We take ourselves too seriously. In the end, we are too pompous about our projects, causes, ideologies, and enthusiasms. This is not to deny that, in the world and in the church, there are real pains and that these call us to put our blood on the line. However, we are also called upon, always, even as we are putting our blood on the line, to keep a sense of proportion, to keep things in perspective. This implies that we keep our sense of humor.

Humor is perhaps the quality that is most absent in the church today. We are pathologically serious. The church is full of anger, polarization, hypersensitivity, and poisonous bitterness. It has reached a point where we dare not laugh at anything lest somebody or some group be deeply offended. We live in a world and in a church that have made a spirituality out of somberness, humorlessness, anger, and hyper-sensitivity.

This is an infallible sign of a loss of health and a loss of a healthy self-love. A healthy self-love includes, always, a healthy self-criticism and a healthy ability to laugh at oneself and to see one’s own pompousness.

Humor is the mark of contemplativeness. Contemplativeness sees things in perspective: they see irony because they see the transcendence of the human spirit in every situation, irrespective of how painful that situation is. Contemplatives laugh a lot. One such, Thomas More, told a joke to his executioner just before having his head cut off. The lack of humor in the church today is a sure sign of the death of contemplation, of a tragic narrowing of perspective, of the loss of a healthy sense of proportion, and of a subtle creeping narcissism which mistakes self-righteousness for God’s righteousness. Today we are so somber and angry because, in the end, we are not contemplative enough to have a sense of the transcendence of our own spirits within the limitations of our own situations. Our spirits are down because we are too tied to the immediate situation. When we’ve stopped laughing we’ve also stopped praying.

Soren Kierkegaard once wrote: “Something wonderful has happened to me. I was caught up into the seventh heaven. There sat the heavenly assembly. By special grace, I was granted the privilege of making a wish. ‘Wilt thou,’ said God, ‘have youth or beauty or power or a long life or the most beautiful maiden or any of the other glories we have in the chest? Choose, but only one thing.’

“For a moment I was at a loss. Then I addressed myself to them as follows: ‘Most honorable contemporaries, I choose this one thing, that I may always have the laugh on my side.’

“Not one of the heavenly assembly said a word; on the contrary, they all began to laugh. From that I concluded that my wish had been granted, and I found that the heavenly assembly knew how to express themselves with taste; for it would hardly have been suitable to have answered gravely, ‘Thy wish be granted.’

So that the laugh may remain on our side – and so that we may retain a healthy self-criticism and self-love, I propose a few readings for those long winter nights:

For those who like biography, I recommend, My Way, the Autobiography of John Paul II. In the area of Ecclesiology, there is a new encyclical on authority: Soc et Tuum, as well as a fine new book entitled, Conflict Management, by Rev. Michael Tyson.

In the area of spirituality is your interest, I recommend: Slain, Stay’in, and Pray’in, an indepth look at the phenomenon of being slain in the spirit. It contains an excellent chapter on how to lengthen your prayer meetings. For priests and sisters there is a new book on celibacy (from Third Way Press) entitled: Virgin/Martyr – Is this title Redundant? For the more piously inclined, there is The Hidden Life of St. Joseph, which finally attempts to answer the question as to why he is always dressed in brown.

In the area of feminist theology, I recommend, from Equality Press, a work on the Trinity: Creator/ess, God/ess, Father-Mother, Redeemer-Spirit, by Emma Emmacho. For religious educators, there is a fine new book with all kinds of suggestions on making your classroom more manageable. It is very practically entitled, Lithium and the Hyperactive Student: There is a Solution.

For pastors and pastoral teams there is an excellent series of essays which has been collected and published under the title: The Process is Worthwhile. This book contains an excellent analysis of the distinction between mission, priorities, goals, aims, and strategies, as well as creative suggestions as to what to do at coffee breaks.

