RonRolheiser,OMI

The Importance Of The Empty Tomb

March 23, 1991

During my recent sabbatical, I was taking a course at the Center for Science and Religion in Berkeley, California. The professor, a professional scientist and devout Christian, began one lecture with the question: “How many of you believe in the resurrection of Christ?”

A student asked: “What do you mean by that? That’s a very complicated question!”

“No, it isn’t!” the professor replied. “At the level of physical science it’s very straightforward. Did Christ’s body decay or not?”

Of the twenty people in class only three hands were raised when the question was asked: “Do you believe there was an empty tomb?”

The student who had earlier suggested that the question was too complex for a clear answer, spoke up and said: “I believe in the resurrection, but I believe that it was a symbolic event. An empty tomb or a decaying body are, in the end, irrelevant to the real meaning of the resurrection?”

The professor then turned towards me and said: “You believe that it was a real physical event. Why?”  

A good question, indeed. Like the student who didn’t believe in an empty tomb, I too believe that the resurrection is highly symbolic. Its deep meaning goes far beyond the literal fact of a dead body being brought to life. To reduce it’s meaning only to this literalness is to miss much of what the resurrection is about. Conversely, however, to cut it off from this literal fact (the real physical transformation of a once dead corpse) is to rob it of just as much meaning … and perhaps of all its credibility! For the resurrection of Christ to have meaning it must, among other things, have been a brute physical fact. There needs to be an empty tomb and a dead body returned to life.  Why?

Because that is what the word incarnation means. To believe in the incarnation and not to believe in the radically physical character of the resurrection is a contradiction. The word was made flesh. This term connotes many things but it always implies something that is radically physical, tangible, touchable (like the old definition of matter as “something extended in space and having weight”). When we say the creed and say “the word was made flesh”, the implied corollary is “and it was extended in space and had weight, it was radically physical.” 

Hence to believe in the incarnation is to believe that God was born in real physical flesh, lived in real physical flesh, died in real physical flesh, and rose in real physical flesh. To believe that the resurrection was only an event in the faith consciousness of the disciples, however real and radical that may be conceived, is to rob the incarnation of its radical physical character and to fall into the oldest form of dualism that exists, namely, to value the non-physical and to denigrate the physical.

Beyond this dualism such a belief also severely impoverishes the meaning of the resurrection. If the resurrection is only a symbolic event then it is also only an anthropological one and not too a cosmic one. That’s a fancy way of saying that it’s then an event only about human consciousness and not also about the cosmos.

But Christ’s resurrection isn’t just something radically new in terms of human consciousness; it is also something that is radically new in terms of atoms and molecules. The resurrection rearranged hearts and minds. It also rearranged atoms! Until Christ’s resurrection, dead bodies did not come back to life! When his did there was something radically new not just at the level of faith but also at the level of atoms, molecules, and planets.  Christ’s resurrection, precisely because of its brute physicalness, offers new hope to atoms as well as to people.

I believe that Christ was raised from the dead, literally. I believe too that this event was, as the rich insights within contemporary theology point out, highly symbolic. It was an event of faith, of a changed consciousness, of new hope that empowers a new charity. But it was also an event of changed atoms and of a changed dead body. It was radically physical, just are all other events that are part of the incarnation – a word which means “God in carnality”.

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Invincible Ignorance and Good Friday

March 17, 1991

The old manuals in moral theology made a distinction between two kinds of ignorance, culpable and inculpable. The latter, also termed invincible ignorance, was seen as something which excused one from sin and moral blame. 

For those who consider such distinctions medieval casuistry, there are Christ’s words at the time of his crucifixion: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they are doing.” (Luke 23,34). Jesus, himself, refuses to consider anyone a sinner who acts in ignorance. 

Nobody can sin in ignorance … and this has implications beyond those immediately evident. My own hunch is that there is, in fact, a lot less sin around and a lot less need to assign moral blame than both the critics of the new and old morality suspect. We are all morally inept. We all do things that we shouldn’t do and we all neglect to do things that we should do. 

However, while the damage to others and ourselves that arises out of this is real, there is, I submit, habitually an extenuating ignorance and naiveté. For the most part, we are innocent because we don’t know what we are doing! Not because, many times, we do not know that we are doing something wrong, since we do know, but because we are ignorant of how much we are loved. If we knew how deeply we are held in love, we would be very different persons. 

All sin is a betrayal of love. Accordingly when there is no real felt experience of love there can be no real felt experience of sin either. This is true as regards our relationship towards both God and community. When we don’t experience ourselves as loved by community, we cannot sin against community. When we don’t experience ourselves as loved by God, we cannot sin against God. To not know love is to be unable to sin. When we don’t know that we are loved then we don’t know what we are doing morally either. 

Several years ago, I wrote an article entitled “Being a loved sinner”.  A woman wrote to me shortly afterwards commenting: “I liked the gist of your article; but the expression loved sinner is a tautology. One can only sin if one is loved. I am 49 years old and can honestly say that for the first 46 years of my life I did not commit a sin. This is true not because I didn’t, during those years, do many bad things, but because during those years I never felt loved. Three years ago, I fell in love. Now, when I do something wrong, I know I am sinning. I can truly say that, until I had an experience of being loved, I didn’t know what I was doing even when I thought I did!”

When Christ asks God to pardon his executioners on the basis of their naiveté and ignorance “they do not know what they are doing” the excusing darkness is not so much an ignorance of right or wrong or even of the fact that they were crucifying the Christ, but of the fact that they, and those who had put them up to this, did not know how they were loved. 

Not realizing how we are loved is the real darkness, the real inculpable and invincible ignorance. In ignorance we crucify the Christ! In ignorance we compromise ourselves! In ignorance we sell ourselves short, settle for second best, abuse others and ourselves, abandon our ideals, fill with rage and jealousy, and give in to every kind of masturbatory compensation and paranoia. When we do these things, many of us know that we are doing wrong … and we are! What we don’t know is how much we are loved! Most of what, in the full light of love, would be sin is, in the darkness of our ignorance, nothing more than the acting out that follows upon despair and resignation. We are not so bad or malicious as we are wounded and despairing of love. 

Christ’s words: “Forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing!” are a challenge to us to let some light into our darkness. But the light that leads to a real moral sense does not emanate, first and foremost, from the realization that we have been, in ignorance, crucifying God’s presence on earth, nor does it depend upon achieving the correct sensitivities and moral tuning. Rather, we will realize that we have been in ignorance and darkness, crucifying Christ and others and compromising ourselves, when we sense how much we are loved and how precious we really are. That realization is the root of all morality and its absence is the inculpable darkness which lets us go on naively crucifying Christ, others, and ourselves. 

Morris West once wrote: “All miracles begin with the act of falling in love.” Christ’s executioners acted in a darkness that resulted from never properly having had that experience.

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Poetic Imagination

March 11, 1991

The night before he first knelt to become “the most reluctant convert in all of Christendom,” C.S. Lewis spent some long hours walking with J.R Tolkien, the famous novelist (Lord of the Rings).

Tolkien, a committed Christian, was trying to convince him of the credibility of Christ and the church. Lewis was full of objections.

At a point, Tolkien countered Lewis’ objections with the simple statement: “Your inability to understand stems from a failure of imagination on your part!”

If Tolkien were alive today, I suspect he might want to take us all for a long walk and challenge us in the same way. So much of the frustration and stagnation in Christian circles today stems from a failure of imagination.

