How many Catholics do you know today who are not frustrated or angry about something?  Generally their frustration stems from the fact that they are fiercely committed and loyal to something that they perceive as sacred, critical, and non-negotiable … and they feel is not being properly valued by the powers that be or is being devalued by self-interest groups.

For example, conservatives are frustrated because certain cherished traditions are being by-passed, trampled upon, militantly challenged as backward, or simply benignly ignored. Liberals, who are often doing the by-passing, challenging, and ignoring, are themselves generally frustrated because, to their mind, the real power structure in the church has not substantively changed. Ministry and power are still essentially in the hands of a small group of male celibates (whom they have little say in choosing) who ultimately make the rules. Then there is still another large group of persons who are interested in neither the conservative nor liberal agenda and are frustrated because they cannot have a tranquil, unpolarized, community within which to meet and worship.

 What all of us, no matter which group we belong to, must realize is that we are Catholic and that word itself suggests that all these tensions should be there. Catholic means wide, universal, a heart with many rooms. That brings with it the call for wide loyalties, for a commitment to many things. Catholic community is not fundamentalistic community. Catholicism opposes sectarianism. Sadly, today, there is a creeping tendency towards intellectual fundamentalism, emotional sectarianism, and simple intolerance within both liberal and conservative groups alike. This is what non-catholicism really means … not the protest- for-God of the Protestant, but the intolerance of a narrow heart!

What is called for, beyond simple charity and respect, is wide loyalties. A true Catholic is loyal to the following components within community:

1) The Gospel template … Christianity has certain non-negotiable creeds, dogmas, ethical stands, and moral and religious challenges. It has certain normative parts. To be Catholic is to be loyal to these, in season and out of season.

2) The sociology of community which includes a certain authority of office … All communities have certain offices and authority structures. Catholics should not believe that Christ left a specific ecclesial blueprint (which fits present structures) but they should believe that any large community necessitates certain authority structures, legitimately established of course, which must be respected.

3) The role of special charism and gift … Certain people should be listened to because of office, others need to be heard because of charism, namely, because their words and actions, of themselves, manifest a certain spiritual and moral authority.

4) The link to the universal church …  To be a Catholic is to be part of a very large community of faith (circa one billion of us on this earth, not counting our ancestors in the faith who are part of the communion of saints with us). At times, individual needs will have to be sacrificed for the sake of larger unity.

5) The needs of the local community … To be Catholic is to be fiercely militant for the needs of one’s own small base community. A body generates life in its cells. This is also true for the church.

6) The unique experience of the “artist” … Every community – aesthetic, political, moral, familial, intellectual – has its “artists”, persons who are, by nature, gifted with an extra sensitivity. These are given to the community as a gift, to generate greater sensitivity and creativity. Their voice may never be ignored.

7) The experience of the ordinary person, especially the experience of the poor … All these other loyalties need to be constantly re-examined against the common experience and especially against the presence and experience of the poor. In fact, given our preferential option for the poor, this always needs special attention.

Freud once said that the only body with no tension in it is a dead one. Given the need for wide loyalties, perhaps it is not untrue to say that one can tell how open-minded we are by the degree of pain under which we labour.

Among John Shea’s poetry, one finds a little piece entitled: Sharon’s Christmas Prayer. It reads:

She was five

sure of the facts

and recited them

with slow solemnity

convinced every word

was revelation.

She said

they were so poor

they had only peanut butter and jelly sandwiches

to eat

and they went a long way from home

without getting lost. The lady rode

a donkey, the man walked, and the baby

was inside the lady.

They had to stay in a stable

with an ox and an ass (hee-hee)

but the Three Rich Men found them

because a star lited the roof.

Shepherds came and you could

pet the sheep but not feed them.

Then the baby was borned.

And do you know who he was?

Her quarter eyes inflated

to silver dollars.

The baby was God.

The Christmas story as told by a child: Joseph and Mary journeying on a donkey, no room at the inn, birth in a stable, the star and the shepherds and the wise men and, of course, the baby: God. For us adults, it is all too easy to miss how incredible that story is: the baby was God. The word became flesh and dwelt among us. What a wild and unbelievable statement! The infinite heart, centre, creator, and sustainer of the universe is born as a baby and lives as a human person on this earth and gives us God’s power.

