The New Legalism – The Tyranny Of Programs

March 7, 1994

One of our perennial struggles as a church is with legalism. Invariably we set up certain hoops which we believe must be jumped through if one is to make proper contact with God. Invariably too we are blind to the fact that we are doing this. Hardly ever does someone see himself or herself as a legalist. Yet that is how we are often perceived by those who are struggling, for whatever reason, with the church.

We all have, I think, a pretty good feel for how the old church (if I may use that phrase) was legalistic. The rules were pretty strict and if a man or woman couldn’t live up to them, well, he or she had to seek the consolation of God elsewhere. We have, I submit, considerably less of a feel for how we, who are trying to build a better church, are perpetuating this. Let me, in a way that is perhaps a bit devious, give an illustration:

I have always found a certain incident in Jesus’ ministry highly curious. It’s the occasion (Mark 7, 24-30) where a Syrophoenician woman asks Jesus to heal her daughter and he refuses, telling her that “it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” But the woman persists, pointing out to Jesus that “even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” That answer changes Jesus’ mind. He mellows instantly and not only grants her the miracle she requests, but tells her that nowhere among the Jewish community had he found a greater faith than hers.

When one reads this account superficially it would seem that, at first, Jesus was pretty petty, legalistic, and hardly the role model we want. He refused this woman the miracle because she is not Jewish, pure and simple. In effect, he tells her that the Jewish people are the children, everyone else are the dogs! Ironically, though, examined more deeply, this incident reveals the reverse, Jesus’ freedom to act beyond legalism. How so?

Picture this: You are in charge of an RCIA program in your own parish. You have, through nearly 8 months, worked with a group of very sincere people who are preparing themselves to enter the church. You have met weekly, shared faith stories, prayed together, studied scripture and church doctrine together, participated in several very moving liturgies of initiation, and have just finished making an intense retreat together as the Vigil of Holy Saturday approaches and these persons, strongly supported by their sponsors, will to be baptized and received into the church. It is now less than an hour before the Vigil is to begin and you are giving some last minute instructions and encouragement to those who are about to be baptized, when a woman, a complete stranger, walks up to you and says: “I would like to be baptized too! Here, tonight, with these others!”

I doubt that she would receive baptism in very many of our churches. I suspect that our response would be similar to Jesus’ initial comment to the Syrophoenician woman: “It isn’t fair, you aren’t prepared like these others, you didn’t do the program!” Yet Jesus, after that initial response, did baptize her that night. In effect, Jesus’ first line was: “You aren’t ready, you didn’t do the program, you didn’t do the RCIA which is called the Old Testament!” But the woman responds to this by showing him that, even though she has not done the formal program, she is just as ready as anyone who has. She gets the miracle, not because she did the program, but because she is ready.

There is a deep lesson in that incident for today’s church which, not infrequently, suffers from a new legalism, the legalism of program. We have, in recent years, developed many good programs (and they are programs, even when we refuse to call them that) to prepare people for baptism, marriage, eucharist, confirmation, and ministry. Please don’t get me wrong. Virtually always, these programs are good and necessary and have helped countless people. But, and this is the point, they have also, in many parishes and communities, become the only way, the non-negotiable avenue, to receive these sacraments. They have too become the new way power is wielded and the way that the poor (who have many faces) are again excluded from the church. Rare is the RCIA director who, if approached on Holy Saturday by a unknown woman, would pull that woman aside right there, interview her, and than decide that perhaps after all she is ready … even though she hasn’t done the prescribed program or process.

John Shea once suggested that Jesus was crucified because “he made God as accessible as the village well.” I sometimes fear that so many of our our programs, good as they are, do not always make God quite that accessible.

Thinking Small

February 28, 1994

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.

Tenderness And Politics

February 21, 1994

Few things are as singularly urgent as is the need to bring about a better marriage, between justice and contemplation. The tension that exists between them expresses itself in a variety of ways.

It’s the perennial tension between piety and politics, private morality and social engagement, biblical righteousness and social justice, your local prayer group and Greenpeace, tenderness and hard action.

Ernst Kasemann once put it this way: The trouble in the world and in the church is that the pious aren’t liberal and the liberal aren’t pious.

Few people resolve this tension very well. Invariably we fall off one side or the other.

