In a poem entitled, Is/Not, Margaret Atwood suggests that when a love grows numb, this is where we find ourselves:

We’re stuck here
on this side of the border
in this country of thumbed streets and stale buildings

where there is nothing spectacular to see
and the weather is ordinary

where love occurs in its pure form only
on the cheaper of the souvenirs

Love can grow numb between two people, just as it can within a whole culture. And that has happened in our culture, at least to a large part. The excitement that once guided our eyes has given way to a certain numbness and resignation. We no longer stand before life with much freshness. We have seen what it has to offer and have succumbed to a certain resignation: That’s all there is, and it’s not that great!  All we can try for now is more of the same, with the misguided hope that if we keep increasing the dosage the payoff will be better.

They talk of old souls, but old souls are actually young at heart. We’re the opposite, young souls no longer young at heart. Wonder has left the building.

What’s at the root of this? What has deprived us of wonder? Familiarity and its children: sophistication, intellectual pride, disappointment, boredom, and contempt. Familiarity does breed contempt, and contempt is the antithesis of the two things needed to stand before the world in wonder: reverence and respect.

G.K. Chesterton once suggested that familiarity is the greatest of all illusions. Elizabeth Barrett Browning gives poetic expression to this: Earth’s crammed with heaven. And every common bush afire with God. But only he who sees, takes off his shoes. The rest sit round and pluck blackberries and daub their natural faces unaware. That aptly describes the illusion of familiarity, plucking berries while carelessly stroking our faces, unaware that we are in the presence of the holy. Familiarity renders all things common.

What’s the answer? How do we recover our sense of wonder? How do we begin again to see divine fire inside ordinary life?  Chesterton suggests that the secret to recovering wonder and seeing divine fire in the ordinary is to learn to look at things familiar until they look unfamiliar again. Biblically, that’s what God asks of Moses when Moses sees a burning bush in the desert and approaches its fire out of curiosity. God says to him, take off your shoes, the ground you are standing on is holy ground.

That single line, that singular invitation, is the deep secret to recover our sense of wonder whenever we find ourselves, as Atwood describes, stuck on this side of the border, in thumbed streets and stale buildings, with nothing spectacular to see, ordinary weather, and love seemingly cheapened everywhere.

One of my professors in graduate school occasionally offered us this little counsel: If you ask a naïve child, do you believe in Santa and the Easter Bunny, he will say yes. If you ask a bright child the same question, he will say no. But if you ask yet still a brighter child that question, he will smile and say yes.

Our sense of wonder is predicated initially on the naivete of being a child, of not yet being unhealthily familiar with the world. 0ur eyes then are still open to marvel at the newness of things. That changes of course as we grow, experience things, and learn. Soon enough we learn the truth about Santa and the Easter Bunny and with that, all too easily, comes the death of wonder and the familiarity that breeds contempt. This is a disillusionment which, while a normal transitional phase in life, is not meant to be a place in which we stay. The task of adulthood is to regain our sense of wonder and begin again, for very different reasons, to believe in the reality of Santa and the Easter Bunny. We need to bring wonder back into the building.

I once heard a wise man share this vignette: Imagine a two-year-old child who asks you, “where does the sun go at night?” For a child that young, don’t pull out a globe or a book and try to explain how the solar system works. Just tell the child the sun is tired and is taking a sleep behind the barn. However, when the child is six or seven years old, don’t try that anymore. Then, it’s time to pull out books and explain the solar system. After that, when the child is in high school or college, it’s time to pull out Steven Hawking, Brian Swimme, and astrophysicists, and talk about the origins and make-up of the universe. Finally, when the person is eighty years old, it’s enough again to say, “the sun is tired and is taking a sleep behind the barn.”

We have grown too familiar with sunsets! Wonder can make the familiar unfamiliar again.

In much of the secularized world, we live in a climate that is somewhat anti-ecclesial and anti-clerical. It’s quite fashionable today to bash the churches, be they Roman Catholic, Protestant, or Evangelical. This is often done in the name of being open-minded and enlightened, and it’s the one bias that’s intellectually sanctioned. Say something derogatory about any other group in society, and you will be brought to account; say something disparaging about the church and there are no such consequences.

What’s the proper response?  While it’s easy to take offense at this, we must be careful not to overreact because, as a church, we should not be fundamentally threatened by this. Why?

