Christiane Brusselmans RIP

November 16, 1991

Last week an obituary appeared in the newspapers: “Internationally known Catholic religious educator, Christiane Brusselmans, died October 29, 1991, the victim of an apparent suicide.”

This obituary needs commentary, partially because of its last line, but especially because of character and importance of the person of whom it speaks. When a person of her character and importance dies, it is criminal if that passing on is not properly highlighted and celebrated. Mircea Eliade was fond of saying that “no community should botch its deaths.” We shouldn’t botch this one.

Christiane Brusselmans, as most of us know, is, and justifiably so, given credit for virtually single-handedly developing the concept of what we call the RCIA, the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults. While doing graduate studies at the Institute Catholique in Paris she, on the basis of her studies of the early church, developed theoretically the paradigm for a revised rite of initiation for adults. Later, while teaching at Harvard, she rallied around herself an interested group of Christians and together they initiated one woman, Jane, into the Christian community. The rest is history. Since that humble beginning in Harvard, tens of thousands of Christians have been initiated into their respective communities in a way that has brought life to them and to the communities that did the initiating. Thousands of other Christians have matured, immeasurably, in their own faith by playing the role of initiators.

Anyone who has ever been connected with the RCIA knows that it is almost impossible to exaggerate what the RCIA has done for our Christian communities. Christiane Brusselmans is the person most responsible for developing it. It is hard to argue against the fact that this, in many ways, is her child.

It is interesting too to note that, today, almost a generation after she developed this paradigm for initiation, anthropologists around the world are beginning to become healthily obsessed with the importance of initiation rites and their importance not just for proper entry into a community, but also for the continual religious renewal of the entire community. Christiane was ahead of her time.

But there was more to Christiane Brusselmans than the RCIA. Those of us who knew her, and I had that privilege, knew too that she was a person of extraordinary graciousness and goodness. She radiated love, sensitivity, energy, and competence. I first met her in her classroom at the University of Louvain ten years ago. I’ve had many professors, some quite renowned, during my years of journeying through classrooms, but none matched the combination of insight, clarity, love, faith, and pastoral sense of Christiane. I told her as much as the end of the semester and her eyes filled with tears. She was always sensitive and grateful.

During my years in Belgium, her aged mother was housebound and Christiane would invite various priests to celebrate mass at their family home outside of Leuven. I was one of those priests and those times of prayer and celebration, complete with her smoking a cigar in their drawing room, remain among my cherished memories. I last saw her in 1985. She had invited me, along Jim Parker, Tom Caroluzza, and Jim Dunning to spend a day with her, walking the beach, at her family cottage near Ostende. She was trying to coax one of us into writing a book about a symposium she had just organized. The book never materialized but none of us will ever, I am sure, forget the specialness of that day.

She died “an apparent suicide” which, as said earlier, merits commentary. Christiane had the artistic temperament, with all its strengths and its proneness to clinical depression. She struggled a lot, a victim of her own extraordinary sensitivity and giftedness. There were also medical issues, which made this manner of dying less surprising. Like many others who have to suffer the stigma of this kind of death, she was taken out of this world against her will, in the same way as is a heart attack, stroke, or cancer victim. There are simply different kinds of heart attacks and cancers. Hopefully no one will be so non-understanding as to let the manner of her death reflect in any way upon the quality of her person or upon the importance of her contribution. She didn’t just develop a paradigm for the RCIA. She was herself a paradigm of graciousness, faith, fidelity, intelligence, and love.

On this earth we live on through our children. The RCIA, the child she never had, is Christiane’s child. It, and she, live on. Gabriel Marcel once said: “To love a person is to say, you at least shall never die.” Christiane Brusselmans was deeply loved by all who knew her. She will never die.

Family As Idolatry

November 7, 1991

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Providence and the Conspiracy of Accidents

November 2, 1991

Some years ago, in a class I was teaching, a woman shared an interesting story:

She had been raised in a religious home and had been a pious and a regular church-goer. During her years at university, however, her interest and practice in religion had progressively slipped so that by the time of her graduation she no longer attended church or prayed. This indifference to prayer and church-going continued for several years after her graduation. Her story focused on how all that changed.

