Playing In The Sun

August 31, 1992

I love the sun. Something about it lifts my soul. My body too rarely gets enough of it. Against the advice of my parents, and now the doctors, I have always tried to walk in it mostly bare-skinned; despite the warnings.

Partly, I suppose, it’s for vanity, the tan, that I and millions of others do this, but there’s something else as well. Frayed ozone layers, medical prudence and some middle-aged girth notwithstanding, there is a sheer delight in feeling the sun on one’s body.

Recently I took a walk in the sun on a warm later afternoon. I was alone and back in a city, Edmonton, which I much love and where I have lived and taught for almost all of my adult years. I was checking out all my old paths, my old haunts, drinking in its familiarity even as I drank in the sun—and I was trying to pray, to lift heart and mind to God.

Trying to pray when you are nostalgic, overly introspective, and walking in the sun can make for strange feelings, especially if your senses are being titillated as well by scores of outdoor barbecues filling the air with a delicious aroma and when, on the surface at least, everything else and everybody else seem to be asleep in that non-reflectiveness that can sedate whole cities on warm late summer afternoons and can give a lonely walker the impression that, in this town at this hour, he alone is at prayer and in deep thought.

Of course, he’s wrong. He’s not alone in prayer and the city is not sleep-walking as he so arrogantly supposes, but, because he thinks so, his prayer will need a more radical intervention by God, and the sun, to dispel somewhat that kind of narcissism.

This lonely walker thought he was praying. As I took my later afternoon stroll in the sun, my head and heart were engaged in the task of prayer and many of the movements that the spiritual textbooks identify with prayer were indeed happening.

There was a sense of perspective, a relativism about the joys of this life, a feeling of centredness in something beyond my own agenda and pleasures, and a challenge to live less selfishly and more simply.

But this didn’t come in purity. It came with a heaviness which made it hard for me, at that moment, to say about this life, this world, and this city: “It is good; indeed, it is very good!”

Instead my prayer brought with it the automatic, unwanted and unwarranted judgment: “This city and these people are asleep to God, to what’s really important. They’ve been spiritually tranquilized by their heartaches and headaches, by their tiredness and pressures, by the demands of their mortgages, by their barbecues and by the sun on this warm summer night.”

Nietzsche’s Madman once made a similar judgment about his generation when he shouted: “God is dead and we are his murderers!” but he wasn’t praying. He was speaking as an atheist.

And that’s the trouble with atheism and bad prayer. It doesn’t make the proper connection between barbecues and mysticism. It doesn’t understand enough the sun—and what a good parent would want of his or her children on a warm summer’s day.

I’ve never had children but, if I were a parent, I don’t imagine that I could hope for anything more than to see my children playing in the sun. Surely that must be both the wish and the delight of any good parent—to see your children playing in the sun.

No parent, save God, is ever adequate to the task. All mothers and fathers cannot not disappoint their children. No mother or father can ever give to her or his children the joy that they would like to.

But every good mother and father tries to arrange times when, however brief that period might be, the children can play in the sun. Despite all their other inadequacies, all parents, I suspect, know they are good parents when they see their children playing in the sun. For that moment, furtive though it might be, there is nothing else a parent can do for a child.

God is a good parent. Nothing, I suspect, makes God feel better as a parent than when s/he sees us playing in the sun. There is a time too for the type of explicit prayer that relativizes the pleasures of this life and asks us to make more easy friends with our own mortality.

But on this particular afternoon, walking in the warm afternoon sun, I suspect that God was smiling, was basking in the smell of barbecue sauce and was feeling every bit the good parent as his children, at least in this one corner of the earth, played in the sun.

Faith Requires Religion

July 27, 1992

Several generations ago, Friedrich Schleiermacher, a prominent Protestant theologian, wrote a book with a curious but revealing title. It translates something like: Speeches on Religion for those among the Cultured who despise it.

The book defends the churches against those who believe that institutionalized religion compromises true faith, that is, those who believe in God, but not in the church; those who have faith in Christ, but not in institutionalized religion; and those who in a now-famous expression, believe that Christ came and preached a kingdom of love and we, by some tragic misinterpretation of that, ended up with the church.

The perennial temptation of the cultured (those of us who are educated, sophisticated and move within politically correct circles), the book contends, is to despise institutionalized religion, seeing it as a hindrance to true worship in spirit and to true community.

Schleiermacher submits that this kind of rejection of the churches is religiously false and is often a very sophisticated form of rationalization. Away from actual historical church community, whatever its faults, we have an open field to live the un-confronted life, to make of religion a private faith that we selectively share only with a few like-minded individuals who will never confront us where we most need challenge.

Faith in God and faith in Christ, he argues, are inseparable from actual involvement within an historical church of men and women who, like ourselves, are sinners, petty, narrow, in need of redemption—and not overly reticent to confront!

We need a Schleiermacher today. There is a dangerous viral heresy floating around that would have us believe that living out our faith means leaving our churches or, at best, tolerating them. This heresy makes a too-easy distinction between spirituality and ecclesial practice, between praying and living out a religious life and going to church.

Hence we are witnessing an explosion of interest within spirituality even as we are seeing a steady and rapid decline in church attendance. We are also witnessing a most curious phenomenon in which more than a few religious leaders and teachers see no incongruity in the fact that they themselves are no longer vitally committed to a concrete local church community.

Very common today is the argument that true faith is compromised by religion—and true religion itself is compromised by the churches.

This argument has a variety of expressions, ranging from the unsophisticated (“I don’t go to church because those who go are hypocrites—they sin all week and then trot off to church, holier-than-thou, on Sundays!”) to the sophisticated (“When I look at the church as an institution, I cannot, in conscience, believe that Christ intended this kind of community to be a normative vehicle for grace and salvation. My own spiritual integrity demands that I do not support this kind of ecclesial community by my involvement and my worship in and through it. I deeply believe in Christ and in ecclesial community… but I cannot believe in this kind of ecclesial community!”)

On the basis of these kinds of arguments is drawn the distinction between faith in God and actual church involvement, between spirituality and ecclesiology—with the former denigrating the latter.

More precisely, what is denigrated is not the concept of the church or of ecclesial community per se, but the church and ecclesial communities as they actually exist. Our spiritualities would more easily extend themselves into ecclesiology if the church communities that actually existed fit perfectly into our own overly-idealized notions of what a church should be.

But, given that around us are only very flawed and imperfect churches, we will not compromise the purity of our faith with actual involvement in so tainted and petty a community—at least not without considerable anger and resentment.

We are poorer for this kind of thinking. For many of us, church community is a diffuse and disembodied word.

