A recent issue of Sojourners magazine (July, 1994), featured articles by two prominent American Roman Catholics, Rosemary Radford Ruether, a leading feminist, and Richard Rohr, the articulate young Franciscan founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation. Both had been asked to respond to this question: Why do you stay in the Church?

That, given the tensions within Catholicism today, is a good question. Many people, especially people who have been as critical of some of the things happening inside of the Church as have Ruether and Rohr, have left the church, saying that they can no longer believe in, nor stay in, in an institution that has these flaws. Those participating in this exodus cite a bevy of reasons: the church’s failure to practice justice within its own house, the church’s failure to afford women full equality in structure, recent sexual scandals among the clergy, a history that has always contained elements of injustice, racism, and hypocrisy. “Why stay?” they ask, “surely this institution is not what Christ intended to mediate grace!”

But Ruether and Rohr are not two persons who think this way.  Both make a strong and a clear option to stay with the church, despite its faults – and the reasons each gives for staying, to my mind, offer a valuable corrective for a generation of Catholics that can too easily lose its balance.

Ruether begins her response by giving a devastating critique of the church. By the time she is finished listing all that is wrong with Roman Catholicism as an institution, you are left wondering as to what’s still left standing. In the face of all of that, she asks: “Why stay?”

So why does she stay? Because she still sees grace present in all of this and she says that the proper response to all that’s wrong in the church is not to leave it, but to grow up. “I suspect that part of our dismay at recognizing the fallibility of the church is our reluctance to grow up, and the way in which certain kinds of ecclesial ‘spirituality’ operate as spiritual infantilization, rather than maturity in faith. We are shocked at clerical and corporate ecclesiastical evils a little the way children are shocked and demoralized to discover that their parents are fallible. We can depart in sorrow looking for another impeccable father (or mother), perhaps in an all-wise guru or a preacher of an inerrant Bible. Or we can grow up and become responsible for the Church of Christ. … We can look steadily and without denial at the records of our corporate apostasy, not as the defeat of the gospel, but as the revelation of God’s amazing power to deliver us from even the most monumental efforts to defeat God’s grace.”       

Rohr takes a slightly different track, but is equally insightful. He, too, begins by admitting the church’s faults. He quotes Romano Guardini in his contention that “the church has always been the cross that Christ is crucified on.” He states that it is easy enough to create a good rationale for leaving the church and adds: “In fact, with the information I have acquired, I might even hurry you out the door.”

But Rohr stays with the church, and he urges others to do so. Why? Because for him it is, in the end, the only institution that ultimately offers hope – and it does this despite its flaws: Those of us who are of sincere will are, he asserts, “trying to preach good news to many disparate groups in our world: youth who want both inspiration and structure, feminists who must know that they have an essential truth, patriarchs who need to be challenged but not dismissed, the simple who need reassurance, the broken who don’t need more words but a healing touch, the seekers who need both depth and patience, the alienated who both need and fear ‘home’, gays and lesbians who need acceptance before agenda, males who need soul work, parents who need skills, the oppressed who need justice and solidarity, believers who need to believe again.”

And, again Rohr’s words, “where else but in the great mystery of church, the living Body of Christ, can all of these find a common hope?” The church has its faults but, outside of it, what have we got in a world that isn’t working? Private choices? Ideology? Pluralism without purpose? Individuation without community? In the end, we are before the church like Peter was before Christ: “Where else can we go?”

But, valuable as these perspectives are, in the end, it is two words that provide for both Ruether and Rohr the sufficient reason for staying in the church – grace and forgiveness.

James Hillman, who is perhaps America’s most fertile thinker, suggests that it is our inferiorities that build up our souls. His view is that it is not our strengths that give us depth and character, but our weaknesses.

Passing strange, yet strangely true, but more of us are rendered superficial by our successes than by our failures, more of us are torn apart by our strengths than by our weaknesses. Why is it like that?

Reflecting on this, I recall a time some years back when I was a young student studying psychology and having, one evening, the privileged experience of being at a seminar with the renowned Polish psychologist, Casmir Dabrowski.