First, because a certain amount of this criticism is good and helpful. Truth be told, we have some very real faults. All atheism is a parasite feeding off bad religion. Our critics feed off our faults and we can be grateful that our faults are being pointed out to us – even if sometimes over-generously. Criticism of the church is healthily humbling us and pushing us toward a more courageous internal purification. Besides, for too long we have enjoyed a situation of privilege, never a good thing for the church. We generally live healthier as Christians in a time of dis-privilege than in a time of privilege, even if it isn’t as pleasant. Moreover, there are some important things at stake here.

We must be careful not to overreact to the present anti-ecclesial climate because this can lead to an over-defensiveness and put us in an unhealthy adversarial position vis-à-vis the culture, and that’s not where the gospel asks us to be. Rather our task is to absorb this criticism, painful though it is, gently point to its unfairness, and resist the temptation to be defensive. Why? Why not aggressively defend ourselves?

Because we are strong enough not to, and that’s reason enough. We can withstand this without having to become hard and defensive. Current criticism of the church notwithstanding, the church is not about to go under or away any time soon. We are two and a half billion Christians in the world, stand within a two-thousand-year-old tradition, have among ourselves a universally accepted scripture, have two thousand years of doctrinal entrenchment and refinement, have massive centuries-old institutions, are embedded in the very roots of Western culture and technology, constitute perhaps the biggest multinational group in the world, and are growing in numbers worldwide. We are hardly a reed shaking in the wind, reeling vulnerably, a ship about to go under. We are strong, stable, blessed by God, an Elder in the culture, and because of this we owe it to the culture to model maturity and understanding.

Beyond that, even more important, is the fact that we have Christ’s promise to be with us, and the reality of the resurrection to sustain us. Given all this, I think it’s fair to say that we can absorb a fair amount of criticism without fear of losing our identity. Moreover, we must not let this criticism make us lose sight of why we exist in the first place.

The church exists not for its own sake or to ensure its own survival, but for the sake of the world. We can easily forget this and lose sight of what the gospel asks of us. For example, compare these two responses: At a press conference, Cardinal Basil Hume was once asked what he considered the foremost task facing the church today. He replied simply: “To need to try to save this planet.” Compare that response with that of another cardinal who, in a recent radio interview, was asked the same question (What is the foremost task facing the church today?) and replied, “To defend the faith.” Who’s right?

Everything about Jesus suggests that Hume’s view is closer to the gospel than the other. When Jesus says, “My flesh is food for the life of the world”, he is affirming clearly that the primary task of the church is not to defend itself, or ensure its continuity, or protect itself from being crushed by the world. The church exists for the sake of the world, not for its own sake. That’s why there is such a rich symbolism in the fact that immediately after Jesus was born, he was laid in a trough in a stable, a place where animals come to eat; and it’s why he gives himself up on a table in the Eucharist, to be eaten. Being eaten up by the world is largely what Jesus is about, namely, risking vulnerability over safety and trust over defensiveness. At the very heart of the Gospel lies a call to risk beyond defensiveness and to absorb unjust criticism without fighting back: “Forgive them, they know not what they do!”

The church is meant to give itself over as food for the world. Like all living bodies it needs sometimes to protect itself – but never at the cost of losing its very reason for being here.

Inside the rite for Christian baptism there’s a little ritual that is at once both touching and unrealistic. At one point in the baptismal rite the child is clothed in a white garment symbolizing innocence and purity. The priest or minister officiating says these words: “Receive this baptismal garment and bring it unstained to the judgment seat of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

As touching as it is to say those words to an innocent baby, one cannot help but think that unless this child dies in childhood, this is an impossible task. Our baptismal robes inevitably take some stains. Adult life sees to that. No one goes through life without losing the innocence of a baby.

But that being admitted, innocence still remains an ideal to be fostered and continually recovered. And that needs some defense today because innocence and its attendants, purity, and chastity, have fallen on hard times in a world that tends to value sophistication above all else and which generally sees innocence as naivete and prudery.

