A recent article in the Vancouver Province strongly attacked its province’s government for refusing to provide funding for the distribution of an educational video on sex. The government had refused funding because, in its opinion, the video promoted the use of the condom without sufficiently considering all the issues that surround its use. The article recorded a series of reactions from concerned and angry groups who argued that the government’s stance was rigid, prudish, simplistic, unrealistic, and dangerous. The government, they submitted, was acting irresponsibly and endangering lives since, if kids were going to have sex anyway, why not, minimally, try to protect them against its worst hazard, AIDS. It ended its condemnation of the government with the statement….“we are talking about mortality, not morality.”

I have no doubt that these groups are acting out of a good instinct. They’re trying to be realistic, lives are at stake. I am less impressed with their distinction between mortality and morality, and the consequences of such a separation. Mortality and morality, in the end, amount to the same thing. If young people are not properly educated about AIDS and do not, very practically, take the proper precautions, lives will be lost. That is simply a statement of fact. Conversely, however, if young people, and not so young people, are not properly educated about all the issues that surround the use of the condom (and that surround the issue of sexuality in general) lives also will be lost. That too is a statement of fact.

Mortality versus morality! That’s an illicit dichotomy. The former depends upon the latter. This needs more than ever to be said, given what is happening in sex education since the advent of AIDS. Given the concern about AIDS, people have a right to feel a panic and urgency regarding the need to act, and to act very practically, vis-a-vis educating people about the responsible use of sex. It is understandable, too given that climate, that people are tempted to abandon some wider concerns about morality in favor of the more immediately practical issue, mortality.

My fear, however, is that in succumbing to that temptation we are not going to accomplish what we are most trying to do, namely, save lives by educating persons to be responsible. What I fear is that we are going to produce a generation schooled in the idea that contraceptive responsibility is the same thing as sexual responsibility. That equation (proper precautions equal responsible sex) is bad algebra. Sexual responsibility implies a whole lot more than proper precautions vis-a-vis pregnancy and disease. It implies responsibility within a whole relationship.

Our society no longer understands that. We already have the expression, “safe sex,” as if proper safeguards against pregnancy and disease could make sex safe. “Safe sex” is an oxymoron. Ex officio, sex negates safety. There can be no safe sex, ever. With or without proper prophylactics, it demands first of all a certain relationship between the two persons engaging in it. For sex to be responsible sex, that relationship, first of all, must be a responsible relationship.

Sex is fire. It plays on deep emotions, sets loose, all on its own, a whole complex of psychological dynamics which demand certain responses and which scream for a certain commitment and mutual responsibility. When these things, intrinsic to the fire of sexuality itself, are not respected, people get deeply hurt, lives are ruined and ultimately lives are lost. The Victorian age, for all its hang-ups about sex, understood this more deeply than we do today. They knew there was no such thing as safe sex. They knew that sexual responsibility implied a whole lot more than proper prophylaxis. As Suzanne Britt puts it: “Great sex on a Victorian sofa is far more awkward than sex atop a Seally posturepedic, king-size mattress, but….these violently contorted Victorian lovers will know by their cracked skulls and bumped shins that what they have engaged in is something and not nothing; is hard not soft; risky not safe; productive of long and dire consequence, not immediately dismissed in a cloud of smoke from a cigarette ironically named ‘True’.” (Books and Religion, January, 1987)

Sex, all sex, is productive of long and dire consequences, for good and for bad. When we teach people that the use of proper safeguards makes for safe sex those we are instructing are less, not more, educated. In the long run the mortality rate will rise, not fall. In Milan Kundera’s, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, his heroine is upset with her husband, Tomas, because of his cavalier attitude towards life in general and towards sex in particular. For Tomas, life is light, sex is casual. His wife finds this lightness unbearable. In that frustration, she is experiencing more than jealousy. The lightness is unbearable because, inside of herself, she understands that morality is at the root of mortality, and that sexual responsibility implies a whole lot more than proper precautions against pregnancy and disease.

“The person who will not have a softening of the heart will eventually have a softening of the brain!” That warning, issued by G.K. Chesterton more than a half century ago, is particularly relevant for today, a time when virtually everything conspires against tenderness and softness.

