Several years ago, while doing my doctoral thesis, I had the privilege of having as mentor and promoter the distinguished Belgian philosopher-theologian, Jan Walgrave. One day, while discussing a point in philosophy, he asked me: “Do you ever sit on a park bench and ask yourself: Why is there something instead of nothing?”  The presence of so great and saintly a man curbs any temptation to lie so  I had to answer: “To be honest, no. Or, at best, very rarely.”

“Then you are not a philosopher!” he gently suggested. “A true philosopher asks the question every day for it’s a miracle that anything at all exists.”

Having met, occasionally, in persons like Walgrave and others, true philosophers, I know better than to claim citizenship in so contemplative a realm. True philosophers, like true mystics, true poets, and true artists, are rare. My natural thought patterns are normally too pragmatic to be numbered among them. More unfortunate still, like most other non-philosophers, I generally take the world and most everything in it for granted.

Sometimes though I have my contemplative moments and, lately, in doing some reading in science regarding the origins of our universe, I am beginning to realize why philosophers such as Walgrave do not so easily take the world for granted. When one examines the current scientific hypothesis regarding the origins of our universe (the so-called “Big Bang” theory) one realizes that it is a miracle, something beyond the human imagination, that there is something instead of nothing.

Science today tells us that our universe had a birthday. Roughly 15 billion years ago there was a ‘time –zero’, a time when everything in our universe as we have it now was not. Everything that is now in our entire universe began about 15 billion years ago with an explosion (the “big bang”) from something which was tinier than a single atom. Moreover, for our universe, our world, and human life to have come about a mind-boggling combination of factors had to be just right. I say “mind-boggling” because it is when we examine those factors that we are left with the philosopher’s wonder at why there is something at all instead of nothing. Let me list just a few of these “mind-bogglers”:

First off, as Stephen Hawking writes, “If the rate of expansion one second after the Big Bang has been smaller by one part in a hundred thousand million million it would have all re-collapsed” and we would have no universe. On the other hand, if it had been greater by one part in a million, the universe would have expanded too rapidly for planets to form. That equilibrium (upon which depends the existence of our universe) is, even today, still balanced on that same razor’s edge.

Second, if the nuclear force caused by this great explosion were even slightly weaker we would have only hydrogen in the universe. If it were even slightly stronger, all the hydrogen would be converted into helium. In either case, we would not have the present universe, the planet earth, and human life. Moreover the explosion was just strong enough so that carbon could form; yet if it were any stronger all the carbon would have been converted into oxygen. Again, a variation within a millionth of a part, and we have no earth and no life.

Finally, in the first seconds that followed this great explosion, for every one billion antiprotons in the universe, there were one billion and one protons. The billion pairs annihilated each other to produce radiation … but the one proton was left over. A greater or smaller number of survivors (or no survivors at all, if they had been evenly matched) and, again, we would not have a universe. And, to accentuate this anomaly, normally there is a symmetrical balance between particles (a billion proton for a billion antiprotons). Why the billion and one?

And then the complexity that is ultimately produced by this big bang! For example, there are a hundred trillion synapses (points at which a nerve impulse passes from one neutron to another) in a human brain and the number of possible ways of connecting them is greater than the number of atoms in the universe.

Looking at all of this, the chance coincidence of so many trillion possibilities that had to be exactly right for a universe and life to emerge, even Stephen Hawking admits, “there are theological implications.”

My mentor, Walgrave, used to define these “theological implications” in the following way … “The next time you are sitting on a park bench and looking at a tree, or you are looking into the eyes of someone you love, there should flood through you gratitude for the marvel of it all and  you should ask yourself: Why is there something instead of nothing?”

In his “Confessions”, St. Augustine describes how he became a committed Christian after a long struggle that involved two conversions: one which intellectually convinced him that Christianity was correct and the other that empowered him to actually live out what he believed. There were nearly nine years between these two conversions and it was during this time (when in his head he was a Christian but in his actions he wasn’t) that he used to say his famous prayer: “LORD, MAKE ME A GOOD AND A CHASTE CHRISTIAN … BUT NOT YET!”

