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.

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).

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!

Recently, while giving a retreat at a Trappist monastery, an old monk came to talk to me. He shared with me at length about the ups and downs of more than 50 years of monastic life.

At the end of all that he said to me: “Give me some hints on how I should prepare to die! What should I do to make myself more ready for death?”

The bluntness and heaviness of that question is, of itself, enough to intimidate a person with a spirituality deeper than my own. But when it is asked by someone twice your age whose heart and spirit seem already deeply charitable, faith-filled and well-mellowed out through years of quiet prayer, then perhaps one’s best response is silence.

I was not so naive as to offer him much by way of an answer, his eagerness notwithstanding.

But his is a good question. Indeed, how can we prepare to die? How should we live so that death does not catch us unaware, “as a thief in the night?” What should we do so that we do not leave this world with too much unfinished business?

The first thing that needs to be said in response to these questions is that anything we do to prepare for death must, if it is not to be a morbid and sick thing, be something that does not distance us or separate us from life and others here and now. We do not prepare for death through any kind of withdrawal.

The very opposite is true. What prepares us for death, anoints us for it, in Christ’s phrase, is a deeper, more intimate and fuller entry into life. We get ready for death by beginning to live life as we should have been living it all along. What do I mean by that?

I would like to flesh this out by quoting two phrases from two of my favorite authors: John Shea and John Powell.

In his poem, The Indiscriminate Host, John Shea writes: “The banquet is open to all who are willing to sit down with all.”

There is a whole lot contained in that line. What Shea suggests here is that the single condition for going to heaven is to have the kind of heart and the kind of openness that makes it possible for us to sit down with absolutely anyone—and to share life and a table with him or her.

For Shea, then, the best way we can prepare to die is to begin to stretch our hearts to love ever wider and wider, to begin to love in a way that takes us beyond the natural narrowness and discrimination that exists within our hearts because of temperament, wound, timidity, ignorance, selfishness, race, religion, circumstance and our place in history.

We prepare to die by pushing ourselves to love less narrowly. In that sense, readying ourselves for death is really an ever-widening entry into life.

John Powell, in his book, Unconditional Love, tells the story of a young student of his who was dying of cancer. In the final stages of his illness, he came to see Powell and said something to this effect: “Father, you once told us something in class that has made it easier for me to die young. You said: ‘There are only two potential tragedies in life and dying young isn’t one of them. These are the two real tragedies: If you go through life and you don’t love . . . and if you go through life and you don’t tell those whom you love that you love them.’

“When the doctors told me that I didn’t have very long to live, I realized how much I have been loved. I’ve been able to tell my family and others how much they mean to me. I’ve expressed love. People ask me: What’s it like being 24 years old and dying?’ I tell them: It’s not so bad. It beats being 50 years old and having no values!”

For Powell, we prepare ourselves for death by loving deeply and especially by expressing love, appreciation and gratitude to each other.

Jesus says much the same thing. When the woman at Bethany poured an entire bottle of expensive ointment on his feet and dried his feet with her hair, he commented on her lavish expression of affection and gratitude by saying: “She has just anointed me for my impending death.”

What he meant by that should not be piously misinterpreted. He wasn’t saying: “Since I am going to be dead in awhile anyway, let her waste this ointment!” No. He was saying rather: “When I come to die, it is going to be easier because, at this moment, I am truly tasting life! It’s easier to die when one has been, even for a moment, fully alive.”

I think that had the old monk cornered Jesus and asked him the question he asked me, he might have heard something like the following: “Prepare for death by living more fully, work at loving more deeply, less discriminately, more affectionately and more gratefully. Tell someone close to you today that you love him or her.”

As a young seminarian, I spent a summer working in a retreat house. The priest directing the house had a curious hobby—he polished stones.

During long, solitary walks he would watch for small stones that looked interesting and, when he found one that looked like it might have value, he would bring it back to his workshop. There he had a small barrel-drum which was itself, filled with small, very hard stones.

He would take the stone he had found, his potential gem, and place it inside the barrel­drum, add some water, seal the drum tightly, and turn on an electric motor which would slowly rotate the drum. After several weeks of this, he would open the drum and search for his little stone.

Many times, he would find that it had disappeared, the weeks of grinding had reduced it to gravel and sand. If the stone, however, had value he would find it now, polished, gleaming, a gem, with all its rough edges rubbed off and all useless gravel and sand knocked out of it.

