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.

Life’s Quest for Service

April 20, 1992

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin once said something to the effect that we reach moral maturity on the day we realize that, ultimately, we have to choose: genuflect before something higher than ourselves or begin to self-destruct!

Simone Weil had a similar idea. She consistently affirmed that our deepest longing was to find someone or something to be obedient to. Without this submission, she claimed, we inevitably inflate, become pompous and make an idol out of ourselves.

In their view, only adoration of something beyond ourselves can save us from self-adoration.

If they are right, and I believe they are, then, as human beings, we have in us a congenital pressure towards adoration and healthy self-abnegation. Deep inside of us there is a pattern for the health of our souls and, according to that pattern, we only feel right when we make our own grandiosity genuflect before something that is really great. As adults, we only feel right when we are giving our lives away.

There are important implications in this and one of them is that we are built for altruism and martyrdom. Ultimately, we only feel right about ourselves when we are dying to our own needs and, indeed, dying to our very lives.

At one level, this is captured in the rather simple axiom: I defy you to show me a selfish person who is truly happy!

But the early Christians added a further dimension to this. It wasn’t just a question of living unselfishly, it was also a question of dying! For them, we were built for martyrdom. Martyrdom was considered the normal end to a Christian life! To live a true Christian life meant to die as a martyr.

What’s interesting is that they continued to believe this, that we are built for and called to martyrdom, even after the Roman powers stopped persecuting and killing Christians. When the persecutions stopped, their theology of martyrdom remained. They still believed that the normal way to end one’s life was in death through martyrdom. What changed was only how this martyrdom was now conceived. In their mind, you still ended your life through a martyrdom of some kind or you ended it badly!

Our own lives, not just as Christians but even simply as human beings, could be a whole lot healthier and less filled with depression if we understood that. Put simply: we either end up dying as a crucified martyr on one hill… or we end up bitter, inflated, a jerk, on some other hill!

That’s rather blunt, but it conveys the sense of what Teilhard, Simone Weil and the early Christians intuited. Only one thing can save us from infantile grandiosity, from dangerous self-righteousness, from ultimate disappointment with and bitterness about our own lives, and from aging and dying badly, namely, martyrdom.

There is reason for this: We are made in God’s image and the Imago Dei puts inside of us an immense fire—energy for love and creativity, but also nostalgia for glory, greatness and transcendence.

There is deep, restless, insatiable, burning energy inside of us, but it is not, in the end, chaotic energy. It’s configured energy—energy arranged in clear and meaningful patterns. We burn with fire, but it’s God’s fire and therefore it has divine meaning, purpose and direction.

It’s fire to bless others, to fight for others, to teach others, to create delight for others, and to empty itself completely, unto death, for others. It’s fire to act like Christ who was the ultimate Imago Dei. Hence, it’s fire for crucifixion.

In the end, we are hardwired both to live for others and to die for them and we are only healthy and happy when we are about the business of doing that.

Our hearts and souls are like our bodies, they contain within themselves the instinctual patterns for their own health. When those patterns are ignored or violated they send out strong signals to let us know that something is wrong. As well, in our hungers and in our proclivities they let us know what they need to sustain their health.

When we analyze the deepest hungers of the heart we see there the longing for martyrdom. This longing has many disguises—the desire for heroism, the desire to be a great lover and the simple desire to be a great person. In all of these, ultimately, there is the longing to take love to its altruistic end—death in sacrifice for the ones we Jove.

This is the deep instinctual pattern of the soul and it posits that true morality and spirituality (and the absence of bitterness and disappointment with life) lie in ending up stretched truly tall, dying on a cross, in crucifixion.

A Cast of Characters

April 13, 1992

Here are some quotes that might prove helpful before approaching the cross to do reverence on Good Friday.

“I’m a Roman soldier, a gambler, I size things up, I calculate, lay bets. I’m not sure what all this means or who exactly this guy is or was. A lot of people think that this death’s not ordinary, that this person’s God. There’s definitely something special about him, that I know, so many people can’t be so stirred up about nothing.

“But is he God? Will this death save me? Should I hedge a bet on this? Should I reverence this cross? I don’t know, the dice seem to come out even. Pascal said it’s a good wager. After all, what have I got to lose by adoring? I’m not so convinced, but at these odds, free salvation, why not take the chance?”