We long for a community to fire our imaginations, but refuse to let any real community confront our actual lives; we take spiritual refuge in some higher form of mystical community, but are not enough involved in the actual problem of human relationships; and we criticize actual existing communities even as we no longer let ourselves be defined by our participation within them.

When faith, in the name of conscience and community, forsakes the churches for something it calls spirituality, much that is essential to Christianity gets lost, not the least of which is fact that religion is not, in the end, a private search, for what’s highest in oneself, but a communal search for the face of God.

Life Calls For Mourning

July 18, 1992

In a recent article, Henri Nouwen counsels us to grieve:

“Mourn, my people, mourn. Let your pain rise up in your heart and burst forth in you with sobs and cries. Mourn for the silence that exists between you and your spouse. Mourn for the way you were robbed of your innocence. Mourn for the absence of a soft embrace, an intimate friendship, a life-giving sexuality.”

”Mourn for the abuse of your body, your mind, your heart. Mourn for the bitterness of your children, the indifference of your friends, your colleagues’ hardness of heart. Mourn for those whose hunger for love brought them AIDs, whose desire for freedom brought them to refugee camps, whose hunger for justice brought them to prisons. Cry for the millions who die from lack of food, lack of care, lack of love…

“Don’t think of this as normal, something to be taken for granted, something to accept… Think of it as the dark force of Evil that has penetrated every human heart, every family, every community, every nation, and keeps you imprisoned.”

“Cry for freedom, for salvation, for redemption. Cry loudly and deeply, and trust that your tears will make your eyes see that the Kingdom is close at hand, yes, at your fingertips!” (New Oxford Review, June 1992).

Today we are called to mourn! There are many aspects to this. As Nouwen rightly points out, we must mourn so that we do not accept, as normal, the hell that so often makes up earth. To properly cry is to see injustice, indifference, lack of love and hardness of heart for what they are—evil, living in each of us, in need of redemption.

But this prophetic call to mourn is also the call for us to properly mourn the poverty of our own lives, to stop torturing others with blame, ourselves with self-hatred, and God with unfair expectations because, this side of eternity, we live lives not only of quiet desperation but of chronic disappointment. On this side of eternity, there is for us no such thing as a clear cut pure joy and we need to accept and healthily mourn that fact.

Mourn, my people, mourn—or else you will give in to blame and fill with self-hatred, restlessness and bitterness.

Mourn because your life cannot not be inadequate, that here, in this life, all symphonies remain unfinished, that you cannot help but live in a certain vale of tears.

Mourn because you cannot not disappoint your loved ones—and cannot help but be disappointed by them.

Mourn because you can never live with or love anyone for long without seriously hurting him or her.

Mourn that the good you want to do, you end up not doing and the evil you want to avoid, you end up doing. Mourn the stains in your baptismal robes.

Mourn what might have been, all that you missed out on in life while you were doing something else.

Mourn your restless heart, the fact that no spouse or family or friends can ever take your loneliness away.

Mourn that you are so different from others, that you cannot help but irritate them, anger them and make them impatient with you.

Mourn your lack of gratitude, that you can so easily take what’s most precious for granted, that you can so blindly seize as owed what’s given as a gift, that charity is most difficult with those you most owe it to.

Mourn your lack of prayer, your infinite capacity for distraction and the heartaches and headaches that make you think about everything but God.

Mourn your lack of hope, all the life that’s been crucified in you, all those dead spots that have taken the bounce out of your step, the light out of your eyes and the expectation out of your heart. Mourn that you no longer believe in the resurrection!

There’s a Chinese axiom that says: “After the ecstasy, go do the laundry!” In a culture and a church too full of bitterness, anger and frustrated dreams, we need to properly mourn our losses so that we can hear an important prophetic message: 99 per cent of life is doing the laundry and waiting for the ecstasy—and that’s OK!

The Vale Of Tears

July 10, 1992

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

A certain king, Jephthah, 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 within 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 Jephthah’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. Its 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 them, 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 infra-structure 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 Jephthah’s daughter, there comes a time when we must go into the desert and mourn the fact that we are to die a virgin.

A Role Reversal At Death

July 6, 1992

Recently I lost a sister through cancer. In my previous column, I described her death, how the pain and devastation of this disease eventually reduced her to a state wherein in many ways she resembled a baby… helpless, vulnerable, unable to speak, needing constant care.

Along with this, the cancer was causing her such pain that even the strongest pain-killing drugs were no longer effective and she was, at the end, reduced to a state of constant groaning.

As we, family and friends, watched this we recognized something utterly primordial, in terms both of human nature and faith. She was about to be reborn, and, in a strange way, she was again being reduced to being a baby. But something else was happening too. Her groans were those of a mother giving birth. In dying like this, she was both baby and mother.

Moreover, there was something else evident in her death—something which is perhaps the least understood aspect in the way that Christ died and in the way many persons who die from terminal illnesses parallel that death. Let me try to explain:

When we look at Christ’s life and death we see a curious design: A long period of intense activity, within which he is the one who is giving and doing, is followed by a brief period before his death within which he is helpless, passive, and is the one to whom things are being given and done to.

We see this pattern in Christ’s life. From the time he begins his public ministry until the night before his death, for the most part, he is the active one. He is the one who teaches, heals, feeds, consoles, challenges and prays for others. He is the doer—the miracle worker, the community builder, the instituter of cult, the minister. Only to a lesser degree do others minister to him.

Then, from the time he is arrested in the garden until he dies, things reverse. He enters his passion (passiveness/passio), his ministry now is to be receptive, passive, to let others do things to him. During his final hours, he does nothing except submit to what is being done to him.

It is both curious and ironic that it was precisely in those last painful hours, when he was most passive in terms of activity and ministry, that Christ did the most for us in terms of salvation.

We were graced through what Christ did for us during his active ministry, but we are particularly saved through what he did for us in his passion and death… a time when, in our ordinary manner of perception, he appears least active and most helpless in terms of doing anything for us.

My sister’s life and death closely parallel this design. Like Christ, she died young. Cancer caught her in the prime of her life and she died just days after her 54th birthday.

During her whole life she had distinguished herself as the prototype doer—homemaker, teacher, and, for the last 16 years of her life, Dean of Students at an all-girls academy where she was mother, big sister, nun, counsellor, doctor, advocate and companion to hundreds of young women.

She also played the same role in our own family, replacing my parents after they died 20 years ago and being, for the rest of us, the family centre and organizer. And she loved it… she loved being the doer!