Finally, there are two works which are a must for everyone, especially neophytes in the faith and those in RCIA programs. I am speaking of course of the recent translation from the German of the classic: Hermeneutical Imperatives Contained in the Inceptive Aorist Usage as Found in the Apocrypha and the Pseudo-Dead Sea Scrolls. As well, there is the recent Towards an Hermeneutical Disciplined and Differentiated Consciousness – A comparison of Heidegger, Gadamer, and Lonergan. These works are a must for beginners.

Enjoy your long winter evenings!

Fyodor Dostoyevski once commented: “The cleverest of all, in my opinion, is the person who calls himself a fool at least once a month – nowadays an unheard-of talent. Formerly a fool recognized once a year at the very least that he was a fool, but not now.” (Bobok, Page 166)

I suspect I will be called a fool for writing this. It will be taken as a compliment!

American novelist, James T. Farrell, once wrote: “I’d like to see God. I’d like to tell him a few things! I’d like to say, ‘God why do you create men and make them suffer and fight in vain, and live brief unhappy lives like pigs, and make them die disgustingly and rot?

“God, why do beautiful girls you create become whores, and grow old and toothless, and die, and have their bodies rot so that they are a stench to human nostrils?

“God, why do you permit thousands and millions of your creatures, made in your image and likeness, to live like crowded dogs in slums and tenements, while an exploiting few profit from the sweat of their toil, produce nothing, and live in kingly mansions?

“God, why do you permit people to starve, hunger, die from syphilis, cancer, consumption? God why do you not raise one little finger to save us from all the sufferings on this human planet?

“That’s what I would say to God, that’s exactly what I would say to him if I could find him. But God’s a wise guy. He stays in hiding.” (Studs Lonigan, Page 360)

It’s not easy to believe in God. Faith is never certitude and the evidence for God’s existence is ambiguous. It is ambiguous because life is. The world is full of beauty, virtue, love, selflessness, artistic achievement, humor and celebration. It is, at the same time, full too of evil, moral and physical – selfishness, murder, rape, exploitation, insensitivity, stupidity, and death-producing phenomena, parasites, cancer, and natural disasters which inflict death, pain, disease, and destruction randomly and senselessly.

One can look at the world, as countless believers have always done, and conclude from the presence of beauty and love that there exists an all-loving and all-beautiful God who created this all out of love. One can also look at the world, as many sincere atheists (e.g. Gordon Sinclair, Albert Camus, Richard Rubenstein, Simone de Beauvoir) have, and conclude from the presence of suffering and evil that no God exists or, if one does, s/he is either malicious, quixotic or incompetent. Millions of persons have trouble believing in God, or being at peace with their belief, because they see an inconsistency between faith in an all-good God and the presence of suffering and evil in the world. As Albert Camus once put it: “If there is a God, then he is the eternal bystander with his back turned on a suffering world.”

What underlies these criticisms which often come from very sincere persons? What underlies them is a confusion, however sincere, between faith and understanding. Simply put, whenever we try to think God we get into trouble. Why? Because mind, imagination, and thought cannot be stretched far enough to adequately understand God. For this reason, when we do try to figure out how there can be a God and how everything can still be imagined consistently, we end up with the unfounded conclusion that God does not exist.

Let me illustrate with just one example of what happens when we try to image God’s existence.

The very immensity of our universe defies imagination: There are perhaps hundreds of millions of galaxies with billions of light years separating them. On each of these planets within these galaxies there are hundreds of trillions of phenomena happening every second (and through billions of years). Can we really believe that somewhere there is a person and a heart so supreme and omniscient that it created all of this and that, right now, it knows minutely and intimately every detail and happening and that it is passionately concerned with every one of these happenings? To expatiate further with just one small example: our planet earth. This is just one of millions of planets.

Yet, just on it, during every second there are hundreds of persons being born, hundreds of persons are being conceived, hundreds are dying, millions are sinning, millions are doing virtuous acts, millions are suffering, millions are celebrating, millions are hoping, millions are praying, many are despairing…and all of this has been happening for hundreds of thousands of years. Can we really imagine that a God exists who intimately knows all of this, in every detail, cares passionately about each individual and every detail, and is, somehow, Lord over all of this so that “no sparrow falls from the sky or hair from a human head” without God knowing and caring deeply? Can we really imagine this?

