Nikos Kazantzakis, the author of Zorba the Greek, once told this parable:

A man came up to Jesus and complained to him about the hiddenness of God. “Rabbi,” he said, “I am an old man. During my whole life, I have always kept the commandments. Every year of my adult life, I went to Jerusalem and offered the prescribed sacrifices.

“Every night of my life, I have not retired to my bed without first saying my prayers. But . . . I look at stars and sometimes the mountains—and wait, wait for God to come so that I might see him. I have waited for years and years, but in vain. Why, Why? Mine is a great grievance, Rabbi? Why doesn’t God show himself?

Jesus, in response, smiled gently and said: “Once upon a time there was a marble throne at the eastern gate of a great city. On this throne sat 3,000 kings. All of them called upon God to appear so that they might see him, but all of them went to their graves with their wishes unfulfilled.

“Then, when these kings had died, a pauper, barefooted and hungry, came and sat upon that throne. ‘God,’ he whispered, ‘the eyes of a human being cannot look directly at the sun, for they would be blinded. How then, Omnipotent, can they look directly at you?

“Have pity, Lord, temper your strength, turn down your splendor so that I, who am poor and afflicted, may see you! “Then—listen, old man—God became a piece of bread, a cup of cool water, a warm tunic, a hut and, in the front of the hut, a woman giving suck to an infant.

“Thank you, Lord,’ he whispered. ‘You humbled yourself for my sake. You became bread, water, a warm tunic and my wife and son in order that I might see you. And I did see you. I bow down and worship your beloved many-faced face!’”

The God who is born at Christmas, the Christ of the incarnation, is more domestic than monastic. He was eventually crucified, as a poet once put it, for making God as accessible as the village well.

We celebrate many things at Christmas, not the least of which is how scandalously easy it now is to see God. Likewise, there are many challenges to the Christmas mystery, not the least of which is, precisely, to be able to see the many-faced face of God in a piece of bread, a cup of water, and in our own homes and families.

After the incarnation, every home is a monastery, every child is the Christ child, and all food and drink is a sacrament.

We struggle to believe this. For many reasons, each of us has the propensity to miss seeing God in the ordinary because we are forever searching for him in the extraordinary. We tend, nearly always, to miss the sacredness of the domestic as we look for the sacred in the monastic.

Too often we are unaware that the incarnation fundamentally changed us from being theists to being Christians, that is, from being people who believe in God to becoming people who believe in a god who was made flesh in Christ.

What’s the difference? Christmas is the difference and Kazantzakis’ parable sheds valuable light on what Christmas really means. To understand the parable of God’s many-faced face, is to understand what the very word “Christ” means.

The word “Christ” is not Jesus’ second name (like Jack Smith, Susan Dolenski or Jesus Christ). Christ is a title, not a name. Literally, in Greek, it means: the anointed one. Jesus Christ=Jesus, the anointed one.

Part of the meaning of that however is that the anointed one is the one who is God-in-the-flesh, God-in-carnus. Christmas then means God-in-the-physical just as it also means that the-physical-contains-God.

Kazantzakis puts it well. In the incarnation, in the mystery of Christmas, God does become a piece of bread, a cup of water, a warm tunic, a house, a spouse and a child. God’s many-faced face is everywhere.

We no longer need to look for God in extraordinary visions—a sunset will do. An incarnational God normally gives precisely that kind of vision! Likewise we don’t need to look for people with the stigmata to see the wounds of Christ—the pain in the faces of those we sit down at table with will do. God’s wounded body too is everywhere.

May the incarnation deeply bless our lives! May God’s many-faced face be present, sacramentally, in all of our Christmas celebrations—our food, our drink, our gifts, our family sharings. Likewise, may each of us struggle to give birth to God’s many-faced face so as to be more sacrament to those around us. God, we bow down and worship your beloved many-faced face.

About a year ago, I was giving a workshop when a man about my own age made the following comment: “I shudder when I think about the Catholicism we were raised on!”

“To think about all the garbage we were taught! All those nuns and priests preaching to us about poverty, chastity and obedience—when what we really wanted was affluence, sex and freedom!”