To let ourselves be led by God through ever-changing times requires, on our part, great imagination. Lately, this has been lacking, in conservative and liberal circles alike.

What is imagination? Imagination is not, first and foremost, the power of fantasy… the power of a George Lucas to create Star Wars or of a Steven Spielberg to create E.T. Imagination is the power to create the images we need to understand and respond to what we are experiencing.

We lack imagination when we stand before our own experience petrified, frozen and unable to accept or cope with what is there; or, when we stand before it stunned, benignly unaware that forces are about to destroy us.

We have healthy imaginations when we stand before any reality and have a sense of what God is asking of us. A healthy imagination is the opposite of resignation, abdication, naive optimism or despair. It is the foundation of hope. Through it, we turn fate to destiny.

Today, as is the case with every generation, we are being asked to re-imagine our faith life and our church structures. Unfortunately, too often we are not up to the task.

We stand before a very complex and radically new situation with either petrified imaginations (the proclivity of the conservative . . . ‘we’ve never done it this way before!”) or with fuzzy uncritical imaginations (the proclivity of the liberal . . . “let the new times roll!”).

In both cases, there is very little chance that fate might be turned to destiny, very little reading of the signs of the times.

In the case of a petrified imagination, there is too much of a sticking one’s head in the sand whereas with the fuzzy uncritical imagination there is an abdication of any critical response in favor of simply rubber-stamping recent opinion polls.

In both cases, the imagination is dead. Religion dies with it.

But Christ is not dead. He is still “about his Father’s business” in the world, the mystery of his death and resurrection is still being lived out daily, and his spirit is still stirring hearts.

However we must have the imaginative radar to read where and how this is taking place: We must be able to look at our lives, our church, and our world and be able to name where we’ve died, claim where we’ve been born, know what old bodies we need to let ascend and recognize the new spirit that is being given us. That’s the job description for the religious imagination.

To use just one example: Looking at history we see that many of the great religious reformers had, precisely, great imaginations.

People like Francis of Assisi, Dominic and Ignatius of Loyola were able to look at religious life in their day and imagine a new way of living it. The specific way in which religious life had been lived out (for centuries) had died… but religious life hadn’t died!

These reformers were able to name a death, claim a resurrection, let (with proper love and reverence) the old go and then live with the new spirit that God was now giving. Religious life was re-imaged and, under the vision that came from their imaginations, exploded in a tremendous burst of growth.

Augustine and Thomas Aquinas (despite the negative press they get today) did the same thing regarding how Christian thought could relate itself to pagan philosophies.

Today, Gustavo Gutierrez’s imagination has helped shape a new vision of how the oppressed might live out the Gospel. Christ, on the road to Emmaus, re-shaped the apostles’ imagination. We need to let him do the same thing to us:

For those of us who remember another time… the church as we knew it, parish life as we knew it, religious life as we knew it, what it means to be a Catholic as we knew it, and even family life as we knew it, are, in the face of contemporary forces, irrevocably different.

We can like it or dislike it, but the fact is indisputable.

We can respond to this with a petrified imagination (“only what worked before can work now! “) or with a fuzzy uncritical imagination (“change is always a sign of progress!”).

Or, we can respond with a paschal imagination… we can look at the pattern of death and resurrection in Christ and then move on to positively and critically shape our destiny by naming our deaths, claiming our resurrections, letting the old ascend and living with the spirit that God is actually giving to us.

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The Interrupted Life

February 28, 1991

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Someone once suggested that “life is what happens to you while you’re planning it”; Etty Hillesum’s exceptional diaries are entitled, An Interrupted Life; and Henri Nouwen says: “I used to resent all the interruptions in my work until I realized that interruptions were my real work”.

Up to now, I have always quoted these expressions fondly. There is something in a planned life that needs to be, for one’s own good, perennially sabotaged by interruptions. I am less glib in quoting them now, given that my own life has just been derailed by a major interruption. I have been named a provincial superior for the religious community I belong to, the Oblates of Mary Immaculate.

The change in life and ministry that this will require of me is radical. It will involve leaving the work that I have been doing for 18 years, giving up my present position, network of support, house that I have lived in for many years, and city I deeply love (not even to mention giving up the last half of a very cherished sabbatical), to move to a new city and take up an entirely different ministry in a radically different kind of setting. Most of all, it will involve a radical shift in the type of work I will be doing.

Up to now my ministry has basically involved teaching, preaching, writing, and some sacramental work.  As a provincial, my ministry will be almost entirely that of administration.  Many close friends cautioned me during these past days: “You shouldn’t accept this. Your gifts lie more in the area of teaching, writing, and preaching. Somebody else can do administration. In good conscience decline the invitation to be provincial!”  That logic makes good sense, but … in the end, despite this caution from sincere and loving friends, I accepted. Why?

Many of the reasons for my decision are connected with a dark inchoate ball of feeling which cannot gain entrance to the left side of my brain. These are compelling feelings of duty, of being called, of gratitude to the Oblates who have always trusted me, mixed in, I am sure, with many other hidden motives, good and bad. I’m an intuitive type, so I act more out of gut feeling than out of a rational algebra. My gut said: “You ought to do this.”

Some of the other reasons for my acceptance of this invitation, which will bring with it considerable grieving and painful displacement, are however available to rational examination. These have to do with a growing understanding, in my own life, of the importance of administration within the life of any community.

When one examines the priesthood a Christ, a priesthood all believers are baptized into, one sees in it three interpenetrating aspects: Jesus ministered as teacher, healer and minister of cult, and as shepherd (community builder). It is this latter aspect, shepherding, which proper administration helps keep incarnate in this world.

It is also a most vital ministry. Administration is, as Plato said, the basis for politics (in the best sense of that word). Politics, itself, is the ability of a community to, first of all, pull itself together and act as a unity and, secondly, to creatively shape its own destiny so that it is not a helpless victim before the random forces of fate.  As such, politics is, singularly, the most important thing within a community. When there are no politics, there can be no community. And when there is no administration, there are no politics.

Hence a certain equation must be acknowledged: Good community depends upon good politics just as good politics depends upon good administration. Christ knew that and worked, first and foremost, at establishing a community. Administration then, when done properly, incarnates Christ the shepherd. It is this idea, more than anything else, that tipped the balance in my acceptance of this new challenge.

Beyond that, an administrative role will also, I hope, help keep me from a dangerous privatization. This is a gentler way of saying it should rein me in so that I don’t end up just doing my own thing! Which is everyone’s danger and certainly mine! In a shepherding role, one’s ministry is necessarily linked with the creation of projects bigger than one’s own. Private dreams and private achievement must be sacrificed to a communal dream. As well, administration is also the route, more direct perhaps than normal teaching and preaching, to help affect systemic change. For the gospel to be lived out, hearts have to change, but systems, ecclesial and civil, also have to change. Administration is the most direct access to affect that.

For these reasons, among others, I have accepted an invitation that will alter my life radically. I will continue, of course, to do some of the things I have done; some teaching, some preaching, and some writing (this column, among things). Yet, this is a new baptism. I enter it with fear and trembling, but confident of your prayers.

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Paschal Imagination

February 18, 1991

The night before he first knelt to became “the most reluctant convert in all of Christendom”, C.S. Lewis spent some long hours walking with J.R. Tolkien, the famous novelist (Lord of the Rings). Tolkien, a committed Christian, was trying to convince him of the credibility of Christ and the church. Lewis was full of objections. At a point, Tolkien countered Lewis’s objections with the simple statement: “Your inability to understand stems from a failure of imagination on your part!”

