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!

The Pursuit Of Innocence

April 19, 1993

Annie Dillard once wrote about innocence: “Innocence is not the prerogative of infants and puppies, and far less of mountains and fixed stars, which have no prerogatives at all. It is not lost to us; the world is a better place than that.

“Like any other of the spirit’s gifts, it is there if you want it, free for the asking, as has been stressed by stronger words than mine. It is possible to pursue innocence as hounds pursue hares: single-mindedly, driven by a kind of love, crashing over creeks, keening and lost in fields and forests, circling, vaulting over hedges and hills, wide-eyed, giving loud tongue all unawares to the deepest, most incomprehensible longing, a root-flame in the heart, and that warbling chorus resounding back from the mountains . . .”(Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, p. 82)

One of the deepest underpinnings of all morality and spirituality is innocence—if not its achievement, at least its desire. Just as any healthy child spontaneously longs for the experience of an adult, any healthy adult longs for the heart of a child.

To lose the desire for innocence is to lose touch with one’s soul. It is, in fact, the loss of one’s soul since to lose entirely the desire for innocence constitutes one of the qualities of being in hell.

What is innocence?

Dillard, herself, describes it as the soul’s “unselfconscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object.” For her, innocence is the sheer gaze of admiration, something tantamount to what James Joyce describes in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, when young Steven sees a half-dressed girl on a beach and instead of being moved by desire for her is moved only by an overwhelming wonder and admiration.

The late Allan Bloom, in a bestselling book, The Closing of the American Mind, suggests that, in the end, innocence is chastity and that chastity has more than sexual connotations.

In his view, there needs to be a certain chastity in all of our experiencing, that is, we need to experience things only if and when we can experience them in such a way that we remain integrated. Simply put, we lose our innocence when we experience things that “unglue” us, that cause disintegration—be that moral, psychological, emotional, spiritual or erotic.

Bloom suggests that, today, most of us, through lack of chastity, have already become somewhat unglued. This, he suggests, manifests itself not just in spiralling rates for suicide, emotional breakdown, and drug and alcohol abuse, but, and especially, in a certain deadness that leaves us “limping erotically,” without fire in our eyes and without much in the way of the sublime in our hearts and in our dreams.

A number of philosophers and mythologists today suggest that adult innocence, unlike the natural innocence of a child, has to do with reaching “second naivete” and “post-criticalness.”

More simply stated, they distinguish between childishness, the spontaneous innocence of a child which has its roots in a certain ignorance and naivete, and childlikeness, the post-critical stance of an informed, experienced adult who again can take on the wonder of a child.

Finally, there is Jesus who defined innocence as consisting in having the heart of a child and the heart of a virgin . . . “Unless you have the heart of a child you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.” “The kingdom of heaven can be compared to 10 virgins waiting for their bridegrooms!”

For Jesus, the heart of a child is one that is fresh, receptive, full of wonder and full of respect. The heart of a virgin is one that can live in patience, in inconsummation, without the finished symphony.

The virgin’s heart is innocent because it can live without breaking certain taboos, knowing that, as a child, many of the things that it so deeply desires cannot be had just yet. The virgin’s heart does not test its God.

In her novel, The Stone Angel, Margaret Laurence describes a woman, Hagar Shipley, who, one day, looks at herself in a mirror and is horrified by what she sees. She scarcely recognizes her own face and what she sees frightens her. How can one, imperceptible to one’s own self, change and become so different, so old, so lifeless, so devoid of all freshness and innocence?

It can and it does happen to us all. Most of us have long ceased being the type of person that the child within us can make easy friends with. It’s time to pursue innocence as hounds pursue hares, single-mindedly, crashing over creeks, keening in lost fields, driven by a kind of love.

A Shallow Compassion

April 12, 1993

The dictionary defines euthanasia as “the practice of killing for reasons of mercy.” Until recently, virtually everywhere, this was considered both criminal and immoral.

Today, in the Western world at least, this is rapidly changing. The Netherlands’ parliament recently approved the world’s most liberal right-to-die law, making it legal in many cases for a doctor to actively assist a patient in commiting suicide.