Interestingly enough, a contemporary of his, also a saint, Ephraim the Syrian (306-373 A.D.) wrote a very similar prayer:

“Sorrow on me, beloved! that I unapt and reluctant in my will abide, and behold, winter hath come upon me, and the infinite tempest hath found me naked and spoiled and with no perfecting of good in me. I marvel at myself. O my beloved, how daily I default and daily do repent. I build up for an hour and an hour overthrows what I have built.

At evening I say, tomorrow I will repent, but when morning comes, joyous I waste the day. Again at evening I say, I shall keep vigil all night and I shall entreat the Lord to have mercy on my sins. But when the night is come, I am full of sleep.”

What Augustine and Ephraim name with such clarity (and not without a touch of humour) in these prayers is one of the great difficulties we face in our struggle to grow in faith and human maturity, namely, the tendency to go through life saying perpetually: “Yes, I need to do that, but now is not the time!”

It’s consoling for us to know that saints struggled for years with moral mediocrity, laziness, and bad habits, that they, like us, could for years cave in to these things with the shrug: “Tomorrow, I will make a new start!” For years one of

Augustine’s favorite expression was, “Tomorrow and tomorrow!”

“Yes, but not yet!” How often does this describe us?  “I want to be a good Christian and a good person: I want to live more by faith, be less lazy, less selfish, more gracious to others, more contemplative, less given over to anger, bitterness, and my tantrums. I want to stop giving in to gossip and slander. I want to be more realistically involved in justice. I want a better prayer life. I want to take time for things, to spend more time with my family, to smell the flowers, to drive slower, to be more patient, less hurried. I have so many bad habits that I need to change, there are so many areas of bitterness in me, I am defaulting on so many things, I really need to change, but now is not the time … 

First … First, I need to first work through this relationship, to grow older, to change jobs, to get married, to get divorced, to finish school, to have a good vacation, to let my ulcer heal, to get the kids out of the house, to retire, to move to a new parish, to get away from this person (or persons) … then I will get serious about changing this all.  “Lord, make me a mature Christian, but not yet!”

In the end, this is not a good prayer. Augustine tells us that, for years, as he said this prayer he was able to somehow justify to himself his own mediocrity. But steadily a cataclysm kept building within him. God is infinitely patient with us, but our own patience with ourselves eventually wears out and eventually we explode.  In Book 8 of the “Confessions”, he writes how one day, while sitting in a garden, he was overcome with his own immaturities and mediocrity and suddenly “a great storm broke within me, bringing with it a great deluge of tears. … I flung myself down beneath a fig tree and gave way to the tears which now streamed from my eyes … in my misery I kept crying, `How long shall I go on saying, tomorrow, tomorrow. Why not now?'”

When Augustine got up from the ground, his life had changed; he never again finished a prayer with that added little nuance, “but not yet.”

We all have in our lives habits which we know are bad but which for a variety of reasons (laziness, addiction, lack of moral strength, tiredness, anger, paranoia, jealousy, the pressure of family or friends) we are reluctant to break. We sense our mediocrity, but we take consolation in the fact that saints themselves often defaulted by praying: “Yes, Lord, but not yet!”

There is valid consolation in that prayer. It teaches us something about the incredible mercy of God under which we live. God, I suspect, copes better with our faults than we cope with each other and with ourselves. However, like Augustine, even as we say “tomorrow and tomorrow” a storm steadily begins to build within us. Sooner or later our own mediocrity will sicken us and we will cry out: “Why not now?” The “new song” that the psalmist invites us to begins with that line.

Beyond Ideology II

For any community to survive it must continually create life as well as preserve it. In short, it must always have both a liberal and a conservative principle.

We see, for example, in the New Testament a certain tension between Peter and Paul. One suspects from reading Scripture that they were, by temperament, very different and not persons who would spontaneously have chosen to work with each other in ministry (not to mention choosing to go out to dinner together!)

