To believe in the resurrection of Jesus is to be comforted, comforted at a level so deep that nothing in life is any longer ultimately a threat. In the resurrection, the hand of God soothes us and the voice of God assures us, frightened children that we are, that all is good and that all will remain good forever and ever.

The resurrection is not just something that happened to Jesus two thousand years ago and will happen to each of us some time in the future, after we die, when our own bodies will be raised to new life. It is that, but it is much more. The resurrection is something that buoys up every moment of life and every aspect of reality. God is always making new life and undergirding it with a goodness, graciousness, mercy, and love that, in the end, heals all wounds, forgives all sins, and brings deadness of all kinds to new life.

We feel this resurrecting power in the most ordinary moments of our lives. A sense of the resurrection, understood in its deepest sense, manifests itself unconsciously in our vitality, in what we call health; in the feeling, however dimly it is sensed, that it is good to be alive. Allow me an illustration here:

Sociologist of religion, Peter Berger, outlining what he calls “rumours of angels in everyday life”, gives us the following reflection:

Consider the most ordinary, and probably the most fundamental of all – the ordinary gesture by which a mother reassures her anxious child. A child wakes up in the night, perhaps from a bad dream and finds himself surrounded by darkness, alone, beset by nameless threats. At such a moment the contours of trusted reality are blurred and invisible, in the terror of incipient chaos the child cries out for his mother. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that, at this moment, the mother is being invoked as a high priestess of protective order. It is she (and, in many cases, she alone) who has the power to banish the chaos and to restore the benign shape of the world. And, of course, any good mother will do just that. She will take the child and cradle him in the timeless gesture of the Magna Mater who became our Madonna. She will turn on a lamp, perhaps, which will encircle the scene with a warm glow of reassuring light. She will speak or sing to the child and the content of this communication will invariably be the same – “Don’t be afraid – everything is in order, everything is all right.

The mother’s comforting reassurance, “Don’t be afraid, it is all right”, is, in fact, a profession of faith, in God and the resurrection. When she says these words, she is making an act of faith just as surely, even if not as explicitly, as if she was saying: “I believe in God, the Father Almighty … and I believe in the resurrection of the body and life everlasting.”

When she assures the child that there is nothing to be frightened about, she means it, and she means it (without her even realizing it) not so much on the basis that there are no immediate dangers to the child or because she is herself able to protect the child as on the basis that, ultimately, everything is all right. What she senses which makes here able to comfort the child is that there is nothing to be afraid of, even if something should kill us or we should kill ourselves, because at the deepest level we are all in the hands of graciousness and love and not in the hands of maliciousness and terror. To say: “Don’t be afraid”, and mean it, is to say that, in the end, the power of goodness is stronger than the power of malice, that dead bodies come out of graves, that all our mistakes will be forgiven, and that all terrors are phantom.

That is the power of the resurrection! That is what we mean when we say: “I believe in the resurrection of the body and life everlasting.” The resurrection means more than just the fact that God raised the body of Jesus from the dead. It means that God’s power to raise death to life buoys up every moment of life and every aspect of reality. The very atomic structure of the cosmos feels and knows that resurrecting power. That is why it (like us, when we are healthy) pushes forward blindly, buoyed up by a hope that it cannot understand.

Do you want to understand the power of the resurrection? Meditate Michelangelo’s Pieta: A woman holds a dead body in her arms, but everything about her and about the scene itself says loudly and clearly: “Don’t be afraid. It’s all right. Everything is all right!” 

There are different kinds of loneliness, just as there are different visions of intimacy. We ache in many places, just as we dream various dreams of consummation.

I remember as a young priest, just ordained and barely beyond the loneliness of adolescence, saying mass and feeling very deeply these words from the Eucharistic Prayer: “Grant that we, who are nourished by his body and blood, may become one body, one spirit in Christ.. I would say those words back then and they would excite my romantic imagination and incite feelings and fantasies that had to do with the fulfilment of my own personal loneliness. To become one body in Christ connoted, for me, that embrace that would put an end to my endless aching, restlessness, and sexual inconsummation. The need for unity in Christ, as I felt it then, had to do with my own personal distance from others.