One day, four years after having given up all practice of prayer and church-going, she flew to the Colorado to spend some time with a married sister and to do some skiing. She arrived on a Saturday evening and the next morning, Sunday, her sister invited her to go to mass with her. She politely refused and went skiing instead.

On her first run down the ski-slope she hit a tree and broke her leg. Sporting a huge cast,she was released from hospital the following Saturday. The next morning, her sister again asked her to come to mass with her. This time (“there wasn’t much else to do”) she accepted the invitation. As luck would have it, it was Good Shepherd Sunday. As chance would have it, there happened to be a priest visiting from Israel. He could not see her, complete with cast, sitting in the pews and yet he began his homily this way:

“There is a custom among shepherds in Israel that existed at the time of Jesus and is still practised today that needs to be understood in order to appreciate this text. Sometimes very early on in the life of a lamb, a shepherd senses that it is going to be a congenital stray, that it will forever be drifting away from the herd. What that shepherd does then is deliberately break its leg so that he has to carry it until its leg is healed. By that time, the lamb has become so attached to the shepherd that it never strays again!”

“I may be dense!” concluded this woman, “but, given my broken leg and all this chance coincidence, hearing this woke something up inside of me. Fifteen years have passed since then and I have prayed and gone to church regularly ever since!”

John of the Cross once wrote that “the language of God is the experience God writes into our lives.” James Mackey once said that divine providence is “a conspiracy of accidents“. What this woman experienced that Sunday was precisely the language of God, divine providence, God’s finger in her life through a conspiracy of accidents.

Today this concept of divine providence is not very popular. Our age tends to see it connected to an unhealthy fatalism (“If God wants my child to live he will not let it die – we won’t take the blood transfusion!”), an unhealthy fundamentalism (“God sent AIDS into the world as a punishment for our sexual promiscuity!”), and an unhealthy theology of God (“God sends us natural and personal disasters to bring us back to true values!”)

It is good that our age rejects such a false concept of providence … because God does not start fires, or floods, or wars, or AIDS, or anything else of this nature (“to smarten us up and bring us back to true values!”) Nature, chance, human freedom and human sin bring these things to pass. However to say that God does not initiate or cause these things is not the same thing as saying that God does not speak through them. God speaks through chance events, both disastrous and advantageous ones. Past generations, like my parents’ generation, more easily understood this.

For example, my parents were farmers. For them, like for Abraham and Sarah of old, there were no accidents – there was only providence and the finger of God. If they had a good crop, God was blessing them! If they had a poor crop, well, they concluded that God wanted them to live on less for a while …and for a good reason! And they would always, in the deep parts of their minds and hearts, figure out that reason.

That’s a deep form of prayer. In the conspiracy of accidents that makes up what looks like ordinary secular life, the finger of God is writing. We are children of Israel and children of Christ (and of our mothers and fathers in the faith) when we look at each and every event in our lives and ask ourselves: “What is God saying to us in all of this?”

The Sacramentality Of Everyday Life

October 27, 1991

Christianity teaches us that our world is holy, that everything is matter for sacrament. In its view, the universe is a manifestation of God’s glory and humanity is made in God’s image. Our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, the food we eat is sacramental, and in our work and in sexual embrace we are co-creators with God.

This is high theology, a symbolic hedge which dwarfs that found in virtually every other religion and philosophy. Nowhere else, save in outright pantheism, does anyone else affirm anything so radical that it borders on blasphemy. But this is Christian thought at its best.

The problem however is that, most times, our daily lives are so drab, distracted, and fixed upon realities that seem so base that its makes this idea (“everything is sacrament”) seem adolescent fantasy. When we watch the news at night our world doesn’t look like the glory of God; what we do with our bodies at times makes us wonder whether these really are temples of the Holy Spirit, the heartless and thankless way that we consume food and drink leaves little impression of sacramentality, and the symbols and language with which we surround our work and sex speak precious little of co-creation with God.

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

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

Let me try to illustrate this with a few examples:

Among the Osage Indians, there is a custom that when a child is born, before it is allowed to drink from its mother’s breast, a holy person is summoned, someone “who has talked to the gods” is brought into the room. This person recites to the newborn infant the story of the creation of the world and of terrestrial animals. Not until this has been done is the baby given the mother’s breast. Later, when the child is old enough to drink water, the same holy person is summoned again. This time he or she tells the story of creation, ending with the story of the sacred origins of water. Only then, after hearing this story, is the child given water. Then, when the child is old enough to take solid foods, “the person who talked to the gods” is brought in again and he or she, this time, tells the story of the origins of grains and other foods. The object of all of this is to introduce the newborn child into the sacramental reality of the world. This child will grow up to know that eating is not just a physiological act, but a religious one as well.

