Grieving Life’s Inadequacy

November 9, 1992

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Social Justice Revisited

November 2, 1992

Few groups have acted with as much moral passion and energy during these past years as have the various social justice groups within the church and within society.

From church basements, from the offices of Greenpeace, from feminist circles, from anti-war protestors, from prolife and pro-choice rallies and from many other places, there has issued forth a moral energy and challenge that few can be deaf to or can choose to ignore.

But… there has been more energy than impact. Save for a few salient exceptions to do with racism and feminism, the mainstream culture has been able to marginalize both the groups and their concerns.

This wouldn’t be so much a cause for concern, given that the prophetic message is always marginalized and “the world” is habitually opposed to Christ, except that, in this case, too many people of good conscience find themselves able to write off most of the concerns of social justice groups.

Why is this? Why after more than 20 years of such effort, has social justice, for the main part, been unable to crack the mainstream conscience? Why, after all this effort, are we unable often times even to crack the conscience of our own families?

The simplistic answer of course is that mainstream, culture and conscience are simply insincere, greedy, hard of heart and too caught up with their own selfish concerns to be open to prophetic challenge. While there is some truth in that, this answer is far from the whole truth.

The whole truth is that social justice action in both church and civic circles, with hardly an exception, has been perennially plagued and depotentiated by its own inherent flaws. Social justice has not gone mainstream because, too often, even while it contained the truth, it undercut its own credibility. Why do I say this?

Because of the limitation of space, I can do little more than name some of the major reasons here:

The failure of social justice to centre itself in something beyond the ideology of either the left or the right and to cloak itself in charity.

Far too often the challenge that is presented is not grounded so much in the Gospel or in charity, as it is in liberal or conservative criticism. What’s at stake then is not so much justice or Christ’s option for the poor as somebody’s ideology. People can, in clear conscience, walk away from this.

The failure of social justice to be healthily self-critical, to check its own strident voices and to make judgments beyond ideological black and white.

Until we, as social justice advocates, are able, when it is proper, to criticize our own, to check strident voices within our own ranks, to stop being ideologically simplistic in our judgments about who is right and who is wrong, and until we become less predictable in our rhetoric and indignations, we will never capture the mainstream conscience.

The failure of social justice to be realistic in proposing justice and eco-ethics.

The failure, during the Gulf War, of many of the anti-war protestors to take seriously the evil of Saddam Hussein did a lot to make the war makers themselves look like heroes of conscience. The failure of many persons who are militantly defending the environment to take seriously enough the fact that we also have nearly four billion people on this planet who too need to live, is a major reason why we do not yet have an eco-ethics that governments will actually buy into.

The failure of many of us who preach social justice to take seriously enough the tyranny of affluence against which most people in the First World find themselves helpless is no small factor in actually helping maintain the status quo. When the challenge to justice isn’t realistic enough, mainstream conscience can, in good conscience, ignore it.

The failure of social justice to resist the temptation to be selective regarding justice issues, our failure to truly present “an ethical seamless garment.”

When people fighting for certain rights refuse, at the same time, to take other rights seriously then good conscience will be divided from good conscience—as we see, for example, in the abortion debate where two justice issues are pitted against each other.

The failure to take seriously contemplation, aesthetics and joy.

Doris Lessing once said that she left the Communist Party because it didn’t believe in color. That speaks volumes and is a commentary on the drabness, colorlessness, over-sensitivity and simple heaviness that too often surrounds social justice circles. Small wonder we can be so easily written off!

The Spirituality of Eugene de Mazenod

October 26, 1992

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Absent From Our Own Lives

October 19, 1992

Recently I had dinner with a young man and woman who are close friends of mine. They had been married for less than two years and were expecting their first child. Both had relatively good jobs; he in communications, she in teaching.

Their relationship to each other, while perhaps past that highly charged passion of first fervor, was, by every appearance, good, respectful, loving and easeful. By every practical standard, they should have been happy, in a good season of their lives.

But that was not the case. Individually, and as a couple, they were quite restless and frustrated, without being able to pinpoint precisely why. They talked about it in this way:

“It’s not that we are unhappy, it’s just that our lives seem too small for us. We want to do something more significant than what we are doing, to somehow leave a mark in this world. The city we live in, our jobs, our circle of friends, even our relationship to each other and our involvement with the church, somehow doesn’t seem enough.”