If Tolkien were alive today, I suspect he might want to take us all for a long walk and challenge us in the same way. So much of the frustration and stagnation in Christian circles today stems from a failure of imagination. To let ourselves be led by God through ever-changing times requires, on our part, great imagination. Lately, this has been lacking, in conservative and liberal circles alike.     

What is imagination? Imagination is not, first and foremost, the power of fantasy … the power of a George Lucas to create Star Wars or of a Steven Spielberg to create E.T.  Imagination is the power to create the images we need to understand and respond to what we are experiencing. We lack imagination when we stand before our own experience petrified, frozen and unable to accept or cope with what is there; or, when we stand before it stunned, benignly unaware that forces are about to destroy us. We have healthy imaginations when we can stand before any reality and have a sense of what God is asking of us. A healthy imagination is the opposite of resignation, abdication, naive optimism or despair. It is the foundation of hope. Through it, we turn fate to destiny.

Today, as is the case with every generation, we are being asked to re-imagine our faith life and our church structures. Unfortunately, too often we are not up to the task. We stand before a very complex and radically new situation with either petrified imaginations (the proclivity of the conservative … “we’ve never done it this way before!”) or with fuzzy uncritical imaginations (the proclivity of the liberal … “let the new times roll!”). In both cases, there is very little chance that fate might be turned to destiny, very little reading of the signs of the times. In the case of a petrified imagination, there is too much of a sticking one’s head in the sand whereas with the fuzzy uncritical imagination there is an abdication of any critical response in favour of simply rubber-stamping recent opinion polls. In both cases, the imagination is dead. Religion dies with it.

But Christ is not dead. He is still “about his Father’s business” in the world, the mystery of his death and resurrection is still being lived out daily, and his spirit is still stirring hearts. However we must have the imaginative radar to read where and how this is taking place. We must be able to look at our lives, our church, and our

world and be able to name where we’ve died,  claim where we’ve been born, know what old bodies we need to let ascend, and recognize the new spirit that is being given us. That’s the job description for the religious imagination.

To use just one example: Looking at history we see that many of the great religious reformers had, precisely, great imaginations.  People like Francis of Assisi, Dominic, and Ignatius of Loyola were able to look at religious life in their day and imagine a new way of living it. The specific way in which religious life had been lived out (for centuries) had died …but religious life hadn’t died! These reformers were able to name a death, claim a resurrection, let (with proper love and reverence) the old go, and then live with the new spirit that God was now giving. Religious life was re-imaged and, under the vision that came from their imaginations, exploded in a tremendous burst of growth.

Augustine and Thomas Aquinas (despite the negative press they get today) did the same thing regarding how Christian thought could relate itself to pagan philosophies. Today, Gustavo Gutierrez’ imagination has helped shape a new vision of how the oppressed might live out the gospel. Christ, on the road to Emmaus, re-shaped the apostles imagination. We need to let him do the same thing to us:

For those of us who remember another time …the church as we knew it, parish life as we knew it, religious life as we knew it, what it means to be a catholic as we knew it, and even family life as we knew it, are, in the face of contemporary forces, irrevocably different. We can like it or dislike it, but the fact is indisputable.

We can respond to this with a petrified imagination (“only what worked before can work now!”) or with a fuzzy uncritical imagination (“change is always a sign of progress!”). Or, we can respond with a paschal imagination … we can look at the pattern of death and resurrection in Christ and then move on to positively and critically shape our destiny by naming our deaths, claiming our resurrections, letting the old ascend, and living with the spirit that God is actually giving to us.

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Take Up Your Couch And Walk

February 10, 1991

Daniel Berrigan once wrote that if Jesus returned to earth he would pick up the whips he used on the moneychangers, go into counseling offices and therapy groups, and drive out therapists and clients alike with the words:  “Take up your couch and walk”! You have skin to cover raw nerves; you don’t have to be that sensitive!”

That’s vintage “Berrigan-talk”, so it comes across harshly, even as it underscores something very important. As human beings, we have tremendous powers of resiliency and we owe it to ourselves and to our world to claim them … otherwise we will never come to community.

We are called to community, to stay with each other. This, despite romantic dreams about friendship, marriage, and community, is singularly the most difficult task that there is. We cannot ever be close to anyone for long without seriously hurting him or her and she or he seriously hurting us. Hence community depends upon us having the resiliency to forgive, forget, bounce back, and live in some joy and happiness despite having been hurt and wounded.

And all of us are wounded, deeply so. There are no whole persons. All of us, from the moment we emerge from the womb, in ways physical and emotional, take spills, get dropped, get burned, get rejected, and are abused. Nobody reaches adulthood without deep scars. This damage, as Judith Viorst so aptly puts it, “is permanent, but not fatal!”

Today, however, it is in vogue to live as if it were fatal. So much, both inside and outside of us, encourages us to be hypersensitive and the result is often psychological and relational paralysis … and the breakdown of community. Rare today is the marriage, friendship, family, religious community, parish community, academic faculty, or social justice group that stays intact for long. Invariably someone (and eventually everyone) gets hurt and things begin to fall apart and everyone heads off to lick their wounds or to look at them in therapy.

Therapy itself can be good. However, and this is Berrigan’s point.  It can also become an excuse for not claiming the resiliency (and, yes, toughness) with which God endowed us and without which we cannot live with each other. Much good is happening in therapeutic rooms and in growth groups today as we get in touch with our wounds, addictions, and dysfunctions and the systems that help cause them. But there is also the tendency among too many of us to let the therapy itself and the new sensitivity become yet another addiction. When this happens then sensitivity to our wounds and dysfunctions tends to make us so oversensitive that we become impossible to live with because everything hurts us so badly. We get to a point where we can no longer take the normal bump and grind that is simply part of all living and relating.

Too common today is the phenomenon of claiming one’s right to be angry and offended, of stomping out of rooms in rage because somebody slipped and said something which offended our sensitivities, and of refusing to make the effort to come back to certain communities and relationships because “we just can’t handle the hurt”. There’s a time for claiming one’s hurts and licking one’s wounds, but there is also a time for claiming one’s resiliency and to get on with the hard, and non-negotiable, task of living and working together … despite and beyond the fact that we hurt.

In her marvelous autobiography, Therese of Lisieux tells us how her major conversion in life was not religious, nor moral, but psychological. As a child she had always been extraordinarily sensitive … to the point where the most minute slight or hurt would cause her to freeze over and withdraw in tears. She reached a point where this deprived her not only of any bounce and happiness in life, but of physical health as well. She lay dying. There, together with her family, she prayed for a miracle. The miracle that eventually restored her health brought with it the ingredient to retain it, the gift of resiliency, bounce, and toughness. Looking back, on her deathbed, she sees this as the turning point in her life … she was able to live beyond her hypersensitivity. She still remained an extraordinarily sensitive person, but she was, from the moment of that conversion onwards, also as person of extraordinary bounce and resiliency, finally equipped with what it takes to live in love and community.

We need to pray for that kind of conversion. To be a Christian is not to be some tragic anti-hero, frozen outside of community by the sure knowledge that we’ve been done to. To be a Christian, is to be both a mammal endowed with extraordinary resiliency and a child of the resurrection who is capable of bouncing back from more than one or two black Fridays … with a new spirit bathing old scars in a joyous light. Real love and community come after that.

There is something deeply catholic (in the full meaning of that word) in claiming one’s resiliency. Christ really meant it when he said: Take up your couch and walk!