He had just given us a lecture on a concept which he called “positive disintegration.” His theory was that we grow by, first, falling apart. At one point, I raised this objection: “Can’t we also grow by being built up by our successes, by taking in positive affirmation and letting it purify us of our selfishness?”

His answer supports Hillman: “Theoretically, yes; we can grow through our successes, just as easily as we can through our failures.

“But I can say this, through more than 40 years of psychiatric practice I have rarely seen it. Almost always deep growth takes place through the opposite—our death, our losses, our dark nights of the soul.”

He, like Hillman, believed that it is, in the end, our inferiorities that build up our souls. Hence, an important exercise in the spiritual life is that of learning to listen to our inferiorities.

Thus, for example, it is generally the least gifted member of the family, the one the family is most publicly ashamed of, more so than the most gifted member of the family, who most enriches a family. Ask any family that has a handicapped member.

Moreover, ask any family who has a handicapped member what they think has given them depth, compassion and understanding? They will, as does Christopher de Vinck in his little masterpiece, The Power of the Powerless, A Brother’s Legacy of Love, tell you that soul comes from inferiority. It is weakness, limit, shame and powerlessness that bring depth.

What has made us deep persons? What has taught us compassion? Our successes? The things we have been praised for? Those qualities of body or mind which make us superior to others? That perfect body that everyone envies us for? That athletic achievement that is one-in-a-million? That summa cum laude that is the envy of our classmates? That perfect home that is the envy of our neighbors? Have these given us soul? Are these what make us interesting?

To the contrary, our souls, precisely in so far as they have depth, strength, compassion and hold interest for others, have been shaped by something quite different: the fear that I will gain weight and end up looking like my mother, that shame that I feel because my teeth aren’t straight, the birthmark that I can’t hide, the blemishes that set me apart, the fat around my waist and hips that humbles me, the fear that I am not smart enough, not interesting enough, that my background isn’t good enough, my phobias, my timidities, my plain and simple inadequacies, these, coupled with the diapers I’ve had to change, the humiliations I endure in my work, in my marriage·and in my family that I am powerless to do anything about, the insults and taunts I received on the playground as a child, my drunken stepfather, these are what give me depth of soul.

It is not that these are, in and of themselves, good; it is just that when we listen to them we grow deep. They build up our souls.

These inferiorities, these humiliations, are not things to be cured from, things to be solved, things to be ignored, things to be buried as private and past shames. They are to be listened to. They are entries into the depth of our souls.

Daniel Berrigan was once asked to give a talk on God. How do we listen to God? He surprised his audience. He gave no theological treatise, he simply described how he goes regularly and sits at a bed­side of a young boy who is deaf, mute, paralysed and unable to react in any way to anything that is around him. He just lies in bed, helpless, powerless, unable to say or do anything.

Berrigan goes and sits by his bedside. Nothing is said and nothing seemingly is exchanged. But, says Berrigan, “I sit by his helplessness and I know that in this powerlessness God is speaking—and speaking in the only way that God can speak in this world!”

Inferiority, powerlessness, humiliation—forgers of depth, of soul, the voice of God!

Several years ago, I attended the funeral of a young man who had been killed in a traffic accident. From nearly every point of view he died in less tha ideal circumstances. He was still very young, not yet 30 years old, had come from a very traditional Catholic family, but had, for the past several years, not been to church, been sexually promiscuous, and died intoxicated. Hardly the paradigm for a Christian death! 

I was the presiding priest at the funeral and as I looked around the congregation, at his family, his relatives, and his friends, I saw not just a deep sadness about his loss, but also a real fear for his salvation. These were good people present, good Christians, who were worried that this young man – whom we all knew and whom we all knew to have, underneath his adolescent irresponsibility, a good, sincere heart – might now be in hell because he had, by all surface appearance, died outside of grace, in serious sin.  A woman, an aunt of his, had commented to me the previous evening, at the wake: “I wish I were God, running the gates of heaven. I would let him in, despite of the way he died … he had such a good heart!” 