But, like Christ, in the last days of her life the roles reversed. She was passive, the one to whom things were being done to. And, like Christ too, I don’t doubt for one minute that she was able to do more for us and give more to us during her passion than during all those years when she actively did so much for us.

Henri Nouwen, in a fine little book entitled In Memoriam, describes his own mother’s death. He tells how painful and great was her struggle to accept death fully in faith, to let go and how this so shattered his own previous naive fantasy of how a woman so full of goodness and faith should ideally die.

For a time, he admits, it did not make sense, until he realized how closely her death paralleled Christ’s. She had Christ’s selflessness, his heart and mind, and should it not make sense, he hints, that she die like him?

Why is the death of good people so often shrouded in pain, humiliation, struggle, helplessness and groaning? Because, as can be seen in Christ’s death (and in my sister’s death and in the death of millions of others), there is birth within death, death within birth, receiving within giving, giving within receiving.

The mystery of redemption, as can be seen from Christ’s life and death, is deep, paradoxical, partly unfathomable, constantly surprising and always life-giving.

Giving Birth Through Death

June 29, 1992

Have you ever stood by the bed of someone dying of a terminal disease or of old age and, in pain and anger, wondered why death sometimes works the way it does?

Often the question is not only why does this person have to die? Rather the harder question is: Why does this person have to die like this? Why does he or she have to be so humiliated, suffer such great pain, be unable to do even the most basic things for himself or herself, and be reduced to an infantile helplessness—but without the freshness, attractiveness and healthy bodily smells of a baby?

Why is death so often shrouded in pain, humiliation, helplessness and groaning?

Death is partly mystery and so there can be np full answer to these questions. Yet faith, and experience, can help us somewhat. Allow me to share a personal story:

Recently, I watched my own sister die of cancer. From the time she was first diagnosed until she died almost exactly five years later, the cancer did its slow deadly work. Beyond the ravages of the disease itself there were operations that mutilated her body and treatments that sapped her energy and slowly killed her mind and spirit as well.

We, her family, and many others too who loved her, stood around helplessly, frustrated, offering what scant support and consolation we could.

Finally, in the last weeks, the disease and the drugs needed to kill the pain took over completely and she was reduced to a shell of her former self, utterly helpless, unable to take care of even her most elementary bodily needs, unable even to speak.

She was literally reduced to a baby, not just in her own helplessness but also in the way we all, inadvertently, treated her… feeding her as we would a baby, speaking condescendingly to her as we would to a child, and trying to coax a smile or a laugh out of her and then congratulating her and ourselves when we succeeded. And all this time, she was sinking ever more deeply into a pain that even the strongest drugs could no longer make bearable.

Watching all of this, at one stage, all of us around her began to feel both bewildered and angry. Why? Why is an adult, a beautiful healthy woman, reduced to this? Why such helplessness and humiliation—not even to mention pain?

A baby, at least, in such helplessness speaks of development and its very smells are healthy. An adult, in such a state, speaks only of disease and disintegration.

But at a point there was also a partial answer, one that surprised us and which came from her very pain and humiliation itself. Someone had just coaxed a timid smile out of her and we were struck at how much like a baby she had become.

In my own anger at this, I suddenly realized something: She was about to be reborn. How fitting that she should again be a baby! The image fit, except for one thing, her great pain. Why such pain in a baby that is about to be born?

Then something else became clear: Dying like this, she was both baby and mother. Her groans were those of a mother in labor. She was both giving birth and being born. This latter element, of partially being mother in her own birth, was even more strongly borne out during the last 20 hours before she died.

During those hours she went into a coma. She withdrew from us and was engaged in some struggle that was now more private and more extreme. Her breathing became very heavy and labored and she literally groaned and moaned as she struggled to let go, to give birth and be born all at the same time.

At this point, none of us present thought any more of her helplessness, her lost health, her lost beauty, her humiliation, nor, indeed, even very much about her pain and impending death. We could only think of labor pains… her struggle to give birth even as she herself was the child about to be born.

I have often heard talk, after the birth of a child, of the mother being in labor for a number of hours—”She was in labor for 14 hours!” Having never actually witnessed a birth, I have not been clear as to exactly what that meant.

I think, now, that I have some idea. My sister was in labor for 20 hours before she gave herself (and was given) final birth. Some women friends of mine have also shared with me that, when they were giving birth, they were in excruciating pain right up to the second of birth. Immediately afterwards there was a certain ecstasy.

I can only imagine and suggest that this is also what happened to my sister when she died… and is what happens to millions and millions of others who suffer and die in this way.

(Next week—a further reflection on how this type of death parallels the death of Christ.)

Living in the Holy Spirit

June 22, 1992

Few expressions so succinctly summarize what is asked of us as Christians as does the expression: “to live in the Spirit.” Too often, however, this phrase is used in a way that is too pious, too over-charged with charismatic fervour, or too theologically abstract to have much meaning for ordinary people. It may well summarize Christian life, but it can also be little more than a very vague platitude. What does it mean “to live in the Spirit?”

St. Paul, in attempting to specify this, is anything but piously deluded or theologically abstract. Rather he speaks with a clarity that leaves almost no room for vagueness or false sentiment. He begins by a certain VIA NEGATIVA, telling us that, if in our lives there is “lewd conduct, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, hostilities, bickering, jealousy, outbursts of rage, selfish rivalries, dissensions, factionalism, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and the like”, then we are not living in the spirit, pure and simple. Conversely, we are living in the spirit when, in our lives, there is “charity, joy, peace, patience, endurance, kindness, generosity, faith, mildness, and chastity.” (Galatians, 5)

This is a valuable insight because, if we take Paul’s word’s seriously, we can never delude ourselves into identifying true life in the Spirit with what it is so often confused with, namely, false piety and over-privatized sentiment (in pious circles) and confrontation out of hurt, paranoia, and narrow loyalties (in both liberal and conservative circles). When the fruits of the Spirit are absent, irrespective of how spiritually confident and self-righteous we might feel or how right our cause might seem, then the Spirit too is absent. We must be clear about this.

The Spirit is present only when charity, joy, peace, patience, endurance, kindness, generosity, faith, mildness, and chastity are deeply in our lives – and permeate the air around us.

The Holy Spirit, as classically defined in theology, is “the love between the God and Christ, the Father and the Son.” It is in meditating this concept that we come to some understanding of what it means to live in the Spirit. Let me try to elaborate on this by using a image, that of romantic love in its peak fervour.

