David Facing Goliath

December 27, 1993

There is no substitute for imagination. Without good images for integrating experience, brute reality overpowers us and leaves us feeling depressed and helpless. Unless our symbols are working, we have. little hope of turning fate to destiny.

This is especially true regarding how we, as Christians, stand before a world that is not much given to love, justice, tenderness and prayer. Oftentimes, especially if you are a sensitive person, you will feel overwhelmed by the seeming hopelessness of it. What can you do? The powers of the world seem so huge and omnipresent while you are so small and limited.

When we feel depressed in this way, a helpful image is the picture of David standing before Goliath. It is the archetypal image of good standing before evil, justice standing before rape and pillage, sensitivity standing before brute impersonality, and tenderness and feeling standing before iron and concrete.

Two forces face each other in a struggle to decide life and death and, from every indication, what is good, just and tender is hopelessly overmatched.

So here is the image: At one point in her history, Israel, who here represents God’s cause, is in battle against the. Philistines who (as the very word “philistine” still connotes) represent brutality, lack of justice, lack of feeling, lack of goodness and lack of God.

Their champion is a giant, Goliath, a brute of unparalleled strength who, in the image, has no feelings, no sensitivity, no goodness. He walks onto the battlefield clothed in iron, seemingly an inanimate force, sneering, arrogant, utterly disdainful of all opposition. Beside him stands his armor-bearer, also clothed in iron.

On the other side, stands Israel, totally intimidated by this brute strength, knowing that, among them, there is nobody who can fight Goliath on his own terms:

So they change the terms. Instead of taking their strongest man, clothing him in iron and sending him out against Goliath, they send a young boy, David, with no armor at all. He goes out barefoot, with only a slingshot, more a boy’s plaything than a weapon of war.

And he cuts a pathetic figure. David walks onto the battlefield the naive child, unsophisticated in war, a joke. That is how Goliath sees him—”Am I a dog, that you come out against me with sticks? You’re not an opponent even worth fighting. You’re a joke! Come over here and I will cut off your head and feed it to the birds!”

Godless forces do not exactly cower when truth marches out to do battle against them.

But we know the outcome. David reaches into his shepherd’s pouch, takes out his slingshot, inserts a smooth pebble and his first shot penetrates the skull of the giant. He then cuts off Goliath’s head with his own sword.

The little boy fells the giant; the plaything of a child overpowers the weapons of war; the naive defeats the sophisticated and sensitivity proves more powerful than brute iron. There is a lesson to be gleaned from this.

That image, David before Goliath, the child before the giant, depicts how anyone who is a true defender of God’s cause always stands before the world—hopelessly overmatched, naive, a child before an adult, bare skin against iron, a joke not to be taken seriously.

But victory belongs to the child. It’s the giant that is vulnerable, it’s iron that falls, providing the child has a shepherd’s pouch, a bag with smooth pebbles and a plaything that he or she has spent many hours palming and pressing.

What is the image here? What is the shepherd’s pouch? What is the plaything? When David reached into his shepherd’s pouch and took out a slingshot and a smooth pebble, you can be sure that this was not the first time he did this.

As a shepherd, off in the fields by himself, he would have spent countless hours practising with his slingshot, countless hours searching for smooth pebbles and many more hours palming those pebbles to know their exact feel, to really make them his own.

Long before we walk onto any battlefield to confront the giant we too need to spend countless lonely hours palming and polishing what’s in our shepherd’s pouch—prayer, sacraments, our traditions.

These are David’s pebbles, our weapons against Goliath. We need, through many lonely hours, to palm them, press them, and give them the smell and feel of our own skin. Then, when we fling them at the giant, they will penetrate the iron and brute power that stands in the way of God . . .and, even if we don’t save the world, we will save our own sanity!

Headlong into the Pudding

December 20, 1993

Many of us, I am sure, are concerned that Christmas has become too much of a secular and commercial event. Stores put up Christmas decorations in late October, Santa Claus parades start in November and what used to be a season of waiting to celebrate, Advent, is now a marathon of Christmas parties.

Where is Christ in all of this? How do we put Christ back into Christmas?

Everyone agrees that some of these excesses must be toned down if we are to highlight that this is, after all, Jesus’ birthday. Beyond this consensus however, sincere pie are divided as to how we should react to all the Christmas hoopla.

For some, the way to put Christ back into Christmas is to eliminate most of what has culturally built up around it—the Christmas tree, Santa Claus, the colored lights, the cards, the carols, the gifts, the endless parties and the extravagant meals. Christ gets lost in all of this, they contend.

Personally, I don’t agree. Christmas, beyond the fact that it is Jesus’ birthday and thus fitting cause for the celebration of all celebrations, is the feast of the incarnation, the time to celebrate flesh and the goodness of physical creation.

In the end, it is helped by all the hoopla surrounding it. The lights, the carols, the colored trees, the gifts, and all that food and drink help highlight the essential spirit of Christmas, namely, that God enters into our physical world and makes everything there holy and good.

If all the hoopla and color was not there, ironic as this may seem, the meaning of Christmas would not come through to the world, nor to ourselves, as strongly.

As John Shea puts it: “A Christmas Spirit that walks around naked will never be noticed. It needs a sprig of holly for allure. In the search for Spirit there may be a time to squint expectantly into the invisible air, but Christmas is not that time. Christmas is a time to plunge into the visible pudding. The many mini-traditions of Christmas are at the service of its magnanimous and unbounded Spirit.” (Starlight, Beholding the Christmas Miracle All Year Long, p.35)

Somebody once commented that Christmas is for kids, that it is their feast. That is only partially true. It is for everyone, but kids have the best feel for it. They do not see its extravagancies and its commercial inflations as rivals to the fact that it is, after all, Jesus whom we are celebrating.

For them, the two can go together and that sleighful of traditions, including much of the commercialism, make the crib of Jesus even more special. Their plunging, body and soul, into the visible pudding helps show what the incarnation as a: mystery is all about.

When we find this an affront to serious religion, it is, I submit, because, partially, we do not accept how good, raw and physical is the incarnation and how extensive is the dwelling of that Word-made-flesh.

Beyond some of its more obvious excesses, we need not, and should not, try to eliminate the customs of Christmas in the name of putting Christ back into it.

All those lights, colors, carols, gifts and food can be seen as refractions of the Light at the Centre. They should be put in their place, but they can be seen as attempts to extend the Spirit of Christmas. In the end, they help us feel the incarnation, how good it is that God is physically with us.

Santa is not Jesus, but if he can be made to stop by the crib and pray then the church is finally permeating the world. Christmas lights in the mall are not vigil lights in the church; but if they help us to realize that we are waiting for something wonderful to break into our lives then they are the lights of Advent.