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Love and our Baptismal Robes

February 3, 1991

Inside of each of us, rooted so deeply that no cynicism or hurt can ever eradicate it, lays the ideal of purity. In the end, all of us hate stain, physical and moral. We like what’s clean and pure. This is connected with our very integrity as human beings. When purity breaks down or is violated, part of our self-identity also breaks down. Rape is so horrible precisely because it assaults not just someone’s freedom and vulnerability, but it violates that person’s purity. For this reason it leaves such deep scars and threatens the psychic health of its victim at a primal level.

When we are baptized a white dress is put on us to symbolize purity and words are spoken to remind us that this garment is the outward sign of our dignity and we are to bring that dignity unstained into the everlasting life of heaven.

Sadly, this ideal has taken on almost exclusively sexual connotations; purity has come to mean sexual chastity, pure and simple. This reduction is tragic, not just because a sexually liberated age so easily denigrates and ridicules sexual purity, but, especially, because we no longer see how impurity creeps into other areas of our lives, especially into our relationships with those dearest to us, and stains deeply the purity  that once enrobed those loves.

Let me try to illustrate this with an example. D.H. Lawrence once wrote a poem on love entitled, History, which reads:

            The listless beauty of the hour

            When snow fell on the apple trees

            And the wood ash gathered in the fire

            And we faced our first miseries.

            Then the sweeping sunshine of noon

            When the mountains like chariot cars

            Were ranked to blue battle and you and I

            Counted our scars.

            And then in a strange, grey hour

            We lay mouth to mouth, with your face

            Under mine like a star on the lake.

            And I covered the earth, and all space.

            The silent, drifting hours

            Of morn after morn

            And night drifting up to the night

            Yet no pathway worn.

            Your life, and mine, my love

            Passing on and on, the hate

            Fusing closer and closer with love

            Till at length they mate.

In the beginning of every love, romantic or not, the dream for that love is connected to the ideal of purity. And, in the early stages of love, this ideal is spontaneously respected. In the stage of attraction, flirtation, infatuation, the rooting of that love in one’s poetic memory, and first fervour, generally the love is, figuratively speaking, enrobed with whiteness. It has a purity.

What D.H. Lawrence describes (so earthily and brilliantly) is how love can gradually and imperceptibly distort and stain, even through its most intimate expressions. And the change that he is referring to is not the healthy transformation, beyond immature romantic ideals, which all love has to undergo to continue to grow. Nor is he referring to the valuable psychological insight that hate is not love’s opposite. He is talking of the distortion that creeps into a relationship precisely when the purity which was part of the dream that initiated that love is violated. Milan Kundera once said that when the idea that a love was founded on dies, then that love too dies.

Real love and real romance are always founded on the ideal of purity … we want not to stain nor be stained in that love.  This implies many things prior to and beyond the issue of sex. Essentially, it says that when we say the words: “I love you!” we may not then mix those words with any kind of disrespect whatever with the hope that the sexual bed, or any other expression of intimacy, can then redeem the initial dream for that love. 

Outside of mutually, honestly, and respectfully facing our miseries, not counting our scars, and keeping a worn pathway, love will imperceptibly begin to sleep with hate, until we can no longer tell the difference; it will come to contain as much resentment as it does delight; and we will find the other becoming a stranger.

The purity symbolized by our baptismal robes must be part of the poetic dream for every one of our loves and, as with all aspects of our baptism, it is our lifelong challenge to bring that dignity home unstained.

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A Prayer for Peace

January 27, 1991

            “LORD, OUR GOD …

                        We come to you in helplessness.

                        We have at this time

                                    no prophet, priest, prince, or leader.

                      You alone are our God … help us, who are alone  
                        and have no one to help us but you.

            WE ASK YOU FOR THE GIFT OF PRAYER …

                        May this lifting of our words, hands, and hearts,

                                    this acknowledgement of helplessness,

                        open us up to insight and strength beyond ourselves.

                        May it link us to all sincere hearts                         

                                    on both sides of this conflict.

                        May it become part of a conspiracy of compassion

                                    a prayer of many hearts and many places.

                        May it call us to be on your side

                                    rather than ask you to be on ours.

                        May it be a prayer that deeply respects those whose

                                    hearts are different than our own.

                        May it be a prayer embracing the feelings of all

                                    while discerning good from evil in that embrace.

            WE PRAY FOR AN END TO THIS WAR …

                        Let grace soften our hearts

                                    and the hearts of our leaders.

                        Lead them and us to the type of truth that sets us free

                                    beyond the tyranny of our greed

                                                and the structures that divide us.

                        Lead us to the type of love

                                                that makes both for charity and justice.

            WE PRAY FOR THE VICTIMS OF THIS WAR …

                        Help us to be in solidarity and displacement with

                                    all whose lives, dreams, and homes

                                                are being destroyed.

                        Receive into your embrace those who are dying

                                    give them the peace

                                                denied them in this life.

                        Touch with healing the wounded

                                    and look with pity on our mother, earth

                                                restore to her

                                                            the freshness of her virginity

                                                            and the fullness of her fertility.

            WE PRAY FOR A NEW ORDER …

                        May your kingdom come

                                    so that all people of sincere will

                                                become one community of heart.

                                    Breathe into us your spirit …

                                                     charity, joy

                                                            peace, patience

                                                            goodness, longsuffering

                                                            fidelity, mildness, chastity

                                                so that war among becomes unthinkable.

                        Give us what we in our helplessness

                                    cannot give ourselves and

                                                            help us in our helplessness

                                                            to remember that

                                                            the true weapons against war

                                                            are faith, prayer, fasting, and love.

            WE PRAY FOR COURAGE AND GUIDANCE …

                        Make this prayer more than privatized wishing

                                    turn our wishes to hope

                                    and let that hope confront the powers of war

                                                            so that

                                    our love will be more than sentiment

                                    our confrontation more than anger

                                    our anger more than self-righteousness

                                    and our righteousness that of your gospel.

            GIVE US PEACE …

                        Teach us that peace which surpasses our understanding

                                    which is not about winning or losing

                                    and power and effectiveness,

                                                but which comes when we

                                                            open our lives and our hearts

                                                                        to your invitation to …

                                                                        `RECEIVE AND GIVE THANKS

                                                                         BREAK AND SHARE’.”

                                                                                                                        AMEN.

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Reaction to War (First in a two part series)

January 20, 1991

Many of us, I suspect, had the same reaction when, on January 16th, we heard the news that war had broken out in the Persian Gulf. We sat glued to our television sets, asking:  “How can this be happening in the late 20th century? Haven’t we learned anything from all our previous wars? Surely there must be another solution? This can’t be real?”

At the level of feeling, most of us, I suspect, felt the same depressing mixture of numbness, helplessness, frustration, anger, disbelief, confusion, and eeriness. Beyond these feelings we were haunted by the sense that we should be doing something, beyond watching simply this on TV.  What is being asked of us?

What should we be doing?

At one level, the answer is obvious, prayer. We must be praying to acknowledge our sin and helplessness and to invite the power of God into our lives and into this situation. But this is not a simple prayer. True petitionary prayer in a situation like this calls for a number of things.

To pray properly in this situation calls, first of all, for a certain displacement. To be in solidarity with those whose lives are so suddenly ripped apart, brought to a violent end, or irrevocably damaged, means that we cannot go on living our own lives in such a way as if nothing in them has been irrevocably ripped apart, damaged, or died. Proper prayer must rip apart and derail (and irrevocably) our agendas, plans, and comfort. If we are really praying for peace and for the victims in this war, we will not go on with “business as usual”.