More recently, while serving on a committee that was writing a document on religious life, I brought a draft back to committee and was confronted by a fellow committee member, also roughly my age, who told me rather angrily: “Revise this radically! Eliminate all the times you say: ‘we must . . . we should . . . we need to. . .’ All of that smacks of super-ego and lays false guilt on people. Reading this, I thought I was back in catechism class 25 years ago!”

These two stories are, in many ways, parables that expose both what is best and what is worst in the religious attitudes of those Catholics who are roughly my age.

We are a rather curious generation, we baby boomers. We straddle two very different times in history. We are old enough to remember another time, when, for better and for worse, life was simpler, especially for Catholics. We had clear ideas then about family, religion, morality and our social institutions. We were raised on a Catholicism within which, precisely, priests and nuns dealt a truth we never questioned.

There were many musts, shoulds, have to’s, need to’s, and nobody doubted these and nobody doubted either that poverty, chastity and obedience were clear-cut virtues. We lived and learned within that Catholic ghetto even while the voices of the Enlightenment told us that all of this was backward and more than enough voices within tempted us towards other things.

Then, right when most of us were in our 20s and 30s, many of the ghetto walls came crumbling in. Within a very short time, almost every religious and moral idea that we had been raised on was challenged and, within an equally short time, many turned upon their religious and moral past with a bitter vengeance that took few prisoners.

The stories above are parables of that. They speak of Catholics who have looked at their past and declared it to be naive and infantile.

What’s to be said about all this? Obviously there is some truth in that judgment, despite its distortions at times. Every ghetto is overly defensive and overly narrow.

The Catholicism of our youth was no exception. There were aspects about it that smacked of infantile religiosity and which helped render us too timid to really enter the dance to which the Gospel of Christ beckons us.

However, in the type of reaction that the two stories above outline, there is an unhealthy excess. We have gone too far.

Why do I say this? Simply put, what that type of reaction does is to substitute a certain infantile grandiosity for a certain infantile religiosity. When we tum in bitter vengeance against poverty, chastity and obedience, we become precisely children of the Enlightenment and take on all the false pride and distortion of that philosophy of life and reality.

What is that distortion? Precisely the failure to recognize that the deepest need of the human soul is for obedience, that without this we inflate and quickly become gods to ourselves and monsters to others.

We are most human when we are genuflecting, revering something beyond ourselves; we are most loving when we are chaste, respectful and unwilling to violate another person; and we are most happy when we are poor, free from the enslaving attachment to material things.

Not all the poverty, chastity and obedience that was preached to us when we were little was healthy. The Enlightenment has its own secrets that are worth knowing. As well, more than enough of us were taught guilt, fear and timidity in the name of the Gospel when what should have been taught us was enjoyment, trust and courage to enter the dance.

But our present reaction throws away too much of the baby with the bath.

The real solution to infantile religiosity is not infantile grandiosity but a free choice for poverty, chastity and obedience that does not rise out of guilt, fear, timidity and lack of opportunity, but from the adult recognition that true belief in God and true respect of others demands a lot of shoulds and a lot of musts.

This week marks the 10th anniversary of this column. The WCR published my first-ever column on Nov. 15, 1982.

Ten years, hundreds of columns and one anthology book later it is perhaps wise, both for scrutiny and celebration’s sake, to return to the beginnings and to have a look again at what fires burned at the origins of all of this.

When I first set out to do this kind of writing, I did it because certain fires burned within me. I began writing for the same reason that most others write—you write because you have to, and that “have-to” has within it both a real selfishness and a real altruism.

A lost soul stranded on a lonely island puts notes into bottles and floats them out to sea. Who knows? Someone might actually find a note and read it. Rescue ships might be sent, the bottle might come back with a reply in it or its finder, as helpless as its sender, might take consolation in knowing there are other shipwrecked exiles. Instinct says put notes into bottles and float them. Obviously this has survival value.

The fires that burned within me then… I was 35 years old, pathologically idealistic, lonely, living in a foreign country, less than fully content with my celibacy, and compulsively driven by a relentlessness that was creative and dissipating all at the same time… dictated that this column should have a particular slant.

