“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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.”

I teach a course in World Religions. Part of the benefit of that is not only that it forces me to read and study these religions, it also gives me the opportunity occasionally to engage in some actual dialogue with them. During the years that I have been teaching this course, I have been in dialogue with a Hindu professor of theology. A gentle, saintly, and prayerful man, he is deeply appreciative of Christianity and, like Gandhi (who was also a Hindu), is seldom out of reach of his New Testament.

However one of the areas that he criticizes within Christianity is the fact that, in recent centuries, we do not have much in the way of a spirituality for the final stage of our lives. As he puts it, “you have no vocation for those who are retired, unless they are professional religious or monks.” He ties this criticism to something larger and he is worth hearing on this:

“Christianity is no longer visible in the marketplaces and part of this is that you have no SANNYASINS (holy persons) there. Your Sannyasins are all in monasteries, tucked away from the world. In Christian cultures all of your street people (those who do sit in the marketplaces and beg) have no religious witness value because they are not begging for religious reasons, but only because they have no other way to live. You do not have a vocation for your older people – where they can become sannyasins who sit in the marketplaces, beg, and by their very presence and appearance force everyone to think that there is a God.

Think what a witness it would be if very successful people, doctors, presidents of banks, athletes, journalists, teachers, business people, tradespeople, farmers, and married persons who had raised children successfully, people who had all kinds of other options in life (a home in the country, winters in the South, golf in the summers, travel to other countries) would instead be sitting, begging, in supermarkets, malls, street corners, and sporting arenas. Nobody could feel superior to them or treat them with pity, as we do with the street people who sit there now. These sit there because they have failed in life. But think … if you sat there, detached, with nothing, begging, because you had been  a success in life. What a witness and vocation that would be! Christianity doesn’t have that, it has no such ideal for those who are moving out of active life.”

He’s right. We have no SANNYASINS, and very little in the way of a spiritual ideal for people who are moving out of active life.

In Hinduism, life is understood to have natural four stages:

Up until you get married and begin a family, you are considered a student. As a student, your primary focus is to enjoy your youthand to prepare for life. Then you become a householder which begins with marriage and ends when your last child is on his/her own and your mortgage is paid and you can retire from your job. As a Householder, your task is family, business, involvement with civic and church groups. These are your most active years, your duty years. The next stage is that of being a forest dweller. This is a period which should begin precisely when you are free from family and business duties. This is meant to be an extended period wherein you withdraw from active life and study and meditate your religion. (For example, you go back to school, perhaps do a theology degree, do some extensive retreats, and so on.) Then, at a point, you return to the world as a Sannyasin, as a person who owns nothing except faith and wisdom. You sit in marketplaces as a street person, as someone with no significance, property, attachments, or importance. You are available to others for a smile, a chat, an exchange of faith, or for concrete acts of charity. You are a street person, by choice, by vocation, for God, for others; not because you do not have other options (the golf course, winters down South, the cottage in the country) but because you have already made a success of your life. You are now readying yourself for death, to return to God as naked and possessionless as you were when you entered the earth.

Those are the stages of life as Hinduism understands them. My professor friend highlights how in Christian spirituality we are weak regarding the last one … and our witness in the marketplace is also weak because of that.

In the early centuries of Christianity, spirituality saw martyrdom as the fullest expression of Christian life, the ideal way to cap off a full life. Justin, Polycarp, Cyprian, and countless others “retired” into martyrdom. Later, Christians used to retire into monasteries and convents. What is offered to us to retire into? The country club? But does this prepare us for death and help make Christianity present in the marketplace?

I think my friend is right. We need a spirituality for Christian SANNYASINS.

Several months ago in this column, I wrote a certain defense for the Roman Catholic practice of granting annulments for marriages that have failed. In that article I argued that an annulment is not just “Catholic divorce”, that it doesn’t deny that a real marriage had existed, and that it doesn’t in any way jeopardize the legitimacy of the children of that union. To do this, I made a distinction between marriage as a purely social and legal reality and marriage as a sacramental bond.

I’ve received somewhat of a critical reaction. Essentially the criticisms can be reduced to two:

i) The concept of a sacramental marriage which I gave was seen as far too idealistic and, by its standard, nobody, it was argued, can really be said to have a sacramental marriage.

ii) The distinction I made between a social/legal reality and a sacramental one was also seen by some as, ultimately, false and an annulment was understood by them not as an adjudication as to whether or not a certain reality had existed,  but simply as the church’s acceptance of the fact that a marriage has failed and the church now in compassion reaches out, wipes the slate clean, and offers the parties the possibility of a new beginning.

My need to respond to these criticism stems not, I hope, from a need to defend a position, but from a need to clarify it.

In the original article I defined sacrament as “anything that visibly or tangibly gives expression to any aspect of God’s revelation or saving grace … anything that tangibly prolongs the saving action of Christ.” To this (taken from Edward Schillebeeckx),  I added a qualification taken from St. Augustine: ” … and for something to be a sacrament there must be a certain likeness to the reality it signifies; otherwise you do not have a sacrament at all.”

Applying this to marriage, I stated that marriage is a sacrament when the love between a man and a woman has a certain likeness to the way God loves the world and the way Christ loves the church. Given that definition of marriage, a marriage is only a sacrament when “it radiates freely chosen love, commitment, fidelity, deep care, profound respect, great tenderness, hospitality for others, and a willingness to dies completely to self for the sake of that love.” 

Reading this, many asked, “how can human love approximate such an ideal?” These qualities, they argued, would only be present in a perfect marriage. According to those criteria, basically nobody would have a marriage.