There is something in that image about family life. There used to be an expression, popular in spiritual literature, which said: Families and communities are schools of charity. I remember reading that as a novice many years ago and, very naively and very badly, misunderstanding it.

My simple thought then was: “Yes, that makes sense! When you live within a family or some other community, it gives you a lot of chances to practice patience, forgiveness and understanding . . . as you deal with other people’s faults!”

How wrong I was! What that expression suggests is no, first of all, that we grow in charity and maturity by putting up patiently with other people’s faults, but that real relationship, actual interaction within family and community, deflates our fantasies, makes us see reality, punctures our narcissism and against every protest, denial, and rationalization we can muster, shows us how selfish and immature we often are.

We cannot live long within any community—marriage, family, religious community or genuine friendship—without becoming aware of our faults and narrowness. We either begin to grow up or we leave.

Sadly, today the temptation is most often to leave. The prevalent theory is that we grow mature by growing away, especially away from the family and community that, by circumstance, we find ourselves within. The idea is that we will be—happy and available for real family and friendship—if we are free spirits, soaring, unattached, unencumbered.

I remember a young nun to whom I once served as spiritual director. Before entering the convent, she had lived alone in her own apartment and was quite popular. She had many friends and was, to her own mind, quite a mature, giving and unselfish person.

Not long after joining a religious community, where she lived in close quarters with other novices and those directing the novitiate, she began to experience major problems within her relationships. She was often at odds with her peers and her directors who, tactfully and otherwise, told her that she was somewhat self-centred and immature. She was particularly frustrated because, often times, the tensions arose over very petty things.

“It must be the community that’s causing this,” she told me during one of our sessions, “I was never a petty, selfish person when I lived alone!”

Then, when I asked why she continued to stay in the convent, if this was the case, she replied: “Because, in my better moments, I know that if I ran off now and got married probably most of the things that are happening here would begin to happen again! Some of this stuff would catch up with me again.

“When I lived alone it was lonely, but it was easier, you didn’t have to live your life under a microscope… but you could easily fool yourself too!”

What was happening to her in that community? The stone was being polished! She was being churned in the barrel-drum that’s called family, community. The other stones were knocking some rough edges off of her and rubbing her free of considerable useless gravel and sand.

It was painful and humiliating for her, but she was learning the most valuable lesson of all, how to share your life in reality as opposed to fantasy. She was in a school of charity. She was being purified.

Family and community aren’t boring, they’re terrifying; they’re too full of searing revelations, there we have no place to hide.

In family life, our selfishness and immaturities are reflected back to us through eyes that are steady and unblinking. Staying within them is often the hell that is purgatory and so leads to heaven.

We are a people who are losing heart. The effects of this can be seen almost everywhere.

There is a loss of heart for fidelity within relationships, as less and less people find within themselves the resiliency needed to live out the tensions that long-term family life, friendship and marriage demand. There is a loss of heart for the church, as more and more people, for every kind of reason, quietly or angrily leave their ecclesial communities.

There is a loss of heart for civic communities and the politics needed to build them as less and less people take pride in their neighborhoods, cities and countries. There is a loss of heart for children, for simple freshness, for romance, for innocence and renewed virginity.

There is a loss of heart for proper aesthetics, for manners and even for the good things of life. Finally, there is, in all of this, a loss of heart for God, both for Cod’s mercy and for God’s challenge.

Today we live lives not so much of quiet desperation, as Thoreau put it, but, in my view, of quiet, inchoate, unrecognized, denied and often highly-rationalized depression. This depression has caught us unaware because it has come upon us imperceptibly, slowly, the by-product of a certain fin de siecle tiredness.

The last decades of this century have been, in the Western world at least, characterized by two major moods: 1) a loss of naivete that has brought with it a debunking of almost all of our heroes and heroines and a concomitant sophistication that has wreaked havoc on our childhood faith and values, and 2) an ever-intensifying sensitivity that has polarized and politicized daily life around gender, ethnicity, ideology, hierarchy, values and power.

The combination of this, has, I believe, slowly tired us and left us hemorrhaging in the heart. Slowly our strength and resiliency is draining out of us. Our hearts are beginning to bleed and lose strength.