“I’m Simon of Cyrene. You’ve heard of me, the perennial chore-boy, always at the wrong place at the wrong time, forced to help carry the cross, virtue by conscription! I’m not sure whether or not this man’s God; mostly I don’t care. It’s just that I’m yoked to his load and his suffering. It’s not something I choose.

“Should I adore? I don’t know. I don’t give it much thought one way or the other. I’m trying to make a living, to mind my own business. Sometimes this type of trouble falls upon you. That’s the way life is.”

“I’m the Bad Thief. I got crucified with him, had the same suffering, endured the same humiliation and abuse. But, I don’t agree with him. This isn’t useful, it’s just bad luck. There’s no God in heaven and there’s no love on earth either, just self-interest.

In the end, nobody gives a damn, nothing matters! A man’s got to take care of himself cause nobody else will, Jesus included! I’m not going to reverence this cross. I suffered as much as he did. To hell with it!”

“I’m Peter. I believe this man’s God. I know everything he said is true. But… I am always so scared, so timid. What I believe privately, I never live out in the world, I’ve neither the courage nor the strength.

”They call me ‘The Rock,’ what a joke! I’m taking a nap while he’s sweating blood, warming myself at a fire while he’s being scourged, and denying him even as he looks at me with love.

But that look on his face when he turned towards me after being scourged by Pilate… his face so soft, so understanding, not disappointed and hurt and me having just denied him! I know what unconditional love means. My mother, my father, my wife, nobody ever accepted me like he just did. I’ll adore, even if I have to do it in secret.”

“I’m Mary, his mother. Would I could take his place, but even here I’m helpless, like everywhere else. The incredible pain and helplessness of watching this! I can’t change anything, say anything, or do anything to make this better… All I can do is wait silently, here at the foot of this cross.”

“I’m the Good Thief. I’ve wasted my life, committed more than my share of sin. I wasn’t even looking for God and forgiveness, I was only looking out for myself, numero uno, like I always have! I got lucky!

“He found me, just before I died. Everything forgiven, washed clean, in a second. I still can’t believe it, but I’ll spend eternity celebrating it. Adore. Adore, this man! There is no great reckoning, no pound of punishment to be paid for each pound of sin. There’s only forgiveness, love. Give yourself over! Fall on the floor! Adore!”

“I’m John, his beloved Apostle. I feel awful…. his best friend, and yet, when he needs me the most, I run away, follow at a safe distance! Discipleship in safety, yes, that’s me! Not once did l speak up, challenge anyone, try to explain anything, or defend him. Timidity always my downfall!

“I know I’m not worthy of his friendship and forgiveness, yet I know he loves me, even more than before. How incredible that this godlessness, this hell, this black Friday is showing even more how scandalously lavish are his love and forgiveness! Looking at his face, leaning on his breast, I always believed that light, love and peace would triumph. Now I understand how. How unbelievable! I can only throw myself at the foot of his cross! Adore! Adore!”

“I’m Judas. I betrayed him. Betrayed Christ! For me there can be no hope. Too late, nothing can undo what’s done! Nothing can help me ever again! I’m sorry, so sorry, but there can only be darkness! I can only run away from this cross!”

These aren’t the separate comments of different biblical characters. No, they are feelings within different parts of each of us as we confront the drama of the cross.

A Culture of Complaint

April 6, 1992

A recent article in Time magazine, entitled The Fraying of America suggests that oversensitivity, political correctness, and a culture of complaint is leading to the breakdown of community.

Perhaps the article isn’t everywhere correct in its analysis as to why community is, at so many levels, fragmenting, but it is depressingly accurate in its documentation of the anger, polarization, hatred, and hypersensitivity that today mark community life in both civic and church circles. We are indeed a culture of complaint.

But the presence of so much factionalism, concern for political correctness, and outright anger and complaint is, in the end, not the problem. It’s a symptom.

Ultimately, what’s wrong is that community is falling apart. Lately, all of us, are finding ourselves precisely more and more alone, cut off from each other, especially in terms of moral affinity. Factionalism reigns in place of family and, on virtually every moral issue, we find ourselves in a cold war.

Never before, I suspect, has a whole culture (and a whole church) been more morally lonely. We ache for community, especially moral community, and, daily, we become more acutely aware that it is slipping from us.

What should we be doing—beyond complaining and nurturing the paranoia that we have been unjustly done to? I think that if Moses came down from the mountain today, he might, after first smashing a few of our ideological golden calves, promulgate some further commandments… for special use during trying community times:

1) Thou shalt not get into personalities, namecalling, and into the narcissism of taking everything personally. This pain and anger is, in the end, not about personalities but about how tough is the long-haul struggle for community.