It’s this point that I address myself: What’s key in Augustine’s qualification is the phrase “a certain likeness”. The church presupposes, given the limits of human love, that no marriage in this world will ever meet this standard perfectly. No two persons in this life can ever love each other as freely, faithfully, respectfully, tenderly, and selflessly as God loves the world and Christ loves the church. However, with that being admitted, it must also be admitted that for a relationship between a man and a woman to bring Christ into the world (since love, to be sacrament, must “be food for the life of the world” and not just mutual narcissism) it must have “a certain likeness” to the free, faithful, respectful, tender, and selfless way that God and Christ love us.

A “certain likeness” does not mean it needs to do this perfectly, but it must do it in some way, however minimal.

This is not, I submit, an impossible ideal, since we, in fact, promise exactly those things in our marriage vows. What else are the marriage vows if they are not a promise to love freely, faithfully, respectfully, tenderly, and be willing to die for each other? When the church grants an annulment it judges (perhaps wrongly in some cases) that this particular relationship did not concretely in life radiate what it promised in its marriage vows.

The very fact that the relationship broke up is, already, by most opinions a sufficient indication of this. As C.S. Lewis once put it, any love that dies had, at its very beginning, already some inherent flaw … and, by my application of the criteria, was then never truly a sacrament that symbolized God’s love for the world (Ephesians 5).

The question, of course, then arises: If the simple fact of failure is sufficient grounds for annulment, then why have the procedure?

The process of annulment is necessary, as the previous article stated, for the freedom of conscience of those who are undergoing it and for the clarity of their status within the rest of the Christian community. Moreover, it helps to bring about the type of closure that makes for a truly new beginning, personally and communally. I have seen many instances where individuals, while being bitter about the process while it was going on, were extremely grateful for it after it was over. That gratitude, I submit, came about because they understood, after it was over, the benefits not just of an act of compassion, but of an act of adjudication.

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Leo Tolstoy begins his famous novel, “Anna Karenina”, with the words: ” All happy families resemble each other, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

The church today, despite a growing health that manifests itself at a deeper level, is an unhappy family … unhappy in our own way!  Tension, anger, and bitterness is dividing not just the sincere from the insincere and the committed from the non-committed, but is, more distressingly, dividing the sincere from the sincere.

Liturgical services, theological classrooms, religious publications, renewal centers, and religious meetings and discourse in general invariably have a certain edge and edginess to them: conservative versus liberal, European theology versus liberation theology, universal church versus local church, feminist versus antifeminist, pro-life versus pro-choice, pedagogy versus andragogy, social justice versus the economic status quo, those for women’s ordination versus those against, left brain versus right brain, piety versus criticism. Increasingly, it is becoming harder for sincere Christians to even worship together.

Much of this is, of course, good. Tension is a sign of life and, as Freud once put it, the only body with no tension in it is a dead one.  Love that does not confront is more properly called sentiment and so the path of faith and community, this side of eternity, is always marked by tears and misunderstanding. In this, all families are similarly unhappy.

Some of this tension, however, does not afflict all families. Behind the ugliness (and it’s ugliness that makes people not want to worship with each other) lurks ideology.

Simply put, most of us have bought into either a liberal or a conservative consensus which now functions as an ideology, acting as conscience, as hermeneutical key, and as eye and ear through which we then selectively see and listen. Accordingly, most of our reactions, opinions, rhetoric, indignations, enthusiasms, and causes then become highly predictable according to whichever ideological catalogue we are following. If it prescribes an indignation, we produce it, if it prescribes an enthusiasm we produce it, if it prescribes a cause we take it up, if it prescribes a cliché we mouth it … small wonder nobody has, as yet, set up a DIAL-AN-IDEOLOGY hotline!

In such an atmosphere free critical thinking, not to mention basic human respect, is generally absent. In its place we frequently see what’s worst in both conversativism and liberalism, namely, ideological rhetoric paraded as criticism and intimidation replacing respect. This is unfortunate because the good scribe should pull out of his or her sack the new as well as the old … there is a demand for both the liberal and the conservative principle in the church and within all human community. Let me try to explain:

Liberal and conservative are, long before they become ideologies, first of all, temperaments that we are born with. We are born, temperamentally, as one or the other, just as we are born white or colored, female or male, light haired or dark-haired.  Granted many other factors – sociological, political, and economic – play into this, but, in the end, we are either liberal or conservative by temperament. Moreover, it seems that, like the ratio of females to males, at any given time the church and the larger family of humanity seems to divide itself roughly 50-50 between liberal and conservative (as voting habits and power blocs give ample testimony of).      

This, while it is perennially irritating for both liberals and conservatives, is healthy and the survival of community depends upon it. A community comes together and stays together and grows together only when there is both an active conservative and liberal principle present.

Thus, for example, in a family it is very important that there be a conserving principle, someone who holds things together, who preserves the family traditions, who demands a certain ethos of family members, who makes sure the house runs, that the meals are cooked, that the bills are paid, that everyone contributes, and who, at times, has the authority to call to order and demand that family members be home sometimes and assume certain responsibilities. Without this conserving principle, as many a frustrated parent knows, family life soon dissipates, a home becomes a boarding house, and a family degenerates into a number of individuals each doing his or her own thing.

On the other hand, however, for a family to survive you need, as well, a liberal principle. You need someone to constantly push edges, to critically examine the family traditions, to show where ethos is bias, to open windows, to invite the family to do new things, to bring new people and new attitudes into the house, and to generate new life so that the family does not suffocate in its own traditions, biases, limits, and idiosyncrasies. To have a family you have to do more than preserve life, you must constantly also create life.

It is no accident that God populates the world with both liberals and conservatives. Each is vital for the formation of community.