Scapegoating Priests

September 6, 1993

Faulty diagnosis makes for wrong prescription. Unless a disease is diagnosed properly there is little chance of effective treatment. These principles should be brought forth, front and centre, today regarding the issue of pedophilia.

Why? Because there is an extremely simplistic, erroneous, slanderous and dangerous identification being made today in the world and the church. When you say the word pedophilia, people automatically think of “priest.” It’s the first thing that comes to their minds. Common sense today spontaneously connects: pedophilia—priest.

It then compounds this misjudgment by making yet another erroneous connection: Celibacy, lack of sex, is what creates pedophiles. It is seen as a celibate sickness, namely, celibates don’t have sex, as normal people do, thus they are, obviously, susceptible to this kind of thing.

That is what passes for common sense today. Yet the facts so belie this that one can only wonder whether these equations are the result of simple ignorance or whether they are the product of malice. Let’s look at some of the facts:

Fact one: Less than one per cent, in fact a small fraction of one per cent, of all pedophilia and sexual abuse is done by priests or other consecrated religious. That, of course, does not excuse the number of instances that are perpetrated by priests and religious. One sexual abuse instance by a priest or a religious is already one too many.

This is not in defence of those priests and religious who have sexually abused anyone. Rather the point here is that common sense has identified the problem with priests and religious—when more than 99 per cent of this kind of abuse has nothing to do with priests.

Statistically, sexual abuse of children happens in one out of every three or four houses on every street in North America. (I don’t know the numbers for Western Europe.) Given those numbers, given the magnitude of that tragedy, one can only wonder why the issue is so constellated around less than one per cent of its perpetrators.

Fact two: Pedophilia has no significant relationship to celibacy. It is an indiscriminate disease. It makes no difference, at least so the statistics show, whether one is married or unmarried, has lots of sex or no sex at all, as to whether one is likely to be a pedophile or not.

It is ironic in fact that consecrated celibates are proportionately less likely to be pedophiles than other people. Bottom-line, your child is more likely, not just in terms of sheer chance, but also in terms of statistical proportionality, to be molested by some person other than a priest, brother or a nun. This fact has rarely been brought to the fore.

Moreover, pedophilia as a pathology, much like rape, is, in the end, not so much a question of sex as it is of something else. Rape, as we all know now, is ultimately not a question of unruly hormones but of power and hatred.

Pedophilia, under diagnostic scrutiny, is also seen to be something more than frustrated hormones. Pedophiles are drawn to children because they are looking for their own lost childhood. All pedophiles were themselves first abused. There is a clinical axiom: every abuser was, himself or herself, first abused . . . and this is true too for every type of abuse, far beyond sex. Given all this, it is very misleading to make pedophilia a celibate sickness.

But it is more than misleading, it is unjust and dangerous.

Where is the justice in tarring all priests and religious with the stigma of pedophilia when the vast, vast majority of them are totally innocent of the accusation, when proportionately they are less likely to be part of the problem and when more than 99 per cent of the problem is perpetrated by others?

But injustice to priests and consecrated religious is, in the end, not the biggest danger here.

As priests and religious we do, in fact deserve some brutal challenges to clean up our act. One instance of sexual abuse is one instance too many. It is time some veins were bled. Hence some of the rage directed against us will, despite its inflations and distortions, do us good.

The real danger here is faulty diagnosis. By seeing this as a celibate sickness, by scape-goating priests and focusing our primary rage on less than one per cent of the problem , we continue to avoid facing the magnitude and horror of the issue.

When one out of every three or four children in our society is sexually abused, it’s time for deeper resolve, deeper understanding, greater courage and more radical honesty in looking at this issue.

Ever So Brief A Glory

August 23, 1993

The last couple of years have not been particularly kind to my family.

Two years ago, a sister was lost to cancer; this spring, a brother-in-law died suddenly of a heart attack while at work; right now, we wait and pray as another sister is dying of cancer. In each case, death has claimed a young person, someone still in the bloom of life.

Our family has faith. In the end, we believe that resurrection will bring us all together again, that ultimately, in the words of Julian of Norwich, “all will be well, and all will be well, and every manner of being will he well.” There will be celebrations still in the future . . . with everyone there. Of that we should have no doubt.

But that future can seem a long ways off and belief in resurrection in some indefinite future often offers scant consolation in the definite present. So we grasp for some seeds of consolation in the present, something to hang on to, as we face losing yet another young member of our family.

Dying young. It’s a compound tragedy. There is the loss of a life, a good-bye with a finality that cauterizes the heart.

Nobody and nothing can prepare you for the reality of death, the finality, the irrevocability, the severance. Death has a sting, a whopping one, despite Christian faith. This is true of every death. When someone dies young, however, the tragedy doubles. Life is cut off in bloom and there’s a sickening waste of health, of beauty, of love, of opportunity.

Few things scar the heart as badly as does the sight of the premature erosion of beauty and the untimely corruption of flesh. When you see the taut flesh of freshness and young life give way to the slack, sickly odor of death, well, that kind of withering has no mercy on the heart.

First it posits anger. Bitterness can easily follow.

But even without anger, it still posits the question: Why? Why all this for so short a time? Why an ending when so much is just beginning? Why all these years of effort, growth, learning, loving, maturing, to be cut off just at bloom? Why a parent dying, a spouse dying, a loving nun dying, when they are still so badly needed—not to mention wanted?

I was sitting in my office last night luxuriating in some self-pity when some small seed of consolation dropped right at my feet, literally.

For a reason that may seem slightly sadistic, I always keep an hibiscus plant in my room. The reason is because one of the features of that plant is that it rarely blooms, though it does so in spectacular color. Its flowers last for exactly 24 hours, then they wither and drop from the tree.

Nature, it would seem, has its reasons for this, months of effort and growth constellate in a spectacular bloom which lasts for only 24 hours—and perhaps nobody even sees it. Yet nature makes no apologies for this and everything about it assures us that the whole thing is worthwhile.

Last night an hibiscus bloom, unusually beautiful, and just one day old and already withered, dropped at my foot. That too posits something. A bloom, however beautiful, is only for a very short while and sometimes nobody even sees it. Nature works like that.

Life is nature and nature is life. So life is brief and the power and health and beauty of our bodies bloom ever so briefly and oftentimes go mostly unnoticed. That’s also true for all that we give bloom to, our human loves, our infatuations, our honeymoons, our achievements, our securities.

It’s all hibiscus flower—beautiful, so much work and nature and feeling constellated in a spectacular bloom that’s destined to begin to die just as it reaches full flower.

Yet nothing is lost in nature. Each flower changes the world and no sparrow falls from the sky, save God notices and marks the event in the great eternal book from which, some day, all that is hidden will be revealed.

Without every sparrow that’s ever flown and without every hibiscus flower that ever gave up its life on the day of its birth, the world would be slightly different. And that exceptionally beautiful hibiscus bloom, with its ever so brief a glory, reminds us that a day of bloom is infinitely better than an eternity of plastic.

