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 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!

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.

Many of us today look askance at circles of piety, especially fundamentalistic ones.

Most mainline Christians, share a common distrust and disdain for those who, with irritating enthusiasm, proudly, militantly, publicly and of ten times obnoxiously, proclaim: “Jesus Christ is my personal Savior.”

A certain religious (and emotional) apartheid exists today between those who make a private personal relationship to Jesus the sole centre of their religion and those of us who believe that being Christian involves a whole lot more than claiming a private spiritual rebirth (“I have been reborn in Christ”), a private personal relationship to the person of Jesus (“Jesus is my personal Lord and Savior”), and a private morality based rather selectively on Jesus’ demands for prayer and private ethics.

Many of us have certain distrust of those who make a private relationship to Jesus the sole focus of their faith.

Thus, the “born again” athlete who, after doing some marvellous feat to help his team win a championship, says on national television: “First of all, I want to thank Jesus Christ, my personal Savior'” generally garners for himself more disdain than respect for such a remark.

Likewise for the TV evangelist who reduces his entire message to: “Give your life to Jesus.” In mainline circles and especially in theological and social justice ones, there is a massive distrust of that kind of talk.

And that distrust has its roots not, first of all, in fact that sometimes the personal lives of those people belie a deep personal relationship to Jesus, but in the sense that this is not true religion.

To many of us, it smacks of fundamentalism, naive simplicity and bad piety that provides its adherents with an escape hatch from the tougher demands of religion. A privatized spirituality of “Jesus-and-I”, it’s often sarcastically called.

We are, I believe, right in that critique… to a point. There is more to faith, especially Christian faith, than having the subjective assurance that God exists, that Jesus is Lord and that Jesus personally relates to us, loves us and forgives our sins.

There is a real danger that faith can become too privatized, too caught up in itself, a form of narcissism, blind to the true demands of Christ, a form of religious sloth, personal therapy more than true religion.

But, as John Updike says, truth has more nooks and crannies than we normally think. Hence, despite these dangers, there are, I believe, some very deep and important truths lodged in the nooks and crannies of “Jesus-and-I” spirituality.

As one who moves in circles that too often uncritically criticize it, I see now more clearly the deep challenge that this king of piety offers to the rest of us.

In our lives the danger is not that we might have an excessively private relationship with Jesus. No. The danger is rather that we can easily end up not having a private relationship with him at all. Strange as this sounds, it’s often true.

Where circles of piety and fundamentalism stand in danger of unhealthily privatizing Jesus, we stand in danger meeting Jesus only as a cosmic, moral, religious, prophetic and psychological principle… “Make sure you are dogmatically sound!” “Work for the liberation for the poor!” “Run great ecclesial programs!” “Higher consciousness be with you!”      ·

For us, Christ too easily becomes just a deep truth; but little more. In the end, we are not privatized and personal enough. I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that of ten times in our liturgies—not even to mention in our social, ecclesial, theological, and prophetic actions—our consciousness borders on agnosticism insofar as a real personal relationship to Jesus is concerned.

We are doing things for Christ, that’s true. But too infrequently do we draw real energy from talking to the person, Jesus, in whose name we are supposedly acting.

In her Booker Prize winning work, Possession, Anne S. Byatt, comments that the trend today is to turn “away from individual sympathies (with concrete individual persons) to universal sympathies with Life, Nature, and the Universe.

“It is a kind of romanticism reborn, but interwined with the new analysis and the new optimism not about the individual human soul, but about the eternal harmony of the universe.” (London, 1990, p.250).

I believe that she is right and that not all of this makes for good religion. From our more fundamentalistic brothers and sisters we do have a lesson to learn.

One of the most significant developments in the Western world today is the growth of neo-paganism. The manifestations of this are everywhere—in the arts, in the churches, and within intellectual and social life. Daily its influence grows.

What is it? In a sense it’s a new renaissance, a going back to pre-Christian sources. Just as in the 14th century, after more than 1,000 years of Christianity, many European artists and intellectuals reached back in time to draw inspiration from poets, artists, mythologists and philosophers who lived before the time of Christ, so too today. More and more intellectuals, artists, and even theologians are turning to pre-Christian and non-Christian sources for inspiration, energy and direction.

