A Lesson Of Fundamentalism

March 9, 1992

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.

A Heart With Many Rooms

March 2, 1992

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 it 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 agendas 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… 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 labor.

Let’s Look At Neo-Paganism

February 24, 1992

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.

Cultivating Loneliness

February 22, 1992

Few persons in recent centuries have touched the human heart as deeply as has Soren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher.

There are many reasons for this, some of which are obvious. He was a man of rare brilliance, with a lot to give others.

One of the reasons that he was able to so deeply and exceptionally touch people’s hearts, however, had less to do with his brilliance than it had to with his suffering, especially his loneliness.

Albert Camus once suggested that it is in solitude and loneliness that we find the threads that bind human community. Kierkegaard understood this and he embraced it to the point that he positively cultivated his own loneliness.

As a young man, he fell deeply in love and, for a time, planned marriage with the woman to whom he was passionately attached. However, at one stage, at great emotional cost to himself and (so history would suggest) at even a greater emotional cost to the woman involved, he broke off the engagement and set himself to live for the rest of his life as a celibate.

His reasoning was simple. He felt that what he had to give to the world came a lot from his own loneliness. He could share deeply because, first of all, he felt deeply. Loneliness gave him depth. Rightly or wrongly, he judged that marriage might in some way deflect or distract him from that depth, painful as it was.

I suspect that there is a part of us that will smile at his reasoning. Marriage is hardly a panacea for loneliness! As well, a part of us will, no doubt, be critical of what seems to be implied in this (even if a Lutheran says so!), namely, that celibacy is somehow superior spiritually to being married.

However, there is a part in us too—that place where our mysticism resides that, I submit, understands exactly what’s at stake here. What Kierkegaard understood, not perfectly of course since this always remains partly inchoate for everyone, is the connection between loneliness and mysticism, longing and community.

What is meant by this? How do we connect to each other in and through our loneliness and longing? What does it mean that we are in mystical connection with each other?

Thomas Aquinas once suggested that there are two ways of being in union with something or with somebody: through actual possession or through desire. What is implied by the former of these notions is fairly clear. The latter needs explication: How are we in union with each other in and through desire?

In his prize winning novel, The Famished Road, Ben Okri describes a Nigerian mother chiding her overly restless son for haunting her dreams: “Stay out of my dreams! That’s not your place! I’m married to your father!”

That’s a most curious rebuke—scolding someone for being in your dreams!

But the mystic within us understands this. In our restlessness and loneliness, just as in our prayers and blessings for each other, we haunt each others’ dreams and each others’ hearts in ways that are just as real as in any physical touch. By entering deeply into our own loneliness, we deeply enter each others’ dreams.

Kierkegaard understood this and worried that if his marriage interfered with his loneliness it would interfere with his power to enter our dreams.

Partly this is mystical and is better accessed through feeling than through thought. Partly, though, this can be given expression: Our loneliness is a privileged medium through which to enter our own hearts. Listening to our own loneliness puts us in touch with ourselves.

When we come to grips with our longing we learn, as Henri Nouwen puts it, that nothing is foreign to us—grandiosity, greatness, greed, generosity, emptiness, fullness, the capacity to kill, the capacity to die unselfishly for another—all lies within the complexity of our inconsummate hearts. In our loneliness and longing we are introduced to ourselves.

In them, we are also introduced to each other. In letting our loneliness haunt us, we begin, in the best sense of that phrase, to haunt each others’ dreams. In loneliness and longing, empathy is born. When nothing is foreign to us nobody will be foreign to us—and our words will begin to heal others.

“What is a poet?” Kierkegaard once asked. His answer: “A poet is an unhappy person who conceals deep torments in his or her heart, but whose lips are so formed that when a groan or shriek streams over them it sounds like beautiful music.”

AIDS In The Body Of Christ

February 17, 1992

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!

When Love Goes Inarticulate

February 10, 1992

There is a fine little poem by a young Chinese America n poet from Chicago, Lee Yung Lee, which talks about the relationship of a father to his son.

Entitled A Story it runs something like this:

Sad is the ma n who is asked for a story

and can’t come up with

one.

