There is parable about a Cretan peasant that I heard some years ago from John Shea. It runs this way:

There once lived a peasant in Crete who deeply loved his life. He enjoyed tilling the soil, feeling the warm sun on his naked back as he worked the fields, and feeling the soil under his feet.  He loved the planting, the harvesting, and the very smell of nature. He loved his wife and his family and his friends, and he enjoyed being with them, eating together, drinking wine, talking, and making love. And he loved especially Crete, his tiny, beautiful country! The earth, the sky, the sea, it was his! This was his home.

One day he sensed that death was near. What he feared was not what lay beyond, for he knew God’s goodness and had lived a good life. No, he feared leaving Crete, his wife, his children, his friends, his home, and his land. Thus, as he prepared to die, he grasped in his right hand a few grams soil from his beloved Crete and he told his loved ones to bury him with it.

He died, awoke, and found himself at heaven’s gates, the soil still in his hand, and heaven’s gate firmly barred against him. Eventually St. Peter emerged through the gates and spoke to him: “You’ve lived a good life, and we’ve a place for you inside, but you cannot enter unless you drop that handful of soil. You cannot enter as you are now!”

The man was reluctant to drop the soil and protested: “Why? Why must I let go of this soil? Indeed, I cannot! What’s inside of those gates, I have no knowledge of. But this soil, I know … it’s my life, my work, my wife and kids, it’s what I know and love, it’s Crete! Why should I let it go for something I know nothing about?”

Peter answered: “When you get to heaven you will know why. It’s too difficult to explain. I am asking you to trust, trust that God can give you something better than a few grains of soil.”

But the man refused. In the end, silent and seemingly defeated, Peter left him, closing the large gates behind. Several minutes later, the gates opened a second time and this time, from them, emerged a young child. She did not try to coax the man into letting go of the soil in his hand. She simply took his hand and, as she did, it opened and the soil of Crete spilled to the ground. She then led him through the gates.

A shock awaited him as he entered heaven … there, before him, lay all of Crete!

When Jesus gave us the Eucharist, he left it to us with the words: receive, give thanks, break, and share. With these words, he was referring to a lot more than ritual and rubrics for the reception of the Eucharist at a liturgy. These words contain an entire spirituality in that they lay out the way that we must live all of life. The story just told, helps us to understand what is meant by one of those word, break.

How do we break so as to become a Eucharistic person? Parable and story can touch deep affective levels in us and move us in rationally inexplicable ways, and so a story of this kind shouldn’t be given too much explanation. It should be more an object for meditation than explanation. Nonetheless, a tiny application might be helpful.

When Jesus links the idea of breaking to the Eucharist, the rending and breaking down that he is talking about has to do with narcissism, individualism, pride, self-serving ambition, and all the other things that prevent us from letting go of ourselves so as to truly be with others. Buddhism suggests that everything that is wrong the world can be explained in one image, that of the group photo. Whenever anyone looks at a group photo, he or she always first looks how he or she turned out and, only afterwards, considers whether or not it is a good picture of the group. Breaking the eucharistic bread has a whole lot to do with looking first at how the group turned out.

St. Augustine, in his eucharistic homilies, was fond of telling people: “If you receive this well, you are what you receive. … for the loaf that contains Christ is made up of many individual kernels of grain, but these kernels must, to become the loaf containing Christ, first be ground up and then baked together by fire.” (Sermo 227, In Die Paschae IV)

Simplistic thinking is always harmful and this is particularly evident when we look at how, so often, we think about our sexuality. Invariably we are either too hard or too easy on ourselves because we don’t allow for paradox, we don’t hold seemingly contradictory positions in a proper tension. Let me illustrate this with two quotes which, on the surface, appear to compete with each other but, upon closer examination, reveal that they are complementary rather than exclusive.

Recently I had a conversation with a friend of mine who, after years of alcoholism and other addictive behaviors, had found some freedom from his compulsions through a 12-step program. Commenting on this, he said: “The key for me was honesty, especially concerning my sexual life. Everything got better once I ‘came clean’ about that, once I had the courage to tell another human being, face to face, everything that’s been a skeleton in my closet. Until I came clean on that, I wasn’t going anywhere because I was still hiding something important and everything else was a bit of a lie. Until you can, face to face, confess your sexual sins you will always have a sickness in your soul!”