The gifts we give to each other do not approximate what God gave us in Jesus, but if they are given in love there is something in them of·that sacrificial giving that shapes real love. And all those Christmas parties and dinners, with all that excess food and drink, these are not the messianic banquet which is predicated on peace and justice, but they do let us physically taste something of the excessive goodness of a God who is only happy when we are.

There are times, as John Shea says, for naked spirit, but Christmas is not one of them. There are times too to plunge headlong into the pudding. Christmas is that time.

Let us de-commercialize Christmas, not by declaring that gifts, Christmas lights, and good food and drink have nothing to do with Jesus’ birthday, but by declaring, first of all to ourselves, how deeply blessed and good is physical creation.

Headlong Into The Pudding

Where is Christ in all of this? How do we put Christ back into Christmas?

If all the hoopla and color was not there, ironic as this may seem, the meaning of Christmas would not come through to the world, nor to ourselves, as strongly.

“Christmas is a time to plunge into the visible pudding. The many mini-traditions of Christmas are at the service of its magnanimous and unbounded Spirit.” (Starlight, Beholding the Christmas Miracle All Year Long, p.35)

Beyond some of its more obvious excesses, we need not, and should not, try to eliminate the customs of Christmas in the name of putting Christ back into it.

There are times, as John Shea says, for naked spirit, but Christmas is not one of them. There are times too to plunge headlong into the pudding. Christmas is that time.

Let us de-ommercialize Christmas, not by declaring that gifts, Christmas lights, and good food and drink have nothing to do with Jesus’ birthday, but by declaring, first of all to ourselves, how deeply blessed and good is physical creation.

They Were Moral Lovers

December 13, 1993

This summer one of my sisters died. As much as we all miss her, none of us, including her own children, feels her absence as much as does her husband.

He doesn’t just miss her. Half his life is gone. That’s where he is different from her kids—they lost their mum, but still have a whole self left. He wakes up mornings, walks through days, and goes about the business of raising family and crops with some of his own body missing.

That’s no romantic exaggeration, as everyone who knew them knows. They were married, husband and wife for 34 years, and everything about them and their relationship suggested that what was between them was rare.

“And the two shall be one flesh!” That they were, just as the second page of the Bible describes it. Both had left their own families and a lot of other things to cling to each other, to be one flesh. When a man and a woman love each other in that way, truly in that way, each dies and something new, some third thing, is born.

In my sister and brother-in-law’s relationship, you saw this third thing, human love gone consummate, grown sacramental.

Small wonder, that my brother-in-law now feels only half alive. For a while he had an ally, a co-conspirator, against the most primal of all loneliness, the one that God himself damned at the origins of history: “It is not good for the man to be alone!”

For a time, he was not alone. He was married—married in a way that is worth reflecting upon:

What makes a great marriage? What made my sister and her husband “one flesh” in a way that is so often denied the rest of us? What really marries one person to another?

There are all kinds of answers to that question and, given a culture that constellates so many of its feelings about love around sex and romantic obsession, what was true in their case is normally not what comes first to mind.

They weren’t Romeo and Juliet. Their’s was not the stuff of Hollywood romances and Iris Murdoch novels. It had such a quietness to it, a gentleness, softness and chastity, that it contained nothing of those exaggerated forms that make for great art—and often for tumult, heartbreak and infidelity in real life.

Nothing between them garbled life. Their relationship was, for the most part, too ordinary to notice. They didn’t often get the chance to look at each other over crystal wine glasses under romantic lighting, though they yearned for that. They had to catch each other’s eye more domestically.

For whole years at a stretch, over dirty diapers and dirty dishes, in a house packed with kids, they would meet each other’s eyes and both would know that they were home: “At last, bone from my bone, flesh from flesh.”

They knew what consummation meant. For 34 years they had only to look at each other to not be alone.

But what makes this? What needs to be there for someone to look at another and feel that other as bone from my bone, flesh from my flesh, kindred spirit? In today’s terminology, what makes someone a soulmate? What do you need to experience with another person to overcome that exile of heart?

Someone looking at my sister and brother-inlaw might, more superficially, have seen some obvious things: deep mutual respect, a gentleness between them, uncompromising fidelity to each other, harmony of thought and feelings on most things important, regular prayer together and a complete trust of each other. Those things are the heart of a marriage.

But, in the end, these were, in their case, symptoms really. What connected them, made for bone of my bone, for the harmony, respect, fidelity and gentleness was something deeper. They had moral affinity. Long before, and concomitant with, sleeping with each other physically, they slept with each other morally.

What’s meant by this curious phrase? Each of us has a place inside where we feel most deeply about the right and wrong of things and where what is most precious to us is cherished and guarded.

It is when this place is attacked that we feel most violated. It is also the place where, in the end, we feel most alone. More deeply than we long for a sexual partner, we long for someone to sleep with us here.

My sister and brother-in-law found this in each other. They were moral lovers. They found, touched and protected each others’ souls. Everything that was deepest and most precious in each of them was understood, cherished and safe when the other was around.

It made for a great marriage—one flesh, true consummation, all predicated on a great trust and a great chastity. This is a secret worth knowing.

Life’s Incessant Longing

December 6, 1993

All life is fired by longing. The simplest of plants and the highest of human love have this in common—yearning, restlessness, a certain insatiable pressure to eat, to grow, to breed, to push beyond self.

Yet longing is something that is rarely examined, despite the fact that it lies at the very heart of the soul.

What is longing? What does it mean to yearn? What is this insatiable press inside of us to eat, to drink, to make love, to want to be outside of our own skins and to want to make ourselves immortal?

Mostly it is unconscious, a dark relentless pressure to reach beyond ourselves.

We see this already in plants. A friend of mine shares how, after buying a house, he decided to get rid of a bamboo plant in his driveway. He cut the plant down, took an axe and chopped down deep into the earth, destroying as much of its roots as he could.

Then he poured bluestone, a plant poison, on what remained. Finally, he filled the hole, where the plant had been, with several feet of gravel which he tamped tightly and paved over with cement.

Two years later, the cement heaved as that bamboo plant began to slowly make its way through the pavement. Its life principle, the blind pressure to grow, was not so easily thwarted by axes, poison and cement.

There is an incredible power, a blind pressure, to grow in all things living. If you put a two-inch band of solid steel around a young watermelon it will, as it grows, slowly burst that steel.

The life-push outwards will have its way. The pressure is always there. All of nature is incessantly driven to eat, to grow, to breed, to fight for more life. Humans are not exempt.

We see this, unconscious still, in the way babies eat and in the hormonal drives of adolescents. There we see a drivenness, impossible to thwart or deny. Life pushes outward, reaches outward, yearns, longs and pushes.

And we see it, a bit more conscious now, in adult restlessness, in our greed for experience, our hunger for sex, our insatiability, our push beyond chastity, and even in our escapes into daydreams, alcohol and drugs.