Her comment became the basis for my homily within which I assured everyone present that this young man, with his good heart, was, right now, being solidly, lovingly, and joyfully embraced by God – not unlike the prodigal son. If we, with our weak understanding and imperfect compassion were able to see through this young man’s struggles to the goodness of his heart, how much more so God? Sometimes we do not give God much credit for intelligence, compassion, and forgiveness!

We teach that God is unconditional love and seldom, in fact never, take that seriously enough. Our generation likes to believe that we have freed ourselves from some older fears – within which God was sometimes seen too much as Someone with a big stick, ready to punish us for every weakness and infidelity, or as Someone with a big book, recording every one of our sins in view of some great future reckoning. We have moved a bit beyond this conception, though not nearly as much as we give ourselves credit for. By and large, our God is still a vindictive God, a petty God, a stupid, non-compassionate God. In conservative circles, God is hung-up on orthodoxy, of dogma and morals. In liberal circles, God is hung-up on social justice. In neither circle is He very joyous, understanding, and compassionate.

We are still a long ways from appropriating the God that Jesus incarnated. Do we ever really take the unconditional love of God seriously? Do we ever really take the joy of God seriously? Do we ever really believe that God loves us long before any sin we commit and long after every sin we will ever commit? Do we ever really believe that God still, unconditionally, loves Satan, and everyone in hell, and that God is, even now, willing to open the gates of heaven to them? Do we ever really take seriously how wide is the embrace of God? Do we ever believe Julian of Norwich when she tells us that God sits in the centre of heaven, smiling, his face completely relaxed, looking like a marvellous symphony? No. 

Except for rare, graced, moments we still believe in a God who is hyper-serious, wired, intense, pained, disappointed in us, disappointed in the world, and far from unconditionally forgiving. 

Yet the deep struggle of all religion is to enter into the joy of God.

Some years ago, while I was doing a 30-day Ignatian retreat, my director, a wise, though not very old, Jesuit, asked me to meditate the scourging of Jesus by the Roman soldiers. He gave me the text from scripture where Peter out of fear betrays Jesus, denying that he knows him and follows at a safe distance, pretending he is not one of his followers. Then, just after Jesus has been scourged and humiliated, he turns and looks Peter square in the face. 

“In your meditation, pretend you are Peter,” my director instructed me. “Let Jesus look at you, really look you in the face, then come back and tell me what you saw in that face.” I did the meditation a number of times, but every time I contemplated Jesus’ face I saw the face of someone very good who loved me – my father, an intimate friend, my mentor – but the face I saw showed, besides love, something else, pained disappointment in me. My director made me do the meditation over and over until, finally, in a graced moment, I saw what Peter must have seen, and what made him go out into the night and weep bitterly, namely, a softness, acceptance, and non-dissappointment beyond what any human being has ever shown me.

There is a virus sweeping the Western world and infecting most of us with a new disease. It comes complete with a high fever. The sickness? The debility and self-focus that come from the feeling that I am a victim, that I am being hard-done by, that the structures of life are particularly unjust to me.

Today we see this everywhere. It seems no group or individual is immune. Everyone feels the victim.

At an obvious level, we see this played out in the tensions surrounding gender: Both women and men feel duly victimized. Women feel that they have been victimized by men, by patriarchal structures, by biology, by a male God, and by history in general. Because of this, many women carry a deep archetypal anger. Men, and this comes as a surprise to most women, feel that they are victims, that the industrial revolution took them away from their homes and their children and took their fathers away from them. They are the ones who history and circumstance forced to do the killing (of other men in war, of animals for food). Many men today feel a deep archetypal sadness. Both genders feel hard done by and both are far from healthy.

And we see this dynamic everywhere. People who have left their churches often feel hurt by those churches and luxuriate in the scars. Church leaders, on the other hand, themselves feel victimized because they have become the symbolic lightening rods around which virtually every type of anger, shortcoming, and hatred can constellate. Persons on welfare feel victimized by a society which cannot provide them with work, just as those who are working and paying the taxes from which welfare takes its money themselves feel victimized by those whom they perceive as getting a free ride. Almost every ethnic group in the Western world portrays itself as the victim, just as the white majority themselves now feel victimized. Everywhere there is a certain sense of anger, of outrage even, at the unfairness of it all.