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

By and large, we have rejected the mythological way of the Osage Indians and the pious way of my parents’ generation. We live, eat, work, and make love under a lower symbolic hedge. Most of our eating isn’t sacramental because we don’t connect the food we eat to its sacred origins and, for the most part, we don’t really pray before and after meals. Most of the time we consider our work as a job rather than as co-creation with God because we don’t connect it to any sacred origins and we don’t bless our workbenches, offices, classrooms, and boardrooms. And our sex is rarely the Eucharist that it should be because the very thought of blessing a bedroom or having sacramental sex causes laughter in most contemporary circles.

I am not sure what the solution is. Our age isn’t much for the mythology of ancient cultures or for the piety of more recent generations. The ways of the past, for better and for worse, are not our ways. But we must find a way … a way to connect our eating and our drinking, our working and our making love, to their sacred origins. Socrates once said that the unexamined life is not worth living. It is also not sacramental. Eating, working, and making love, without reflective prayer and proper ritual, are, in the end, drab and non-sacramental. The joylessness of so much that should bring us joy can tell us as much.

A Communion with the Saints

October 21, 1991

In 1979, Sheldon Vanauken published a book, A Severe Mercy, within which he tells the story of the death of his wife, Davey. The book is a vivid account of a most powerful romance—one cut down while still in full bloom by Davey’s premature death.

This story has intrigued many people, both because of the extraordinary relationship which he describes between himself and Davey before her death and because of the relationship between them after her death.

Subsequent to her death, Vanauken describes how he still felt very strongly and vividly Davey’s presence. She was gone, in that brutal and irrevocable way that death always takes people away, but he felt her presence—as really as he ever had before she died.

In the early months after her death, her presence to him was constant, warm, guiding, sure, consoling, and on the same plane as it had been while she was alive. She had died, but, in the silence of his heart and soul, he felt her present to him—as wife, lover, best friend, moral companion.

During those months, he carried always in his pocket her wedding ring which he fingered tenderly many times each day. Touching it always helped centre him and make him aware of her presence.

One day, while on a ship crossing the Atlantic, he felt her presence change. In the silence of his heart and soul, it was as if she was speaking to him, telling him that, up to now, he had needed that kind of presence from her, but that now this needed to change. They needed to move to a different plane in their relationship. ·

To do this, she was “letting him go” in the way she had been present to him and she was asking him to ”let her go” in the way that he had had her. It was a difficult moment, but Sheldon understood its meaning. He took the ring from his pocket and quietly dropped it into the ocean.

From then onwards, Davey was still present to him, but in a new way. Her presence now was more inchoate; not more distant, but less the presence of the earthly wife, lover, best friend, moral companion and more the presence of a person who loves you and holds you in a way that is harder to describe.

Thousands of persons who have lost loved ones to death, including myself, identify with that story, both in terms of feeling the presence of a deceased loved one within the silent recesses of heart and soul and in terms of feeling this relationship gradually develop and move to a new plane.

In my own case, I lost both parents when I was 22 years old Initially, for a period of more than a year, like Sheldon Vanauken, I felt their presence inside of me as sure, guiding, and parental (they were still very much my mum and dad and they were still very much with me); though, in my case, it was not a fully consoling and warm presence, the pain of their loss would occasionally bring me to a type of tears that cannot be described as warm.

However, somewhere between the first and second year after their deaths, this changed. For me, unlike for Vanauken, there was not one clear moment when this happened. Yet, gradually and imperceptibly, their presence to me and within me changed.

Very parallel to Vanauken’s experience, what I experienced was a shift in presence from one plane to another. I still felt their presence, just as before, but now something clearly had let go, even as something else had developed.

I felt their presence now as a deep consolation and their loss no longer hurt as before. I no longer felt a need to pray for them… though now I felt a need (which I still feel today, 20 years later) to pray to them.

