Infantile Grandiosity and the Image of God

July 8, 1991

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Eucharist as Sacrament of Reconciliation

June 10, 1991

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Criticism

June 8, 1991

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Not To Commit The Original Sin

May 30, 1991

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Hidden Life

May 27, 1991

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

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

That, however, was not the full picture.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Healthy and Unhealthy Fear of Hell

May 26, 1991

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Moral Loneliness

May 6, 1991

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Social Justice – New Knowledge/New Responsibility

April 15, 1991

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Dark Night Of Spirit

April 8, 1991

We are born with deeply greedy hearts, hardwired so that, spontaneously and insatiably, we are driven to possess what we love and find beautiful.

Etty Hillesum once described this in the following way: “And here I hit upon something essential. When I saw a beautiful flower, what I longed to do with it was press it to my heart, or eat it all up. It was more difficult with a piece of beautiful scenery, but the feeling was the same. I was too sensual, I might almost write too greedy. I yearned physically for all I thought was beautiful, wanted to own it.Hence that painful longing that could never be satisfied, the pining for something I thought unattainable, which I called my creative urge. I believe it was this powerful emotion that made me think that I was born to produce great works. It all suddenly changed. God alone knows by what inner process, but it is different now. I realized it only this morning, when I recalled my short walk round the Skating Club a few nights ago. It was dusk, soft hues in the sky, mysterious silhouettes of houses, trees alive with light through the tracery of their branches, in short, enchanting. And then I knew precisely how I would have felt in the past. Then all that beauty would have gone like a stab to my heart and I would not have known what to do with the pain. Then I would have felt the need to write, to compose verses, but the words would have refused to come. I would have felt utterly miserable, wallowed in the pain and exhausted myself as a result. The experience would have sapped all my energy. Now, I know it for what it was: mental masturbation. (An Interrupted Life, p.13)

This greediness of spirit that Hillesum describes is part of our natural make-up as human beings and is, as she too so well describes, the deep source of much restlessness and inchoate pain. Beauty and love should bring joy and invigorate us with energy. Instead, too often they go “like a stab to the heart … and we do not know what to do with the pain.”

Why this happens is more clear than is its resolution. Our spontaneous greed and possessiveness, especially within relationships, is the reason why beauty and love often bring more pain, jealousy, frustration, and restlessness than they do joy, peace, admiration, and delight. Beauty causes us pain because we want to possess it, and possess it in a certain exclusivity. To use just one example, we notice that so often when someone turns to us in vulnerability, in need, and in exclusivity, our hearts soar and we become gracious, grateful, and loving (often to the extreme).How generous and noble we become when someone makes us his or her sole god! Conversely, and more revealing, whenever someone radiates a beauty, love, security,and a strength that is neither drawn from a relationship to us nor can be captured in a certain exclusivity, we get insecure, jealous, petty, and fill with suspicion and pain. Then beauty goes, precisely, “like a stab to the heart”. In short, whenever we cannot press someone or something to our hearts like a flower that we can own exclusively, then their beauty comes to us not as a source of delight, but of pain. How horrible … when one sees it so clearly!

So central is this problem that the great mystics suggest that one of the fundamental tasks of the spiritual life is to move from this natural urge “to press the flower to one’s heart” to “the sheer gaze of admiration”. John of the Cross calls this movement the dark night of the spirit and submits that the achievement of “the sheer gaze of admiration” is the highest degree of spiritual and psychological maturity attainable in life. He also, very realistically, outlines how painful and difficult it is to do. Attaining it, he asserts, is nothing less than purgatory.

My intent here is not to outline his praxis for attaining this. Rather it is to alert us to its need since as another mystic, Therese of Lisieux, puts it, “in following our possessive instincts we seek ourselves and we end up getting a broken heart that way.”

The movement towards the ‘sheer gaze of admiration’, the breaking of our instinct urge to possess what we love, is the experience of purgatory, but its achievement brings with an unique peace. When, as Hillesum puts it, she was able to admire rather than possess … “beauty now filled me with joy. I was just as deeply moved by that mysterious, still landscape in the dusk as I might have been before, but somehow I no longer wanted to own it. I went home invigorated and got back to work. And the scenery stayed with me, in the background, as a cloak about my soul, to put it poetically for once, but it no longer held me back: I no longer ‘masturbated’ with it.’

Young In God’s Eyes

April 1, 1991

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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”.

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.

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!”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!