Prophecy II

April 9, 1990

Second of a two-part series

Contrary to most popular thought, a prophet does not foretell the future and is not necessarily a chronic protestor. A prophet is someone who speaks with God’s voice. Accordingly a prophet is someone who radiates love, not alienation, whose voice attracts even as it upsets, and whose words offer, at the same time, deep challenge and deep consolation.

Hence we recognize the prophetic voice, God’s voice, whenever we hear words that challenge us to what’s higher, what’s truer, what’s more noble, what’s more loving, what’s more ideal. We recognize the prophetic voice in words like these:

“That’s the difficulty in these times: ideals, dreams, and cherished hopes rise within us, only to meet the most horrible truth and be shattered.

“It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped my ideals because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet, I still believe that people are really good at heart, I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness. I hear the ever-approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.

“In the meantime, I must uphold my ideals, for perhaps the time will come when I will be able to carry them out.” (Anne Frank’s diary, July 15, 1944—the third last entry in her diary)

“Those who propound an image of the human person that would be different from that which has been developed in the church and preserved in the Western tradition, seem today to make human weaknesses a fundamental principle, and to declare that this is a human right.

“Christ, on the contrary, taught that each person has above all a right to his or her own greatness, a right which transcends him or her. This is in fact where our true dignity really appears… In Christ each person has a right to such greatness. And through Christ the church has the right to the self-offering of such a person through the gift through which one gives all of oneself to God in order to become a servant of all.” (Slightly redacted from John Paul II, in his Nov. 17, 1980 address to the seminarians at Fulda, West Germany.)

“There comes a time in every person’s life when the choice is clear: stand up for what you believe in or die! If we don’t stand up because we are afraid of death, or of losing our job, or of losing our health, or friends, or position, or prestige, or anything whatever. If we refuse to take a stand in order to prolong our life—then it doesn’t matter whether we are 20, 28, 36, 47, or 60, we are dead. And even if we live on until we reach 80 or 90, we have just kept on breathing, not living. We die at the moment when we do not stand up for what we believe in.” (Martin Luther King, in his famous I have a dream speech. Redacted slightly.)

“In any situation dominated by fear, you need people who have died before they die, people who, before death, already live the resurrection. In this is fear, timidity, overcome.

“Too often, however, we just want to survive. Then we choose not to die, but that is not the same as choosing to live. We need to die before we die to live in the freedom of the resurrection already now.” (Mary Jo Leddy, in a retreat given to the Oblates in Saskatoon, Sask., May, 1989.)

“The future belongs to those who have nothing left to lose.” (Herbert Marcuse)

“The church is, of necessity, a community of resistance. But resistance flows from a sense of joyful praise and loving celebration. We are first called to be a community of celebration, celebrating the life we are called to, the life given us to share together and then to give away for the sake of the world. We become a community of resistance. But before that, and through that, and even after that, we are a community of praise and celebration.” (Jim Wallis, The Call to Conversion, Page 135)

“Only when a person has fully attained his or her own spiritual identity can he or she live without the need to kill, and without the need of a spiritual doctrine that permits him or her to do so in good conscience. You have to take the time alone to become yourself, to face yourself in your fundamental reality, and to peel away the accretions of mediocre or false values imposed by society, ambition and self-interest. Only then, as the overflow of such contemplation, can you find your truth and your reality.” (Thomas Merton, quoted by J.H. Griffin, in Follow the Ecstacy, Page 200)

“You command the Gospel by living it: the first change of all is exacted of yourself. You declare peace, as others declare war…

“Dorothy Day embraced this design, be it noted, not in order to bring political or economic changes. Not in the first place. The first place was sacrosanct, and existed independent of political gain or loss. She would live in such a way, and speak and write from the bottom, not because it made sense in the world to do so (it made no sense, she would be vilified and despised for it), or because it converted the world (it converted very few), or made human tragedy somewhat less likely.

“None of these. Her politics stemmed from a command that she heard proclaimed from someone of no time or place, of every time and place. Blessed are the peacemakers, blessed are the poor in spirit, what you do for the least of these, you do for me.” (Daniel Berrigan, To Dwell in Peace, Page 70)

And, in a bad redaction of Rudyard Kipling, “If you can sense deep truth in these quotes, when all about you they are settling for something less challenging… you are listening to today’s prophets.”

Prophecy

March 26, 1990

First of a two-part series

Paul Simon ends his famous song, The Sound of Silence, with the phrase: “The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls, and tenement halls, and whispered in the wells of silence.”

Are they? Is the graffiti we see on the walls of our public bathrooms really prophetic? Are the silent frustrated words we can never speak something prophetic? What is a prophetic word?

Few things are as badly needed in our world today as is prophecy. But, what is a prophet? In the past, the term prophet was often confused with fortune-telling or future-telling (“play the prophet for us, who struck you?”) but it has nothing to do with predicting the future or with any other type of extraordinary knowledge of this sort. More recently, we have tended to see as prophet the social maverick, the justice protester, the person who is chained to a fence or arrested for a cause. This may be prophecy, but one must be careful not to make an automatic identification here.

A prophet does not foretell the future and is not necessarily a chronic protester. A prophet is someone who speaks for God, pure and simple. God’s voice is recognized because it does two things: It challenges more deeply than any other voice and, at the same time, it offers a deeper consolation than any other voice. When you hear a voice that deeply shakes you and yet, in another way, offers deep hope, a voice that both draws and upsets you, you are hearing a prophetic voice. When your reaction to somebody is like Herod’s to John the Baptist (“Herod was greatly upset when he listened to John, and yet he liked to listen to him.”) then, usually, you are listening to prophecy.

Unfortunately, not many voices in our culture do that. More commonly we experience only one of the two: a voice which greatly upsets us, but offers no deep hope; or a voice that offers cheap consolation without deep challenge. These are voices of false prophets.

Given that a prophet speaks for God and God has a special compassion for those who are hurting most badly, and given that God is calling us to share in a life beyond what we can even imagine right now, a prophet will necessarily be a person who speaks for the poor, who sees things from the point of view of those who are most hurting. Thus, a prophet will be someone who, invariably, stirs us up, upsets us, shows us where we are complacent, blind, selfish, using others. Hence, the prophet is always leaven, yeast, and therefore, usually a cultural and cognitive deviant.

Once that is said, however, something else needs to be said: Not just anyone who upsets people or who stirs up trouble in the name of God and virtue is a prophet. As well, not everyone who confronts the culture with its faults is necessarily doing God’s work. Gail Sheehy, the author of Passages and Pathfinders once commented something to this effect: “I don’t know why everyone seems to have to find a cause through which to work out his or her neuroses and frustrations. Some of us are more honest. We admit we are involved in a more process that’s called growing up!”

Sheehy’s comment highlights something which is very important and too easily forgotten: If challenge comes out of one’s own neuroses, or out of anger, or out of ideology, it is not prophecy, it’s only agitation and the person challenging others should be involved, as she so aptly puts it, in a more humble process.

Jim Wallis, the founder of Sojourners and one of the true prophets of our time, would concur. As would Daniel Berrigan. For both Wallis and Berrigan, a prophet is not, first of all, characterized by anger, but by love. Angry challenge and pointing out of someone else’s faults are only productive when their root is love. When they arise out of neuroses and ideology they only make things worse: they harden hearts rather than melt them, they polarize rather than heal, and they freeze and deaden what’s highest and noblest inside of others.

We experience this in our everyday relationships. When we are challenged, even bitterly, by someone whom we know truly loves and cares about us, that anger is productive. Because we sense the other’s love, we want to change. Conversely, when we are angrily challenged by someone, irrespective of how correct his or her challenge may be, whom we sense does not love us nor truly care about us, that challenge brings out what’s worst in us. We freeze over, harden, rationalize, and most often, entrench more deeply in the very thing we are being challenged on. We don’t see the challenge as prophetic, nor the one challenging as prophet. Instead we have the feeling that this someone has “gotten the goods on us,” they’ve done their homework and have finally gotten the chance to work out their spite. Spite doesn’t function the same way as love.