A wounded heart acts out: It prefers a negative tearing down over a building-up, cynicism over trust and cursing others over blessing them. In the end, devoid of trust and fatigued from constant tension, a wounded heart finds its rest in a certain emotional apartheid—”I’ll find my home and niche with certain like-minded persons and avoid as much as possible dealing with those different from myself. I haven’t the heart to deal with others beyond that!”

But we are not a bad people. We are only a tired, depressed one whose strength, resiliency, trust and robust will for community is hemorrhaging. And like the woman in the Gospels suffering from chronic internal bleeding, we too are slowly despairing of finding something to stop the drain. Slowly, but steadily, we are losing heart.

When I try to read the signs of the times, what seems clear is that the depression, polarization and loss of heart that is besetting us at all levels today must be recognized and addressed.

We face some radical dangers today, both in the society as a whole and within the church. Our marriages, families, homes, communities, churches and even our friendships are breaking down as, more and more, we are unable to find the heart to make them work. Given the truth of this, it is time, I submit, to seriously discern what aspects of the prophetic challenge of God that we should be emphasizing today.

My own belief is that, given a certain naivete within the church of our youth, for those of us who remember the pre-Vatican II church, certain emphases of the last quarter century, 1965-1990, were what was needed. The more liberal thinking, the openness to deconstruction, the challenge beyond individualism and piety, the uncompromising emphasis on social justice, and the strong challenge to grow beyond an infantile faith—emphases that have slowly taken over essentially the intelligentsia within ecclesial, academic, and artistic circles alike—are, I believe to a large extent, a real response to the signs of the times.

My own belief, too, is that now, for awhile at least, a new shift is needed. The shift that is required is not a conservative one, nor a fundamentalistic one (though that certainly is the temptation for many!), but it is clearly in the post­ liberal, post-critical, post-modern, post-hypersensitive and post-deconstruction direction.

Liberal, critical, modernist, hypersensitive and uncompromising social justice-emphases thinking, like John the Baptist, help prepare a path for the Way, the Truth and the Life. But they are not the Christ. Eventually, they must decrease while something else must increase!

Few spiritualities have ever caught our attention and imagination as has “the little way” of Therese of Lisieux. By the same token, few spiritualities have been as badly misunderstood.

For a great many people, Therese’s little way, is something to be praised and revered (who can say anything bad about a child or a pious icon?), but it is scarcely seen as something offering a deep secret to complex, full-blooded and restless adults.

Recently I received a letter from a reader who shared with me, both in prose and poetry, a spirituality that she has forged for herself. It’s a version of “the little way” and with her permission (with a few deliberate redactions to disguise her identity—being ”little,” she is also shy!) I share its broad outlines with you:

“I am 28 years old and have spent most of my adult life unemployed, like a lot of other people in this area. I live in an apartment block in one of the most economically depressed areas of England. The complex I live in is a large deck-access council block—of about 1,000 buildings.

“My own flat is about 50 feet up, right over one of the noisiest sections (which can have its moments, especially at night). People do their best, but the place is still full of graffiti, litter and dog dirt—not much to look at, unless you like a lot of bare concrete.

“I can’t pretend to be entirely happy in a place like this—there’s a lot of noise, a lot of violence, the lifts stink of urine and nobody seems to have any hope left. Unemployment on these flats normally varies from 60 per cent to 75 per cent.

“My concern for justice—not only for places like this, but for women, for the unborn, for disabled people, for anyone who needs it—led me into politics. However, the more I go on, the more of a strain I find it.

“Admittedly, my health hasn’t helped, but the real strain has been the conflict between the political mentality and my particular spirituality. In politics, whatever party you belong to, the aim is to get power; ideally so that you can use it to empower others.

“I’ve tried to do that, though I’ve never had much actual power and am growing in the suspicion that even those who do have power are prevented by the system from ever using it to really help others.

“But I’ve developed a spirituality for this. It’s about being vulnerable, hurting alongside people, showing God’s strength in my own weakness. In a place like this, I don’t see what else I could have.

“I don’t believe at all that there is anything wrong with political power; a close friend of ours had a fairly important political position here and God worked through him in a number of ways. I just find it’s very difficult to put it together with being little.