Imagine a man and a woman who are deeply, passionately, and completely in love. What will characterize their relationship? Constant giving and receiving, resulting in an ever deeper relationship and an ever intensifying gratitude – which will leave them both, daily, feeling ever more mellow, joyful, peaceful, mild, patient, chaste, and wanting to reach out and share with others what is so quickening in their own lives. Moreover, their love for each other will create, around them, an ambience, a climate, an atmosphere, of charity, joy, peace, patience, mildness, and chastity. The movement of giving-and-receiving-in- gratitude between them will create a warm hearth where others will spontaneously come to seek warmth in a world which offers too little peace, patience, joy, and the like.

Such a relationship can be a modest indicator for what happens in the Trinity, of how the Father and the Son generate the Spirit, and what results from this generation.

The Father constantly creates and gives life.
The Son receives life from the Father and gives it back in gratitude.
This then (as is true in all relationships wherein gift is received lovingly) makes it possible for the Father to give even more to the Son.
As this flow of life, this giving and receiving, goes on, gratitude intensifies and an energy, a spirit, the Holy Spirit, is created.
This Spirit, since it is generated by gratitude, naturally is a Spirit of charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, long-suffering, mildness, faith, and chastity. It is then too a spirit that is naturally incompatible with idolatry, adultery, violence, gossip, factionalism, jealousy, rage, and infidelity.

When we meditate on how the Holy Spirit is generated, we are under less illusion as to what it means to live in the Spirit. To believe that we are living in the Spirit when our lives are not permeated by, and radiating, gratitude is to be dangerously deluded. We must be clear about this, lest, as poet William Stafford puts it: “Following the wrong God home, we may both miss our star.”

A Mystic for Today

June 15, 1992

As child of my own generation, I catch myself drawn to the lives of the rich and famous. As a child of my parents’ generation, I also find myself attracted by the lives of the saints.

Where we read People magazine and biographies of the rich and famous, my parents used to read about the saints. Butler’s The Lives of the Saints was their Who’s Who.

Recently I am finding myself ever more fascinated by the person and life of Therese of Lisieux—more commonly called the Little Flower. When she died at age 24 in 1897 her Carmelite sisters sent her unpublished diaries to a few other convents, intending to let a small circle of religious women know of her death and a bit about her life.

The rest is history. The manuscripts were leaked to a wider public and, in less than 10 years, printing presses were literally having trouble meeting the demand for her autobiography, her little convent in Lisieux was receiving over 500 letters a day, and people from all over the world were beginning to come on pilgrimage to Lisieux. A hundred years later, little of this has changed.

Why? Because, besides the fact that she is one of the purest mystics that the church has ever produced, there is something about Therese that deeply touches the religious and the romantic imagination of virtually everyone. She is a great mystic, but she also has great mystique.

Therese has an anomalous background and it produced a most extraordinary character. Her life as a child was, in some ways, a tragic one. Her mother got sick at the time of Therese’s birth and was unable to care for her during the crucial first year of her life. She was cared for by a nurse and an aunt.

As a one-year-old she was returned to her mother but, when she was four, her mother died. Therese then chose her older sister, Pauline, to be her new mother. Five years later, though, Pauline entered the convent and as a nine-year-old again she lost a mother.

Shortly after this Therese took ill and almost died. This was triggered by a visit to Pauline. Together with her three other sisters and her father, she had gone to visit Pauline.

After Pauline had spent some time focused on her little sister, she naturally became preoccupied in adult conversation. Left out, in sheer frustration, the little Therese stood right in front of her big sister and, shaking her dress, began to cry.

“What’s the matter?” asked Pauline.

“You didn’t notice!” cried Therese, “I’m wearing the dress you made me!”

Therese then became disconsolate and on returning home took to bed and for some weeks, despite the best efforts of various doctors and every kind of cajoling by her family, hovered between life and death. Eventually, when all hope has already been lost, she recovered. Such was the tragedy and sensitivity of Therese’s childhood.

Yet, and this is the great anomaly, as a child, Therese was doted on and loved in a way that few children ever are. Her father, her sisters and her extended family considered her their little queen and she was cherished and made to feel extraordinarily precious and unique. Few children ever grow up as sheltered and nurtured in love and affirmation as did Therese.

And her personality bore out the effects of both the tragedy and the love. She had her heavy, dark, withdrawn, otherworldly stoic side. She made easy friends with mortality. Here she was the mystic of darkness, the austere adult, the little girl woman who, wounded early, grew up fast.

But she remained always too the Cinderella, the magical child—who, because she was so loved and graced, developed a vigorous and healthy self-esteem, a confidence and a capacity to love as few others ever have. Doted on, a part of her remained ever the little girl, the puella, the very incarnation of child-likeness, innocence, chastity and gaiety. Only a Therese of Lisieux could end all of her letters with the phrase: I kiss you with my whole heart!

In a soul so formed lies some of her secret and much of her mystique—her unique combination of depth, insight, adult capacity to work at a transpersonal agenda (even as she desperately longs for the tiniest gift from her family) and her childlike freshness that so totally disarms her critics.

Only a soul so formed would, at age 22, have the complexity and wisdom to write a mystical and theological treatise that rivals that of great elderly doctors and only a soul so formed could be both a study in hyper-sensitivity and human resiliency.

A soul so formed, a saint so pathologically complex, has much to offer too to our own generation. She kisses the religious and romantic imagination in a way that very few can.

Chaos And Original Sin

June 8, 1992

Shortly before she died of cancer, Princeton mayor, Barbara Boggs Sigmund, commented in The New York Times that too many people spontaneously judge a cancer victim as somehow responsible for the disease. She ended with the protest: ”We humans would rather accept culpability than chaos.”

That statement is healthily corrective in a climate that too much looks for someone or something to blame. What do I mean?

In many circles today there is prevalent the idea that our personal failures are in fact the result of political failures. Simply put, what this means is that many of the things that go wrong with us, in our marriages, in our families, and in our professional lives, are the result of us, ourselves, first being victimized and wounded by the failure of others.

We fail because, first of all, others have failed us… and those others who failed us were themselves, first of all, failed by a system which victimized them.

Often this insight is summarized in the axiom: the personal is political and the political is personal. In that statement lies the essence of the feminist critique as well as the central insight that is articulated in much of the literature produced by those who are working with victims of poverty, racism, sexual and physical abuse, alcohol, and simple neglect.

Nobody today can credibly comment on the ills that afflict us without knowing and appreciating that personal failures are often the result of someone first being herself or himself victimized.

But there is something important which is usually missing in all this and this must be named, otherwise the prescription that is assigned for our ills will not fully address the disease. Incomplete diagnosis will not lead to sound treatment.