To be a prophet is not to proclaim oneself loudly as counter-cultural, as cultural deviant, as agitator, as divine disturber, as righteous protector of the poor, as angry by divine right. To be a prophet is to love the world and hope that you never have to get angry with it. To be a prophet is to cry tears of love when you are angry. To be a prophet is to get angry only to lead back to love.

Thus, to be a prophet is to challenge hedonism even as you affirm the goodness of creation; its’ to challenge consumerism even as you affirm the importance of enjoyment; it’s to challenge materialism even as you affirm the fact that the incarnation is all about God becoming material; it’s to challenge individualism even as you affirm the centrality of community, and it’s to call the culture to something higher even as you affirm everything that’s good within the culture.

To be a prophet is to make a vow of love, not of alienation.

Next week, some examples of prophetic writings today.

Prayer Life Needs Rhythm, Ritual

March 12, 1990

It’s no secret that it’s hard to sustain daily prayer. The reason for this is not always as obvious or deep as some would make it.

Why do we find it so hard to pray regularly? Some answer by blaming the culture, with all its pressures and seductions. Others blame the devil or concupiscence or laziness. While others blame prayer forms themselves, claiming that our worship services and ways of praying are outdated and unimaginative.

There is, I suspect, some truth to all of these, but, relying on the testimony of the mystics (persons who sustained very deep prayer lives for long periods of time) I want to suggest another reason: boredom, lack of energy, tiredness, distaste for prayer, and the simple inability to crank it up. According to the mystics, the biggest problem we face in sustaining prayer is boredom and lack of energy, pure and simple.

This is important to recognize because, invariably, the solution suggested by spiritual authors, preachers, liturgists and prayer leaders is new prayer forms, more variety, endless novelty, or the simple challenge that we shouldn’t be so lazy and selfish and crank up more energy for prayer.

These solutions are, I submit, largely dysfunctional because they do not respect properly the rhythms of prayer and life. Praying is like eating and eating is like life itself; you need some variety, but mostly you need rhythm and ritual.

Eating has a natural rhythm and there are natural rituals to it: banquets and quick snacks, rich meals and salads, high times with linen serviettes and low times with paper napkins, meals which take a whole evening and meals which we eat in five minutes… and the two extremes depend upon each other, ordinary time and high season create each other.

Our eating habits generally respect anthropology—our time, energy, tiredness, the season, the hour, our boredom, our taste.

Prayer is the same as eating, but this isn’t generally respected. Too common are the myths that suggest that the following rules should guide prayer and worship: All celebrations should be high celebrations, upbeat, with lots of singing and energy expenditure. The more variety the better. Longer is better than shorter. More is better. Time and tiredness may never be a consideration. A good prayer leader or celebrant does not need a good wristwatch. The persons participating in the prayer need not have a clear durational expectancy. The solution to boredom and lack of energy is more variety and imagination.

Given those guidelines, it’s no wonder that we are often too tired and lack the energy to pray.

If boredom and lack of energy are the major culprits working against daily prayer, and the mystics suggest that they are, then, I suggest, what we need is a better rhythm and better rituals governing our prayer and worship. Monks have secrets worth knowing and they have, since the beginning of monasticism, suggested that the key to daily prayer is not so much variety and novelty as it is the expected, the familiar, the repetitious, the ritual, the clearly defined, clearly delineated prayer form which gives people a clear durational expectancy and does not demand of them an energy that they cannot muster on a given day.

There are times, important times, for high celebration, for variety and novelty, for spontaneity, and for long celebrations. There are also times, and these are meant to predominate just as they do in our eating habits, for ordinary time, for low celebrations, for prayer that respects our energy level, work pressures, and time constraints.

It is, I submit, no accident that more people used to attend daily Eucharist when daily Eucharist was precisely shorter, simpler, less demanding in terms of energy expenditure, and gave people attending it a fairly clear expectation as to how long it would last. The same holds true for other prayers, the office of the church, the rosary, and other such ritualized prayers. What these clear, and most of the time simple and brief, rituals would provide is precisely a ritual that depended upon something beyond our own energy input. The ritual could carry our tiredness, our lack of energy, and our occasional indifference or distaste. It would also carry us… keeping us praying even when we were too tired to muster up very much energy.

There is much to be commended in the renewal of prayer forms and liturgy in the past decades a renewal that has stressed more variety, more novelty, more celebration, more personal involvement, and has demanded more energy from us when we pray. But sometimes, I fear, we have fallen into the trap we are working too hard at it… and we are not letting the ritual do its work.

Bonhoeffer once while instructing a young couple for marriage said: “Tonight you are young and very much in love and you thinking that your love will sustain your marriage. But I give you the opposite advice: Let your marriage sustain your love.”

The advice that comes to us from the mystics regarding prayer is the same. You think that your good will and energy will sustain your rituals, Eucharist, divine office, devotional prayer, but instead, let your prayer rituals sustain your good will and energy.

Won’t Someone Please Stop Me?

February 26, 1990

Some years ago, Judith Viorst wrote a book of poems entitled: How did I get to be 40 & other atrocities. One of the poems, “Self-Improvement Program,” reads like this:

I’ve finished sic pillows in Needlepoint,
And I’m reading Jane Austen and Kant,
And I’m up to pork with black beans in Advanced Chinese Cooking.
I don’t have to struggle to find myself
For I already know what I want.
I want to be healthy and wise and extremely good-looking.

I’m learning new glazes in Pottery Class,
And I’m playing new chords in guitar.
And in Yoga I’m starting to master the lotus position.
I don’t have to ponder priorities
For I already know what they are:
To be good-looking, healthy, and wise.
And adored in addition.

I’m improving my serve with a tennis pro,
And I’m practising verb forms in Greek,
And in Primal Scream Therapy all my frustrations are vented.
I don’t have to ask what I’m searching for
Since I already know that I seek
To be good-looking, healthy, and wise.
And adored.
And contented.

I’ve bloomed in Organic Gardening,
And in Dance I have tightened my thighs,
and in Consciousness Raising there’s no one around who can top me.
And I’m working all day and I’m working all night
To be good-looking, healthy, and wise.
And adored.
And contented.
And brave.
And well-read.
And a marvelous hostess,
Fantastic in bed,
And bilingual,
Athletic,
Artistic…
Won’t someone please stop me?

Won’t someone please stop me? From what? From spending all of my time and energy, my life, cancerously chasing an ideal which says that to be happy, acceptable, marketable, and worthwhile, I must be athletic, artistic, well-read, good-looking, an expert dancer, a seasoned traveler, trilingual, the model parent, the over-achieving professional, the poet who smells the flowers and writes about them, the most committed social justice advocate on the planet, a gourmet cook, and a person who has friends at the top and friends at the bottom, has limitless time for all of them, and yet is, at the same time, a person who comes out of a deep solitude.

The expectations of our culture, both written and unwritten, give us quite a job description. When we try to meet them, and we spend much of our lives trying, we end up constantly overtired, over-extended, disappointed, and feeling deeply inadequate. Only we know—and we rarely admit this fully even to our most intimate friends—the cost, the price we pay to somehow measure up, too look right, to have the correct curriculum vitae, so that we are seen as ”good-looking, healthy, and wise.”

Ultimately, we would all like to be introduced like this:

“Allow me to introduce to you Mary Doe-Rodriguez. Mary has her doctorate in psychology and religious studies from Harvard. After this she spent three years doing post-graduate work at the Jungian Institute in Switzerland. She has published four books and over 60 articles. She teaches one semester a year at the University of Chicago and spends the second semester in Peru where she is collaborating with various liberation theologians vis-à-vis the linkages between Third World and First World oppressions.

“Her weekends are spent teaching handicapped adults and working with the mothers of the disappeared. She serves on seven different commissions, including the president’s committee on ecology, the bishops’ committee on the status of women, and the international theological commission on the renewal of liturgy. She is also a consultant for Green Peace. Beyond this, she is actively involved in her own community, is a member of her parish council, and heads a group that has started a food bank within the inner city. However her real passion is her family. She is happily married, the mother of three children, does all her own cooking, sews all her own clothes, and plays tennis and squash every day… and by looking at how well she has kept herself up, you would never guess she is already 34 years old!”