2) Thou shalt not fall into excessive self-pity. A “holier-than-thou” attitude is no worse than a “more-wounded-than-thou” one.

3) Thou shalt not let the archetypal warrior possess you. Warriors tend to be more interested in winning battles than in winning love. The battle for a community of the heart depends more on the beatitudes than on political fire-power.

4) Thou shalt not rationalize impatience with ideology and high metaphysical theories of history. This life is a vigil demanding great patience. Impatience remains impatience, irrespective of whether or not we attempt to invest it with positive moral meaning by defining ourselves as warriors of truth.

5) Thou shalt not rationalize disrespect and a breakdown of fundamental charity. Disrespect is disrespect, and it remains an obstacle to every kind of community. No cause, be it ever so imperative, justifies abdicating respect and charity!

6) Thou shalt not let the rhetoric of the right or the left create, in you, false dichotomies which force you to choose between good things and good people. Don’t buy rhetoric which separates the good from the good and makes you line up on one side… Are you for women or for children? Are you for laws or for people? Are you for obedience or for conscience? Be for both!

7) Thou shalt not lose the sense of sacred intimacy within the family. Practice the ancient discipline arcani. Intimacy is sacred so don’t discuss the family’s deepest secrets with the whole world—and especially avoid doing this on talk shows!

8) Thou shalt not succumb to the temptation to justify excess and lack of self-criticism. Two wrongs do not a right make! It is not justifiable to say: “Because we have been treated wrongly for so long we can now enjoy certain excesses ourselves.”

9) Thou shalt not become so pompous, puffed-up, and full of self-importance so that you see healthy humor as an affront to your “cause” and dignity. When you no longer have the capacity to take a joke, you lack the proper resiliency for healthy living and should leave political arena for the therapeutic couch.

10) Thou shalt not lose the sense of the Body of Christ. In Christ’s body no one part can ever say to another: “I don’t need you!” We are, on both sides of eternity, forever bound to each other.

We can grow angry and fight with each other, and even for a while go on sabbatical from community, but this concrete bunch of people on earth, for all its faults, is the only family we have. We bear its birthmarks and can never leave it even when we try. In the end, our final imperative is to come to peace with the family… and to die with a warm heart!

Sitting in the Ashes

March 30, 1992

I’ve gone through many changes in my relationship to the ashes that mark our foreheads at the beginning of Lent.

When I was little, they brought me the distraction that the extraordinary always brings to children. You got to go up the aisle with adults and got a black mark on your forehead and returned to your pew caught up in the feeling that something peculiar had happened to you.

You didn’t understand it, but it felt special. Then you could stare at everyone in church and go home and examine yourself in a mirror. I was always slow to wash them off.

In my early teen years, fighting inside of myself to integrate the fact that several young people around me had died, the idea of getting ashes put on my forehead, complete with the formula— “Remember, dust thou art, and into dust thou shalt return!”—both frightened and repulsed me. It reminded me too much of death.

During those years, I was most quick to wash them off after leaving church.

As a young seminarian, going through the years of first fervor within religious life, the ashes of Lent took on deep meaning. They reminded me of the young and saintly deaths of Therese of Lisieux and Gabriel the Passionist—and they reminded me that here we “mourn and weep in this valley of tears” and that it is best not to put all of our stock in this world. Again, I was slow to wash the ashes off.

Later, as a post-Vatican II seminarian and a young priest, I went through a phase where, again, I thought the whole practice of receiving ashes (and especially the formula about dust and death) was morbid. I guess the rest of the church felt at least a bit the same because the church changed the formula and made the bit about returning to dust optional.

What the church should have been emphasizing, I felt then, was not death and sin, but resurrection and love. Those years I didn’t even wait until Mass was over before pulling a handkerchief from my pocket and wiping the ashes away.

Several years ago, for many reasons, a connection formed in my mind between those ashes and call to social justice. The ashes symbolized the burnt and crumpled lives of the poor. Again, I wore ashes with pride and was slow to wash them off.

This past Ash Wednesday, I felt altogether different about ashes. They symbolized, for me, so much of my own life that has been burned and reduced to ashes—certain dreams, a naïve innocence, youth, a sense of power over my life, a sense of my own goodness and moral adequacy.