On the surface at least, this comment stands in some contrast to another man’s remarks which I heard a short time later. This latter person, also a friend of mine, is, at this time of his life, working through some bitterness towards the institutional church, especially vis-à-vis its views on sex and confession. In his view, the church should not demand or even suggest confession for sexual things because  “sex is the most understandable of all human weaknesses. Next to our instinct for breathing comes our instinct for sex. Given that, the church should recognize that this is the most human of all struggles, the most forgivable of all sins, and the failing for which we should have the least (not the most!) shame. We should also, be the most self forgiving in this area. Sex is so powerful and its failures are so human! Why the demand for confession? Doesn’t this manifest a lack of understanding and compassion? Doesn’t it help foment unhealthy shame, false guilt, and lack of self forgiveness?”

It’s easy, but counterproductive, to see these as competing views. These comments are in a certain opposition to each other, but they are, in the end, not mutually exclusive. Both say something valuable. On the one hand, we do ourselves and others considerable violence when we do not recognize that the struggle with sex is the most human, understandable, and forgivable of all struggles. Failure to be fully integrated in this area should always be met with the greatest understanding and compassion. On the other hand, the area surrounding sex also offers the greatest potential for rationalization and hardening of the heart. Why?

Because we have two great struggles with sex: one for proper integration and containment, the other for honesty. It is hard for us to “come clean”, to be honest about our sexual struggles and failures. From masturbation through adultery, the temptation is perennial: do not admit! Struggle with sex might well be the most human and understandable of all our faults, but, ironically, for most of us, it is the area about which we have the most difficulty in being honest. We can confess that we sin in other areas – greed, gossip, temper, envy, lack of concern for the poor, lack of prayer, dishonesty in certain areas of our lives – but, in formal confession and outside of it, we find it the hardest to admit moral failure in the area of sex. Sex is the most understandable of all human struggles, but is the area within which we find it hardest to “sin bravely”. (Perhaps the fact that all sexual conduct has immense social consequence accounts unconsciously for this reticence.)

Be that as it may! The point is that when we don’t sin bravely, we sin dishonestly. Honest sin is humbling; it grounds us in the fact that we are God’s little ones and stand in need of mercy and redemption. Dishonest sin is inflating and distorting,it hardens the heart and the conscience and makes us believe that we don’t need anyone’s mercy for we are doing no wrong!

The truth that sets us free lies in paradox, in holding in tension seemingly contradictory positions. This is particularly true in our struggles with sex where two seeming opposites, great compassion and searing honesty, are two warm allies which should never be made mutually exclusive.

Recently I published a reflection which, following the intuition of some saints and mystics, hints that the final end of history might be the conversion of the devil himself and the emptying of hell. The column drew a spirited reaction from a variety of persons who, in all sincerity, felt that it bordered on heresy. For the most part, I appreciate the instinct behind their critique.

I was somewhat less appreciative though of the cover story in a Western Canadian magazine (published under two names, ‘The Western Report’ and ‘The Alberta Report’). They, in the name of defending Christian orthodoxy and true values, printed a most critical review, one which, besides missing the original point of my reflection, at crucial junctures, thoroughly distorted and misrepresented what I originally said.

My spontaneous temptation, of course, is to defend myself, to protest that I have been misrepresented. I have decided, however, on a different response, one which will address itself more to the wider issue of unhealthy criticism itself – of which this particular critique is just a symptom.

Simply put, far too much criticism today, especially in religious circles, lacks basic respect, charity, and honesty. This is true on both sides of the ideological spectrum, liberal and conservative. In this case, the criticism came from a conservative perspective. It could just have easily, given its basic tone, have come from a liberal camp. In virtually every way it was typical of the way we treat each other today.