There’s a long history to this. For centuries, the churches held up innocence, purity, and chastity as salient virtues within Christian discipleship and within life in general. However, from the 17^th century, right down to our own time, major thinkers have tried to turn this on its head, suggesting that these (so-called) virtues are in fact the antithesis of virtue. For them, innocence and its counterparts, purity, and chastity, are fraudulent ideals, fantasies of the timid, symptoms of an unconscious hostility towards life. Nietzsche, for example, once wrote: “The church combats the passions with excision, in every sense of the word: its practice, its cure, is castration.” Freud suggested that in the ideals of innocence, purity, and chastity there is more than a trace of narcissism, frigid arrogance, and a fantasy of invulnerability. According to these (Enlightenment) thinkers, in idealizing innocence, purity, and chastity, humankind has agreed to make itself unhappy in that the medicine we take to purify our souls lets in the moral toxins of self-righteousness, arrogance, and insensitivity, a mischief that makes lust look benign.

Our culture, minus some of the harsh rhetoric, essentially buys in to this. There are of course a few salient exceptions within some of our churches, but our cultural ethos pretty much identifies innocence, purity, and chastity with timidity, naivete, and fundamentalism.

Where to go with all of this? Well, one isn’t quite sure where to look.

Conservatives, in their very makeup, tend to fear the breaking of taboos, not least those surrounding innocence, purity, and chastity. This has a healthy intent. This is J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye) looking at innocent young children playing and wishing they would never grow up but could always remain this innocent and joyful. Conservatives fear any kind of sophistication that destroys innocence. That’s well intended but unrealistic. We need to grow up and with that comes complexity, sophistication, mess, and stains on the purity of our baptismal robes. God did not intend for us to be children forever playing in innocence in a rye field.

Liberals have a different genetic make-up, but struggle equally (just differently) with innocence, purity, and chastity. They are less fearful about breaking taboos. For them, boundaries are meant to be stretched and most times broken, and innocence is a phase you pass through and outgrow (like belief in Santa and the Easter Bunny). Indeed, for liberals, real self-actualization begins with owning your complexity, recognizing its goodness, and accepting that complexity and lost innocence is in fact what opens us up for deeper meaning. Experience brings knowledge. When Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, their eyes were opened, not closed. To the liberal eye, naivete is not a virtue, sophistication is. Innocence is judged as unrealistic, purity as sexual timidity, and chastity as religious fundamentalism.

Both these views, conservative and liberal, wave some healthy warning flags. The conservative flag of caution can help save us from many self-destructive behaviors, while the liberal flag inviting us to more fearlessness can help save us from much unhealthy timidity and naivete. However, each needs to learn from the other. Conservatives need to learn that God did not intend for us to make an idol out of the innocence and the naivete of a child. We are meant to learn, to grow, and to become sophisticated beyond first naivete. But liberals need to learn that sophistication, like innocence itself, is not an end in itself, but a phase through which one grows.

The renowned contemporary philosopher Paul Ricoeur hints at something beyond both. He asserts that growth to final maturity goes through stages. We are meant to move from the naivete of a child, through the lost innocence, messy and often cynical sophistication of adulthood, towards a “second naivete”, a post-sophistication, a second innocence, a childlikeness which is not childish, a simplicity that is not simplistic.

In this second naivete, our baptismal robes will emerge again unstained – washed clean in the blood of a new innocence.

In the musical Les Miserables, there’s a particularly haunting song, sung by a dying woman (Fantine) who has been crushed by virtually every unfairness that life can deal a person. Abandoned by her husband, sexually harassed by her employer, caught in abject poverty, physically ill and dying, even as her main anxiety is about what will happen to her young daughter after she dies, she offers this lament. Many of us, I suspect, are familiar with these words:

But there are dreams that cannot be
And there are storms we cannot weather
I had a dream my life would be
So much different from this hell I’m living
So different now from what it seemed
Now life has killed
The dream I dreamed.

Recently while giving an interview on suicide, I was asked whether I considered suicide an act of despair. I answered unequivocally in the negative, at least for most suicides, and raised this question in return: What really is despair?What does it mean to despair?

Despair comes from the Latin word meaning “to be without hope.” Dictionaries generally define despair as a verb which means to abandon hope or to lose heart in the face of a difficult situation. I have no difficulty with that definition. What I have difficulty with and what I submit needs to be radically re-examined is how this has been understood both in our churches and in society, namely, as the ultimate moral and religious failure, the ultimate sin against God and against ourselves. Despair has all too often been understood as the one unforgivable sin, the absolute worst state within which one could die. In brief, despair has been understood as the worst single thing a person could do.