In the men’s movement, in feminism, in New Age religions, and in activity around Stonehenge, Celtic mythology and North American native religions, as well as in Jungian circles and in graduate schools in anthropology, one sees the attempt to draw energy, inspiration, morality and principles for contact with the divine and with each other from, among other things, pre-Christian myths, fairy tales, Celtic mythology and tribal religion.

Bookstores abound with a new literature on the sacredness of nature, the cycles of the animal body, the moon, the goddess, the eagle, body heat, ritual initiation and ritual scarring, tribal religion, and the wisdom hidden in fairy tales.

A generation ago, books on these topics would have been outrightly suspect or at least banished to the realms of the esoteric. Today they are becoming mainstream and the ideas they contain are becoming ever more influential.

What’s to be said about this neo-paganism? Some people think that it is devil-inspired, anti­Christian and highly dangerous. Others see it as the source for an insight and an energy that Christianity has for too long neglected. Who’s right?

The answer, to my mind, lies somewhere between the extremes. Just as nearly 600 years ago the Renaissance was a mixed blessing for Christianity, so too this neo-paganism. It must be approached judiciously. To embrace it uncritically or to reject it out of hand as anti­Christian are both dangerously naive.

There is much that is good in it. Talk about wisdom contained in mythology, goddess energy, Celtic myths, the moon, tribal religion, sacred birds, body heat and hairy erotic monsters hidden within the human psyche can be pretty scary, but, of themselves, there is nothing within these that necessarily goes against what is Christian.

In a culture and a church which draws energy too one-sidedly from the rational, which is almost completely deaf to ritual and mysticism, and which has, for the last some centuries, too much ignored, broken, and denigrated its relationship to nature and to the body, such talk will surely help bring about a better balance. It will also, as is already evident, be the source of a rich stream of energy and insight.

Conversely, though, there are many dangers in this new (old) thought. Its tenets and the energy it creates must be examined critically by Christians. God does speak through what’s best in mythology, tribal religion and the archetypal configurations of energy within the animal body; but that wisdom is, in the end, dwarfed (though never ruled out) by what is spoken through positive revelation (Hebrews 1:1).

As well, too often the proponents of this new paganism, in the first fervor of rich discovery, degenerate into a brand of fundamentalism that none but the most narrow of Christian fundamentalists ever approximate.

Thus, for example, the Christian fundamentalist contends that AIDS is God’s punishment upon a sexually promiscuous world whereas the neo­pagan fundamentalist (for example, Tom Robbins) contends that AIDS is caused not by sexual licence, “but by fear of sexual license, by the conservative DNA’s inability to adjust to hedonism… and… by guilt over the suppression of the Great Mother and the denial of the sensuality that so frequently underscored her coexistence with the void.”

Neo-paganism also contains within it a number of inherent propensities that perennially spark a set of temptations which must be sharply monitored, namely, temptations to forget that this life is not the only life, to parade sex as soteriology, and try to redress centuries of stress on rationality, order, patriarchy and pedagogy by denying entirely any goodness or value to these at all.

Neo-paganism is a rich, though mixed, blessing. It should be received by a spirit that is both very open and very critical.

Mysticism is perhaps the thing we least understand within all of religion. We are mystically tone-deaf. We no longer believe much in anything that we cannot rationally explain.

Robert Bellah tells the story of how one of his researchers, while talking to an expert at the Environmental Protection Agency on the trade-offs that must be made between economic development and environmental protection, said: “Some people believe that human life is priceless.”

The scientific expert replies (in all seriousness): “We have no data on that.”

Most of us who smile or are horrified by that statement are, in fact, just as insensitive and as empirically shackled when it comes to our belief in what constitutes the body of Christ and how this communion of saints works. We believe in what we have rational, left-brained, data on.

However, how, in Christ, we constitute one body and how this body works is not something we have data on (in the contemporary sense of that expression). Hence so much of what is precious and important in the spirituality of the body of Christ is getting lost.

There is serious spiritual danger in this.

Stripped of its mysticism, the body of Christ is also robbed of its power and stands in danger of contacting AIDS.

AIDS in the body of Christ? What is meant by such a curious expression?

Part of our Christian faith, as canonized in our creed, is the belief that our unity and community with each other in Christ is so real, so deep, so physical, and so mutually interdependent that we constitute not an aggregate or a corporation but an organism, a living body. And, just as in any physical body there are visible assets that can be observed with the naked eye and other, more invisible, aspects that go on under the surface and escape simple observation, so too within the body of Christ.