In a crass oversimplification, it might be said that Peter represents the conservative principle and Paul the liberal one. They had different temperaments and concerns: Peter more solicitous about memory and history, Paul pushing edges. Together they were two of the main architects of the New Testament. Today, on our Christian calendars, they are given a single day together, the feast of Peter and Paul.

There is, I submit, a certain pedagogy in that two characters who are temperamentally so different, liberal and conservative, both celebrated on a single feast day; both, as we saw, needed for community, each bringing a separate gift.

The liberal brings faith in the future, the push not to stagnate, the demand to ever stretch mind and heart, the imperative of change and evolution, and the important truth that faith, truth, and life are not a baton that is handed on from one generation to the next like a stick in a relay race.

The conservative brings respect for memory and history, the demand for universality in ethos, and the important truth that something is lost when something is gained and that, accordingly, all change must be scrupulously adjudicated.

But each, unfortunately, invariably brings something else to community as well, namely, its own particular neurosis. It is the latter that makes “the family unhappy in its own way.”

What are the faults and neuroses peculiar to each?

Although their temperaments are very different, at one point, liberals and conservatives are the same in that both very often operate out of an anger and bitterness that leads to disrespect and incapacity to genuinely listen. This, sadly, is particularly true within church circles. I am not sure whether my own experience is atypical or whether I’ve had a wide enough experience outside of church circles, but, for myself, the most unhappy, angry, and bitter persons I have met, I have met in church circles and theological classrooms. I wish that weren’t so, but we are a family unhappy in its own way!

Beyond this shared bitterness, liberals and conservatives differ in their faults:

More peculiar to the liberal is the tendency towards self-hatred, to rewrite his or her own past in bitterness. As well, more peculiar to the liberal is the tendency towards intellectual arrogance, to judge that anyone who does not agree with his or her position is backward, unenlightened, not sensitized, a dinosaur. The ultimate accusatory judgment of the liberal is always: “If you were brighter and more informed, you could not think as you do!”

More peculiar to the conservative is the tendency towards timidity and the plain fear of change. As well, the conservative is perennially given over to paranoid judgment and, here, the ultimate accusatory judgment is always: ” If you were sincere, and still prayed, you could not think (and destroy values) as you do!”

Moreover, liberals and conservatives, today, tend to wield power differently. If a liberal doesn’t like you, he or she will write an article against you, accusing you of intellectual backwardness. If a conservative doesn’t like you, he or she is more likely to try to get you fired or silenced. Liberals resort more to intellectual intimidation, conservatives tend more to pragmatic power … and both sides tend to ridicule, disrespect, and selective listening.

The purpose of this listing of virtues and faults is, I hope, positive in that, in examining them, we might be less prone to identify the needs of community with our own temperamental needs. In seeing both the functions and dysfunctions of liberal and conservative ideology we might be more tempted to, first of all, to resist the tendency to identify truth with judgments that are colored by our own temperament and its needs. Moreover, once it is admitted, by liberals and conservatives alike, that both principles are necessary for community, then there is a chance that not only will there be some mutual respect and genuine listening, but, finally, we will be able risk some genuinely new things without hating or losing our past.

We will always be ideologues, all of us. The beginning of wisdom is the recognition of this fact. True dialogue can only take place when this is the acknowledged starting point, on both sides of any debate. Moreover, once this is acknowledged, both liberals and conservatives will, more easily, see what they bring to community, both positively and negatively, In that insight, we, incurable ideologues that we all are, can begin a little to live beyond ideology … and, in that, our family will be less unhappy “in its own way”.

Recently I began a year of sabbatical. Initially I was euphoric … one whole year with no responsibilities except those that are self-imposed! What a delicious luxury!

That euphoria hasn’t subsided much, but a curious guilt has begun to color it: Sabbaticals are an extravagant luxury that few can afford, the prerogative of the rich. The poor don’t get sabbaticals, for them there is no escape from the work, pressure, and responsibilities imposed by circumstance and duties of state. Beyond that, a sabbatical offers the perfect setting for a self-indulgence that can be rationalized and given a high symbolic coating.

Those issues are worth reflecting upon.