This, I believe, needs a second look, both in terms of how we understand our human condition and especially in how we understand God. When someone is so crushed in spirit by circumstance, unfairness, cruelty, sickness, pain, accident, or by another person’s sin so as to be unable for find any seeds of hope inside himself or herself, is this really a moral choice? Is this a moral failure? Is this really the worst of all sins, the ultimate unforgivable blasphemy? Sadly, that has often been our view.

There’s an old saying that God doesn’t send us more than we can handle. I accept that. God never sends us more than we can handle, but circumstance, accident, oppression, and nature sometimes do. There’s a healthy iconoclasm in the title of Kate Bowler’s book, Everything Happens For a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved. We must be careful how we understand pious expressions such as, God never sends us more than we can handle.

The Psalms tell us that God is particularly close to those who are crushed in spirit and that God will save them. Jesus makes this central to his teaching and ministry. Not only does he have a special affection for those who are broken in spirit, he identifies his presence with their brokenness (Matthew 25) and assures us that they will enter the Kingdom of Heaven before the rich, the strong, and the powerful. For Jesus, the broken are God’s specially loved little ones.

Given that truth, do we really believe that God will send someone to hell who dies crushed in spirit, seemingly without hope? Do we really believe that God would send Fantine to hell? What kind of God would do this? What kind of God would look at a person so crushed in life so as to lose all hope and see this as the ultimate insult to his love and mercy? What kind of God would look at a person crushed in spirit and see him or her as blaspheming the human condition? Certainly not the God that Jesus taught us to believe in.

The same holds true for how we need to look at this from the perspective of human understanding and empathy. What kind of person looks upon someone else’s brokenness and sees terrible sin and blasphemy? What kind of person places moral blame on someone who through a series of tragic circumstances lies dying in a sea of disappointment, pain, and broken dreams? What kind of person would watch Les Miserables and suspect that Fantine went to hell?

In Mark’s Gospel, just before he dies on the cross, Jesus cries out, My God, My God, why have you forsaken me? Then he hands over his spirit to his Father. In our classic understanding of this text, we generally explain what happened there in this way. Jesus was tempted towards despair, but he found the strength to resist and instead, in hope, surrendered himself to God’s mercy. I suspect that in the end this is what most people who die (seemingly having given up hope) also do, that is, crushed in spirit, they surrender to the unknown – which is God’s embrace.

We need to be far more understanding in the judgments we make vis-a-vis despair. There are storms we cannot weather!

The earth was dark twice. Once at the original creation before God first created light. But later there was an even deeper darkness, on Good Friday, between the 6^th and 9^th hour, when we were crucifying God, and as Jesus dying on the cross cried out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me!”. Utter darkness. In response to that, God created the most staggering light of all – the resurrection.

It is interesting to look at how scripture describes the creation of original light. The Bible opens with these words: “In the beginning God created heaven and earth. Now the earth was a formless void and God breathed over the waters. God said, ‘Let there be light’ and there was light.” A combination of God’s breath and God’s word produced the first light. The ancients identified God’s presence very much with light. For them, God was the antithesis of all darkness and, indeed, the symbol of God’s fidelity was the rainbow, namely, refracted light, light broken open to reveal its spectacular inner beauty.

But it got dark a second time! The Gospels tell us that as Jesus hung on the cross, though it was midday, darkness beset the whole land for three hours. We don’t know exactly what occurred here historically. Was the entire earth plunged into darkness? Perhaps. After all, the earth was crucifying God, and God is light! Irrespective of how literally or not we take this, what happened on Good Friday triggered a different kind of darkness, a moral one – the darkness of godlessness, hatred, paranoia, fear, misguided religion, cruelty, idolatry, ideology, and violence. This is the most blinding darkness of all.

What was God’s response? God’s response to the darkness of Good Friday was to say a second time, Let there be light! The resurrection of Jesus is that new light, one which at the end of the day eclipses all other lights.

It is interesting to compare how scripture describes God creating the new light of the resurrection with how God created the original light at the origins of creation. The Gospel of John has a wonderfully revealing passage that describes Jesus’ first appearance to the whole community after his resurrection. It tells us that on the evening of Easter Sunday the disciples (representing here the church) were gathered in a room with the doors locked because of fear. Jesus comes to them, passing right through their locked doors, and stands in the middle of their huddled fearful circle and says to them, “Peace be with you!” And after saying this, he breathes on them and says: “Receive the Holy Spirit.”