And so beautiful flowers wither and die and we look on and we cry, but with real tears, spilt over real life and real beauty.

Humanae Vitae … 25 Years Later

August 9, 1993

In late summer, 1968, Paul V1 released the encyclical, Humanae Vitae. Few church documents in recent centuries have caused the kind of stir that ensued. Almost immediately every kind of ecclesial, moral, and ideological tension constellated around it.

For conservative Catholics, it is all too often seen as the criterion of moral orthodoxy. You are a good Catholic only if you can live Humanae Vitae! In the conservative mindset, Humanae Vitae is the last moral line in the sand, if Catholicism crosses this, if it allows contraception, then Catholic morality will have sold out. Liberal Catholics, conversely, tend to see it as the most serious mistake within recent Catholic history. For them, it has come to represent all that they feel is wrong within the church – flawed, outdated, medieval argumentation, brought down from on high by a celibate hierarchy which is speaking of something, sexuality, on which it has neither competence nor moral authority. In the liberal mind, Humanae Vitae is, singularly, responsible for the fact that the church as lost so much credibility and influence in the years since 1968..

What’s to be said about all this? To my mind, these polarized positions are both unfortunate. The liberal temptation to see Humanae Vitae as a disaster that is best flushed away and the propensity of Conservatives to make of it the ultimate criterion of moral honesty are both wrong. Humanae Vitae is not an infallible church teaching which constitutes the dividing line between what’s moral for Roman Catholics and what’s not; nor is it the disastrous, backward, repressive document that liberals claim it to be.

What is it? It is, first of all, a call to conscience, not the criterion of moral orthodoxy. Like the social encyclicals, it presents an ideal – even if most people cannot meet it. Hence, the claim by liberals that it is wrong because the majority of Catholics have rejected it makes no more sense than to claim that the social encyclicals are wrong because most people also reject them. Conversely, Conservatives should only make it the criterion of moral honesty if they, too, give the social encyclicals that same status. As well, the liberal claim that the pope has no business in our bedrooms makes no more sense than the conservative claim that he has no business in our boardrooms. Held in parallel to the social encyclicals, one sees both the proper authority and the moral legitimacy of Humanae Vitae.

It contains a deep wisdom, enshrining three important ideals:

Married life must be open to bringing new life into the world and genital sexuality is, in the end, tied to both of these: marriage and the openness to transmitting new life. Humanae Vitae does not affirm that each and every sexual act must intend procreation and be open to it. It does affirm that there is an inbuilt meaning to sexual intercourse and part of that meaning is an openness to the transmission of human life. This, I submit, is a deep truth that, if ignored, wreaks a hidden havoc within relationships. Relationships closed to new life are like stagnant waters, eventually life within them dies.
Sexual relationships should, ideally, regulate themselves from within, on the basis of the relationship itself, without reliance on chemicals, rubbers, plastics, and the like. God told Moses: “Take off your shoes before the burning bush!”. Shoes are made of leather, rubber, and plastics. These, in the end, get in the way of naked encounter. I trust the metaphor is clear.
In the ideal, it is better to regulate something naturally than artificially. For example, it is better, obviously, to handle hypertension, naturally, through physical exercise, than it is through sedation by drugs. However it is not a sin to take medication or to use chemicals and drugs. However, anyone taking drugs to regulate hypertension longs for the day when this is no longer necessary. To admit this is to admit the wisdom of natural law. Ideally, one does not use chemicals and plastics!

In the end, like the social encyclicals, Humanae Vitae is a prophetic document. It beckons towards the ideal, towards the high ground. It puts eros under a high symbolic hedge. It represents the road less taken. It is a challenge to not settle for second best. It should be seen as such, a beautiful ideal. It goes without saying that, given the pressures of contemporary life, millions of very good women and men, persons of real moral sincerity, will, for all kinds or reasons, be unable live that ideal. To not be able to live Humanae Vitae is no sin – but to ignore it as medieval casuistry is to cheat oneself.

An Honest Anger

July 21, 1993

Today, for the main part, most of us live in chronic depression. This is not clinical depression so it’s not as if we need professional help or therapy, it’s just that there is within our lives precious little in terms of delight.

We live and breathe within a culture and a church that are growing daily in sophistication, adultness and criticalness. This is not always a bad thing, but it is helping to spawn a polarization, anger and despondency that is making it almost unfashionable to be happy.

Much of this despondency has constellated around two centres, women’s anger and men’s grief.

As women touch gender issues, normally anger follows, much like smoke follows from fire. There is already within the popular mind the stereotype of the angry feminist. It’s more than a stereotype. Many women who get in touch with gender issues do, in fact, get angry.

Interestingly, when men today touch their own gender issues, as they are doing today in men’s circles, they have their own stereotypical reaction. They become sad and begin to grieve; so much so that today there is a new stereotype emerging within the popular mind that parallels the image of the anger feminist, namely, the grieving male.

Recently I addressed a national conference of Catholic journalists and tried to make the point that, as a Catholic press, we must address this despondency.

After my talk, I was challenged by a woman, a former teaching colleague and a longtime friend, who said to me: “Yes, I am angry, and so are many other women. But you make you anger sound like something hard and calloused—while you make men’s grief sound like something soft and sensitive. Is that really fair? Are they really that different? Isn’t anger, in the end, just another form of grief?”

I was thankful for her challenge because, for the main part, she is right—anger and grief are not that different. On the surface, they appear antithetical, oil and vinegar, but examined more closely, most of the time they are expressions of the same thing, love that’s been wounded and yearns for reconciliation.

Rollo May once suggested that the opposite of love is not hate or anger. The opposite of love is indifference. You can only really hate or be properly and thoroughly angry with somebody that you love.

The deeper the love, the deeper will be the anger and hatred if the love is wounded or betrayed. Anger and hatred, initially at least, are almost always a sure sign of love. They are love’s grief. Most anger, in the end, is a form of grief . . . just as most grief, when boiled down to its essentials, is a form of anger.

But not all anger is good and neither are all forms of grief. There are different kinds of anger and these have parallel kinds of grief. There is honest anger and there is dishonest anger, there is honest grief and there is dishonest grief.

Let me try to explain this, using anger. Grief has identical parallels.

Honest anger obeys three rules:

First, it does not distort. Good anger does not let hurt blind one to what was good in the past so as to allow a revisionist distortion of the truth. Honest anger is real anger, it feels and points out what is wrong, but it doesn’t, on that account, lie about what is and what was good. It lets the good remain good.

Second, it is not rage. There is a big difference between honest anger and rage. Despite its rather coarse surface and its painful disturbing of the peace, honest anger, in the end, seeks to build up, to bring to a new wholeness, to reconcile something that is felt as fractured or broken. It is a disruptive means towards a good end.

Rage, by contrast, wants only to bring down, to break apart, to utterly destroy. Its wound is so deep that there is no more desire for unity and reconciliation. The clearest expression of this is murder/suicide, the case where the wounded lover kills his lost love and then kills himself.