“It’s all too ordinary, too domestic, too insignificant. Life seems so big and we seem so small! Maybe having this baby will change things—bringing a new person into this world is pretty significant and very irrevocable.”

“At least that will be one timeless thing that we did. But… maybe it will make us even more restless because now we will be tied down in ways that we can no longer leave or change.”

I found it difficult to offer much to them by way of advice. I sensed their restlessness; indeed, I often feel just that kind of dis-ease within my own life. My life is going on, full of many things, and, too often, I am absent from those things, too restless to receive the spirit of my own life.

Rich life, life-giving love, true community and God are present… but I, like the young couple I just talked about, am absent. Perhaps it sounds strange to suggest that we can be absent from our own lives, but in fact it is rare that we are present to what’s actually there and taking place within our lives.

St. Augustine, in a famous prayer after his conversion, expresses this well: “Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved! You were within me, but I was outside and it was there that I searched for you. In my unloveliness I plunged into the lovely things which you created. You were with me, but I was not with you.” (Confessions, Book 7).

”You were within me, but I was outside.” Few phrases more accurately describe how we relate to God, life, love and community than does that line from Augustine. It’s why my friends could have so rich a life and yet be so deeply restless; it’s why we all generally look everywhere else rather than to our own actual lives for love and delight; and it’s why we are perennially so deeply restless.

This restlessness cannot be stilled by a journey outward. It’s inward that we need to go. Inside of our own actual lives, beyond our restless yearnings and fantasies, God, love, community, meaning, timeless significance and everything else that we search for, are already there.

We become bigger than our seemingly too small lives not by finding and doing something extraordinary and timeless—great achievements, world fame, leaving a mark in history, being known by and connected to more and more people—but in being present to what’s timeless and extraordinary within our ordinary lives.

I have a series of axioms that I try to meditate on regularly to keep myself aware of how, perennially, what I am yearning for is inside of me but I am outside. Allow me to share them with you:

Life is what happens to you while you are planning your life.
I always resented interruptions to my work until I realized that those interruptions were my real work.
Who is my neighbor? My neighbor is the person who is actually in my life while I am plotting how to be in somebody else’s life.
Love is what you are experiencing while you are futilely searching for it beyond your own circles—and taking the circles around you for granted.
Joy is what catches you by surprise, blindside, from a source that is quite other than where you are pursuing it.

The Prayer of St. Francis captures the same thing—and it’s that kind of prayer we need most when our restless yearning overwhelms us and our lives feel too small for us.

Blessed By Our Roots

October 12, 1992

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Solitude Sends Us Reeling

October 5, 1992

A few summers ago, I decided to spend three months in a Trappist monastery. I was tired out from a very busy year within which my work kept me over-active, over-involved and over-stimulated, I was looking for solitude, and in the weeks and days immediately preceding my departure for the monastery, I began more and more to fantasize about how good it was going to feel spending those months in solitude.

I imagined myself walking in silence around a peaceful lake, sitting by a fireplace smoking a pipe, making visits to the chapel to pray and sitting under an oak tree drinking in the serenity of the distant mountains.

Now I was in a panic, wondering what I would do for the rest of the summer—with no work to do, no meetings to go to, no classes to teach, no talks to give, no newspapers to read, no movies or television to watch, no picnics to go to with the family and friends, no sports scores to watch over.

I suddenly felt very sorry that I had gotten myself into this commitment. Also, at that moment—hyper, restless, dislocated, disillusioned and in panic—I began to enter into solitude.

The reality is, normally, exactly the opposite. Real solitude most often hits us unawares and sends us reeling. Almost always the initial stages of solitude are extremely painful and are experienced as dislocation, disillusionment and intense loneliness.

Moreover, like real prayer, genuine solitude is often not something we choose for ourselves. More often, solitude is the experience of being taken, against our own choosing, where we would rather not go.