In our culture curriculum vitae is everything, it’s far more important to be adored and admired than to be happy. It’s also impossible and depressing and hopelessly tiring to try to measure up.

Dan Berrigan, in his autobiography, describes a recurring nightmare. In it, he sees himself walking a road, underneath a resplendent red rug unrolls ahead of him. This part of the dream feels good. However, when he glances behind, he sees that the rug is rolling up, mysteriously, right at his heels. He must break into a smart trot to stay ahead. This becomes a tiring enterprise with no promise of rest.

When most of our energies have to go into simply measuring up, life does become a tiring enterprise with an unhappy ending for, as the Orphic myths (in Dan Berrigan’s interpretation) put it a long time ago, a hero is only a sandwich: up for grabs, down for good.

We Need A Heart With Many Rooms

February 12, 1990

To come to peace as a human being is not a simple task. We aren’t simple. Our hearts and minds are pathologically complex and pull us in many directions all at the same time. To be human is to be a bundle of contradictions, seldom certain of what our hearts and minds really want.

This makes it difficult for us to live simple, peaceful, and restful lives. To be at rest is to be at peace, but peace is more than the simple absence of war. Peace is a positive quality, the positive ordering of various elements into a harmony, a symphony.

Thus, for example, if someone sits down at a piano and strikes various keys at random, the result is discord, an abrasive sound, something far from peaceful. If, though, the various notes played are bound into a certain harmony, you have a melody, a peaceful sound. Most melodies, however, are far from simple, they’ve many notes. Hence if someone plays a certain musical score and omits certain notes, again you have discord, no melody. Peace depends upon ordering the notes correctly and upon having all the notes there.

Given this idea of peace, we see that the task of coming to peace as human beings is one of bringing into harmony all the various notes, elements we experience inside of us. This is far more difficult than it sounds and is a task that we rarely do well. Why?

Because most often we try to make the melody without all the notes. Rarely do we accept all that is inside of us, rarely do we resist the temptation, coming to us from our own temperament, to not reduce and render too simple our own hearts and minds.

By temperament, we are much simpler than we are in actuality. Each of us have certain propensities—to be liberal or conservative, upbeat or morose, individualistic or communitarian, intellectual or emotional, earthy or spiritual, given to feasting or fasting, prone to naïve trust or more naturally given to cynicism and doubt. By nature, we tend to one or the other and thus, perennially, our temptation is to reduce the complexity of our hearts and minds and of life itself to what we are most at home with inside of ourselves.

If we are liberal by temperament, we tend to reduce the bad to the good, the head to the heart, the soul to the body, the fast to the feast, law to conscience, the individual to the social, the next world to this world, and Good Friday to Easter Sunday. If we are conservative by temperament, we tend, conversely, to reduce the good to the bad, the heart to the head, the body to the soul, the feast to the fast, conscience to law, the social to the individual, life after birth to life after death, a joyful resurrected life to a “mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.”

Accordingly, if we are liberal or conservative by nature we judge the validity of all conventional wisdom, ideology, theology, spirituality, and catechetics according to whether or not it emphasizes strongly what is most evident in our particular temperament.

The price of this is lack of peace. Our hearts and minds have many more rooms than does our temperament. In reality, we are always both: good and bad, head and heart, body and soul, creatures of fasting and feasting, subject to both law and conscience, social and individual, destined for life after birth as well as life after death, living in joy and pain, Good Friday and Easter Sunday, all at the same time.

To come to peace we must bring all of these into harmony, we must make these various elements within us be friends with each other. Not to do so, to reduce in any way any of these elements, is to create a heart and a mind, and a life, which is ultimately too small for us to live in.

To vary the metaphor: We need every letter of the alphabet if we are to write words for every season and aspect of our lives. To deny part of ourselves is to lose some letters and to make it impossible to ever make a symphony of our lives. We need a song for every season of life. Again, to deny part of ourselves leaves us without some notes we need to fully sing the song of life. We need a heart with many rooms. To deny any aspect of ourselves is to close off a room which, on some occasions, we will desperately need to live in.

We need an alphabet with enough letters to write words both emotional and rational, spiritual and bodily, individualistic and communitarian. We need a song with enough notes to sing about life after birth as well as life after death: a song that can be sung while feasting or fasting. And we need a house with rooms enough for crying during our bitter seasons of death, sickness, hurt and loneliness, and with rooms enough for celebrating and drinking, for feast lies at the heart of life itself.

To be human is to be pathologically complex. To come to peace is to find an alphabet with enough letters, a song with enough notes, and a heart with enough rooms.

Death Washes Things Clean

January 29, 1990

When I was a child, as part of our family prayer, we used to pray for a happy death.

In my young mind, I spontaneously associated a happy death with dying cradled in the loving arms of family and church, fully at peace with God and everyone around you.

Not many persons, even very good persons, get to die like that. Given the randomness and contingencies of human circumstances, very often people die in broken and compromised situations: bitter, unforgiving and unforgiven, not having dealt with their own sings, unreconciled with their own families and the church, alienated, indifferent to God and community, angry, drunk, dead by drug overdose, by suicide. Or, at times, death catches people before they have had or taken the time to say some things that should have been said or done some things that should have been done. Very often when people die they leave behind, on this side of heaven, much unfinished business. As an old Confiteor has it, there is a need to be reconciled for what’s been said and left unsaid, done and left undone.

To cite a few small examples: I once, in counselling, dealt with a man in his 50s who was unable to forgive himself because his mother, as she was dying (when he was seven and unware that she was dying) asked him to come and hug her and he, inhibited, male, refused. More than 40 years later there was still some unfinished business.

In another case, I officiated at the funeral of a man who, just before getting killed in an accident, had had a major blowup with his family and stomped out of the house in a rage of anger.

Many of us, I am sure, have had persons close to us die with whom we had unfinished business. Perhaps we hurt them, or they hurt us and it was never reconciled, or we should have given them more of ourselves but were too preoccupied with our own lives to reach out at the time, or we hated them and should have made some gestures of reconciliation and we didn’t and now it’s too late! Death has separated them from us and what was left unfinished now lies, irrevocably, unfinished and we live with guilt and keep saying: “If only, if only…”

These “if onlys” will disappear if we take seriously the Christian doctrine concerning the communion of saints. This doctrine, so central to our faith that it is one of the doctrines enshrined in the creed, asks us to believe that we are still in vital communion with those who have died, indeed in privileged communication.

To believe in the communion of saints is to believe that those who have died are still linked to us in such a way that we can continue to communicate, to talk, with them. It is to believe that our relationship with them can continue to grow and that the reconciliation which, for many human reasons, was not possible in this life can now take place.

Why? Because not only is there communication between us and those who have died before us (this is the stuff of Christian doctrine, not that of séance) but because this communication is now privileged. Death washes clean. Not only does the church teach us that, we simply experience it.

How often in a family, in a friendship, in a community, in any human network, is there tension, misunderstanding, anger, frustration, irreconcilable difference, selfishness that divides, hurt which can no longer be undone, and then… someone dies! The death brings with it a peace, a clarity, and a charity which, prior to it, were not possible.

Why is this so? It is not because someone has died and that changes the chemistry of the family or the office or the circle, nor is it because, as might seem the case sometimes, the source of the tension, or headache, or heartache, or bitterness has died. It happens because, as Luke teaches us in the incident where on the cross Christ forgives the good thief, death washes things clean.

Analytical words fail me in trying to explain this, so allow me to resort to story.

Some years ago, a woman, then 49, recounted to me how, after being sexually abused by her own father at age nine, she lived for some 40 years in anger, bitter and unreconciled, not just with her father who had abused her, but with life itself. Her healing took place with her father’s death. For years she had avoided him and been unable to feel anything but bitter hatred towards him. She told me how on returning home from his funeral she had looked at him in his casket and… “he looked so peaceful. All the anger and jealousy I had always seen in his face seemed to have drained out with death. He looked more peaceful than I had ever seen him in life. I kissed him and, for the first time ever in my memory, I had for him some sympathy and understanding. Suddenly I felt for him, for his struggles, for his own hurts, for his addictions. It was as if hi death washed away the dirt and the hatred.”

