle of novelty, freshness, and resurrection.

Thomas Aquinas once defined the human soul as made up of two principles, the principle of energy and the principle of integration. One principle keeps us alive and the other keeps us glued together. These two principles, while in tension with each other, desperately need each other. A healthy soul keeps us energized, eager for life, but a healthy soul also keeps us solidly glued together, knowing who we are when we look at ourselves in a mirror. Our souls need to provide us with both energy and integrity, fire, and glue.

God is love, and love wants and needs both order and chaos. Love wants always to build a home, to settle down, to create a calm, stable and chaste place. Something inside us wants the calm of paradise and thus love is about order. It wants to avoid emotional and moral disintegration. But love is also about chaos. There is something in love that wants to let go, that wants to be taken, that wants to surrender its boundaries, that wants the new, the foreign, and that wants to let go of its old self. That’s a fertile principle within love that has kept the human race going!

Our God hallows both of these gods, chaos and order, and that is why it is healthy that both be kept in a healthy tension. To be healthy, we need to bring them together within ourselves and we need to bring them together not as we would bring two parties to meet at a negotiating table, but as a high and a low-pressure system meet to produce a storm. After a storm, the weather is clear.

In the tempest there is life and there is God. In it we are initiated, initiated through immersion into the intense fires of desire and the ecstatic waters of surrender.