Everywhere, today, the atmosphere is one of professionalism, efficiency, toughness, competitiveness, and lean strength. Workplaces, and at times even our homes and church circles, leave little room for softness, be it inefficiency, sentiment, or fat.  Even to insert a call for any tenderness and softness to somehow tone this down is to endanger one’s status and respect. Our world has a very restricted place for what is unprofessional, sentimental, inefficient, fat, soft and fragile. Toughness and achievement are what get respect.

For this reason, we often experience our places of work and even our homes as being cold and somewhat brutal. But when we feel this coldness, what we are actually experiencing is our own intimidation. Our fear of being seen as soft, fat, childish, and as unable to handle pressure and meet certain standards of toughness and efficiency pushes us to make every kind of sacrifice rather than let ourselves be so judged.  This shouldn’t be so, but, in fact, most often is. Ideally, we shouldn’t allow ourselves to be thus intimidated, but, most often, we do. The fact is that we generally do live and work within an atmosphere that is cold and unfeeling.

Given this, it is all too easy for us to become embittered, cold, and competitive ourselves. This happens gradually, imperceptibly, like the process of aging and the greying of hair. We look into the mirror each day and think we look the same. Then one day we look at an old photograph of ourselves and we’re shocked at how much we’ve changed.  If we could see old photographs of ourselves which somehow indicated eagerness of spirit, spontaneity, hospitality, compassion, and simple joy and zest for life, many of us, I suspect, would be shocked at how much we’ve changed, hardened, through the years. The coldness, untenderness, and hardness that was so long outside of us, is now, in a large measure, inside of us, in our eyes, in our actions, and, sadly, often enough in our hearts. So gradually it happens. We change, harden, become the type of persons we would not choose to be friends with ourselves.

Given this, perhaps the most important prayer moments we can have each day are those moments which soften the heart, moments which bring us back to eagerness of spirit, hospitality, compassion, and childlike joy. To have a tender moment is to pray.  Praying is more than just saying prayers. We are asked to “pray always.” This implies that we need to be praying even when we aren’t formally saying prayers.

To pray always, as Jesus says, implies that we read the signs of the times, that we look at the conspiracy of accidents which shape our lives and read in these the finger and providence of God. The language of God is the experience that God writes into our lives. To pray means to read our lives religiously.  Perhaps the most important way in which we need to do this today is to pick up, read religiously, and see as grace and prayer those moments which somehow soften the heart, moments which put us in touch with our vulnerability, our tenderness, our sense of compassion and hospitality, and our connectedness with each other and our common struggle. We share a common heart and a common struggle. To become aware of that is to soften the heart.  The world can be hard and, if we aren’t careful, if we do not massage the tender moment as prayer, we will harden too, becoming as untender, cold, and inhospitable as the world itself.

William Wordsworth once observed that a person often seems cold when s/he is only hurt. Lately, I suspect, too many of us radiate this coldness for precisely that reason. We need to pray by picking up the tender moment and letting its grace soften us.  What constitutes the tender moment? Anything in life that helps make us aware of our deep connectedness with each other, of our common struggle, our common wound, our common sin, and our common need for help…the suffering face of another which mirrors our own pain, the sense of our physical mortality, the acceptance of our own sin, the beauty of nature, the eagerness and innocence of children, the fragility of the aged, and, of course, not least, moments of intimacy, of friendship, of celebration, of every kind of shared joy, pain or vulnerability.

John of the Cross once suggested that the function of solitude is “to bring the mild into harmony with the mild.” Moments which make us mild are deep moments of prayer. We need such moments badly or a cold and brutal world will make us cold and brutal. We need, daily, to pick up the tender moment.

Chesterton once also said: “The swiftest things are the softest things. A bird is active because a bird is soft. A stone is helpless, because a stone is hard. The stone must by its own nature go downwards, because hardness is weakness. A bird can of its nature go upwards, because fragility is force.” (Orthodoxy, Page 221)

For many of us, politics is a dirty word. It speaks of dishonesty, misused power, patronage, self -interest, pressure groups, propaganda, and ideology. Phrases such as “an honest politician” or “a hardworking administrator” are commonly seen as oxymorons. The very word politics conjures up images of what is fat and lazy, crooked and unnecessary. Given this, the temptation is great for us to avoid politics or to be as minimally involved as possible. Our attitude towards politics tends to parallel our attitude towards taxes, they are unfortunate evil to be avoided.