The answer quite simply is that we can’t. Our minds and imaginations simply won’t stretch that far. But that is the precise point. The biggest religious mistake we can make is to try to imagine God. God is infinite, our minds are finite. It makes for a bad equation. When we make God fit the categories of what we can think and imagine we end up in trouble. When God asked Moses to take his shoes off before the burning bush, God was asking for space – space within which to be God. Our belief in God can only be strong if we respect the mystery that is God and not try to figure out God or make God fit into the limits of our own imaginations.

When we do this, and it is the perennial temptation, when we try to make God consistent with our imaginations, then God ceases being God, ceases being worth believing in, and we soon stop believing.

Several years ago, Carlo Carretto, one of the great spiritual writers of our time, returned to Italy from the Sahara desert after many years as a monk among the Bedouin. He then wrote a spiritual testimony entitled, “I Sought and I Found,” within which he chronicles his journey towards, and struggles with, God. He ends the book with a letter, a love letter, addressed to the church, the visible institutional church. A paraphrase of the opening lines reads like this:

“How much I must criticize you, my church and yet how much I love you!

“You have made me suffer more than anyone and yet I owe you more than I owe anyone.

“I should like to see you destroyed and yet I need your presence.

“You have given me much scandal and yet you alone have made me understand holiness.

“Never in the world have I seen anything more obscurantist, more compromised, more false, yet never have I touched anything more pure, more generous or more beautiful.

“Countless times I have felt like slamming the door of my soul in your face – and yet, every night, I have prayed that I might die in your sure arms!

“No, I cannot be free of you, for I am one with you, even if not completely you.

“Then too – where should I go?

“To build another church?

“But I cannot build another church without the same defects, for they are my own defects. And again, if I were to build another church, it would be my church, not Christ’s church.

“No. I am old enough. I know better!”

What a magnificent description of the church – flawed yet divine, mediating God’s presence even as it obstructs it! I have found myself drawing upon this description more and more as I deal with complaints about the institutional church. What’s to be said in the face of the fact that the institutional church is flawed, compromised, corrupted by power, fraught with human weakness and pettiness? What’s to be said in the face of the fact that the church has never lived radically and fully the Gospel it preaches? What’s to be said in the face of the fact that, in its darker moments, the church has hurt, and continues to hurt, countless persons? How can it claim credibility and how can it claim to mediate God’s presence in the light of this? These are frequently voiced complaints and often one hears the added comment: “I can deal with God, I can’t deal with the church!”

Such complaints are often sincere, though they can also be a rationalization. In either case, however, the facts they point to are true. We cannot deny history and reality. The church has always had, and still has, a dark side. It does not mediate God’s presence purely. That is simply a fact.

However, with that having been admitted, something else must be added: The church, just as humanity itself, is not something abstract. It exists only in real people. We meet the church only in a very particular, historical, concrete enfleshment, that is, in real people with real names, real problems, and real blemishes. What we meet is never the church, but only this or that particular church. The church is a family, a very concrete and historical one.

This can be, I feel, a very helpful perspective to keep in mind. When we are born into a family, we bear its birthmark. We can dislike it, we can get angry with it, we can stay away from family celebrations for long periods of time, we can rage against its faults, and we can fill with bitterness and protest that it should be more loving, more understanding, less quick to judge and assign guilt…but, in the end, it’s our family and we want to die reconciled with it. Ultimately, one of life’s non-negotiable imperatives is that one tries to come to peace with one’s family. Nobody ever really leaves one’s family, even if they die outside of it.

It is the same with the institutional church. It isn’t God. The institutional church is no more identifiable with God than my historical father is identifiable with God the Father. But, like our historical parents, it is real.  It is what we actually meet on earth. As with our real family, we can dislike it, rage at its faults, and be bitter about its imperfections. We can wish for another family. We can fight with it and stay away for long periods of time (and, sometimes, this can be healthy), but, in the end, we bear its mark on our skin, it’s ours, it’s the actual and only place in history where we contact the historical Christ.