Beyond this displacement, proper prayer calls for a deeper confrontation with the reasons for this war, including those within us. Here we must be prepared to face some searing truths, truths which take us beyond the selective explanations of both the right and the left.

This is not a war brought about simply by the inflexible personalities of two men, George Bush and Saddam Hussein, or the historical intolerance of two countries, Iraq and the USA. Nor is it simply about aggression and oil. Beyond economics, politics, oil, and personalities, it’s about how we all live, about our own violations (minute and gross) of the moral and aesthetic orders, and about our own inflexibility, greed, intolerance, inability to compromise, and incapacity to find roads that lead beyond historical injustice and entrenchment to present reconciliation.  Let me try to word this more simply:

A slogan that I very much agree with says: Peace depends upon justice. That’s true, but that algebra goes further. Peace depends on justice, but justice itself is rooted not just in economics and politics, but also in the wider moral and aesthetic order. What this means is that justice is about more than political and economic power, though surely it is about these. It’s also about morality, aesthetics, and chastity in every area of life, public and private. The whole moral order is inextricably linked and thus how can we expect George Bush and Saddam Hussein to compromise and move beyond historically entrenched positions to new possibilities, when we cannot do this in our own families, marriages, religious communities, academic classrooms, or even between the sexes? How can we not expect that ideology can become so rooted that it allows violence and death, when we let that precise thing happen in our personal relationships and in our church circles?  How can we expect our political leaders to be too morally sensitive to violate the preciousness of human life when, daily, we violate beauty, preciousness, and dignity through disrespect, vicious judgment, slander, irresponsible sexuality, and greed? How can we not expect hatred at a world level when there is so much of it in our own personal lives?

Simply put, how can we expect countries to get along when we cannot get along with each other in our families, marriages, communities, and churches? When we are, almost always, suspicious of each other and at war in our personal relationships can we expect anything else at a world level?

War is not something we may accept. Pacifists are right, there is no such thing as a just war. As Archbishop Hunthausen of Seattle puts it: “Some things may be worth dying for but nothing is worth killing for!” True prayer understands that and it wages peace by displacing the one praying from both the smugness and comfort of a non-displaced life and from the smugness and comfort of the selective morality and ideology of both the right and the left …  who have convinced us (when we don’t pray) that others, not we ourselves, are the cause of war. True peacemaking comes out of prayer and wages peace in the public domain and it begins and ends in the seamless heart of God within which the tiniest and the largest things are both important and within which private and communal chastity are one and the same thing. 

(Next week … A Prayer for Peace)

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Blessing And Cursing Life

January 15, 1991

“And God saw that it was good, indeed it was very good! This tells us how God feels about us and the world and it contains the implication that we should feel the same way about ourselves and the rest of the world … “good, very good!”

This is the primary creational and anthropological affirmation within all of scripture and its challenge is as far-reaching as it is (when examined in the light of our actual lives) startling.  To believe that our world and we are good, very good; to take delight in our lives and in each other; to live lives that radiate joy rather than depression, boredom, and resentment; well … that sounds simple and easy, but remains a rare thing that’s seldom accomplished.

How many people do you know who actually take delight in their lives, in their families, in their spouses, in their friends? The rule is more depression. Rather than feeling delight and joy in our lives and our relationships we feel boredom, resentment, paranoia, jealousy, possessive clinging, or a sense of guilt or threat. Delight is rarely the word which describes what we feel about anything. Sadly, too, rather than helping create delight around us, we more commonly kill it. We tell our children to shut up and stop making so much noise when they are enthusiastic and full of life and we generally feel the delight and laughter of others as a threat to our drabness and deadened sense of delight. Shouts of laughter, joy, and delight, tend to irritate us bringing a “will you shut up” reaction rather than a calling to delight in the fact that “it is good, very good!”

After childhood, we rarely find it easy to delight in anything. Yet delight, along with gratitude, is the primary religious virtue, and is the deepest root of all love, friendship, sexuality, family life, community, passion, and enthusiasm.  All of these, if they are not to die, must be a constant source of delight. 

When delight is lost in love, friendship, sexuality, genitality, family life, community life, or our jobs and vocations, then depression, resentment, and self pity take over and these soon enough tell love, friendship, sexuality, genitality, family, community, and creativity what we tell over-enthusiastic children, namely, to “shut up! When joy breaks down, eventually everything breaks down. When we stop blessing (which means precisely to affirm and delight in someone’s joy, beauty, and creativity) we immediately begin to curse.  To meet beauty, joy, laughter, and creativity with affirmation, to bask in them, to delight in them, is to bless. Any other response is a curse that brings death and is, in the truest meaning of that word, necrophilia, preferring to love to what’s dead rather than what’s alive! 

Why do we do that? Why, when our deepest desires are for delight and joy, do we constantly kill them within ourselves and within others?

A simplistic line of argument suggests that the whole root of this lies is a distorted image of God. Simply put, this argument says that our past religious training injected into us the notion of an angry, defensive, anti-erotic, anti-enjoyment god who is threatened and angry when we are happy and experience pleasure so that every time we thoroughly enjoy something we feel like we are stealing pleasure from God. 

There is some truth in that, though not nearly as much as many think. Given that the propensity to curse delight rather than bless it is as stronger (or stronger) in persons who have journeyed far from the influence of the distorted religious training just mentioned, one suspects that the real culprit is more psychological than religious, namely, wounded narcissism.

We curse joy rather than bless it because we have been cursed rather than blessed whenever we manifested it (especially when we where very young). We don’t take delight in ourselves and the world and we don’t feel like  they’re “good and very good” because too few persons ever took delight in us and too few persons ever told us that we were “good and very good!” We tell over-enthusiastic children to “shut up” because, when we were over-enthusiastic children, we were told to “shut up”! 

The most important challenge that all of us face in life, religiously and psychologically, is to overcome this and to bless rather than to curse! When we look at a child in a high chair joyously smudging its face with food, when we hear the over-enthusiastic noise of children shouting, and whenever we feel (in love, friendship, sexuality, genitality, community, or creativity) the power, beauty, and pleasure of life, we must respond with delight … saying: “God, it’s good, it’s so good!” Then, and only then, are we honoring our Creator, honoring ourselves, and moving beyond necrophilia to make love to what’s truly alive.

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The Incarnation Honors the Flesh

December 5, 1990

Canadian poet, J.S. Porter, writes:

            Honour flesh,

                        its passing, its oblivion.

            Touch woos the woman;

            Kiss awakens the princess.

            One is death.

            Two is life.

            One rubbing against another makes fire

            And fire leaps and jumps like life.

            One is stone,

            Two is flesh.

            The flesh mother and the flesh father make

                        the flesh child.

            Remember, eternity once in the high fever of

                        creation made flesh life, and only

                        flesh life escapes the doom of everlasting

repeating recurring things.

            Tremble at stone

                        quake at wood.

  But honour flesh.    

(The Thomas Merton Poems, Moonstone Press, c1988)

Christmas, the mystery of the Incarnation, honors flesh, its goodness and importance, beyond the imagination of even the most rabid materialist, Marxist, or hedonist for the very term “incarnation” (deriving from the latin IN CARNUS) means “in flesh”, “in carnality”, “in radical materiality”.

