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.”

Infantile Grandiosity and the Image of God

July 8, 1991

For nearly 200 years the intellectual world has not been kind to believers. Beginning with the Enlightenment, which debunked religious authority as a criterion for judgment, the intellectual world has to a large part propounded the idea that religion is false and that it impoverishes the human spirit.

For Nietzsche, religion was a blindness; for Feuerbach, an alienation of humanity from itself; for Marx, an opium for the masses; and for Freud, a psychic displacement. In each case, religion is something backward, a harmful naiveté, something that keeps humanity from being what it should be. In each case, too, there is the call to have the courage to move beyond religion.

Many great writers, artists, and scientists have, in the past 200 years, supported that general idea. In the popular mindset too there is present the idea, never far from the surface, that religion and churchgoing are a naiveté, a backwardness, a timidity that would not stand up to courageous scrutiny. The idea is that religion, in the end, is something that keeps people down and blocks them from being fully creative and from fully enjoying life. The church, with its dogmas and nuns, preaching poverty, chastity, and obedience – when what brings happiness is affluence, sex, and freedom!

Today the intellectual world is softening on that. Scientific circles, beginning with Einstein and running through Stephen Hawking, are much less arrogant and more open to the question of God. Great anthropologists, like Mircea Eliade and Victor Turner, are telling us that, to order our lives in a meaningful way, we must either believe in a God or in some myth that functionally does what religion does.

And the circles of psychology that follow Karl Jung are looking at the adult child of the enlightenment and suggesting that most of what is wrong with that child has to do with lack of proper religion. In their perspective, we are not born simple cameras with rationality and emotion. We are born driven beings, with savage propensities which make us, many times, anything but rational because we are hard-wired to certain archetypes (energy configurations, instinctual patterns, a collective unconscious) which fundamentally help shape how we think, feel, and judge, whether we are conscious of this or not. We are anything but neutral, urbane, sophisticates, acting out of a certain enlightened rationality.

Moreover, and this is key in their insight, at the center of these archetypes, as the source of them all, lies the sense that we are a god or goddess, a divine king or queen. The ultimate source of energy for every person is a sense of grandiosity. In Christianity, we’ve always known this. We are the Imago Deo, the image of God. This grandiosity, the Jungians now assure us, cannot be denied, outgrown, moved beyond by therapy, or even transformed. It can only be admitted to and creatively contained. For them, there are only two kinds of people in this world, those who admit their infantile grandiosity and those who don’t!

They go on to say that, in the end, the idea of the enlightenment and of Nietzsche, Feuerbach, Marx, and Freud, the idea that humanity is better off without God, is not only wrong, but dangerous. Unless our innate grandiosity is contained through some form of obedience to a god beyond the individual ego and through an agenda that is genuinely transpersonal, it leads to self-destruction (and often the destruction of others too). How? Because when we try to live with our grandiosity without a proper relationship to something beyond ourselves we inflate or go crazy – or both. So much for the essence of the enlightenment!

The history of secularity during the last 200 years, I submit, provides more than enough evidence for the hypothesis that the human person without God or without some god myth is a menace towards himself or herself and towards others. When one does not worship a God on a throne or the Christ child in the manger, he or she soon enough sets self upon that throne or highchair and demands worship. We either deal religiously or in some other ritual way with the image of God inside of us or, as is so prevalent today, we will be dealing with infantile grandiosity and the destructive and addictive behaviors and depressions that stem from it.

The concept of infantile grandiosity sheds light on many things, not the least of which are our pathological complexities – our neuroses, psychoses, grandiose longings, perpetual dissatisfaction, chronic depression, and our yearning to be, in the end, worshipped. It also explains why there is a clear and unalterable need in our lives for God, religion, and obedience.

The Eucharist as Sacrament of Reconciliation

June 10, 1991

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.

Criticism

June 8, 1991

There’s confusion today, among conservatives and liberals alike, about what it means to be critical.

The common notion is that a critic debunks the inflated, exposes the rotten, and challenges the naive and superficial.

There’s truth in that, though, of itself, this notion leaves much room for each of us, whether liberal or conservative, to do this debunking according to our own selective ideologies and to simplistically believe that everything we don’t like should be changed in the name of truth.

What does it mean to be critical? The word critical comes from the Greek word for judge, kritus. A judge, or critic, is one who hears evidence and tries, on the basis of that evidence, to make a judgment concerning guilt or innocence.

The primary part of this role is not debunking, bashing or challenging that status quo, but of exposing the truth, irrespective of where it might lie.

This means that a critic is a person who agitates for greater objectivity, depth, wholeness and aesthetics. He or she is iconoclastic. The critic smashes idols.

This, however, is a very difficult role and is rarely done well. Too many things conspire against true criticism.

In the writings of some of the great intellectuals of recent times, Einstein, Heisenberg, Durkheim, Freud, Jung, Lonergan, Habbermas, in the more popular insights provided by such things as the Enneogram and Myers-Briggs, and in the psychology surrounding dysfunctionality and co-dependency, we see how complex is the structure of human thought and feeling.