They were still my parents, but something had changed. I hesitate to use words to describe this which sound vague and pious, but what I felt can only be characterized as follows: They were still my parents—alive, deeply concerned for me, and more present in my life than they could ever be while still in this life.

But now I felt that presence as something higher, more eternal, more universally shared with others, and more tied to God’s love and presence to me. It became harder to differentiate their presence from the general feeling of divine providence that I sense about my life,

I come from a large family. Basically all of my brothers and sisters had the identical experience. As well, my ministry affords me many privileged occasions wherein people share with me their stories concerning how they continue to feel their relationships with their deceased loved ones.

Vanauken’s story of our ongoing and developing relationships with those who have died is paralleled everywhere. Relationships continue to grow and develop, even after death.

Weird stuff, right? No! Not if we believe one of the essential articles of our creed which affirms that we believe in “the communion of saints… and continued relationships (life) ever after!”

Eucharist In The Time Of Insufficient Ministers

October 6, 1991

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unfinished Symphonies

September 28, 1991

Not long ago, I watched, on television, a discussion between a prominent religious commentator and several reputable theologians representing various Christian denominations. The commentator hosting the show had asked the theologians the question: “Should it make any difference in the way a Christian lives whether he or she believes in life after death?” All the theologians on the panel and the host himself agreed that it should not. They all asserted that, whether or not there is life after death, it should make no difference whatsoever in how a Christian lives his or her life.

They went further. Explicitly or by insinuation, each suggested that a positive belief in life after death might even be harmful as it could falsely focus a person so much on life after death that he or she never quite gets around to living life after birth. They felt that people who do believe in life after death tend, in a rather childish way, to let a system of promised rewards and threatened punishments affect their behaviour as opposed to living out of a more mature moral inner-directedness. Moreover, they suggested that belief in life after death tends to deflect people from deep involvement in the world. Those who believe in a life beyond this one end up being otherworldly in an unhealthy sense.

For all of them then, the question of life after death was not an important religious and Christian question. They left the viewer with the impression that to think otherwise, to have any preoccupations whatever with thoughts of life after death, was a sign of an immature faith.

There is a certain commendable stoicism in that kind of an attitude but, in the end, it masks a belief which, beyond being religiously false, wreaks much havoc in actual life. Simply put, when we stop believing in life after death there is a very real tendency to demand that this life, here and now, give us something it cannot give, namely, full consummation.

Karl Rahner once remarked that we will be haunted and driven by restlessness until we accept the fact that here all symphonies remain unfinished. Our age would do well to listen to him because we demand too much from life. We demand the finished symphony.

We enter this world with mind and heart built for the infinite, with tortured complexity, and with deep insatiable congenital longings. We ache for a great love, to embrace the whole world and everyone in it. There is, as the author of Ecclesiastes puts it, a certain timelessness inside of our hearts that puts us out of sync with full peace. We are built for the infinite, but what we meet in life is always the finite. We ache to achieve the perfect, in love and in art, but what we achieve is always limited and blemished. We ache for the eternal, but are frustrated in time.

It is no wonder that we are so demanding … in our relationships, our jobs, our vacations, and life in general. It is hard to make a full peace with our own very real limits, of body, mind, and achievement. In all of our lives, there is a huge gap between what our hearts demand and what we can actually attain in this life. Consequently we are frustrated, never able to attain the finished symphony.

When one does not believe in life after death there is the very real temptation to demand that this life give us the finished symphony. After all, we only live once and what a tragedy it would be to go through that one life unfulfilled!

In the parable of the conscientious steward, Jesus points out how the steward who does not expect his master’s return then sets about beating his fellow servants and eating and drinking with drunkards. The images of violence that Jesus inserts here are metaphors precisely of the type of violence we do to life when we demand that it give us the finished symphony.

Conversely, the person who awaits the master’s return, who does believe this life is not all, can live in a greater patience with the frustrations of a life that refuses the full symphony. When this life is not all, then it is easier to not demand all from it.

The Eucharist – Word And Ritual

September 10, 1991

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Anniversary To Mark

September 6, 1991

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Recently I took part in an international symposium marking the 400th anniversary of the death of the great Spanish mystic, John of the Cross. For me, it was a very special time. I have taught courses on him for nearly 15 years and he has been for me, during my adult years, without doubt, the single most important spiritual guide in my life.

