Virtue in Self-sacrifice

March 8, 1993

Previous generations had a certain sense of sacrifice which, for better and for worse, we have all but lost.

In my parents’ generation, to offer just one kind of example, it was not that uncommon for someone in a family to forgo his or her own private ambitions in order to stay at home and take care of an aging or sick parent. For years that person would put his or her own life on hold while essentially he or she lived for someone else.

Very often, by the time the parent died, it was too late for that person to build the kind of life that might have been possible—marriage, children, a career—if circumstances had not so conscripted him or her to do this family duty.

Today we no longer see virtue in that kind of self-sacrifice. On the contrary, we tend to frown upon it and judge it negatively, as a failure of nerve, a tragedy, the waste of a life!

Our own assessment of what is virtue and what is lack of nerve and simple timidity tends to suggest that real virtue and real lives be dictated by circumstance and the demands of others. Today, for the most part, it is considered a tragedy to have missed out on any of life’s opportunities because we were, due to external demands, unfree to actualize them.

But is this always a tragedy? Could it not sometimes be altruistic virtue? Might self-fulfilment, genuine individuation, and real meaning lie, at times, in precisely this kind of self-abnegation?

Might not the cause of some of our current difficulties in keeping our marriages, families and communities together be the breakdown of this kind of self-sacrifice?

My own hunch is that while this kind of self-sacrifice was sometimes more timidity than virtue, it, many other times, was an expression of the kind of displacement that real love asks for. Moreover, this kind of sacrifice is, in the end, the cornerstone of family and community life.

The person who so sacrificed herself for another, for the family, perhaps did lack the nerve to live her own life. Perhaps, by living for a parent, she did remain always a child, not really grown up.

Irrespective of whether that is true, she, on the other hand, did recognize something that today, for all our adultness, we often don’t perceive, namely, that in this life we are essentially interdependent. We owe: our lives are not just our own. There is a transpersonal agenda that is larger than our own private needs, ambitions, loves and wounds. We have duties as well as rights.

In John’s Gospel, when Jesus calls Peter, he asks him three times: “Simon Peter, do you love me?” Each time, Peter assures Jesus that he does.

Jesus then says: “I tell you solemnly, Peter, up to now you have girded your belt and walked wherever you wanted. Now, because you have said this, others will put a belt around you and take you where you would rather not go.”

St. Paul, at his conversion, is taught roughly the same lesson: He opens his heart to Christ and asks him what he, Paul, should now do. Christ then gives him the first lesson of both Christianity and of love.

Paraphrased, Christ’s answer might read something like this: “To have opened your heart in this way is to lose your freedom. Your life is no longer your own. Your blindness right now is simply an indication of that.

“Someone will now take you by the hand and lead you into Damascus where someone else will come and tell you how much you will have to suffer for what you just opened your heart to.”

For both Peter and Paul, their real encounter with love amounted to a derailment. From then on, and this was their baptism, their own private agendas were no longer that important.

It can be very helpful, both psychologically and religiously, to know this.

In our Western world today there are thousands of women and men, often in their 40s or 50s, who are lying on psychiatric and counselling couches and telling their therapists: “I’ve never had a chance to live my own life! It seems like I’ve always had to live for others, sacrificing what I wanted out of life. It was either my family, or my spouse, or my kids, or m y church, or my community . . . always the demands of others! I’ve never really had the chance to live for myself!”

On the one hand, that can seem like a tragedy. You never got to live your own life!

On the other hand, it is perhaps better at the age of 40 or 50 to be frustrated or in therapy, lamenting how much you have had to do for others, than living in the smug assurance that you were always able to do everything “my way!”

An Old Monk’s Question

March 1, 1993

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.”

A Marvellous Symphony

February 15, 1993

James Hillman once said that a good image is the most open, most exploratory, most suggestibly subtle, yet most precise thing to allow the soul the widest imagination for its complexes.

With this in mind, I would like, here, as a meditation, to submit some images of God . . . to allow the soul some imagination for its complexes.

Recently I received a letter from a young mother who described the disappointment of her little son when she had to leave home for a few days to attend a convention.