Sadly, that attitude is often a commentary on the concrete state of politics in the countries and localities we live in. Most of the time, in fact, politics are dominated by abuse, patronage, payoffs, propaganda, ideology, and self-interest. However, with that being said, something else too needs saying:

Politics is in its concrete life, like the church, full of sin and self-interest. Yet, like the church, politics demands our involvement despite this. The temptation to say: “This is a dirty business. I’ll have no part of it! I’ll be content to quietly mind my own business” is one that the Gospel itself demands we resist. No Christian or concerned human being is afforded the luxury of avoiding politics since no one is afforded the option of avoiding community.

We are essentially social beings, meant to live with others. A non-negotiable imperative to be involved in politics follows from that. Upon politics depends a community’s ability or inability to organize itself. Thus, it is no exaggeration to say that, singularly, the most important thing within every community is politics. Without effective politics, we are the helpless victims of chance, fate, loneliness and an unpredictable impinging future.

What is meant here?

Without politics a community has no effective centre of power and action with which to respond to the contingencies of nature, time, and history. Without politics there is no community. Community doesn’t just happen. It depends upon equitable and just relationships, upon information and education, upon laws, structures, and institutions which help regulate and promote harmony, which protect the weak and helpless, and which mark and create occasions to gather and celebrate. As well, community depends upon shaping both the present and the future so that they are not experienced as pure fate.

Langdon Gilkey states that the function of politics is to transform fate into destiny. He goes on to add that at the root of many of our present difficulties lies a failure in politics…tyranny, war, ecological disaster, and anarchy are, in the end, political problems, not biological or psychological ones.

To have community, some of life must be positively shaped. This demands politics. This is the definition of politics. Because of this, politics demands the participation of all. To avoid politics is to attempt to avoid community and that temptation is condemned, way back, when God looked at Adam and said: “It is not good for the man to be alone!”And, it is precisely because we are too much alone that so many of the problems of our time overwhelm us. More and more, we are experiencing our lives as fate rather than destiny. This indicates, in the end, a breakdown of politics.

Thus, for example, we watch the news at night and feel depressed and helpless as we see the mega problems of our world, the strain on the ecology, the threat of nuclear war, the omnipresence of injustice and poverty, the breakdown of family life and sexual morality, the decertification of the unborn, and the paralyzing grip of consumerism on our consciousness.

Moreover, we sit around our coffee circles and lament about the rat race, about the tyranny of our mortgages, and about our powerlessness to challenge our own kids….whether it be about designer jeans, sexual morality, or church going.

Why do we feel so helpless in the face of these things? We feel helpless because, practically, we are helpless, helpless because we are alone, not effectively linked with others, unable individually and in our small family, coffee, and church circles to have much impact. We are experiencing what Adam experienced before the creation of Eve and community, that it is not good to be alone!

Effective compassion is as much collective as it is individual. We are helpless against the mega problems of our world because we are watching the news alone, apolitically. We are helpless against the rat race and consumerism because we lament about these in coffee circles that are too apolitical, that is, isolated from each other. If sincere people in the world everywhere watched the news together, we could turn the world around. If coffee circles everywhere linked with each other, we could effectively shape our own lives and those of our children. But this involves politics, the ability of a community to organize itself. That is why everyone has to be involved in politics. When, for whatever reasons, masses of sincere people avoid politics (perhaps mostly because of its earthiness and tensions), then politics becomes precisely a vehicle to promote self-interest. Politics then is taken over by the self-interested.

We must all be politically involved for, as Edward Schillebeeckx says, “what we dream alone, remains a dream. What we dream with others can become a reality.”

I am particularly fond of biography. Stories of people’s lives, save for the cheaper accounts of the lives of the rich and famous, are a special kind of literature. A good story always throws light on everyone’s life since, as Willa Cather says, “there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened.” This is even more true when we are dealing with the story of someone of our own generation, someone who, even though his or her life may be very different from ours, has felt the changes of the world at the same time we did. There is a certain affinity, compassion, connaturality, and even a mysticism, that exists among those who experience the same things at roughly the same time.