Moreover what we see within groups is paralleled in individuals. Most of us have a paranoid conviction of personal injustice. Life has not been fair to us. We have been abused, taken-for-granted, used, not given equal access, or not given a fair shake. We feel victims of racism, sexism, family violence, incest, sexual abuse, physical abuse, emotional abuse, cultural abuse, of something unfair – and we are now reacting to life appropriately, with anger and rage.

Hence we are obsessed with rights, with claiming them, and with suing whoever who might even accidentally or indirectly infringe upon them. North American society, in particular, is obsessed with rights. We have Human Rights Commissions working overtime to deal with the multiple indignations that arise when everyone in a culture feels victimized, analyzes life through a victim-perpetrator typology, is mad at the world, and is in an ideological sulk.

Where does that leave us at the end of the day? Communally, it leaves us fragmented, raw, living a certain emotional apartheid, and unable to build real political and ecclesial communities because, while we have rights, we don’t have equal responsibilities. In the Western world we have Charters of Rights and Human Rights Commissions but we don’t have their necessary counterpart, Charters and Commissions on Human Responsibilities. In a climate where everyone feels victimized the focus will always be on rights. While this may be good and necessary in many non-Western societies at present, in the Western world it is a focus that betrays an unhealthy self-obsession. We are too narcissistic to have the heart and resiliency for community.

Moreover, in our private lives this sense of being the victim has rendered us unhappy and made it hard for us to genuinely reach out in love. Why? Because when I feel victimized, it is impossible to feel gratitude and delight, to count my blessings.  As such, it becomes equally arduous to be unselfish since gratitude, in the end, undergirds all love and virtue. When my primary identity is that of being a victim – “I have been abused! I am a woman! I am a man! I am a minority! I come from a dysfunctional family! My rights have been violated!” – I, like a patient in a hospital, am someone to be ministered to, someone who must first undergo a convalescence before being capable of ministering much to others. When I feel the victim I do not have the resiliency to absorb the necessary give and take of community, nor do I have the heart to live the dialectic of love that Christ proposed, namely, that if I want love and forgiveness I should, first, go out and give them to others. When I feel as victim, I am not likely to be living the Prayer of St. Francis. 

James Hillman, who is perhaps America’s most fertile thinker, suggests that it is our inferiorities that build up our souls. His view is that it is not our strengths that give us depth and character but our weaknesses.

Passing strange, yet strangely true, but more of us are rendered superficial by our successes than by our failures, more of us are torn apart by our strengths than by our weaknesses. Why is it like that?

Reflecting on this, I recall a time some years back when I was a young student studying psychology and having, one evening, the privileged experience of being at a seminar with the renowned Polish psychologist, Casmir Dabrowski. He had just given us a lecture on a concept which he called “positive disintegration”. His theory was that we grow by, first, falling apart. At one point, I raised this objection: “Can’t we also grow by being built up by our successes, by taking in positive affirmation and letting it purify us of our selfishness?”

His answer supports Hillman: “Theoretically, yes, we can grow through our successes, just as easily as we can through our failures. But I can say this, through more than 40 years of psychiatric practice I have rarely seen it. Almost always deep growth takes place through the opposite – our deaths, our losses, our dark nights of the soul.”  He, like Hillman, believed that it is, in the end, our inferiorities that build up our souls. Hence, an important exercise in the spiritual life is that of learning to listen to our inferiorities.

Thus, for example, it is generally the least gifted member of the family, the one the family is most publicly ashamed of, more so than the most gifted member of the family, who most enriches a family. Ask any family that has a handicapped member. Moreover, ask any family who has a handicapped member what they think has given them depth, compassion, and understanding? They will, as does Christopher de Vinck in his little masterpiece, The Power of the Powerless, A Brother’s Legacy of Love, tell you that soul comes from inferiority. It is weakness, limit, shame, and powerlessness that bring depth.