It’s because of this, its inexorable reality, that, precisely, we have such strong feelings about it. Like Carretto, there are the times when we feel like slamming the door of our soul into its face, and yet, daily, we pray to somehow die in its arms. It’s because of this that, like Carretto, we too ultimately realize that we can never really leave the church.

Several years ago, after concluding a confession within which she had admitted to some rather serious things, a lady asked me: “What would you call those things? My neuroses? My woundedness? My struggle areas? My immaturities?” Half-jokingly, I answered: “Call them sin! Afford to them and to yourself the dignity of a rich and timeless symbol.”

Her confession had been honest and she was not, in posing that question, trying to evade responsibility or guilt. Yet, within her, there was something which made her hesitate to simply say: “I sinned…I am a sinner.” In that hesitation, she is a child of our age. Today, unless we are speaking of corporate or systematic evil, there is a general hesitancy to use the word sin. It is rare that we hear someone simply and humbly say, beyond any reference to circumstances or excuse: ‘I’ve sinned. There aren’t any excuses…outside of being human.’ We are poorer for not being able to say that.

First of all, we are poorer because our sense of sin is connected with our sense of love. To sin is to betray…in love. To have lost a sense of personal sin is to have lost a sense of being personally and deeply loved. Lovers know that their immaturities, woundedness, and neuroses play a part in their struggles. They also know that, ultimately, there is something called betrayal, sin.

Secondly, more superficially, not to speak of ourselves as sinners is to lower the symbolic hedge under which we live. Bluntly put, psychological symbols – neuroses, immaturity, woundedness – do not link our actions to anything interesting, rich, or timeless. The symbol of sin does. A sin, in the end, can be ever so much more interesting and rich than a neurosis or an immaturity. Daniel Berrigan once, sarcastically, stated that when the obituary for our age is written it will tell future generations that our age died of “nothing more serious than moral acne, hemorrhoids of the spirit.”

I would like to think that our faults have more dignity than that! The symbol of sin links our faults to the weaknesses of all who have ever struggled and with all who will ever struggle. A sense of sin grounds us, humbly, in history. More seriously, however: To admit that we sin gives us the space to be honest and a place within which to receive forgiveness.

When we refuse to admit that we sin we are forced to be dishonest because, in the end, no one can, honestly, stand before God and others and not have to say: “I am weak, I do things I shouldn’t. The good I want to do, I cannot. The evil I want to avoid, I end up doing. I need forgiveness.” Not to say this, is to lie. Not to admit sin forces us to rationalize, to give excuses, to project blame, and to over-emphasize psychological and sociological influences on our behavior.

We see this already in the Adam and Eve story. Confronted by God after their sin, they are unable to simply admit sin. Instead we see the proclivity for rationalization…“The woman you gave me offered me the fruit! The devil tempted me!” Had there been, then, the simple honesty to admit sin, human history might have been different. Instead of crying out for redemption, Adam and Eve burrowed themselves more deeply into their own woundedness. The same is true for us. When we lie and rationalize we refuse to stand in the space within which we can receive forgiveness and we retreat more deeply into what is not best in us.

It is when we can stand before God and others as the publican did and say in the face of our betrayals, “These things are wrong. I shouldn’t be doing this, but I can’t help myself,” that we can receive the forgiveness that washes us clean. Forgiveness doesn’t wash away neuroses or immaturities. It washes away sin. It is when we humbly and simply own our sin that we take our place among God’s broken, the ones Jesus came to save, and are given the chance to start again, new, fresh, loved.

A man I know is fond of expressing his displeasure with his own moral failures by saying: “That was incredibly stupid…but it seemed like a good idea at the time!” That’s a contemporary form of the publican’s prayer. There’s an honesty in that which allows him to accept forgiveness.

Another person I know, a lady who has been coming to me for the sacrament of reconciliation for some time, always begins her confession with the beautiful phrase: “I am a loved sinner.” In that expression, she keeps in correct balance the most important truths of humanity: We are sinners and we are loved in spite of it. To admit sin sets us free to receive love under the only condition it can be truly offered. To acknowledge that we are loved, in spite of sin, sets us free from false guilt and self-hatred.