We’ve domesticated the incarnation; the real Christmas story staggers the mind and befuddles the imagination.  How’s this for a Christmas story to rival Sharon’s:

We begin by setting up the proper ambience: Imagine the universe … Light travels at 186,000 miles a second. Hence light travelling to the earth from the body nearest to us, the moon, already takes more than a second to get here. From the sun it takes more than 8 minutes to reach earth. But the sun and the moon are close to us. Their distance from us enormous but in terms of the universe as a whole, it is minuscule. If one looks up at the stars at night, of those stars visible to the naked eye, the ones nearest to us are so far away that light travelling from them at 186,000 miles per second takes more than 4 years to reach us. Those which are farthest away, but still visible to the naked eye, are so distant that light travelling from them at 186,000 miles per second takes 800,000 years to get here. That befuddles the mind.

More incredible still: Science today, using X-ray telescopes, has sighted planets whose light has not yet reached earth. These stars are so distant that their light will take 6 trillion light years to get here. That is totally beyond imagination and that is just the universe we have already seen. There may be billions of galaxies and universes of which we are not yet even aware.

So what does Christmas mean? Given that there are perhaps billions of galaxies with trillions of light years separating them, consider that at the centre of all of this there is one heart, one creator, one sustainer, one God who has made all of this and who right now watches over it all so that every individual person and event is passionately cared about, so that “no hair falls from a human head nor sparrow from the sky” without this God knowing and deeply caring. And most incredulous of all … this heart, this God, this centre of everything, actually was carried for nine months in the womb of a peasant woman in Palestine and was born into our world as a baby and then lived here, taught us, and gave us, his believers, all the power he, himself, had as God. What a wild belief! Speak about winning the lottery! If we believe this, and that is the Christmas message, we should be singing carols and passing drinks around.

After John Shea has let the five-year-old Sharon tell the Christmas story, he notes her reaction and supplies us with a one line commentary that expresses the only appropriate way to treat the news of Christmas:

And she jumped in the air,

whirled round, dove into the sofa,

and buried her head under a cushion

which is the only proper response

to the Good News of the Incarnation.

The Perfect Christmas Wish

The child will begin to smile back; she has awakened

Love in its heart, and in awakening Love in its heart,

she awakes also recognition … In the same way, God

Awakes himself before us as love. Love radiates from

God and instills the light of love in our hearts  (Hans Urs Von Balthasar)

Christmas celebrates the birth of the Christ child, an infant at whom we must smile for a long time to awaken into love.

And where is this Christ child at whom we must smile?

If Mary became pregnant by the Holy Spirit, the spirit of charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, longsuffering, fidelity, mildness, and chastity, then her child’s face must radiate these features.

We celebrate Christmas when we smile at these, especially where we see them vulnerable, in need of a mother to nurse, nurture, guide, and coax them into adulthood.

Our Christmas gift to those we love can only be a smile …for in them we have seen the charitable, joyful, peaceful, patient, good, longsuffering, faithful, mild, and chaste face of a very vulnerable Christ.

Hopefully they will return the gift – by smiling back! 

Anger and grief do not make for a good mixture. When someone is angry it only makes it more frustrating to have to contend with a grieving person. Conversely, when a person is grieving, the last thing he or she needs is to contend with someone who’s angry. Yet, today, as women and men grow ever more sensitive to issues of gender, that is what, to a large part, we have to look forward to, anger and grief contending with each other.

During the past 25 years, feminism has been a major influence within the Western world. It is not, however, a monolithic phenomenon. The word “feminist”, like the word “catholic”, has as many variations as it has individuals committed to its credo. Many kinds of things emanate from feminist circles.

Despite this, there is a common denominator, anger. To be committed to feminist consciousness is to be, at some point, angry. This is not surprising. What feminism helps set free is, in the metaphorical language of some feminist circles, the anger of the frustrated goddess.  What does this mean?

We all carry within us the Imago Dei, the image of God. We are born the divine child and this, whether we admit it or not, colours every aspect of our lives. It is written into our bodies, our hearts, our minds, our souls, and our feelings.  We are gods and goddesses, kings and queens, mothers and fathers, called to create, order, nurture, and bless. This is true of both sexes, women and men. We have the same stamp of divinity within us, the same archetypal brand, and, from it, comes our mutual vocation – create, order, nurture, bless.