Finally, honest anger, has a time limit, it is not forever. It howls and wails for “40 days,” the length of time needed, and then it moves on, to the promised land. Honest anger never sees itself as an end, a substitute for the lost love.

It does not make an ideology of itself (“I am unhappy . . . and I have every right to be!”). Like the Israelites in the desert, like a pining lover, its every energy seeks for the road beyond, the way out, reconciliation, an embrace which heals the fracture.

Honest grief follows the same rules—and these are important rules for all of us, women and men, who desire to move beyond the present divisions to a new embrace.

Eucharist as God’s Touch

July 14, 1993

Andre Dubus, in a beautiful essay on the Eucharist, makes the following comment: “My belief in the Eucharist is simple: without touch, God is a monologue, an idea, a philosophy; he must touch and be touched, the tongue on the flesh, and that touch is the result of monologues, the idea, the philosophies which led to faith; but in the instant of the touch there is no place for thinking, for talking; the silent touch affirms all that, and goes deeper . . .” (Broken Vessels, Godine Pub. 1991, p. 77).

Like Dubus, my belief in the Eucharist is also simple: the Eucharist is God’s physical embrace of us, God’s touch. Nowhere is the body of Christ so physical, sensual, carnal and available for deep intimacy as in the Eucharist.

Lest this type of talk scandalize, it might be well to read St. Paul’s thought on the matter. Speaking of our union with Christ and with each other within Christ’s body, Paul points out that it is as real, as physical and as sensual as is the union of sexual intercourse.

Today we do not take seriously enough this radical physical and sensual character of the Eucharist. Rarely do we risk understanding the Eucharist in the earthy terms which I will propose here. We are the poorer for it.

The early church was less reluctant in this than we are. For it, the Eucharist was a communion of such deep physical intimacy that they surrounded it with a certain secrecy and barred all except the fully initiated from being there.

They practised something they called the discipline arcani. Part of this discipline was the practice of never speaking about the Eucharist to anyone except to fully-initiated Christians and to not allow anyone who was not fully initiated to attend the Eucharistic celebration. Our present practice within the RCIA of asking catechumens to leave after the homily is based upon this ancient discipline.

This secrecy, however, was not an attempt to surround the Eucharist with a certain mystique so as to intrigue others to be curious about it, as is usually the case with secrecy of this kind. It was not an attempt to create some secret cult. No. The secrecy was a reverence.

For them, the Eucharist was such an intimate thing that one didn’t do it with just anyone nor did one talk about it publicly—akin to not making love in public and being too exhibitionist about your intimacies. In their view, in the Eucharist you made love . . . and that is done with the bedroom door closed.

The shrouding of the Eucharist with this kind of quasi-sexual reverence is in fact most proper. In the Eucharist, Christ touches us, intimately, physically, sensually, carnally. Eucharist is physical, not spiritual; its embrace real, as physical as the incarnation itself.

In this way, Eucharist is more radical than is the Word. Indeed the relationship of the Word to the Eucharist is most accurately and profitably understood within the metaphor of physical embrace and sexual intercourse (and this may be more than metaphor).

The Word is sacramental, but it is less physical than the Eucharist. The communion it creates is less physical than is Eucharistic union. In a manner of speaking, the Word is a preparation for, a readying for, making love. Its role is to prepare us for Eucharistic communion.

The Eucharist is the touch, the physical coming together, the embrace, the consummation, the intercourse.

I suspect that this kind of comparison might scandalize and upset some of you. Comparing the intimacy of Eucharistic communion to sexual intercourse, isn’t this going a bit far? It is going far, admittedly; but it errs primarily in the fact that it doesn’t go far enough.

The mystery of the Body of Christ—God becoming incarnate, Christ leaving us the Word and the Eucharist, and the intimacy and communion that we experience with Christ and each other in the Eucharist—can, in the end, not be exaggerated. Its reality, including its physical character, goes further than we imagine.

This is not wild new theory; it’s wild old doctrine. Pius XII said as much in Mystici Corporis.

A friend of mine, a recent convert, is fond of saying: “I became a Catholic because of the Eucharist. I don’t really understand it, but I feel, always, its reality and power. Nothing is more precious to me.”

The Eucharist is more than sufficient reason to become a Catholic or, indeed, a Christian of any denomination. To be embraced physically by God is, on either side of eternity, all that one can hope for. Like Andre Dubus I long daily for that kind of touch.

Longing for Innocence

July 5, 1993

We are all haunted by two great desires, beyond the desire for intimacy. We long for innocence and long for sincerity.

But they, like intimacy, are highly elusive. It is not easy to be innocent and sincere.

I was reminded of this recently while having a conversation with a friend of mine, an ex-seminarian, now married, who just became a father. “Now that I have a child,” he told me, “I want to grow up, finally grow up! I am sick of the way I am, of being bounced around by every whim and fad and politically correct thing to think or say or do.

“I am sick of not knowing what I really, deep down, myself, believe in and stand for. I have to find a way to move beyond all that or I’ll never grow up! But it’s difficult! How do we know what is really most true within us? How do we touch that?”

The man saying these words was in his late thirties, already into middle age, and still unsure of how much of what he said, did and thought were really coming from his true centre.

I point this out with sympathy. This man was longing for sincerity, which he identified with “finally growing up” and was finding that it was, for the most part, evading him.

He was struggling to contact his own soul, to touch his own heart, to think his own thoughts, and was finding more false layers and pretence there than he had ever imagined. He was discovering, in the words of Iris Murdoch, that it is not easy to get out of a muddle.

Much as the desire for sincerity haunts us, it is very difficult to be sincere. Why? Because too many things get between ourselves and our true centre. There are almost too many muddles to escape from.

What does it mean to be sincere? Dictionaries offer two versions of the root of the word and both interpretations shed light on its true meaning. Some dictionaries suggest that sincere comes from two Latin words: sine (without) and caries (decay). Hence, to be sincere means to be “without corruption.”

Other commentators suggest that its root is: sine (without) and cero (to smear, to coat with wax). In this view, to be sincere means to be uncovered, to have a certain nakedness of soul, to not have a coat of something smeared on you.

Certainly, both are true.

To be sincere is to be, in mind and heart and soul, uncorrupted. To be sincere is also to be bare, uncoated, naked, truly yourself, not smeared by pretence, whim, fad, political correctness, posturing and acting out. To be sincere is to be without false props, without a mask, without anything that is not really true to you.

But this is a state we rarely achieve.

To offer just one example: Parker Palmer, an American educational philosopher of some distinction, recently commented that while he did a graduate degree in theology at a Christian seminary, despite all the good and sincere people he met there and all the valuable insights that passed through the classrooms, there was little in the way of genuine sincerity. Classrooms themselves, he suggests, almost ex officio, militate against sincerity.

I paraphrase his comments: “During all those years, in all those classes, with all those good people, I doubt that there was ever truly one sincere question asked. There was a lot of posturing, some pretence, a lot of asking of the right things, a lot of political correctness, but not really a question that laid bare a heart, that spoke truly for someone’s soul, that issued forth from a genuine curiosity.”