In both tone and substance, it manifests, as does so much other criticism today, the following:

• It is devoid of self-criticism and any hint that it, itself, should perhaps struggle more deeply with the question it is considering.
• It is long on rhetoric and ideology and short on charity.
• It lacks essentially in respect for the persons and positions it attacks. It presupposes and suggests that these positions are born out of superficiality or ignorance.
• It relies very much on cliques, slogans, and ridicule which cheapen the position being criticized.
• It makes everything either/or and never both/and by creating illicit dichotomies which make us chose between two things which are not in themselves incompatible thus forcing us into the type of thinking and feeling which does not allow for sufficient distinctions, subtly, paradox, and the admission that sometimes there aren’t clear answers and the best we can do is to hold two positions in tension.
• It doesn’t seriously try to understand the other’s position.
•  Finally, it takes itself too seriously, is pretentious, heavy, and lacks joy and humor.

The net effect of this is not a re-centering of people around truth and genuine values, but a destructive and unnecessary polarization within a community wherein, already, too many people are reading and analyzing through the microscope of neurosis, suspicion, and paranoia on the pretense that this is prophetic sensitivity to the truth.

We see too much of this in every kind of circle today  “liberal, conservative, feminist, antifeminist, social justice, Yuppie, pro-life, pro-choice, environmentalist, traditionalist and radical alike. Underneath all this hypersensitivity for the truth too often lies a loss of basic respect and charity that works to divide the sincere from the sincere, the committed from the committed. Good people can no longer work together or even talk together.

If we were indeed in genuine pursuit of truth and value, if, like Christ, our real intent was to help forge on this earth a community of intimacy among all the sincere, then this would not be happening.

We would all do well to read the Desert Fathers’ account of the story of Abba Moses and Abba Arsenius. It’s the story of two men, both sincere, who viewed reality very differently. A searcher of truth prayed to God, asking: “Whom do you favour of these two, Abba Moses or Abba Arsenius?”  God answered him in a vision: “Two large boats were shown to him on a river and he saw Abba Arsenius and the Spirit of God sailing in the one, in perfect peace; and in the other was Abba Moses with the angels of God, and they were all eating honey and cakes.”

Recently I wrote a piece on the Eucharist within which I shared the story of a man who had drifted away from the church, had returned, received the Eucharist without first making any explicit confession, and had felt very healed and reconciled through this. I had used the story both as an illustration of how the Eucharist is a sacrament of reconciliation and as an apologia for why the church has always considered it as the primary sacrament of reconciliation. Letters poured in from two continents. Mostly, beyond simply accusing me of being wrong, they asked the question: “If the Eucharist is the primary sacrament of reconciliation, what then is the place of confession?” That’s a fair question.

What is the relationship of the Eucharist to explicit confession vis-à-vis reconciliation?

Perhaps some valuable light can be shed on this question by approaching it phenomenologically rather than simply theologically. David Steindl-Rast, in speaking about reconciliation in a much wider context, namely, the human struggle to come to peace with life itself, points out how, in moments of peak experience, we experience deep reconciliation. Commenting on peak experience, he writes:

“At the peak of our Peak Experience everything suddenly makes sense. Your heart is touched and there is peace. Not that suddenly you found answers to all your questions. Not that all contradictions are suddenly reconciled. Not even your problems are solved. But you have hit upon something deeper than questions; more comprehensive than all contradictions; something that can support all problems without need for solutions. How strange.  We usually think that we must trace our questions to the ultimate question to arrive at the ultimate answer. We are convinced that we must work our way through contradiction after contradiction to arrive at an ultimate reconciliation; struggle with problem after problem to find the ultimate solution. Yet, what happened here is something entirely different. For one split second we were distracted from our preoccupations with problems, questions, and contradictions. For one split second we dropped the load of our preoccupations and the super solution, the super answer is suddenly ours, in one great super reconciliation of everything. … the paradox is not dispelled. It is brought home, it is made bearable; you can stand under it and rejoice in it as children rejoice in snowflakes. And thus, standing for once under the paradox rather than against it, you can understand; you can understand yourself.” (A Listening Heart, pp. 39 & 71)