What’s missing? Simply put: a concept of original sin. When Barbara Boggs Sigmund says we prefer culpability to chaos she is pointing this out. We prefer to blame someone or something rather than accepting, at a point, that many of our inadequacies and tensions are implicit in the human condition itself and are nobody’s fault. In essence, that is the concept of original sin.

Unlike previous generations which over-used this concept, we tend not to use it at all—and are poorer for it. Where former generations spoke of original sin as the root of all evil, we blame something else.

Thus, by way of an example, for radical feminism, patriarchy functions as original sin. It is seen to be ultimately responsible for the greed, violence, injustice, competition and bad relationships that plague our lives. In its view, what looks like personal failure and personal inadequacy has, in fact, a root cause far beyond ourselves and our present lives. We are far from what we should be but much of it isn’t our fault. It’s the fault of patriarchy.

This kind of analysis is common in many circles, from social justice groups to those who analyze alcohol and drug dependency. These groups also generally finger a culprit (who usually is guilty!) and make that someone or something carry much of what was traditionally carried by our first parents, namely, responsibility for many of our present frustrations and failures.

And there’s much to be said for this. As Gloria Steinem’s recent book Revolution from Within attempts to demonstrate, only when our personal failures are understood within the context of their root causes (most of which pre-date any personal responsibility) can we develop the healthy self-esteem and self-love we need to live more adequate and happy lives.

But what’s missing in all this is precisely something which the old concept of original sin gave us, namely, an explanation for inadequacy that rested more on chaos than on culpability—and thus gave us permission to live lives of quiet desperation without needing to blame anybody.

Whatever else it meant, or didn’t mean, the classical doctrine of original sin taught that much of what is wrong with us is implicit in the human condition itself.

We can be saved from much misdirected anger by understanding that. A lot of our moral and relational inadequacies, a lot of our pains and frustrations, and a lot of the reason why most of our potential dies long before we do, is best coped with without us blaming anyone.

We do not live in a perfect world and the reason for that has at least as much to do with chaos as with culpability.

The Traditional Idea Of Love And Marriage – Under Siege

June 1, 1992

Most of us who are over 35 were raised on a certain morality regarding marriage, sex, and family. In brief, we were taught the ideal of one sexual and marriage partner for life.

We didn’t always live up to this ideal, but, if we didn’t, we saw that failure as a certain falling away, a fracturing of the norm. Moreover, this was not just something that we felt was morally non-negotiable; it was our romantic ethos and part of the very infrastructure of Western imagination. Not only did our churches teach this, our romantic novels glorified it.

Today that concept, that the ideal way to express sexual love is within a life-long married commitment, is under siege. The challenge comes first of all from practical life where more and more the norm is not sex inside of marriage and life-long commitments, but sex outside of marriage, infidelity within marriage, divorce as normal, and various forms of temporarily living together in non-institutionalized and non-sacramentalized ways. More significantly perhaps, this ideal is today being challenged theoretically, both as a moral model and as a romantic ethos. Let me cite just one salient example.

In her new book, Revolution Within, Gloria Steinem, suggests that the old moral and romantic idea of marriage and the place of sex within it are both flawed and harmful. Among other things, she argues that its basis is not morality or true romanticism, but an unfortunate historical accident which (she more than hints) religion helped bring about for its own fearful and patriarchal purposes. Thus, for instance, she writes …

“We still think of love as ‘happily ever after’. That was a myth even in the nineteenth century, when, as Margaret Mead pointed out, marriage worked better because people only lived to be fifty. (Charlotte Bronte [who idealized romantic love] herself died at thirty-nine of toxemia during her first pregnancy.) Though an average life span is now thirty years longer in many countries of the world, we haven’t really accepted the idea of loving different people at different times, in different ways. It’s possible to raise children with a loved partner and then move amicably on to a new stage of life, to love someone and yet live apart, to forge new relationships at every phase of life, even at the very end – in short, to enjoy different kinds of love, in a way that doesn’t hurt but only enriches. [Love has such resiliency, here she quotes Alice Walker, that] the new face I turn up to you no one else on earth has ever seen.” (pp. 282-283)

Futurist, Alvin Toffler, and many other social analysts today, suggest the roughly the same thing.

What’s to be said about this? Is the old moral and romantic idea of marriage, in the end, dysfunctional and repressive? Could Christianity morally sanction a whole different way of living out sexuality and marriage? Should our romantic imagination be radically restructured?

Hegel suggested that thought makes progress through dialectics. We have today, both practically and theoretically, an antithesis to our classical idea of sex and marriage. Steinem’s expression simply articulates what millions of people today in fact believe and live. Are they right? My own belief (and I say this rather categorical) is that they are not, neither morally nor romantically. However, their critique, despite this, offers things that need, as an antithesis, to be integrated within the classical view of sex and marriage.

Where it is corrective morally is in its insistence that love and sexuality are complex, evolving, and almost infinitely resilient. Sometimes we didn’t emphasize that sufficiently in the past – namely, that falling from the ideal of love leaves scars that are permanent, but not fatal; that love gives us more than one chance in this life; and that we are asked to deeply love more than one person, even within the ideal of monogamy, life-long commitment, and sex only within marriage … and not everyone who doesn’t fit the norm or who has fallen from it is tainted, fallen, second-best, or (like the rich young man) must go away sad. Romantically it also offers something positive, namely, not to put so much stock in the Romeo and Juliet ideal (one man – one women … destined from all eternity to be salvation and wholeness to each other) so as to render real marriage an institution which can only chronically disappoint.

God writes straight with crooked lines. In the current antithesis to the traditional idea of sex and marriage there is a positive moral and romantic challenge.

Gratitude the Basic Virtue

May 25, 1992

There’s a Jewish folk-tale which runs something like this:

There once was a young man who aspired to great holiness. After some time at working to achieve it, he went to see his Rabbi.

“Rabbi,” he announced, “I think I have achieved sanctity.”

”Why do you think that?” asked the Rabbi.

”Well,” responded the young man, “I’ve been practising virtue and discipline for some time now and I have grown quite proficient at them. From the time the sun rises until it sets, I take no food or water. All day long, I do all l do all kinds of hard work for others and I never expect to be thanked.

“If I have temptations of the flesh, I roll in the snow or in thorn bushes until they go away, and then at night, before bed, I practice the ancient monastic discipline and administer lashes to my bare back. I have disciplined myself so as to become holy.”

The Rabbi was silent for a time. Then he took the young man by the arm and led him to a window and pointed to an old horse which was just being led away by its master.