When worship, piety and private morality are the dominant focus of our religious lives, we too often tend to rationalize away the Gospel’s demand for social justice. Religion then means going to church, praying privately and keeping our private morals roughly in order.

In circles of piety frequently there is little sense that true worship of God demands more than church going and private morality.

Conversely, when social justice is the dominant focus of our religious lives, we too easily confuse Greenpeace with the Gospel and forget that what ultimately grounds our commitment to justice is Jesus Christ, not liberal ideology.

In social justice circles there is often too little sense that the commitment to justice demands more than merely having a just cause and doing effective political action.

One person who, to my mind, has found a rare balance here and who serves both as a challenge and a model for the rest of us is Jim Wallis, the founder of Sojourners, community in Washington, D.C. Wallis and his Sojourners community are in the front lines in virtually every justice issue in America; they are also a community on the front lines of Christian worship and private morality. And they are not a Johnny-come lately to either of these.

Right from its inception 20 years ago, Sojourners, mainly through the vision and articulation of Wallis, committed itself non-negotiably to both personal righteousness and social justice, private morality and social transformation, piety and liberality. They married these, the church and the street, in a way that few, very few, others have.

And the ensuing 20 years have not been kind to that marriage, just as they haven’t been to most marriages. Pressures of all kinds, from the right and from the left, tempt them and everyone else to give up on that marriage.

But fortunately the reverse seems to be happening. What is coming out of Sojourners, as seen both in the literature it is producing and in the social actions it is taking, is a model for how contemplation and justice, private and social morality should meet.

In Sojourners we see a paradigm for how the church and the street, piety and politics, might mix, namely, in a Gospel that is not divided, but that embraces both the call to conversion and the summons to justice, a Gospel that integrates prayer, worship, private morality and social transformation.

Allow me here to quote a recent article by Wallis (‘Worth Fighting For,” Sojourners, Feb./ March, 1994):

“The frightening disregard for human life among too many young people is a bitter reflection on the way these same young people have become so utterly disregarded by their society. The coldness of heart that makes even veteran urban activists shiver is a judgment upon our coldness towards our poorest children: We reap what we have sown.

“Neither liberal sociology nor conservative piety can begin to address the roots of this crisis. Neither government spending nor simplistic self-help slogans will suffice. What is called for now is that particular biblical combination of which the prophets most often spoke—justice and righteousness.

“Both the structures of oppression and the morality of personal behavior must undergo radical transformation. We need a change of heart and a change of direction not only among troubled urban youth, but for all of us.

“The problem is too deep and our task too large to take it on by ourselves. We will need the help that comes by faith. As another young man in the post-riot meeting in Watts said to us: ‘We’ve got some habits that only God can cure.’ That goes for all of us.”

Wallis goes on to suggest that at this critical historical juncture only faith will make possible the political imagination needed to find solutions to the social problems that beset us. He sees signs of hope already emerging. He is one of them!

Rooted In Honesty

February 14, 1994

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.

Broken and Distributed

February 7, 1994

Ten years ago, while I was doing graduate studies in Belgium and still on faculty at a theology college back home, I received a letter from one of the students at that college. She shared with me, rather excitedly, that a new student had registered there. “And she’s a poet, a genuine poet,” she wrote. “A big surprise awaits you on your return, we’ve got a real poet here at the college!”

I returned there a year later and met our poet, a young woman named Mary Lynn Jones. For the next two years, though, she never shared any of her poetry with me, nor, as far as I know, with anyone else at the college. I soon forget that she had been introduced to me as a poet. What I noticed instead was her keen intelligence, her diligence, her gentle spirit, her shyness, her quietness, her faith, and her physical disability. Mary Lynn was already walking with the aid of a cane, a victim of scleroderma, a rare connective tissue disorder that slowly debilitates and then kills its victims.

For two years I was one of her teachers and, during one of those semesters when Mary Lynn found it too tiring to attend class regularly, I had the rare privilege of giving her a guided reading course, a process that required that occasionally we would have long discussions together. Still she read me no poetry, nor even hinted that she had some to offer. Then, one night, after having dinner at her house, with her husband and myself near killing her with cigar smoke and Mary Lynn pouring the cognac, she suddenly announced: “Tonight I want to read you some poetry!” She did and I was deeply moved. Her poetry, was good, very good. It carried all of her intelligence, shyness, gentleness, and faith.