We are ever the bamboo plant, blindly pushing upward; the baby, unconsciously crying for food.

The earth is ablaze with the fire of God. Part of that fire is burning longing—blind pressure, incessant hunger, relentless hormones, insatiable restlessness and crying dissatisfaction. People have always had their own ways of trying to explain this.

Many ancient peoples believed that the human soul was a piece of divine fire that had somehow become disconnected from God and it was this divine fire blazing within us, trying to return to home, that made us restless. For them we were on fire because our immortal soul was trying to escape from a mortal body.

That idea, the soul as divine fire, might strike us as rather naive and dualistic, but it is in fact a beautiful metaphor that captures and soothes the imagination in ways that most analytical psychology never can.

Where it errs is only in its dualism. The fire, the relentless pressure, is not only in the soul, it is in everything else as well. The cosmos is all of a piece. The chemicals in your hand and in your brain were forged by the same furnace, the furnace of the stars. The story of life, body and soul, is written in DNA—and relentless yearning lies just as much in the cosmos and the DNA as it lies in our hearts and souls.

And what is it all for? Why do bamboo plants push blindly through walkways? Why are we always hungry? Why do the hormones of our body and the rages of our soul give us so little peace?

In the end, longing and yearning are not really sightless at all. They may be experienced as blind pressure, driving life to eat its way through driveways, food, sex, friendship and creativity, but they are the Spirit of God, groaning and praying through us.

Ultimately, this is what Scripture is talking about when it tells us that when we do not know how to pray, the Spirit of God prays through us, in groans too deep for words (Romans 8:26). At its root, all longing is for the fruits of the spirit; all life, all eros, and all energy, blind or conscious, yearns for charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, fidelity, mildness and the union that chastity can bring .

Whether it’s a bamboo plant pushing through a driveway, or a baby blinding taking food, or an adult man or woman kneeling in supplication, the yearning is for this.

What touches you is what you touch. Advent is the season to touch these longings and to let them touch us.

A Sensual Heaven

November 29, 1993

Andrew Greeley once suggested that we might profitably meditate the following vision of heaven:

“What will the resurrection be like? . . . The condition of physical ecstasy and emotional satisfaction which results from intercourse between two people who are deeply in love is the best anticipation currently available to us of our permanent condition in the resurrected state.

“The powerful inspirational value of sexual electricity and the awesome splendors of the human body will not be inhibited in the resurrected state as they are by the weaknesses of this world. The resurrection joys, then, will be interpersonal, physical, sexual, and corporate because we will enjoy them with each other.” (Life for a Wanderer, pp. 161-162)

More than a few people are shocked by this kind of imagery when it is applied to heaven. However, it is precisely this image, sexual intercourse, which is dominant in the way the great Christian mystics, including John of the Cross and Theresa of Avila, describe heaven.

More importantly, when one looks at how some of the prophets, notably Isaiah, fantasize about “the end times,” one sees a remarkable similarity between their vision of what constitutes salvation and the sexual imagery of the mystics. In both cases, in the end, the vision is one of wholeness, of consummation, of love without limit, of normal life turned upside-down, of a final peace that is ecstatic.

Thus, for example; when Isaiah suggests that, in the last times, the wolf will lie down with the lamb, the panther with the kid, and the cow and the bear will make friends, even as the lion eats straw like the ox, and when he fantasizes the end times as a great banquet of all the best foods and the choicest wines, his fantasy is different only in image, not in substance, from what Greeley suggests.

In either case, a delicious and deeply sensual image, one that is meant to delight the imagination, is used to describe what things can be like, and will be like, if we are open to the gift of salvation.

I highlight these fantasies here because too seldom are we ever taught that our fantasies, indeed even and especially our sexual ones, can be the place where we intuit the meaning of salvation. We are the privileged exception if we have been taught that our fantasy-life can, potentially at least, be a deep rich source for spiritual insight and growth.

How so? In our favorite daydreams we picture most of the essential components of salvation. Thus . .

Our best fantasies are always ultimately images of consummation and wholeness. In them we are consummated and consummating, made whole and making whole, knowing fully even as we are known fully, face-to-face (as Paul describes this in 1 Corinthians 13: 12-13).

In our daydreams, we don’t lack for a perfect marriage nor for deep sexual embrace. In our dreams, we can unreservedly and truly make love.

Our best fantasies too turn reality delightfully upside-down and, in them, lions eat straw like the oxen. In our daydreams, the normal rules of the world are bypassed and we are able to perform great and noble things, irrespective of our athletic, artistic, educational or practical limitations.

In our fantasies we are never limited by our body, our race, our education, our background, our situation or our intelligence. Nothing is impossible in our daydreams. We can have what we yearn for. In our fantasies we can fly—and be that one-in-a-million artist, novelist, athlete, movie star or saint.

Moreover, in our fantasies there is justice and vindication. Just as the prophets imagined a great day of reckoning, when the inflated will be brought down, the cruel will have to answer for their meanness, and the hidden virtue of those suffering silently will be revealed, so too in our daydreams.

A good fantasy, in its own delicious manner, always brings about justice. In our fantasies, we intuit a new heaven and a new earth.

Finally, in our healthy fantasies we are always at our best and our noblest. We are never petty, narrow and small in our daydreams. There we are always paragons of virtue and nobility—generous, kind, deeply loving and most gracious.

Thomas Aquinas distinguished between two kinds of union. For him, you could be in union with something either through possession or through desire.

In our fantasies, indeed most often in those that are so sensual, so narcissistic and so private as to make us ashamed of them, we are given the privileged opportunity to intuit what salvation looks and feels like.

Blessed By Being Seen

November 22, 1993

To really see someone, especially someone who looks up to you, is to give that person an important blessing. In a gaze of recognition, of understanding, in an appreciative look, there is deep blessing.

Often times, it is not so important that we say much to those for whom we are significant, but it is very important that we see them.

Let me try to explain:

A couple of years ago, a family that I know had a painful incident with their 13-year-old daughter. She was caught shoplifting. As things, turned out, she was stealing things that she neither needed or wanted.

Moreover, in her case, her stealing these things was not, as it often is among teens, something intended to impress peers, a little rite of passage necessary for acceptance into a group of friends.

No, without her saying so, she was stealing to get her father’s attention. Her father, struggling in his relationship to her mother, was not around a great deal and didn’t give a lot of attention to his daughter. So she forced his hand.

It was he that she demanded come to the police station to pick her up and settle things with the police. In doing that he had to give his daughter his attention. He had to look at her. Her shoplifting was a way of forcing her father to see her.

There is a deep longing inside of us to be seen by those to whom we look up—our parents, our elders, our leaders, our teachers, our coaches, our pastors and our bosses. It is important to us, more so than we generally imagine, that those who are above us, look at us, see us, recognize us.