Martin Luther had, precisely, this in mind when he so wisely said: “Sin bravely!”

(First of a two-part series)

I grew up in a church which was concerned with apologetics. We were forever worried about making ourselves credible. A lot of effort went into showing that the faith made sense, that being a Christian fulfilled rather than denigrated humanity. We devised all kinds of arguments intended to impress or discredit non-believers: proofs for the existence of God, arguments demonstrating why the human person needs God, and schemae that tried to demonstrate the validity of the church as an institution.

As a young man studying theology, I often met this kind of question in a classroom: “Imagine you are traveling on a bus and you meet an atheist, how would you talk about God to such a person?”  Or, for those of us who were Roman Catholics, we got more specific: “Imagine you are on a train and meet a Protestant, how would you attempt to show that the Roman Catholic Church is the right one?”

Most of these arguments didn’t get beyond the safety of the classroom. I have been in ministry for 15 years and have, rarely, on bus, train, boat, or plane, met that questioning atheist or Protestant. Most talk on buses and trains revolves around sports, entertainment, politics, and food. Despite this, the old apologetics had some value, it helped make the faith more credible to those within it.

We still need an apologetics. However, its audience has radically changed. If I wrote or taught on apologetics today, I would pose the question this way:  “Imagine you are sitting at your family table… where some of your own family no longer attend church or take seriously the church’s moral teachings, how would you try to prove that faith and Christianity are credible?” We’ve come a long way from the theoretical atheist on the bus!

The problem of faith in our time is the problem of unbelief among believers. For too many of us, faith in Christ is little more than a hangover…toxic residue from a former activity. What do I perceive as the issue behind this? The problem, I submit, both within and without, is a problem of credibility, the faith is no longer believable to, nor livable for, many in our age.

Why? Why is Christ known, but not really believed in? When I scan religious literature, I see various proposed explanations:  Conservatives blame our present malaise upon lack of prayer and the failure of our age to keep the commandments, pure and simple. If we don’t pray and our moral lives are shabby, how can we expect to have a vital faith?  Liberals point to slow renewal within the church as the cause. We are not really renewed, they argue. We still pray to God, talk about God, and worship God in mythical and medieval images.

We are schizophrenic in regards to religion. We live modern lives but try to live an old-time religion. Ultimately, this freezes God out of all the important areas of life. Religion becomes the great art form and the church becomes the great museum.

Social justice advocates submit that the problem is one of affluence. If Christ made a preferential option for the poor and Christianity is seeing life from the bottom, it is, quite simply, impossible to live as affluently and selfishly as we do and still have a vital connection to Christ.

There is some truth in each of these, but, in the end, the real reason for the erosion of faith and hope in Christ is something beyond all of these.  What, singularly, are we missing today within Christianity that could make us credible to the world and to our own families?

Community. The greatest need in our time is, as Jim Wallis puts it, “not simply for kerygma, the preaching of the Gospel; nor for diakonia; service on behalf of justice; nor for charisma, the experience of the spirit’s gifts; nor even for propheteia; the challenging of the King.

The greatest need of our time is for koinonia, the call simply to be church….to offer to the world a living, breathing, loving community of church. This is the foundation of all answers.” (Jim Wallis, The Call to Conversion, Page 109)

In the end, people are as agnostic about faith, Christ, and the church as they are about the experience of community. When there is a strong experience of community there is generally a strong faith.  For example, wherever today we see a strong faith, we see, invariably, strong community… RCIA groups, cursillo groups, marriage encounter groups, social justice groups, charismatic groups, Bible study groups, third order groups. These are pockets of fervor within the church and it is no accident that all of them are linked to strong community experiences.  As well, even in those Christians who are deeply committed and beyond first fervor, we see that ultimately their strength issues from community, the Eucharist, common prayer, and a shared morality and life within the Holy Spirit.

Christianity, in the end, is a communal endeavor. We believe in it when community works, we stop believing in it when community and family break down.  Our primary task today is to live community. If we can do that, then the visible body of Christ, the church, will have an incredible resurrection.

