Listening To Different Voices

April 29, 1989

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.

Being Normal Is Not Our Goal

April 10, 1989

In a recent interview in the National Catholic Reporter, Richard McBrien suggests that the Roman Catholic Church ought to change its law regarding priestly celibacy. His argument is as straightforward as it is convincing: “I mean, healthy people are sexually active people. That’s normal. So why do we make priests behave as if they’re not healthy and normal?” (NCR, Jan.20, 1989)

The functions and dysfunctions of priestly celibacy might be debated, as might McBrien’s argument. What has implications in that statement for issues far beyond clerical celibacy is the appeal to normalcy as the criterion for health and rightness….“That’s normal. So why are we acting otherwise?” That’s very persuasive and powerful. What’s healthy is what’s normal. To deviate from that imperative is to risk sickness. One must act as do normal people.

There’s much truth in that. There are serious risks in thinking one can be healthy and yet live differently than do normal persons.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and as McBrien goes on to point out, celibacy does in fact take its toll upon the lives of many priests who do end up unhealthy…succumbing to alcohol, a rationalized double life, gadgetry, compensating consumption, or repressed sexuality that frequently then manifests itself in the abuse of power. What is true here for celibacy is also true for many other areas wherein religions, or anything else, asks one to live what most others aren’t living.

For example, in monasticism (as well as more recently in social justice circles) one sees a dark side among some….weirdness, repression of need, elitist self-righteousness, neuroses and anger paraded as sanctity, and, as in clerical celibacy gone sour, the misuse of power. One takes a very serious risk in not letting what is more normal adjudicate health.

However, with that being admitted, Goethe might aptly be quoted: “The risks of life are many, and safety lies among them.” The Gospel asks of us risk, to put out into the deep waters. This demand, if followed, will precisely displace us from what we would like to live as normal life. Let me explain. The word church comes from the word ecclesia, which itself comes from the Greek, ek kaleo (Ek – out of; kaleo – to call). To be a member of the church is to be called out of something. What are we called out of? Precisely, normal life, as unchallenged human propensity would like to define it.

Outside of a challenge from something beyond us we automatically identify what is normal with what most people are living at a given time. Normalcy by popular consensus. Health and sanctity defined by Gallup poll. When this happens then invariably normalcy identifies itself with idiosyncratic preference, the good life…a good job, a good romance, a good house, good vacations, good sex, a good body, and enough money, freedom, and leisure to enjoy it all. That’s what all of us, normal people, in fact, want.

Baptism into Christian life is meant to be a displacement from that. It is meant, precisely, to call us out of that normalcy. It is meant to derail us, to put a belt around us and lead us where we would rather not go. Entry into church is, to use an older phase, a consecration. That word, too, like church, means displacement, derailment.

For most of us the word consecration is a pious sacristy word. It speaks of consecrated chalices, altars, churches. Of itself, that is not an improper use of the word. To consecrate something is to displace it from normal use: an ordinary cup is set aside to become a chalice, an ordinary table is set aside to become an altar, or an ordinary building is set aside to become a church. However, when we think of consecration in that sense it generally takes on such connotations of piety and separateness that it means little to us in ordinary life.

Let me attempt another way of explaining this: To be consecrated is to be displaced from normalcy. Imagine yourself setting out to go on vacation. You’ve planned your trip in detail and are eagerly looking forward to enjoying this well-deserved rest. You pack the car and set out. On the way you come upon a serious traffic accident. Some people are hurt and dying. There’s no one else around. At that moment you become consecrated. Your vacation plans must be, for the moment, set aside, displaced, with the rest of normal life. A very legitimate agenda must be set aside.

Christian life displaces in the same way. It sets aside what we would, without baptism, define as normal life. A friend of mine who is deeply committed to family, church, and social issues, is, when overwhelmed and frustrated, fond of saying: “If there is re-incarnation, in my next life, I am coming back as a yuppie. I’ll have nothing to do with having kids, church, or the poor. I’ll have season’s tickets to everything, go on a lot of ski trips, and let God take care of his own world.” There’s as much wisdom as self-pity in that remark. It speaks of a genuine baptism, of a life that has been consecrated in that the needs of the kingdom have derailed plans for a more selfish fulfillment.

The human instinct is to define the normal by idiosyncratic preference and social consensus. We need to challenge this if religion is to have an agenda that includes celibacy, social justice, or anything else which goes against what most people are, in fact, living.