Where were you when Kennedy was shot? Do you remember the cold war, the fall-out shelters, the advent of Presley, the Beatles, hard rock, hard drugs, Woodstock, the Vietnam war, the world going crazy in 1968? Do you remember the time before the sexual revolution, Vatican II, the slide of marriage and family life, the hopeless fragmentation of knowledge, and the anger, polarization, and yuppyism of the 1980s? These events were the acid, we are the litmus paper. Most of us, I suspect, turned the same colors.

Given that affinity among us, I want to share part of my own story. Not because it is in any way extraordinary, but, precisely, because it is so ordinary and typical. I want to describe some of the colors I’ve turned and still am turning. Perhaps it will be helpful to you in dealing with your own story since we share a common place in history. We’ve been dropped in the same test tube. I am a child of our age and, for this reason, straddle two cultures and am subject to two voices:

The earliest voice that spoke to me was the voice of my parents and of their culture. They were immigrants, economically poor, pious, Christian. So was their culture. Their voice spoke as follows: Worldly success is not important. What’s important is Christ, family, church. Duty and self-sacrifice are more important than personal fulfillment. Life here, in this world, is not so important. We can live in dissatisfaction and frustration since, before death, we live as in a valley of tears, in a world in which the symphony can never be finished. Ecstasy must be postponed until the next life. Personal morality, especially if it has to do with sex, is a big deal. So too is private prayer. You should be charitable to the poor. (There was little talk of social justice since we were, in fact, the poor). The world is a cold and pagan place, set over against the church. The voice said: be suspicious, always suspicious, of the world and its ways.

But already as a child another voice and another culture began to seep in. I read magazines, listened to the radio, watched TV and movies, looked at catalogues and travel brochures, and began to read a literature which spoke in another voice. Each year, too, I watched events irrevocably changing our lives and our culture. This new voice spoke as follows: You are poor now, but you can move from rags to riches. You were born the immigrant, but you can live as something else. Family, church, and Christ are important, but so too is success, a career. Make something of yourself. Be admired. Duty and sacrifice need sometimes to be jettisoned for personal fulfillment; after all, you only live once and there is meant to be some life after birth (as well as after death). Private prayer and private morality, including sexual ethics, are not such a big deal. Don’t be suspicious of the world. It often affirms life where the church does not.

Be suspicious instead of the church and its hang-ups, timidities, and fears. Look at where it blocks life.  I’ve spent most of my life caught between these two voices…confused, stretched, unsure, torn, testing one, then the other.

One of these voices, that of my parents, has won an essential victory. But that victory is still bitterly contested and is far from complete and unequivocal. Parts of me belong to the culture that wasn’t my parents’ and these sometimes win their own kind of victory. Moreover, in head and heart, it is not so clear that that one voice, my parents’, is everywhere identifiable with Christ’s voice and that the other voice is always identifiable with the world.

My parents’ culture had its faults. It could be racist, bigoted, prejudiced, narrow, timid, and unhealthily fearful. Invariably there was the timidity of the immigrant, the bias of the ghetto…“us against them,” “stay with your own kind,”, “don’t even selectively try to love what’s outside.” As well, the other voice, despite its obvious bias for the world, speaks of a universalism, an openness, and a challenge beyond fear and timidity that echoes the Gospel better than does the former voice.

So where does that leave me?

Living a question. Uncertain of a lot of things. Steady in some convictions, gasping for oxygen in others. Convinced that old-time religion and fundamentalism are not the answer, but suspicious that perhaps I, we, somehow need to be inner immigrants. Beyond those questions, though, is a growing comfort, totally undeserved to be sure, in a surer knowledge that we are loved by God, myself no less than everyone else. Given that comfort, I feel no panic about the two voices. Being pulled between them is quite an adventure.

Easter is mostly about waking up. It’s Easter when God and spring susurrate through the veins of nature giving frozen earth and frozen hearts a wake-up call. That call is ever needed. The human proclivity is towards sleep. Without outside revelation, the trumpet blast announcing resurrection, a divine force opening tombs, and God whispering new life inside of us, our preoccupations and obsessions invariably render us blind as bats – left to fly by radar.