(In my next article I will develop this further, showing how, outside of vital community, we cannot even preach the Gospel.)

We are fired into life by a madness that comes from our incompleteness. We awake to life tense, aching, erotic, full of sex and restlessness.  This dis-ease is, singularly, the most important force within existence. It is the force for love and we are fundamentally shaped by our loves and deformed by their distortions. Shakespeare called this our “immortal longings” and poets, philosophers, and mystics have always recognized that, within it, there is precisely something of immortality.

Religiously, we have surrounded this longing with chastity and mystique. Ultimately, our restless aching was seen as nothing less than the yearning within us for God. Augustine’s interpretation of this eros was seen as the proper one: “You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” The longing was understood religiously: Adam, missing his rib, longing for Eve, man and woman, woman and man, longing for a primal wholeness in God and each other. This was high longing, eros as the spark of the divine in us, the fire from the anvil of God imprisoned inside of us like a skylark, causing hopeless disquiet!

In the light of such divine restlessness we lived as pilgrims in time, longing for a consummation in a kingdom not fully of this world, caught, in Karl Rahner’s words, “in the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable, inconsummate, but knowing that here in this life all symphonies remain unfinished.” In such a view, we pursued each other, embraced each other, and loved and made love to each other against the horizon of the infinite, under a high symbolic hedge. Love, romance, sex, and passion were sacred things, surrounded by much chastity and mystique.

Today that hedge is lower, the mystique and the chastity are less. We no longer embrace against the horizon of the infinite and our aches are no longer seen as longing for the transcendent. Instead, for the most part, we have trivialized this longing, making it mean something much more concrete. The longing is for the good life, for good sex, for good successes, for what everybody else has, for the sweetening of life. There is little mystique in this. Plato, in his Symposium tells of his students sitting around “telling wonderful stories of the meaning of their longing.” Mystics, in their writings, tell of their deep longing for consummation within the body of Christ.

Today we rarely sit around and tell wonderful stories of the meaning of our longing, and, ordinarily, there is little talk of aching for consummation within the body of Christ. Our stories are, for the most part, of yearnings more concretely channeled. It is a rare self-understanding today which lets one believe that his or her aches and yearnings are mystical. We are not accustomed to think in such high terms, our symbols are more humble. Our aches and longings are seen as directed towards what we can attain, practically, in the here and now, achievement, success, sex, limited love and enjoyment.

There is nothing bad about these things, but, in the end, if we define our deepest longings as directed towards them in themselves, we end up in erotic despair. Eventually, we no longer believe that we can recover a primal wholeness through the embrace of another, the perpetuity of our seed, and the contemplation of God. We lower our sights. We trivialize our longing. We no longer see our longing as a congenital and holy restlessness put in us by God to push us towards the infinite. Instead it becomes a tamed and tame thing, domesticated, anesthetized and distracted. We are restless only in a tired way (which drains us of energy) and not in a divine way (which gives us energy).

And so we should ask ourselves the question: What kind of lovers are we? Are we still fired into life by a madness which lets us understand the insatiability of our hearts as a call to infinite love? Do we still see ourselves as pursuing each other, embracing each other, and loving each other against the horizon of the infinite? Do we still understand ourselves as meeting on holy ground with all the mystique and chastity that this implies?

Or, do we believe that life is best lived without such mysticism, high romance, high eros, and high chastity? Do we still tell each other wonderful stories of the meaning of our longings or do we discourage each other from raising our eyes above the immediate?

Do we cry with each other and support each other in the frustration of our incompleteness or do we give each other the impression that there is something wrong with us because our lives are inconsummate and our symphonies are incomplete?

Do we still take our longings and emptiness to God in prayer or do we demand that life give us, here and now, the full symphony?

Do we lovingly and gratefully receive the spirit of our own lives, despite the tensions, or do we live in angry jealousy?

Are we loving against an infinite horizon or is our eros directed only towards the concrete sweetening of life?

What kind of lovers are we?