As a sacrament of reconciliation, the Eucharist functions in the same way. In being embraced by Christ in so intimate a way, we touch the super answer, the super solution, the super reconciliation.  The Eucharist is a deep intimate kiss, physical and real. In that embrace we are unconditionally loved and accepted in a manner that, for a moment, holds us in the same way as a partner holds another in sexual intercourse when this is had in its truest expression. In such an embrace, there is reconciliation even though one’s faults and infidelities are not erased, traced to their roots, nor even necessarily amended. Nor are one’s faults, by such an embrace, accepted. The embrace discriminates. It does not pretend that there isn’t unwholeness present, but it embraces the goodness and sincerity of the person in such a way that, in being so held, there is unity and reconciliation with the lover beyond  (not in spite of) the sin and infidelity that are there and not fully resolved. In a real sense “power goes out” of the lover which, for a moment at least, does for the one embraced what touching the hem of the garment did for the woman who clandestinely touched Jesus – the flow of blood stops! 

Moreover, as for the woman who touched the hem of Christ’s garment, such a touch is precisely what often empowers us with the courage to then explicitly confront our areas of sin and infidelity. The embrace is the primary reconciliation and its power is what helps give us the heart and the courage to move on to the more explicit apology (confession), complete with its concomitant resolutions and amends.

Eucharist and confession are, in a way, not two separate sacraments of reconciliation but part of one process of reconciliation. The Eucharist is the embrace (the father of the prodigal son embracing his wayward child) which, because its unconditionality accepts the whole person beyond one’s infidelities, kisses the person in such way that he or she is now empowered to more explicitly confront his or her sin. Explicit apology (confession) follows the embrace. This, of course, can also work in reverse; explicit apology can lead to the peak embrace. That is also good; but neither order is normative and, ultimately, the embrace, the Eucharist, is the more primal reconciliation.

Some years ago, I sat in on a series of lectures on the theology of the Trinity given by James Mackey. At one point in these lectures, Mackey suggested that perhaps the best words available to help us understand somewhat the flow of life within God are the four Eucharistic words of Jesus: Receive, Give Thanks, Break, and Share.

In explaining the first of these words, Receive, he shared with us the following story:

A man he knew was once part of a hunting expedition in Africa. One morning this man left the camp early, by himself, and hiked several miles into the jungle where he surprised and eventually bagged two wild turkeys. Buckling his catch to his belt, he headed back for camp. At a point, however, he sensed he was being followed. With his senses sharpened by fright, he stopped, hands on his rifle, and looked around him. His fears dispelled when he saw who it was that was following him.

Following him at a distance was a naked, and obviously starved, adolescent boy. The boy’s obvious objective was food, not threat.  Seeing this, the man stopped, unbuckled his belt, and letting the crane fall to the ground, backed off and gestured to the boy that he could come and take the birds.  The boy ran up to the two birds but, inexplicably, refused to pick them up. He was, seemingly, still asking for something else. Perplexed, the man tried both by words and by gestures to indicate to the boy that he could have the birds. Still the boy refused to pick them up. Finally, in desperation, unable to explain what he still wanted, the boy backed off several meters from the dead birds and stood with outstretched and open hands … waiting, waiting until the man came and placed the birds in his hands.  He had, despite hunger, fear, and intense need, refused to take the birds. He waited until they were given to him; he received them.

That simple story is a mini course in fundamental moral theology. It summarizes all of Christ’s moral teachings and the entire Ten Commandments. If we, like this boy, would always wait until life was given to us as gift, as opposed to taking it as by right, seizing it, or raping it, we would never break a single commandment. Moreover we would have in our lives the first, and most important, religious virtue of all, the sense that all is gift, that nothing is owed us by right.

In a way, this story is the opposite of the original sin story. In the Adam and Eve story, God gives them life and then adds a commandment which, on the surface, appears rather strange and arbitrary, “do not eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge and good and evil”. What is this commandment? 