We see this acted out ritually, for instance, when someone has an audience with the pope. In such an audience, not a lot of meaningful words are exchanged. The idea is not so much to have a deep conversation with the pope as it is to be seen by him.

It is important that the pope sees you, that he recognizes you, that his appreciative gaze falls upon you. There is a certain blessing imparted in that and, contemporary cynicism notwithstanding, those who have had an audience with the pope—or with the Queen or some royalty—have some feeling for what this is.

Blessing by seeing is one of the deep archetypal functions of all royalty, of all parents, and of all who lead others in any way. Thus . . .

Good Kings and Queens see their people; good parents see their kids; good teachers see their students; good pastors see their parishioners; good coaches see their players; good executives see their employees; and in really good restaurants the owner comes around to the tables and sees his or her costumers—and the customers are, without being able to explain why, grateful that the owner took the time and pain to see them.

We are blessed by being seen.

At a primal level we see this need to be blessed by being seen acted out in every playground on earth. The little child is playing at something, but he or she is constantly looking about for the parent and saying: “Mummy, watch me!” “Daddy, watch me!”

As well, more than one is the mother who cannot get any work done because her toddler is demanding every minute that mummy look at her or him.

And so, what’s my point?

My point is that today the young are not being seen enough in this way. Our youth, much like the 13-year-old girl referred to earlier, are acting out in all kinds of ways as a means of getting our attention. They want to, and they need to, be seen by us—parents, adults, teachers, priests, coaches, leaders. They need our blessing.

They need to see, right in our eyes, the radical acceptance of their reality and they need to read in our eyes the words: “You are my beloved child, in you I am wellpleased.”

Youth need our appreciative gaze; mostly they simply need our gaze—period. One of the deepest hungers inside of young people is the hunger for adult connection, the desire to be recognized, seen, by a significant adult.

The surface often belies this. We can easily be fooled and put off here. Our young people will, precisely, tend to give us the impression that they neither want nor need us, that we should butt out and leave them to their own world.

Nothing could be further from the truth. They desperately need, and badly want, the blessing that comes from our gaze and presence. They need for us to see them.

In the end, more than they want our words, they want our gaze . . . and so much of their acting out, the shoplifting, the drugs, the insolence and the absence, are little more than an attempt to force our hand, to demand and beg: “Mummy, Daddy, someone significant and adult, watch me!”

Truth Comes Tainted

November 15, 1993

“Sometimes I think the whispering in the ward at night sounds very Catholic. Perhaps that’s why I think so much about you (Mother). You were my religion for so many years. I asked Fr. O’Hare once how I could find favour in the eyes of God, and he told me, ‘First you must find favour in your mother’s eyes.’ It would have pleased you, Mother, Mary, to know how much you denied me. Not many women can take away a Church.” (Lisa St. Aubin de Teran, The Marble Mountain and Other Stories)

Can somebody take your church away? Lately, I have spent more than a little time listening to people make exactly that claim. There is an ever-expanding circle of people who complain that arrogant, power-abusing church persons and a dysfunctional church institution have hurt them to the point where they can no longer practice their faith.

More and more common is the complaint that the institutional church has hurt people and religiously depotentiated them.

In street language, you hear it put this way: “The institutional church has hurt me, abused me, not understood me, and not respected me to the point where I struggle to participate in its life. I still believe in God. God is good, that’s more than I can say for the church. Religion isn’t God! The church isn’t Christ! That’s true, isn’t it?”

I find myself drowning in a sea of emotions as I try to answer that question. For myself, there is no emotional separation between God and the church. In my own experience, perhaps atypical today, God and Christ were given to me by a church, by a religion, and by a mother and a father who, more than any other experience that I have yet had, made God and Christ believable.

The church that I met when I was little did not abuse me, misunderstand me, belittle me, riddle me with false guilt or make it difficult for me to believe in Christ. To the contrary, despite many imperfections and dysfunctions, for me, it made Christ credible.

But that was my experience. Others, it would seem, have had a different one.

But, although my emotions don’t spontaneously say: “Religion isn’t God, the church isn’t Christ,” I feel some of the truth in those expressions because my own experience with some other important groups parallels this kind of experience of the church.

My concrete experience make me spontaneously feel that, just as the church isn’t Christ, moralists are not morality; social justice groups aren’t social justice; feminists aren’t feminism; conservatives aren’t conservation; theologians aren’t theology; artists aren’t aesthetics; and pro-life and pro-choice groups aren’t always life and choice.

Truth is always compromised by those who try to give it incarnational feet and just as someone can take your church away, someone too can take away your social justice, your feminism or your theology. So says my experience.

And I suggest my experience is pretty typical here: Many is the man who fights the truth of social justice because of the social justice groups he knows; many is the woman who fights the truth of feminism because of the feminists she has met; many is the Catholic who fights against the value of theology because of the theologians he has read; many is the person who falsely asserts his or her moral freedom because of the moralists (professional and amateur) that he or she has had to endure; and many are the victims who fight the value of power and hierarchy because the very power that should have protected them against abuse abused them.

Jesus, as the second person of the Trinity, is the only incarnation of truth that doesn’t have a bad history and doesn’t, near hopelessly, mess up truth with inadequacy, neuroses and self-interest.

It is not easy to not be put off of truth by those who seek to bring it about. The churches do not have a monopoly on compromise and double standards here—though, clearly, they do not always rise above the pack either.

So where do we go, given the truth of this?

Does the fact that all advocates for truth are flawed and compromised give us the right to pass on the question of involvement and commitment?

Leibniz once said that God did not make the best of all possible universes. The man understood his planet. His comment is also singularly accurate as a description of church life, social justice, feminism, theology, pro-life, conservatism, liberalism and near everything else.

Beauty, love and family, just like the world itself, do not exist in purity, crystal forms of unadulterated goodness. They exist in the flesh, tainted, steeped in compromise, neurotic, full of betrayal, bad history, dysfunction and abuse.

Yet they’re the only truth we meet in the flesh. Outside of them there is nothing. Perfection is the enemy of the good. We choose for life when we, limping and stained, choose to become involved with what is less than perfect.

A Humbled Heart

November 8, 1993

In his latest book, The Return of the Prodigal Son, Henri Nouwen suggests that one of the main things that has to happen in order for us to come to conversion and purity of heart is that we must move from being judge to being repentant sinner.

From judge to repentant sinner, what is being suggested here? Psalm 50 haunts the heart with the refrain: “A humbled and contrite heart you (God) will not spurn.” Our problem is that, despite considerable sincerity, our hearts are rarely humble and contrite. The norm is judgment of others, anger at them, and a certain moral smugness and self-righteousness.