What has made us deep persons? What has taught us compassion? Our successes? The things we have been praised for? Those qualities of body or mind which make us superior to others? That perfect body that everyone envies us for? That athletic achievement that is one-in-a-million? That Summa Cum Laude that is the envy of our classmates? That perfect home that is the envy of our neighbours? Have these given us soul? Are these what make us interesting? 

To the contrary, our souls, precisely in so far as they have depth, strength, compassion, and hold interest for others, have been shaped by something quite different: the fear that I will gain weight and end up looking like my mother, the shame that I feel because my teeth aren’t straight, the birthmark that I can’t hide, the blemishes that set me apart, the fat around my waists and hips that humbles me, the fear that I am not smart enough, not interesting enough, that my background isn’t good enough, my phobias, my timidities, my plain and simple inadequacies, these, coupled with the diapers I’ve had to change, the humiliations I endure in my work, in my marriage, and in my family that I am powerless to do anything about, the insults and taunts I received on the playground as a child, my drunken stepfather, these are what give me depth of soul.

It is not that these are, in and of themselves, good; it is just that when we listen to them we grow deep. They build up our souls. These inferiorities, these humiliations, are not things to be cured from, things to be solved, things to be ignored, things to be buried as private and past shames. They are to be listened to. They are entries into the depth of our souls.

Daniel Berrigan was once asked to give a talk on God. How do we listen to God? He surprised his audience. He gave no theological treatise, he simply described how he goes regularly and sits at the bedside of a young boy who is deaf, mute, paralysed, and unable to react in any way to anything that is around him. He just lies in bed, helpless, powerless, unable to say or do anything. Berrigan goes and sits by his bedside. Nothing is said and nothing, seemingly, is exchanged. But, says Berrigan, “I sit by his helplessness and I know that in this powerlessness God is speaking – and speaking in the only way that God can speak in this world!” Inferiority, powerlessness, humiliation – forgers of depth, of soul, the voice of God!

Recently I was talking with a young woman who was trying to convince me that I, and the church, have a distorted view about sex. “You make it such a big deal and link it so inextricably to love. It can be that, but usually it isn’t. I can tell you, most of the time love is not about what happens between the sheets!” 

She was talking from considerable experience and I wasn’t about to argue the point. Sex is not always about love, though it should be. It is however about soul, and this is the thing that neither my young friend, nor our culture, really understands. Whether it is mindless, abusive, or sacramental, sex always, and deeply, touches soul. Sex and soul are inextricably linked. 

Nikos Kazantzakis once wrote: Three Kinds of Souls, Three Prayers:

1) I am a bow in your hands, Lord, draw me, lest I rot.

2) Do not overdraw me, Lord, I shall break.

3) Overdraw me, Lord, and who cares if I break! 

Something similar might be said about sex: Three Kinds of Sex, Three Effects: 

1) Abusive sex – destroys the soul.

2) Casual sex – trivializes the soul.

3) Sacramental sex – builds up the soul. 

In recent years, our culture has come light years forward in its understanding of the first category. We now know how deeply damaging is all sexual abuse. It wounds in a way that perhaps no other thing does. To be violated sexually is not the same as to be violated in other ways. Abusive sex leaves a soul scar that is unique both in its pain and in its power to create chaos and disintegration within the one who has been violated. We now know how deep is the cut that is left by any sexual crime. 

Where we are far less insightful is in our understanding of casual sex. To my mind, there are few areas within human relationships where, as a culture, we are as blind as we are in this one. We live in a culture within which, for the most part, sex has become a normal part of dating and within which we have begun to identify contraceptive responsibility with sexual responsibility. Thus, for the main part, we are beginning to believe, and what a naivete this is, that casual sex, “as long as it is consensual, contraceptively responsible, and loving”, harms no one and leaves no scars. We rationalize this blindness, as does my young friend, precisely by separating real love from what happens between the sheets. 

But, while our heads may not be hurt our souls are. They are affected in ways that we no longer have the courage to squarely face. Casual sex, however loving and consensual it pretends to be, trivializes the soul and ultimately cheapens the experience of love. In sex, something very deep is touched, even when it is not intended. It is no accident that past lovers appear in present dreams. Sex and soul are inextricably linked. 