Who was this man? That question is not easy to answer since, around John of the Cross, there exists a myth which scares off most people. For all kinds of reasons, both his admirers and critics alike, tend to paint John this way:

He is a brilliant person, whatever his faults. However, he is a most austere, severe, and inhuman person, someone who is insensitive to the normal feelings, urges, and distractions that incurably haunt the rest of us. He is pathologically single-minded, not given to distractions or humor. He is heavy, the mystic of darkness, hung up on suffering and the cross, a spiritual masochist, counseling us to choose always pain over pleasure, what is more difficult over what is more pleasant, and life after death over life after birth.

As well, he is a mystic. His thoughts are drawn from extraordinary revelations from God which are the prerogative of certain spiritual athletes like himself. These mystical revelations are themselves a sure sign that he is divorced from the bread and butter of life (not your average neighbour whom you invite over on a summer’s evening for drinks and a barbecue!) He’s a saint, but, ultimately, he and his spirituality do not enter with true understanding the realm of ordinary day-to-day life, with all its heartaches and headaches over relationships, mortgages, money, sex, careers, food, and entertainment. He was a great man, one in a million, and his books are great books, but his person is divorced from the ordinary life and his spirituality is, at best, a high road for a religious elite.

That is the way most people, admirers and critics, understand John of the Cross. He is, for them, like an art object, something you stare at and dislike or admire, but that you go home from!

What, among other things, is unfortunate about this picture is that it confuses an extraordinary expression of something with the idea that this something itself is extraordinary. John’s spirituality is an extraordinary expression of something very ordinary.

Samuel Butler once distinguished between what he called statecraft and soulcraft. Statecraft is the art of shaping community. Soulcraft is the art of shaping the soul.

John of the Cross is one of the great masters of all time in the art of soulcraft. What he offers in this realm is parallel to what a Mozart offers in the area of music, a Michelangelo offers in the area of painting and sculpture, and what a Shakespeare offers in the area of literature. He is a master and what he produces can be intimidating to the amateur for that reason.

George Eliot once wrote a small book entitled, The Lifted Veil within which she tells the story of a woman who had extraordinary psychic powers. This woman could see into the future because, for her, the veil of time was partially lifted.

John of the Cross is a master of soulcraft because, for him, the veil was also partially lifted. As a mystic, he was not given insight into the future, but he was given privileged insight into the dynamics of love, prayer, loneliness, faith struggles, transformation, suffering, and consummation. His books might also aptly be entitled, The Lifted Veil.

Hence, while he was not an ordinary person and his writings are far from ordinary, his spirituality is not elitist. Shakespeare was a one-in-a-million writer, but his plays are meant to be enjoyed by the millions. John of the Cross was a one-in-a-million mystic, but his works are meant to give insight and challenge to the millions. Common folk enjoy the Mozarts, Michelangelos, and Shakespeares … even as they know that these were not ordinary composers, artists, and writers. They were rare, great geniuses that gave precious expression to ordinary experience.

John of the Cross should be understood in the same way, as a most rare, great genius, a one-in-a-million master of soulcraft, who gave precious expression to ordinary religious experience.

Justice And Anger

August 31, 1991

Several years ago, just as I was stepping away from the podium after giving a talk on social justice, I was challenged by a man and a woman, both very active in social justice, who were upset that I had down-played the role of anger in my talk. “Anger is necessary, if anything is ever to get done in the area of justice,” the man said. “People confuse love with ‘being nice’ and are afraid that if they ‘aren’t nice’ they won’t be seen as loving persons. But anger is a great fuel! When people get angry, things finally get done!”

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

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

This question is not easy to answer since anger can be healthy or unhealthy.. A healthy anger has its root in a genuine love for those whom it challenges. Like Christ’s anger, it challenges only because it, first of all, deeply loves those at whom it is angry and wants their happiness above its own. An unhealthy anger is rooted in neurosis, personal frustration, jealousy, and ideology. Its object is more spite and destruction than construction. Because of this, in the end, it is invariably self-serving, hateful, and disrespectful of those it claims to want to save and it is not useful, long range, for peace-making and justice. Why?