That was the loneliness I felt then and that was what, by and large, I most wanted from the Eucharist (which I have always believed to be an embrace). I’m no longer a young priest and, although I cannot confidently state that I am beyond the loneliness of adolescent (who is?), I feel those words of the Eucharist quite differently now. When I now pray that Christ should make us one body, it is not so much my personal loneliness that I want overcome as it is something much wider, something beyond just me and my own aches and inconsummations. What I now feel more strongly is how painfully separate, and separated, we all are from each other and how seemingly hopeless are the divisions among us.

I pray the Eucharistic prayer now and what I feel, first of all, is not my own romantic and sexual separateness but how torn is our world and everything in, myself included. How separate we are! How divided!  So much makes it difficult, seemingly hopeless in fact, to ever be one body, one spirit – history, circumstance, background, temperament, ideology, gender, race, geography, and religion, among other things. There is a loneliness and inconsummation in the whole world. The world aches, as did my adolescent self.

Moreover, the older I get, the more I despair of any simple solution to this. There will not be world community, world peace, and one body simply because we sincerely desire it. The divisions among us, like the issues that separate a man and a woman who can no longer fight through the things that divide them and are asking for a divorce, are too overpowering. We too, as a world, cannot find a way any longer to embrace that will heal all the hurt and stop the divisions. We need an embrace from beyond, a vision from beyond, an intimacy we cannot give to ourselves.

Jesus, dying on the cross, is that embrace, that vision, that intimacy. We look at a cross and we see the secret. That is what real reconciling embrace looks like. We don’t understand it, we see it. And what do we see there?

A man, a God, hangs naked, exposed, vulnerable, defenceless, silent, with his arms stretched wide, open for an embrace, and with his hands also stretched open with nails driven through them. Yet strangely, in all that, we don’t see bitterness, defeat, and anger. Paradoxically, we see their opposite. This is what real trust, love, and metanoia (which means un-paranoia) look like.

And I say “look like” because we don’t understand this, we see it. We don’t understand intellectually how giving oneself over in betrayal teaches trust and how vulnerability and powerlessness are the real powers to bring about intimacy. But we see this when we look at the cross of Jesus. It is no wonder that so many people, millions of people literally, wear a cross as a symbol of love, trust, and hope. Unconsciously, they know, however dimly, what theology can never quite make clear to us, namely, that what divides us from each other can only be bridged by the cross of Christ and that our hope for intimacy and community is not in ourselves but in an embrace that is beyond us. In a cross this is not understood, it’s seen – mystically, not rationally.

So, as a priest, I stand daily before an altar and pray the words: “Grant that we, who are nourished by his body and blood, may become one body, one spirit in Christ.” What I pray for is precisely that what we see in the cross of Christ might be actually given to us, namely, an embrace from beyond ourselves.

In the cross lies the answer to our loneliness.

Every so often a book comes along that deeply touches the romantic imagination. Twenty­-five years ago, Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull did this.

Now, in North America at least, we have roughly the same phenomenon with Robert Waller’s book, The Bridges of Madison County (Warner Books, New York, 1992).

In the wake of this story, many a person, married and unmarried, will be restlessly searching for that one-in-a-million soulmate and daily scanning the horizon with burning eyes that ask:

“ls that her? ls that him? Might this finally be my soulmate, my destiny, the person with whom my true life can begin?”

Waller’s book is the true story of a love affair between Francesca Johnson, a farm wife from Madison County, Iowa, and Robert Kincaid, a free-lance photographer. In 1965, when he was 52 years old, Kincaid went to Madison County from Bellingham, Wash., to do some work for National Geographic magazine. His assignment was to take pictures of the covered bridges there.

Searching for one of those bridges, he stops by a farm house to ask for directions and his life and the life of Francesca, a married mother whose husband and two teenage children are gone for the week, change forever.

Instantly both sense that this meeting is not an accident but destiny. Both, too, instantly realize that life will never be the same again, that this meeting will leave a scar, of joy and pain, that will relativize all their joys and pains for the rest of their lives.