In the communion of saints we have privileged communication with those with whom we still have unfinished business. It can be a great consolation to die a happy death, snug and reconciled in the arms and the warm thoughts of those around us. Fortunately, for them and their loved ones, there is a privileged time after death to finish off some things for those whose lives end in situations full of bitterness, anger, irresponsibility, sin, and lack of warmth and love.

A Chance to meet the Lynx’s Eye

January 15, 1990

Soren Kierkegaard once commented in a letter to a friend how frustrating it is trying to communicate: “What I require is a voice as piercing as a lynx’s eye, as terrible as the sigh of a giant, as persistent as a note of nature, with a range extending from the deepest bass to the highest and most melting chest-tone, with a modulation capable of the lightest sacred whisper and the fire-spouting violence of madness. That is what I need to deliver myself of what lies in my mind, to thrill the bowels both of anger and sympathy.”

As I read, peruse, or otherwise handle the many books that pass through my hands and over my desk, I sometimes find myself staring smack into a lynx’s eye. For a second there is light. Or, other times, there is audible the sigh of a giant or some voice of nature, or some sacred whisper, or some human voice so bass, high, or angry that, for a second at least, my self-preoccupations lessen and some deeper chromosomes stir. I rarely go into a mystical trance, more I regularly reach for a pen and notebook when this happens.

From the books that went through my hands this past while, from varied authors – Therese of Lisieux, Annie Dillard, Ruth Burrows, Morris West, Herbert Marcuse, Peter Berger, George Eliot, John Shea, David Steindl-Rast, Hans Urs Van Baltasar, Doris Lessing, Simone Weil, Daniel Berrigan, Teilhard de Chardin, Charles Peguy, William Auden, Yogi Berra and Woody Allen – I offer you some sacred whispers and a chance, hopefully, to occasionally meet the lynx’s eye:

On faith, hope and happiness:

Remember…faith must constitute a certain cognitive defiance, a certain saying “no.” When we first pronounce the word “no” it will be tentative, hardly audible, it will come from our mouths like the first word of an infant or the words of a foreign tongue. But we had best soon be declaring our “no” loud and clear, under the pain of never saying it at all. However remember faith is an assent that implies restless cogitation.

Hope is not lost when we grow weary of evil, but when we tire of good, when we grow weary of joy. It is only the constant desire to defeat ourselves that can finally defeat us.

The purpose of life is love, not heroics. The Christian is not the tragic anti-hero luxuriating in despair, Hamlet canonized, bu the child of the kingdom, resilient, able to celebrate love because of the laughter of the resurrected Christ and the incredible resiliency of human nature. We need to be, for each other, mutual islands of sympathy, chastising each other only when we love each other, saying in our love… you, at least, shall not die!

What do we really need from life? Enough light to see a divine sense in this world; enough faith to follow that light; and enough love to make the darkness tolerable. Happiness is not what makes us grateful, but gratefulness is what makes us happy.

On patience for the long haul:

There is not short cut to wisdom. After all the centuries of invention, the soul’s path lies through the thorny wilderness which must still be trodden in solitude, with bleeding feet, with sobs for help, as it was trodden by them of old. Moreover, purity is attained when one seeks to give Christ’s desire to consummate all things precedence over one’s own immediate and momentary advantage. We must never give up heaven for the sake of our dignity or pleasure.

On idolatry, ideology and honesty:

One can take as an idol, not something made of metal or wood, but a race, a nation, an idea, a cause, a philosophy, a religion, something just as earthly. Race, religion, cause, solidarity, even commitment to the poor can be essentially inseparable from idolatry. Be ever aware of the liberal or conservative consensus operating as a surrogate for conscience, governing morality and conduct in place of truth and Christ. The house of idolatry and ideology has many mansions. Idolatry and ideology are recognized by the bitterness and joylessness they invariably spawn. Bitterness and joylessness are always infallible signs of self-pity.

On community:

When we come to the end of our pilgrimage and reach heaven, God will say to us: “Where are the others?”

And some thoughts for psychic hygiene:

Keep your eyes open, sometimes you can see a whole lot of things just by looking. Remember our sofas and chairs know secrets about us that others don’t. After the ecstasy, go do the laundry. And… when tempted towards hyper=criticalness, do keep in mind that, although reality isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, it’s still the only place you can get a decent steak!

The Real Christmas Story

December 18, 1989

Among John Shea’s poems, one finds a little piece entitled: Sharon’s Christmas Prayer. It reads:

She was five,

sure of the facts,

and recited them

with slow solemnity,

convinced every word

was revelation.

She said

they were so poor

they had only peanut butter

and jelly sandwiches to eat

and they went a long way from home

without getting lost. The lady rode

a donkey, the man walked, and the baby

was inside the lady.

They had to stay in a stable

with an ox and an ass (hee-hee)

but the Three Rich Men found them

because a star lit the roof.

Shepherds came and you could

pet the sheep but not feed them.

Then the baby was born.

And do you know who he was?

Her quarter eyes inflated

to silver dollars.

The baby was God.

The Christmas story, as told by a child: Joseph and Mary journeying on a donkey, no room at the inn, birth in a stable, the star and the shepherds and the wise men and, of course, the baby, Jesus who was God. All the elements of the story are there, but, for an adult, it is too easy to miss how incredible it is that God takes on flesh.

The word became flesh and dwelt among us. What a wild and unbelievable statement! The infinite heart, centre, creator, and sustainer of the universe is born as a baby and lives as a human person on this earth and, through that, gives to us God’s power to save. We’ve domesticated the incarnation, but the real Christmas story staggers the mind. How’s this as a Christmas story?

Imagine the universe: Light travels at 186,000 miles per second. Hence light traveling to the earth from the moon (the body nearest our planet) already takes more than a second to get here. Light traveling from the sun takes more than 8 minutes to reach earth. But those bodies are close to us. The distance from the sun to the earth is immense but, in terms of the universe as a whole, it is minuscule. If one looks up at the starts at night, of those stars visible to the naked eye, the ones nearest to us are so far away that light traveling from them to earth (at 186,000 miles per second) takes more than 4 years to get here. Those which are farthest away, but still visible to the naked eye, are so distant that light traveling at 186,000 miles per second takes 800,000 years to get here. That’s unimaginable.

More incredulous still: Science today, using X-ray telescopes, has sighted planets whose light has not yet reached earth. These planets are so distant that light traveling from them to earth will take 6 trillion light years to get here. The human mind simply cannot stretch to imagine that. Yet this is just the universe we know. There may be in fact billions of galaxies and universes.

Imagine this story: Given that there are perhaps hundreds of billions of galaxies with trillions of light years separating them, and given that on each of the planets within these galaxies there are hundreds of trillions of phenomena every second, can we imagine that at the centre of all of this there is one heart, one creator, one sustainer, one God who made all of this and who right now watches over it so that every individual and every detail is passionately cared about, so that “no hair falls from a human head and no sparrow from the sky” without this God knowing and caring?

And most incredulous of all: Can we imagine and believe that this heart, this God, this centre of everything, actually was carried for nine months by a peasant woman in Palestine and born into our world as a baby and then lived here, taught us, and gave us, his believers, all the powers he, himself, had as God? What a wild belief! We should be singing songs and passing drinks around!

After John Shea has let the five-year-old Sharon tell the Christmas story, he notes her reaction and supplies an apt one-line commentary:

And she jumped in the air,

whirled around, dove into the sofa,

and buried her head under the cushion

which is the only proper response

to the good news of the incarnation.

Curing Fire By Fire

December 4, 1989

In his Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot contrasts two kinds of fire:

The only hope, or else despair

Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre –

To be redeemed from fire by fire.

Who then devised the torment? Love.

Love is the unfamiliar name

Behind the hands that wove

The intolerable shirt of flame,

Which human power cannot remove.

We only live, only suspire

Consumed by either fire or fire.