The late Allan Bloom, examining this from a purely secular point of view, suggests that casual sex de-eroticizes and demystifies human relationships since sexual passion now no longer includes intimations of eternity. Sex, for all its power and potential, is now precisely “no big deal”. In Bloom’s words, it, like most everything else, becomes “narrower and flatter.” There can be no illusion of eternity in casual sex. The soul has to make it flat and narrow so as to protect itself against lying. This is a fault in the soul and the soul that acts in this way is being trivialized and, in some way, distorted. 

Bloom elaborates with a rather graphic example. Lamenting precisely the rather flat and narrow experience of a soul that has been trivialized through its erotic experience, he says: Plato, in his Symposium, comments on how his students sit around and tell wonderful stories about the meaning of their immortal longings. My own students, says Bloom, sit around and tell stories of being horny. Such is the difference in soul. 

Finally there is sacramental sex. It has power to build up the soul in ways that, this side of eternity, few other experiences can. It is eucharist, incarnation, love-made-flesh, truly. In sacramental sex, a soul is joined to another and, in that moment, experiences the central purpose of God’s design for it. When that happens the soul strengthens and swells, in gratitude, stability, and peace … and that kind of experience of soul is, our culture notwithstanding, truly a big deal!

Many of you may have heard this story before. I’ve heard it told by James Dobson, by Richard Rohr, and a few others. But it merits repeating:

Some years ago an American research centre conducted an experiment with a wall-eyed pike. They placed this fish in an aquarium and fed it regularly, Then, after a time, they inserted an invisible glass plate into the aquarium, sealing off part of it. They began to put the wall-eyed’s food on the other side of that plate. Every time the fish tried to take some food, it would bump against the glass plate and come away empty.

For quite a while the fish kept trying, swimming up, attempting to take food, bumping its mouth, and coming away empty. Eventually, the wall-eye stopped trying. It would swim towards the food but, just before striking the glass plate, it would turn and swim slowly away.

At this point, the researchers removed the glass plate. But the damage had been done. The fish never ate again. No amount of hunger could drive it to attempt again to eat. It would swim up to the food and, at the last second, turn away, not knowing that the glass plate was now gone and that it could eat freely. The wall-eye eventually died of malnutrition – surrounded by food.

This is not meant as a sentimental little anecdote designed to make us feel sorry for a poor fish which had the misfortune of falling victim to the cruelties of human experiment, though, hearing it, does give the heart a sad wrench. 

The sorrow it triggers goes much deeper than mere sentiment. This story goes to that part of the heart where we would want to cry and cry and never stop crying – but, for the most part, cannot. It goes to that part of the heart where we are most damaged – and most hardened. That’s why it begs for tears even as some of the feelings it evokes brings our wounded pride to the surface and hardens us against all softness. Somebody once suggested that the reason why men are afraid to cry is that if they ever gave in to what’s deep inside of them and allowed the tears to flow there would be no end of it. The tears would never stop. I believe that this is true of men – and of women as well.

Hearing this story helps us understand why.

All of us know exactly what happened to this wall-eyed pike and why it eventually stopped eating – and most of us are in danger of dying from a similar malnutrition.

What an incredible parable this is! What an insight it can give us into why we are starving when love is all around us! Why this deep well of inchoate sadness within us? Why such affective timidity? Why our chronic distrust? Why are we so limp in our capacity to simply let ourselves be loved? Why are we so debilitated and starving for affection, even as we, and everyone around us, are bursting with desire?

We are dying of from lack of love in a world where most everyone wants to love and we are unable to pour out love upon people who are starving for it. Strange. There are no glass plates between ourselves and others and yet we cannot really touch. Food is all around and we are dying from malnutrition. Something is deeply wrong and we are, all of us, deeply sad.

This story, to my mind, says something very important about what is wrong, why we are so deeply sad, and what’s to be done about. And its value is that it speaks to the soul, gently, directly, deeply. It is something not so much to be explained as it is to be felt. Its language and image honours the soul and gives it both the space and the respect that it needs to do its proper grieving. Hence stories like this are badly needed. Today we have too little language and too few images that give our souls the permission they need to feel certain things.