They spend just five days together, talking, drinking beer and brandy, smoking Camel cigarettes, dancing in the farmhouse kitchen, making love, sharing deeply their mutual loneliness, and taking pictures of the bridges of Madison County.

For them, however, those five days constitute a life-time, more than a life-time in fact. Both of them go to their deaths (Robert in 1982 and Francesca in 1989) believing that those five days were really their only real life and that in those five·days, they experienced something that, arrogant though this might sound, perhaps nobody has ever experienced as powerfully.

Waller’s book, based largely upon Francesca’s journals, found after her death, focuses mainly on those five days.

When Francesca’s husband and children return she is forced to make a choice—go with Robert or return to her life? Her whole being aches for Robert but her sense of duty wins out and she stays with her husband and children.

Except she doesn’t stay, really. From that day on, until she dies, even though she and Robert never see each other again and never, save for one small postcard, contact each other again, her heart and soul are with Robert and his are with her.

When, after his death, his will is opened, it contains a letter for Francesca within which he says: ‘I live with dust on my heart . . . There have been women before you, a few, but none after. I made no conscious pledge to celibacy, I’m just not interested.”

When he was leaving he had said to Francesca: “In a universe of ambiguity, this kind of certainty comes only once, and never again, no matter how many lifetimes you live.” For Robert Kincaid and Francesca Johnson, that was true.

Perhaps it is not true for some of the rest of us, but the fact that this book has stirred such a restlessness within so many people suggests that a good number of persons believe that it could be true for them . . . if only they would meet that one special person!

What’s to be said about this? ls there some one-in-a-billion person out there, some soulmate, who, if we could only meet, would make us whole and make the world real in a way that nothing within our lives now can ever approximate?

There is something lodged inextricably inside the heart that wants to say “yes” to that. But one wonders: If Romeo and Juliet had lived, would the spell have broken? If Francesca Johnson had gone to live with Robert Kincaid, would this one-in-a-billion romance have eventually become a one-like-everyone-elses?

Neither the naive romantic nor the cynical analyst, to my mind, can answer that question correctly.

But irrespective of our own answer, whether Waller’s story deeply stirs our romantic imaginings or leaves us shaking our heads cynically at two people who felt they had invented the wheel, we must, I submit, deal with this longing for a soulmate more by filtering it through Augustine’s dictum, “you have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you” than with restless eyes that assess every new person with the question: ”ls this finally her? ls this finally him?”

A year ago, I was at a religious education conference which had as its keynote speaker Maya Angelou, a black woman of considerable talent and remarkable graciousness. Among the many things she shared was this story:

“When I was six years old,” she said, “one summer day on the playground a little boy called me a nigger. Fall came that year, winter came that year, spring came that year and brought with it all kinds of flowers, and summer came in all its splendour and beauty – but, in all that richness, the only thing I can remember from that whole year is being called a nigger!”

Hearing her, I was reminded of a story I once heard from John Patrick Gillese, one of our Western Canadian writers. He tells the story of going home, to the small town in Alberta where he had grown up, for a funeral of an elderly woman. Among the many messages of condolence that were sent to her family there was a note from a family who now lived in British Columbia and who had left that small Alberta district some 30 years before. The note expressed sympathy to the family on the loss of their grandmother and added simply: “We will never forget how kind she was to us back in the 1930s.” Here was a family who remembered a small act of kindness, whatever it was, fifty years later.

These stories, although they make the point in opposite ways, teach the same thing: Small acts, of cruelty or kindness, leave their effect long after the effects of events of seemingly much greater importance have passed away.

There is, I believe, a profound lesson in this. The Kingdom of God, as Jesus assures us, is about mustard seeds, about small seemingly unimportant things, but which, in the long run, are the big things.