“I have been observing that horse for some time,” the Rabbi said, “and I’ve noticed that it doesn’t get fed or watered from morning to night. All day long it has to do work for people and it never gets thanked. I often see it rolling around in snow or in bushes, as horses are prone to do, and frequently I see it get whipped.

“But, I ask you: Is that a saint or a horse?”

This is a good parable because it shows how simplistic it is to simply identity sanctity and virtue with self-renunciation and the capacity to do what’s difficult. In popular thought there’s a common spiritual equation: saint=horse. What’s more difficult is always better. But that can be wrong.

To be a saint is to be motivated by gratitude, nothing more and nothing less. Scripture, everywhere and always, makes this point.

For example, the sin of Adam and Eve was, first and foremost, a failure in receptivity and gratitude. God gives them life, each other and the garden and asks them only to receive it properly, in gratitude—receive and give thanks. Only after doing this, do we go on to “break and share” Before all else, we first give thanks.

To receive in gratitude, to be properly grateful, is the most primary of all religious attitudes. Proper gratitude is ultimate virtue. It defines sanctity. Saints, holy persons, are people who are grateful, people who see and receive everything as gift.

The converse is also true. Anyone who takes life and love for granted should not ever be confused with a saint.

Let me try to illustrate this: As a young seminarian, I once spent a week in a hospital, on a public ward, with a knee injury. One night a patient was brought on to our ward from the emergency room. His pain was so severe that his groans kept us awake. The doctors had just worked on him and it was then left to a single nurse to attend to him.

Several times that night, she entered the room to administer to him—changing bandages, giving medication, and so on. Each time, as she walked away from his bed he would, despite his extreme pain, thank her.

Finally, after this had happened a number of times, she said to him: “Sir, you don’t need to thank me. This is my job!”

“Ma’am!” he replied, “it’s nobody’s job to take care of me! Nobody owes me that. I want to thank you!

I was struck by that, how, even in his great pain, this man remained conscious of the fact that life, love, care, and everything else come to us as a gift, not as owed. He genuinely appreciated what this nurse was doing for him and he was right— it isn’t anybody’s job to take care of us!

It’s our propensity to forget this that gets us into trouble. The failure to be properly grateful, to take as owed what’s offered as gift, lies at the root of many of our deepest resentments towards others—and their resentments towards us.

Invariably when we are angry at someone, especially at those closest to us, it is precisely because we are not being appreciated (that is, thanked) properly. Conversely, I suspect, more than a few people harbor resentments towards us because we, consciously or unconsciously, think that it is their job to take care of us.

Like Adam and Eve we take, as if it is ours by right, what can only be received gratefully as gift. This goes against the very contours of love. It is the original sin.

A Grieving Church

May 18, 1992

We are, among other things, a church which is grieving. That insight, that we are suffering in this particular way, that we are a church which is grieving, is, I believe, very important and needs to be understood. We are a grieving community. What does this mean?

We grieve when something that is loved and precious to us is lost or broken. What, in our experience of church, has been lost or fractured? What have we loved and lost?

Put metaphorically, we have lost a certain Christ, a certain Jesus and a certain church, we once had. Now, like the first disciples after the crucifixion, we are experiencing loss, are walking with face and spirit downcast, are wanting our old Jesus back, and are lamenting what once was and what, in our own scheme of things, might have been. Some previous peace and harmony has been fractured, broken, pierced with a soldier’s lance. Something’s died and we are sad.

What? What has been fractured? What have we lost? A certain stability, simplicity, clarity, harmony, peacefulness, ordinary time, and healthy joy and pride in our church and its institutions, that’s what we’ve lost. A quarter century ago, whatever it faults, church life was not short of these. Today, whatever its virtues, church life is short on them.

This is not to say that what has happened is bad and that what was is good. No. That would be far too simplistic. Value judgements can be made about this, but that is not our point here. For our purposes, we want only to emphasize the fact of this, that a massive transition has taken place, that something has died and something else has been born, that something that was precious to us has been lost and that we grieve because of this.

For better and for worse, the particular church we once knew, the pre-Vatican II church of latin masses, Gregorian chant, universal catechisms, First Friday promises, forty hour devotions, spiritual bouquets, Friday fasts, full convents and rectories, where Father knew best, and where there was, for the most part, an unquestioning acceptance of authoritative pronouncements on dogma and morals is no more. The church still is, but that particular expression has, for the most part, disappeared. In its place there is a life that exhibits more ambiguity than clarity, criticalness than obedience, hermeneutics than devotion, complexity than simplicity, hyper-sensitivity than naivete, tension than harmony, self-hatred than pride, and urgency than ordinary time. Something has died and something else has been born and we must, in faith, name our deaths and claim our births – but also grieve those deaths reverently and properly. We are dealing with a crucified body of Christ and this calls both for tears and gentleness.

Something precious has died and we aren’t grieving properly. Our generation has lived through the death of a very beautiful and powerful expression of Christianity (whatever its faults!) and hardly anyone is actually grieving. For the most part, we are either into denial and clinging (the sin of the conservative) or into hatred and distortion of our past (the sin of the liberal). Both of these attitudes are blockages in the body of Christ. The Holy Spirit can only be received when, first, one lives through the “forty days”, a time of adjustment and grieving.

Few images, I believe, are as helpful to our self-understanding today as is this image of the “forty days” between Christ’s resurrection and the sending of the Holy Spirit. This time was, for the disciples of Jesus, a time of grieving, a time of adjustment wherein they had to let go of the pre-resurrected Jesus so as to receive the post-resurrected Christ. It wasn’t easy for them. They wanted their old Jesus back and they had to be gently told: “Don’t cling to me!” This was a time, too, where they had to have their imaginations reshaped, where all the old scriptures and dreams had to be re-interpreted in the light of a new crucifixion – “wasn’t it necessary that the Jesus you knew had to so suffer and die … ” There were, I suspect, a lot of heartaches, tears, objections, and misunderstandings during those forty days and attempts at denial, clinging, hatred of the past, and distortion (for every age has its conservatives and liberals). After a time of grief, however, they were able to let the old body of Jesus ascend so as to receive his new spirit.

Like the first Christians, we too are living in a time of adjustment, the “forty days” before pentecost. We are a grieving community. Let us handle the crucified body of Christ, each other, and ourselves with more gentleness.

Justice and Spirituality

May 11, 1992

A crucial spiritual task for our time is that of bringing together justice and contemplation, commitment to the poor and genuine worship of God.

Few do it well. More often there is a one-sidedness. Social justice circles are seldom known for their piety even as circles of piety rarely spend much of their fervor in the service of justice.

Fortunately, there are exceptions and, given their rarity today, they are truly prophetic and the rest of us should look to them for challenge.