The incarnation is a multifaceted diamond turning in the sun. It gives off many sparkles, many meanings, and not the least of these is the value of the flesh, the material, the sensual, the physical. Christmas is, at its core, a very physical, sensual mystery. Tragically, this is rarely understood inside of our Christian circles as well as outside of them.

Freud once said that you understand things best by looking at them when they are broken. Well, Christian spirituality has broken its real link to the flesh, just as those circles which have most criticized Christianity for doing this (Marxism, hedonism, and science) have also, though in a very different way, done.

Christianity today has painted itself (and has been painted by those outside of it) into a corner wherein it is perceived as being anti-materialistic, anti-sensual, anti-body, anti-sexual, anti-physical pleasure, and anti-erotic. Marxism, hedonism, and science have claimed these areas (the physical, the sexual, the body, the erotic, physical pleasure) as their areas and stand, most times against Christianity, as defenders of the flesh, of its reality, goodness, and importance.

This is a sad and tragic critique of a religion which begins with God being born into the flesh. I am not sure how we’ve come to this point, nor why in both old and new theologies (the “old” theologies which were all about the soul and never about the body; and the “new” theologies which, even as they react to the spiritualism of the old, are perennially uncomfortable with Christ’s “physical” resurrection … “it’s not important whether or not Jesus’ physical body came out of the tomb!”) there is forever the reluctance, for once and for all, to affirm the God bearing goodness of real flesh, the physical. Somehow we never we end up honoring the flesh. Invariably we end up crassly or subtly devaluing the flesh even when the center of our faith is all about  “the word made flesh”.

The criticism made against us on this point by the Marxists, the hedonists, and many scientists and materialists is true. And it’s as true of newer spiritualities and theologies as it is of older ones. Nobody takes the flesh seriously enough. In our defense, it should be pointed out the Marxists, hedonists, scientists, and materialists (always so ready to see our weakness here) fare no better in the long run. They too end up missing the full reality of the flesh, not because they take it so seriously, but because they don’t take it seriously enough. No more so than we, pathological spiritualists that we are, do they turn to the flesh and find it shimmering with divinity. We miss the flesh for the divine, they miss the divine for the flesh. Both of us miss Christmas. Neither of us finds “the word made flesh”,  God “in Carnality”

Nikos Kazantzakis once said that God became “a piece of bread, a cup of cool water, a warm tunic, a hut, and in the front of hut, a woman giving suck to an infant” so that we might see him and bow down and worship  his “many-faced face.” (The Last Temptation of Christ, N.Y., 1971, p. 324)

The word has become flesh, but to celebrate Christmas properly, to worship God’s many-faced face, we must honour flesh.

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What is a Father?

December 2, 1990

Twenty years ago today my father died, late on a December night.  As clearly as I remember his death, I remember the bitter cold. Within a day the temperature dipped to 40 below centigrade.

I was still young; too young (I thought, at the time) to lose a father. Later I would realize I was wrong. Nobody, after the instant of conception, is too young to lose a father, although, this loss ,before certain things can be given and received, does leave its scars.

We, the family of this father, were lucky enough. We had plenty of preparation for his death (he died after a yearlong battle with cancer); he died with his faith, care, and humour intact; and he had given us his blessing. And he died without bitterness, grateful, blessing life.  There are worse ways to die and there are worse ways to lose one’s father. For all the years I could remember, in our family prayers, he had always led us in prayers for a happy death. Some months and years later, after some warmer weather, I realized he had died happy in the way that he had prayed for.

But this little reminiscence, twenty years after that bitterly cold day, is not meant as a eulogy (something he would be uncomfortable with), nor even as a homily on what constitutes a happy death. It’s intended as a reflection upon what constitutes a father, a dad, and how we are connected, formed, and sometimes deformed by such a figure.

What is a father? What is a dad?  What does your father do for you simply by fathering you and, then, do to you by his love and his absence, by his care and his neglect, and by his virtues and his weaknesses?

If the Neo-Freudian are right, then your father and your mother have very different roles in the formation of your person. It is the mother who is your symbiotic link to life and it’s from her, much more so than from your father, that you get your body, your link to the earth, and, to the extent that you have this, your sense of being loved, wanted, cradled, and cherished. Among all mammals, it is the mother who must lick the newborn and thus free it from whatever constricts it at birth. The mother, after birth, opens the body to life. It’s she who gestates, carries, and then licks, cradles, and nourishes the child. No child or adult ultimately ever forgets this and the constrictions or freedoms in our hearts are very linked to our mothers.

But it is the father who mediates authority and who must give the child both the permission to enjoy life and the challenge to discipline. It’s the father who must, especially by the way he himself lives, model for the child the correct combination of pleasure and renunciation. It’s from him, more so than from the mother, that the child learns the combination of release and control, submission to authority and the freedom to walk one’s own path.

If the major figures in the new movement in masculine spirituality (e.g., Robert Bly, Michael Meade, Robert Moore) are correct, than a father’s task is also key in initiating you into adulthood, in helping to lead you beyond being the little boy or the little girl towards the adult, the man or the woman. A father does this to you by, first of all, showing you in his own life how erotic energy and warrior energy (your energy for love and your energy to fight) should flow into an each other and form some harmony so that all the boundless and chaotic forces within you can be contained, focused, and then creatively opened and spent for the service of God and community. The father must show his child the purpose of both sexual and warrior energy, namely, how enjoyment and creativity blend with courageous self-renunciation and how erotic and warrior energy merge in the fight to protect community (especially its weakest members). Your father must teach you how to be both a lover and a warrior.

My own father, imperfect as are all human fathers, didn’t always find, nor radiate, the perfect balance between enjoyment and discipline, lover and warrior, sexual enjoyment and self-abnegation. As one of his sons, I then too do not always know how to walk the tightrope and there is sloppiness between laziness and overwork, love and anger, self-indulgence and masochism. Sometimes I can protect community and sometimes I cannot even protect myself. But I have steadiness too, sometimes, beyond the slopping around. I had a good dad. He both loved and fought, and he was sometimes too hard on himself but sometimes he thoroughly enjoyed his life.

I am twenty years after that minus 40 degrees centigrade day and sometimes my spirit is still that cold and I am still the little boy, the pre-adult, alone, waiting for my father to protect me and lead me to adulthood, unsure of how to integrate loving and fighting, enjoyment and discipline. But, when I look for his person, his spirit, not among the bones of ancestors, but among the communion of Christ’s saints, I find him walking a delicate tightrope and his hand reaches back to help steady my struggle with loving and fighting and with enjoyment and renunciation and then I feel a little more like an adult.

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Optimism Or Pessimism

November 25, 1990

This past summer, while being interviewed by a journalist, I was asked whether or not I am optimistic or pessimistic about the future. Being pathologically eclectic, my answer is stolen from Dan Berrigan, William Stringfellow, and Joyce Hollyday.

Are you optimistic or pessimistic? The answer is irrelevant because the question is unimportant. Optimism and pessimism are mostly a question of individual temperament, one’s enneagram number. Some people, by nature, are upbeat; others more morose and suspicious. Whether one falls in the former or latter category is, in the end, unimportant.  As well, optimism and pessimism are, beyond temperament, grounded in practical human possibilities. One looks at a situation and tries to judge realistically whether or not there might be grounds for a happy outcome. One is then optimistic or pessimistic on the basis of that.

Given this, that optimism and pessimism are rooted in temperament and practical possibility, it follows that what’s important for a Christian is not optimism or pessimism, but something else, namely, hope.