Let me quote from my first ever column, where, in the light of all of that burned within and around me then, I gave the column both a name and a mission:

“I have chosen to call this column In Exile (a name it still retains in two newspapers). Superficially, I have chosen this title because I am now living in Europe, far from much of what I consider as home.

“For much more significant reasons, I have chosen this title because all of us live our lives in exile. We live our lives seeing (as St. Paul puts it) as through a glass, darkly. We live in our separate riddles, partially separated from God, each other, and even from ourselves. We experience some love, some community, some peace, but never these in their fullness.

“Our senses, egocentricity and human nature place a veil between us and full love, full community and full peace. We live, truly, as in a riddle: The God who is omnipresent cannot be sensed; others, who are as real as ourselves, are always partially distanced and unreal; and we are, in the end fundamentally a mystery even to ourselves.

“In that sense we are, all of us, far away from home. We are in exile, longing to understand more fully and to be understood more fully. The asphyxiating ambiguity of the riddle we live in slowly tires us”.

“Daily our hunger for consummation within the body of Christ intensifies. We feel so distanced from so much. We would want to go home.”

“And, while we are on this pilgrimage, our perspectives are only partial; our vision, even at best only that of the ‘foreigner’, one out of the mainstream, who does not fully see nor understand. From this exiled perspective, I will offer my reflections. I will try to write humbly and honestly.”

“The column itself will take a variety of forms, Margaret Atwood once said: ‘What touches you is what you touch!’ I plan to touch on a whole lot of things, stuff of all kinds”.

“Mostly I will offer reflections on various theological, church and secular issues. (That about covers everything!) Occasionally, however, prose will give way to poetry and more serious reflection will be replaced by satire. As well (though not often) I will offer a review of some book.

”The reflections will not be in any way systematic. If there is any one umbrella under which these diverse reflections might find a home, it is precisely in their title, In Exile. All of them, in their own way, are trying to untangle the riddle, to end the exile, to help get a pilgrim home!”

Ten years after writing this, I try to suppress a smile as I read these words. (They really are a bit melodramatic!)

Yet the same essential, idealistic, restless, pilgrim fires still burn in me. I mean those words as much now as I did then. Thus, as long as health, and publishers, continue to smile on me, I will continue writing them from precisely this perspective.

Someone once suggested that we have two great struggles: The first half of life is spent struggling with the sixth commandment, the second half struggling with the fifth. We spend half of life as a prodigal son and half as an older brother.

This isn’t always true, but it often is. Very often, in the earlier years of life, we struggle with pleasure, hedonism, greed, sensuality and sex.

Just as often, in the later years of life, there is a struggle with anger, paranoia, bitterness and with the incapacity to forgive. In the second half of life, far tougher than the prohibition on adultery is the commandment: “Thou shalt not kill!”

It is not easy to grow in mellowness as one grows in age. The rule is normally the opposite. Almost invariably, as we grow older, our childhood wounds constellate into full-blown neuroses and dysfunctions. We tend then to spontaneously fill with bitterness, anger, jealousy, a sense of having been cheated, and with disappointment about the choices we have made (or that have been made for us) regarding our lives, our marriage partners, our vocations and our careers.

With the onset of this, begins our ultimate religious, moral and emotional struggle. This struggle is not, in the first place, the struggle with sex, lust, greed or blindness to the area of social justice, but the struggle of the older brother or the prodigal son, that is, the struggle to live out of a heart that is warm, honest, full of gratitude, able to forgive and able to enter into celebration and love.

But how do we do that? How do we keep warm, mellow and honest hearts when our natural inclination is towards bitterness, distortion and the feeling of having been cheated?

Traditional Christian spirituality suggests that the way beyond bitterness, hurt and the incapacity to forgive is to move more radically into self-forgetfulness, charity and martyrdom—live an unselfish life and you will be happy. Popular psychology submits that the road beyond an angry heart lies in more adequate self-expression and creativity—live in such a way so that your life is genuinely an expression of who you really are and you will be fulfilled.