What Eliot captures here is the deepest and most painful of all human choices, the alternative between God’s flames and those of our own making. What is implied here?

We are born dis-eased, erotic, full of tension, relentlessly restless, full of fire. To be a human being is to be on fire for a consummation, a restfulness, a love, a symphony which, in this life, perpetually escapes us. In every cell of our bodies and in every area of our minds and hearts there is a fire, a restless ache, a burning for someone or something we have not yet experienced.

What comes naturally to us because of this is restless and compulsive activity. Being on fire, we are greedy for experience and find it hard to ever be satisfied or to come to rest. So much of what we do in life comes not from a free centre inside of us but from restlessness and compulsiveness. We are perpetually dissatisfied and unable to live within the spirit of our own lives. Our lives seem always to be too small, too petty, too domestic, too unimportant because we are on fire for bigger things, more important jobs, more important places.

Moreover, this fire, this relentless restlessness, does not necessarily suggest that somehow we are living wrongly. Its source is our own depth, the infinite caverns of our minds and hearts. Philosophers and anthropologists have always distinguished human from beast on the basis of rationality. In my own anthropology classes, I like to phrase that somewhat more humorously by stating that the difference between human and beast is that animals munch grass contentedly in meadows while humans smoke it discontentedly in bars….in there lies the difference! And what difference issues from different depths of mind and heart. Animals aren’t deep, humans are.

Given our infinite depth and our infinite hungers, in this life, we will always be on fire. The fire inside of us will never be extinguished by attaining the right experiences – the right partner in love, the right job, the right city, the right friends, the right recognition. Our choice is not between restlessness and restfulness, but between two kinds of restlessness, between two kinds of fire – “pyre and pyre.” We are destined to be consumed by one kind of fire or another, but the flames are very different – God’s flames or those of our own choosing. The solution to our restfulness, our fire, is to let it be consumed and transformed by a higher fire, a higher eros, a higher restlessness, the eros of God. What is implied here? In capsule, what is meant is that we must widen our longings, deepen our aches, raise further still our psychic temperatures so that we burn precisely for the final consummation, the final symphony, God’s kingdom.

Several years back, after giving a conference on celibacy to a group of seminarians, I was approached by one of them with this complaint: “I am tired of abstract talk about sexuality. It’s all useless because nobody can tell us what to actually do with sexual tension.” What can be done with unresolved tension, sexual or otherwise? We can pick it up, enter it, widen and deepen it, and let it be transformed by something still deeper, Christ’s loneliness. Fire must be redeemed by fire, eros by Eros, aching by aching, frustration by advent, restless compulsion by gestation.

Great spiritual writers have always told us that we should imitate Christ not by trying to look as he looked, or even by trying to do the precise things that he did. Rather we should imitate Christ by trying to feel like he felt, by trying to imitate his motivation, that is, his deep longing for the consummation of everybody and everything in one community of love and peace.

That feeling is a fire, a restlessness, an ache, an eroticism. But it is a fire that doesn’t lead to a compulsive greed for experience or to a restless incapacity to receive the spirit of one’s own life. Rather it is a restlessness that leads one to genuinely live in advent, that is, to become pregnant with the gifts of the holy spirit – charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, long-suffering, constancy, mildness, and chastity – and gestate the conditions within which all fire and longing can be consumed by the fire and longing of God.

Who then devised the torment? Love.

The Monasticism Of Daily Life

November 20, 1989

David Steindl-Rast once commented that leisure is not the privilege of those who have time, but rather the virtue of those who give to each instant of life the time it deserves. That’s a valuable insight, especially today when everywhere life seems dominated by the constraints of time. Always, it seems, there isn’t enough time. Our lives are dominated by pressure, the rat race, demands which are all absorbing. The plant has to run and, by the time that is taken care of, there is no time or energy for anything else.

And we are conscious of our pathological busyness. We know that life is passing us by and we are so pre-occupied with the business of making a living and the duties of family and community that only rarely is there any time to actually live. It seems that there is never any unpressured time, unhurried time, undesignated time, leisure time, time to smell the flowers, to simply luxuriate in being alive. We lament about this over our coffee circles but are unable to effectively change anything. Is there something frighteningly wrong with our lives? Is there a need to drastically change our lifestyles?

Perhaps. Obviously in our lives there is too little family time, prayer time, celebration time, and simply restful time. But we are also compounding our problem through misunderstanding. Philosophies of “taking time to smell the flowers” have sometimes led us to understand leisure precisely as the privilege of the rich and unoccupied. What Steindl-Rast challenges us to do is to understand time correctly. Time is a gift. When T.S. Eliot says, “Time, not our time,” he is pointing out that there needs to be a certain detachment from time, a certain monasticism, in our lives.

In monasteries, life is regulated by a bell. Monks and nuns know that time is not their own, that when the bell rings they must drop whatever they are doing and move on to what is being asked of them next. When the bell rings, St. Benedict once said, the monk must put down his pen without crossing his “t” or dotting his “i.” He must move on, not necessarily because he feels like doing something else, but because it is time….time to eat, or pray, or work, or study, or sleep. Monks’ lives are regulated by a bell, not because they don’t have watches and alarm clocks, but to remind them, always, that time is not their own and that there is a proper time to do things. Monks don’t get to sleep, eat, pray, work or relax when they feel like it, but when it’s time to do those things.

There is an astonishing parallel between that and what happens in our own lives and we can be helped by understanding it. There is an inbuilt monasticism to our lives. We too, at least for the more active years of our lives, are called to practice a certain asceticism regarding time – to have our lives regulated by “the bell.”

In our case “the bell” takes a different form, though its demands are the same as those of the bell in a monastery. In our case the bell is an alarm clock and the dictates of our daily lives: a quick breakfast, a commute to work (carrying a bag lunch), staying home with small children, demands at work or at home, driving kids for lessons, dealing with them and their demands, household chores, cooking, laundry, taking out garbage, calling in a plumber, church on Sundays. Like monks we sleep, rise, eat, pray, and work, not necessarily when we’d like to, but when it’s time.

And this is true, not just for our daily routine, but as well for the seasons of our lives. We go to school, we prepare for a career, we enter the work force, are tied down with kids, mortgage payments, car payments, and the demands of family and work, not necessarily because we always feel like it, but because it’s that time in our lives. The play of children and the leisure of retirement come before and after that season.

During all of the most active years of our lives we are reminded daily, sometimes hourly, that time is not our own, we are monks practicing a demanding asceticism. There will not always be time to smell the flowers and we are not always poorer for that fact. Monasticism has its own spiritual payoffs. To be forced to work, to be tied down with duties, to have to get up early, to have little time to call your own, to be burdened with the responsibility of children and the demands of debts and mortgages, to go to bed exhausted after a working day is to be in touch with our humanity. It is too an opportunity to recognize that time is not our own and that any mature spirituality makes a distinction between the season of work and the Sabbath, the sabbatical, the time of unpressured time.

Most important of all recognizing in our duties and pressures the sound of the monastic bell actually helps us to smell the flowers, to give to each instant of our lives the time it deserves – and not necessarily the time I feel like giving it. We are better for the demands that the duties of state put on us, despite constant fatigue. Conversely, the privileged who have all the time in the world are worse off for that, despite their constant opportunity to smell the flowers.

Monks have secrets worth knowing…and the pedagogy of a monastic bell is one of them.

Social Justice And Contemplation

November 6, 1989

Some years ago, Ernst Kasemann, the Scripture scholar, commented that the problem with the church is that, chronically, the liberals aren’t pious and the pious aren’t liberal. If only, he speculated, Christians could be both. Today, I submit, this dichotomy exists in the church between social justice and contemplation. Invariably, those most actively involved in social justice are not as deeply involved in contemplation. Conversely, those on the front lines of contemplation are often glaringly absent in the arena of social justice.

This situation, while far from ideal, would be more acceptable, given different charisms and calls, a division of labor, and the fact that nobody can be on the front lines of everything, except for the fact that, most often, there is suspicion and distrust between those who identify closely with one or the other of these. Far from seeing each other as sisters and brothers in a common struggle, as persons with different charisms called to unblock different arteries within the body of Christ, more often than not, these two spend more time fighting with each other than challenging a world which tends to ignore both of them.