Rarely are we on our knees with our heads against the breast of a forgiving God, contrite about what we’ve done and left undone—our betrayals, our sins, our inadequacies. Most of the time our posture is that of the judge. Our own faults are rarely at issue as we adjudicate others’ need for contrition and pronounce judgment on their faults.

Our own judgmental attitude and self-righteousness is, most of the time, hidden from us. In our own eyes we are never the hypocrite, the one sitting in judgment on somebody else’s life. No. We are the honest ones, the compassionate ones, the humble ones.

Yet, that is rarely the way we are seen by others, especially by those closest to us. Almost always they feel judged by us and almost always they see in us a self-righteousness and a moral smugness that offends them. People around us are only too aware that we are much more the judge than the repentant sinner, even as we ourselves are little aware of it.

Thus, for example, if our temperament puts us at home in liberal circles, there is a good chance that we nurse a fair amount of anger against our more conservative and traditional brothers and sisters. Invariably they will appear to us as morally smug, holier-than-thou, complacent, timid, rigid, dogmatic, fundamentalistic, power-hungry and intellectually backward—and yet as claiming the moral and religious high ground.

Moreover, we feel that they are judging us, believing that we no longer pray, that we have sold out in terms of sexual morality, and that we are not really Catholic and Christian in the true sense.

And this double awareness—of their hypocrisy and of being judged by them—will dominate our self-awareness much more than will any self-criticism or awareness of our own duplicity, sin and betrayals.

Little are we aware that they, the conservatives, feel judged by us, that they feel us as intimating that they are stupid, backward, sexually hung-up, racists, sexists, blind to justice, legalistic, naive of real human experience and fundamentalistic. Little are we aware that they, whom we label as holier-than-thou, consider our attitude as “holier-than-thou.”

The converse is just as true: If we find our home among those of a more conservative mindset, there is a very good chance that we harbor a lot of anger against our more liberal sisters and brothers—against feminists, against social justice groups, against a lot of artists and against theologians. Invariably they will appear to us, precisely, as morally smug, as posturing (more-sensitive-andinclusive-than-thou), as intellectually arrogant and bullying, and as claiming, in pharisee fashion, the religious and moral high ground.

And we will feel them as judging us, believing that we are intellectually backward, fundamentalistic, unenlightened, hung up on sex, insensitive to the needs of the poor, a racist, a sexist,, a dinosaur from another age.

Little are we aware that they, on their part, feel so judged and put down by us. That they perceive us as the bully, the power to be feared, the person who is anti-life, the dealer of unfreedom and death.

Strange how each of us so clearly sees the judgmental attitude in the other and yet is so unaware of how brutally judgmental we ourselves are. One man’s prophet is another man’s fanatic; one woman’s freedom fighter is another woman’s terrorist; and one person’s pro-life struggle is, for another person, the dealing of death!

What is true here in terms of the self-righteousness and self-blindness that exists within our ideological circles is perhaps even more true within the ordinary give and take of our daily lives. We are invariably judge, never repentant sinner.

Conversion begins when we stop standing as judge in order to kneel as sinner. When we are humble and contrite of heart we will not be spurned by God—nor by each other.

Your Dad Only Dies Once

November 1, 1993

It’s a hard thing going through life without adequate self-expression. How painful not to be an artist, not to be able to draw or paint or carve into stone or onto paper that sunset, that tear, that smile or even that heartache which for one moment, makes the world stand still and deeply stirs your chromosomes.

You see life naked, exposed, lying bare for the seeing and, for a second, you see, really see it. Then it’s gone and you’ve only its scars and you go home and do the laundry and life goes on as before; except, except now you’ve seen something you never saw before and you aren’t quite the same anymore.

I had my chromosomes stirred in this way recently and I wish I had it in me to make a painting of the face that did that. It was at the funeral of a friend’s father.

This wasn’t a particularly sad funeral, in comparison to some others. It was a faith-filled occasion and the man being buried had been an exceptionally good man, one who had served his God, his family, his church and his community well.

Deeply loved and respected, and 81 years of age, he had lived a full life. There wasn’t a lot of unfinished business left. His children were all grown and had lives of their own and he had given them both sufficient time and faith to prepare for his death.

But you only lose your father once and no amount of faith and preparation takes away the sadness of that. Nobody had to tell that to this man’s family, especially to one of his sons, my friend’s older brother—a 50-year-old bachelor, the type of shy unmarried man you often find in small rural towns and villages.

A shyness, a timidity and a goodness even, sometimes make a strange and wicked conspiracy that keep a certain kind of man unmarried. Everything inside of him would like to be married, even as that everything knows that it never will be. My friend’s older brother was a victim of this kind, a conscripted celibate, a good man unwillingly predestined to never have a wife and kids.

So he lived at home still with an aging mother and father, freely, though against his will, at 50. He took care of them, without fuss, though with a resentment which, while not admitted here, obviously admitted itself into other areas of his life and feelings. A man, respected and loved, but hurt.

We all know men and women of this kind, but mostly they can hide their real pain and mostly we are too preoccupied with our own pain to notice much.

But he was really hurting on this day and funerals are a contemplative time, a privileged time for seeing. I sat beside him at the reception table after the funeral as people filed by and offered condolences: “I’m sorry! Your dad was such a good man. He’ll be missed! It will be such a consolation to your mother to have you home. Take care of yourself!”

As he stood up to leave, he could no longer hold back the tears: “You only lose your father once!” he said, as if to apologize for crying. Then he checked his tears, his brief moment of weakness, and his face quivered.

For that second he was stripped bare, whipped. Fifty years of hurt, 50 years of inconsummation, 50 years of a kind of timidity and shame that come from being alone in this way, from being good and doing what’s expected of you, from being everyone’s sugar uncle, and losing a dad you still lived with—it all showed.

He was defenceless and exposed as though he was walking around naked. Losing a loved one can do that to you.

I realized then that he was not apologizing for his tears, he was embarrassed for his nakedness. Quickly he began to talk of something else, the ravaged local and the kind of death this was bringing to his home town. “A whole way of life is dying here,” he said, as if to make it clear that there were other kinds of death on his mind, beyond dad’s.

A young and very pretty woman, a friend of the family, came up to him and gave him a tight hug. Then, perhaps seeing what I saw, she gave him a kiss, right on his lips.

She took a step back from him, took his hand and said: “I’m sorry about your dad. You take care now, please do. Don’t forget lots of us love you!” His face softened a little and the tears reappeared: “Thank you, I do appreciate that!” “We’ll see you around then, OK!” she said as she walked away.

He let his tears flow freely for a bit. Then, as they stopped, the quiver returned, as did his need to apologize: “You only lose your dad once!” he told me again. “It’s tough! These things are really tough!”

Yes, death is tough . . . in all its forms.