It is when we feel most without moral companionship, when we feel out of sync with everyone else, dislocated, disillusioned, naked and alone, that we are led into solitude. This is the desert that constitutes solitude and it is always, initially, very painful—and it is rare that we go there of our own choosing. Most often we end up there after having exhausted every means of escaping the experience.

In John’s Gospel (John 21) after Peter swears his love for him, Jesus tells him: “Until now, you have girded your belt and walked where you wanted to walk. Now others will put a belt around you and take you where you would rather not go!”

John informs us that Jesus said this to indicate the type of death Peter was to die. Prayer and solitude are a lot about a certain kind of death—death to narcissism, to fantasy; to illusion, to false grandiosity, and to false beliefs and values.

Rarely do we walk into the desert that purifies us of these by ourselves. Generally it is a conspiracy of circumstances, more accurately called divine providence, that puts a rope around us and leads us where we would rather not go. Most of our solitude is by conscription. It is rarely by our active choosing that we are taken into the real desert.

This should, I hope, be valuable to us in helping us understand what is happening to us during those times when we feel so dislocated, isolated, alone and morally lonely. We are experiencing desert pain, the rope of baptismal displacement that Jesus told Peter about, the dark night of the soul, the painful purification of real contemplation.

Real solitude is not the type that one normally reads about in the tourist brochures… or that one fantasizes about when one is over-tired and over-restless! It is important, at those times when we are most lonely and in pain, to know this.

But it is the type of solitude that, because it is so disillusioning, precisely dispels illusion. It also dispels fantasy and narcissism because it takes us out of a dream world into the real world.

And it is, ironically, this type of painful aloneness that is the basis for real community since, as Rainer Marie Rilke once said, love is the capacity of two solitudes to protect and border and greet each other.

The Limits Of Love

September 28, 1992

(Marriage Under Siege Pt II)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Non-Selective Tears

September 16, 1992

The signs of the times cry out to us … hear and respond to what cries for redemption!

Few things cry out as loudly today as does the brokenness of a world and a church that are torn and divided by hatred, anger, polarization, and conflicting ideologies. We are in a situation where the sincere are divided from the sincere, the good from the good, the truth from the truth. Good people can no longer work together, worship together, or even talk charitably with each other. There is an emotional schism developing within the church and within society as a whole.

We see this, for example, in the way the abortion issue has polarized. There is much sincerity and goodness on both sides, but we have reached a point where meaningful (not to mention, charitable) dialogue between the sides is impossible. Neither can any longer empathically connect with the other. Any potential understanding is subverted by anger, abrasive rhetoric, accusatory judgement, and by a moral indignation that works itself into such a fever that it can accept no criticism or corrective challenge whatever. The same thing holds true in numerous other areas of church life, politics, and civil discourse. Feminism, the concept of hierarchy, social justice, diverse approaches in theology and spirituality, and even our use of language, divide and polarize us, creating a new dualism with each side having its prescribed ideology, rhetoric, and moral indignations. The net effect of all of this is an emotional apartheid that painfully and tragically divides community, setting the sincere against the sincere.

Some might suggest that much of this divisiveness is good, that the gospel is meant to divide and that tension is a sign of life. That is simplistic. There is too much in the anger and polarization around us today that may not justify itself on such high prophetic ground. The gospel is meant to divide the good from the bad, not the good from the good. Good tension likewise does not divide healthy energy from healthy energy. Much of the anger and polarization that is present in the world and in the church today is not the product of the truth that Christ said would bring fire to the earth, but the product of a fundamentalism of both the right and the left, a product of hearts and minds that are too ideologically-driven to be truly charitable and understanding.

Given this fact, it is true to say that one of the important vocations we are called to today is that of being a reconciler, a builder of unity. If Jesus were walking our earth today – stalking our pulpits, teaching in our schools and universities, writing in our newspapers and magazines, leading parish groups, or directing social justice programs – he would, I submit, call us to begin to work more deliberately at living, working, and ministering beyond the kind of anger and concern for ideological and political correctness that spawn so many of our present divisions. He would call us beyond the highly selective tears, indignations, anger, moral fever, and simple lack of charity of both the right and the left. He would call us beyond political correctness.

Put more positively, he would call us to an ever-widening loyalty of mind and heart so that we could enter vulnerability of his crucified state wherein, by not protecting himself against the pain of anyone, he was able to absorb the pain of everyone.