There are salient exceptions of course, as will be mentioned later, but all too common is the case where social justice activists cynically accuse their less socially active brothers and sisters of excessively privatizing the Gospel; of confusing love with sentiment, with being nice; of neglecting Jesus’ non-negotiable demand that we side with the poor; and of identifying Christian practice simply with church-going, with private prayer and private morality, especially sexual morality.

Why, this group asks, are those not actively involved with social justice forever talking about sexual morality and Humanae Vitae, and never about the social encyclicals? Why are people so fanatical about abortion and then so calloused regarding poverty, women’s rights, immigration, and capital punishment?

Those less active in social justice return the accusations: All too common is the angry and judgmental accusation that those most active in social justice no longer pray; that they have the Gospel confused with Green Peace; that they neglect the fact that Jesus’ non-negotiable demands radically invade one’s private world and are equally as demanding there, in the order of sexual morality and private charity, as they are in the area of social justice; and that talk of justice and equality for all is hopelessly compromised when it issues from hearts hardened to the unborn.

I think Kasemann’s words are true here. The liberals aren’t pious and the pious aren’t liberal.

This is a bad situation. If we are to offer any kind of help to a world which is interested neither in social justice nor in contemplation, a world which, effectively, has written us off, then we had best become liberal and pious, contemplative and socially active, both at once. In my opinion there is nothing more urgent on the Christian agenda than this question, the marriage between social justice and contemplation. Both sides on this issue have correctly intuited that survival is what’s at stake.

Unless the issues surrounding justice, poverty, war, the ecology, ethnic rights, and women’s rights are addressed we won’t have a world within which to practice our piety. Conversely, if private prayer, private morality, and contemplation die, then we still will somehow lose the world or, certainly, we will lose any world worth living in.

The signs of the times need to be read: Vatican II, the recovery of the social Gospel, the growing affluence of first world Christians, the breakdown of marriage and family life, the ecological crisis, the rise of feminism, the threat of nuclear war, oppressive injustice in the Third World, and the shrinking size of our planet, have conspired to make it vital, a matter of life and death, that we make a marriage between social justice and contemplation. If we don’t, we’ve no future.

As mentioned earlier, some are already modestly etching out a path towards this: Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement, Catherine Doherty and the Madonna House Apostolate, Richard Rohr and the Centre for Action and Contemplation, Jim Wallis and Sojourners, Jean Vanier and Henri Nouwen and L’Arche, Sheila Cassidy and the Hospice movement, Gustavo Gutierrez with his brand of Liberation Theology which always puts justice, love, and grace together in the same breath, Mother Teresa with her directness in dealing with both God and the poor, Thomas Merton and Dan Berrigan with their reflective approach to civil disobedience, and, of course, John Paul II and many bishops’ conferences with their social encyclicals and pastoral letters on justice.

In these we see the beginnings of a path, some charting of the uncharted. Action and contemplation, private morality and social awareness, prophetic anger and understanding, liberalness and piety, are being married. From their lead we should take our cue.

Romero Died Before He Was Killed

October 23, 1989

On March 24, 1980, Salvadoran Archbishop, Oscar Romero, was assassinated as he celebrated the Eucharist. A recent film, Romero (Paulist Films – Cineplex Odeon), excellently depicts the interplay of forces both within El Salvador and within Romero himself that culminate in this assassination. From Romero, the man and the film, there is much to learn. The film ends with his assassination, but it begins with other things.

Initially, when Romero is chosen as archbishop, he is judged to be weak. Rome picks him because it feels he won’t ruffle feathers; the rich applaud his installation because they feel he will keep the church in the sanctuary, away from justice issues; and the poor accept his appointment with more resignation than hope. He is judged by all, and not without reason, to be very “safe” and mediocre. At first, he is just that, safe and mediocre. Even more, he is somewhat of a bumpkin, an absent-minded evasive intellectual lost in the face of practical issues. The rich try to use him. The poor ignore him. Those in the front lines of the justice struggle are irritated by him.

For many of us this comes as a shock. Romero, the martyr, slow to take a stand, fuzzy of vision, weak in courage, reticent, sneered at by those working for justice, ignored by the poor. But Romero changes, changes as he begins to deal more directly with the poor. His simple honesty and his refusal to distort the truth he sees leads him to see how the struggle for justice and the struggle for the Gospel are inextricably linked. As his vision clarified, his courage grew. However, his conversion is not, as many suppose, a conversion to ideology, or violence, or anger, or to any one-sided compassion.

He continues to love all, poor and rich. When he is accused by the rich of being overly concerned for the poor he protests by saying he is painfully concerned for everyone. He condemns violence, by the poor as much as by the rich. At one stage, he confronts one of his priests who has taken to carrying a machine gun and suggests that, by carrying a weapon, he is putting himself on the same level as the oppressors. The priest counters by suggesting that Romero’s non-violence, while idealistic, is ineffective.

Romero then asks the priest: “Do you still pray?”

“Yes, I do,” was the reply.

“Then why,” questions Romero, “are you carrying a gun?”

As Romero understood more the need to struggle for justice he understood, in a way that the machine gun carrying priest never did, how Good Friday and Easter Sunday, not terrorism and gun fire, are the paths to justice and the kingdom. Sister Mary Jo Leddy recently commented that, in any situation dominated by fear, you need people who have died before they die, people who, before death, already live the resurrection. In this is fear, timidity, overcome.

Too often, however, we just want to survive. Then we choose not to die, but that, as she points out, is not the same thing as choosing to live. We need to die before we die to live in the freedom of the resurrection already now.

Romero’s real witness consisted in precisely that, long before an assassin’s bullet ended his life, he had already died. The great courage he had during his last months came from this, as a dead man, he had nothing left to lose.

It was a dead man that he could write…

“I have often been threatened with death. Nevertheless, as a Christian, I do not believe in death without resurrection. If they kill me I will rise in the Salvadoran people. I say so without meaning to boast, with the greatest humility. As a pastor I am obliged by divine mandate to give my life for those I love – for all Salvadorans, even those who may be going to kill me. If the threats come to be fulfilled, from this moment I offer my blood to God for the redemption and for the resurrection of El Salvador. Martyrdom is a grace of God that I do not believe I deserve. But if God accepts the sacrifice of my life, let my blood be a seed of freedom, and the sign that hope will soon be a reality….You may say, if they succeed in killing me, that I pardon and bless those who do it. Would that thus they may be convinced that they will waste their time.”

Martin Luther King used to tell the story of a young boy, a black, who, during the height of the segregation era in Alabama, was caught trespassing in a white man’s toilet. He was beaten up and, just before being kicked out, had his face pushed into a urinal. King comments: This boy has two choices: The first is to bide his time, nurture and intensify his wound and hatred, and when, if ever, he has the strength and resources, strike back. Or…

There’s another, a more difficult choice. The true revelation of love asks that boy to get up and recognize in the smell of that filth, the filth of humanity, the smell of Christ’s blood, defiled with spittle on the way to Calvary. Romero, like King, tried to give his people that message. In the film, just before the credits appear at the end, the screen flashes the words: “Romero lived and died for non-violence. 60,000 people have died in El Salvador in the 10 years since his death. His message has not been heard.”

Maybe it’s not too late for us to hear.

High Season For Religion Foes

October 9, 1989

These are tough days for those who believe in the institutional church and in organized religion.

Daily our newscasts document incidents of sin, corruption, abused power, misguided fanaticism, and betrayed trust….all done in the name of religion or under its guise!

Pedophilia among Roman Catholic priests, sex and money scandals among TV evangelists, hostage takings and bombings by fundamentalist Arabs, Irish Catholics, and Hindu Sikhs, these and other lesser scandals fill the front pages. As one commentator put it, “this is the church’s Watergate!”

Many people’s faith is shaken; understandably so. Trust, once given, then betrayed, is not easily restored. Faith in organized religion is difficult at the best of times and so, given all this disillusionment, it is becoming ever easier for people to believe that they are best to go through life independent of the institutional church.