Note the parallels to the original creation story. For the writer of John’s Gospel, this huddling in fear behind locked doors is the darkness of Good Friday, a moral “formless void”. And Jesus brings light to that darkness in the same way light was brought to the original creation, through God’s word and God’s breath. Jesus’ words, “Peace be with you!” are the resurrected Jesus’ way of saying, “Let there be light!” Then, just as at the original creation God’s breath begins to order the physical chaos, Jesus’ breath, the Holy Spirit, begins to order the moral chaos, continually turning darkness into light – hatred into love, bitterness into graciousness, fear into trust, false religion into true worship, ideology into truth, and vengeance into forgiveness.

The staggering new light that Jesus brings into our world in the resurrection is also one of the things that our Christian creed refers to in its stunning phrase that, in the darkness of Good Friday, Jesus “descended into hell.” What’s meant by this? Into what hell did he descend? Simply put, the new light of the resurrection (unlike natural light that can be blocked out) can go through every locked door, every blocked entrance, every impenetrable cell, every circle of hatred, every suicidal depression, every paralyzing anger, every kind of darkness of the soul, and even through sin itself, and breathe out peace. This light can penetrate into hell itself.

Good Friday was bad long before it was good. We crucified God and plunged the world into darkness at midday. But God created light a second time, a light that cannot be extinguished even if we crucify God – and we have never really stopped doing that! Good Friday still happens every day. But, beyond wishful thinking and natural optimism, we live in hope because we now know God’s response to any moral darkness, God can generate, resurrection, the creation of new light, life beyond death.

The renowned mystic Julian of Norwich coined the famous phrase: In the end, all will be well, and all will be well, and every manner of being will be well. To which Oscar Wilde added, And if it isn’t well, then it is still not the end. The resurrection of Jesus has brought a new light into the world, one that proclaims against all counter claims that light still triumphs over darkness, love over hatred, order over chaos, and heaven over hell.

Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. These words of Jesus apply not just to those who are ordained to ministry and administer the Sacrament of Reconciliation, but to everyone inside the body of Christ. All of us have the power to bind and to loose.

What is this power? How do we bind and loose each other on earth in a way that engages heaven?

One part of this allows for some easier explanation. Here’s an example:  If you are a member of the Body of Christ and you forgive someone, Christ forgives that person and he or she is loosed from sin. Likewise, if you, as part of the Body of Christ, love someone and remain connected to him or her, that person is connected to the Body of Christ and through you (biblically) touches the hem of Christ’s garment, even if he or she is not explicitly confessing that. That is one of the incredible gifts given us in the incarnation.

But what about the reverse? Suppose I refuse to forgive someone who has wounded me in some way; suppose I hold grudges and refuse to let go of the wrong that another has done to me, am I binding that person in sin? Does God also refuse to forgive and let go because I refuse to forgive and let go? How does the Body of Christ work regarding the “binding” part of the power that Jesus gave us?

This is a difficult question, though a couple of preliminary distinctions can shed some light on the issue.

To begin with, the logic of grace – and grace, like love, has a logic  – only works one way. In grace, just as in love, you can be gifted beyond what you deserve, but the reverse is not true. The algebra of undeserved grace works only one way. Love can give you more than you deserve, but it cannot punish you more than you deserve. God gives us the power to set each other free, but not the same kind of power to keep each other in bondage.

Second, in this life, as C.S. Lewis used to say, hell can blackmail heaven, but this is not true in the other realm. Thus, while we can hold each other captive, psychologically, and emotionally, on this side, God does not ratify those actions.

When we bind each other here in this world by refusing to forgive each other, that refusal does not bind God to do likewise. Put more simply, when I hold a grudge against someone who has wronged me, keeping him constantly aware that he has done wrong, I am keeping that person tied to their sin – but God isn’t endorsing this. Heaven will not go along with my emotional blackmail.

These distinctions though provide only an ambience for an understanding of this. What does it mean to bind a person?

The Christian power to bind and loose is the power to bind and loose in conscience, in truth, in goodness, and in love. When I refuse to forgive another, when I hold a grudge, I am acting not as the Body of Christ, nor as an agent of grace, but precisely as part of the very chain of sin and helplessness that Christ was trying to break. When I act this way, it is I who need to be loosed from sin since I am acting contrary to grace. My non-forgiveness may well bind another person emotionally, keeping her bound in that way to her sin, but it is the very antithesis of the power that Christ gave us.