Her account of her son’s reaction to her leaving expresses a healthy motherly mixture of pride, love, delight, understanding and humor: “Andrew is three years old and is still very much mummy’s boy. He cried when I left and then when I went to hug and kiss him. He went and sat on the coffee table with his back towards me and wouldn’t even look at me. He was so mad!”

Imagine how God must feel, at times, proud as a mother, looking at us! I doubt that, in the light of eternity, our sullen pouts, our angers, our turning away and even our dramatic declarings that “God is dead” look much different than does the typical three year-old who is throwing a tantrum because mummy is going away.

I don’t doubt either that God, like the mother just described, cannot help but smile at the humor in it all. How delightfully little and silly we must appear at times.

I suspect, too, that our very littleness itself must, at times, move God’s heart to unspeakable levels of compassion. Again, let me risk an image:

A few years ago, I was visiting some family friends. Their young daughter was about five years old. At 8:30 or so, her mother put her to bed and, when she returned to the living room where we were visiting, she told me that the child would like me to go into her room and say good-night . . . and perhaps tell her a story.

I went into the room and found a child who was rather restless (since she had to go to bed by herself and miss out on all the activities that were still going on) and a bit afraid (she told me she was always afraid to be by herself, alone, in the dark).

After sharing this with me, she smiled and said: “But I have a secret that helps me!” Then, reaching under the curtain onto the window ledge above her bed, she brought down a little stuffed horse.

“He’s my secret!” she said as she kissed him and tucked him under her pillow, “nobody knows about him, except me!” Then, looking infinitely more secure and comfortable, she said good-night and I left.

I am not a man much given over to sentimentality or saccharine, but the purity of the littleness of that moment—that child, alone and restless in the dark, taking security from a cheap, small, stuffed animal, her secret horse—stirred in me a tenderness, a love, a protectiveness, and an understanding that physically wrenched my heart.

At such a moment, you see a soul, literally, and you see in its very pettiness and smallness its beauty and its largeness.

I am not sure what will happen to this young child once she trades in her naiveté and her stuffed horse for other kinds of secrets to help her calm her restlessness and to help herself in the loneliness of the night. But I am certain that God, who will always see her as a young child, will, when watching her, constantly have the same kind of tender wrenching of the heart that I experienced that night.

Our littleness, no matter what our age and what our secret horse, must constantly trigger indescribable pity and compassion within God.

Julian of Norwich whose intuitions of God most certainly provide the soul with the widest imagination for its complexes, once described the following scene:

“My mind was lifted up to heaven and I saw our Lord as a Lord in his own house where he had called his much-loved friends and servants to a banquet. I saw that the Lord did not sit in one place but ranged throughout the house, filling it with joy and gladness.

“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, and it was that wonderful face shining with the beauty of God that filled that heavenly place with joy and light.”

How rarely, we truly put ourselves under the mercy! Looking at our angers, our solemn sullenness, our littleness, and the secret horses we keep to still our fears and restlessness, I suspect that God’s face must constantly radiate measureless love like a marvellous symphony

The Polished Stone

February 8, 1993

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.

The Gender Of God

February 1, 1993

One of the more contentious debates within contemporary circles concerns the gender of God. For centuries, the common, though unreflective, notion was that God was masculine—God the Father! Today there are strong feelings, both ways, about that.

Feminists and others are demanding that the churches change their way of thinking and speaking about God to reflect the fact that God is not any more masculine than feminine. Others, however, are digging in an attempt to defend the more traditional notion.

How are we to conceive of God? Is God male, female, genderless? The debate here is both serious and important. Occasionally, too, it exhibits its own sense of humor, as in the case of Janet Foster, who, arguing as a woman, submits that God can only be conceived of as male:

God is a woman, the feminists cry,
But any fool knows that’s a terrible lie.
He toiled for six days, spent the seventh in
heaven;
If God were a woman, she’d toil the full seven

God can’t be a woman, as some people say,
Or he wouldn’t have needed to rest on that
day,
‘Cause since time first began and we women
know best,
Only children and man—and God—need a rest!

More seriously, though, how is God to be conceived of and spoken about?

There is a double issue involved in grappling with this—a theological one and a pastoral one. The pastoral questions are trickier: How, concretely, do we begin to speak about God if we cease conceiving of, and speaking of, “him” as male?