Moreover, for those who despise or ignore organized religion (cultured agnostics, religious lone rangers, anti-clerics) this is high season.

What all these scandals are doing is helping confirm their most hopeful suspicions: Religion is a hoax; organized church practice serves the interests of those who organize it; Roman Catholic celibacy is a front; everyone has an angle; in the church, as elsewhere, sex and money are what it’s ultimately all about; the institutional part of religion is what corrupts faith; pure self-sacrifice does not exist within the churches; one is best off without organized religion; Jesus founded a kingdom, humans created the churches. All these Watergate-type revelations are finally revealing the truth!

What’s to be said and done in the face of all of this?

All healing begins with a lancing of the wound. We should, despite the pain and humiliation of all of this, be grateful that the truth is being exposed. In the long run, the truth will set us free.

In the short run, the prognosis is less positive. We have to be prepared for a season, perhaps a very long one, of continued pain and embarrassment and a further erosion of trust. We have to accept this and accept it without self-pity, rationalization, half-baked justifications, or any attempts to water-down the seriousness of what is revealed in these scandals. Partly we are sick and, like a virus that has infected the body, this has to run its course and the body, in pain and fever, has to build up a new immune system. In the short run, we can only do what Lamentations advises: “Put your mouth to the dust and wait!”

Beyond that, those of us who are not directly involved in these scandals, either personally or institutionally, must resist the temptation to distance ourselves and our churches from these with the attitude: “Don’t look at me, I’m innocent, this is somebody else’s problem!”

It’s our problem, irrespective of whether or not we are innocent or guilty. All Christians, along with all other sincere believers, form one body, Christ’s body. We are all in this together, with Christ. We may not facilely link ourselves with our church’s graced moments, its saints, martyrs, and proud achievements, and then slickly distance ourselves from its dark history, its compromises, its perverseness, its pedophilia, and its sex and money scandals. To be a member of the church, to be a believer, is to be linked to all of this, grace and sin.

In this context, it is significant to point out that Christ died between two thieves. He was innocent; they weren’t. However, because his sacrifice was seen against that horizon, it was judged, by association, by those present to be as tainted as were the deaths of those he died with. People watching the crucifixion did not distinguish between who was guilty and who was innocent. They assessed what they saw en bloc. For them, all crucifixions meant the same thing.

The church is still judged in the same way. To be a church member is still to be connected, by association, with sin and sinners. Christ was the object of suspicion and misunderstanding. Every kind of accusation was leveled against him. This will be true, always, of his church.

Like him, the church will always be seen by outsiders as framed against a certain horizon…on display with scoundrels, child molesters, fakes, frauds, bad thieves and good thieves. The crucifixion of Christ is still going on and it is mixed in with the personal tragedies of honest and dishonest sinners. Christ is always pinned up among thieves.

But the church need offer no particular apologetics for this. The historical Jesus was found there. Why shouldn’t the church be found there?

As the great Protestant theologian, Friedrich Schleiermacher, stated already a century ago in a book entitled, Speeches to the Cultured Despisers of Religion, the temptation is always to despise religion in its positive form, namely, in its concrete historical expression in the churches where it finds itself hopelessly and inextricably intertwined with the sin, pettiness, and foibles of ordinary human beings. Invariably the temptation is to say: “I can handle God, but I won’t be involved with all this human mess we call the church!”

To speak that line is to utter the greatest ecclesial heresy there is. To speak it is also to abandon the true Christ for an idol. Jesus walked with sinners, ate with them, was accused with them, and died with them. The church is true when it is in solidarity with him, especially in that. Lately the church has been dying a lot with sinners. It’s been an humiliating experience…but, then, so was the crucifixion!

Soft Peddling The Truth?

September 25, 1989

Several years ago, during the question period following a talk I had given, I was asked a series of questions about morality, sin, confession, and forgiveness. I began my response with a few distinctions calculated to show how complex these questions were and was moving on to the next step, an attempt to give some answers, when one man present lost both his patience and his temper. He challenged me angrily:

“Father, why are you fudging around in answering this? You know the answer, every Catholic does! Sex outside of marriage, missing Mass on Sundays, these are mortal sins…and no theological or psychological distinctions can change that! You know too, only too well, that the Catholic Church teaches clearly, and has defined at the Council of Trent, that there is only one way to have serious sin forgiven, confession to a priest. To not say that clearly is to soft-peddle the truth!”

I was searching for a response to this challenge when a lady stood up and, shaking and nearly overcome with emotion, spoke for me: “This is not soft-peddling the truth. I believe that Father is saying…and I’ll tell you why. I had a 19-years-old daughter who was killed in a car accident two years ago. She hadn’t been going to church for over a year before that and she was living with her boyfriend. But she was a good girl, with a good heart, and nobody is going to tell me that she went to hell!”

Recently, at a diocesan conference on the sacrament of reconciliation, I had been explaining how reconciliation, like all sacraments, was a touching of the body of Christ and how, consequently, one could have one’s sins forgiven through touching Christ’s body within Christian community and within Eucharist. I went on to say that I consider the practice of confession a beautiful and important sacrament, one used by the mature….and how I consider the fact that many Christians today no longer practice it a bad sign. However, despite the value and importance of private confession, radically we can, and do, have our sins forgiven through living and worshipping within Christian community and especially through receiving the Eucharist.

Again, I was accused of soft-peddling the truth. The Catholic tradition, I was passionately informed, is that all serious sin can only be forgiven through explicit confession to a priest. I’ve been around long enough to know that this statement is generally perceived as, in fact, being the Catholic tradition on reconciliation and so I have had to think long and hard about this: Am I soft-peddling the truth? Doesn’t the Council of Trent clearly demand private confession as the condition for the forgiveness of serious sin? Is a certain theology of the Incarnation (upon which I base the belief that when one goes to Eucharist or participates otherwise in Christian community one is touching the hem of Christ’s garment and is thus being reconciled) faulty? Am I being influenced by some liberal consensus which, blind to all except its own ideological concerns, is trying to be a surrogate for truth?

These are valid questions, questions all religious teachers who know Christ’s warning about scandalizing little ones had better ask themselves fairly regularly. There are penalties for playing loose with the truth. But there are also dangers the other way, one can dangerously reduce truth. One can also soft-peddle the incarnation. Just as one can lack the courage to affirm hard truths because they demand things which go against the grain, one can just as easily lack the courage to affirm how incredible and far-reaching are the tentacles of the incarnation and how lavish is the mercy of God that is revealed in it. I doubt that any Christian who takes seriously what Jesus taught us about God would want to challenge the lady who claimed that, despite her daughter’s wanderings and her dying without explicit confession, her daughter was surely not in hell.

So what do courage and truth demand we say? That there is no forgiveness for serious sin outside of the explicit sacrament of reconciliation….or that Christian community and the Eucharist are the body of Christ on earth and that when we touch them with even a modicum of sincerity we are healed?

Do courage and truth demand that we take Trent’s statement on private confession to mean that outside of explicit private confession there can be, for any Catholic, no other means of reconciliation….or, do they demand that we take Trent’s statement in its proper context and with all its qualifications and affirm, in the name of Trent, that there are ways outside of explicit confession to have sins forgiven?

Do courage and truth demand that we teach that only Jesus can forgive sin and that, today, that forgiveness is dispensed only through private confession…or do courage and truth demand that we affirm, as does Scripture, that we do not replace the body of Christ, that we are not like his body, nor even that we are his mystical body, but that we are his body, flesh, blood, tangible, in history, the on-going incarnation, and that consequently when we forgive, Christ forgives; when we bind, Christ binds; when we console, Christ consoles; and when that woman loved and forgave her wandering daughter, Christ loved and forgave that wandering daughter?

In what does the greater danger lie…in soft-peddling confession or in soft peddling and reducing the incredible love and forgiveness that are revealed in the incarnation?

Romance Gives Inkling Of Heaven

September 11, 1989

Recently a Canadian poet, J.S. Porter, published a book of poems under the title, The Thomas Merton Poems (Moonstone Press, 1988). His claim is that these poems Merton might have written had he lived longer. Merton, I suspect, would indeed recognize himself in these poems.