In essence, what God is telling Adam and Eve is … “I am going to give you life. You may only receive that life. You may never take it. To take it is to ruin and destroy the gift that it is.”   Adam and Eve’s sin was, ultimately, one of rape, the act of robbing, despoiling, and taking by force something which can only be had when it is received gratefully and respectfully as gift. Their sin, as is all sin, was an irreverence, the failure to respect the deepest foundations of a reality that is love contoured.  Simply put, the original sin was a failure in gratitude and receptivity, the failure to respect gift.  It is no accident that the author of the story employs images (nakedness, shame) that are suggestive of sexual violation. That is the very point of the story, except that the rape that is being talked about here is wider than sex. In turning away from the posture of receptivity to the posture of seizing, Adam and Eve began to take by force, as by right, what was theirs only as gift. The result of that is always, shame, a darkened mind, rationalization, and the beginnings of a dysfunctional world.

In the story of the boy who refused to take the very food he needed to live on, we see what the opposite of original sin looks like. That kind of patient receptive waiting and respect might aptly be termed  “original virtue” … and it is so needed today!

In a world whose spirit defines morality by achievement and the accumulation of things, and which invites us to demand our rights and suggests that “God helps those who help themselves”, it is radically countercultural to suggest that a patient waiting to be given life (even when we are hungry) is better than the active seizing of it.  But …

To Adam and Eve, God said: “It is good, but it is gift, respect it as such. Don’t ever take the apple!”  All of morality is still summarized in that line.

Some years ago, I read a book by a very pious Christian visionary who had visions of the afterlife in which she saw “souls going down into hell like snowflakes.”  She linked this vision to Jesus’ saying that “the gate is small, and the way is narrow that leads to life, and few there are that find it.” (Mt. 7,14)  In her visions, the vast majority of people were going to hell and only a small minority was being saved.

Is such a view sound or sick? Does it speak a deep truth or does it insult the nature of God? Is the fear that it potentially inspires healthy or morbid?

Given the current cultural and religious spirit, a majority of persons would, I suspect, protest that any fear of hellfire whatsoever is unhealthy. That, however, is overly simplistic. Jesus assures us that hell is a real possibility and that a certain fear of it is not necessarily morbid anxiety.

What this visionary expresses, however, is morbid. Her vision of “souls going down into hell like snowflakes” contains some very false and dangerous conjectures, namely, that one can go through this life blissfully unaware of the fact that he or she is on the road to damnation, and that the majority of people are going to hell.

Can we go through life blissfully ignorant of the fact that we are on the road to damnation? Are the majority of people, in fact, going to hell?

The nature of God and the incarnation belie these suggestions. In regards to being unaware of being on the road to damnation, Jesus does warn us that we can, at a point, rationalize and distort our own consciences to the degree that we see truth as falsehood and prefer the misery of hell to the happiness of heaven. That being done, one can, in fact, be unaware, though hardly blissfully, of being on the road to damnation. However, even in this case, hell will not be a surprise waiting for a basically sincere and happy person, but will rather be the full flowering of a lifetime of dishonesty, distortion, and rationalization.

Hell is not full of people spending eternity regretting their mistakes on earth … painfully wishing that they had just one minute back on earth in which to make some act of contrition which would enable them to go to heaven! I suspect that hell isn’t very full at all and, if there’s anyone there, they are not regretting their lives on earth, but are looking with disdain and pity at those poor naive folk who have been duped into heaven. Far from regretting their choices on earth they are grateful for how “enlightened” those choices have made them. The quality of truly being in hell is not regret, but disdain for those whose choices have made them happy. It is not easy to go to hell, at least not forever. It takes a very strong person to permanently set his or her heart against love and happiness. Thank God for weakness!

This implies that the majority of people are not going to hell. To suggest that they are is, I believe, a great insult to the Creator. If God is the passionate, all-patient, all-forgiving Lover that Christ reveals, then it is unthinkable that God would sit idly by while the majority of people were being eternally lost. If that were the case, God would redo the incarnation!

One might protest here, saying that, if God truly respects human freedom, there is, beyond what has already been given and revealed in Christ, nothing further God can do. This, however, does not takes seriously enough the nature of God and the power of God’s love.