Therapy of Public Life

October 25, 1993

Twenty five years ago, Philip Rieff wrote a very important book entitled The Triumph of the Therapeutic. In it, he argued that widespread reliance upon private therapy arose in the Western world mainly because community broke down.

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

If Rieff is right, and I think he is, then it follows that the solution to many of the things that drive us to the therapeutic couch lies as much, and perhaps more, in a fuller and healthier participation within public life, including ecclesial life, than it does in private therapy.

We need, as Parker Palmer is so fond of suggesting, the therapy of a public life.

What is meant by this? How does public life heal and strengthen us?

In caption, public life—life within community, beyond our private selves and private intimacies—is therapeutic because it draws us beyond ourselves into the lives of others, because it gives us a certain rhythm and because it connects us with resources beyond the poverty of our private helplessness.

To participate healthily in other people’s lives takes us beyond our own obsessions. It also steadies us. Most public life has a certain rhythm and regularity to it that helps calm the chaotic whirl of our private lives which are so often racked with disorientation, depression, psychological impotence, paranoia and an almost infinite variety of obsessions.

Participation in public life gives us clearly defined things to do, regular stopping places, regular events of structure and steadiness, a rhythm. This is a commodity that no psychiatric couch provides.

Then, too, 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 this! While doing my doctoral studies in Belgium, I was privileged to be able to attend the lectures of, and to have frequent conversations with, 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 and a believer, is to too 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 obsessional problems are mainly problems of over-concentration . . . and over-concentration is broken mainly by getting outside of yourself, outside of your own mind and heart and life . . . and room!

“Get involved in public things—from entertainment, to politics, to work. Get outside of your closed world. Enter more 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 that solving one’s inner private problems is dependent upon outside relationships, both of intimacy and of a more public nature.

As a corollary to this, I offer too this example: For 16 years I taught theology at a seminary college. Many is the emotionally unstable student, fraught with every kind of inner pain and unsteadiness, who would show up at our college and slowly get emotionally steadier and stronger. . . and the strength and steadiness came not so much from the theology courses, but from the rhythm and health of the community life.

These students got well not so much by what they learned in the classrooms as they did by participating in the life outside of them. The therapy of a public life helped heal them.

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

Monks, with their monastic rhythm, have long understood this and they have a secret worth knowing: Program, rhythm, public participation, the demand to show up, the discipline of the monastic bell have kept many a man and 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 nurture deeply our spiritual lives, they keep us sane and steady.

Private therapy can sometimes be helpful in supplementing this, but public, ecclesial life, with its peculiar rhythms and demands, is what, first of all and most of all, keeps us steady on our feet.

Truth and Beauty

October 11, 1993

In a recent interview, Mary Gordon, one of the brightest young novelists in America, commented on the Catholicism that she was raised on and how she feels about the church today.

For her, Roman Catholicism, both of the past and of today, has an impressive aesthetics. There is a beauty in its form and its (classical) language that has the power to hold her. She speaks less impressively of its content.

Asked whether she still goes to church, she replied: “Sometimes, I can’t say that it shapes my life in a central way. It’s not that I never desire to go or that I feel nothing when I go. I like hearing the gospels read and I like feeling that I’m in a room with people who at least pretend to believe these words that are of great beauty.

“I like being in a large room with a lot of different kinds of people . . . all of whom have their hearts tilted towards one thing which, at its best, I find very beautiful.”

In the same interview, at one point, she comments on how she felt as a young girl, going to the Latin Mass:

“It had a kind of austerity and richness in form and language and sensuality that was wonderful training, that really created a standard of aesthetic formality. I was utterly absorbed in it.

“Religious Catholics (then) would be ashamed to talk about the beauty of the Mass, as if it were a work of art. It was utterly functional; it was the vessel that housed the truths by which you lived.

“To consider it a species of beauty rather than truth, rather than an utterly sacred vehicle for transformation that they believed to be real—they actually believed that bread and wine were turned into the body and blood of Christ—to reduce the immensely powerful and important experience to mere beauty would have been unthinkable” (Catholic New Times, June 27,1993).

I am not sure where exactly Mary Gordon, herself, lands on all of this, whether she sees the language and ritual of Catholicism simply the way an aesthete might see a well-done ballet or whether she admits, as well, the existence of God and the communion of saints underneath. She never quite tips her hand.

What her comments do serve to express, however, is a certain atheism, a practical bracketing of God’s existence, that is today quite common within theological and church circles. Simply put, for more and more people today faith is more a question of aesthetics than it is of truth. In such a view, religion is not judged as true or false on the basis of the existence or non-existence of the realities that it claims underlie it.

Does God actually exist or not? No, religion is judged not to its truth. Rather it is seen to be of value if its language, ritual and moral code, analogous to a work of art, have the power to catch one’s heart. Less and less is religion focused on God and more and more is it focused on us.

This is not all bad. Real truth does focus on you—and it often takes your breath away. It has, precisely, a burning aesthetics which has you looking back on many things and saying: “Were not our hearts burning within us!” I suspect it is because of this that Mary Gordon still feels drawn to church. More than a little faith and truth are carried in aesthetics.

But in the end, not enough of them are. There is no salvation in aesthetics alone. Faith and truth need to be carried by other things—private prayer and a personal relationship to God—as well.

Otherwise it doesn’t take long before someone looks at Christian worship (either with the cold gaze of the pure analyst or with the con- descending stare of the someone pitying the naive) and sincerely says: “They actually believe that bread and wine are turned into the body and blood of Christ,” as if belief in the transcendent and the miraculous were simple superstition!

What is missing in reflections such as Mary Gordon’s is any reference to the actual existence of God. Christianity is approached the way we approach a great centre for the arts: Great masters have created beautiful things and put them there. These things move us deeply . . . but it is incidental, of no importance whatever, that the masters who created those treasures are now themselves dead. The treasures alone are important. Nobody prays to a dead artist.

But Christianity asks that we pray to a live existent God. It also asks that we actually believe in some rather miraculous things, including the truth that bread and wine actually become the body and blood of Christ.

Sex is a Moral Issue

October 4, 1993

Recently I read an article within which a fairly respected Catholic moralist commented that the church is too hung up on sex. It has, in his words, an obsession with the pelvis—”everything below the waist is a big deal!”

That is the stated opinion of one man, a moralist no less, but it is also an expression of how, in fact, many others feel.

Among a certain circle of Catholics today there is almost a positive disdain for the church’s traditional teaching regarding sex. What is novel about this is not that people are challenging the church’s age-old insistence that, morally, sex is a big deal. This has always been challenged.

What is new today is that the major practitioners of this criticism are Catholics, within the church. More and more common is the Catholic who believes that the church is unhealthily obsessed with the question of sex, hung up with what’s below the waist, to the detriment of what he or she believes to be the more important moral issues.