Easter is about eyesight, seeing. George Orwell once summarized our difficulties in this area: “A rather cruel trick I once played on a wasp. He was sucking jam on my plate and I cut him in half. He paid no attention, merely went on with his meal, while a tiny stream of jam trickled out of his severed oesophagus. Only when he tried to fly away did he grasp the dreadful thing that had happened to him. It is the same with us. The thing that has been cut away is our soul and there is a period of time…during which we do not notice it.” (G. Orwell, Collected Essays, Vol. II, Page 15)

It’s a strange irony! We spend our lives searching for life in its rarity and we hardly notice Easter and spring. It’s Easter and we are heavy in spirit. Resurrection is all around and we are feeling old! Why? Why so blind to spring and resurrection?

Classical spiritual writers have always affirmed a connection between morality and epistemology. That’s a sophisticated way of saying that how we live morally affects our eyesight, our perception of reality. Moral laxity, sin, and lack of faith, cloud vision. That’s very true and our propensity to sleep through the resurrection, obviously, has something to do with our less than perfect faith and morals. However, I believe, in the end the problem is not so much our badness as our busyness, our sin as our obsessions. Let me try to explain this:

I don’t think that we are a particularly bad people. We have moral faults and laxities which are peculiar to our generation, but, conversely, we also have moral strengths and virtues that past generations lacked. Moreover, God is used to revealing love and resurrection to a sinful people. Where God is perhaps less practiced is in revealing love and resurrection to such busy and preoccupied persons. Where we differ from past generations is more in the pace of our lives than in our moral inadequacies. We are pressured, preoccupied, hurried, hell-bent, and driven in a way that previous generations never were. We’ve no time for the examined life, for contemplation, to notice spring and resurrection. “The plant must run!” as Merton once put it. There is little time or energy left after that has been taken care of.

Sadly, this is true even of our preaching of the Gospel. We are so busy teaching the Gospel, learning the Gospel, running religious programs, administering sacraments, and making sure the religious plant runs that there is precious, little, if any, time and energy left to actually live the Gospel. We have to spend so much time talking about God that, at a point, there is no time to listen to God any more. To this we add restlessness and emotional obsessions. Here too we differ from past ages. We are more restless, more dis-eased, than they. People have always been restless and prone to obsessions, but our age militates against restfulness and literally invites obsessions.

A myriad of factors – mass media, more leisure time, unbridled romance and sex, and philosophies of self-fulfillment which point us towards a salvation within our world – have driven up our psychic temperatures and have made it very difficult for us to accept our own lives and spirits. This makes for lots of heartaches. As painful as are the headaches that come to us from the hurriedness and pressures of our work, they are a lesser evil. It’s our heartaches, the emotional obsessions that so unsettle our rest, which, in Orwell’s metaphor, keep us concentrated on the jam.

They are the pain and the narcissism which makes us unaware of spring and resurrection and the whispering of God about newness and stones being rolled back. We don’t notice spring and resurrection because, outside of our heartaches and headaches, we hardly see anything at all. The earth is ablaze with the fire of God, with sights, sounds, smells, touches and tastes that are enough to make anyone want to take one’s shoes off. There’s resurrection a plenty! Mostly it goes unnoticed. We sleep the sleep of heartaches and headaches!

It’s the time for spring and resurrection. I doubt there will be any resurrection trumpets loud enough to blast the narcissistic hell out of us. Mostly resurrection is about susurrection, whispering. God whispers a lot. There are all kinds of secrets to be heard. Spring and Easter is a good season, for looking and listening.

We celebrate feasts differently than we used to. Formerly, there was generally a long fast leading up to a feast, and then a joyous celebration afterwards. Today, usually, there is a long celebration leading up to the feast, and a fast afterwards.

The way we celebrate Christmas exemplifies this. Nearly two months before the actual day, we already begin to celebrate. The parties start, the decorations and lights go up, the cards go out, and the Christmas music begins to play.  When the day of Christmas finally arrives, we are already satiated with the specialness of the season, tired, over-saturated with celebration and ready to move on. By Christmas Day, we are ready to go back to ordinary life, and even to do some fasting…having had, already, enough of partying, lights, special music, and turkey dinners! The Christmas season used to last until February. Now, realistically, it is over on Dec. 25.