In the United States there is Dr. Jack Kervorkian, popularly known as the “suicide doctor,” who has, without prosecution by the law, already assisted 15 people in taking their own lives. More and more, all over the Western world, there is pressure on governments to allow a limited euthanasia.

Formerly we lived by the principle, enshrined legally and medically even when it was not explicitly espoused religiously, that only God is lord of life and death. Today that is being challenged, not just practically but morally.

It is the proponents of euthanasia and doctorassisted suicide that are claiming the moral high ground. It is they who claim to be truly compassionate towards the suffering and dying, they who claim to be opening up for humanity the chance to die with dignity—and it is those who oppose them that are seen to be morally unsophisticated, legalistic, unfeeling, lacking in compassion and ignorant of what in fact enhances human dignity.

What’s to be said about this?

Despite the fact that, for the main part, this comes from a sincere instinct and a sincere desire to be compassionate, it is, in my opinion, dangerously wrong, morally and practically. Why do I say that?

First of all, because it violates one of the most sacred of all taboos, namely, that no human person may actively take a life, including his or her own. God alone is lord of life and death. Moreover, history demonstrates clearly that there is invariably the tendency to take things too far whenever a taboo is breached.

Up until now, we have retained a valuable moral distinction between active and passive in this regard: The belief was that one could refrain from actively intervening, especially by extraordinary means, in order to preserve a life. It was considered moral to let nature take its course at times, to let a person die. But nature snuffed out the heartbeat, not some human person.

Thus, sometimes, life-sustaining machines or intravenous tubes were disconnected and a person was left to die. This was not considered killing or suicide. Nothing was done actively to kill that life. It is this distinction that is being challenged and its demise will, I fear, open Pandora’s box. That is what is more obvious.

What is less obvious and perhaps even more pernicious is that the push for doctor-assisted suicide, for all its moral posturing in the end, props up a very shallow and callous ethic of our age which would have us believe that physical beauty, physical health and physical wholeness are the norm for morality and the only credentials for life itself.

A certain physical quality of life—defined daily more and more by health spas, one’s capacity to be productive and competitive in the world, and even by the fashion industry—becomes a higher value than life itself.

To accept, as legal and moral, doctor-assisted suicide helps move us more towards a world within which Darwin’s evolutionary principle—the survival of the fittest—plays God.

In such a world the weak are ever more marginalized and eventually eliminated . . . while the Jack Kervorkians become heros, get famous and get to be guests on the talk shows. To my mind, that is not progress in human compassion.

In the end, for all their claims of compassion, the mentality and morality of euthanasia, under stand neither the mystery nor the mysticism of physical suffering. We give deep love and life to each other, not just when we are healthy, strong, young, beautiful, productive and bright.

As the mystery of Christ’s own passion and death, the mystery of many painful terminal illnesses, and mystery of many people born with handicaps who have deeply blessed their families has shown, there is just a lot about what gives life and love that we do not understand, but that we feel and know—and which we are given by those who are weak, ill, handicapped, suffering and dying.

We are ever so much poorer, in love and understanding and especially in compassion, when we reduce the mystery of suffering and death to what we can rationally understand and explain.

A little moral sophistication is a dangerous thing. So is the reductionistic compassion of euthanasia.

Dying In Order To Live

April 5, 1993

Leo Tolstoy once commented that “each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” I like to think that restlessness is like that, it takes many forms but each of us is restless in his or her own way.

One form of restlessness that many of us share in common, however, is a sense of feeling trapped in certain marriages, families, vocations, careers, churches, jobs and locations which frustrate us, but which, for all kinds of reasons, we feel powerless to ever leave.

Hence, we live in a state of dissatisfaction and restlessness, unable really to make peace with our lot in life and yet unable to leave it either.

Thus, we all know people who feel that their marriages are really not good, but who cannot ever leave those marriages, just as we know people who cannot make peace with the fact that they are not married, but who themselves know that, realistically, they will never be married.

What we see in these people and in ourselves since we all have our own particular experiences of this is a perpetual kicking against the goad, a cancer of spirit, a refusal to accept one’s lot in life, an incapacity to make peace with what one is in fact living.