Unlike optimism, hope is not grounded in natural temperament nor in what should realistically emerge from a given situation. One isn’t hopeful because she’s upbeat or because she looks at a given situation and feels that it merits a positive assessment.  Hope is grounded in belief in God and in the nature and power of that God. A person has hope because God is infinitely gracious and powerful and, because of that, ultimately, everything will turn out for the good.

Peace, community, justice, forgiveness, and oneness of heart will come about not because a positive attitude towards life will make our desire for them a reality (though positive optimism might indeed be helpful) or because, looking realistically at the world and the church, there are practical grounds for expecting these things. No! Peace, community, justice, forgiveness, and oneness of heart will come about because a God who can do what is naturally impossible, raise bodies from the dead, will also raise these up.

This distinction, between hope and optimism, is so important because it is crucial to keep in front of us the fact that hope is grounded in God while optimism is grounded in human possibility. The kingdom will come about through sustained hope, not through sustained optimism.

If, in examining the foundations of our political, social, and economic order (and indeed, the fabric of institutional religion), one looks at practical possibility alone, then only the most naive of persons will see in those foundations any reason to hope for a future which is better than the present one. Looking simply at what is happening within world and within the churches, there are few, precious few, grounds to realistically think that things will ever be substantially different than they are right now. From the phenomenological facts alone there is little reason to dare think that we, or anyone else, will ever sing a truly new song.

But the seeds for a new earth do not lie in practical possibility. The foundations of our political, social, economic and ecclesial structures are shot through with injustice and selfishness. There are precious few indications that this will ever change substantially. The foundations of our interpersonal lives (our marriages, families, communities) reek with polarization, anger, past hurt, and jealousy. Not much has changed since Cain killed his brother … and there are few enough indications that, left on its own, anything is ever likely to change. The foundations of our personal lives are full of moral ineptness, self-interest, timidity, self-pity, and neuroses.

Given all that, perhaps it takes a lesser act of faith to believe that God exists than it does to believe that things will ever be any different than they are now.  It is easier to believe that an historical person, Jesus, once rose from the dead than it is to believe, really, that our world, and all of us, will ever rise to true peace, justice, love, and community. It is easier to believe in intimacy after death than in intimacy after birth.

Human possibility alone offers ground neither for optimism nor for hope (unless one hasn’t watched the news for a long time!) We have struggled long and painfully (and have produced martyrs) for justice, wholeness, and community and yet, daily, injustice triumphs over justice, brokenness is more manifest than wholeness, and community is fragmented at every level. Our present structures (sociological, political, economic, and ecclesial) and our present psyche (the contemporary soul), left all on their own, will not bring about a city of justice, peace, and intimacy on this earth.

The point is that it is not so important whether one responds to this fact with optimism or pessimism. The Christian task and vocation is that of hope.

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An Open Letter from a Restless Pilgrim

November 15, 1990

Recently I received a letter from a lady whom I have never met, but who occasionally writes to me. She writes when she is frustrated and, at that time, is unable to talk to those whom she does know. I have a number of such letters from her and, despite different dates and wording, they all have roughly the same sound. Let me, with her permission, open up these letters for you. I synthesize and paraphrase:

Dear Father: (Reader)

I don’t know why I am writing to you. We don’t know each other, but I thought maybe we might understand each other. Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Karin, but that is not important, though you need to know some of my background to understand what I’m sharing.

In fact, I don’t quite know what I am sharing, but I am going to give this a try. I’ll start with the feeling and then try to fill in some background. I’m frustrated and on the surface there should be no reason for this since I’m young (just turned 40), healthy, happily married (in that I think don’t have enough reasons in my marriage to be unhappy), have two nearly grown (healthy and good) children, have a job that I basically like and which gives me some creative outlet, have some very supportive friends, and, while not rich, am also not poor. There’s no one big thing that is radically weighing on me.

But that’s the smooth surface. Some other things lurk underneath. They don’t seem all that big or serious but they can at times, like right now, render everything else pretty unsatisfying and make me almost hopelessly restless and frustrated.

The frustration I am talking about is not some big existential angst, like Camus and Bergman talk about; or even midlife crisis, or the types of things they suggest therapy for nowadays (victim of childhood abuse, Adult Child Of an Alcoholic, lack of self-esteem). I even did therapy once for some of those things (and it helped).  But this is unconnected to that.

It’s frustrating to talk about because it seems like such a small thing, something of no importance; certainly not something that should outweigh my blessings … but yet, it’s there, and it doesn’t go away. So I’m struggling and frustrated.

I want to share my person (my values and my spirit) in a way that I am not sharing them right now, especially in my marriage (but everywhere else too). Nobody seems interested, at least not most of the time. My husband is a good man, the proverbial “Israelite without guile”, but he isn’t interested in this kind of sharing or self-disclosure. He prefers an emotional and spiritual celibacy, even when he doesn’t like sexual celibacy.  With some of my other friends, there’s depth to a point, but almost always, there is a line that we don’t cross. It seems there is always one block or another to this kind of sharing. It’s the wrong time, or the wrong place, or the wrong people are around, or we’re too tired, or the mood isn’t right.

Sometimes I wonder who is interested in anything beyond the simple sweetening of life!

All this probably makes me sound like the typical person who is frustrated by the plainness of a life and a marriage which don’t measure up to the ideals and expectations of romance and self-fulfillment in the culture. Maybe there’s a bit of that here. But that’s not my frustration. I am not naive about romance, nor about salvation laying in self-fulfillment. I’m old enough to have known another time (my parent’s poverty, their making due, their sometimes crushing realism). That’s in my genes. I grew up praying daily the words  “to thee we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.” If anything, I am a crushing realist. I am hardly looking for the finished symphony, the perfect consummation in a marriage or elsewhere, though I dream of it. I know enough of life (and romance and marriage) to know that, in some fashion, all of us will always sleep alone. What I’m looking for is not a lover, good sex, an affair with somebody who’s sensitive and who will make everything better.

So what am I looking for? Maybe this letter is just trying to name it. A kindred spirit maybe? Somebody to sleep with in a different way? (But would that be an infidelity to my marriage?) Some ear to simply really hear me? Some other person to know what it’s like? A statement of frustration that would overcome the torture of repressed expression? A saying out loud of a whispered truth that, in this world, we are all celibates whether we marry or not?

You tell me, am I filling in what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ or am I just neurotic as hell?  Is my marriage, such as it is, all I should expect or am I selling myself short? Is my life, such as it is, all I should expect or am I being sold short? Am I suffering Christ’s loneliness or am I just a frustrated woman approaching middle age? What’s the difference between being a pilgrim or earth or just being sexually frustrated? What is proper expectation?

Please write to me and venture some opinion. Right now I don’t know.

Peace,

Karin.

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Understanding Suicide

November 11, 1990

In the years that I have been writing this column, I have on three or four occasions done an article on suicide. Each of those columns prompted a flood of grateful letters. The gratitude came from the fact that those columns suggested that, in most cases, suicide claims its victims in the same way as does a heart attack, a stroke, cancer, or an accident. There is no freedom not to die. Suicide victims are, like victims of sickness and accidents, not responsible for their own deaths and suicide should not be a matter of secrecy, shame, moral judgment, and second-guessing.