Nearly a generation before him, another noted educator, C.S. Lewis, made a similar criticism. In his classic, The Great Divorce, Lewis, arguing against a professor of theology who no longer believes in a transcendent God, outlines the anatomy of a lost faith, suggesting that at root it is based upon insincerity: “Let us be frank. Our opinions were not honestly come by. We simply found ourselves in contact with a certain current of ideas and plunged into it because it seemed modern and successful.

“At college, you know, we just started automatically writing the kind of essays that got good marks and saying the kind of things that won applause. When, in our whole lives, did we honestly face, in solitude, the one question on which all turned: whether after all the Supernatural might not in fact occur? When did we put up one moment’s resistance to the loss of faith” (pp. 37-38).

My friend was right to identify the quest for sincerity with the struggle to “finally grow up.” Sincerity is the final resistance to everything that is immature, that blocks us from truly facing ourselves, each other and our God.

Hungry for Blessing

June 28, 1993

Several years ago, I preached a homily on the baptism of Christ within which I remarked that the words that God speaks over Jesus at his baptism: “This is my beloved child in whom I take delight!” are words that God daily speaks over us.

Some hours later my doorbell rang and I was approached by a young man who had heard my homily and who was both moved and distraught by it.

He had not been to church for some time but had gone on this particular Sunday because he had, just that week, pleaded guilty to a crime and was awaiting sentence. He was soon to go to prison.

The homily had struck a painful chord inside of him because, first of all, he had trouble believing that God or anyone else loved him; yet he wanted to believe it.

Secondly, and even more painful, he believed that nobody had ever been pleased or delighted with him: “Father, I know that in my whole life nobody has ever been pleased with me. I was never good enough! Nobody has ever taken delight in anything I’ve ever done!” This man had never been blessed. Small wonder he was about to go to prison.

What does it mean to be blessed? What is a blessing?

The word blessing takes its root in the latin verb: Benedicere, to speak well of (Bene—well; dicere—to speak). Therefore, to bless someone is, in the end, to speak well of him or her.

But this implies a special form of “speaking well.” To bless someone is, through some word, gesture or ritual, to make him or her aware of three things:

the goodness of the original creation where, after making the earth and humans, God said that it was “good, very good”;
that God experiences the same delight and pleasure in him or her. that he experienced with Jesus at his baptism when he said: “This is my beloved child in whom I take delight”; and
that we, who are giving the blessing, recognize that goodness and take that delight in him or her.

Thus, the ritual blessing that we are given at the end of a Eucharist: “I bless you in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit” could be pharaphrased to sound like this: “As we leave this celebration, let us feel deeply and take with us the deep truth that we, the world, and our lives are good, very good. There is no need to live in guilt and depression. We are, despite our faults, very good and delightful to God. Let us, therefore, take delight in each other and in ourselves. We are, after all, extremely pleasing to God.”

When I left home as a 17-year-old boy, my father and mother blessed me. They had me kneel on the old linoleum floor of our kitchen, placed their hands on my head and said the ritual words of Christian blessing.

In effect, however, what they were saying to me was: “We love you, we trust you, we are proud of you and we send you off with our full spirit. You are our beloved child and in you we are well-pleased.”

I suspect that had the young man I spoke of above been blessed in the same way by his parents or by anyone else significant to him, he would not have been on his way to prison. To be unblessed is to be bleeding in a very deep place.

So much of our hunger is a hunger for blessing. So much of our aching is the ache to be blessed. So much of our sadness comes from the fact that nobody has ever taken delight and pleasure in us in a non-exploitive way.

When has anyone ever made you the object of delight? When has anyone taken, in a nonexploitive way, delight in your body, your beauty, your intelligence, your person? When have you last felt that you are someone in whom others, and God, take pleasure and delight?

Only a few, I suspect, move about in their daily lives with the joy, confidence and grace that comes from knowing that they are, as persons, good, beautiful and objects of delight. Depression is more the rule.

Most of us are more like the young man spoken of above—bleeding, less than whole, unconfident, depressed, going through life without a sense either of its goodness or of our own, going through life without being able to really give or experience delight.

Scripture says that when Jesus was baptized the Spirit came to him in bodily form and said: “This is my beloved child; in him I take delight!”

What we need, more than anything else, is to precisely give bodily form to this blessing. We need, daily, within our families and within our relationships in general, to do things and say things that help those around us believe that life is good, that their lives are good, that they are good and that we, and God, look on them with great pleasure and delight.

God Locked Them In!

June 21, 1993

In story of Noah and the ark there is a most curious line. God asks Noah to build an ark and then to put into it a pair, a male and a female, of every living thing on earth. After Noah does this and himself, with his family, gets on the ark, the author of Genesis says: “And God locked them in.” (Genesis 7, 16)

That expression, “and God locked them in”, is a rich metaphor which says a lot about community, family, marriage, and church. When we understand these correctly, we understand too that we are locked into them, that virtually every kind of community that we belong is not a free choice, and that to seek life outside of community is to die.

As unpopular as it is in most contemporary circles to use words such as obligation, duty, bound, and locked in, we badly need to apply these words today, precisely, to community, family, marriage, and church. The general mindset within Western culture today, both inside and outside of religious circles, too readily suggests that these things are free options, things we can take or leave as we like, things we are not bound to by duty or locked into, whether we want them or not. The common attitude today is that community, family, and church are not obligatory.

But such a view is both false and dangerous, false because it belies human nature and goes against the essence of Christianity and dangerous because, left off of the ark of community, family, and church, we die. Community, family, and church are not things we may freely choose to enter into or to ignore, according to idiosyncratic preference. As Christians, and simply as human beings, we are not free to “hang loose”, to choose community, family, and church on our own terms. Religiously and morally we are locked in.

Community, family, and church are not free associations of like-minded individuals into which we can, if we feel a need or if we feel generous and altruistic, freely enter and then leave when we no longer want them or feel a need for them. They aren’t free associations at all. Into them, we are born; to them, we are irrevocably bound; in them, we have duties and obligations; and outside of them, we die. God created us social, communitarian and ecclesial, in our very essence . God locked us in … since it is, as the second page of scripture tells us, not good for the human being to be alone!

To the extent that we believe that the choices for community, family, and church, are free options and not moral obligations, we still stand in need of conversion. Lack of permanent commitment to community, lack of the sense that we have to stay, and lack of the sense that we are unfree to leave even if we want, is a sure sign that we are not yet truly committed within the Kingdom because then it is clear that we have not yet made God’s cause really our own. The Kingdom of God is about community, it’s about people coming together beyond like-mindedness, despite differences and faults, and irrespective of the tensions, angers, selfishness and sins that divide them. To opt into community when we feel like it or when it is without pain and petty tensions and to opt out when it no longer suits us or when it gets too painful, is to be, at a deep level, not yet really converted. Part of any true Christian conversion is the understanding that community, family, and church, are not negotiable items. To be Christian in heart and soul is to know that we are locked in, no longer free to leave.