Jim Wallis, the founder of Sojourners, in his Easter message this year, remarked that the resurrection of Christ calls us to be midwives of hope. That’s a metaphor worth reflecting on. It is interesting to notice that the pre-resurrection ministry of Jesus has men as its principal actors. Men are the ones who are called to be his apostles and men are the ones most directly associated with his ministry. Women are always there, helping in less visible ways – important, but behind the scenes. A significant shift occurs with the resurrection. In all the Gospels, Christ first appears to women. They are the ones first entrusted with the newness of the resurrection. They are also the ones who are the first to be sent out to tell others about the resurrection.

Recent feminist literature has highlighted this fact. However, they have not, to my mind, fully enough, developed the significance of it. Women were the first to be entrusted with the reality of the resurrection because, among other things, they were, then, normally, the midwives. Christ’s resurrection is, precisely, a birth and our subsequent vocation is to help deliver this new life. But this needs explanation:

From the time of creation until the time of the resurrection, death was final. The rhythm of nature, birth-growth-decline-death, held no exceptions. Whenever something died, it remained dead. There was no basis for hope beyond the limits of this life with its constant losses, blemishings, aging, and breakdown.

Then Christ rose from the dead and something radically new entered history. The very structure of the physical universe changed. Death is no longer terminal, now it is paschal. There is new basis for hope because a new birth canal has been opened. When a baby is born, normally the head emerges first from the birth canal, opening the way for the body to follow.

Christ, as Scripture tells us, is our head. He has already emerged from death. He has been, in the real sense, born again. We, his body, are meant to follow through the birth canal which he opened. It is here where midwives are needed. The vocation of a midwife is to help pull someone through a door, the birth canal, to new life. The resurrection of Christ offers us new life and new hope, beyond the too-small world of our limited biology and our limited human possibilities. But, just as we needed help, from a midwife, at our biological birth, so, even more so, do we need a midwife to help draw us into the new life of faith.

Belief in the resurrection of Jesus sends us out to help pull each other through the birth canal of faith. Scripture tells us that the experience of the resurrection brings with it, as part of the experience itself, the vocation to go out and try to bring others to a vision of this new life. The post-resurrection vocation is that of being midwife. However, when we look at history and see the lives of those who have been midwives of faith and hope, we see that this vocation is prophetic and painful.

The early Christians, starting with the women to whom Christ first appeared, rushed out to try to pull others through the door to this new life. They met with ridicule, opposition, apathy, meager results, and very often, were themselves martyred. They also came to realize, very quickly, that it would take a long time to pull others to new birth. Fifty years after the resurrection of Christ, less than 1 per cent of the population was converted. Labor pains are long, birth happens painfully.

This has been the experience of all the midwives of hope in history: Those who helped give birth to self-government; those who helped give birth to the emancipation of slaves; those who helped give birth to just wages and more humane working conditions; those who helped give birth to the vote for women; all of these met with ridicule, meager results, and various forms of martyrdom.

None of them lived to actually see the full child of their midwifery. But they pulled a lot of others through the birth canal. When enough were born, the world changed. We need, today, midwives of hope, people who believe in the reality of the resurrection and who will help pull others out of the womb of simple biology, with all its demands; out of the womb of woundedness, neuroses, paranoia, and lost innocence; out of the womb of resignation to mediocrity, broken relationships, non-forgiveness, injustice, and war; out of the sense that a deep life of prayer is not possible, to a new hope and vision which does not say: “That’s the way things are, that’s the way they’ve always been, and that’s the way they will always be!”

After the resurrection, nothing need ever be inevitable again. The old physics of death is broken. Christ, our head, has opened the birth canal that leads from death to new life. But we need to impregnate each other with resurrection hope and, then, help draw each other though the birth canal.

I rarely look to biographies of the rich and famous for my inspiration. Normally this is hagiography of the worst kind, the culture’s version of the lives of the saints. When you read religious lives of the saints, even though the stories are often badly written, you are, in the end, at least dealing with a saint. Most of the time, in spite of all, you are inspired.