There is wisdom in both of these, but there is also something important missing. To move from bitterness, self-pity, anger and hurt to the type of self-forgetfulness and self-expression that comes from a warm heart, involves, before anything else, the gift of tears, grieving.

Alice Miller, in her ground-breaking work, The Drama of the Gifted Child, shines a flashlight into the plumbing of all of this and what she shows is that middle-age bitterness is, at its root, the failure to grieve. If we are bitter, angry, unable to celebrate and feel like life has cheated us, we need, before and more than anything else, to grieve.

Contempt, rage and anger, she says, cease when we begin to mourn “for the irreversible that cannot be changed.” In her view, the first task for middle age is grief—”the whole decayed building must collapse and give way to true, deep and defenceless mourning.” (The Drama of the Gifted Child, pp. 104, 89)

What does she mean by this? To oversimplify her complex insight, what she suggests runs something like this: We are born into this world gifted, special and meant to be loved and valued simply for who and what we are. However, from our conception onwards, life itself and others around us—especially those closest to us, our mothers and fathers—are inadequate to the task.

Already as very young children we quickly pick up that we are loved and valued only to the degree that we meet others’ expectations of us. But we cannot meet those expectations, regardless of our talents and efforts. Daily, deep inside of us, this sinks in and, by the time we reach the second half of our lives, we tend spontaneously to fill with rage, bitterness and with the sense that we have been cheated.

And the truth is that we have been cheated, all of us. What we are spending all of our anxious energy in trying to prevent from happening has already happened. We have already been wounded at the core of our being.

But blaming others, lashing out, acting out or rationalizing our wounds under high symbols is not helpful. The prerequisite work of middle age is grief. When we properly mourn the radical inadequacy of our lives we can again find the strength and health of our youth.

During the years that I have written this column, I have rarely referred to the fact that I belong to a religious order, the Oblates of Mary Immaculate. That omission is not, I hope, an unconscious evasion since being an Oblate is, I assure you, something of which I am quite proud.

However, I rarely flag the fact that I am a priest and a member of a religious order because my belief is that what I say here and elsewhere should have to ground itself on other things.

In this column, however, I want to speak about the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, not, first of all, because I am one, but because what the founder of the Oblates had to say about Christian life and spirituality is, like the legacy that has been left us by Bernard, Francis, Dominic, Angel Merici, Ignatius of Loyola, Vincent de Paul and other great religious founders, something that has value and challenge for the entire community. The Oblates of Mary Immaculate, more commonly referred to simply as the Oblates, were founded in France by Eugene de Mazenod (1779- 1861). A French bishop of aristocratic origins (whom some popular myths identify with the bishop in Les Miserables), de Mazenod was a man whose personality ran somewhat naturally in the direction of the stern, the introverted, the strongly inner-directed, the mystical and the single-minded.

He wasn’t the type of person who would be most people’s first choice for light dinner conversation, but he was the type of person who is often God’s first choice to found religious orders.

Soren Kierkegaard once stated that “to be a saint is to will the one thing.” De Mazenod clearly did that and, in his case, the one thing had a number of aspects to it that taken together form the basis of a very rich and balanced spirituality… one which, to my mind, rightly emphasizes some aspects of Christian discipleship which are much needed today.

De Mazenod’s first emphasis was community. For him, a good life is not just one of individual greatness; it is a life that evokes the power inherent within community. He was a firm believer in the axiom: what we dream alone remains a dream, what we dream with others can become a reality.

In his view, compassion becomes effective when it becomes collective, when it issues forth from a group rather than just from an individual. Alone, we can make a splash but not a difference! He founded a religious order because he deeply believed this.

If someone, in the face of all the issues confronting the world and the church today, were to ask de Mazenod: “What’s the one single thing I might do to help make a difference?” He would reply: “Connect yourself with others of sincere will within community, around the person of Christ. Alone you cannot save the world. Together we can!