Easter Should Be An Eye Opener

March 27, 1989

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.

Cross Symbolizes Hope For Al

March 13, 1989

The passion and death of Christ is a timeless mystery, throwing redemption backwards and forwards in time. It is timeless, too, in that it is ongoing. It is still being lived out. Christ is still dying, in multifarious fashion, within our sufferings. We all have our passion narratives, our Good Friday stories at whose centre lies the cross, with all its bitter shame and real death.

Recently a lady shared with me her passion narrative. With her permission, I share it with you, verbatim, uncensored, earthy, tragic… It’s the passion of our Lord, Jesus Christ, according to one of millions of contemporary evangelists, God’s poor, who in their bodies and hearts taste the gall of Good Friday: “When people look at me all they see is my anger. I guess I am an angry person since I don’t have a whole lot of friends right now. Everyone likes bouncy people….with their big smiles and their bouncy personalities. I lost my bounce years ago. It’s taken me all these years to really understand why.

“Father, you should read this book. It’s Mary Gordon’s, Temporary Shelter. In it she has an essay on violation. I wish I had read it 25 years ago. The years of frustration it might have saved me. She tells her story, how she was, twice, raped – once by her own uncle. Funny, how hearing someone else’s story doesn’t make your own sound so bad.

“Well, my story is bad. Sexually abused by my own dad at 9. Something inside of me died then. It’s 40 years later and, really, I’m still in shock. My whole life really ended then. I remember once reading in a book by Joyce Carol Oates, and she simply said: ‘and the spirit went out of the man!’ That’s what happened to me…the spirit left me at 9. I’ve had no enthusiasm, really, for life ever since.

“I went through some times when I was able to bury it, to leave it behind, to pretend, to go on with life, to act normal, like everyone else. Yeah, I went through the motions – I fell in love (kind of), I got married, had three kids – and for a while I even thought it was behind me. I was even able to forgive my dad (kind of). I remember coming home for his funeral, seeing him there in his coffin in the funeral home. His face looked peaceful (more peaceful than I’d ever remembered him in life). The tension and anger that were always there seemed to have drained away with his life. He looked peaceful. I kissed him. I made my peace. He was dead and I wanted to let him and it go! But it didn’t die. It didn’t go.

“It started with my reading feminist books, but I know that it would have come out anyways, in a different way. I read those books and it put me in touch with my wound. I understood a lot. And I got angrier: if only, if only… if only my father hadn’t been so sick, if only society was fairer, if only women had equal rights and power, if only men weren’t so damn macho! If only…Well, I got angrier and angrier. I froze up inside like an iceberg. I was hardest on my family – my husband, my kids, and then on those around me, the parish, my friends, everyone! God, I fought – and I was right too! It is unfair. It is a damned shame that lives, especially women’s lives, can be forever ruined so easily. It is unfair to live in a world that isn’t fair to us.

“Yeah, my anger ruined my marriage, it ruined my relationship to a church I once loved and respected; it ruined my happiness. But something else ruined me long before that! I wish somebody understood that.

“Sometimes I think that’s true, even of God! I’ve grown tired of praying. For a while I was taken with the idea of God as woman. But, in the end, God, father or mother, who gives a damn?

“I’ve such mixed feelings. Sometimes, I don’t even want ever to be healed or happy. I just want to cling, cling like hell to this god-awful death that wasn’t my fault, that isn’t fair!

“But something else inside of me wants to let go. I want some life back, some joy back, some love back. I wasn’t born this angry, I don’t want to die this angry! I don’t want to be this angry!

“Funny how through all this, the anger, the bitterness, my leaving the church and all, what’s come through to me is the cross. I don’t know how to explain it, even to myself, but somehow that symbol gives me the hope that, somewhere does understand….”

Value Of Fasting And Feasting

February 20, 1989

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.

Pro-Life And Anti-Abortion

January 2, 1989

The next few years will be decisive regarding the question of abortion. The battle will be definitively lost or won. Bottom line, we have had, in the Western world, abortion on demand for more than a decade. However, this has never sat easy. There has been, even as the movement towards abortion on demand ploughed irresistibly and seemingly irrevocably forward, a massive growth of resistance. Now that resistance has ripened just at a time when governments, for a variety of reasons, are being forced to re-examine the laws that have given us abortion on demand.