When she finished her reading, I suggested to her that she should try to publish it, not just in a book, but also in some ongoing way, in a column in some newspaper. There was no false modest refusal – “Oh dear, I don’t think it’s that good!” No. She knew that it was good and that it was worth sharing. She too thought that publishing would be a good idea and it is her comment on this that I most want to share here: “If some newspaper or magazine would accept the idea, I would very much like to write a regular column, both of poetry and commentary, and I think that I would like to call it Broken and Distributed since, when you have a disease like mine, when your body is falling apart and you cannot hide that fact, when your debilities and vulnerabilities are so public, when you are 39 years old and walking around with a cane, when your physical beauty is wasting away in a world that values mostly that, and when you are daily becoming more helpless and there is nothing you can do about it, then you are broken and distributed – a little like the broken body of Christ in Eucharist.”

Mary Lynn never did get to publish her column. She died a month ago, bedridden and physically broken. Those of us who loved her, and there were many, gathered to say our good-byes and, especially, to reflect upon what a gift her life had been for us.

It was a joyous good-bye. All of us felt it. We were at a double Eucharist. Christ’s body was being broken and distributed, but so was Mary Lynn’s, just as it had been during those years of her illness. Sick, she gave us her life, not her sickness. Her sickness was only a prism through which it was sometimes easy for us to see her gentleness of soul, her trusting faith, and her deep beauty. Now with her passing, and we all felt it, she was also giving us her death. What a gift that can be.

Henri Nouwen suggests that there is such a thing as a good death. We choose the way we die. We choose between clinging to life in such a way that death becomes nothing but a failure to keep on living or we choose to let go of life in such a way so that we can be given to others as a source of hope. Death can be our final gift to others. Mary Lynn’s death was this kind of gift. Everyone who knew her, everyone who had ever dealt with her, and everyone who gathered to say good-bye to her felt nothing in the way of guilt, unfinished business, or heaviness towards her life or her death. She left us peace and at peace.

Like the Eucharist too, she left us grateful.

When Therese of Lisieux was dying, she promised those around that, after her death, she would shower the world with roses. Mary Lynn Jones was a person of extraordinary gentleness of soul. Those of us who knew her are already experiencing a shower of gentleness. I am sure that, given the mystery of the body of Christ, many others who didn’t know her will receive that same rain. She died and it is us who are now resting in peace.

The Restless Spirit

January 31, 1994

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.

Some Of The People

January 24, 1994

Michael Meade, the mythologist, is one of the truly gifted story tellers in America today. Maybe it’s his Irish chromosomes, but when he tells a story everyone, from young to old, sits spellbound.

And there is a particular refrain that appears like a leitmotif in many of his stories. Michael will be recounting some incident when he will say: “Then the people, that is, some of the people, began to say this, and they began to say that . . .”

He is not fond of saying “the people” without immediately adding a significant little nuance, “that is, some of the people.”

I bring this up because today we live in a world wherein many people claim to be speaking for “the people.” In truth, all of us have that constant temptation, which we often publicly act out, of precisely thinking we are speaking for “the people” in some form or fashion.

How frequent is the phrase: “The people are saying this! The people are angry! Youth feel this way! Women feel that way! Men think like that! The people don’t want that anymore! The people are leaving the church for this reason! Adults only learn by this method of education!”

Rarely, most rarely, when we hear these phrases, or speak them, are they immediately qualified with the nuance: “that is, some of the people are saying these things, and some of the people are learning in this fashion, and some of the people are feeling like that.”

Recently at a church conference I was attending, there was an open forum. Anyone could go up to a microphone and, for three minutes, give a little editorial on some issue that she or he felt some passion on.

There wasn’t a Michael Meade in the bunch. Speaker after speaker left no doubt that he or she was speaking for “the people.”

One speaker told us that youth (by her insinuation, all of them) felt that the church today had sold itself out to the secular world and that it is because of this that youth are disillusioned with it.

Another speaker told us that people (by her submission, all of them) no longer attend church functions because the church did not use adult methods of education and that adults (all adults) learn only by a certain methodology.

Another person went to the microphone and told us that youth (again, supposedly all of them) were totally disillusioned with the church’s stance on sex outside of marriage and until the church woke up to this and responded more positively youth would not be much in sympathy or attendance.