Do we use gender-neutral terms—Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier? What would this do, longrange, to our conception of God as a person? Is today, when father-hunger is perhaps the deepest longing within our whole world, a good time to start moving away from the concept of God as father?

These are hard questions which, at present, need much study and discussion.

The theological question, however, is clear . . . and that needs unequivocal affirmation: God is as much female as male, as much mother as father. That is beyond serious dispute. Christian tradition is clear everywhere, and especially in the creation story, that male and female both equally image the likeness of God.

Moreover, in discussing the question of God’s gender, more important even than explicit scriptural affirmations is the whole question of our theology of God and our language about God.

All proper theology of God begins with, and grounds itself upon, the affirmation that God is, by definition, ineffable. What this means is that, because God is infinite, without boundaries, God is, by that fact too, inconceivable and unthinkable. We can know God, but we can never think God.

Our minds can never capture God in a concept. Even less can we ever accurately speak about God. All of our concepts and all of our words, including those in Scripture itself, are highly inadequate, telling us always more about what we don’t know than what we do know about God. No concepts and language about God are even remotely adequate, let alone accurate.

We use the revealed language that the Scriptures give us, not because we pretend that it captures God with any accuracy and adequacy, but because it is less inadequate than other language and we have been given permission by God to use it—and thus, in the apt words of Annie Dillard, can use it without being blown apart from heaven!

But in the end, as the church itself has dogmatically defined (at the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215), everything we think about and speak about God is more inadequate than adequate, more inaccurate than accurate.

All of this is doubly true vis-a-vis Gods gender. God is not simply male, just as God is not simply female. Nor is God neuter, a genderless force. All thought and language fall short here.

Given the truth of this, none of our personal nouns or ordinary pronouns can be used about God with any accuracy. Perhaps the best route to go here is that used, centuries ago already, by Julian of Norwich who wrote of God:

“As truly as God is our father, so just as truly is he our mother. In our father, God Almighty, we have our being: in our merciful mother we remade and restored . . . . It is I, the strength and goodness of fatherhood. It is I, the wisdom of motherhood. It is I, the light and grace of holy love. It is I, the Trinity, it is I, the unity.”

In that unity we move and have our being.

A Tired, Depressed People

January 25, 1993

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!

The Power Of The Resurrection

January 14, 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 neighbour. 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, his fellow prisoners murdered him.

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 ten years she was unable to speak. She was put into special schools, seen as handicapped, retarded, abnormal with all the psychological and social havoc that 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 became 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 hers 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.

Many of us remember a line from an old Joan Baez song: “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. 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 and resiliency is its key. In it, we see the resurrection of Christ, we see dead bodies rise from their graves, dead voices sing again, abused bodies delight again in joy, and wounded spirits grow strong again and forgive.

A Thousand Little Things

January 11, 1993

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.

Resolutions That Last

January 8, 1993

Most of us, I suspect, have our own long history of broken New Year’s resolutions.

How many times have we begun a new year with the sincere intention of ending some bad habit and of finally setting ourselves to living life as we should have been living it all along and, after a very short time, have found ourselves again solidly embedded in our old habits and ruts?

What becomes more apparent each time this happens is how true is Aristotle’s dictum that ”habits are our second nature.” As we grow older, many of us, in a real way, despair of real change, of genuine novelty, in our lives.

Much of our life is in defeat, many of our dreams have long been crucified and even we don’t like much ourselves anymore, but we feel helpless, after having failed so many times in trying to change ourselves and our situation, of ever really making things any better.

Hence, most of us live lives not so much of quiet desperation as of quiet resignation . . . . “This is the way I am! This is the way my life has always been! This is the way I will always be!”

How to change? How to, as the Psalms put it, “sing a new song”?

Real change, as opposed to the simple desire for change and newness, is not easy. Our dissatisfactions with ourselves notwithstanding, there are too many things within us and around us that conspire to keep us static, in our old ways.

But the belief that things can be different, and for the better, is a crucial part of our Christian faith. To believe that there can be “a new heaven and a new earth” (and that we can be paragons of virtue and delight within it) is not something that takes its ground in natural optimism (for example, “I always see the positive in things.”) but is something that is rooted in the belief that “nothing is impossible with God.”