What is a sabbatical? Curiously, the term which is religious in origin and intent, is almost never used anymore in religious settings (where words like “retreat” have replaced it) and has survived for the main part in university circles. University teachers and other such professionals go on sabbatical. In church circles we no longer have much of a theology, nor practice, of sabbaticals. This is unfortunate for the concept of a sabbatical is, in the end, deeply religious.

Sabbatical comes from the word “sabbath”. God, as Genesis reports, worked for 6 days creating the world and then on the 7^th day, the sabbath, rested. What is meant by that curious phrase: “God rested”?

What is meant here has not so much to do with God’s busy-ness or leisure as it has to do with the purpose of creation. The sabbath is the end of creation, the feast for which creation was made, the prefiguration of the world to come, the opportunity for us, already, to taste (every 7th hour) the final state (rest, reconciliation, and play) for which we were made. As Jewish theology has it, God set up things in such a way that already in this life, with all its pressures, tears, and tensions, every “sixtieth hour” we should taste the world to come.

Hence according to scripture, life should have a rhythm: work should be followed by play, pressured and designated time by unpressured and undesignated time. Every “sixtieth hour” we should taste a little bit of heaven – especially given that the hours in between are consumed by demands, work, and duties. Very practically, according to our religious tradition, life is supposed to have the following rhythm: you work for six days, and then spend one day on sabbatical; you work for six years and then spend on whole year on sabbatical. In the past that rhythm, at least as it pertained to having a sabbatical every 6 days was maintained through our observance of Sunday as a day of rest. Once a week, everyone went on sabbatical and this was meant to remind us that, ultimately, we were not created for work but for play, that we do not live by work alone and in the end won’t live by work at all.

Moreover, the sabbath was understood as being more than just a time of rest. It was meant too be a time or reconciliation, a time when one tried to bring oneself and everything else into sympathy with all other things. Hence it was a time to forgive debts, to let go of resentments, and generally wipe the slate clean in order to be more in harmony with everything.

Understood in this sense a sabbatical is not the prerogative of the rich but a religious duty for everyone. Without the sabbath, the sabbatical, without the rhythm of life wherein every “60th hour” we taste the end of life and are called to reconciliation, life becomes a compulsive endeavour wherein work, duty, ambition, greed, and resentments consume us. Without sabbaticals we tire, lose our capacity to pray and enjoy, and, most importantly, lose our capacity to forgive. Whenever we sense ourselves as “caught in the rat race”, we are no longer living the proper rhythm of life as Genesis lays it out.

But a further distinction needs to be made: Sabbatical means unpressured, free, time. There are 2 kinds of unpressured, free, time, just as there are 2 kinds of solitude: We can speak of unpressured time as a private, personal, restful, therapeutic space (one kind of solitude), and we can speak of unpressured time as desert conversion space (another kind of solitude). The former is advertised in tourist brochures; the latter was modeled by Christ in the desert.

A sabbatical, ideally, is a time for both of these. It’s a time to rest and play, a time when one can claim one’s own time. But it’s also a time for conversion and prayer, a time when one must confront one’s demons in the desert. This, as the testimony of Christ and the saints assures us, is often not a peaceful process. The pressures of our work and our many duties, for all their demands, cushion us from the many demons of resentment, greed, jealousy, and fear that haunt deeper recesses within us. One doesn’t need to rest long before they make themselves felt  … and the restful therapeutic space becomes the desert, a battleground for opposing spirits.

With these thoughts in mind, I begin a sabbatical year, asking for prayers that it might, indeed, be a time wherein I taste that “one-sixtieth part of the world to come” and wherein I might, through some desert experience, might find myself more in a “general sympathy with all things.”

Nothing is as important today in theology and in church life as is the task of continuing the marriage between social justice and the Gospel. One of the groups who have been true pioneers in this area is the SOJOURNERS community based in Washington, D.C. under the leadership of Jim Wallis. They live in a community which builds its life around the Gospel, prayer, and the eucharist, they work actively with the poorest of the poor, they protest radically against all forms of violence and injustice, and they reflect theologically upon their praxis. In them you see something which is too often absent in circles both of piety and of social justice, namely, a radical commitment to both Jesus and justice.