Not much in our world today helps us to believe that. Most everything urges us to think big and to be careless about small things. The impression is given us that what is private in our lives is little and unimportant. Likewise what is played out on the smaller stage of life – in the more domestic areas of family, marriage, and our exchanges with our neighbours and colleagues – is also deemed to be of little consequence. The big stage is what is important. What mark have you left in the world? What have you achieved on the bigger stage? What has been your involvement in the great causes? Nobody cares about your little life!  Private morality, private grudges, the little insults that we hand out, our many angers and resentments, the small infidelities within our sexual lives, the many little acts of selfishness, and, conversely, the small acts of sacrifice and selflessness that we do and the little compliments that we hand out, these are not valued much in our culture. As a song suggests: “Our little lives don’t count at all!”

I remember a young man, very dedicated to social causes, once asking me: “Do you really think that God gives a damn whether or not you say your morning prayers, or whether or not you hold some small grudge, or whether or not you are always polite to your colleagues, or whether or not you are always chaste sexually? That’s petty, small, private stuff that deflects attention off of the bigger moral issues.”

Well, I believe that God does care, and that God cares a great deal because, in the end, we care and small things, as these stories illustrate, affect a great deal.

I have always found it ironic that we easily forget the big things, the events that seem of great importance. Who won the Nobel prize for literature two years ago? Who won the academy awards last year? Who won the Super Bowl three years ago? Who won the World Cup 10 years ago? Who starred in that Broadway (or West End) play three years ago? It’s funny how quickly we tend to forget these things. It is also curious what we do not forget.

We tend to forget quickly who won such or such an award, or who starred in such and such a movie or play. But we remember, and remember vividly, with all the healing and grace it brought, who was nice to us all those years ago on the playground at school. We remember who encouraged us when we felt insecure. Conversely, we also remember, and remember vividly, with all the scars it brought, who laughed at us on the playground, made fun of our clothes, or who called us stupid.

Falls come, winters come, springs come, summers come and go, and sometimes the only thing we can remember from a given year is some small mustard seed, of cruelty or kindness.

You are as sick as your sickest secret! That’s a phrase some Alcoholic Anonymous groups use to challenge people to understand what, at its roots, sobriety really is.

Drunkenness, of all kinds, has much more to do with lying than it has to do with alcohol, drugs or anything else. We are sober, truly sober, when we stop lying.

I point this out because today, everywhere, the prevailing temptation is to lie. Very little invites us to real honesty, to face our sickest secrets and make a searing act of contrition. Rationalization is more the rule and is, to my mind, perhaps the leading spiritual disease of our time.

Everything conspires with us to bury our sickest secrets so deeply that, after a time, we are no longer even aware that they are there and to rationalize them so that eventually we don’t even realize that they, and we, are sick.

This is a dangerous game. The health of our souls is what’s at stake here. Let me try to explain:

A few years ago, a 26-year-old filmmaker, made a movie which he intriguingly entitled Sex, Lies and Videotape. It won first prize at the Cannes festival. Deservedly so.

At the risk of an irreverent comparison, this movie makes a good commentary on the ninth chapter of John’s Gospel, where John uses his famous story of the man born blind to teach us a basic truth: We don’t have to be sinless, bright or even religiously interested to find Christ and eventually give ourselves over to him. We just have to be honest. We just have to stop lying!

Sex, Lies and Videotape says much the same thing, save it substitutes the concept of health for Christ.

Its story line is quite simple. A young man, with every kind of dysfunction in his background and with a sick sexual neurosis, makes a vow that he will never again tell a lie. Whatever other sin or whatever other folly he might fall into because of weakness, circumstance or hurt, he resolves that he will never again lie. And he invites others, in his own warped way, to follow him in this.

So he sets up a cheap video camera and invites people to come and, with as much honesty as they can muster, speak into the camera and tell the story of their sexual lives.

An interesting thing happens. Everyone who comes and who speaks honestly gets better, grows gentler and eventually gets healthy, irrespective of whatever weaknesses and perversions he or she has. Conversely, everyone who lies, who does not face the truth, slides ever deeper into hardness, rationalization and self-deception.

Maybe it’s stretching things to say that when those people face the camera and began to tell their sickest secrets we see the secular equivalent of the sacrament of confession.