Feminist consciousness tells us that, for many centuries now, women have been partially (and sometimes largely) frustrated in this. Their call to create, order, nurture, and bless has been too often denied them, denigrated, constricted to a very small arena, and abused or usurped by men. The Imago Dei within them, the goddess, has been frustrated. Now that goddess is angry.

That anger, like feminism itself, is complex. There is proportionate anger (measured anger at specific injustices); ideological anger (politically incited and politically correct anger –  “the anger of the great march”, in Milan Kundera’s phraseology); neurotic anger (“All of my personal unhappiness is political and the political has destroyed all of my happiness!”); and archetypal anger (anger that touches the psychic imprint within which are banked all the frustrations of women throughout the centuries).

When anyone is angry, normally there is some mix of all of these. Feminists are no exception. However, it is the last kind, archetypal anger, which is important here. When someone looks at feminism today and asks: “Why are you so angry? Isn’t your anger really out of proportion to its proximate causes?” that someone does not understand archetypal anger, the anger that is the tip of a pine cone that is releasing the frustration of the centuries.

That, though, is also the case with men’s grief. It is interesting, when men’s groups meet the dominant feeling that surfaces is not anger, but grief, sadness. There are many tears at “gatherings of men”. This grief, like anger within feminist circles, has many roots: grief for the father that the industrial revolution took away from his son; grief for the loss of the primal circle of intimacy with the mother that coming to male identity necessarily takes away from the male; grief for the gender depression that results from not knowing how to act in such a way that it feels good to be a man; and, especially, archetypal grief, grief that touches the psychic imprint within which are banked all the losses of men throughout the centuries.

When a man cries he too is the tip of a pine cone … through which seep the tears of every coal miner who has ever died of black lung, of every 19 year old soldier who ever left home to die in a strange country in a heartless war, and of every man who ever had to kill an animal or an enemy.

When someone stands before a man today and says: “Why are you so chronically sad? Why are your suicide rates thirty times those of women?” that person is not understanding  archetypal grief.

Archetypal anger and archetypal grief do not make a good mix. But it is vital that they be understood if we, as men and women, are ever to come to a nurturing and tender mutuality which can help heal the centuries old wounds of both women and men.

One of the great iconoclasts of our age, Simone Weil, was fond of pointing out that in the house of idolatry there are many rooms. “One can take as an idol,” she states, “not something made of metal or wood, but a race, a nation, an idea, a philosophy, a religion, something just as earthly. All of these can be essentially inseparable from idolatry.”

When Christ states that no one can be a true disciple of his unless he or she first hates father, mother, wife, husband, children, brothers, sisters and even his or her own life, the harshness of that statement must be understood precisely in the context of idolatry. Family can be idolatrous if it lets its demands get in the way of the higher dictates of charity and respect.

What does this mean? How can family, which is itself a sacred concept (and one which is under siege today and needs all the defense that the churches can give it) be idolatrous?

For all its sacredness and importance, natural family must always be subservient to higher family, the family of charity. Jesus, himself, clearly affirms this when he says, “Who are my mother, and brother and sisters?  Those who hear the word of God and keep it!”

In Jesus’ view, only one kind of family does not, at a point, have to give way to something higher and more important than itself. The family that is constituted by “charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, longsuffering, faith, fidelity, mildness, and chastity” is the only normative family. Its bonding alone is nonrelative. All other families are subservient to it. To deny this is to break the first commandment and worship the golden calf.

We all belong to many families. Many kinds of things naturally bond us to certain people and separate us from others. Blood, ethnic origins, language, gender, country, city, religion, political affiliation, ideology, a shared cause, a shared enemy, a shared neighbourhood, a shared history, or even shared wounds divide us from some persons and form us into a certain natural family with others. Nature, temperament, and circumstance spontaneously form us into various cliques. One of these, our blood family, has a certain inherent sacredness and demands, just of itself, a primal loyalty and duty.