“How does one fight for peace and yet remain gentle? I ask these questions . . . and I still stay in politics because I feel if there weren’t any little people, some of the big people might start to forget about them. I think some of them do already. So, here’s a poem that says what I feel and think . . . .

Little Things

There is a strength in little things:
the snowdrop breaking through the sod,
the echo of the voice of God
in every morning bird that sings.
The balm for spirits crushed and broken
is not made by decree of kings,
but from a thousand little things
like gentle words, like prayers unspoken.
The world is huge; around it rings
the clangour of unending war.
Whatever we are fighting for,
there seems no room for little things.
Yet snowdrops do not cease to grow,
small envoys of successive springs;
the still small voice of little things
brings joy amidst our human woe.
When every day the paper brings
more news of human misery,
Lord, give me strength and grace to be
a voice among your little things.

The kingdom of God does, as Christ assures us, lie in mustard seeds, little things. Thank you, Ruth, for reminding us of that.

No amount of preaching shapes a soul as much as does the influence of a good Christian life. If that is true, and it is, then no marriage course is ever as powerful to teach about marriage as is the witness of a good marriage.

I understood this first-hand a few months ago when I attended the 50th wedding anniversary of an uncle and aunt. Theirs has been a good marriage—good harmony, good hospitality, good family, sustained faith.

However, and only they know the full price tag, this did not always come easily. They spent enough years without money and without extras, raising a large family. His first job, clerking in a store, paid him 50 cents a day. She couldn’t find any work at all—”women weren’t needed in the job market in those days!”

There were as well, as in all families, countless other struggles and, in their case, countless more hours spent by both beyond their own family concerns, working in church and community circles.

Nearly 300 of us, family and friends, gathered to toast and roast them. At the end of the banquet my uncle stood up to thank everyone.

He ended his comments with the words: “When we got married 50 years ago, we didn’t have much, but we had an unconscious trust that if we lived by the Ten Commandments and the laws of the church then things would turn out all right . . . and I think they did.”

What an understatement! They turned out more than all right. A good marriage can best be described, I believe, by four images and theirs is the prime analogue of each of these:

• A good marriage is a warm fireplace. The love that two people have for each other generates a warm place. But the warmth it creates does not just warm the two people in love, it warms everyone else who comes near them—their children, their neighbors, their community and everyone who meets them.
• A good marriage is a big table, loaded with lots of food and drink. When two people love each other sacramentally that love becomes a place of hospitality, a table where people come to be fed—figuratively and really. Again, love, in a true marriage, feeds not just the two people who are generating it, but, because it is sacramental, it always contains more than enough surplus to feed everyone who is fortunate enough to meet it.
• A good marriage is a container that holds suffering. An old axiom says: “Everything can be borne if it can be shared!” That’s true. Anyone fortunate enough to have a true moral partner in this life can bear a lot of suffering.

That is even truer in a good marriage where the wife and husband, because of their deep moral and emotional affinity, can carry not just their own sufferings but also can help carry the sufferings of many others.

• Finally, to draw upon a deep Christian image, a good marriage is Christ’s body, flesh that is “food for the life of world.” Christ left his body to feed the world. A good marriage does precisely that, it feeds everything and everybody around it.

Many of us have experienced this in some of the married people we’ve met. Having them in our lives is a constant source of (moral, psychological, religious and humor) nourishment.

The marriage of my aunt and uncle is exactly described by these images. Their relationship to each other is a fireplace, where many people, including myself, have found warmth. It is a table—all their houses have always had big tables, big loaded refrigerators and big doors that have welcomed and given hospitality and food and drink to everyone who crossed their threshold.

And their relationship has been a container for suffering. Through the years, thanks to their love for each other, they were able to bear with faith, dignity, soft hearts, and ever-deepening charity, all the pain, tragedy and suffering that came their way. But they were also able to help many other people, to carry their sufferings.

Finally, their relationship has been, and remains, Christ’s body, food for the life of the world. Virtually everyone whose path ever crossed theirs has been fed, nourished, given vitamins in their soul by this marriage.

An age that no longer understands sacrament might, I submit, look at a marriage like this one to better see what shapes soul and what constitutes sacrament.

Sometimes the answers we seek are not found in books but in the house across the street. Sometimes too the sacrament we need to feed our souls is found, not just at the communion rail, but in a warm living room and at a loaded table. Joe and Amelia Gartner—ad multos annos!