But it is a curious irony that many people who, for all kinds of reasons, regard sacramental reconciliation with a certain disdain understand what was happening in this movie.

The point is as clear. The truth sets you free. When you stop lying and face and speak the truth, you change, the world changes, you get healthy, no matter what you’ve ever done and no matter what issues you are struggling.

Granted, the movie zeroes in on being honest in just one area, sex—and this is not incidental because sexuality is the area that we find it very hard to be really honest about—but its point is universally true. Health takes its roots in honesty. To lie, in any area of life, is to be somehow sick in every area of life.

The blind man in chapter nine of John’s Gospel, could be a character from Sex, Lies and Videotape. His blindness is more than physical. He’s blind to the truth, not interested in the way, the truth and the life. But they find him . . . because he refuses to lie.

Truth, Christ, life, light, health, these will find us too if we stop rationalizing and lying. NO honest heart will stray far or stay long from the truth.

A friend of mine who, in the passion of his youth, once did a colossally stupid thing, a thing which is now the source of considerable embarrassment for him, is, when he is confronted with his past mistake, fond of saying: “It seemed like a good idea at the time!”

I often wonder how different human history might have been had Adam and Eve—after eating the apple and being found by God, hiding, naked, cowering and ashamed—instead of rationalizing and blaming, simply said to God: “It seemed like a good idea at the time!”

Martin Luther once said: Sin bravely! There’s a wisdom of every sort in that. We are as sick as our sickest secret. The truth can set us free, but we must, at some point, stare our sickness in its face and honestly acknowledge it. Then the truth will find us, just as Christ found the man born blind.

In the preface to Elizabeth O’Connor’s book, Search for Silence, N. Gordon Cosby writes: “The one journey that ultimately matters is the journey into the place of stillness deep within one’s self. To reach that place is to be at home; to fail to reach it is to be forever restless.”

That’s a scary thought, especially for those of us who are restless and who find it difficult to be comfortable alone and with silence. Yet there is no doubt that Cosby is right, not to reach inner stillness is to be forever restless. So it is good to make our peace with this.

And that peace is not easily won. The journey inward to that quiet centre, that central silence, where one’s own life and spirit are united with the life and Spirit of God, is long and arduous. Moreover, very little invites us to make it.

First of all, we are born restless, over-charged for our own lives, so on fire with eros and energy of every kind that simply sitting still is already itself a considerable task. This restlessness, which is the heartbeat of a human soul, is the fire of God within us and is God’s assurance, written into nature, that we will not settle for anything less than everything.

As Augustine so aptly put it: “You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”

Still, given all this, spontaneously our restlessness pushes us outward rather than inward. When we are restless, almost invariably, there is the compulsive desire to seek rest in something or somebody outside of ourselves. Rarely, when we are deeply restless, are we drawn inward, to seek a solution to our yearnings in stillness and silence.

In addition, almost everything within our world militates against journeying inward towards stillness and silence as a remedy to the painful obsessions that we experience in our restlessness. This in a double way. The world both intensifies and trivializes our restlessness.

Our culture invites excitement, not silence; activity, not stillness. Thus we find ourselves constantly titillated and overstimulated in our restlessness. Somehow the impression is out there that everyone in the whole world is finding something that you are not, that everyone’s life is more full and complete than yours, that your life, as it is, is too small and timid . . . and that only if you bring many more people, things, places, and experiences into your life will you find peace and calm.

The world suggests that the solution to your restlessness lies outside of yourself, in building a bigger and more exciting life. If you are lonely, find a friend; if you are restless, do something; if you have a desire, fulfill it.

Beyond this, the world trivializes our restlessness, inviting us in a thousand ways to forget that God has called us to make an inward pilgrimage. The world, while not necessarily against God, invites us to forget God.

“Distract yourself,” it says. “Lower your ideals. Forget about immortal longings and eternal peace and think of your immediate frustrations, your lack of self-expression, your yearning hormones and of how little of the good life you’ve actually got. Do more things, change marriage partners, make a career change, have a better sex life, travel more, read more books, go to more movies—or write a book, plant a tree, have a child. Find enough life and leave some mark and you won’t be so restless.”