We see this expressed in some liberal and social justice circles. There is a Catholic here, often about my age or older, who is coming out of an experience wherein the church was indeed too hung up on sex. For example, a number of old moral manuals, some of which were seminary textbooks, taught that all sexual activity, including masturbation, outside of marriage was a mortal sin. Talk about high symbols around sex!

As well, in those manuals and in many others of the past, sex was unduly singled out, as if it was the only sin. You could do horrible things with your temper and /or totally ignore the demands of social justice and still go to Communion, but you couldn’t transgress any of the church’s sexual laws and do the same thing.

Given this background and the human proclivity for over-reaction, there is, among a good number of Catholics today, the reverse attitude: sex is now unduly singled out as the one moral issue that is not important. Often times, in fact, the impression is given that any moral energy spent in sexual issues detracts from what is of more critical importance, social justice.

But that is only half of the story and not the important half at that. Where the church’s traditional teaching on sex is really being challenged is in actual life. Here the challenge expresses itself not in theory but in benign neglect. More and more common is the Catholic who simply sees no real moral issue whatever in ignoring the traditional teachings of the church on sex.

In a culture where, for the majority of persons, sex is a standard part of dating, more and more people simply see no moral issue in what they do in their private sexual lives, as long as issues such as abuse, incest and the like are not involved.

Thus things such as sex outside of marriage, living together before marriage, masturbation and a host of other things are no longer, for many people, considered to be wrong. Very rare today is the person who feels the need for reconciliation about things within his or her sexual life.

What’s to be said about this? Is this a moral growing-up? Are we freeing ourselves from an unhealthy fixation on pelvic issues? Was the church in the past wrong in surrounding sex with such high symbolism?

My own opinion is that we have gone too far in our reaction to our past. Statements like the one that I quoted above—”the church is too hung up on the pelvis”—betray a moral narrowness that can be positively harmful.

Morality is about both the private and the social, about sex and justice, about real big things and very small things. We are asked, always, to do both. To be involved in great causes does not grant one an exemption from even the smallest demands of sexual responsibility. Just as fidelity to the church’s sexual laws is not a licence to now ignore the demands of justice.

God gave us the rather astonishing capacity to walk and to chew gum at the same time. This should be reflected in our moral capacities. We need to take both justice and the pelvis seriously at one and the same time!

Moreover, in the end, pelvic issues are not of small consequence—dwarfed in importance by the bigger issues of justice and sociology. Irresponsible sexuality, at every level, seriously damages all of us.

The pathos brought into our lives by irresponsible sexuality may never be underrated. Many is the marriage, the family, the friendship, the life, the happiness, that has been wrecked by irresponsible sex. Analysts, for example, tell us that in nearly 80 per cent of teenage suicides some fracturing of the person’s sexuality lies at the root.

Pelvic issues are important. Our sexuality lies at the heart of our self-identity and dignity. We should be grateful to the church for its perennial refusal to trivialize that fact.

Of Oranges and Pennies

September 27, 1993

This summer, on a couple of occasions, a particular skepticism of mine was assaulted.

You see, I am one of those people whose faith allows for God to do big, earth-shaking, historically-significant, miracles—the Red Sea and the resurrection of Jesus—but expect that, save for these interventions every 10,000 years or so, God leaves everyday life pretty much alone.

So it was with considerable skepticism that I sat in chapel one day and heard one of our most respected Oblate missionaries share the following story:

Some 25 years ago, he had been in charge of two northern missions which were a considerable distance apart. In winter he made the trip between them by dog-sled. Since the trip was too long to make in one day, he had built for himself a rough shack half-way in between them, on each trip, he would spend one night.

Each spring, after the snow had melted, he would have to go back there and take out all the things inside of the shack (stove, bedding, cooking utensils and so on) so that these would not get stolen during the summer months. Once spring day, he returned to the shack to collect these things for the summer.

He came on horseback, stayed overnight, and in the morning packed all the things on to a sled-like contraption that he hooked behind the horse. He then set off for the day-long journey home and, because the horse was already pulling a huge load, he was on foot.

The day was unusually hot and, despite drinking water regularly, he slowly began to feel dehydrated. He reached the main road at 9 p.m. exhausted. Luck was on his side and, just after reaching that road, a truck chanced to come by and its driver volunteered to take all of his supplies to town for him.

With his horse now free of its load, the priest was able again to climb on its back and rest from his marathon walk. However he was still two hours from home, on horseback now, but dehydrated and exhausted.

Riding along in this state, he slowly became obsessed with the craving for an orange, a cold orange. Over and over in his mind, there was the image of himself sinking his teeth into a cool succulent orange. He said a little prayer to God, half wishing to find an orange.

A short time later he looked down the road, this abandoned dirt road in the middle of nowhere and saw an orange gleaming in the moonlight. He was so sure that it was an illusion that he continued riding right along. Then, more to check his sanity than in the hope of finding an orange, he turned back and got off the horse.

Incredible! There was an orange, cool, whole, delicious, just as he had fantasized. He peeled it and ate it. A mile later, another orange appeared; and a mile after that, still another one. A mile apart from each other, “God gave” him four oranges that night . . . at least that is how he interprets it!

I believe this story because I trust the sanity and sanctity of the man who told it; even though I am not much for believing in oranges inexplicably appearing at night on abandoned roads!

Less than a month later, I was visiting one of our retired priests who lives by himself in a small city near the West Coast. He is a man of extraordinary simplicity and deep prayer.

I spent some hours sitting with him in his apartment, listening to him describe how he goes up into the hills every morning to watch the sunrise because as he puts it, “in the refraction of light, I see God.” He invited me to go out for supper with him and as we were walking towards the restaurant my eyes chanced to see a penny on the sidewalk.

I bent to pick it up, saying: “This is one of my superstitions. If I find a penny, I think I will be lucky that day!”

“It’s not a superstition,” he told me. “God is blessing you. I know it because before we get to the restaurant you will find another penny. When God blesses us we find two pennies.”

The agnostic part of me was still dealing with his “seeing God in the refraction of light” when he gave me this assurance that God blesses us by giving us not one but two pennies. Really? Yes, it happened! Just as we got to the door of the restaurant, I looked down and there was a second penny! Who am I to doubt!

Coincidence? Piety gone over the edge? Have I been working too hard lately? Does God drop oranges on roads and pennies on sidewalks?

Somebody once said that the only difference between a mystic and a psychotic is that the mystic is more careful about whom he or she talks to.

As clever as that sounds, it’s wrong. The difference has nothing to do with whom he or she talks to, but with the fact that God is real, that the world of the supernatural actually exists, and that God’s providence includes everyday miracles, oranges and pennies.

Kissing the Leper

September 20, 1993

There is a story told about Francis of Assisi, perhaps more mythical than factual, which illustrates how touching the poor is the cure for a mediocre and dying faith:

One night prior to his conversion, Francis, then a rich and pampered young man, donned his flashiest clothes, mounted his horse, and set off for a night of drinking and carousing. God, social justice and the poor were not on his mind.