One such exception is, I submit, Jim Wallis, the founder of Sojourners, an interdenominational community of Christians based in Washington, D.C. who have com mitted themselves, precisely, to bringing together real worship and real commitment to justice. Under that title, Sojourners, they publish a magazine dedicated to that ideal.

Recently l had the opportunity of visiting Sojourners community in Washington and of spending an evening talking with Jim Wallis. I had more questions than our time together allowed, though not more than he had patience for, so our conversation took many roads. In this brief space, I would like to share some of his thoughts on a couple of key questions:

1) Given that social justice is so nonnegotiable within Christian spirituality, why are not more mainstream Christians more deeply taken up with it?

Wallis (in paraphrase rather than quote): The major reason is simply the power and the addictive quality of the culture, the grip it can have on people’s lives. What results is not so much badness as simple moral blindness.

So much of what’s wrong here is captured in the bumper sticker: “I shop, therefore, I am!” or seen in what’s on MTV. Social justice is not so much rejected as it simply is not thought about.

There are, admittedly, some problems with how social justice has been presented by its advocates. Some justice groups have not been sufficiently self-critical nor sufficiently checked strident voices in their own ranks. This has hurt.

However, there are some salient exceptions, Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Daniel Berrigan, William Stringfellow, Henri Nouwen, and Richard Rohr—and, modestly but honestly stated, Sojourners itself.

Here one sees concern for self-criticism and for proper boundaries that keep the demand for justice a faith and Gospel imperative, something rooted in Christ, and not simply an echo of secular liberal criticism.

2) A key component of Sojourners is apostolic community. From the 20 years you have struggled to build this kind of community among Sojourners, what perspectives would you want to share?

Wallis: struggles in community are generally more an issue of fidelity to the centre, Christ, than they are in proper definition. Defining community is not so much the issue, though many would disagree with this.

It’s ironic that classical religious communities are looking to communities like Sojourners for help in direction when Sojourners itself is looking to them for guidance, especially in laying out the disciplines required to live apostolic community.

Sojourners just recently, as a result of a long and painful process, came out with a faith statement, Our Life at the Foot of the Mountain, which defines how we understand ourselves as an apostolic community and how we see our specific charism. We are now working at developing a statement specifying the essential disciplines required for this.

Perseverance should also today include an element of stability, namely, the community itself should have a certain geographic commitment which it should consider a vowed trust. Sojourners is now attempting to network committed Christians all over North America (and elsewhere) into base communities along this ideal.

This year Sojourners is celebrating its 20th anniversary. Its ideals are captured in Wallis’ foundational book, The Call to Conversion, now itself 10 years old. To read (or re-read) that book is, today, to listen to a truly prophetic voice.

Taken Completely by God

May 4, 1992

Theresa of Avila would sometimes become very bold in her prayer and say to God: Kiss me full on the mouth. This is her own twist to the opening line of the Song of Songs where the author prays: “Let him kiss me, with the kisses of his mouth!”

That is vary audacious prayer and, understood properly, a most radical one. For Theresa, this is a formula for the ultimate act of commitment and surrender. For her, you pray this prayer only when you are ready to give yourself completely to God with absolutely no reservations, hesitations, conditions or restrictions.

It is the ultimate prayer of single-mindedness, of purity of heart, of, in Kierkegaard’s famous dictum, willing the one thing. Kiss me full on the mouth! A mystic’s metaphor! When someone says this to God, it is a request to be taken completely, an offer of total surrender.

Steven Hawkings ends his A Brief History of Time by saying that, up to now, science and philosophy have found pieces of explanation for how and why things are as they are.

We have, he says, bits of information and valuable insights into reality, but lack a unified theory, a simple equation, he insists, should it ever be found, must be understandable by everyone, not just by a few scientists. The formula that ties all the bits and pieces together must be, in Hawkings’ view, utterly simple, something very primal.

Kiss me full on the mouth fits that description, not as the scientific equation that Hawkings is looking for to explain why it is that we and the universe exist, but as a formula tying together all the bits and pieces we know about prayer, love and surrender.

Here, just as in science, we have a lot of unrelated insights but generally lack a unifying formula. The mystics proposed such a formula and it is utterly simple and primal—Kiss me full on the mouth! To say that in prayer is to bind all bits and pieces of our “prayer and longing together and give them a single meaning and a single thrust.

But this isn’t a prayer that can be uttered easily. Nor, indeed, is it something that can be easily in truth said to another human being.

There is an innocent romanticism inside of us which lets us naively, but falsely, believe that true love and surrender are easy. This, along with other blind spots which are less innocent and inculpable, generally make us naive to the fact that there are many pre-conditions necessary for this prayer to be said and truly meant. What are those pre-conditions?

Inside of each of us there is major book which, should it ever be written, could be given the title: Kiss me full on the mouth. That phrase can serve as the hermeneutical key to help understand the constant struggle between resistance and surrender that rages deep inside each of us.

For we are born with two great drives, both of which try to claim us. On the one hand, we are driven by the longing to be free, independent, to set ourselves apart. On the other hand, we are equally as driven by the urge to merge, by the desire to lose ourselves, to give ourselves over to the great embrace, to return to the kind of primal intimacy that we lost at birth.

Our lives are simply chronicles of that primal struggle within us between resistance and surrender. The yearning for intimacy and surrender competes with the yearning for independence and control.

Thus, in both our love relationships and in our prayer, we vacillate back and forth: We give ourselves over and we take ourselves back; we want intimacy, even as we are fighting it; we strive for unconditionality in love even as we set all kinds of conditions; and we say, “kiss me full on the mouth,” even as we are turning our heads (and our lives) to avoid the full brunt of such an encounter.

Not until we reach the highest levels of maturity, altruism, selflessness and sanctity can we ever ask God or anyone else to kiss us full on the mouth and really mean it. Hence, love and prayer are, in the end, a struggle to say that prayer.

Jacques Maritain once commented that only three kinds of people think that love is easy: Manipulators, who have everything confused with their own selfishness; saints, who through years of practice have made virtue easy; and naive dreamers, who don’t have a clue what they are talking about!

Each of us is a manipulator, saint and naive dreamer, all at the same time. We struggle with love and prayer, with resistance and surrender. The mystic’s prayer: Kiss me full on the mouth, is the clue as to how those struggles must eventually be resolved.

Truth and the Resurrection

April 27, 1992

As children we live in a dream world, naively believing that there is somewhere a divine magic which can, and will in the end, swish away all evil, injustice, and pain and make a happy ending to everything.