His five year-old son waits in his lap: “Not the same story baba!

Not the same one, a new one!”

The man rubs his chin and scratches his ear.

In a room full of books

In a world full of stories he can recall not one.

And soon he thinks

This boy will give up on his father.

And already the man lives far ahead

he sees the day the boy will go away. “Don’t go,” he says, “hear the alligator

story again.

Hear the angel story one more time. You love the spider story!

You laugh at that spider. Let me tell it!”

But the boy is already packing his shirts he is looking for his keys.

“Are you a god,” the man screams, “that I am mute before you?

Am I a god, that I should never disappoint

you?”

But truly the boy is still here. “Please, baba, a story!”

It is an emotional rather than a logical question.

It is an earthly, not a heavenly one.

And it posits

that a boy’s supplications and a father’s love

add up to silence.

Lee’s poem is about the inadequacy and inarticulateness of a father before his son. The poem reads just as well however when one substitutes mother-daughter, mother-son, father-daughter, or even wife-husband, husband-wife, or friendfriend for father-son.

One person’s supplication, be they child or adult; and another’s love too often add up to silence and disappointment. We are all, in the end, inarticulate in love and we all, ultimately, cannot not disappoint each other.

It is valuable to reflect on this occasionally, especially in relationship to those with whom we are most deeply bound. I think of so many situations where our supplications add up to silence.

Almost daily we find ourselves sitting across from our spouse, family, children, relatives, neighbors or friends in a situation which calls for a new story and we can “recall not one.” There is supplication in everyone’s eyes and in the very situation itself… “a new story, baba, not the old one!” But the supplications and our best intentions add up to silence.

We are mute before each other or we tell the alligator story again… we talk football scores, shopping, neighbor gossip, fashion, the weather, the latest TV show, but what’s important is not spoken.

And so our children sit on our laps as infants and toddlers, and then come home to visit on vacation and weekends, and we visit a family member or a friend in the hospital, and husbands and wives sit across from each other at a table, and parents agonize as they lose a closeness to their children as those children wrestle with the restlessness of puberty, and families gather for birthdays, anniversaries, and other celebrations and, too often, we feel like saying: “Are you a god that I should be mute before you… Am I a god, that I should never disappoint you!”

There is no shortage, ever, of supplication. Mostly though we can only repeat a few timeworn stories. “Let’s talk about sports! Have you heard this joke?”

Suddenly everyone’s packing to leave and we say: “Don’t go! Hear the alligator story again!” But truly they are still here and saying only: “Please, baba, a story!”

Iris Murdoch begins perhaps her greatest novel, The Black Prince, with a foreword that contains the words: “I have known, for long periods, the torture of a life without self-expression.” Nowhere is this torture more felt than in relationship with those dearest to us.

Anger Can Be Self-Serving

January 27, 1992

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)

Church Running Out Of Priests

January 20, 1992

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 fewer 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 centre 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 centre 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 centre of community and the belief that stepping outside of the canonical structures is not the way to go. In tension it waits for God to lead us to a new day.

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

Our Whole World is Holy

January 13, 1992

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.

The Illusion of Familiarity

January 5, 1992

Some years ago, a confrere of mine wrote a simple unpretentious poem which he dedicated to his 10 year old niece after she had given him a tour of the rather humble prairie town within which she lived. Entitled: “To Sheryl, My Niece, Aged 10, On Guiding Me Through the Town of Virden” it reads like this:

I wish someone like you

could have guided Adam through

his first fact-finding tour

or his Father’s store

eons before

and named

much more than claimed

things as his own

or told us what they’re for.

We both know Adam’s handicap:

he had no niece

nor patience, nor the peace

to wait for one.

But this he could have done:

Called upon his little girl

to come along

not set out alone

to claim¡

and name

and number when his first call

clearly was to ponder and

to wonder

– Jerome Harry Hellman, OMI

These words echo Elizabeth Barrett Browning who once said that the earth is ablaze with the fire of God, but only those who see it take their shoes off – the rest sit around and pick blackberries! Her words themselves echo God’s words to Moses at the burning bush: “Take your shoes off because the ground you are standing on is holy ground.”