Soren Kieregaard once said that “to be a saint it to will the one thing,” but he didn’t speak about our motivation for willing that one thing. Iris Murdoch supplements Kieregaard when she suggests something to the effect that to be a saint is to be warmed by gratitude, nothing more and nothing less. Hers’ is an important qualification since, as T.S. Eliot says, it is a treason “to do the right thing for the wrong reason.”

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

Gustavo Gutierrez, the father of Liberation Theology, and a man who is not likely to want to give an easy escape clause to those who are indifferent to the demands of justice, once, in a speech to a North American audience, said something to this effect (I paraphrase): If you are living in the first world and you watch your television sets and you see the poverty and injustice of the third world and you fill with anger and indignation, and you want to come and help us, then stay at home. Likewise, if you, in the first world, see our poverty on television and you fill with guilt about how much you have and how little we have, and you want, as a result, to come and help us … then stay at home. The third world has many problems without importing first world neuroses and unhappiness. We want only one kind of person to come and live with us in the third world. If you are a person who can look at yourself and feel grateful for what God has done for you, then come and live with us. You can help us and we can help you.

Gutierrez, like T.S. Eliot, understands that there can be a certain treason in doing the right thing for the wrong reason, that angry actions for justice and peace can be authentic but they can also be simple psychological “acting out”. Not all anger is useful to help bring about the kingdom. Hence, just as `being nice’ may never be simplistically identified with loving, conversely, righteous indignation and prophetic hatred may not always be simplistically seen as contributing to the progress of justice.

In her letters from the Nazi concentration camp at Westerbork, Etty Hillesum, herself soon to die in Auschwitz, wrote: “The absence of hatred in no way implies the absence of moral indignation. I know that those who hate have good reason to do so. But why should we always have to choose the cheapest and easiest way? It has been brought home forcibly to me here how every atom of hatred added to the world makes it an even more inhospitable place. I believe, childishly perhaps but stubbornly, that the earth will become more hospitable again only through the love that the Jew Paul described to the citizens of Corinth in the 13th chapter of his first letter.” (Letters from Westerbork, p. 36)

Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut

August 16, 1991

When I was 17 years old and a novice in the Oblate novitiate, one Saturday afternoon, while horsing around in the lake with my fellow novices, I almost drowned. I had already gone down twice and was unable to call for help. Only luck and the perceptiveness of a fellow novice prevented my death.

I was pretty shook up. When we returned to the novitiate in the evening, there was letter waiting for me from my mother (who wrote to me every week). It was her usual letter, full of motherly concern and of the various details of our family’s life that week. I was more touched than usual because, as I was reading that letter, I kept thinking how close I had come to never reading it and how my mother and my family would be feeling right now had I drowned.

I re-read that letter recently and it triggered a flood of thoughts and emotions. I am 25 years passed that near fatal day, my mother herself has been dead for 20 years, and the years have changed me. I kept thinking: “Had I died that day, so many years back, what would died?”

I look back now at myself at 17 and see a boy of uncommon naiveté, of much innocence, considerable purity, high intention, deep faith, and, happily, lacking much of the complexity and many of the neuroses that I carry today. Much as I hate to admit it, the boy of 17 was somewhat more hospitable, uncompromised, and innocent than the man of today.

I am enough of the realist to know that this type of comparison is, at a point, false romanticism, the “catcher-in-the-rye” nostalgia of J.D. Salinger. One does not grow to adulthood with the innocence of one’s childhood intact. Real virtue and purity of heart are post, not pre, critical, and the task of living is to achieve adulthood, not to remain ever the puer or the puella. This requires a certain death. The child dies when the adult is born.

And the adult no longer looks nor feels like the child. As adults, all kinds of scars and stretch marks (not to mention the wrinkles, middle-age bulge, and greying) blemish our bodies, while complexity, hurt, and moral failure sully our baptismal robes. Had I died at 17, I would have died less blemished, physically and morally, but I would have died a boy, not man.

Still there is more than romantic sentimentalism in longing for the simplicity and purity of one’s youth, in spite of its naiveté. As we grow more experienced and adult, we lose, in ways more than sexual, progressively our virginity.