Real change is not easy, but it is possible. Our faith prescribes that possibility –and it prescribes it according to a certain pattern. To “sing a new song,” in the sense that our Christian faith intends those words, we must follow a certain paschal pattern for new birth. That pattern includes four movements:

From realism to faith . . . George Orwell once said that if you want an image by which to picture the future, imagine a human boot stepping on a face forever! That’s what a hard realism would, arguably, suggest.

Faith suggests something radically different. In faith we see that the deepest facts are, in reality, different and that, at the heart of death, there lie stunning surprises, namely, that death itself is not final, that dead bodies ultimately rise, that sterile bodies can give birth, and that defeated and crucified life rises from its defeat.

The beginning of true transformation begins in believing this.

From wishing to hope . . . Faith turns wishes to hopes. Dissatisfaction marks our lives and pushes us constantly to wish for things. We wish that we could be brighter, healthier, better looking, younger, richer, more talented, more respected, more loved, in a better job, in a better marriage, in another country, and so on.

Our daydreams are endless. But that is wishing, a desire not grounded in anything and which, consequently, most of the time, cannot go anywhere.

Hope is different. Unlike wishing, hope is grounded in a promise. We hope that life could be different, that we could live forever, that we could experience perfect love, that we could be known fully even as we know fully.

We hope these things not because it would be nice if they came true but because they have been promised us.

From dead waiting to gestation . . . We are, generally, powerless to bring about the things we wish. We wish for things but live in a certain dead waiting, powerless to actually effect them. Hope, however, does not leave us powerless. Every hope is a real impregnation that we can, in our own flesh, gestate to some kind of reality.

From the short road of instant results to the long road of fidelity . . . Hope promises us that mountains will move, but it doesn’t promise that they will move quickly! Hope is tied to a gestation process and gestation itself is slow and can never be rushed.

What hope promises us will come to pass, real change will take place, but only if we are patient and faithful enough to persevere. All things, we are assured by faith, come to those who believe enough and who are faithful enough.

Given this, let us do more hoping and less wishing in 1993!

Signs of a Good Marriage

December 28, 1992

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!

The Incarnation Means God is in the Ordinary

December 21, 1992

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.

Reacting to Sinead

December 14, 1992

Funny how religion finds its way into everything. A few weeks ago, Irish singer, Sinead O’Connor, appearing on the U.S. television series, Saturday Night Live, tore up a picture of the pope while singing words to the effect that it is time we attacked the real evil.

Reactions were both strong and mixed. Her audience was left in a stunned silence. The television network that produced the program was bombarded with negative calls and, publicly at least, did nothing in the way of defending Sinead O’Connor, but instead promised the public that it would be a good long time before she appeared on their network again.

A week later, singing at a Bob Dylan concert at Madison Square Garden, O’Connor was booed by a large segment of the crowd even as a fundamentalist group in New York City publicly smashed her records. However, there were cheers as well, both in Madison Square Garden and elsewhere.

More than a few persons rushed to her defence, claiming that her action was a prophetic one and that it gave voice to many “recovering Catholics” who feel that the Roman Catholic Church has radically abused its power in general and abused them in particular.

O’Connor, herself, in an interview in Time, explained herself as follows: “It’s not the man, obviously—it’s the office and the symbol of the organization that he represents. I consider them to be responsible for the destruction of entire races of people and the subsequent existence of domestic and child abuse in every country they went into. . .

“I consider the Vatican to be anti-Christian because in the name of Christianity, they committed anti-Christian acts. They blessed the bombs that went into Ethiopia. They gave permission for the Irish people to be starved, the French people, the African people, for the Jewish people to be slaughtered. They are responsible for all of the destruction we see in the world today.” (Time Nov. 9, pp 64-65).

What’s to be said about all this? Freud once said that we understand things best if we examine them when they’ve been broken. What then does a torn picture of the pope of the Roman Catholic Church help us to understand?

Irrespective of how we react at the level of the feelings, this action invites reflection, far beyond what would be called for had this been the act of a simple madman. For better and for worse, it carries more things than can be easily sorted out. Sinead O’Connor is a talented artist and she is also the product of a very dysfunctional Catholic background.

Again, irrespective of where our emotions spontaneously land on this issue, it is obvious, and not just from her need to shave her head and to tear up pictures of the pope, that Sinead O’Connor is more than a little scarred by a bad brand of Catholicism . . . within which the Gospel coerced rather than freed and within which more death than life was peddled.