With this in mind, I would like to alert readers to a recent book by one of its members: Turning Toward Home, a Sojourn of Hope, by Joyce Hollyday (Harper and Row, San Francisco, 1989). It’s Hollyday’s autobiography and it chronicles her journey of faith.

The book’s main interest lies not in the fact that she is associate editor of SOJOURNERS MAGAZINE and is married to Jim Wallis (things which she barely mentions) but in the fact that it is truly the story of a soul, a pilgrim soul tempted to many options but which, eventually, through the grace of God is able, in Kierkegaards’s definition of sanctity, to will the true thing.

It’s an important story because, as Dan Berrigan writes in the Foreword, it is not that easy to will the true thing. “Joyce is the story of all of us. At least in ricochet, in longing. (And in recoiling from?) The story we wish were ours, the story we fear might be ours. The life we pray for (and against), the life we know we are called to (at least in metaphor, and according to circumstance), the life we wish could happen, or wish could never happen, to us. Admiration and fear, that uneasy mix.”

Unlike so many autobiographies which tend towards self-indulgence, narcissism, and exhibition, hers faces outward and chronicles a faith journey. It’s a journal of a soul, in the best sense of that phrase.

She begins with the story of her childhood, how she grew up in a comfortable middle class home in Hershey (the chocolate capital of the U.S.). Even as a very young girl faith was already very important to her. However, dreamt the dreams of her generation: a good education, the right husband, the right job, the right home in the right suburb, kids, comfort, travel, culture, recreation. She had all the tools to actuate the dream, but faith and circumstances singled her out for something else and baptized her (remember, baptism means displacement and conscription).

As a college student she went to work with the poor in Harlem. Her life was never to be the same. After an undergraduate degree in Maine, she enrolled in the Yale divinity program, bent on ordination. Sometime before her junior year she decided instead to leave school and join Sojourners. Sojourners has been her life ever since.

The book is rather brief on most of the chronological detail of her life, even after joining Sojourners. She does describe in brief detail some of her work, a couple of arrests for peaceful protest, and trips to Central America and to South Africa. Mostly though the book is about her journey into Jesus and into justice, and the struggle to keep those two ever together.

It’s an exposition of her, and Sojourners ethics, a consistent ethics—one which begins with the Gospel, prayer, and eucharist, flows into (as they call it) “the waging of peace,” tries to be consistent in its stance for life (e.g., she is both a feminist and pro-life, believing the life of a woman and a child may never be pitted against each other), and ends up in gratitude and celebration. For her, as for Sojourners, piety must be wed to Jesus and Jesus to piety and both must ever be wed to gratitude and celebration. That, in brief, is the perennial task of Christianity.

The book is a challenge to many things: First of all, to let ourselves be more displaced, baptized, by the needs of the poor. Conscription by circumstance: “This world cannot be a home for any of us until it is a home for all of us.” It’s a challenge to greater courage: “There are some things so dear and so precious and so eternally true that they are worth dying for.” It’s a challenge to patience, to give ourselves over to the struggle without expecting quick results: “Although we never see results, faith demands that we act. We act for the sake of the faithful ones who went before us and showed the way, trusting that we would follow—and for those who will come after us on the journey.”

Finally it is a challenge to reconciliation: “Eras of Christian history have been marked by prevailing theologies addressed to particular historical situations. Emphasis has been placed at various times and places on salvation, conversion, or grace; on pietism, evangelism, mission, or liberation. I would assert that what we most need today is a theology of reconciliation—a faith that acknowledges Christ’s redeeming grace, the social burden of the Gospel, and the promise of a new unity in the body of Christ which cuts across all lines of division. At this juncture in history, we must heal the divisions and learn to live together, or none of us will live at all.”

God has a history of calling prophets with strange backgrounds. Amos is pulled away from sheep and sycamores. Joyce Hollyday is pulled away from idle class dreams and the chocolate capital of the U.S. Her writings bear a striking similarity to those of Amos. Turning Towards Home is a truly prophetic book that deserves reading.