Instead we have a virtual library of analytical literature which attempts to explain to us why we are, in its terminology, dysfunctional, chronically depressed, and unfree to simply enter the flow of love and delight in it. Its a valuable literature, good in itself, but it is a clinical one. It examines us the way a doctor would – naked on the diagnostic table, under the merciless glare of fluorescent lights, every mole and scab exposed, and no dignity possible as various instruments do their probing.

Weeping with the wall-eyed pike takes away the glare of the fluorescent lights and gives our tears dignity.

Introspection is not always a bad thing. On occasion, it’s good to reflect on the persons and events that helped shape your soul. This is a form of prayer of which we should do more.

I sometimes do this sitting at my parents’ grave. They’re buried together in a small rural cemetery and, when there is occasion and my mood is right, I sit at their graves and try to figure out who gave what to me.

Half of me is my mother. She was an overly-sensitive person who wounded easily, was anxious to please, and who could not say no enough. So she often found herself over-stretched and tired. Today some would say that she didn’t keep clear boundaries. She had 16 children. Her critics would rest their case.

She was a generous person, always giving things away. Sometimes she gave away food and clothes that our own family needed. As a child I was angry with her for that. I didn’t want a generous mother. I wanted things. She, on her part, wanted some things that she didn’t always get, good health and peace in her family. I remember her crying one Saturday morning as she was cleaning the house and trying to keep peace and order in a family that was, on that particular day, given over to disorder and crankiness. She cried and told us how disappointed she was that our family wasn’t like the holy family.

We weren’t the holy family and she was frustrated a lot, not so much with us as with the plain inadequacy of life. Beyond this all though, she was a happy person, more naturally buoyant in spirit than my father. She danced more easily than he, laughed more spontaneously, was an easier touch for us kids. She took life less reflectively than he did, though not as unreflectively as we, her children, naively supposed. After she died, we found a diary and we found that she’d thought more deeply about things than we’d supposed.

She was completely relational and her deepest longing was to share her soul. Here she got lucky. She met my father. They became, from soon after they met until they day he died, soul-mates in every sense of that word. She didn’t have to tell him her secrets or share with him her frustrations, and neither he in reverse. They understood each other without having to explain themselves. In all my years of growing up, I cannot ever recall them having a single misunderstanding or even being angry with each other.

My father died of cancer and she, who had been strong until his death, died three months later of pancreatitis and a loneliness nobody could cure. Today some would look at that and say she was a co-dependent. But she would laugh and tell you that she got what she wanted from life. She died of missing my father, died happy. There’s something to be envied in that.

I’m her son and when I contemplate these things about her my own soul becomes less mystery, as do my struggles, my faults, my longings, and my strengths. I even understand why I’m tired a lot!

The rest of me is my father. There’s nothing in me that isn’t explained by genes. He was the other half of my mother. He didn’t dance easily, though he was a deeply affectionate man. Dancing was too public for him. He preferred to express his love in private. He loved my mother, us, his family, and most everyone else. But his way was not to trumpet this in public. There was a reticence here that could look like coldness, but you had to read his actions, and his eyes. There was an abhorrence of all exhibitionism, especially as it pertains to any public expressions that say: “I love you!”  Some people cannot make love with the bedroom door open. My dad was one of these.

He was the faith, the stubborn uncompromising moral principle in our family. This was another reason he had trouble dancing. He agonized over all that was not right in the world and his patience didn’t always meet the test. I feared his eyes at those times that I disappointed him. I also feared, and still do, ever disappointing him. He was the most moral person I’ve ever met and he had a sixth sense here that was near infallible. He knew right from wrong in a way I couldn’t doubt. He instructed me – against my protests. If I end up in hell, I can’t plead ignorance. My dad equipped me, faith-wise and morally, for the world. I have the faults that come with that too, his faults, compounded by my own.

What a mysterious thing is a human soul! What incredible factors account for its beauty and its distortions!