Many great saints and mystics were either borderline or full-blown universalists. This means that they believed that, in the end, there is universal salvation, nobody will be in hell forever, and the final consummation of history will be when the devil himself converts and enters heaven. Their reason for believing this is not the perennially popular (and very bad!) argument: “If God is all-loving and merciful how can He send anyone to hell?” Rather they argue from the power of God’s love: “God wishes the salvation of everyone and is, ultimately, powerful enough to bring it about. If we believe in the power of love to heal and to create freely its own response, surely God’s perfect love will eventually bring even the most hardened sinner to accept it. If human love, weak and imperfect as it is, can melt hard hearts, won’t perfect love eventually penetrate every kind of resistance?”

If that is true, and it is, then nobody is going to spend eternity regretting missed opportunities on earth … and people are not going to hell “like snowflakes”. A hell that’s fuller than heaven is mockery of God’s nature, love, and power.

Former Jesuit Superior General, Pedro Arrupe, was once asked why there is such an emphasis today on social justice when, in the past, many saintly persons and good spiritual writings appeared to almost entirely neglect this, at least in terms of an explicit development. He answered rather simply: “Today we know more!” 

He’s right. In the past, because we knew less, it was possible to be good and saintly and less involved in social justice, despite the fact that scripture and Christ’s explicit teaching make the call to justice just as non-negotiable as the call to prayer and private morality. Today we know more, not just because modern communications daily shows us the victims of injustice on our television screens and in our newspapers, but also, and especially, because we are less sociologically naive. Put positively, this lack of naivete means that we understand better how social systems affect us, both for good and for bad … and social justice is really about how systems affect us, especially adversely. 

It is very important that this be understood. Although they interpenetrate each other and depend upon each other, social justice and social morality are distinct from private charity and private morality.Private morality is something that, precisely, I do on my own. Other persons might guide me or inspire me, but, in the end, I am moral and charitable at this level on the basis of my own personal goodness and personal actions. Social justice, on the other hand, has to do with the social systems I am part of and participate in. I can be a good person in my private life, churchgoing, prayerful, kind, honest, gentle, and generous in my dealings with others, and still, at the same time, be part of a social, economic, political, and even ecclesial system that is unfair in that it works for the benefit of some at the cost of victimizing others. Issues such as war, poverty,violation of the ecology, feminism, native rights, abortion, and racism (to name just a few) are caused not just, nor indeed any longer primarily, by individual persons acting in bad conscience and doing bad things, but by huge impersonal systems which are inherently unfair and are, to an extent, beyond the control of the individuals who participate in them. 

Let me try to illustrate the difference between social justice and private charity with a story, famous in social justice circles: 

Once upon time there was a town which was built beyond the bend in a river. One day some of its children were playing by the river when they spotted 3 bodies floating in the water. They ran to get help and the townsfolk quickly pulled the bodies from the river. One body was dead so they buried it. One was alive, but quite ill, so they put it into the hospital. The third was a healthy child, so they placed it in a family who cared for it and took it to school. From that day on, each day a number of bodies came floating around the bend in the river and, each day, the good charitable townspeople pulled them out and tended to them – burying the dead, caring for the sick, finding homes for the children, and so on. This went on for years, and the townspeople came to expect that each day would bring its quota of bodies … but, during those years, nobody thought to walk up the river, beyond the bend, and check out why, daily, those bodies came floating down the river. 

The difference between private charity and social justice is, in one way, the difference between handling the bodies that have come down the river and doing preventive work up the river. It’s more complex than that, especially when one sees the web of intertwined social, political, historical, and economic factors responsible for those bodies, but the analogy at least helps show a key distinction. Private morality has more to do with personal charity and personal goodness and honesty. Social justice has to do more with changing systems which, although often managed by persons in good conscience, are of themselves evil in that they, knowingly or unknowingly, victimize certain people. Thus, for instance, a man may be very sincere and, in his private life, very charitable, gentle, prayerful, and moral. Yet, he might, blindly, unknowingly, participate in and help sustain (through his work, his political affiliations, his economic ideology and investments, and simply by a cosumeristic lifestyle) systems which are far from charitable, gentle, prayerful, and moral. While good for him they might be horrible for others.