Canadian poet Margaret Atwood once wrote certain things need to be “said and said until they don’t need to be said anymore.”  With this in mind and given the painful misunderstandings that habitually surround suicide, I was all set last week to write another column on suicide which would reiterate the fact that suicidal depression, like certain other physical diseases, was a terminal illness and not a free choice that connotes moral and psychological delinquency, when a new book by William Styron, the author of ‘Sophie’s Choice’ and several other classic novels, fell into my hands. Entitled ‘Darkness Visible’, A Memoir of Madness (Random House, N.Y., 1990), the book chronicles Styron’s own descent into suicidal madness and his helplessness as he spirals into that hell.

Since Styron writes more clearly than I, and is sharing firsthand the experience of suicidal depression, allow me to quote him extensively:

“The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it, and it kills in many instances because its anguish can no longer be borne. The prevention of many suicides will continue to be hindered until there is a general awareness of the nature of this pain. … to the tragic legion who are compelled to destroy themselves there should be no more reproof attached than to the victims of terminal cancer. …

What I had begun to discover is that, mysteriously and in ways that are totally remote from normal experience, the gray drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain. But it is not an immediately identifiable pain, like that of a broken limb. It may be more accurate to say that despair, owing to some evil trick played upon the sick brain by the inhabiting psyche, comes to resemble the diabolical discomfort of being imprisoned in a fiercely overheated room. And because no breeze stirs this caldron, because there is no escape from the smothering confinement, it is entirely natural that the victim begins to think ceaselessly of oblivion.”

And Styron describes graphically how the depressed person thinks such thoughts of oblivion: “many of the artifacts of my house had become potential devices for my own destruction: the attic rafters (and an outside maple or two)  a means to hang myself, the garage a place to inhale carbon monoxide, the bathtub a vessel to receive the flow of my opened arteries. The kitchen knives in their drawers had but one purpose for me. Death by heart attack seemed particularly inviting, absolving me as it would of active responsibility, and I had toyed with the idea of self-induced pneumonia, a long, frigid, shirt sleeved hike though the rainy woods.”

After reading virtually all the literature, medical and psychological, on the issue, Styron suggests the suicidal depression is, in the end, caused by chemical imbalance, despite the fact that other factors (lifestyle, childhood, moral values, memory) play in. Modern sensitivities, he contends, make us reluctant to use old-fashioned words like madhouse, asylum, insanity, melancholia, lunatic, or madness, but “never let it be doubted that depression, in its extreme form, is madness. The madness results from an aberrant biochemical process. It has been established with reasonable certainty (after strong resistance from many psychiatrists, and not all that long ago) that such madness is chemically induced amid the neurotransmitters of the brain, probably as a result of systemic stress, which for unknown reasons causes a depletion of the chemicals norepinephrine and serotonin, and the increase of a hormone, cortisol.”

Styron was one of the lucky ones. With his suicide already planned, he “drew on some last gleam of sanity” and, in that, realized that “could not commit this desecration on” himself and his loved ones. He woke his sleeping wife and she drove him to a hospital. In its “safety” and given “seclusion and time” he healed. He lives today, healthily, and he tells the insiders’ story.

That insiders’ story is doubly valuable. Not only should it helps us to understand suicide more deeply and thus exorcise it of its shameful stigma, but, once its anatomy is better known, we should be able to better help others (and ourselves) in its prevention.

Beyond that, a proper understanding of suicide should help us all walk more humbly and compassionately in grace and community, resisting the bias of the strong and unreflective who make the unfair judgment that people who are sick want to be that way and who are blind to the fact of their own psyche’s exquisite fragility and perishability.

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Unnoticed Blood

November 4, 1990

Nearly one hundred years ago as Therese of Lisieux lay dying she told her sister, Pauline, that the entire foundation of her spirituality came from her contemplation of the face of the suffering Christ (“the Holy Face”, she called it). She described to her sister how she was always struck by the Good Friday texts (from Isaiah and from the gospels) that describe the face of God’s suffering servant on earth, how that face is marred, unattractive, and either ignored or despised by those who see it.

Therese (whose real religious name, incidentally, was “Sister Therese of the Holy Face, and not “the little flower” or “Therese of the Child Jesus”) then tells Pauline: “One Sunday, looking at a picture of Our Lord on the Cross, I was struck by the blood flowing from one of his divine hands. I felt a pang of great sorrow when thinking this blood was falling to the ground without anyone’s hastening to gather it up. I was resolved to remain in spirit at the foot of the Cross and to receive its dew.” (Story of a Soul, p. 99). In a later conversation, she adds: “I don’t want this precious blood to be lost. I shall spend my life gathering it up for the good of souls.  …  for “to live from love is to dry Your Face “Vivre d’Amour, c’est essuyer ta Face.” (Last Conversations, pp. 126 & 134).

This metaphor – noticing the preciousness of Christ’s blood, gathering it up, and gently drying the face of the suffering Christ – is the metaphor Therese uses to describe her entire vocation. It’s this that constitutes the deep foundation upon which she grounds the other elements of her spirituality.

For her, Christ is still bleeding in the sufferings of persons on this earth, in our sufferings, yours and mine. And, as was the case with Jesus, this blood is, mostly, dripping unnoticed, unvalued, and often to the tune of another’s indifference and ridicule. Therese’s sensitivity (which was born out of her own suffering, her deep prayer, and from the unique way she was loved and valued and made to feel precious as a small child) alerted her to preciousness that was seemingly being wasted. Like a sensitive artist watching a masterpiece being heartlessly defaced and destroyed, the sight tore at her heart and so baptized and displaced her so that her whole life became nothing else than an attempt to do something about it.

Before dying, Therese promised that she would even spend her eternity, heaven, coming back to earth to continue to gather these unnoticed drops of blood and to continue to dry the sufferer’s face. 

What a powerful and fruitful image this could be for contemporary spirituality as we struggle to bring together the demands of piety and private morality with the demands of social justice and committed action in the world. Martyr’s blood is still flowing; Christ’s blood is still flowing, the suffering servant of God is still being ridiculed on this earth … both in the poor of the world (the victims of injustice) and in the workplaces and homes of the not so poor (which is, perhaps, the main reason why this latter group so easily and blindly places the role of victimizer). 

Christ’s suffering is still going on, the cost of living charity, joy, peace, justice, patience, mildness, and chastity, is evident in faces everywhere.  Tragically, we are not inundated with spiritual artists who notice that something precious beyond words is being defaced and destroyed. Nobody seems too bent on “hastening to gather up” that blood, nobody seems to notice how uniquely precious it is, and nobody seems to have the fully discriminating insight, Therese’s insight, into  Christ’s suffering face.

If Christ’s suffering face was truly understood we would see the coming together of private morality and social justice, of circles of piety and social action … for social justice circles would recognize the preciousness, importance, and utter non-negotiability of the tiniest private moral, psychological, or spiritual action and circles of piety would begin, immediately, to make the preferential option for the poor since they would immediately see that in the lives of the poor something precious beyond words is being defaced and destroyed – and nobody is noticing or caring!

Beyond that, once we would start saying to each other, “to live from love is to dry your face”, our habitual propensity for anger, self-pitying, self-righteousness, and giving up in despair would give way to a resurrection of, precisely, charity, joy, peace, justice, patience, mildness, and chastity in our lives. Why? Because the faith of Christ is always built upon the blood of the martyrs.

What’s needed, both in social justice and piety circles, are more persons with the insight of Therese of Lisieux, more persons who notice where Christ’s blood is being spilt today and who say: “I don’t want this precious blood to be lost. I shall spend my life gathering it up.”

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