The insights which this wide variety of individuals and schools of thought provide might aptly be called meta-criticism for they show us how virtually all of our judgments are shaped and colored by limited perspective, temperament, ideology, self-interest, and sociological and psychological conditioning… not even to mention bad eyesight and intellectual density!

It is not easy to criticize something on any basis beyond our own self-interest and most criticism is, as somebody once put it, a form of autobiography. Given all that, it’s valid to ask whether it’s even possible to ever think a truly critical thought.

Perhaps that’s too radical a skepticism, given that there is within human conscience a critical faculty that has a grounding in something beyond temperament and historical conditioning. Be that as it may.

Minimally, what this does suggest is that we become more humble, careful, and self-critical in what we consider to be critical thought. Our criticism must be more reflective and based upon much more than ideology and our private likes and dislikes.

True Christian criticism must start where all critical thought must begin today, namely, with the admission that we, like everyone else, are far from objective. All of us think and feel through a certain symbolic system, a pre-ontology, a bias.

But this need not make us skeptical about attaining the truth. The task of being critical is not to rid oneself of all bias (an impossibility, even if it were desirable). The task of true critical thought is to have the right bias, to think and feel through the correct software. But what is the correct bias? What constitutes a good Christian software? What kind of thinking constitutes true criticism?

Jesus tells us that “the pure of heart will see God… and will see straight!” But what constitutes this purity of heart?

Hugo of St. Victor answered by saying: “Love is the eye!” When we are properly in love we see things the way God sees them. This is the genuinely critical eye! When we see things with proper compassion then, and only then, are we good judges, kritus, in the best sense.

John of the Cross says much the same thing when he suggests that we have purity of heart when our motivation is that of Christ, when our reasons for interacting with others and the world issue from a real desire to help bring about a permanent community of life among all people and all things.

When we think and feel like that, as Christ did, then our thoughts and actions are genuinely critical and we bash away at the status quo or try to conserve it on the basis of whether it is aiding or hindering this community of life—and not on the basis of temperament, personal neuroses, or the urge (that issues from the wounded narcissism in the little boy or little girl in each of us) to “kill the king.”

True criticism is, unlike so much thought and action which postures as criticism today, first of all, marked by a deep compassion. Beyond this, it is recognized by its openness, its respect for those with whom it disagrees, its self-criticism and its healthy sense of the importance of aesthetics and enjoyment.

True Christian criticism does not radiate panic, pompousness and cynicism, but rather charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, longsuffering, fidelity, faith, mildness and chastity—and humor.

How Not To Commit The Original Sin

May 30, 1991

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.

A Hidden Life

May 27, 1991

Some years ago, while, directing a retreat, a woman shared with me this story: She was a person very admired and respected within her family and circle of friends.

From all appearances, when looking at her, the outside world saw the devoted mother, the faithful wife, the dedicated Christian, the concerned citizen, the person who had her life together.

That, however, was not the full picture.

Beneath that surface of calm, stability and fidelity, she dealt with an emotional and sexual complexity that had led her, many times in her youth and several times in her more recent past, to behavior that would, she felt, surprise and scandalize, if they ever found out, her circle of family and friends who saw her as so single-minded, devoted and faithful. She was a complex person; partly grace incarnate, partly dark history with skeletons in her closet. She shared with me some thoughts about her “hidden life,” thoughts which merit a wide audience:

“Often I feel like a hypocrite, I’m so admired and, yet, there is this other side of me. I worry about what people would think, if they really knew everything about me.

“I’ve always been honest in Confession, I take consolation in that at least, but what really scares me is the passage where Jesus says, ‘Nothing that is hidden now will not be revealed.’ When I hear that, I always imagine myself standing naked, exposed, before everyone, an object of surprise and disappointment.

“But something came to me recently, reflecting on all of this, that has helped me a great deal, not so much to rationalize my own betrayals, but to live with a lot less self-pity and anger in my life. What I came to was this…

“I realized that in my life there are not only bad things that are hidden, but many good things too. If all of my darkest moments and thoughts would ever be fully exposed, those who knew me would be, I think, genuinely shocked.

“Conversely, though, if all the hidden acts of virtue, dedication, duty, kindness and charity that I have ever done (which are also hidden …and taken for-granted, not rewarded, nor properly recognized) were exposed and brought.to full light, I think, my family and circles of friends would also be genuinely shocked and surprised.

“This has helped me many ways: First, because I believe Christ’s words that ‘everything now hidden will one day be revealed,’ I try to do a lot of good things quietly, in a hidden way, without needing to be recognized or thanked for them.

“Since I have a certain hidden dark life, I want too to have a certain hidden grace life. When the great book is opened and all is revealed about me—well, there will be some surprisingly pleasant shocks as well!

“More importantly though, this has helped me eliminate much self-pity from my life. I have always been tempted towards self-pity and resentment because those closest to me rarely notice what I do for them. Most often, what I do (in general and for them in particular) goes unnoticed, unappreciated and is taken for granted.