I recall a remark by actress, Faye Dunaway, I once read. Commenting on her ups and downs in Hollywood, she said: “I went through the star machine and became urban, sophisticated, neurotic, cold, and all that. I’d gotten very far from my own heart and soul and who I really was: a little girl called Dorothy Faye from the South.” (Maclean’s, Dec. 21/87)

Then there’s the story of Saul who, upon becoming king, was the handsomest, best, most gracious and humble man in Israel, and who slowly and in a way that was imperceptible to himself, filled with a jealousy and bitterness that led him to suicide.

Finally, I there’s the admonition given in Revelation within which God tells us that he likes most everything about us, except that we now, as adults, “have less love in us than when we were young!” (Revelations 2,4)

For good and for bad, we all come a long ways from the little girl or little boy we once were!

J.D. Salinger once wrote a little short story entitled, Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut. It’s the story of 2 women who had been childhood friends and who meet after many years. They spend an afternoon drinking, reminiscing, and crying to each other about broken relationships, frustrations, and wounded lives. Their dialogue is full of bitterness, malicious gossip, and harsh judgment of others, and it betrays the type of street smarts that must have characterized Adam and Eve after they ate the apple and had “their eyes were opened.”

At the end of the afternoon, very drunk and tired, one says to the other: “Remember when we first came to New York, and I had that dress that I used to wear in high school, and I wore it and they laughed at me and said nobody wore a dress like that in New York, and I went home and cried all night … I was a nice girl then, wasn’t I?”

Breaking The Eucharistic Bread

August 11, 1991

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)

A Child and the Kingdom

August 4, 1991

Recently I was with a family I know quite well for a picnic supper. It was a gorgeous summer evening and we were sitting on the grass enjoying sandwiches and cold drinks. The family has a four-year-old daughter and, just after the meal started, she stood directly in front of me and, without speaking, kept smoothing down the dress she was wearing. She said nothing, but she obviously wanted to draw my attention to something. She just kept smiling and smoothing down her dress, but I wasn’t picking up her signal. Finally her older brother said to me: “Look! She wants you to look at her, to see her new dress. She wants you to notice that she is wearing a new dress!”

I looked up. She stood there silent, beaming, proud, healthily exhibiting herself. There was no pretense; she was proud of her new dress and wanted the whole world to see it and to know that she was happy. Beyond her joy, her face and body spoke of innocence, simplicity, purity of heart, and purity of intention. She was a little girl in a new dress, happy in that moment, unashamed to let the world know that she felt good, proud, happy, and beautiful. Her joy was pure and she felt no reason to mask it.

I was moved. Such moments are precious and rare enough. Such sheer delight in creation is also precious and rare. The distractions of the moment soon enough spoiled her pure delight and, not too many minutes later, she was complaining and crying in a childish way, despite her new dress. I too was soon distracted, but the image of her uninhibited and innocent joy has stayed with me.

Driving home afterwards, I thought of Jerome David Salinger’s, The Catcher in the Rye. Salinger, lamenting how growth to adolescent and adulthood destroys the innocence, purity of intention, and naive joy of a child, once had a high fantasy within which he envisaged children playing in a rye field. He, their guardian, watched over them and made sure no one strayed falsely in or out of their field of joy. In his fantasy, they were to remain children always, spared the pain, compromises, pretense, lost innocence, lost honesty, and lost simplicity that make up adult life. These children, playing in the rye field, would always remain innocent, pure, and joyful, even if the price of that was isolation and naiveté.

There is enough of a romantic and nostalgic streak in me to, like Salinger, also want to be a catcher in the rye. Wouldn’t it be nice, if somehow we could block out what’s ugly and impure in life so that children would go through life uncompromised and uncontaminated, able always, like this four-year-old girl, to experience pure delight and express it so honestly and without shame?

That’s unreal though, and children, like adults, also have their selfishness, their real cruelty, and their dishonest masks. Their field of play has its own little brutalities. Moreover, salvation does not lie in playing naively, sheltered in the deathless and yet uncompromised field of childhood. But this child’s delight in her new dress did speak of salvation because salvation lies, Jesus assures us, in having the heart of a child and, in that instant when this little girl smoothed down her dress, I saw what that looks like.

When we pray the Lord’s Prayer and say: “Your kingdom come”, we are praying for salvation. What really are we praying for?