Moreover, all of these families are good, up to a point. It is not good to be alone, so the Creator says. We “need a helpmate”  … stable primary relationships, neighbours,  an ethnic, cultural, and linguistic family, political parties, and all kinds of groups to bond with for support. Natural families and other cliques are, in themselves, healthy both psychologically and sociologically. Thus, it can be good to be loyal and dutiful to our blood families, to fight for our language and culture, to be proud of our ethnic origins, to band together with others for political purposes, to work for our city and neighbourhood, to cheer fanatically for our local teams, and to meet as women in feminist circles even as men to go off together to beat drums and tell each other masculine stories.

Yes, all of this can be good … but only when it has a healthy in-built self iconoclasm, that is, only when it is prepared to step aside at each and every place where it finds itself blocking fundamental charity and respect and the needs of the larger community. All groups must ultimately be subservient to the family of humanity and to the non-negotiable demands of charity and respect. When membership in any group blocks that it becomes, at that moment, idolatrous.

This is, today, hard to admit in both liberal and conservative circles. In more pious circles, blood and religious family easily becomes idolatrous. (“My family, my country, my church – I am for them, right or wrong  – love’em or leave’em!”) In more liberal circles, like-mindedness, shared cause, and shared gender easily become idolatrous. (“How can I respect or work with those who are so unenlightened?”) 

In both circles, there is the tendency to rationalize lack of respect and charity by appealing to family, namely, to some group loyalty (party affiliation, ethnic or language group, gender, cause, or shared wound) which justifies a certain smallness of mind and heart. But that is idolatry. Family is sacred, but, unless it itself submits to the higher call to charity and respect, it becomes the golden calf.

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 drab, distracted, and fixed upon realities that seem so base that its 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 where 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, drab and non-sacramental. The joylessness of so much that should bring us joy can tell us as much.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez once wrote a book with a curious title, Love in the Time of Cholera. Perhaps we might describe our time in the church today in an equally curious way as Eucharist in the time of insufficient Ministers.

We face a curious dilemma within the Roman Catholic church today. We are a Eucharistic church running out of ministers who can celebrate the Eucharist.

The Roman Catholic church has the celebration of the Eucharist at its heart. To be a Roman Catholic is to participate in the Eucharist. In its ecclesiology, the Eucharist is the cement which holds everything else together. Today that cement is in danger of coming undone because more and more we are in a situation where we no longer have enough ordained ministers to celebrate the Eucharist.

We have responded by either closing parishes and communities (abandoning them altogether or asking them to amalgamate into huger mega-parishes) or by continuing these communities as “priestless parishes”. Is this ideal?

What are our options? Where can we go, given the dilemma of being a Eucharistic church without sufficient ministers ordained to celebrate the Eucharist?

When I look at what is actually happening, I see four different approaches:

• The Patching option … Proponents of this option see the problem as temporary, a bad time which is eventually to pass. In their view, vocations will increase again and in the interim we must patch and make do … we can import clergy, delay the retirement of existing clergy, stretch the workload of existing clergy, and combine parishes so that less priests are needed until things again go back to how they once were.
• The radical Revisionist option … People operating out of this model see no solution in patching. For them, the problem is indicative of an ecclesiology which can no longer be upheld. In this view, and it has shades of radicality, the root of the issue is the fact that the ordained ministry is hierarchical, male, and celibate. Until a new model of church is followed, one which is less hierarchical, masculine, and celibate in its structures for ministry, the present dilemma can only worsen. The answer, for them, is not that of patching, nor that of staying within the structures and trying to change them from within, but it is that of stepping outside the structures and of becoming church in a different way. Simply put, in this view, one does not wait for the day when the pope might ordain women and married people. Rather one joins a group that already celebrates the word, the sacraments, and the Eucharist according to its own structures of ministry and leadership … irrespective of Rome’s approval.
• The Word-over-Eucharist option …  This option believes that church can be sufficiently created and maintained around the word. This is the “Protestantization-of-Roman-Catholicism” option. One makes the word the heart of church. In such a view, a shortage of ordained ministers to celebrate the Eucharist is not so serious since community forms around the word and non-ordained persons can lead services of the word.
• The Stretch-it-to-the-Canonical-Maximum option … In this view, the solution is not that of patching, nor that of stepping outside of the present canonical structures or abandoning the Eucharist as the center of community. What it purports is that, difficult as this might be both practically and emotionally, one stays inside the canonical structures and continues to do everything possible (to the canonical maximum!) to have Eucharist as the center of church gathering. But unlike the patching option which believes that this is a temporary situation which will soon be resolved by a new supply of celibate male vocations, it believes that this crisis is leading us, more through our feet than through our heads, to a new way of conceiving ministry. It calls for both challenge to and fidelity to the present structures. It has no Five-year plan and no clear plan. It challenges, waits, and trusts. In a time of Eucharist without sufficient ministers it holds two deep values, the belief that Eucharist is the center of community and the belief that stepping outside of the canonical structures is not the way to go, in tension and waits for God to lead us to a new day.   