“Worse yet, sometimes, other people take the credit for something I did. This used to make me want to scream. Now I realize that, if so much of my sin is to remain hidden, isn’t it right and fair that so much of my virtue should also remain hidden and unexposed.

“There’s something not right in wanting all our virtues and good deed trumpeted publicly and all our sin to remain hidden. Realizing that ‘everything that is now hidden will one day be brought to full light’ has helped me live with a lot less self-pity and resentment.

“I can also forgive others more easily because now I no longer need, first, to have every injustice that was done to me by them fully exposed and admitted. It doesn’t matter so much to me any more whether someone is getting away with something… since I am getting away with a lot! Injustices done to me may also lie hidden.”

There is much practical spiritual wisdom in this simple theology of the hidden life. We all have our dark side even as we have our hidden virtues.

Daily we get away with murder, even as nobody notices the many ways that cost is painfully exacted from us as we live lives of quiet heroism. God knows—and, in God’s book, the murder is forgiven and redeemed, even as the hundredfold reward is being prepared for our hidden sacrifices. Knowing this should, as this woman rightly observes, lead to a lot less self-pity.

Healthy and Unhealthy Fear of Hell

May 26, 1991

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.

Moral Loneliness

May 6, 1991

Some years ago, I wrote a book within which I suggested that there are four basic kinds of human loneliness: alienation, restlessness, rootlessness, and psychological depression. Were I to write such a book today, I would add another kind: moral loneliness.

As human beings, we are born with deep and multifarious longings. There’s a fire inside of us that aches insatiably. At every level, body, psyche, soul, we feel our un-wholeness and are restlessly driven to seek consummation with others and the world beyond us. We never quite overcome this in this life, but are always somewhat alone, restless, rootless, and depressed. Like Adam before the creation of Eve, we survey what is around us and long for something that will take away our aloneness. This constitutes the fundamental dis-ease of the human person.

Sometimes this longing is more inchoate and we are not clear what precisely we are lonely for. At other times our aching is very focused and we are so obsessed with a certain person that we lose all emotional freedom. Sometimes we are lonely in both ways, inchoately and compulsively, but always we are lonely.

When we examine loneliness within our current culture, it is all too easy to conclude that, ultimately, we are lonely for sexual union. For reasons too complex to examine here, our culture has tied the final solution for loneliness to romantic sexuality. This is so true that, today, the very expression “lover” connotes a sexual partner. In our culture the common impression is that we will be lonely until we have the right romantic sexual partner and, as a corollary, it follows that the right sexual partner will be a panacea for our loneliness.

There is some truth in all of that, despite its one-sidedness. Sexual union, in its truer forms, is indeed the “one-flesh” consummation decreed by the Creator after the condemnation of loneliness “it is not good for the man to be alone.” Outside of sexual union, one is, in the end, always somewhat alone, single, separate, cut off, a minority of one.

However, sexual union itself, as the history of human sexual experience reveals, is no guarantee of a consummation that alleviates aloneness. Ultimately, we are lonely at levels that sex alone cannot get at. Our deepest aloneness is moral. Where we feel most alone is, precisely, in the deepest part of our being, our moral soul, the place where we feel most strongly about the right and wrong of things and where what is most precious to us is cherished, guarded, and feels violated when it is attacked. Not often does anyone penetrate that dwelling. Why? Because where what is most precious lies is also where we are the most vulnerable to violation. We are, and rightly so, deeply cautious about whom we admit to the room wherein lives what is most precious.

Most often, in that house, we are alone. A fierce loneliness results – a moral loneliness. More deeply than we long for a sexual partner, we long for moral affinity, for someone to visit us in that deep part of us where all that is most precious to us is cherished and guarded. Our deepest longing is for a partner to sleep with morally, a kindred spirit, a soul mate in the truest meaning of that phrase.

Great friendships and great marriages, invariably, have this at their root, deep moral affinity. The persons in these relationships are “lovers” in the true sense because they sleep with each other at that deep level, irrespective of whether or not there is sexual union. At the level of feeling, this type of love is experienced as a certain “coming home”. Sometimes it is surrounded by romantic feelings and sexual attraction and sometimes it isn’t. Always though there is the sense that the other is a kindred spirit whose affinity with you is founded upon valuing most preciously what you value most preciously. You feel less alone because, in that place where you cherish and guard all that is most precious to you, you know that you are no longer a minority of one. Like Adam looking at Eve, you have now found someone of whom you can truly say: “At last, flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone!”

Therese of Lisieux suggests that, as humans, we are “exiles of the heart” and we must overcome this through mysticism, that is, precisely by moral communion with each other through sleeping with each other in charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, longsuffering, faith, fidelity, mildness, and chastity. A culture which does not value sufficiently non-genital love because it is considered “just platonic” might well examine what it means to be morally lonely … and what, in our loneliness, we are really looking for.