Second, he believed that any healthy spirituality makes a deep marriage between contemplation and justice. His own exact expression of this, judged in the light of all our contemporary sensitivities, is perhaps flawed and in need of re-articulation, but his key principle is perennially valid: Only an action that issues forth from a life that is rooted in prayer and deep interiority will be truly prophetic and effective.

Conversely, all true prayer and genuine interiority will burst forth in action, especially action for justice and the poor.

Third, de Mazenod, in his own life and in the spirituality he laid out for the Oblates, made the preferential option for the poor. He did this not because (as is so often the case today) it is the politically correct thing to do, but because it is the correct thing to do (period).

His belief was simple and clear—as Christians, we are called to be with and work with those that nobody else wants to be with and work with!

Finally, in his life and in the ideal he laid out, de Mazenod brought together two seemingly contradictory tendencies: a deep love for the institutional church and the capacity to prophetically challenge it at the same time. He loved the church, believed in it and suggested that it was the noblest thing for which one might die.

At the same time though, he wasn’t afraid to publicly speak of the church’s faults or to admit that, this side of the parousia, the church needs constant challenge and self-criticism… and he was willing to offer it!

His personality was very different from mine. I doubt that he and I are two persons who would spontaneously like each other. But that is incidental. I am proud of his legacy… and enough convinced of his spirituality to give my life to it.

Several years ago, when l still taught on a college staff, I had a colleague, a priest, who used to travel nearly 200 miles regularly to visit his invalid mother.

She was 90 years old, almost totally incapacitated, couldn’t recognize her son, couldn’t speak to him, or make any form of rational contact. Yet her son would regularly visit her, just to sit quietly at her bedside.

For him, there was no rational contact, but there was tremendously meaningful contact—”I go and sit by my mother’s bed and it steadies me, it centres me in some deep inchoate way. I always leave after a visit with a much more surer sense of who I am and what I believe in. After sitting with my mother for awhile at least, I know who I am!”

I experienced something quite similar recently when our extended family gathered for a family reunion. On my father’s side we are an extremely large clan and when we gather for a full reunion every 10 years, almost 300 people show up.

But it isn’t just the chance to see long-lost relatives that makes this a special gathering. For most of us, almost as important as the people is the place. We meet for a weekend at our old parish grounds in a very remote farming region where our grandfather and grandmother and some of their friends and relatives came and homesteaded nearly 100 years ago—and where most of us grew up.

Our grandparents were the first persons to ever break the soil there, to build houses there, to raise families there and to build a church there. That church still stands, a very humble stone and cement building, alone among some very lonely hills. It’s still worshipped in by the local parish which is made up mainly of relatives. My parents are buried in the church cemetery.

Something happens when we gather there that goes far beyond the simple nostalgia of seeing the old place, reminiscing with relatives you haven’t seen for 10 years and visiting your parents’ graves. There is a deep experience of coming home, of sitting by the bedside of a silent mother who, while she cannot talk to you, can steady you and help you sort out who you are and what you really believe in.

To truly touch your roots is to be nurtured by them, to drink strength from them, and to be steadied and given solid direction from the trunk that they have produced. Like my priest friend’s experience with his aged mother, there isn’t rational communication, but there is mystical touch, a dusting off and a branding of what lies deepest in the mind and heart. We know most truly who we are when we are at home.

Anthropologists today tell us that home is as much about place as it is about kinship, blood relationship, and family or psychological bonding. To be at home, one needs a place, a homeland (as the Germans say).

Sadly, today, for many of us, there is no longer any sense of home as place, no homeland. Home no longer has any land to call its own.

In a world of transience, of future shock—when people, organizations, knowledge, things, and places, move through our lives at an ever increasing rate—where perhaps we have never been able to sink meaningful roots in any one place, it is no accident that more and more of us find ourselves morally lonely and anything but steady.

Instability, confusion and a deep moral loneliness are born of transience. When we’ve not a place to truly identify with, no roots to drink from, no tree trunk to give us clear direction, it is no accident that we can, on any given day, sincerely wonder who we really are, what our values are, what we mean and which of our seeming multiple personalities is our true one.