Theologically this can be described as a blockage of pentecost, an unwillingness to receive the Holy Spirit for one’s own life.

How do we move beyond this kind of restlessness? There is an old adage, now the motto for Outward Bound programs in the U.S., that reads: If you can’t get out of something . . . get more deeply into it.

There is more than a little wisdom in that line, despite its rather glib sound. Taken seriously, it is a paschal prescription, a challenge to die so that we might live.

If you can’t get out of something . . . get more deeply into it. Christ illustrated what that means in his prayer in Gethsemane.

First he prayed that he might get out of it: “Father, let this cup pass from me.” Then, when he couldn’t get out of it, he got deeply into it. The result was the resurrection.

Many resurrections, for us, lie in imitating Christ in this matter. Thus, for example . . .

If we find ourselves restless in a marriage which is far from what we would now choose, but which we know we can never leave then we have no other choice but to get more deeply into it. We are so restless because we are no longer drawing life from the relationship.

Only by entering that marriage more deeply can that restlessness be turned to restfulness and can that seeming death be turned to life. Not to enter it more deeply is to condemn ourselves to the living death we are now experiencing—our relationship is neither alive nor dead.

The same holds true for those of us who struggle restlessly with the single life and celibacy. If we cannot get out of it, we will avoid a cancerous restlessness only by getting more deeply into it.

If we do enter more deeply into it and grieve properly our inconsummation we can turn that frustrated longing into a wider hunger that creates advent space, that helps us enter into a deeper mysticism within the communion of saints, and which drives us outward to try to create and enter human union beyond the individual and romantic level.

Again, not to die to our daydreams here, not to enter more deeply into celibacy, is to perpetuate a living death within our sexuality.

The same dynamic is likewise operative in our relationship to our church. Today there are many people who are very unhappy with their churches but, for all kinds of reasons, can never leave those churches.

As some put it: “Even if you leave the church, it never leaves you!” If that is the case, then the prescription is clear: If you can’t get out of it, get more deeply into it. Enter your church more deeply, see and experience in the tensions, petti ness, divisions and angers of this particular community the basic and universal struggle of all people to come together around one table, to have one heart.

The struggle for one community is, singularly, the most difficult and demanding of all human endeavors. Your local church offers you the laboratory to work at the project.

All of us are unhappy in our own way, be it with our marriage, our family, our celibacy, our church, our career, our neighborhood, our temperament, or even our physical appearance. If we can’t get out of these—get more deeply into them!

In Praise Of Fools

March 29, 1993

Dostoyevski once suggested that part of what’s wrong with our world is that fools take themselves seriously and we neglect to take the talk of fools seriously.

Moreover we have lost the wisdom of calling ourselves fools: “The cleverest of all, in my opinion, is the person who calls himself or herself a fool at least once a month—nowadays an unheard-of talent. Formerly a fool recognized once a year at the very least that he or she was a fool, but not now” (Bobak).

In ancient times, kings and queens knew how important it was to have a fool around, a jester, a trickster, who could bring you down to earth by farting just as you seated yourself pompously to make an important speech.

Without a court fool, kings and queens knew that they would inflate with self-importance and grow heartless and dangerous. They were wise enough to keep fools around, even when the foolishness that resulted was cause for high irritation.

With this high anthropological and mythical hedge sheltering my words, let me quote some of the good lines that some of our contemporary court jesters have thrown around lately . . .

Here’s how the court fool assesses the last 70 years:

In the ’30s we lost it all
In the ’40s we tried to build it all
In the ’50s we dreamt it all
In the ’60s we did it all
In the ’70s we wanted it all
In the ’80s we had it all
In the ’90s . . . we are getting the bill

And, what does the trickster say about the liberal-conservative tension, both within theology and within ideology?

The true liberal temperament: “If something is moving, get on board; if it isn’t moving, get it moving; if you can’t get it moving—then paint it! But don’t leave things the same!”

The true conservative temperament: “Nothing should be done for the first time!”