It is my belief that this latter option is the best one.

It has been more than 20 years since Vatican II released its document on liturgy. During those years, we’ve seen many changes in the Eucharist. But the question might be asked: “Is the Eucharist more meaningful to people now than it was before all those changes?”

My own hunch is that, while we have done a pretty good job in the area of renewing the liturgy of the word, we have perhaps regressed in our understanding of the liturgy of the Eucharist. Why do I say that? Because if you stood at the door of a church on an average Sunday and asked people leaving the church: “Was this a good liturgy?” they would answer yes or no almost exclusively on the basis of the homily and the singing. We employ a simple algebra: good homily and good singing = good liturgy. Conversely, poor homily and little or bad music and we go away with the sense that nothing very meaningful has happened.

But this betrays a certain weakness in our understanding of the Eucharist. Twenty-five years ago, had someone stood at a church door and asked my parents’ generation the same question (“Was this a good mass?”) they wouldn’t even have understood the question. They would have mumbled something to the effect: “Well, aren’t all masses the same, isn’t the mass Christ’s sacrifice?”

Their answer too would have betrayed a weakness, namely, for them, the mass tended to be only a re-enactment of Christ’s sacrifice. It was not as important for them that this coming together should also be a time break the word and to be together as a faith community.

However, where they were stronger was in their understanding of ritual. Today, like the rest of our culture, we in the church, are going ritually tone-deaf. We no longer understand cult and what it means to be in a ritual container within which the sacred and profane, God and ourselves, can meet and we can be empowered in a way beyond and deeper than words.

From the Enlightenment onwards, down until today, our sense of ritual has progressively atrophied and now it has basically died. In many respects, the Roman Catholic and High Anglican mass is the last true deep sacred ritual left in our culture … and now, this is my fear, we are losing our understanding of precisely that part of it (the memorial, sacrifice, communion) which lies at the core of the ritual. More and more, we are identifying Eucharist mainly with what happens in and through the liturgy of the word.  We use the words meaningful or not meaningful, which once were applied only to our subjective reaction to what happened at a Eucharist, to apply to the objective event. Past generations were unable to do that and this, I submit, suggests that, at one level, they understood the Eucharist a whole lot more deeply than we give them credit for – and perhaps more deeply than we do ourselves.

What is ritual? What is a ritual container? What is re-enactment? What is a sacrifice?

Anthropologists, mythologists, and scripture scholars can, and do, give good explanations of these. Lately, those explanations seem to have got lost somewhere between our best theologies of liturgy and the actual expectations and assessments of those attending those liturgies. In the end, too few people today go to Eucharist any more looking for the magic of God’s real presence in the consecration and the communion. The only magic we expect (and it itself is rarely delivered) is such as can be produced by a good homily, good singing, and the experience generated by people worshipping and being together. What is generated by these elements, word and community, should not be underrated, as my parents’ generation sometimes did. 

However, the magic that they looked for, and most always found at “mass” (as they called it) should not be underrated by our generation. Theirs’ was a magic not dependent upon the right priest, like-minded community, a good homily, good singing, or a psychological sense of being bonded and supported. Theirs’ was a magic ultimately not dependent upon human effort at all, but one generated by sacred ritual which promised and delivered the presence of Christ and his saving actions beyond our words, efforts, and community and personal shortcomings. Such ritual was mysterious and mystical because it involved something beyond words, touching and being touched by the source of all life.

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 Kieregaard once said that “to be a saint it to will the one thing,” but he didn’t speak about our motivation for willing that one thing. Iris Murdoch supplements Kieregaard when she suggests something to the effect that to be a saint is to be warmed by gratitude, nothing more and nothing less.  Hers’ 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)