That is rarely true for the stories on the bookracks and in People magazine about the rich and famous. Usually, in reading these, you are not inspired but only titillated in your more selfish instincts.  There are exceptions, of course, and two recent stories, autobiographies, of the rich and famous are worth noting.

Annie Dillard, who won a Pulitzer prize for “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” has published the story of her early life in,  “An American Childhood” (Harper and Row, 1987). Patty Duke, who was the youngest person ever to win an Academy award, has published her autobiography in,  “Call Me Anna” (Bantam Books, 1987). I doubt that Dillard and Duke know each other, or even know of each other, they are very different kinds of persons, inhabiting very different kinds of worlds. Their main similarity lies in age: Dillard was born in 1945, Duke in 1946. I was born in 1947. Perhaps that’s why their lives hold an extra fascination for me. They’re my generation, having felt all the shocks of our culture and our world at the same age I did. That makes for some extra affinity. But, extra affinity aside, their stories speak to hearts, irrespective of when they were born. Margaret Atwood once said: What touches you is what you touch. These are great human stories. Touch them and certain things inside you will be touched.

Patty Duke is well-known, but her story isn’t. The child of a poor, Catholic, Irish, immigrant family, she grew up among the rats and fleas of New York’s ghettos, until, at age 7, she was discovered to have an exceptional talent for acting.  The next 30 years of her life are a chronicle of professional success and personal tragedy. She is taken from her family, abused, stripped of her name, her religion, her personality, her freedom. After a series of unsuccessful marriages, suicide attempts, and nervous breakdowns, she regains herself, her family, her name, and, to an extent, her God. She båegins the book with a one-line statement of her philosophy: “If you keep living the truth of your life, that, not the mistakes and exaggerations, is what will endure.” (Page 4) She ends the book by commenting that despite nearly going completely under a number of times, that philosophy has worked: “Isn’t it amazing that I survived at all?… I’ve survived, I’ve beaten my own bad system and some days, most days, that feels like a miracle.” (Page 298)

Her story is powerful, with lots of potential for helping heal other lives. It is healing because it is searingly honest. It details in a simple and honest way the anatomy of lost innocence, of lost personality, of the disintegration of a life until there is nothing left save honesty itself. And that honesty is enough. She makes it. Like David in the Scriptures, she’s taken from poverty to the kingship; and, from there, she loses innocence and moves near death. But, like David, ultimately, she ends up writing psalms. It’s a story worth reading.

Annie Dillard’s story is different. She’s the antithesis of the poor, abused child. Rich and loved richly, she grows up both blessed and cursed by a pathological curiosity and an exceptional perceptiveness. Already as a child she takes upon herself as a vocation the task of saving memories for the world: “As a life’s work, I would remember everything – everything, against loss. I would go through life like a plankton net. I would trap and keep every teacher’s funny remark, every face on the street, every microscopic alga’s sway, every conversation, configuration of leaves, every dream, and scrap of overhead cloud. Who would remember Molly’s infancy if not me?

“Some days I felt an urgent responsibility to each change of light outside the sun porch windows. Who would remember any of it, any of this our time, and the wind thrashing the buckeye limbs outside? Somebody had to do it, somebody had to hang on to the days with teeth and fists, or the whole show had been in vain.” (Page 173)

This book, like all of Dillard’s books, is a certain reflection on holiness, earthy holiness. Like Patty Duke, she sees her life, and every life, as a miracle: “You may wonder, that is, as I sometimes wonder privately, but it doesn’t matter. For it is not you or I that is important, neither what sort we might be nor how we came to be each where we are.

“What is important is anyone’s coming awake and discovering a place, finding in full orbit a spinning globe one can lean over, catch, and jump on. What is important is the moment of opening a life and feeling it touch-with an electric hiss and cry-this speckled mineral sphere, our present world.” (Page 248-249)

Two American children, Patty Duke and Annie Dillard, now entering their 40s. In the end, in each of their stories, what emerges from their honesty and struggle is the sheer joy of being alive. Noting this joy is always a compliment to its Creator. Two stories, in a manner of speaking, earthy lives of the saints.