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!

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!

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-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.

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.

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!”

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.

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.

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.