One poem particularly caught my eye is without title and reads:

There’s too much of everything

books, stars, flowers.

How can one flower be precious

in a bed of thousands?

How can a book count

in a library of millions?

The universe is a junkyard

burnt out meteors, busted up stars

planetary cast offs, throwaway galaxies

born and buried in an instant

repeating, repeating

Yet something remains

the dream of fewness

one woman, one man.

There was a time in my life when this poem would have burned holes into me and left me haunted and restless. The dream of fewness…one woman, one man. It still touches the deepest parts of me and triggers a certain ache, but there are now other parts of me that raise questions that weren’t, until recently, inside of me.

Is this dream a dream of the adolescent? Are we longing for a teenage crush? Is it speaking of something more aptly termed obsessional neurosis? Does it refer to something we are meant to outgrow, first fervor, untransformed love? Are we talking here of naive, unrealistic Hollywood daydreams? Are we talking here of a narcissistic longing to find another lonely person with whom to gang-up with against genuine community? Are we talking here about a dream of a sick privatized, selfish love which (as Marxism suggested years ago) hinders the movement towards justice and wider community? Is this a dream for dizzy romance or for what’s most precious in God’s kingdom?

These questions themselves need questioning. What is their root? Are they the fruit of growing up or are they the fruit of cynicism, tiredness, a fatigued spirit, and a heart that has lost its ideals and is content with second best? I suspect it’s some of both. The dream of fewness can be adolescent and can lead to much useless restlessness and aching. Its pursuit can be counterproductive of community and a hindrance to justice. However, the loss of this dream can also indicate a heart that has lost its most important fire for life and had domesticated its passion.

The dream of fewness comes from our wildest longings and is an ache for a great love. As such, whatever its dysfunctions, it is God’s lure pulling us towards our real aim, glory. Nobody who still believes in the dream of fewness needs the reminder that we “do not live by bread alone,” that there is infinitely more to living than the simple sweetening of life. This dream spawns within us a deep and unrelenting restlessness which, perhaps more than anything else, can push us beyond our instinct to settle in, consume, hoard, be secure, and let the amusements and distractions of the good life be somehow enough for us.

To dream the dream of fewness is to know, right within the restless stirring of one’s own heart, that one is, as both Scripture and philosophy affirm, fired into life with a madness that comes from the gods and which demands that one attain a great love. It’s only when we despair of attaining that great love that we grow embarrassed with romance, with “falling in love,” with the dream of fewness and attempt to tame our longings by subduing them with phrases like naive, adolescent, counterproductive of community, sickly privatized, and obsessional neurosis.

Already a generation ago, C.S. Lewis commented upon this as follows: “In speaking of this desire….I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you – the secret which hurts so much that you take revenge on it by calling it names like nostalgia and romanticism and adolescence, the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that, when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves, the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell.”

A friend of mine who is getting married this summer recently tried to assure me that she knew what she was getting into: “I’m being realistic, Father, this isn’t naive passion. I’m not looking for Hollywood romance.” I sent her the poem on the dream of fewness with an attached note that read something like this: “Enjoy the first fruits of your love, your honeymoon, the dream of fewness. It’s one of the better foretastes of heaven given us in this life. The accidents of life, soon enough, deprive us of that. Taste and remember!”

The dream of fewness. Taste and remember. Think of how much happier and mellower and centred beyond the immediate the world would be if everyone had tasted and could remember.

Pedophilia Raises Hard Questions

August 28, 1989

This article will, I fear, upset a number of people. Something needs to be said, but, given the levels of hurt, disillusionment, bitterness, anticlerical glee, vicarious over-identification, and just simple gossip that surrounds this issue, nothing meaningful can be said which will not, I fear, deeply offend somebody. There is a lot of hyper and raw nerves around, yet the greater danger lies in remaining silent.

The issue is one which has been prominent in the news in recent months, namely, that of priests and religious brothers being arrested and charged with pedophilia. Every day the list of accusations, revelations, and arrests grows and, with that, every day, pain, confusion, suspicion, and bitterness grow as well. Everyone, save those who feast of gossip and misfortune, has been deeply pained by this. It’s an open sore within the community, especially among Roman Catholics, who, until recently, had a tendency to place their priests on a pedestal. How does one make the adjustment from seeing someone as another Christ to seeing him arrested for sexual assault?

There is, understandably, a lot of paranoia and suspicion around: How far-reaching is this thing? What is the church covering up? Whom can we trust? Are our kids safe around rectories and sacristies?

Beyond this, these events have made clerical celibacy, itself, the object of suspicion. Omnipresent now is the idea that priests are prone to this type of perversity because they are celibate. Thus, for example, in the suburbs where I live, the local newspaper polled a number of Catholics at a local supermarket. Without a single exception, each one felt that clerical celibacy was at the root of this.

What’s to be said in the face of all this? There’s over-reaction and there’s under-reaction. We have too much of both. What’s a proper reaction?

All reactions should begin with compassion for the victims. They, after all, have been most hurt. This compassion must be very concrete, not just ideological. There must be real compensation and real help given, psychological, spiritual and financial. Part of this reaction must also be the recognition of the seriousness of the crime. Something has been wounded inside of these persons which, this side of the resurrection, can never be fully put right again. Any trivialization of that is not just an under-reaction, but is itself criminal.

However, such compassion must be sharply distinguished from something else which looks very similar but which is itself another form of victimization, namely, the tendency some people have to vicariously and neurotically over-identify themselves with these victims. This parades itself as a compassion and crusade. It is only the latter, not the former. Real compassion manifests itself by actual and concrete outreach towards a victim and not in the claiming of that victim for one’s own ideological or curriculum vitae purposes. Genuine compassion aids the healing process. Vicarious over-identification, for all its fervor and good intention, is counterproductive in that, in its further sowing of hatred and polarization, like swelling around a wound, it delays and positively hinders healing.

Secondly, we must see these revelations as a knife lancing a wound. The truth sets us free. A wound open to light and air can heal. The church and the priesthood will survive. In the long run, both will be healthier. Moreover, the adverse publicity and the civil lawsuits will force us to screen clerical candidates more carefully as well as take more seriously any kind of sexual deviance among priests. Bishops, religious provincials, seminary rectors, and parish councils are all learning, under fire, some valuable lessons. Things will be better in the future.

Thirdly, something needs saying which most newspaper reports and other commentaries, radio and television, have not always brought out. For whatever reasons, these have been reluctant to state that pedophilia is not proportionately higher among Roman Catholic priests than it is among other professions. In fact, statistically, it is slightly lower among Roman Catholic clergy than among the male population at large. Moreover, it is not higher among celibates than among married men. Translated, all this means that your kids, statistically, run no higher risk around priests and religious brothers than around anyone else, including their own fathers.

Pedophilia is a disease, and a very complex one at the. Like alcoholism it plays no favorites but ravages priests and laity, celibates and non-celibates, alike. Celibacy, whatever its other merits or dysfunctions, is not the culprit. Like many other factors it can be complicitous, but of itself it is not the issue.

Finally, we may not withhold compassion from the victimizers themselves. Despite their crime, there is, I’m sure, more than one good thief among them. Christ died among, and for, people like them, and us. The gravity of their offense must, with a certain brutality, rule out all trivialization of the crime, but to withhold compassion and understanding from them is, on our part, the sign of a small mind and of even a smaller heart. We are dealing here with an illness, a disease, not with maliciousness. Moreover, many of these men were themselves, as children, victims of abuse. Further, few persons have ever had to endure as public and as humiliating a crucifixion as they have suffered. Any heart not overly preoccupied with its own hurts and narcissisms will have a compassion that, at some point, embraces these men as well.

Morris West once said: sin, sex, and suffering form perhaps the most constant trinity within human experience. How true that is!

The final word must be the word prayer. When so many are hurt and hurting, our hearts must move towards prayer…for the victims, the victimizers, the community, and for forgiveness and healing so that, eventually, for all, there may be a new day.