When Pedro Arrupe said: “Today we know more!” he was referring precisely to the fact that current sociological and economic analysis has shown us, with a clarity that we cannot rationalize any distance from, how our political, economic, social, and ecclesial systems, irrespective of how individually sincere we might be in our support of them, are unfair and wounding to so many others. Given this, daily, our ignorance is less inculpable and the imperative to “walk justly” becomes less escapable.

Several years ago, I spent two months living in the guest house of a Trappist monastery.Visitors from many parts of the world would pass through, spend of a few days, have meals together at a common table, and pass on. I met a lot of interesting people. 

One day an elderly couple passed through. They had retired twenty years earlier, travelled the earth, and seen many of the world’s greatest sites. They were describing all of this when someone asked them: “Of all the things you’ve seen on earth what, singularly, was the most impressive?” 

The husband answered: “This will sound strange, but it’s true! Of all the things we’ve seen, what impressed me the most was the stones on the bottom of the Grand Canyon. They’re only stones! But, as we were standing on the floor of the Grand Canyon, I was reading the tourist brochure and it said: ‘The stones you are standing on are 2 billion years old.’ Two billion years! When I think of my life in relationship to that, it isn’t even as long as a snap of my fingers. I believe in eternal life and so two billion years from now we are all going to still be alive. Putting life against that background kind of puts us into perspective now, doesn’t it?” 

It certainly does … and how badly we need that!  The pains, tensions, and preoccupations of daily life habitually pin us obsessively into the here and now, making it almost impossible to think of life beyond our present problems and concerns. Our hearts, bodies, and heads ache, and the pressures and tensions of our lives simply overwhelm us and we cannot see beyond them. We spend most of our lives pathologically obsessed with our heartaches and headaches and, because of that, chronically depressed. 

In terms of an analogy, this might be understood as follows: Imagine a young child breaking her favourite toy. She’s disconsolate. Her mother tries to console her and reassures her that this was only a toy,that she soon will completely forget about it, and, years later, will joke about this incident and find it amusing. 

That’s easy for the mother to say. She’s lived long enough to know that time heals, opens up new perspectives, and colours the past in altogether new ways. She knows that life is long, that we outgrow the toys and obsessions of our childhood. From her perspective as an adult she can see how insignificant and transient is this particular experience of loss.But it’s not so easy for the child. In her young mind and heart there is nothing to give perspective beyond the present loss and desolation. She sincerely believes that she will never be happy again, that nothing can heal this hurt. 

As we grow from childhood to adulthood, gradually our perspective widens and, from that vantage point, we can look back with calm and amusement on many of the losses and hurts of our childhood (at least at broken toys and fractured emotional crushes!). Within the perspective of a long life, they can appear as incidental, growing pains, amusing.

However, even as we see our childhood losses in this light, the tensions and obsessions of the present moment (fractured relationships, lost innocence, lost youth, lost health, lost limbs, lost jobs, lost honeymoons, lost families, and so on) make us just as disconsolate and narrowly depressed  as did the broken toys of our childhood. When we suffer loss, we still believe in all sincerity that nothing will ever really make us happy again. 

When this happens, it is hard for God, the great Mother, to console us and to assure us that, within the larger perspective, these heartaches and headaches too will pass and too will be eclipsed by perspectives beyond our present imagination and experience. When  we ache inconsolably, it is hard to get through a given day or night … let alone think two billion years down the line! Yet to keep perspective, to keep our hurts from crushing us and our achievements from inflating us, and to keep ourselves from being old and despairing when we are still young and have eternal possibilities, we need to see our lives against this larger horizon. In terms of real life, in God’s eyes, we are all still in eschatological diapers, irrespective of age! We are children, babies really, crying over broken toys. 

That’s also true with respect to our moral failures. We are children bumbling selfishly through life, needing to be challenged daily to share our toys with others. God, like any  understanding parent, especially as one who has watched so many children grow up (and foul-up!) is, I am sure, doing more amused smiling at our smudged faces and dirty diapers than condemning. 

When we live in depression or obsession we have lost perspective.We’ve forgotten how young we are, how understanding God is, and how old are the stones at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.