All genuine Christian conversion brings with it the sense that we no longer belong just to ourselves but are now bound to others in a way that we are not free to take or leave. Just as we, when we are truly converted to Christ, know that we are no longer free to walk away from him, so too we realize that we are no longer free to walk away from community and from the church. Just as Christ is non-negotiable within Christianity, so too is community and church. To be a Christian is to be involved in ecclesiology.

Bernard Lonergan, in mapping out the dynamics of Christian conversion, highlights this by saying: “All genuine conversion to Christ is, at a point, conversion to the church.” Jesus says the same thing in different words when he says: “Unless you eat my flesh, you cannot have life within you!” (John 6) The flesh that Jesus speaks of here is not just the Eucharist, his more antiseptic body on earth, but the church, his more flawed body on here on earth.

And God locked them in! Within Christianity, that expression contains an entire ecclesiology.

Ice Cream Vs. Beans

June 14, 1993

An elderly man was once asked what he would do differently if he had his life to live over again. His reply is worth meditating:

“If I had my life to live over again, I’d try to make more mistakes next time. I would limber up. I would be sillier than I have been this trip. I know of few things I would take seriously.

“I would take more trips. I would climb more mountains, swim more rivers and watch more sunsets. I would do more walking and looking. I would eat more ice cream and less beans. I would have more actual troubles and fewer imaginary ones.

“You see, I am one of those people who live prophylactically and sensibly and sanely hour after hour, day after day. Oh, I’ve had my moment and if I had it to do over again, I’d have more of them. In fact, I’d try to have nothing else. Just moments, one after another, instead of living so many years ahead of each day.

“I have been one of those people who never go anywhere without a thermometer, a hot water bottle, a gargle, a raincoat, an aspirin and a parachute.

“If I had it to do over again, I would go places, do things and travel lighter than I have. If I had my life to live over, I would start barefooted earlier in the spring and stay that way later in the fall. I would play hooky more. I would ride more merry-go-rounds. I’d pick more daisies” (Brother Jeremiah).

Had these words been written by a young person, they would not have the same power. There’s something within youth that, more naturally, seizes the moment, that takes ice cream over beans, that prefers to travel lightly and carelessly, and that excuses conscience so that playing hooky is a temptation more readily succumbed to.

Unfortunately, much of that spirit dies as we take on more responsibility in life, as the burdens of duty weigh us down and as the pressures of making a living excessively preoccupy us. Slowly we change and eventually we end up so taken with the business of making a living that we rarely get around to simply living.

Eventually too we end up overly timid about life, overly protected from it, looking at it and analyzing it rather than actually living it. Eventually we end up with too many aspirins, hot water bottles, gargles and raincoats, wearing plastic shoes before the burning bush.

Sadly, I suspect that most of us will have very similar sentiments to Brother Jeremiah when we look back on our lives. Only after it’s too late will we realize how little we got around to actually living.

Thoughts such as these have crossed my mind this springtime, when the trees are in blossom, the air is fertile and I am sterile, preoccupied with work and duty.

I remember as a graduate student, living in San Francisco, walking down a street on Easter Sunday and being struck by a sign which hung around the neck of a blind beggar which read: It is springtime and I am blind.

This springtime, for lots of reasons, I’ve been blind, to spring and to too many other things that I’ve been put on this earth for.

A recently deceased colleague of mine, who was a fine poet and a man of extraordinary sensitivity, used to tell us how important it was to pay attention to the weather:

Let’s go back to the weather.
Most days you don’t notice there is an
until you fall into love, and / or sin,
and then you see the clouds and stare holes
into heaven,
looking for Christ
when He’s really at your shoulder looking for
you
and in such great shape, you’d never believe
what he’s been through
Then before you know it happened, its July
again or August
and you have time to do what you should
have been doing all
your life,
sitting or walking on the grass in bare feet
and loving.
For God’s sake it doesn’t matter how you begin
though if I had my choice, I’d do it all over
again.
Then you’re all petals once more, and tendrils
till the storm breaks
your heart.
And the biggest piece goes to heaven,
and to hell with the weather.

– Harry Hellman, omi, Caprice

It’s not good to be blind to the weather or to spring!

Memories Dispel Depression

June 7, 1993

One of the newspapers that I write for, the Catholic Sentinel, in Portland, Ore., occasionally carries a column by a young teacher and freelance writer from Pompton Plains, N.Y., Christopher de Vinck.

Invariably I find myself moved by what he writes and have begun more and more to clip and save his columns.

Recently, walking through an airport, I saw a book of autobiographical essays that he published under the title, Only the Heart Knows How to Find Them: Precious Memories for a Faithless Time (New York, Viking Penguin, 1991).

There was no hesitation. I bought the book. I read some thousands of pages annually and, for this year at least, no book has moved me more deeply than has this collection of memories.

For that reason, I want to review somewhat this book for you.

Karl Jung once stated that transformation takes place only in the presence of images. Given the truth of that, good biography is exactly that, good biography, precious memories of love and fidelity in a time when these are not so common.

In a very simple, unpretentious, yet poetic style, de Vinck shares with us some of his memories—memories of his childhood, of his parents and their family home, of his loneliness during his adolescent and university years, of his joy at finding Roe, the woman he married, and of the deep and simple joys of being married and raising three young children.

Each memory he chooses to share, in its own way, is an image, an icon of sorts, of what love and fidelity look like in a world not much given to them.

At the end of the book, in giving a little apologia as to why he published these memories, he quotes Dostoevsky: ”You must know that there is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and good for life in the future than some good memory, especially a memory of childhood, of home. People talk to you a great deal about your education, but some good, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education.”

Our spirit, de Vinck asserts, is a collection of holy and innocent bits of the universe. With that in mind, allow me to highlight for you some of the “holy and innocent bits” that he shares:

Speaking of his marriage, he first writes rather philosophically: “Years and years before I met Roe, I began to write poetry, because there was an emptiness deep inside of me. I didn’t want to have affairs. I didn’t want to drink. I just wanted to be loved and embraced. I wanted to love and embrace.

“Poetry filled the emptiness which, with patience and hope, transformed itself into the goodness and loveliness that is my wife. . . .

“Bach, music, poetry, do not carry with them any risks. They are there to sail upon, to bathe in, to lie beside as the tide swells along the shoreline. My wife, my children, they are what I have risked my sacrifice and my love upon. I have few chances in my lifetime to dare to love, and dare to embrace what is true. My wife is truth. Art does not return your love” (pp. 84, 86).

Then he goes on to tell the story of how his wife sleeps with her socks on and how, each morning, these are rolled and loose somewhere under the covers. He makes the bed as she is doing her hair and, each morning, they have the same ritual: He reaches under the covers, makes like a magician, and solemnly announces: “Out of nowhere, not rabbits but two—yes, ladies and gentlemen, two—white socks.” Only a wife, he comments, would laugh.

The rest of us, however, will see in these stories he shares a theology of marriage that few books and courses on that subject ever approximate. His memories are what a good theology of marriage should sound like.