This is a curious reversal. Traditionally always the build-up was towards a feast, celebration came after. Today the feast is first, the fast comes after. Why is this? And, are we the better or the worse for reversing the fast-feast cycle?

A colleague of mine recently commented that our society knows how to anticipate an event, but not how to sustain it.  That’s only partially true. The real issue is not so much that we do not know how to sustain something, we precisely do not know how to anticipate something. We confuse anticipation with celebration itself. One of our weaknesses today is that we find it hard to live in the face of any anticipation, inconsummation, or unfulfilled tension without moving swiftly to resolve it. Longing and fasting are not our strong points. Neither is feasting. Because we cannot build properly towards a feast, we cannot celebrate properly either.

Celebration is an organic process. To feast, one must first fast: to come to consummation, one must first live in chastity; and to taste specialness, one must first have a sense of what’s ordinary. When fasting, inconsummation, and the dour rhythm of the ordinary are short-circuited, then fatigue of the spirit, boredom, and disappointment replace celebration. We are left with the empty feeling that says: “All this hype, for this!” Something can only be sublime if, first of all, there is some sublimation.

I am old enough to have known another time. Like our own, this time too had its faults, but it also had its strengths. One of these strengths was its belief, a lived belief, that feasting depends upon prior fasting, that the sublime depends upon a prerequisite sublimation.  I’ve vivid memories of the Advents and Lents of my childhood. How strict these times were! These were seasons of fast and renunciation: no weddings, no dances, fewer parties, fewer drinks, fewer desserts, and generally less of everything that constitutes specialness and celebration. Churches were draped in purple and statues covered. The colors were dark and the mood was penitential…but the feasts that followed, Easter and Christmas, were oh so special!

Perhaps I am wafting nostalgia; after all, I was young then, naive and deprived, and thus able to meet Christmas and Easter, and other celebrations, with a fresher spirit. That may be, but the specialness that surrounded feasts has died for another, more important reason, namely, we do not anticipate them properly anymore. We short-circuit fasting, inconsummation, and the prerequisite longing. Simply put, how can Christmas be special when we arrive at Dec. 25 exhausted from weeks of Christmas parties? How can Easter be special when we’ve treated Lent just as we treat any other season? How, indeed, can anything be sublime when we’ve all but lost our capacity for sublimation?

Celebration, as mentioned earlier, is an organic process. It is created by a dynamic interplay between anticipation and fulfillment, longing and inconsummation, ordinary and special, work and play. Life, love, and sexuality must be celebrated within that fast-feast rhythm. Seasons of play must follow seasons of work, seasons of consummation are contingent upon seasons of longing, and seasons of intimacy can only grow out of seasons of solitude. Presence depends upon absence, intimacy upon solitude, play upon work. Even God rested only after working for six days!

Today the absence of genuine specialness and enjoyment within our lives is due largely to the breakdown of this rhythm. In a word, Christmas is no longer special because we’ve celebrated it during Advent, weddings are no longer special because we’ve already slept with the bride, and experiences of all kinds are often flat, boring, and unable to excite us because we had them prematurely. Premature experience is bad precisely because it is premature. To celebrate Christmas during Advent, to celebrate Easter without fasting, to short-circuit longing in any area, is, like sleeping with the bride before the wedding, a fault in chastity. All premature experience has the effect of draining us of great enthusiasm and great expectations (which can only be built up through sublimation, tension, and painful waiting).

The Lenten season is upon us. If we use it, precisely, to fast, to intensify longing, to raise psychic temperature, and to learn what kinds of gestation can develop within the crucible of chastity, then the feast that follows will bring into our lives much sublimity and specialness.