Julian of Norwich once said that, when the kingdom comes, “all will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of being will be well.” For a few seconds that summer night on our picnic grass, in one little girl’s heart, “all was well and all manner of being was well.” Innocence, honesty, healthy exhibitionism, beauty, joy and delight in creation, deathlessness, the healthy carelessness of the lilies of the field, lack of pretense, and purity of heart came together. Somebody was happy, content, admired, grateful, and delighting in herself and the rest of creation. For just a few seconds, I saw what heaven is going to look like … and I saw what kind of vulnerability, self forgetfulness, innocence, openness, and joy is needed for us to let heaven happen.

When, in all the heartaches and headaches that constitute our normal lives, we pray: Your kingdom come, this is what we are praying for, the capacity to, like this child, stand before each completely unmasked and, in purity of heart, take sheer delight in the goodness of God, ourselves, and creation.

Sexuality and Honesty

July 31, 1991

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.

Finding Rest For Our Souls

July 21, 1991

Several years ago, Yale philosopher, Nicholas Wolterstorff, wrote a book entitled, Lament for a Son. It’s a chronicle of his struggles to come to grips with the death of his 25 year old son, Eric, who died in a mountain climbing accident.

His approach is like Job’s. He keeps asking: “Why? Why was a young person with such potential so tragically struck down? How does one make sense of a life that ends before it’s given a chance to really achieve anything?”

Assessing Eric’s untimely death, he comments: “His project was never finished. His notes lie mute in boxes. … Does that matter? Most human beings do not contribute to the cultural deposit of humanity. They live out lives of routine as farmers, as housewives, as factory workers, as husbands, as mothers, as fathers; after two or three generations the earth knows of them no more. Others make creative additions to culture, things that get passed on through time. Would Eric’s project have been such an addition? I do not know. Does it matter? Is his death to be lamented more than the death of another twenty five year old who spent his life in routine but through that routine loved those he knew, trusted God, and cherished the earth? What is it that we carry into God’s abiding kingdom? Is it only love and faith and trust? Or is it culture too? I lament all that might have been, and now well never be.” (Lament for a Son, pp. 21-22)

Wolterstorff makes this lament in the face of the death of his young son. But death takes many forms and, when our youthful day dreams die, we also ask the question: “Does it matter?”

Does it matter that, for virtually all of us, our notes written and unwritten, will lie mute in boxes? Does it matter that our life stories, with all their unique and precious insights, will not interest anyone, nor indeed even be known, after we die? Does it matter that, as Thoreau says, when we reach middle age we are forced into the kind of realism that salvages a woodshed from the materials we once gathered in hopes of building a bridge to the moon, or a palace or a temple?

These are painful questions and we do not do anyone a favour if we simplistically dismiss them with the suggestion that they should not arise in someone who prays and is humble. To fear living and dying in obscurity is not a sign of megalomania. The longing to leave a mark, to be significant, to have everyone in the whole world, now and in the future, know and appreciate us, is part of the ache for immortality. That ache, whether we admit it or not, is the drive behind much of what we do.

It’s also behind a lot of our restlessness. Socrates once said that we come into life possessed by a divine madness which pushes us to try to recover wholeness by embracing another, by trying to perpetuate our seed, and by trying to get others to remember our deeds. Plato and Aquinas agreed. Popular philosophies of self-development, despite their habitually excessive narcissistic quality, say the same thing. They tell us that something inside of us needs “to plant a tree, have a child and write a book!”

But we don’t need anyone to tell us this. The ache for immortality is part of our hard wiring, an instinct nearly synonymous with our drive for life itself. We are compulsively driven to leave something behind which will tell future generations that we were significant. Only in a true saint, in someone whose faith in God is so strong that he or she knows and trusts that the only mark (whether one is speaking of love or cultural achievement) which truly remains is the hidden mark one makes in the body of Christ, is this ache transformed so that it no longer restlessly haunts our every action. Those of us who aren’t saints play out and act out the same familiar tapes and scripts. We compulsively plant trees, have children, and write books because we are in the business of trying to make some immortality for ourselves.

When Christ says: “Come to me all you who labour and are heavy burdened, and I will give you rest,” the rest of which he speaks is not a rest that we can give ourselves through a good night’s sleep or a good vacation. It’s a much deep rest, a rest for the soul, a rest from all the compulsive restlessness that emanates from our congenital propensity to achieve that special something that would forever leave a mark.

Rhetoric Which Divides Community

July 13, 1991

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.”