Before a word of counter-challenge is uttered, every apologist for the church, including this one, should first clearly hear what such a symbolic action says about the dangers of bad religion.

However, beyond that acknowledgement, some more critical things must be said: Such an act, publicly tearing up a picture of the pope, is itself much like flag-burning, an act of violence which consequently is ill-designed to serve as an instrument to further love and peace.

Moreover, it is an ideological inflation: To link all of the world’s troubles, all domestic and child abuse, and much of the world’s problem with starvation, war and violence, to a single root (“the Roman Empire and the Catholic Church”) is simply untrue and, more importantly, is dangerously inflammatory. Nine-tenths of the truth (and this isn’t even close to being 9/10^th true!) is the most dangerous of all heresies.

What statements and symbolic actions like these by Sinead O’Connor do is to create an unhealthily and false polarization within society and within the church. In the end, this serves to divide the sincere from the sincere and God ends up fighting against God.

Worst of all, it helps instill a dangerous hatred and scapegoating which is the most dreadful characteristic of all fundamentalism. Surely by now, historical experience and psychological insight should have taught us what happens when any group begins to blame all of its troubles on some other group!

In her interview with Time, she says that she did this because the “fact is that people are asleep. They need a short, sharp shock.” It’s ironic that this is precisely the type of talk that so often characterizes those particular Catholic circles that Sinead O’Connor is trying to recover from.

We Have Gone Too Far

December 7, 1992

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.

Drawing Fire From Tradition

November 30, 1992

A couple of years ago, a group of Christians who are very involved with justice issues in the Third World wrote a short booklet inviting Christians in the First World to convert more radically in the area of social justice. They entitled the booklet, On the Road to Damascus.

This was a good booklet and its appeal sparked considerable sympathy in diverse circles, despite the fact that its analysis was sometimes one-sided and ideologically-driven.

What made it good, and what made it a document that did not just preach to those already converted, was that it appealed to what is already religiously and morally good within its readers. It respected the sincerity and goodness that already exists in those it was trying to call to a deeper conversion. It wasn’t telling people that they were bad or religiously off the road.

Rather it was asking them to re-direct and fine-tune the goodness and fervor which is already firing their moral and religious lives.

As the title, On the Road to Damascus, suggests, they were inviting people to undergo the type of change that Paul underwent when he was felled by a flash of light on his way to Damascus.

What did happen to Paul on that road? Did he have a radical conversion or, more accurately, did he, in the light of this encounter with Christ, simply end up re-directing a moral and a religious fire inside of himself that already existed and was already good—even if somewhat misdirected?

Paul himself suggests the latter. He doesn’t speak of himself as being converted or as reborn. Rather he speaks of himself as being re-directed, but as still operating out of the same moral and religious intentionality and fervor that fired him before that confrontation on the road to Damascus.

Paul always remains proud of his pharisaical past and his former religious fervor. He never hates it, he draws fire from it. When he assesses what happened to him on the road to Damascus, he understands himself as re-directed, not as converted.

What is conspicuously absent in his self-assessment is the self-hatred and vicious revisionist judgement that is almost always present in those who have had a “conversion” and those who try to call others to one. Rare is the case of someone who has had some kind of conversion and who can look back on his or her religious past with pride and love and see in it the fire that now, somewhat re-directed, still fires them.

My own suspicion is that, until we understand this, we will not have much success in converting many persons to anything, especially in the area of social justice. It is also my suspicion that the inability of social justice spiritualities to make major inroads into the mainstream culture stems partially from not understanding (or accepting) this.

Let me try to illustrate this by using an example that I judge as typical:

I look at my own generation of Christians here in Western Canada. Most of us are children of immigrants.

We stand with one foot in another time, a time when we were poor (we didn’t have to talk about poverty when we were young… we were poor), when our families were very close, when our churches were full, when our parents and grandparents (whose style of faith is now what’s under fire) died with a strong faith in their hearts and when, irrespective of how naive and narrow such a piety might have been, we believed that being a good Christian meant that one went to church, prayed alone and in one’s family, and respected and tried to keep the church’s laws regarding sexuality and marriage.