“Every time I thoroughly enjoy something, I feel guilty, like I am stealing pleasure from God. The deeper the pleasure, the stronger the sense of guilt!” These words, and others like them, are what psychiatrists’ couches are often about, namely, false guilt, the inability to enjoy pleasure, gift, and raw unmerited goodness. I am sure that most of us easily resonate with this. It is hard for us to simply enjoy pleasure, especially if it is deep and unmerited, without somehow feeling: “I’ll have to pay for this somehow. I shouldn’t be enjoying this. I don’t deserve this. Somewhere, someone is displeased!”

Invariably when we feel good we end up feeling so guilty about feeling good that we soon wind up not feeling very good at all. That’s a strange irony since more than anything else we want to enjoy the goodness of life and creation. Deep down, all of us know that the best way to thank God for the gift of life is to enjoy it. But enjoyment isn’t easy and it doesn’t follow automatically from the availability of pleasure.

Today we have more opportunity for pleasure – access to the good life, health, food, sex, clothing, comfortable and luxurious housing, recreation, travel – than any previous generation in history. Sadly, we actually enjoy these things very little. Our lives are riddled with guilt and excess is our substitute for enjoyment. Why is this? What lies behind this sense of guilt, this inability to enjoy, this neurosis? Why, when more than anything else we crave raw unmerited goodness, do we feel guilty when we attain even a small taste of it? Why can we not luxuriate in gift? Many answers have been proposed: Original sin has flawed us.

We have been badly socialized so that we know how to accept the bad, insults and adversity, but not how to receive the good. We have been too strongly influenced by Augustine and Stoic philosophers who have engrained in our common sense that somehow what hurts is better for you. There is some truth in all of these suggestions, but the root of this neurosis lies deeper.

Simply put, we feel guilty when we have lost the practice of sacrifice in our lives. Sacrifice is what can set us free from false guilt. What is meant here? What is sacrifice?

The word is used in many ways: As a child, I thought I was making sacrifices when I gave up things for Lent, or when I gave money to the missions, or when I gave up time I would rather have spent playing in order to help out somewhere. Parents speak of making sacrifices for their children. Wives speak of sacrificing careers for their families. The Bible speaks of sacrificing grain and cattle as burnt offerings to God…and it speaks of Jesus as sacrificing his life for us. Is there anything common to all of these? Giving. The common element is gift. Sacrifice is giving something up. It is giving something away, not in an attempt to change the way God feels about us, but in an attempt to change the way we feel.

The biblical story of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac is helpful in illustrating this: The story tells us that God asks Abraham to take his only son, Isaac, his most precious love and the one upon whom the future depends, up a mountain and to sacrifice him by killing him and burning his body. Abraham, we are told, complies and sets out with Isaac ascending the mountain towards the place of sacrifice. At the last moment, God intervenes and stops the sacrifice. He gives Isaac back to Abraham and asks instead for a male animal as a substitute. Abraham and Isaac make the      a cir way back down the mountain. But something has been fundamentally changed.

What has changed? Has Abraham passed some arbitrary, but radical, test of faith and is now happy because he has come through and put his money where his mouth is? No. Abraham is fundamentally changed, not because he has passed some test of faith, but because he now has his son, Isaac, in a way that he never had him before. He now has Isaac without guilt, as pure gift. By sacrificing him, Abraham has him regiven to him in a fuller way.

What transpired in the sacrifice was this: By symbolizing giving Isaac away and having him returned, Abraham recognized more fully that Isaac was gift. Isaac was his, not by right, but by divine right. His willingness to sacrifice Isaac was a response to a sense of being indebted (and this is the sense that we generally confuse with a feeling of guilt). He felt that he owed God, and he did owe God, because God had gifted him with a son. His attempt to give Isaac back was a recognition of that indebtedness. Obviously God stops such sacrifices.

God does not want gifts returned. But the act of symbolically giving back accomplishes something. It does not pay off, or attempt to pay off, a bad debt (“You owe because you have been so gifted”). Rather through sacrifice one accepts that debt is unpayable, that gift is precisely gift, and that goodness and love unmerited. Our sense of guilt stems from our sense of indebtedness. We are indebted…since all we are and have is gift. When we give away – life, time, money, love – we recognize that, we accept that debt is unpayable and that all is gift, and we begin to free ourselves from the sense of guilt.

Our age is witnessing an erosion of Catholicism. The consequence of this, besides our dram somberness, is a polarization which, both in the world and in the church, is rendering us incapable of working together against the problems which threaten us all.