And so the editorials went on. Never did any of these speakers intimate, even vaguely, that perhaps he or she was speaking for only some of the people.

I kept hearing Michael Meade as each one spoke his or her piece, however sincere, and every time someone said, “youth feel this way, people think that way, adults learn this way,” I inwardly added to myself: “yes, some youth feel this way; yes, some people think that way; and yes, some adults learn like that.”

Perhaps, this example is unfair, but I use it because it is so typical. All of us—conservatives, liberals, feminists, anti-feminists, social justice advocates, adult educators, pedagogues, androgogues—alike, especially if we have a passion for truth, tend to have and give the impression that we, and we alone, are truly feeling what the people are feeling; that we, and only we, are truly hearing what the people are saying; that we, and only we, are truly understanding what the people are struggling with; and that we, and only we, are truly speaking for the people.

But that is a fault both in modesty and truth. Simply put, there is not one thing in the whole world that all of the people feel and think the same about and it is selfrighteous, self-deceptive, and highly irritating to everyone around us when we do not make real allowances for that in our language and judgments.

I recall a psychologist who once taught me, telling our class: “Never, never, presume that anyone feels or thinks exactly as you do! That is a cardinal mistake and you will begin to be much more helpful to people when you learn that.”

Had he taken the microphone that night, at that open forum, I suspect that his editorial would have constantly qualified itself with the phrase: “And the people, that is, some of the people, feel this, and they say that, and they learn in this fashion.”

So this is my little editorial and I suspect that when it appears the people, that is, some of the people, will think it says something of importance. Conversely, I suspect, the people, that is, some of the people, will consider it a piece of self-contradictory and self-righteous tripe.

Hence, I ask you, the people, that is, some of the people, to bear with me and forgive me this little affront. After all, this is what people today are feeling!

A Church Which Comforts

January 17, 1994

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.

My Parents Shaped My Soul

January 16, 1994

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

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

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

She was a generous person, always giving things away. Sometimes she gave away food and clothes that our own family needed. As a child I was angry with her for that. I didn’t want a generous mother. I wanted things.

She, on her part, wanted some things that she didn’t always get—good health and peace in her family. I remember her crying one Saturday morning as she was cleaning the house and trying to keep peace and order in a family that was, on that particular day, given over to disorder and crankiness. She cried and told us how disappointed she was that our family wasn’t like the Holy Family!

We weren’t the Holy Family and she was frustrated a lot, not so much with us as with the plain inadequacy of life. Beyond this all though, she was a happy person, more naturally buoyant in spirit than my father. She danced more easily than he, laughed more spontaneously, was an easier touch for us kids.

She took life less reflectively than he did, though not as unreflectively as we, her children, naively supposed. After she died, we found a diary and we found that she’d thought more deeply about things than we’d supposed.

She was completely relational and her deepest longing was to share her soul. Here, she got lucky. She met my father. They became, from soon after they met until the day he died, soulmates in every sense of that word.

She didn’t have to tell him her secrets or share with him her frustrations, and neither he in reverse. They understood each other without having to explain themselves. In all my years of growing up, I cannot ever recall them having a single misunderstanding or even being angry with each other.

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

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

The rest of me is my father. There’s nothing in me that isn’t explained by genes. He was the other half of my mother. He didn’t dance easily, though he was a deeply affectionate man. Dancing was too public for him. He preferred to express his love in private.

He loved my mother, us, his family, and most everyone else. But his way was not to trumpet this in public. There was a reticence here that could look like coldness, but you had to read his actions and his eyes. There was an abhorrence of all exhibitionism, especially as it pertains to any public expressions that say: “I love you!” Some people cannot make love with the bedroom door open. My dad was one of these.

He was the faith, the stubborn uncompromising moral principle in our family. This was another reason he had trouble dancing. He agonized over all that was not right in the world and his patience didn’t always meet the test. I feared his eyes at those times that I disappointed him. I also feared, and still do, ever disappointing him.

He was the most moral person I’ve ever met and he had a sixth sense here that was near infallible. He knew right from wrong in a way I couldn’t doubt. He instructed me—against my protests.

If I end up in hell, I can’t plead ignorance. My dad equipped me, faith-wise and morally, for the world. I have the faults that come with that too, his faults, compounded by my own.

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

Ten New Commandments

January 10, 1994

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 . . .

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.