Feeling more than a little dislocated and inadequate, I took the ashes and was in no particular hurry to wash them off—nor was I thrilled by leaving them on. After all those years and all those changes, this year, for the first time, I felt like I was sitting in the ashes.

When I look at all of this, I see that through these years the ashes have been very patient with me! They’ve challenged me and have, like God himself, been most accepting of my reaction.

I see too that, irrespective of how I felt about them, I needed them and the reaction they caused in me spoke loudly of what demons I was meant to meet in each particular Lent. This year, it seems, they want me to sit myself among them. What does it mean “to sit in the ashes”?

In some Indian tribes they used to live in communal longhouses. In the centre of these longhouses the roof opened to the sky and the fires that were used for heating, cooking and light were lit under that opening.

Sometimes a certain tribe member would be going through some phase in his or her life and would, for a period of time, long or short, sleep (not in the beds) but at the edge of the fire, in the ashes. During this time, he or she wouldn’t wash or do his or her regular work.

It was understood that they needed to be “in the ashes,” that some dislocation had rendered them powerless to go on with business as usual and that some silent inner work was going on inside of them. Always, after some time, they would one day wash off the ashes and return to regular life (and a regular bed)… usually full of a new energy and power.

The ashes of Lent can be those kind of ashes for us. They invite us, among many other things, to leave our regular beds and tables to sleep and sit patiently for a while in the ashes at the edges of the fire so that some silent, inner, gestation process can teach us what it means that we are dust and that we are invited to turn from sin to the Gospel.

Another Type Of Icon

March 23, 1992

Many people are aided in prayer by icons. I am too, though because I am more intuitive than sensate, the icons that move me more deeply are often not pious images painted on wood panels.

No. For me, generally it’s a face in a certain situation or a particular human incident or story that has power to take me beyond my normal heartaches and headaches to a deeper awareness of the compassion of God and others.

Let me share with you one such icon that helps open my heart and spirit to the presence of God and others. It’s a story that Robert Coles tells in his Harvard Diary (New Oxford Review, November 1991) I re-read it regularly and it always moves me towards prayer.

In 1970, Coles had gone to rural West Virginia. While there, he was introduced to a 14-year-old boy who had been partially paralysed while working in a strip mine.

The boy, living in an economically poor family, largely illiterate, without a television set to look at, with almost nothing to do and seemingly no practical goals to live for, lay on his bed, stared out at the world, and, when Coles asked him what went through his mind all day, this is what he said:

“I’ll be here, lying on the bed, staring up at the ceiling, or looking out of the window-yonder, to the hill. I get to thinking. I wonder why I was ever born—if there was a reason. To end up like I am now?

“I wonder if it makes any difference if anyone is ever born! I mean, a hundred years from now, we’ll all be gone, and if anyone has any idea who we are, it’ll be because he stumbled on a grave, or he saw a picture in someone’s scrapbook, like I do sometimes when Grandpappy comes visiting, and he shows me his Grandpappy.

“When I look out there, I see the trees and I figure they must know something we (human beings) won’t be told. They just stand there, and they wear their sap, then they yield it, and nothing seems to bother them, while we’re running all over the place.

“You cut into them and mark them up (he was referring to his own habit of using his knife to put his initials on certain trees) and they don’t say ‘ouch’; maybe they feel sorry for you, that you do that!

“It’s the start of the day that I notice most of all. I never did (take such notice) before. Now I’m up, because there’s only so much sleep you can get, and I’ll be lying there in the darkness, and my mind is having these thoughts, like why was I put here in the first place, and when will I be going, and does it make any difference, that I’m here, and is there a God, and has He got time to pay any attention to me, what with all the other folks, so many of them, all over the world.

“All of a sudden—it sure happens every time!—there’s a shift: It’s not so dark as it was, you begin to realize. It’s ‘the first light,’ my Mom calls it. You know what she told me: It’s the Lord coming on his visit, his morning call to us, checking on us! I think she’s being the joker she is, but she’s serious too.

“Our dog doesn’t miss that time. No sooner does the light come (into the room) than he’ll (the dog) stand up and come and pay me a visit. He sniffs me, and licks my hand—he’s telling me good morning partner, there’s another one (day) coming around the corner, for both of us to have for ourselves! That’s what I imagine him thinking!

“Sometimes I even will think of him as having more on his mind, like: Partner, it’s alright, you can get used to being like you are, the way I have—we’re all part of the place here, and if you’re giving orders, it shows how much you need people to take hold upon you, and if you’re taking orders, it shows how much you’re needing help for direction, and so there’s no one who isn’t in some kind of need, and that’s the biggest need a person has, to understand that.”