Let me explain: We are, I submit, becoming ever less Catholic. What is implied here? What is slipping? What does it mean to be Catholic? The opposite of Catholic is not Protestant. All Christians, Protestants as well as Roman Catholics, characterize their faith as Catholic – as well as one, holy, and apostolic. The word Catholic means universal, wide. It speaks of a comprehensive embrace. Its opposite, therefore, is not Protestantism, but narrowness, pettiness, lack of openness, sectarianism, provincialism, factionalism, fundamentalism, and ideology.

To my mind, the best definition of the word Catholic comes from Jesus, himself, who tells us: “In my Father’s house there are many rooms.” (John 14:2) In speaking of the Father’s house, Jesus is not pointing to a mansion in the sky, but to God’s heart. God’s heart has many rooms. It can embrace everything. It is wide, unpetty, open, and antithetical to all that is factional, fundamentalistic, and ideological. It is a heart that does not divide things up according to ours and theirs. Nikos Kazantsakis once wrote: “The bosom of God is not a ghetto.” That’s another way of saying that God has a Catholic heart.

To affirm this, however, is not to say that, since God is open to all and embraces all, nothing makes any difference; we may do as we like, all morality is relative, all beliefs are equal, and nobody may lay claim to truth. There is a false concept of openness which affirms that to embrace all means to render all equal. Jesus belies this. He affirms the universal embrace of God’s heart without affirming, as a consequence, that everything is okay. His Father loves everyone, even as he discriminates between right and wrong. Catholicism can be spoken of as slipping in that, unlike God’s heart, more and more it seems, our hearts have just one room.

Today we are seeing a creeping narrowness and intolerance. Fundamentalism, with its many types of ideology, has infected us. This is as true in the secular world as in the church. Fundamentalism and the narrowness and consequent polarization it spawns are everywhere. But this needs to be understood. We tend to think of fundamentalism as a conservative view which takes Scripture so literally so as to be unable to relate to the world in a realistic way. But that is just one, and a very small, kind of fundamentalism. We see fundamentalism wherever we see a heart with just one room. The characteristic of all fundamentalism is that, precisely, it seizes onto some fundamental value: e.g., the wisdom of the past, the divine inspiration of Scripture, or the importance of justice and equality and makes that the sole criterion for judging goodness and authenticity.

In that sense, the fundamentalist’s heart has just one room – a conservative, liberal, biblical, charismatic, feminist, anti-feminist, social justice, anti-abortion, or pro-choice room. It judges you as good, acceptable, decent, sincere, Christian, loving, and worth listening to only if you are in that room. If you are not ideologically committed to that fundamental, complete with all the prescribed rhetoric and accepted indignations, then you are judged as insincere or ignorant, and in need of either conversion or of having your consciousness raised. In the end, all fundamentalism is ideology and all ideology is fundamentalism – and both are a heart with one room, a bosom that’s a ghetto.

That is the real un-Catholicism.

Tragically too, at the heart of all fundamentalism and ideology, there is an absence of a healthy self-love and a healthy self-criticism. That’s why fundamentalists and ideologues are all so defensive, hypersensitive and humorless. It is because of this that the world and the church are so full of intolerance, anger, lack of openness, self-righteous condemnation, scapegoating, and academic and moral intimidation. There are too few rooms in our hearts!

Given this, it is not surprising that very little genuine dialogue ever takes place. Most attempts at it are little more than name-calling and cheerleading. Given this, too, it is not surprising that the working out of personal neuroses is frequently confused with genuine commitment to causes.

In God’s house there are many rooms. There is an embrace for everyone; rich and poor, conservative and liberal, irrespective of whether one is wearing silk or denims. God’s house is a Catholic house. And “we must be Catholic as our heavenly Father is Catholic.” We must create more Catholic hearts and more Catholic houses. And this is not a call to be wishy-washy relativists who affirm that everything is okay as long as you do it sincerely. Like Christ, we must discriminate between right and wrong and believe in a divine truth which judges the world. But we must free ourselves from un-Catholicism, from fundamentalism and ideology which create a heart with just one room.