Biblically, we bind each other when, in love, we refuse to compromise truth and when we refuse to give each other permission to take false liberties and make bad choices. Thus, for example, parents bind their children when they, lovingly but clearly, refuse to give them permission to ignore Christ’s teaching on marriage and sexuality. We bind a friend when we refuse to give him our approval to cheat in his business in order to make more money. A friend binds you when she refuses to bless your moral compromises.

In Robert Bolt’s play, A Man for All Seasons, we see Henry VIII literally beg Thomas More to bless his marriage to Anne Boleyn. Henry appeals to their friendship, appeals to their shared humanity, and tries to morally bully Thomas by telling him that his refusal to approve is timidity and arrogance. Yet Thomas refuses to approve. He binds Henry in conscience and Henry knows he is bound. In the end, he kills Thomas for his refusal to compromise and give permission, to (biblically) loose him.

Ever since God took on concrete human flesh, grace has a visible human dimension. Heaven is watching earth – and is letting itself be helped by the best of what we do down here, but not bound by the worst of what we do down here.

The night before he died, Jesus struggled mightily to accept his Father’s will. The Gospels describe him in the Garden of Gethsemane, prostrate on the ground, “sweating blood”, and begging his Father to save him from the brutal death that awaited him. Then, after he finally surrenders his will to his Father, an angel comes and strengthens him.

This begs a question: where was the angel when, seemingly, he most needed it? Why didn’t the angel come earlier to strengthen him?

Two stories, I believe, can be helpful in answering this.

The first comes from Martin Luther King Jr. In the days leading up to his assassination, he met angry resistance and began to receive death threats. He was courageous, but he was also human. At a point, those threats got to him. Here is one of his diary entries.

“One night towards the end of January, I settled into bed late, after a strenuous day. Coretta had already fallen asleep and just as I was about to doze off the telephone rang. An angry voice said, ‘Listen, nig.., we’ve taken all we want from you; before next week you’ll be sorry you ever came to Montgomery.’ I hung up, but I couldn’t sleep. It seemed that all of my fears had come down on me at once. I had reached a saturation point.

I got out of bed and began to walk the floor. Finally, I went to the kitchen and heated a pot of coffee. I was ready to give up. With my cup of coffee sitting untouched before me, I tried to think of a way to move out of the picture without appearing a coward.

In this state of exhaustion, when my courage had all but gone, I decided to take my problem to God. With my head in my hands, I bowed over the kitchen table and prayed aloud. The words I spoke to God that midnight are still vivid in my memory.

‘I am here taking a stand for what I believe is right.  Now I am afraid. The people are looking to me for leadership, and if I stand before them without strength and courage, they too will falter. I am at the end of my powers. I have nothing left. I’ve come to the point where I can’t face it alone.’ At that moment I experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never experienced Him before.” (Strive Toward Freedom)

Notice at what point in his struggle the angel appears.

In her autobiography, The Long Loneliness, Dorothy shares this story. As a young woman, along with the man she loved, she had been somewhat militant in her unbelief. Indeed, their reluctance to enter the institution of marriage was meant as a statement of their non-acceptance of traditional Christian values. Then she conceived a child and its birth was the beginning of a radical conversion for her. The joy she felt holding her baby convinced her that there was a God and that life had a loving purpose. She became a Roman Catholic, much to the chagrin of the man she loved, the father of her child: he gave her an ultimatum: if you have this child baptized, our relationship is ended. She had the child baptized and lost that relationship (though they continued as friends). However, she now found herself a single mother with no job and no real vision or plan as to where to go now in life.

At one point, she became desperate. She left the child in the care of others and took a train from New York City to the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C. In her autobiography,she describes how she prayed that day, how desperate her prayer was. Like Jesus in Gethsemane and Martin Luther King in Montgomery, her prayer was one of raw need and helplessness, of an admission that she no longer had the strength to go on. Essentially, she said this to God: I have given up everything for you and now I am alone and afraid. I don’t know what to do and am lacking strength to carry on in this commitment.

She prayed this prayer of helplessness, took the train back to New York, and not long after found Peter Maurin sitting on her doorstep, telling her that he had heard about her and that he had a vision of what she should now do, namely, to start the Catholic Worker. That set the path for the rest of her life. The angel had come and strengthened her.