Given all of this, it is not easy for us to believe that the ultimate solution to our restlessness lies in a journey inward. Given all of this too, it is not easy to have the courage to make that journey, even when we know that it must be done.

Cosby’s challenge—”The one journey that ultimately matters is the journey into the place of stillness deep within one’s self. To reach that place is to be at home; to fail to reach it is to be forever restless”—should be written in bold letters in the preface of every spiritual book today. Too much inside of us and around us invites us to forget this and it is too dangerous to forget it. It’s our rest, our peace, that’s at stake here.

When Christ invites is to make the preferential option for the poor, he also spells out the consequence of ignoring the invitation, namely, at the last judgment the King might not recognize us since he never met us in the least of our brothers and sisters.

The invitation to move inward, in silence, to gently calm our raging restlessness with an inner stillness that comes from union with God is just as non-negotiable. To ignore it is to take a bad risk.

Recently I attended a church synod in my home diocese. About 200 very committed persons had gathered for a week to reflect on what the church should be doing today.

At one stage, the synod animator gave us this question: “What is the most important thing that the church has to give to the world?” A very interesting question.

I was struck by the variety of answers people gave: “The church needs to challenge the world to care more for the poor! The church needs to challenge the world to find deeper meaning! The church needs to challenge the world’s secularism and consumerism! The church needs to challenge the world . . .”

All the suggestions had to do with challenges. Valid as these are, none of them, to my mind, named the most important thing that the church has to give to the world. And what is that?

Consolation. The first task of the church is console the world, to comfort its people. As Isaiah puts it, “Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God” (Isaiah 40:1).

Thinking about this, I remembered a conversation I had shortly after I was ordained. Working for a summer in one of our larger Oblate city parishes, I was living in the rectory with an elderly priest, a very fine, saintly man.

He had been ordained for more than 50 years and had, during all those years, been exemplary, honest, faithful and generous. He was deeply respected by everyone who knew him. Now, in his late 70s, legally blind and semi-retired, he said a Mass every day, heard some occasional confessions and spent most of the rest of his time praying.

I was taken by his goodness. One evening, sitting in the recreation room with him, I asked him this question: “Leo, if you had your life as a priest to live over again, would you do anything different?” I was expecting him to say no, that given his obvious goodness and fidelity, he had no regrets. His answer surprised me.

“If I had my priesthood to live over again,” he said, “I would be a lot gentler with people the next time. I would console more and challenge less. You see, I was one of those people who was taught, and who deeply believed, that only the full truth can set us free, that we owe it to people to challenge them with the truth, in season and out. I believed that and did it for most of the years of my ministry.

“And I was a good priest, I lived those years for others and never once betrayed in any real way my vows and my commit ments. But now that I am older, I regret a lot of what I did. I was too hard on people! I meant it well, I was sincere, but I think too often I ended up laying more burdens on them when they were already carrying enough pain!

“If I were just beginning as a priest, I would be a lot softer, I would spend my energies more trying to lift pain from people. People hurt enough. They need us, first of all, to help them with that!”

He is right. What the world needs first of all, and most of all, from us, the church, is comfort, help in lifting and understanding its pain, its wounds, its anxieties, its raging restlessness, its temptations, and its infidelities and its sin.

Like the prodigal son, it needs first of all to be surprised by unconditional love. Sometime later, and there will be time for that, it will want some challenge.

And our comfort must be offered not on the basis of human optimism, human forgiveness and human potential, which, in some respects, the world already understands more deeply than we do.

No. The comfort that we offer is that which we ourselves will first feel when we begin to realize how deep, wide, all-embracing and all forgiving is the heart of God.