Later in the book, reflecting on his own loneliness and the struggle we all have to touch each other, he comments that the road to intimacy is not easy for we are all built differently: “Some people want to talk; others would rather read the newspapers. Some people want to hang colorful curtains on the windows; others would rather panel the basement walls. Some people want to be embraced; others want to build a deck off the kitchen.”

Small wonder that intimacy is a task!

In ancient times, the poets were blamed if the people were despondent and rationalizing and if there was drought and infertility in the land. These memories (poems, in the true sense) by Christopher de Vinck are most useful to help dispel depression, rationalization, drought and infertility.

The Prodigal Son’s Brother

May 31, 1993

Recently, while giving a series of lectures, I was confronted by a rather angry man who accused me of being soft on hell, God’s judgment and God’s justice.

Though angry, he was, in his own way, a good man, one who had given his life in duty to his family, his church, his country and his God.

“I cannot accept what you say,” he shouted at me. “There is so much evil in the world and so many people are suffering from other people’s sins that there must be, after this life, some retribution, some justice.

“Don’t tell me that all these people who are doing these things—from molesting children to ignoring all morality—are going to be in heaven when we get there! What does that say about God’s justice?”

His lament is, in fact, quite an old one. The prophet Isaiah had the same kind of wish. For him it was not enough that the Messiah should usher in a time of peace and freedom for good people. Along with rewards for the good, he felt, there needed to be too a “day of vengeance” on the bad (Isaiah 61:2).

Interestingly, in a curious omission, when Jesus quotes this text to define his own ministry, he leaves out the part about vengeance (Luke 4:18).

There are too many of us in the church and the world today, in both conservative and liberal camps, who like this man have the same burning need. We want to see misfortune fall upon the wicked. It is not enough that eventually the good should have their day. The bad must be positively punished.

If we are conservative, we wish this especially on those who neglect their religious duties or do not follow the sixth commandment. If we are liberal, we want God’s vengeance on the perpetrators of injustice.

All ecclesial camps today agree that justice demands that sin and wickedness be positively punished. We only disagree on what constitute sin and wickedness.

To my mind, this desire for justice (as we call it) is, at its root, unhealthy and speaks volumes about the bitterness within our own lives. All these worries that somebody might be getting away with something and all these wishes that God better be an exacting judge, suggest that we, like the older brother of the prodigal son, might be doing things right, but real love, forgiveness and celebration have long gone out of our hearts.

We are bitter as slaves and are quite outside the circle of the dance.

Julian of Norwich once described God in this way: “Completely relaxed and courteous, he himself was the happiness and peace of his dear friends, his beautiful face radiating measureless love like a marvellous symphony.”

This is one of the best descriptions of God ever written. I often meditate on it and, to be honest, most times it makes for a painful meditation. Far from basking in gratitude in the beautiful symphony of relaxed, measureless love and infinite forgiveness that makes up heaven, I feel instead the bitterness, self-pity, anger and incapacity to let go and dance that was felt by the older brother of the prodigal son.

I am sitting in the banquet room, amongst all that radiance and joy, pouting, waiting for the Father to come and try to coax me beyond my sense of having been cheated. Such is my feeling. . . I am not happy in the presence of messianic celebration, but, given that life is unfair, I have every right to be unhappy! Such too is most people’s feeling!

Alice Miller, the great Swiss psychologist, suggests that the primary task of the second half of life is that of grieving. We need to grieve, she says, or the bitterness and anger that come from our wounds, disappointments, bad choices and broken dreams will overwhelm us with the sense of life’s unfairness.

Her solution is simple: Life is unfair. Don’t try to protect yourself from its hurts—you’ve already been hurt! Accept that, grieve it and move on to rejoice the dance.

In the end, it is because we are wounded and bitter that we worry about God’s justice, worry that it might be too lenient, worry that the bad will not be fully punished, worry that there might not be a hell.

But we should worry less about those things and more about our own incapacity to forgive, to let go of our own hurts, to take delight in life, to give others the sheer gaze of admiration, to celebrate and to truly join in the dance. To be fit for heaven we must let go of our bitterness.

Like the older brother, our problem is ultimately not the excessive love that is seemingly shown someone else. Our problem is that we have never fully heard or understood God’s words: “My child, you have always been with me and all I have is yours, but we, you and I, should be happy and dance because your younger brother who was dead has come back to life!”

Religion’s True Birthright

May 26, 1993

Recently I was part of a panel which was interviewing people who were hoping to enter full-time ministry in the church. One of the questions we asked everyone we interviewed was: “What, in your mind, is the greatest task facing the church today? What, in your dream of ministry, do you most want to accomplish?”

One man, when asked this, answered without hesitation: “The major task of ministry today is to bring people to accept Vatican II. Too many people are blocked in terms of renewal.”

That is a laudable answer, though, in my opinion, an unfortunate one. Too many of us, people who can still remember the pre-Vatican II church, are people who are dealing more with the past, our own and our church’s, than with the present and its real needs. Because of this we tend to confuse our own religious issues and wounds with the real religious needs of the world and most often end up missing the forest for the trees. Let me try to explain:

What is the greatest task facing the church today? What should ministry strive to bring about?

Long before Vatican II (or, indeed, the Vatican) is ever mentioned our task is to try to awaken within people the sense that God exists, that God is alive, and that, because of this, there is a challenge and a consolation that is deeper than they have ever imagined. Our first task in ministry is to tell people that they are being held, unconditionally and inescapably, in the hands of a living and loving God and that this God is delighting in them. Before anything else, we need to remind people that God is real and that, because of that, there is a deep goodness and sense to everything, including their own desires, temptations, and tortured sensitivies.

The rest of ministry flows from that. Somewhere, down the line, there will need to be talk, important talk, of church, of dogma, of denominational boundaries, of moral codes, of liturgy and worship, of authority structures and about who should be ordained, and perhaps even of Vatican II. But these latter things, all of them, are parasitical by nature, they take their blood out of some other life, in this case, from the life which appears when people realize that they are unconditionally loved and held by the source and origin of all life. As that realization sinks in, it will bring with it, slowly, the awareness that it is, after all, a demanding thing to fall into the hands of a living God and many of the things that Vatican II talked about will then become important issues. But that comes later.

Thus, the task of religion is to evangelize desire, to make the whole world and everyone in it understand existentially the truth and the implications of Augustine’s famous prayer: “You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”

As we look at our world today (and at our own children!) we need to be clear that this is our most important religious task. We need to evangelize our world’s desires by revealing the consolation and the challenge of God; otherwise the irresistible physicality, lure, and wildness of pagan beauty will continue to take away both the world’s breath and most of its capacity for virtue and worship.

The last quarter century has produced libraries full of valuable scriptural exegesis, good historical correctives to bad theology and corrupt ecclesiology, sensitive moral insights, and every kind of useful suggestion regarding theology and programs for sacraments and liturgy. What it hasn’t produced are an effective missiology and effective missionaries for a first-world context.