David Steindl-Rast once commented that we tend to be resentful when things interrupt our work until we realize that, often times, interruptions are our real work.

Most of us tend to be impatient and resentful, sometimes deeply so, when our plans are interrupted by demands which deflect our energies from what we would ideally like to be doing. Sometimes this is minor: an unexpected phone call interrupts our work or our favorite TV program. Sometimes the interruption is major: an unwanted pregnancy interrupts our career or education; economic demands interrupt our plans to be a writer or an artist; the demands of a family interrupt our chance to travel, to see movies and plays, and to have the type of hobbies and recreations we would like, or the loss of health interrupts our career.

Countless things, big and small, constantly derail our agendas, force us to alter our plans, and slowly kill our dreams. Very often we are resentful: “If only! If only this hadn’t happened! Now I have to wait to go back to school, to resume my career. Now I’ll never have a chance to fulfil my dream.”

Sometime in middle age, or even earlier, this resentment takes a more radical form: “I’ve wasted my life. I’ve been a victim of circumstances. I’ve given in to the demands of others and now I’ll never get the chance to do what I really wanted to do.” Sometimes, however, as Steindl-Rast points out, the opposite happens. Instead of resentment there is gratitude. We realize that the interruptions, so unwelcome at the time, were really salvific and, far from derailing us off of our real agenda, they were our real agenda.

A few examples can be helpful here. I am sure all of us have known individuals or families where an unplanned pregnancy suddenly turns all plans (economic, career, travel, new house) upside down. Initially there is some bitterness and resentment. Later on the unwanted interruption turns into a much wanted and loved child who creates a happiness in life that dwarfs what might have resulted had original plans not been derailed by that interruption.

A.N. Wilson, the British historian, in a recent biography of C.S. Lewis, describes how Lewis’ life as a teacher and writer was, during virtually all of his productive years, interrupted by the demands of his adopted mother who made him do all the shopping and housework and demanded hours of his time daily for domestic tasks. Lewis’ own brother, Warnie, who also lived in the household (and who generally refused to let his own agenda be so interrupted) laments this fact in his diaries and suggests that Lewis could have been much more prolific had he not had to spend literally thousands of hours shopping, walking the dog, and doing domestic chores.

Lewis himself, however, gives us a far different assessment. Far from being resentful about these interruptions, he is grateful for them and suggests that it was precisely these domestic demands that kept him in touch with life in a way that other Oxford Dons (who never had to shop and do housework) were not. Historians like Wilson agree and suggest that it was because of these interruptions, which kept Lewis’ feet squarely on the ground, that Lewis came to insights which appeal so universally.

As these examples demonstrate, what initially is experienced as an unwanted interruption can, in the end, be our real agenda.

This, though, is not always true. Our lives are not meant to be left to pure circumstance and fate. We must also actively choose and create destiny. It is not always good to accept whatever happens. We have dreams and talents, and these are God-given, and so we must fight too for our agenda.

However, we must look always for the hand of providence in our interruptions. These often constitute a conspiracy of accidents within which God guides our lives. If we were totally in control of our own agendas, if we could simply plan and execute our lives according to our own dreams with no unwanted derailments, I fear that many of us would (slowly and subtly) become very selfish and would (also slowly and subtly) find our lives empty of simple joy, enthusiasm, family life, and real community. We do not live by accomplishment alone!

The very word baptism means derailment. Christ baptizes Peter on the rock when he tells him: “Because you said you love me, your life is now no longer your own. Before you said this, you fastened your belt and you walked wherever you liked. Now, others will put a belt around you and take you where you would rather not go.” To submit to love is to be baptized… and to let one’s life be forever interrupted. To not let one’s life be interrupted is to say no to love.

C.S. Lewis once said that we will spend most of eternity thanking God for those prayers of ours that he didn’t answer. Along the same lines, I suspect we will spend a good part of eternity thanking God for those interruptions that derailed our plans but which baptized us into life and love in a way we could never have ourselves planned or accomplished.