Most of what is happening vis-a-vis health or disease within the body, is, long before it shows up externally, not observable to the unaided eye. Enzymes, bacteria, viruses, and antibodies do their work for health or disease invisibly. By the time we see external symptoms, they have al­ ready been working for a long time.

This is also true within the body.

Thus, Christ taught, and the saints believed, that the most private spiritual and moral battles in one’s heart had an effect for good or for bad on the whole body of Christ—and, indeed, on all of humanity. They believed too that private prayer and praying for others made a profound difference—beyond what “we have data on!”

Therese of Lisieux, for example, based her entire spirituality on this—and her life and death, eventually, gave us “data” that validated her belief in this.

As a lively 15 year-old, she fasted and prayed that a condemned criminal might become a Christian before being executed. He did. As a dying 24 year-old, she offered her sufferings so that others might be healed and boldly stated that, upon her death, she would deliver a shower of roses upon this earth. Everything that has happened around her name and to the little city of Lisieux ever since provides considerable data that she did deliver as promised.

This idea can be, and has been at times, badly understood. At its worst, it was understood as a kind of Divine Credit Union into which the good paid and the bad withdrew­—the saintly mother (or the Crucified Christ) paid in, the wayward child took out! Some of these divine savings bonds could even be sold as indulgences.

But that is not our major danger today. An age which is besotted by the empirical and which de­emphasizes private morality, tends to forget that any healthy body needs a strong immunal system, healthy antibodies. Otherwise it becomes HIV positive.

What are the antibodies that create the immunal system within the body of Christ? If we can believe those who have been physicians within the body of Christ, we create antibodies when we, silently, suffer for each other, pray for each other, live out lives of quiet martyrdom, and when we emerge victorious in our little battles with the petty within our lives.

The small sins—the grudge, the masturbation, the little lie, the petty jealousy—do make huge difference after all. Mystics have secrets worth knowing!

Several years ago, just as I was stepping away from the podium after giving a talk on social justice, I was challenged by a man and a woman, both very active in social justice, who were upset that I had down-played the role of anger in my talk .

“Anger is necessary if anything is ever to get done in the area of justice,” the man said. “People confuse love with ‘being nice’ and are afraid that if they ‘aren’t nice’ they won’t be seen as loving persons. But anger is a great fuel! When people get angry, things finally get done!”

He’s right about several things: “Being nice” isn’t always the same thing as being loving and “anger is a great fuel.”

But is anger the right fuel? Do actions that are fuelled by it really, in the long run, help bring about peace and justice? Or, does it, itself, add yet more hatred and inhospitality to a world which already has too much of these?

This question is not easy to answer since anger can be healthy or unhealthy… A healthy anger has its root in a genuine love for those whom it challenges. Like Christ’s anger, it challenges only because it, first of all, deeply loves those at whom it is angry and wants their happiness above its own.

An unhealthy anger is rooted in neurosis, personal frustration, jealousy and ideology. Its object is more spite and destruction than construction. Because of this, in the end, it is invariably self-serving, hateful, and disrespectful of those it claims to want to save and it is not useful, long range, for peace-making and justice.

Why?

Soren Kierkegaard once said that “to be a saint is to will the one thing,” but he didn’t speak about our motivation for willing that one thing.

Iris Murdoch supplements Kierkegaard when she suggests something to the effect that to be a saint is to be warmed by gratitude, nothing more and nothing less. Her’s is an important qualification since, as T.S. Eliot says, it is a treason “to do the right thing for the wrong reason.”

This is true, even as regards working for peace and justice. We can do the right thing for the wrong reason… and then the right thing will not have the right result.

Gustavo Gutierrez, the father of liberation theology, and a man who is not likely to want to give an easy escape clause to those who are indifferent to the demands of justice, once, in a speech to a North American audience, said something to this effect (I paraphrase): If you are living in the First World and you watch your television sets and you see the poverty and injustice of the Third World and you fill with anger and indignation, and you want to come and help us, then stay at home.

Likewise, if you, in the First World, see our poverty on television and you fill with guilt about how much you have and how little we have, and you want, as a result, to come and help us… then stay at home. The Third World has many problems without importing First World neuroses and unhappiness.

We want only one kind of person to come and live with us in the Third World. If you are a person who can look at yourself and feel grateful for what God has done for you, then come and live with us. You can help us and we can help you.