It’s these men and women, us, who are being confronted with the challenge to social justice. Far too often, however, we are being confronted by voices which, irrespective of how much prophetic truth they contain, lack both an essential understanding and a fundamental respect for a rich moral and religious fire and tradition that is our heritage.

We are being asked to be reborn in a way that would cast false light on our parents and grandparents; to hate our past rather than, like the post-Damascus Paul, to draw energy and fire from it; and to meet a new Christ rather than to meet a deeper and more whole version of the one we’ve already met. Small wonder most people are saying: “I won’t have it!”

We need instead to be invited to be on the road to Damascus, to trust our faith in a God we’ve already met, even as we prepare to meet a Christ who will radically surprise us.

Ten Years Of ‘In Exile’

November 23, 1992

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.

Mourning Incompleteness

November 16, 1992

There is a story in the Old Testament that both shocks and fascinates by its sheer earthiness.

A certain king, Jepthah, is at war and things are going badly for himself and his army. In desperation he prays to God, promising that if he is granted victory he will, upon returning home, offer in sacrifice the first person he meets. His prayer is heard and he is given victory.

When he returns home he is horrified because the first person he meets, whom he must now kill in sacrifice, is his only daughter, in the full bloom of her youth, whom he loves most dearly. He tells his daughter of his promise and offers to break it rather than sacrifice her.

She however, insists that he go through with his promise, but there is one condition: She needs, before she dies, time in the desert to bewail the fact that she is to die a virgin, incomplete, unconsummated. She asks her father for two months time during which she goes into the desert with her maiden companions and mourns her unfulfilled life. Afterwards, she returns and offers herself in sacrifice. (Judges 11).

Despite the unfortunate patriarchal character of this story, it is a parable that in its own earthy way says something quite profound, namely, that we must mourn what’s incomplete and unconsummated in our lives.

Karl Rahner once wrote that “in the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable we begin to realize that here, in this life, all symphonies remain unfinished.” He is correct.

In the end, we all die, as did Jepthah’s daughter, as virgins, our lives incomplete, our deepest dreams and deepest yearnings largely frustrated, still looking for intimacy, never having had the finished consummate symphony… unconsciously bewailing our virginity. This is true of married people just as it is true for celibates. Ultimately, we all sleep alone.

And this must be mourned. Whatever form this might take, each of us must, at some point, go into the desert and bewail our virginity—mourn the fact that we will die unfulfilled, incomplete. It’s when we fail to do this—and because we fail to do it—that we go through life being too demanding, too angry, too bitter, too disappointed and too prone to constantly blame others and life itself for our frustrations.

When we fail to mourn properly our incomplete lives then this incompleteness becomes a haunting depression, an unyielding restlessness, and a bitter centre which robs our lives of all delight.

It is because we do not mourn our virginity that we demand that someone or something—a marriage partner, a sexual partner, an ideal family, having children, an achievement, a vocational goal or a job—take all of our loneliness away. That, of course, is an unreal expectation which invariably leads to bitterness and disappointment.

In this life, there is no finished symphony. We are built for the infinite. Our hearts, minds and souls are Grand Canyons without a bottom. Because of that we will, this side of eternity, always be lonely, restless, incomplete, still a virgin—living in the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable.

My parents’ generation tended to recognize this more easily than we do. They prayed, daily, the prayer: “To thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.” That prayer and others like it were their way of bewailing their virginity.

Contemporary spirituality tends to reject such an emphasis on the limitations of this life as unhealthy and a bit morbid. That is arguable. What is not is the fact that we never, here in this life, get the full symphony, the panacea to our loneliness. Any balanced truly life-giving spirituality must take this into account and challenge people to understand, integrate and live out that fact.

Perhaps the best way to do this is not the way of my parents’ generation, who sometimes put more emphasis on life after death than upon life after birth. Maybe it is a bit morbid to consider this life so much a “vale of tears.” But tears must be factored in. Otherwise, in the end, we are falsely challenged and the symbolic infrastructure of our spirituality is inadequate to handle our actual experience.

The daydreams of our childhood eventually die, but the source that ultimately fires them, our infinite caverns of feeling, do not. We ache just as much, even after we know the daydream can never, this side of eternity, come true. Hence, like Jepthah’s daughter, there comes a time when we must go into the desert and mourn the fact that we are to die a virgin.