Yet that is what is perhaps most needed today, missionaries who can evangelize first-world desire. The harvest is ripe, but the Christian labourers (who are on the right track) are few … as is evident from the fact that more and more people are turning to New Age spiritualities, pagan philosophies, and various ideologies in an attempt to make sense out of their eroticism, their restlessness, their innate moral promptings, and their innate grandiosity and religiosity.

The human heart today, as much as in any other age, sincerely yearns for to feel both the consolation and the challenge of God. Offering that is religion’s birthright …and it is our first task as a church.

Ordinary Ground is Holy

May 17, 1993

Some years ago, a confrere of mine wrote a simple unpretentious poem which he dedicated to his 10-year-old niece after she had given him a tour of the rather humble prairie town in which she lived.

Entitled To Sheryl, My Niece, Aged 10, On Guiding Me Through the Town of Virden, it reads like this:

I wish someone like you
could have guided Adam through
his first fact-finding tour
or his Father’s store
eons before
and named
much more than claimed
things as his own
or told us what they’re for.

We both know Adam’s handicap: he had no niece—

Nor patience, nor the peace
to wait for one.

But this he could have done:

Called upon his little girl
to come along
not set out alone
to claim
and name
and number
when his first call
clearly was
to ponder
and
to wonder.

– Jerome Harry Hellman, omi

These words echo Elizabeth Barrett Browning who once said that the earth is ablaze with the fire of God, but only those who see it take their shoes off—the rest sit around and pick blackberries!

Her words themselves echo God’s words to Moses at the burning bush: “Take your shoes off because the ground you are standing on is holy ground.”

Ordinary ground is holy. There is more than enough mystery, secret, marvel and miracle ablaze in ordinary reality. Unfortunately, most of the time we don’t see this because we stand before it trying to claim, name, number, psych out and render familiar . . .when our true task is, instead, to ponder and to wonder. This is an irreverence that fatigues the soul.

Irreverence lies at the root of all sin—and taking-for-granted lies at the root of all irreverence. We begin to take things for granted at the precise moment when we no longer approach life with eyes of a 10-year-old who can look at a small town and still see its rich secrets.

It’s then, when pondering and wondering are lost, that we become bored, cynical and restless with our lives and begin to feel that reality holds no secrets, that it is less than marvellous and worthwhile, that, as Margaret Atwood once put it, we’re stuck here in a country of thumbed streets and stale buildings, where there is nothing spectacular to see and the weather is ordinary—and where love occurs in its pure form only on the cheaper of the souvenirs!

At the root of boredom and cynicism lies the death of wonder. Familiarity deadens the soul. It also spawns our resentments.

True contemplatives, mystics and children never live the illusion of familiarity. That is why they are never bored, cynical and resentful. For them, there are no hick towns, godforsaken places, or ordinary marriage partners and ordinary children who can be taken for granted and rendered familiar.

For them, there is only holy ground, the extraordinary, miracle in ordinary life. They, in the words of G.K. Chesterton, “have learned to look at things familiar until these look unfamiliar again.”

Karl Rahner was once asked whether he believed in miracles.

“I don’t believe in them,” he replied, “I rely on them to get me through daily life!” There’s a secret wisdom worth contemplating.

Truth With Gentleness

May 10, 1993

Jesus was once asked why he spoke in parables. His answer is more than a little curious: “I speak in parables . . . lest they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart and turn again, and I should heal them” (Matthew 13:15).

At first glance, this seems to suggest that Jesus was being deliberately vague so that people would not understand the truth—and so could remain ignorant and obstinate.

The opposite is true. His deliberate vagueness is a studied gentleness, a deep compassion that recognizes that people’s lives are complex and that truth is not a sledgehammer.

It is not enough just to have the truth. Truth can set free but it can also freeze hearts still further, if it is not presented with the utmost compassion, gentleness and understanding. Let me try to illustrate this:

The novelist, Joyce Carol Oates, received a letter one day from a young woman whom she had once taught in a classroom. This woman shared with Oates much of her own story, which was a very checkered and painful one. She has come from a bad home, been abused as a young girl and had spent a number of years consoling herself in her depression by mindless and anonymous sex.

At the time she writes this letter, she is trying to pull herself out of both her past and her depression and is, among other things, attempting to make one of her teachers, a married man with children, fall in love with her so that he would leave his wife and marry her.

In her letter to Oates she complains bitterly that she was not helped much by the class she took from her. Allow me, with a few slight redactions, to quote from her letter:

“You once said in one of your classes: ‘Literature gives form to life.’ I remember you saying that very clearly. And now I want to ask you something: ‘What is form? And why is that better than the way life happens by itself?’

“I hate all that, all those lies, so many words in all those books. What form is there to the way things happen? I wanted to run up to you after class and ask you that question, cry it out at you, shout it into your face because your words were wrong! You were wrong!

“And yet I envy you. I have envied you since I first saw you. You and others like you. Your easy way with words and people. The way you can talk to others, like friends.

“One day before class I saw you walking into the building with another teacher, the two of you, well-dressed, talking, smiling, like that was no accomplishment whatsoever. And another time I saw you driving away from school in a blue car.

“And I hate you for that. For that and for your books and for your words, and for your knowing so much about what never happened in any perfect form.

“I even see your picture in the newspapers sometimes. You, with all your knowledge, while I have lived my life already, turned myself inside out and got nothing out of it. I have lived my life and there is no form to it. No shape.

“I could tell you about life. I and people like me. All of us people who lie alone at night and squirm with a hatred we cannot get straight, into a shape. All of us women who give themselves to men without knowing why, all of us who walk fast with hate, like pain, in our-bowels, terrified. What do you know about that?”

“Like the woman I am sitting across from right now in the library as I write this letter. She is fat, heavy, thick cream colored fat-marbled old legs, cracked with varicose veins. People like her and me know things you don’t know, you teachers and writers of books.

”We are the ones who wait around libraries when it is time to leave, and sit drinking coffee alone in the kitchen. We are the ones who make crazy plans for marriage, but have no one to marry. We are the ones who look around slowly when we get off the bus; but don’t know what we are looking for.

”We are the ones who leaf through magazines with colored pictures and spend long hours sunk in our own bodies; thinking, remembering, daydreaming, waiting for someone to come and to give form to so much pain. And what do you know about that!” (Them)

There is a story told about Vincent de Paul which says that, on his deathbed, he spoke words like these to his community: “When you grow tired of giving to others, when you are tempted to self-pity and begin to believe that others, the poor, are taking advantage of you, that you are being asked to give more than is fair, then continue to give and, maybe, sometime in the future, the poor will find it in their hearts to forgive you. For it is more blessed to give than to receive—and it is also a lot easier!”

Maybe, sometime in the future, the poor will find it in their hearts to forgive us for, so often, using the truth as a hammer to enslave them further rather than to set them free.

Called Out Of Darkness

May 3, 1993

Hans Urs Von Baltasar once wrote: “After a mother has smiled for a long time at her child, the child will begin to smile back; she has awakened love in its heart, and in awakening love in its heart, she awakes also recognition.”