Liberal theology in one line—”Mary wasn’t; Jesus didn’t; God can’t; and you can!”

The conservative lament: “Even nostalgia isn’t what it used to be.”

A fool’s pocket-wisdom . . .

Indecision is the key to flexibility.

There is always one more jerk than you counted on.

Someone who thinks logically provides a nice contrast to the real world.

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.

This is probably as bad as it gets, but don’t count on it.

If you smile when things go wrong, you probably have someone in mind to blame!

Remember—one-seventh of your life is spent on Mondays.

(Source unknown)

And then there is the court fool who tells his buddy: “Marriage is good for a man, it puts you in touch with your feelings—and with lawyers!”

And for when we are feeling pompous—remember . . .

Our tables and chairs and sofas know things about us that our lovers can’t. (W. Auden)

Reality might not be all its cracked up to be—but it is still the only place you can get a decent steak (Woody Allen).

Remember too . . .

When you have a new hammer, everything looks like a nail (Maria Harris).

Sometimes you can see a whole lot just by looking (Yogi Berra).

Bitterness and anger are like manure, they make great fertilizer, or you can burn them for fuel or light, but don’t try to eat them or you will die (Buffy Saint-Marie).

If you remember the ’60s—you weren’t there! (Timothy Leary).

Now, should this column irritate you, remember: “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for an irritated man or woman to enter into the kingdom of heaven!” (Stanley Elkin).

Pro-Life Prayer Needs Flesh

March 22, 1993

The issue of abortion is today perhaps the most divisive issue within all of society.

The two sides on this question have polarized so strongly that there is, in most cases, no longer even the possibility of civil, meaningful and respectful dialogue—let alone any hope of a practical political resolution to the problem.

What is especially unfortunate in all this divisiveness, beyond the paramount fact that abortions continue, is the deep split this issue has caused among those who work for social justice.

Abortion pits two social justice issues against each other: the rights of the unborn versus the rights of women. Both sides are absolutely convinced that the final moral truth lies on its side and each attacks the issue with a fervor that, not infrequently, erupts in violence.

What is the Christian response to all of this?

The temptation for many of us is either a quiet or a highly-rationalized withdrawal: “There is nothing that can be done right now, so I won’t do anything! Nothing is to be gained by demonstrations, vigils, getting arrested, signing petitions, or protesting.

“The only real solution is to, long-range, create a society within which abortion is not so much illegal as unthinkable . . . and all we can profitably do at this stage is to pray and have patience!”

Most people, in fact, respond this way. But is it enough?

Those of us who believe that abortion is wrong—that, in the end, a human heartbeat is stilled and thus the unborn fetus is the ultimate victim, irrespective of whoever else was also victimized—can we, despite sharing many sympathies with those who advocate abortion, in good conscience remain so inactive and uninvolved at the practical level?

Our answer to this question is again, I suspect, a reflective protest: “I’m against abortion, though I believe in the goodness and sincerity of many of those who advocate it.

“Politically, however, the issue is insoluble at this time, given how radical feminism and most contemporary social philosophy have helped constellate the issue so that any restriction of abortion is seen as a violation of the privacy and civil rights of a woman.”

“When that is the dominant mindset, and it appears that it is, at least among governments, law-makers, academics and the media, the political struggle to prohibit abortion is, for now, hopeless.

“All the trump cards, the capacity for moral, intellectual and political bullying and intimidation, lie in the hands of those who advocate abortion. No practical action against this will be productive at this time.”

As true as that is phenomenologically, it is inadequate as a Christian response. Prophecy must challenge phenomenology! In this time of division we are asked, I believe to . . .

Work off of the premise that this is not a simple struggle between different kinds of personalities or philosophies or even between good and evil. It’s the struggle for human community—which requires, as is now becoming obvious, a deeper truth than either side, those advocating abortion and those opposing it, have been able to see or live to this time.

This issue indicates that all of us, on both sides, must go deeper into faith and resolve than we have ever gone before.