Ordinary ground is holy. There is more than enough mystery, secret, marvel, and miracle ablaze in ordinary reality. Unfortunately, most of the time we don’t see this because we stand before it trying to claim, name, number, psyche out, and render familiar … when our true task is, instead, to ponder and to wonder. This is an irreverence that fatigues the soul.

Irreverence lies at the root of all sin and taking for granted lies at the root of all irreverence. We begin to take things for granted at the precise moment when we no longer approach life with eyes of a 10 year old who can look at a small town and still see its rich secrets. It’s then, when pondering and wondering are lost, that we become bored, cynical, and restless with our lives and begin to feel that reality holds no secrets, that it is less than marvelous and worthwhile, that, as Margaret Atwood once put it, we’re stuck here in a country of thumbed streets and stale buildings, where there is nothing spectacular to see and the weather is ordinary and where love occurs in its pure form only on the cheaper of the souvenirs! At the root of boredom and cynicism lies the death of wonder. Familiarity deadens the soul. It also spawns our resentments.

True contemplatives, mystics, and children never live the illusion of familiarity. That is why they are never bored, cynical, and resentful. For them, there are no hick towns, godforsaken places, or ordinary marriage partners and ordinary children who can be taken for granted and rendered familiar. For them, there is only holy ground, the extraordinary, miracle in ordinary life. They, in the words of G.K. Chesterton, “have learned to look at things familiar until these look unfamiliar again.”

Karl Rahner was once asked whether he believed in miracles. “I don’t believe in them,” he replied, “I rely on them to get me through daily life!” There’s a secret wisdom worth contemplating.

Time to Examine Life’s Gifts

December 23, 1991

As a child growing up, New Year’s Day always stood out as one of the biggest days of the year. Our family always had a big celebration, complete with a number of rituals.

The rituals began already on New Year’s Eve. We didn’t go out that evening, we stayed in and celebrated together as a family. Everyone stayed up until midnight and, just before 12, whatever else we were doing was stopped and my father would lead us in a brief prayer.

This prayer never strayed far from a basic theme: He thanked God for the year that had just passed, for, in the words of his generation, “the graces that we had received.” He thanked God for having protected us, that we were still alive and together in faith and in family.

Then he would, very simply, ask for God’s blessing and protection for the coming year. Finally, exactly at midnight, when the old year ended and the new one began, we would sing together the hymn, Holy God We Praise Thy Name. After this would follow the “Happy New Year” greetings, the kisses, handshakes, drinks and food.

New Year’s Day itself was, after church, given up entirely to visiting and receiving friends. Here there was a formal New Year’s greeting (about 10 lines in length, in German) that had to be memorized and recited, even if you no longer knew German, at the door of each person’s house as you arrived. And at each house, after this ritual greeting (called Wunschend), you finally completed the round of houses and returned home, you were loaded with treats and money and so, of course, as a child this was a day that rivaled Christmas.

My parents have now been dead for 20 years. Within those 20 years most of these rituals have died. Mobility, the death of most of my parents’ generation, the breakdown of the immigrant sociology of our district, and the natural changes that the passing of time brings, have made for an almost altogether new situation in our old district and in the world at large.

A few persons still do the old rituals, but the heart has gone out of them. About the only real continuity lies with the drinks—that ritual survives the changes of time and the breakdown of any sociology.

My own family has regrouped around new rituals, but the description and prescription of these is not my purpose here. This is a reminiscence, not a homily.

As I get older, what I remember most about those New Year’s celebrations, what lies inside of me as roots which I can use to steady myself and to draw a certain sustenance from, is that New Year’s Eve prayer by my dad and that midnight singing of Holy God We Praise Thy Name.

Socrates once said that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” That could be recast to say: “A blessing which is unasked for, unrecognized, and for which thanks is not given, is at best only a half-blessing.”

When my dad prayed his end-of-the-year prayer in which he thanked God that we were all still alive and within which he asked for God’s providence and protection for the coming year, Socrates would have been proud. My dad was not living the unexamined life, nor was he neglecting Christ’s request that we ask for the Holy Spirit.