There is a story told about a past Mayor of New York City. One afternoon, together with several of his councillors, he was in a helicopter surveying various areas of the city that were severely devastated by poverty, racism, crime, over-crowding, and lack of financial resources. Discouraged to the point of despair by the sheer magnitude of the issues he was facing, he commented to a colleague: “Wouldn’t it be great if there was a plunger and we could just pull it and flush this whole thing into the ocean!” He was joking, of course.

Sadly, among circles both right and left today, his comment typifies the prevalent feeling. More common than empathy for those who think and feel differently from those in our own circles is the attitude that those others are the great unwashed – a cesspool of ignorance, consumerism, moral decadence, and insensitivity – which we would love to flush away! Our empathy and tears are not for them, but for our own kind only.

How different the image of Christ, weeping indiscrimate, non-selective tears, beyond the tears of the right and of the left! To cry these tears is read the signs of the times.

Understanding The Desert Of Loneliness

September 10, 1992

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Frustrated Hunger

September 7, 1992

We all ache for community. Few longings within us are as incessant. Everywhere, it seems, people are looking for community and complaining about how their families, churches and civic circles have let them down and disappointed them.

There is a general frustration about community. At every level, today, it seems community is in trouble. Marriages, families, religious communities, likeminded associations, and even business and civic communities that succeed, that sustain themselves long-range, are now the exception more than the rule.

As well, in the past few decades, many people have tried to start new communities. In almost all cases, these communities have failed, despite much initial passion and considerable good will.

Why is that? Why, when we so desperately long for community, do we find it so hard to achieve and sustain it?

Among the many reasons for this, one appears crucial in that its roots affect almost all the other reasons. Simply put, today we often are not able to sustain community because we have false notions and false expectations as to what constitutes it. An overly romantic and psychological notion is so coloring our vision that we rarely even recognize real community when we see it.

Let me begin with example:

Several years ago, I was serving as spiritual director to a very idealistic young man. He was a member of a religious order, but he spent a good deal of his time and energy complaining about his religious community.

Constant was his gripe that there wasn’t enough intimacy within the community, that people didn’t share deeply enough with each other, that the real issues were never addressed, and that he felt lonely and isolated.

At one stage, worn out by his complaining, his community sent him to see a psychologist. After delivering his regular list of complaints to the psychologist, the young man was fairly surprised at the psychologist’s reaction.

Instead of reinforcing all of his theories about the dysfunctionalities of the community, the psychologist told him, gently but firmly: “What you are looking for, you won’t find in a religious community. You’re looking for a lover—not a religious community!”

This story is a parable of sorts. It points out what real community is by flushing out some of the things that it isn’t.

What is community? There are many kinds of community—of which being somebody’s lover is in fact one kind. However community as Christ defined it—Christian community, apostolic community, life together in the Holy Spirit—is, as this psychologist made clear, something quite other than what the romantic imagination spontaneously suggests.

What is it? For purposes of clarity, let me begin by clearly dissociating it from what it is commonly confused with.

Christian community is not…

Mutual compatibility, like-minded individuals gathering together on the basis of liking each other.
Huddling together in fear of loneliness, lonely or scared people ganging up against a cold and hostile world.
People rallying around a common task or cause, people brought together because they share a common passion or ideal.
Family, understood in the romantic sense, people brought together through psycho-sexual attraction.
Family, understood in kinship sense, people bonded through blood.
“One roof.” People together because they live in the same house, eat at the same table or sleep in the same bed.

None of these factors are bad and each of them makes for a certain kind of community—but none of them touches the essence of Christian community. What is Christian community?

Simply put, it is gathering around the person of Christ, being displaced from our own narcissism by that gathering, and then living in the spirit of that person, namely, in charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, long suffering, faith, constancy, mildness and chastity.

Until we live in our marriages, families, religious communities, and civic communities with this idea in mind, namely, that our unity has to come from something beyond liking each other, huddling in loneliness, a common cause, psychosexual attraction, shared blood line, or shared house or neighborhood, the deep hunger for community within us will continue to be frustrated—and we will continue to complain!

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.)