Riding down a narrow road, he found his path blocked by a leper. He was particularly repulsed by lepers, their deformities and smell revolted him, and so he tried to steer his horse around the leper, but the path was too narrow.

Frustrated, angry, but with his path clearly blocked before him, Francis eventually had no other choice but to get down off his horse and try to move the leper out of his path. When he put out his hand to take the leper’s arm, as he touched the leper, something inside of him snapped. Suddenly irrational, unashamed and undeterred by the smell of rotting flesh, he kissed that leper.

His life was never the same again. In that kiss, Francis found the reality of God and of love in a way that would change his life forever.

Today many of us struggle with the same issues as did the pre-converted Francis—a pampered life and a mediocre and dying faith. We know that our faith calls us to work for social justice and that this demand is non-negotiable.

We know too, as somebody once put it with a succinctness that is praiseworthy, that strength without compassion is violence; that compassion without justice is weakness; that justice without love is Marxism; and that love without justice is baloney!

What we often don’t know is that the preferential option of the poor is the cure for our mediocre and dying faith. We must kiss the leper.

Simply put, if we touch the poor, we will touch Christ. In this way, touching the poor can be a functional substitute for prayer . . . and given the power of Western culture today, we often need this substitute. Let me try to explain: Western culture today is so powerful and alluring that it often swallows us whole. Its beauty, power and promise generally takes away both our breath and our perspective. The lure of present salvation—money, sex, creativity, the good life—has, for the most part, entertained, amused, distracted and numbed us into a state where we no longer have a perspective beyond that of our culture and its short-range soteriology.

One way out of this, of course, is through prayer. A life of prayer can cure a dying faith. The problem here, however, is that what our culture erodes in us is, precisely, our life of prayer. The hardest thing to sustain within our lives today is prayer. Everything militates against it.

Given this, perhaps the only way we have of not letting ourselves be swallowed whole by our culture is to kiss the leper, to place our lot with those who have no place within the culture, namely, the poor with their many faces: the aged, the sick, the dying, the unborn, the handicapped, the unattractive, the displaced and all those others who are not valued by the culture.

To touch those who have no place within our culture is give ourselves a perspective beyond our culture.

Daniel Berrigan, who writes eloquently on this, describes in his memoirs how much his perspective changed when he began to work fulltime in a cancer ward, ministering to the terminally ill.

When you walk home from work after a day of being with those who are dying, he says, your vision clears pretty well and what your culture offers to you no longer seems so overpowering and irresistible. Concrete contact with the poor is Christian contemplation. It knocks the scales off one’s eyes!

“Whatsoever you do to the least of my people, that you do unto to me,” Christ assures us. In the poor, God is ever-present in our world, waiting to be met. In the powerless, one can find the power of God; in the voiceless, one can hear the voice of God; in the economically poor, one can find God’s treasures; in the weak, one can find God’s strength; and in the unattractive, one can find God’s beauty.

The glory of God might indeed be humanity fully alive, but the privileged presence of God lies especially in and with the poor.

Thus, like Francis, we need to get off our horses and kiss the leper. If we do, something will snap, we will see our pampered lives for what they are, and God and love will break into our lives in such a way that we will never be the same again.

Sex And Morality

September 14, 1993

Recently I read an article within which a fairly respected Catholic moralist commented that the church is too hung up on sex. It has, in his words, an obsession with the pelvis – “everything below the waist is a big deal!”

That is the stated opinion of one man, a moralist no less, but it is also an expression of how, in fact, many others feel. Among a certain circle of Catholics today there is almost a positive disdain for the church’s traditional teaching regarding sex. What is novel about this is not that people are challenging the church’s age-old insistence that, morally, sex is a big deal. This has always been challenged. What is new today is that the major practitioners of this criticism are Catholics, within the church. More and more common is the Catholic who believes that the church is unhealthily obsessed with the question of sex, hung up with what’s below the waist, to the detriment of what he or she believes to be the more important moral issues.

We see this expressed in some liberal and social justice circles. There is a Catholic there, often about my age or older, who is coming out of an experience wherein the church was indeed too hung up on sex. For example, a number of old moral manuals, some of which were seminary textbooks, taught that all sexual activity, including masturbation, outside of marriage was a mortal sin. Talk about high symbols around sex! As well, in those manuals, and in many others of the past, sex was unduly singled out, as if it was the only sin. You could do horrible things with your temper and/or totally ignore the demands of social justice and still go to communion, but you couldn’t transgress any of the church’s sexual laws and do the same thing. Given this background and the human proclivity for over-reaction, there is, among a good number of Catholics today, the reverse attitude: sex is now unduly singled out as the one moral issue that is not important. Often times, in fact, the impression is given that any moral energy spent on sexual issues detracts from what is of more critical importance, social justice.

But that is only half of the story, and not the important half at that. Where the church’s traditional teaching on sex is really being challenged is in actual life. Here the challenge expresses itself not in theory but in benign neglect. More and more common is the Catholic who simply sees no real moral issue whatever in ignoring the traditional teachings of the church on sex. In a culture where, for the majority of persons, sex is a standard part of dating, more and more people simply see no moral issue in what they do within their private sexual lives, as long as issues such as abuse, incest, and the like are not involved. Thus things such as sex outside of marriage, living together before marriage, masturbation, and a host of other things are no longer, for many people, considered to be wrong. Very rare today is the the person who feels the need for reconciliation about things within his or her sexual life.

My own opinion is that we have gone too far in our reaction to our past. Statements like the one that I quoted above – “the church is too hung up on the pelvis” – betray a moral narrowness that can be positively harmful. Morality is about both the private and the social, about sex and justice, about real big things and very small things. We are asked, always, to do both. To be involved in great causes does not grant one an exemption from even the smallest demands of sexual responsibility, just as fidelity to the church’s sexual laws is not a license to now ignore the demands of justice. God gave us the rather astonishing capacity to walk and to chew gum at the same time. This should be reflected in our moral capacities. We need to take both justice and the pelvis seriously at one and the same time!

Moreover, in the end, pelvic issues are not of small consequence – dwarfed in importance by the bigger issues of justice and sociology. Irresponsible sexuality, at every level, seriously damages all of us. The pathos brought into our lives by irresponsible sexuality may never be underrated. Many is the marriage, the family, the friendship, the life, the happiness, that has been wrecked by irresponsible sex. Analysts, for example, tell us that in nearly 80% of teenage suicides some fracturing of the person’s sexuality lies at the root. Pelvic issues are important. Our sexuality lies at the heart of our self-identity and dignity. We should be grateful to the church for its perennial refusal to trivialize that fact.