From lack of home, we suffer schizophrenia, dislocation and much loneliness—both psychologically and morally. And part of that lack of home has to do with place. Place is also a home, a mother, we need to go back to occasionally.

It is no accident that land can be considered holy and that so many wars have been fought over the Holy Land, that our aboriginal peoples feel so utterly dislocated once they have lost their lands and that living in exile, away from one’s homeland, for anyone, is so painful and disorienting. These things have to do with the loss of home. And home, in this case, means place.

Our old church back home stands on a hill, itself surrounded by miles and miles of desolate prairie hills. Those lonely hills are silent. They don’t speak. I looked at them long and hard a few weeks ago, standing with some of my family by the graves of my mother and father.

We said some prayers and we felt, from our deceased parents and from those silent lonely hills, a strength, a joy and a steadiness that, for that time at least, took away a lot of moral loneliness.

(Marriage Under Siege Pt II)

The notion that the only proper way to fully express sexual love is within a life­long marriage is today under siege, both as a moral and a romantic ideal.

Not only is practical life challenging it, but many respected analysts are suggesting that the old ideas of sex only within marriage and marriage for a lifetime are historically and socially conditioned notions that life and evolution have now rendered obsolete.

Alvin Toffler, for example, remarks how some of the young people at Woodstock (some 25 years ago already) told him that they practised free love there because “we’ll never see any of these people again, so it’s OK! It’s not like our lives are irrevocably tied together. In a situation like this, sex is not something that follows a long process of relationship-building, it’s a shortcut to deeper communication!”

Toffler suggests that, given the high degree of mobility and transience within Western society today, perhaps what was true at Woodstock can now be true for the population at large. The former morality and mystique surrounding sex and marriage, he intimates, made more sense in a culture of little change.

Gloria Steinem, in her latest book, suggests roughly the same thing—the old ideas of sex and marriage are, for most people today, obsolete.

What’s to be said about this? In last week’s column, I suggested that this critique is not without its merits. Here, however, I want to examine its more negative underside.

Steinem, in her call for an end to the old absolutes regarding sex and marriage, submits that we can move on to a new paradigm within which sex can be given ideal expression outside of marriage and within which people can move on to new partners as they move on to new phases in their lives. This, she suggests, can be done in a way that “doesn’t hurt but only enriches.”

She illustrates this with her own story: Some years ago she met a man, they fell in love, became friends, then lovers and then, after some years, both moved on to take on other lovers—but, at the same time, were able to retain a deep and life-giving relationship with each other. She holds this up as possible paradigm for what love, sex and romance might be within a new order.

I am not one to dispute her experience, but I am one to claim that it is most atypical. What she describes rarely happens in such a way that it “doesn’t hurt but only enriches.” More often it leaves in its wake a broken heart, a broken life, bitterness, jealousy, emptiness, suicidal restlessness and depression.

The human heart and the human psyche are evolving and resilient, but they have limits regarding how much they can stretch and what they can healthily absorb. Feelings of fierce jealousy, bitter anger and obsessive depression at losing a relationship are not just culturally conditioned responses.

If they are then the great novelists and poets (Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Kundera, Lessing, Browning, among others) are both wrong and naive.

Hearts don’t break through lack of enlightenment. They break when the contours of love are violated, when something unbending within them is bent. Fractured relationships, irrespective of the personal maturity of those who suffer them, often cause precisely this kind of bending.

“The heart has its reasons,” Pascal suggests. Love and sex have their own inner dictates, many of which are a mystery to the understanding. There are aspects of love and sex that simply do not evolve and move on, save for the tearing out of some deep roots within the heart. To suggest that this is not true is to ignore human experience.

Entirely independent of religious considerations, though these might fruitfully be considered, one must be careful in throwing away the old links between sex and marriage and lifelong commitment.

The anger, bitterness, jealousy, depression, chaos and not-so-quiet desperation that most always surround the “evolution to new relationships” are not so much a sign that we need a new paradigm for understanding sex and love, they are the heart’s protest.