Stand where God stands, that is, with all the victims of brokenness, violence and oppression, the unborn and women alike. Our morality and fervor may not be selective and may not pit some rights against others.
Never, despite the life and death that is at stake in this issue, let go of issues of personal conscience and charity. We may never rationalize disrespect, name-calling, refusal to dialogue and the simple lack of love and charity.

The issues of personal conscience, personal faith and personal charity are just as much at stake here as is the issue of political effectiveness.

Within these parameters, do something! Non-involvement in something concrete, at a point, is rationalizing and an escape from responsibility. Pray at a clinic, write your government, organize a vigil, get involved with agencies and individuals who help pregnant women, and perhaps even discern if you are called to more radical prophetic actions—protests, confrontation, pickets, getting arrested.

Give prayer some incarnational flesh!

God Is The Real Parent

March 15, 1993

Towards the end of the movie, Rachel, Rachel, there is a particularly moving dialogue.

Rachel, the story’s main character, an aging spinster teacher, is more than a little frustrated with her state in life—teaching other people’s children rather than having her own.

Lamenting to another woman, who is a mother, she complains how difficult it is for her as a teacher to, year after year, intimately work with and get to know the young children in her classroom only to have them soon move on to other classrooms and to grow away from her. She expresses an honest envy of women who have their own children.

The mother, to whom she is speaking, says in reply: “It’s not so different for a parent. You also get to have young children only for a short time. They move on and grow away from you. They have their own lives and don’t belong to you. In the end, even for parents, your kids are never really your own!”

There is much to be learned from meditating on that—the children we have are not really ours. They are given to us, in trust, for a time, a short time really, and we are asked to be mothers and fathers, stewards, mentors, guardians, teachers and friends to them, but they are never really our children.

They belong to somebody else—God—and to themselves more than they ever belong to us. There is both a deep challenge and a deep consolation in understanding and accepting that.

The challenge is more obvious. If we accept this, we will be less inclined to act as “owners” to manipulate our children for our own needs, to see them as satellites within our own orbits, and more inclined to love, cajole, challenge and correct, even while giving them their freedom.

The consolation is not as obvious—and it is my real focus here: When we realize, in the healthy sense, that our children are not really ours, we also realize that we are not alone in raising and caring for them.

We are, in the end, foster parents. God is the real parent and God’s love, care, aid and presence to our children is always in excess of our own. God’s anxiety for our children is also deeper than our own.

Ultimately, you are never a single parent, even when you don’t have a human spouse to help you. God, like you, is also worrying, struggling, involved, crying tears of solicitousness, trying to awaken love. What is consoling is that God can touch, challenge, soften and inspire at levels inside of a child that you cannot reach.

Moreover, your children cannot, ultimately, turn their backs on God. They can refuse to listen to you, walk away from you, spit on your values—but there is always another parent from whom they can never walk away, whom they carry inside. Nobody, I suspect, could ever have the courage to be a parent without realizing this.

That we aren’t alone in our task of parenting needs emphasis today for another reason: More and more, very sincere couples are opting not to have children for fear of the world into which they would be bringing those children.

They look at the world, at themselves, their inadequacy and are frightened at what they see: “Do we really want to bring children into a world like this? We are powerless to guarantee them health, safety, security, love. It’s an unfair risk to the child!”

Persons who think like this are right in their feeling of powerlessness and in their sense that they cannot guarantee health, safety, love and security to a potential child. But they are wrong in their feeling that they alone are responsible for effecting and guaranteeing these.

God is also there and, because of that, in the end, all will be well and all manner of being will be well. One can risk having children since God risks it.

Finally, and perhaps most consoling of all, realizing this can do more than a little to bring back some peace and joy into the hearts of those who have lost children tragically—to accidents, but especially to suicide, drug and alcohol-related deaths, and other such things that make parents second-guess, worry about their failures and betrayals, and worry about all the things they should have done.

Again, we are being asked to not forget that we are not the only parents here.

When this child died, in whatever circumstances, he or she was received by hands far gentler than our own. They left our foster care and our inadequacy to fully embrace them to live with a parent who can fully embrace them and bring them to joy and wholeness.

Parents and prospective parents: Fear not you are inadequate! But there is some good news, you are not alone!