Lewis also once said that God’s harshness is ultimately kinder than human gentleness and that God’s compulsion is our liberation. In our interruptions, not infrequently, we experience this.

A couple of years ago, I was at a conference on social justice. The final speaker was a very impassioned young man and after his talk several of us gathered near the podium to engage him in some further questions. He expressed how frustrated and disappointed he was that so few people ever took up his challenge.

“Why?” he asked, “are people who are sincere so reluctant to get involved in justice issues?”  One man present responded by saying: “Maybe I would be tempted to get involved if people like you didn’t always insult me with your rhetoric!”

I use this story not to accuse particularly the orators of social justice. I hope to make a wider accusation, with this story serving only as one kind of illustration: One of the biggest factors working against community and against our ability to work together as a church or world is abrasive rhetoric. Simply put, too often the language that tries to promote truth and justice is insulting to others, judgmental, arrogant, patronizing, self-righteous, and more apt to drive persons still further away from the truth it is trying to promote than to invite them to embrace that truth. 

This style of language, full of both truth and disrespect, is characteristic of groups both on the left and on the right in the church and world today. We see it in liberals and conservatives, feminists and antifeminists, pro-life and pro-choice persons, social justice advocates and the defenders of privilege. We see it in those who push for the universal against the particular and in those who push for the particular against the universal. We see it in those who push religion and in those who push against it.  Invariably the language that tries to defend and promote the truth carries not just passion for  the truth but a good amount of hatred, judgment, and arrogance as well.

The sad consequence is that rather than unite and rally others around the truth (which is the object of the discourse) it divides …  and it divides not just the sincere from the insincere, and the committed from the non-committed, but it also divides the sincere from the sincere. In the end, it divides the truth from itself.

In doing this, it hardens positions and it creates illicit dichotomies that force people to choose between two positions which, ideally, they should both support. 

To offer just a couple of illustrations: The rhetoric of feminism often alienates others (particularly other women) who, rightly or wrongly, feel trapped in choosing between feminism and pro-life, feminism and a contented staying at home, and between feminism and obedient service in the church. Conversely, the rhetoric of antifeminism often alienates others (again, particularly other women) by suggesting that if you are unwilling to say that “abortion is murder”, if you are not uncritically supportive of the status quo in the church, and if you dare suggest that a woman’s true place can also be outside the home then you are insincere and warped by contemporary ideology.

The rhetoric of conservatives often forces you to choose: “Either you are loyal and a defender of the status quo or you are irresponsible and helping to bring down values and morals.”  The rhetoric of liberals suggests: “Either you are dissatisfied with the status quo or you backward and need your consciousness raised!” The rhetoric of pro-choice says: “If you defend the rights of the unborn, you are anti-woman.” Pro-life suggests: “You can only defend abortion if contemporary ideology has warped your morals.” 

Rhetoric of this kind is not the truth that Christ promised will set us free. It neither unites nor invites. It doesn’t lead to community because it doesn’t melt hearts. Instead it polarizes us into camps, spreads paranoia, narrows our sympathies, and freezes us all more deeply within our immaturities and biases because, within it, there is too much that insults and tries to intimidate.

If we are to promote peace and justice, truth and charity, then peace and justice, truth and charity, must also characterize our language. Scripture tells us that the spirit of God is recognized by charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, long suffering, constancy, mildness, and chastity.  Sadly, it is these qualities which are normally absent from most discourse in the areas of religion and justice. This is often defended with the idea that the demands of justice, truth, and charity call us beyond the simplistic idea that somehow we always have to be “nice” to each other. Not infrequently too there is a reference made to Jesus’ anger and his driving the moneychangers from the temple. 

Again, in this rhetoric there is some truth. The demands of truth, justice, and charity, if taken seriously, eventually shatter the idea that we must, at all costs, be nice to each other.  However, the demands of charity and justice never ask that we let go of charity and justice themselves in our discourse (even as we claim for ourselves a higher charity and justice.) The kingdom is not built through insults and disrespect. Our language must take that seriously.