Notice at what point in these stories the angel makes its appearance – when human strength is fully exhausted. Why not earlier? Because up to the point of exhaustion, we don’t really let the angel in, relying instead on our own strength. But, as Trevor Herriot says, “Only after we have let the desert do its full work in us will angels finally come and minister to us.”

The biblical story of Saul is one of the great tragedies in all of literature. Saul’s story makes Hamlet look like a Disney character. Hamlet, at least, had good reasons for the bitterness that beset him. Saul, given what he started with, should have fared better, much better.

His story begins with the announcement that, in all of Israel, none measured up to him in height, strength, goodness, or acclaim. A natural leader, a prince among peers; his extraordinary character was recognized and proclaimed by the people.  They made him their king. The beginning of his story is the stuff of fairy tales, and it goes on in this way for a while.

However, at a point, things begin to sour. That point was the arrival of David on the scene – a man younger, more handsome, more-gifted, and more-acclaimed than he was. Jealousy sets in and envy begins to poison Saul’s soul. Looking at David, he sees only a popularity that eclipses his own, not another man’s goodness, nor indeed what that goodness offers to others. Instead, he grows bitter, petty, hostile, tries to kill David, and eventually dies by his own hand, an angry man who has fallen far from the innocence and goodness of his youth.

What happened here? How does someone who has so much going for him – goodness, talent, acclaim, power, blessing – grow into a bitter, petty man who ends up taking his own life? How does it happen? The late Margaret Laurence, in a brilliant, dark novel, The Stone Angel, offers a good description of how this happens and how it happens in ways that are hidden to the one undergoing the transition.

Her main character, Hagar Shipley, is a “Saul” of sorts. Hagar’s story begins like his: She is young, innocent, and full of potential. What’s to become of such a beautiful, bright, talented, young woman? Sadly, not much at all. She drifts into everything: adulthood, an unhappy marriage, and into a deep unrecognized and unspoken disappointment that eventually leaves her slovenly, frigid, bitter, and without energy or ambition. What’s as remarkable as sad is that she doesn’t see any of this herself. In her mind, she remains the young, innocent, gracious, popular, attractive young girl she once was in high school. She doesn’t notice how small her world has become, how few real friends she has, how little she admires anything or anyone, or even how physically unkempt she has become.

Her awakening is sudden and cruel. One winter day, shabbily dressed in an old parka, she rings the doorbell of a house where she is delivering some eggs. A bright young child answers the door and Hagar overhears the child tell her mother: That horrible, old egg-woman is at the door! The penny drops.

Stunned, she leaves the house and finds her way to a public bathroom where she turns on all the lights and studies her face in a mirror. What looks back is a face she doesn’t recognize, someone pathetically at odds with whom she imagines herself to be. She sees in fact the horrible, old egg-woman that the child saw at the door rather than the young, gracious, attractive, big-hearted woman that she imagines herself still to be. “How can this have happened?” she asks herself. How can we, imperceptible to ourselves, grow into someone we don’t know or like?

In some way, it happens to all of us. It’s not easy to age, to accept the fall from what we dreamed for ourselves, to watch the young take over and receive the popularity and acclaim that once were ours. Like Saul, we can fill with a jealousy that we don’t recognize, and like Hagar, we can grow bitter and ugly without knowing it. Others, of course, do notice.

It’s not that we don’t gain something as this happens. Usually we grow smarter, wiser in the ways of the world, and remain goodhearted, generous people. However, we tend to be nastier than we once were, whine too much, feel too sorry for ourselves, and give ourselves over more to curse rather than bless those who have replaced us, the young, the popular, the acclaimed.

And so, the penultimate spiritual and human task of the second half of life is to give up this jealousy and ugliness and come back again to the love, innocence, and goodness of our youth, to revirginize, move towards a second naiveté, and begin again to admire something.

At the beginning of the Book of Revelations, John, purporting to speak for God, has some advice for us, at least for those of us beyond the bloom of youth: “I’ve seen how hard you work. I recognize your generosity and all the good work you do, but I have this against you – you have less love in you now than when you were young! Go back and look from where you have fallen!”

We might want to hear this from scripture before we overhear it from some young girl telling her mother that some dour, bitter, old person is at the door.