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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.