If you come to the end of a year and are still alive, then you haven’t had a bad year! If you are still within the family of faith, then you’ve had a very good year, irrespective of personal sickness, economic misfortune, lost relationships or any other tragedy.

Moreover, if there’s gratitude in your heart and you can ask God for providence and protection for the coming year, you’ve entered that year on the right note. If you can follow this by expressing sincere love and best wishes for those around you (the kisses and embraces that say “Happy New Year”), well, that’s all a human being can do to welcome a New Year properly.

The year 1991, I am sure, was for all of us a year of mixed blessing. It had its cold bitter moments and more than enough heartaches and headaches. But, for all of us too, I am sure, it had its joys and its newness, its extraordinary blessings and providence. Each of us, in our more lucid moments, know how many bullets we dodged.

If we are still alive and we still have faith, it was a good year! It deserves to be celebrated with expressions of gratitude, affection, and a doxology… and even with another old ritual, drinks!

Wide Loyalties … The Call of a True Catholicism

December 19, 1991

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.

How to Give Birth to God

December 16, 1991

Annie Dillard, once said: “Faith would be that God is self-limited utterly by his creation—a contradiction of the scope of his will; that he bound himself to time and its hazards and hopes as a man would lash himself to a tree for love.

“That God’s works are as good as we make them. That God is helpless, our baby to bear, self-abandoned on the doorstep of time, wondered at by cattle and oxen.” (Holy the Firm, p. 47)

That is deeply insightful, God never dynamites his (or her) way into our world as an overpowering superstar who takes you r lives by storm.

God still enters the world, in the same way as Christ did, as the result of a special gestation process which produces a baby which must then be picked up, nurtured and coaxed into adulthood.

Hence the birth and presence of God in our world depend, a t least within the dynamics of the incarnation, upon a certain human consent and cooperation.

Simply put, for God to have concrete flesh and power in this world, and for us to have faith in God, a certain pattern must occur. That pattern, modelled by Mary, is the paradigm for God taking on actual flesh in the world. It is also the blueprint for how faith is born into our lives.

What is that pattern? when we look at how Mary gave birth to Christ, we see that there were four moments to this process:

Impregnation by the Holy Spirit
Gestation of Christ within herself
The pangs of giving birth, and
The nurturing of an infant to adulthood.

To meditate on these is to take a bath in the essence of Advent:

Impregnation by the Holy Spirit… We are told that Mary pondered the word of God until she became pregnant with it. What an extraordinary notion!

This doesn’t just mean that Christ had no human father and that, physically, Mary got pregnant from the Holy Spirit, it also means that Mary so immersed herself in the Holy Spirit (in charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, long-suffering, faith, mildness, fidelity and chastity) that she become pregnant with them, their seed took root in her.

Gestation of Christ within herself… She then gestated them into real flesh. In the silent recesses of her heart and body, and not without that particular kind of nausea that is part and parcel of pregnancy, an umbilical cord developed between herself and that seed of charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, long-suffering, faith, mildness, fidelity and chastity.

Through that cord she gave to that seed of her own flesh so that it grew into an actual child which, at a point, pushed to be born into the outside world.

The pangs of childbirth… With much groaning of the flesh is a baby born. It is always excruciatingly painful to give in birth to the outside world something one has lovingly gestated inside oneself. This was true of Mary, despite many pious treatises that would make of Jesus’ birth something miraculously unnatural vis-a-vis birth pangs to his mother.

Nurturing an infant to adulthood… After a woman has given birth to a child, she has a baby, not an adult. This was also true of Mary. Mary gave birth to a baby, Jesus, but what she ultimately gave to the world was the adult Christ.

Like all mothers, after the baby was born, she had to spend years nursing, nurturing, coaxing and loving her child to adulthood.

And that pattern is perennially the same: We must ponder God’s word until we become pregnant with charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, long-suffering, faith, mildness, fidelity and chastity.