The thesis that love and sex are infinitely adaptable, that they have no inherent boundaries that demand a certain exclusivity and fidelity in their most intimate expressions, might be an expression of faith in the evolutionary potential of humanity, but, in the end, it is mistaken, both in terms of morality and romance… and is, I submit, more naive than the naivete of traditional morality and romance that it seeks to enlighten.

The heart has its reasons. It also has it limits. The old morality of sex and marriage, I believe, protected that insight.

A few summers ago, I decided to spend three months in a Trappist monastery. I was tired out from a very busy year within which my work kept me over-active, over-involved, and over-stimulated, I was looking for solitude, and in the weeks and days immediately preceding my departure for the monastery, I began more and more to fantasize about how good it was going to feel spending those months in solitude. I imagined myself walking in silence around a peaceful lake, sitting by a fireplace smoking a pipe, making visits to the chapel to pray, and sitting under an oak tree drinking in the serenity of the distant mountains.

I arrived at the monastery in the early afternoon and could hardly wait to begin all this solitude and … by late evening, I was restless and climbing walls. I had already done almost all of the contemplative things I about which I had fantasized. I had walked around the lake, smoked my pipe by the fireplace, visited the chapel twice, and sat under the oak tree and drank in the mountains! Now I was in panic, wondering what I would do for the rest of the summer – with no work to do, no meetings to go to, no classes to teach, no talks to give, no newspapers to read, no movies or television to watch, no picnics to go to with family and friends, no sports scores to watch over. I suddenly felt very sorry that I had gotten myself into this commitment. Also, at that moment – hyper, restless, dislocated, disillusioned, and in panic – I began to enter into solitude.

My case, I suspect, is typical. Our fantasy about solitude most often sees it precisely as leisured serenity, a quiet walk in the woods, a peaceful contemplation of some scene of beauty, or a consoling time spent sitting in a chapel or church. The reality is, normally, exactly the opposite. Real solitude most often hits us unawares and sends us reeling. Almost always the initial stages of solitude are extremely painful and are experienced as dislocation, disillusionment, and intense loneliness. Moreover, like real prayer, genuine solitude is often not something we choose to put ourselves for ourselves. More often, solitude is the experience of being taken, against our own choosing, were we would rather not go.

We are led into solitude. Thus, for example, we are led into it in our experience of moral loneliness, namely, on those occasions when, alone or within a group, we feel ourselves radically isolated, a minority of one, in terms of what we hold precious and value deeply. It is when we feel most without moral companionship, when we feel out of sync with everyone else, dislocated, disillusioned, naked and alone, that we are led into solitude. This is the desert that constitutes solitude and it is always, initially, very painful – and it is rare that we go there of our own choosing. Most often we end up there after having exhausted every means of escaping the experience.

In John’s Gospel (John 21), after Peter swears his love for him, Jesus tells him: “Until now, you have girded your belt and walked where you wanted to walk. Now others will put a belt around you and take you where you would rather not go!” John informs us that Jesus said this to indicate the type of death Peter was to die.  Prayer and solitude are a lot about a certain kind of death – death to narcissism, to fantasy, to illusion, to false grandiosity, and to false beliefs and values. Rarely do we walk into the desert that purifies us of these by ourselves. Generally it is a conspiracy of circumstances, more accurately called divine providence, that puts a rope around us and leads us where we would rather not go. Most of our solitude is by conscription. It is rarely by our active choosing that we are taken into the real desert.

This should, I hope, be valuable to us in helping us understand what is happening to us during those times when we feel so dislocated, isolated, alone, and morally lonely. We are experiencing desert pain, the rope of baptismal displacement that Jesus told Peter about, the dark night of the soul, the painful purification of real contemplation. Real solitude is not the type that one normally reads about in the tourist brochures … or that one fantasizes about when one is over-tired and over-restless! It is important, at those times when we are most lonely and in pain, to know this.

But it is this type of solitude that, because it is so disillusioning, precisely dispells illusion. It also dispells fantasy and narcissism becaused it takes us out of a dream world into the real world. And it is, ironically, this type of painful aloneness that is the basis for real community since, as Rainer Marie Rilke once said, love is the capacity of two solitudes to protect and border and greet each other.