An icon, theological dictionaries tell us, is a flat picture, usually painted in egg tempera on wood, but also wrought in mosaic, ivory and other materials, to represent the Trinity, Christ, the Blessed Virgin Mary or some saint. In circles of piety, the belief is that icons are powerful channels of grace.

The thoughts of this “backwoods” Appalachian boy are such an icon. When Scripture tells us that on the way to Calvary, Jesus turned and looked at Peter and, on the basis of that look, Peter’s heart softened, one wonders what Peter saw in and on that face of Jesus to cause such a reaction. ·

My own suspicion is that he saw there the same kind of humility, compassion, understanding, and openness for consummation in the God’s kingdom that this young boy’s words, in their own simplicity, so beautifully and clearly, express.

The Prayer Of Charity

March 16, 1992

God is found in solitude and silence! Few reputable spiritual traditions dispute this. Longstanding in Christian tradition is the dictum that nobody makes progress in the spiritual life unless he or she prays, alone and in silence, for an hour a day.

Moreover, even pop psychology insists that the key to psychic health and mental hygiene is regular withdrawal from the rat-race, a substantial and sustained period of silence every day.

I am not one to argue with that. That an hour of silence every day would do marvels for our spiritual, psychic and even physical health is, I believe, indisputable.

What’s more problematic is finding the time to do it. In spite of good intentions, practically, realistically in fact, most of us cannot (or, at least, certainly do not) find the time to take an hour a day away from everything for solitude and prayer. Pressures beset us from within and without and we simply do not, on a daily basis, pull away for an hour of silence and payer.

Many of us feel uneasy about this and our anxiety is often compounded by feelings of guilt when we are accused, by ourselves or by others, of being workaholics, addicts and persons who cannot find any meaning outside of their work.

What’s to be said about all of this? Is it impossible to make progress spiritually and to stay healthy psychologically without substantial daily periods of silent withdrawal?

One should always be uneasy when he or she does not have, on a daily basis, a regular period of silent prayer and withdrawal. But, as in everything else, we must be careful not to become fundamentalistic about this. The call to find God in silence and withdrawal too can become an idol. Let me try to explain:

Carlo Carretto, one of the leading spiritual writers of our century, tells the story of how, after spending nearly 25 years alone as a hermit in the Sahara Desert, he realized that he was not nearly as contemplative, prayerful and unselfish as had been his mother who, for most of her adult life, had been so busy with the duties of raising her children that she had virtually no time alone for solitude and prayer.

During most of the years of her adult life, her life had been so completely taken up in responding to the needs of others, her family, the church and the community at large, that she rarely had time for an hour of prayer and solitude. Yet, despite her busyness, she consistently grew in prayer and unselfishness.

Carretto draws an interesting conclusion from this. Rather than suggest that there was anything wrong with what he did as a hermit in the desert, he hunches that there was something very right about his mother’s total self-abnegation all those years when her whole life was taken up in responding to the needs of those around her.

That self-giving did for her exactly what countless hours of formal prayer might have done. It helped break her narcissism, displaced her from her own selfishness and consecrated her through a true baptism—immersion into the demands of charity. She prayed by conscription!

When Jesus consecrated Peter, he set him on a rock and, three times, asked him: “Do you love me?” Each time that the question was asked, Peter protested loudly that he did. Finally, after Peter’s third pledge of love, Jesus said to him: Because you said this, your life will radically change. “Up to now you girded your belt and you walked wherever you liked.” Now, because you have given yourself in love, “others will put a belt around you and lead you where you would rather not go!”

All true prayer, formal or ether, does exactly that. It puts a belt around us and takes us where we would rather not go. In the case of Carretto’s mother, as in the case of millions of other dedicated (and hurried, hassled, tired and guilt-ridden) women and men, the demands of life-of children, marriage, vocation, job, church politics, neighborliness, and mortgage payments—when responded to with a gracious heart, do exactly what proper formal prayer and solitude will do—they put a belt around you and walk you where, by your own choice, you would never walk.

They walk you where the deep demands of God and love call you to be.

God is found in silence and solitude… the saints are right in suggesting an hour of silence and prayer every day. Sometimes, though, and perhaps for many of the years of our adult lives, duties of state, circumstance and the only edict that can never be idolatrous—the demand to respond in charity—conscript us to a life of prayer that has very different contours but the same results.