Awakening love and recognition within a child’s heart is, however, tied to more than just the mother’s smile. Just as important as her smile is her voice.

Mothers don’t just cuddle babies and smile at them, they speak to them and it is this that is most critical in bringing a child to human awareness.

We come out of the darkness and chaos of unconscious infancy only when we are called out by voices which cajole, caress, reassure and forever keep luring us beyond ourselves.

Very often, during the early critical months of a child’s life, it is the mother’s voice that does a lot of this. Thus, it is no accident that the first language we learn is called “our mother tongue” for it was its sounds that caressed us and ultimately lured us out of unthinking darkness and uncontrollable chaos.

Rainer Marie Rilke says that an infant’s journey into human awareness depends upon the mother’s voice displacing “the surging abyss.”

Language philosophers agree. In their view, language structures consciousness and creates the very possibility of thought and feeling. Before we can speak or otherwise use a language, we are trapped in a darkness and chaos that leaves us unable to think and feel as human beings.

We see this clearly, for instance, in a case like Helen Keller. In a real sense, it is true to say that Annie Sullivan, Helen’s teacher, broke open the world for Helen. By teaching her language, Annie Sullivan precisely took Helen Keller out of darkness and chaos and opened up for her the possibility of freedom, thought, deep feeling, self-expression and love.

Perhaps no image is more valuable than this one to help us understand the real purpose of the word of God in our lives. All preaching, teaching, theology and pastoral practice is really in function of this—of letting God’s voice become the smiling, beckoning, caressing, cajoling, luring mother, calling the child out of fear, darkness, chaos and inarticulateness to freedom, thought, deep feeling, self-expression and love.

The purpose of God’s word is not, first of all, to challenge us to charity or to do social justice or live a certain morality or even to worship something higher and to form community in a certain way among ourselves, valid though each of these is in itself.

Christ came, as God’s incarnate word, to bring us life, light and love. Christ came as the word to do for us what our mother tongue does, namely, to shape us in such a way that we can move beyond the fear, darkness and chaos that prevent us from entering the world of love, thought and self-expression.

Christ, as the word, is Annie Sullivan trying to help Helen Keller break through the chaos of being trapped inside of herself, unaware of and unable to enter into true human life. It is no accident that the gospels are fond of speaking of Christ as “the word.”

Christianity is more a particular kind of language (“our mother tongue”) than it is a religion.

My own hunch is that this is too little the case, today. In our theology schools, in our church circles, in our religious magazines and periodicals, and in our preaching and religious teaching in general, there is, I feel, too little of Annie Sullivan and too much a using of God’s word for every kind of other purpose.

If I take a representative sampling of religious language of any persuasion, the preaching, teaching and writing of conservative Catholicism, liberal Catholicism, social justice spiritualities, academic theology of most kinds, pious devotional literature, New Age spiritualities or the growing literature around alleged Marian apparitions, I find, with a few salient exceptions, precious little that sounds like my “mother tongue.”

For the most part, I search in vain in it for an Annie Sullivan who, with incredible patience, understanding and gentleness, is trying to lead me out of the darkness, inarticulateness, deafness and chaos into which I was born.

That is not to say that what passes itself off today as preaching, theology and pastoral practice is not full of valuable truth, interesting insights and prophetic challenge.

What tends to be absent is the caressing, smiling, gentle, beckoning mother who is, with the patience and love of an Annie Sullivan, trying to teach me how to speak, how to enter a world whose complexity and hugeness, at this stage, hopelessly dwarfs me, and how to shape my consciousness so that freedom, love and self-expression are possible.

Like millions of other Christians today, I long for the word of God—in my mother tongue.

Love Is Resilient

April 26, 1993

We know that Christ has risen from the dead because, despite all death and wound, love exists and love continues in the world. Charity is the new life of Easter.

What do I mean by that? Recently I was at a conference given by Maya Angelou. She is the Black American poetess who spoke at Bill Clinton’s inauguration.

Among other things, she told the story of her childhood. When she was seven years old, one night she was raped by a neighbor. She told her grandmother, who called the police. Her assailant was arrested and put in prison.

Criminals within prisons have their own codes and one of them is that sex offenders are themselves often tortured and killed by fellow inmates. This was the case for her attacker. Soon after his arrest he was murdered by his fellow prisoners.

Her seven year-old mind and heart, already severely traumatized by the rape, was not able to deal with this. Quite naturally, she blamed herself.

The effect of this was so severe that for the next nearly 10 years she was unable to speak. She was put into special schools, seen as handicapped, retarded, abnormal—with all the psychological and social havoc this wreaked. It is hard to imagine a more wounded and broken childhood than hers.

But she recovered, learned to speak again, and eventually has become a gifted speaker, opera singer, writer and poet. More importantly, she has become a woman of rare vibrancy, zest, graciousness, style, warmth, gratefulness, faith and love—complete with an exceptional sense of humor and delight.

Looking at and listening to the Maya Angelou of today, it borders on the impossible to believe that she is the same person who endured her own childhood.

When she speaks she tells you her secret; faith. But her’s is a particular kind of faith, a faith in the resurrection. She has her own, one-line, wording for this: resiliency is the key to love.

Listening to her, I was reminded of an old Joan Baez song that I heard years ago, an old civil war song called, The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down. The singer is telling the story of her brother, killed in the war.

It’s a beautiful song, expressing a deep melancholy that is full of a noble stoicism, but contains nothing of hope. Her young brother is dead, killed senselessly in war:
He was just eighteen
Proud and brave
When a Yankee laid him in his grave.
I swear by the mud below my feet
You can’t raise a Caine back up
When it’s in defeat.

Listening to Maya Angelou’s story, helped awaken in us, her listeners, the central tenet of our faith: You can raise life back up when it’s in defeat! There is resurrection and this puts all wound and death into a completely different focus. It also calls on us to move beyond our wounds and our deaths. Resiliency is the key to love.

Stories like Maya Angelou’s are proof of the resurrection, proof that the grave of Christ was empty, proof that love is more resilient than the many things that crucify it. Love and laughter go on. Charity is the new life of Easter.

I believe that Jesus was resurrected from the dead because of the many Maya Angelous that I have met. I have experienced charity, love, forgiveness and resiliency. I have seen the new life of Easter.

In Maya’s story, and in our own stories, we see that dead bodies do rise from their graves, that dead voices do sing again, that abused bodies do delight again in joy, and that wounded spirits do grow strong again and forgive.

And that is the challenge of Easter, the challenge of the resurrection. It invites us to a new life, charity arid resiliency. Faith in the resurrection is the only thing that can ultimately empower us to live beyond our crucifixions, beyond being raped, beyond being muted by wound.

A friend of mine once sent me an Easter card which ended with the challenge: May you leave behind you a string of empty tombs! That is both my Easter wish and my Easter challenge for all of us.

Let our wounded, muted voices begin to sing again: Christ is risen! Life is very very good! Happy Easter!