Then we must, complete with the morning sickness this causes us, gestate them into real flesh within our own bodies and, when the time is right, with much groaning of our natural flesh, give them concrete birth into the world.

Finally, we must spend years nursing and coaxing that helpless God (“self -abandoned on the doorstep of time, wondered at by cattle and oxen”) into adulthood. That’s the way the incarnation works.

That is also how faith works. How do you prove that God exists? You don’t! God is not found at the end of some logical syllogism or some experiment of reason. No. God has to be gestated into our world in the same way as Mary did all those years ago at the first Christmas.

A Christmas Story

December 10, 1991

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!

Bath in the Essence of Advent

November 30, 1991

Annie Dillard, once said: “Faith would be that God is self-limited utterly by his creation – a contradiction of the scope of his will; that he bound himself to time and its hazards and hopes as a man would lash himself to a tree for love. That God’s works are as good as we make them. That God is helpless, our baby to bear, self-abandoned on the doorstep of time, wondered at by cattle and oxen. (Holy the Firm, p. 47)

That is deeply insightful. God never dynamites his (or her) way into our world as an overpowering superstar who takes our lives by storm. God still enters the world, in the same way as Christ did, as the result of a special gestation process which produces a baby which must then be picked up, nurtured, and coaxed into adulthood.

Hence the birth and presence of God in our world depend, at least within the dynamics of the incarnation, upon a certain human consent and cooperation. Simply put, for God to have concrete flesh and power in this world, and for us to have faith in God, a certain pattern must occur. That pattern, modeled by Mary, is the paradigm for God taking on actual flesh in the world. It is also the blueprint for how faith is born into our lives.

What is that pattern? When we look at how Mary gave birth to Christ, we see that there were four moments to this process:

i) Impregnation by the Holy Spirit

ii) Gestation of Christ within herself

iii) The pangs of giving birth and

iv) The nurturing of an infant to adulthood

To meditate on these is to take a bath in the essence of advent:

1) Impregnation by the Holy Spirit. We are told that Mary pondered the word of God until she became pregnant with it. What an extraordinary notion! This doesn’t just mean that Christ had no human father and that, physically, Mary got pregnant from the Holy Spirit, it also means that Mary so immersed herself in the Holy Spirit (in charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, longsuffering, faith, mildness, fidelity, and chastity) that she become pregnant with them, their seed took root in her.

2) Gestation of Christ within herself. She then gestated them into real flesh. In the silent recesses of her heart and body, and not without that particular kind of nausea that is part and parcel of pregnancy, an umbilical cord developed between herself and that seed of charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, longsuffering, faith, mildness, fidelity, and chastity. Through that cord she gave to that seed of her own flesh so that it grew into an actual child which, at a point, pushed to be born into the outside world.

3) The pangs of childbirth. With much groaning of the flesh is a baby born. It is always excruciatingly painful to give birth to the outside world something one has lovingly gestated inside oneself. This was true of Mary, despite many pious treatises that would make of Jesus’ birth something miraculously unnatural vis-à-vis birth pangs to his mother.

4) Nurturing an infant to adulthood. After a woman has given birth to a child, she has a baby, not an adult. This was also true of Mary. Mary gave birth to a baby, Jesus, but what she ultimately gave to the world was the adult Christ. Like all mothers, after the baby was born, she had to spend years nursing, nurturing, coaxing, and loving her child to adulthood.

Our task in looking at all this is not so much admiration as it is imitation. Mary is not an icon to be reverenced, but the pattern for how the incarnation is to continue, for how God continues to take flesh in this world. And that pattern is perennially the same: We must ponder God’s word until we become pregnant with charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, longsuffering, faith, mildness, fidelity, and chastity. Then we must, complete with the morning sickness this causes us, gestate them into real flesh within our own bodies and, when the time is right, with much groaning of our natural flesh, give them concrete birth into the world. Finally, we must spend years nursing and coaxing that helpless God (“self-abandoned on the doorstep of time, wondered at by cattle and oxen”) into adulthood. That’s the way the incarnation works.

Frustrated Goddesses and Grieving Warriors

November 24, 1991

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.