The older we get, the harder it is for us to believe in magic and happy endings. The older we get, the more easy it gets for us to believe that George Orwell is more correct than the fairytales when he says: If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on the human face-forever” (1984, N.Y., Signet Books, 1950, p. 220).

But who is, ultimately, more correct—the child or the Orwell-type realist? Is there divine magic and are there happy endings or are death and a boot-in-the-face a truer picture of the human future? In the end, what is real and what is naive?

For most adults, even those of us with faith in God, the growing temptation is to opt for the realism of Orwell. We wish, of course, that it were otherwise, that the naive and trusting faith of the child was well-founded, but that wish is far from a genuine hope.

Experience has long since taught us how things actually are, namely, that we are radically orphaned, on our own, devoid of any help from fairy godmothers (and God). Worst of all, when all is said and done, it seems that…

Darkness triumphs over Light
Loneliness over community
Self-interest over love
Egoism over altruism
Injustice over justice
Chaos over order
Cruelty over compassion
Malignancy over graciousness
Tastelessness over beauty
Death over life.

To be realistic, to be educated, to take the facts seriously, is to believe this. Only the naive believe otherwise.

Thus, to be realistic means to live in a certain despair. This takes various forms, ranging from outright cynicism about love and life (“Life stinks!”), to an upbeat, but often empty optimism in the power of positive thinking (“Think rainbows and you’ll always get them”), to the metaphysical rebellion of an Albert Camus which affirms that, given the ultimate triumph of disease and death, we can create some temporary dignity and meaning for ourselves by fighting these.

In the end, irrespective of its genre, despair is despair. When there is no power or magic beyond our own, a boot-in-the-face is the final destiny of the human race.

Christ’s resurrection, among many other things, exposes that despairing epistemology for what it is, not realism but naivete.

In the resurrection of Christ, reality is turned upside down, the supposed empirical facts are blown to hell (literally!). What looks like naivete is, in fact, final truth. What looks like realism is, in the light of the resurrection, naivete.

If we believe in the resurrection, then Orwell is wrong, the child is right; the hard empiricists are wrong, the pious are right; those who stopped believing in magic are wrong, the believers in fairytales are right; and even those theologians who, in the name of science and enlightenment, say that the tomb was never empty are wrong, and those who believe that Jesus’ actual physical body rose from the dead are right.

Most importantly of all, if we believe in the resurrection of Christ then those who believe that, no matter how bad the story, there will be a happy ending in the end are right. To believe otherwise, in the name of the empirical facts and experience, is naive.

In the resurrection, we see the final conclusion of the story, regardless of all supposed facts to the contrary. There is real divine power (and magic) beyond our own and, when the whole story has unfolded, the final end will not be darkness, loneliness, self-interest, injustice, chaos, evil, death and the void.

No. it will be what we, as children, always knew it would be—light, love, justice, order, graciousness, joyous embrace, life, God.

With faith in the resurrection of Christ, we can stare empirical facts in the face and know that aboot-in-the-face is but an interim chapter of the story.

Beyond our present limits, pains and oppression, there is someone with the final magic wand and that someone loves us more dearly than any fairy god mother ever loved a child. Happy Easter! Christ has Risen!

An Evening With Jim Wallis

April 25, 1992

A crucial spiritual task for our time is that of bringing together justice and contemplation, commitment to the poor and genuine worship of God, Few do it well. More often there is one-sidedness. Social justice circles are seldom known for their piety even as circles of piety rarely spend much of their fervour in the service of justice.

Fortunately, there are exceptions and, given their rarity today, they are truly prophetic and the rest of us should look to them for challenge. One such exception is, I submit, Jim Wallis, the founder of Sojourners, an interdenominational community of Christians based in Washington, D.C. who have committed themselves, precisely, to bringing together real worship and real commitment to justice. Under that title, Sojourners, they publish a magazine dedicated to that ideal.

Recently I had the opportunity of visiting Sojourners community in Washington and of spending an evening talking with Jim Wallis. I had more questions than our time together allowed, though not more than he had patience for, so our conversation took many roads. In this brief space, I would like to share some of his thoughts on a couple of key questions:

1) Given that social justice is so non-negotiable within Christian spirituality, why are not more mainstream Christians more deeply taken up with it?

Wallis (in paraphrase rather than quote) … The major reason is simply the power and the addictive quality of the culture, the grip it can have on people’s lives. What results is not so much badness as simple moral blindness. So much of what’s wrong here is captured in the bumper sticker: I Shop, therefore, I am! or seen in what’s on MTV. Social justice is not so much rejected as it simply not thought about.

There are, admittedly, some problems with how social justice has been presented by its advocates. Some justice groups have not been sufficiently self-critical nor checked sufficiently strident voices within their own ranks. This has hurt. However, there are some salient exceptions, Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Daniel Berrigan, William Stringfellow, Henri Nouwen, and Richard Rohr – and, modestly but honestly stated, Sojourners itself. Here one sees concern for self-criticism and for proper boundaries that keep the demand for justice a faith and gospel imperative, something rooted in Christ, and not simply an echo of secular liberal criticism.

2) A key component of Sojourners is Apostolic Community. From the 20 years you have struggled to build this kind of community among Sojourners, what perspectives would you want to share?

Wallis … Struggles in community are generally more an issue of fidelity to the center, Christ, than they are in proper definition. Defining community is not so much the issue, though many would disagree with this. It’s ironic that classical religious communities are looking to communities like Sojourners for help in direction when Sojourners itself is looking to them for guidance, especially in laying out the disciplines required to live apostolic community. Sojourners just recently, as a result of a long and painful process, came out with a faith statement, Our Life at the Foot of the Mountain, which defines how we understand ourselves as an apostolic community and how we see our specific charism. We are now working at developing a statement specifying the essential disciplines required for this.

Apostolic community doesn’t necessarily imply living under one roof. It does though imply what is essentially captured in the vows of classical religious communities, namely, poverty (simplicity of life and identity with the poor), chastity (properly committed sexuality, though not necessarily celibacy), obedience (real accountability to the gospel and to community) and perseverance (not necessarily understood as permanent membership in a given community but as permanent commitment to the ideals of apostolic community). Perseverance should also today include an element of stability, namely, the community itself should have a certain geographic commitment which it should consider a vowed trust. Sojourners is now attempting to network committed Christians all over North America (and elsewhere) into base communities along this ideal.

This year Sojourners is celebrating its 20th anniversary. Its ideals are captured in Wallis’ foundational book, The Call to Conversion, now itself 10 years old. To read (or re-read) that book is, today, to listen to a truly prophetic voice.