We will comfort the world, and it will be comforted, when we show it that God sees its heart with the eyes of the heart, that God feels for it more than it feels for itself, that God never feels frightened or wronged by the assertions of its freedom, that God always opens another door when we close one, that God is not put off by all the times we turn our back on what we know is best, that God empathizes with our lusts, our greed, our anger, our jealousies, our failures and with our every despair, that God never stops loving us for a moment even when we put ourselves in hell, and that God descends into all the hells we create, stands in the middle of our huddled, shivering, timid, wounded, and guilty hearts and breathes out peace.

We will comfort the world when we tell it that, in spite of everything, its life is good. The world will finally be helped by us when we trust God enough to have the courage to tell it to live, even to risk mistakes, because, in the end, all will be well and all will be well and every manner of being will be well.

God once gave us Ten Commandments to help teach us love.

They are not infallible indicators of love, for we can keep them and still not be loving, but they are infallible in one sense: if we are not keeping them then we clearly are not loving.

As we begin this New Year, I would like to offer 10 other commandments, 10 New Year’s resolutions, of a different genre. I call them 10 things we should try to befriend this year:

This year try to make friends . . .

1. With your humanity . . .

To be human is to be fallible, wounded, dysfunctional, scarred, and living in a far from perfect world, family, church, body and history.

Don’t look for somebody to blame, to sue, to be angry at. This is the human condition. Make friends with it. Grief, not rage, is the proper response. Chaos, not blame, is what is at issue. An older generation called it “original sin.”

Don’t let the literature on dysfunctional families, valuable though it is, make you an enemy of your own condition—and of much of the world as well.

2. With what is best in you . . .

Henri Nouwen recently said: “Here lies the great call to conversion: to look not with the eyes of my own low self-esteem, but with the eyes of God’s love.”

As long as we look out at the world and others through our wounds we will be full of self-pity, bitterness and jealousy. If, however, we can look out through the prism of what’s best in us, through the sense of gratitude for where we’ve been blessed, our jealousy will turn to appreciation and we will be astonished by other’s goodness.

3. With those who love you . ..

John Powell once said that there are only two potential tragedies in life: To go through life without loving and not to express love and affection for those who love us. We need to make better friends with our friends. We need to express affection, appreciation, contrition, and love frequently and readily. Thank those who love you, tell those whom you love that you love them.

4. With chastity . . .

So much of our pain and restlessness comes from our lack of chastity. So much of our dishonesty and subsequent hardness of heart comes from not admitting this. Those with the heart of a child and virgin enter the kingdom of God.

We have sophisticated ourselves into unhappiness. Make friends with chastity. Make a searing and honest confession some time this year.

5. With your own body . . .

Do not be afraid of your own body, of its goodness, its sexuality, its pleasures, its tiredness and its limits. It’s the only one you’ve got in any case!

Be friends with it. Don’t punish it, don’t spoil it, don’t denigrate it. It’s a church and it’s the medium through which you love and communicate. Give it enough rest, exercise, respect and love.

6. With the other gender . . .

Women are angry, men are grieving, everyone is uneasy and picking away at somebody. Gender issues are real—but their resolution lies in deep and mutual sympathy. Make friends with what seems threatening to you in the other gender.

7. With your Father . . .

The deepest hunger in the world today is “father hunger.” Reconcile with your own father, with other fathers and with God the Father. It’s only your father’s blessing that can deconstrict your heart.

8. With your own mortality . . .

Death comes to us all. Make friends with mortality, with aging, with wrinkles, with grey hair and with the fact that, as we age, we are asked to give our blessing and life to the young, let go and move on.

9. With your sense of humor . . .

The fact that we can laugh, irrespective of whatever enslaves us, shows that we are somehow transcendent, above, all situations.

Our hearts and our souls can soar, through them we can fly above the things that bind us. Humor is a marvellous way of flying. Thomas More made a joke with the man who beheaded him. No prison could break him—and no prison will break us if we can continue to laugh.

10. With your God . . .

God, as Julian of Norwich assures us, looks down on us with a face that is completely relaxed, smiling and beaming out a goodness that resounds like a marvellous symphony.

God also assures us that, present pain and sin notwithstanding, in the end, all will be well, and all will be well, and every manner of being will be well. We want to try to be better friends with that God.

In 1994, begin to befriend.