Today, at many levels, community is disintegrating. It’s becoming every harder to unite and rally people around anything. There are many reasons for this … not the least of which is our failure, in our rhetoric, to properly respect and love each other.

A Catholic journalist recently commented that the world will begin to take the church seriously when it talks about sex if the church, first of all, affirms what it should always be affirming, namely, that for married persons the marriage bed is their daily eucharist.

Sex as a sacrament. Sex as eucharist. Is this high spiritual truth or is it blasphemy? It can be either since, within a Christian understanding, sex is precisely either sacrament or perversity.

In a recent article in GRAIL, British psychiatrist, Jack Dominion, discusses the sacramental role of sex within a marriage. Without denying what traditional Christian thought has always affirmed, that is, that procreation is a function of married sexuality, he goes on to suggest five possibilities (ultimately, sacramental possibilities) which can be realized each time a married couple make love: 

• First, each time they do make love they, potentially, verify their personal significance to each other. More simply put, each act of sexual intercourse is a reminder of (and a celebration of) the fact that they are the most important person in each of each other’s life. Sexual intercourse, within its proper context, love consecrated through marriage, verifies and celebrates (physically, emotionally, and spiritually) what was pronounced in their marriage vows, namely, ‘My love is now consecrated, displaced, for you!’ ”

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer once told a couple he was marrying: “Today you are young and very much in love. You think that your love will sustain your marriage. Well, I give you the opposite advice: let your marriage sustain your love.” Sexual orgasm facilitates a personal encounter that speaks of and demands precisely the type of exclusiveness and fidelity that the marriage vows promise.

• Secondly, sexual intercourse is one of the most powerful acts through which a couple reinforce each other’s sexual identity, making, as Dominion puts it, the woman feel fully feminine and the man fully masculine. 
• Third, sexual intercourse can be, potentially, a most powerful act of reconciliation, healing, and forgiveness. In all relationships, perhaps especially in married ones, wounds will appear (arising from, among other things, different temperaments, disappointment with each other, past histories, weaknesses and inadequacies) which will, at one level, appear to create an unbridgeable chasm. Sexual orgasm can facilitate a peak experience within which harmony is restored beyond the hurt, not because the hurt is taken away, but because in that peak experience something is felt which, for a second at least, lets persons drop the load of hurt, disappointment, and bitterness and meet in a super reconciliation which is a foretaste of the reconciliation of heaven itself.
• Fourth, sexual intercourse is perhaps, singularly, the most powerful way a couple has of telling each other that they wish to continue in this consecrated relationship. Freud once said we understand the structure of a thing by looking at it when it’s broken. Thus we see that within a marriage when the sexual bond is broken, when there is an unwillingness or a hesitancy to sleep with each other, there is, at some level, also some unwillingness or hesitancy to continue the relationship at a very deep level. 
• Finally, sexual intercourse is, as Dominion so aptly puts it, a rich vein of thanksgiving. Orgasm, within a proper relationship, spawns gratitude.

Given these possibilities for sex, it does not strain the imagination to see that the marriage bed is, potentially, a sacrament, a daily eucharist. 

A sacrament is, as theology as always said in one fashion or another, someone or something which visibly prolongs a saving action of Christ; something visible, fleshy, tangible, incarnate, which somehow makes God present.  

More specifically still, what takes place in the marriage bed (between a couple who are properly loving each other) parallels what takes place between ourselves and Christ in the eucharist. Each eucharist also has those five possibilities: In that encounter we say to Christ and Christ says to us: “My life is consecrated, displaced, for you.” Through that encounter, as well, we reinforce our identity as Christians, are embraced in a super-reconciliation, announce through word and action that we want to continue in a deep relationship with Christ, and are imbued with and express gratitude. 

The marriage bed, like the eucharist, is fleshy, tangible, visible and incarnate. (Not at all a sacrament for angels!) Like the eucharist too it expresses special love, fidelity, reconciliation, and gratitude in an earthy way. That quality, its earthiness, makes it, like the eucharist, a very powerful and privileged sacrament. Through it the word becomes flesh and dwells among us.