Gutierrez, like T.S.Eliot, understands that there can be a certain treason in doing the right thing for the wrong reason, that angry actions for justice and peace can be authentic but they can also be simple psychological “acting out.” Not all anger is useful to help bring about the kingdom.

Hence, just as “being nice” may never be simplistically identified with loving, conversely, righteous indignation and prophetic hatred may not always be simplistically seen as contributing to the progress of justice.

In her letters from the Nazi concentration camp at Westerbork, Etty Hillesum, herself soon to die in Auschwitz, wrote: “The absence of hatred in no way implies the absence of moral indignation. I know that those who hate have good reason to do so. But why should we always have to choose the cheapest and easiest way?

“It has been brought home forcibly to me here how every atom of hatred added to the world makes it an even more inhospitable place. I believe, childishly perhaps but stubbornly, that the earth will become more hospitable again only through the love that the Jew Paul described to the citizens of Corinth in the 13th chapter of his first letter.” (Letters from Westerbork, p. 36)

Christianity teaches us that our world is holy, that everything is matter for sacrament.

In its view, the universe is a manifestation of God’s glory and humanity is made in God’s image. Our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, the food we eat is sacramental, and in our work and in sexual embrace we are co-creators with God.

This is high theology, a symbolic hedge which dwarfs that found in virtually every other religion and philosophy.

Nowhere else, save in outright pantheism, does anyone else affirm anything so radical that it borders on blasphemy. But this is Christian thought; at its best.

The problem however is that, most times, our daily lives are so dram, distracted and fixed upon realities that seem so base that it makes this idea (“everything is sacrament”) seem adolescent fantasy.

When we watch the news at night our world doesn’t look like the glory of God; what we do with our bodies at times makes us wonder whether these really are temples of the Holy Spirit, the heartless and thankless way that we consume food and drink leaves little impression of sacramentality, and the symbols and language with which we surround our work and sex speak precious little of co-creation with God.

Why is this so? If the earth is ablaze with the fire of God, why do we, in the words of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, sit around and pick blackberries? What have we lost?

We have lost the sense that the world is holy and that our eating, working and making love are sacramental; and we’ve lost it because we no longer have the right kind of prayer and ritual in our lives. We no longer connect ourselves, our world, and our eating and our making love, to their sacred origins. It is in not making this connection that our prayer and ritual falls short.

Let me try to illustrate this with a few examples: Among the Osage Indians, there is a custom that when a child is born, before it is allowed to drink from its mother’s breast, a holy person is summoned, someone “who has talked to the gods” is brought into the room. This person recites to the newborn infant the story of the creation of the world and of terrestrial animals. Not until this has been done is the baby given the mother’s breast.

Later, when the child is old enough to drink water, the same holy person is summoned again. This time he or she tells the story of creation, ending with the story of the sacred origins of water. Only then, after hearing this story, is the child given water.

Then, when the child is old enough to take solid foods, “the person who talked to the gods” is brought in again and he or she, this time, tells the story of the origins of grains and other foods. The object of all of this is to introduce the newborn child into the sacramental reality of the world. This child will grow up to know that eating is not just a physiological act, but a religious one as well.

An older generation, that of my parents, had their own pious way of doing this ritual. They blessed their fields and workbenches and bedrooms, they prayed grace before and after every meal, and some of them went to finalize their engagement for marriage in a church. That was their way of telling the story of the sacred origins of water before drinking it.

By and large, we have rejected the mythological way of the Osage Indians and the pious way of my parents generation. We live, eat, work and make love under a lower symbolic hedge.

Most of our eating isn’t sacramental because we don’t connect the food we eat to its sacred origins—and, for the most part, we don’t really pray before and after meals.

Most of the time we consider our work as a job rather than as co-creation with God because we don’t connect it to any sacred origins­—and we don’t bless our workbenches, offices, classrooms and boardrooms. And our sex is rarely the Eucharist that it should be because the very thought of blessing a bedroom or having sacramental sex causes laughter in most contemporary circles.

I am not sure what the solution is. Our age isn’t much for the mythology of ancient cultures or for the piety of more recent generations. The ways of the past, for better and for worse, are not our ways.

But we must find a way… a way to connect our eating and our drinking, our working and our making love, to their sacred origins.

Socrates once said that the unexamined life is not worth living. It is also not sacramental. Eating, working, and making love, without reflective prayer and proper ritual, are, in the end, dram and non-sacramental. The joylessness of so much that should bring us joy can tell us as much.