During the next few years, certainly in North America, new laws will be brought in or old laws will be upheld which will, I fear, cement the issue into one mold or the other for a long time to come. Consequently the next few years are critical for pro-life. People tend to accept as okay whatever they’ve gotten used to. Practice becomes custom, custom becomes law, legality is seen as morality. Our culture is getting used to abortion on demand. The longer this perdures the more irrevocable it becomes.

Given this situation and the present political state, there is a chance, a last chance perhaps for a long time, to again instill in our political system the will to protect the unborn. But we must act quickly and massively. Many of us are not used to acting regarding this question. We are pro-life, but in a rather anti-septic way.

Pro-life is part of our curriculum vitae: we are officially pro-life; we offer it moral support; we write articles and make statements about its place within the wider spectrum of social justice, but we are entirely absent from the picket lines and from any direct lobbying or confrontational process. I have been an antiseptic pro-lifer. I’ve written an article a year against abortion, spoke out against it in my classrooms, and even addressed pro-life groups, but I haven’t walked a picket line, written or phoned a government member, or realistically confronted anyone on this issue for 15 years.

Given this background, I was deeply cut, cut as one is when a truly prophetic word is heard, by an editorial, “An Open Letter to Socially Concerned Catholics: Resist Abortion Now!” in Catholic New Times, June 25, 1988. Since there are out there, I suspect, many other antiseptic pro-lifers like myself, I share with you, by way of brief précis, some of the salient points of that very prophetic editorial:

One of the most unfortunate developments within the church and within society at large, is the phenomenon wherein both conservative and liberal Christians both tend to lack a consistent approach to pro-life. Liberals, while clamoring loudly for social justice in the areas of economics, racial and sexual discrimination, immigration laws, housing, and Third World concerns, have been simply tolerant of and silent about abortion.

Conservatives, on the other hand, have championed the fight against abortion, but have frequently reduced the concern for life to a simple anti-abortion focus. Thus, while speaking clearly in favor of life on one front, they have been noisily in favor of capital punishment, nuclear arms, and the system of liberal capitalism (which sees society as a system of competing individual rights which must be legally bartered). As well, they have been less fully for life in their views regarding women.

However, with that being said, the editorial goes on to praise the conservatives’ pro-life efforts:

Pro-life groups, despite being single-issue focused and inconsistent in the support of life, have nonetheless “borne the political heat of the day on the issues of abortion. And they have born it with courage”. Their passion is a welcome challenge. Tolerant liberals, who often find pro-life tactics distasteful, would do well to examine themselves and see whether they are backing off from the abortion issue because of the current sense of what is socially acceptable.

The editorial goes on to say that the social virtues of tolerance may never be invoked “to legitimate the decertification of the unborn as human beings.” The work of justice, it asserts, is “totally lacking in integrity if, by omission or commission, we participate in the bartering away of the rights of the smallest and weakest members of our society.” Moreover, we may not believe “that the rights of a woman, or of any other group, will be served as long as the rights of one group, the unborn, can be negotiated out of existence. A society which assumes the divine right of deciding when life begins will all too easily move on to decide when it should end and for whom.” Such a clear stand on abortion does not, the article rightly asserts, diminish the sincerity and admirable social commitment of many pro-choice persons. Nor does it withhold compassion for or judge those who have had abortions. It simply offers a consistent ethic for life and, prophetically, stands up for those who have the least voice.

Finally, and importantly, it calls upon all of us antiseptic pro-lifers to do something, to actually act: ‘In the name of God, do something: Go to the phone and call your Member of Parliament. Walk a picket line. Commit civil disobedience. Wear a button. Start or join an action group. This is politics and pressure is now what counts. Pressure the Members of Parliament. May they not rest in peace!”

Sacrifice Frees Us From Guilt

January 1, 1989

“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.

Some Of Life’s Questions

December 1, 1988

Rarely do faith, hope, and love come to us pure. Instead, like life itself, they come with mess and doubt, raising huge questions. Living a human life is not a simple business, especially if one attempts to do this beyond simple instinct. To try to believe in something beyond sight and understanding, to try to place one’s trust in something beyond what one can secure, and to try to love non-manipulatively, not infrequently raises more questions than it answers.

Not to be haunted by doubt, ambiguity, and temptation is to close oneself off from deep thought and feeling. To think and to feel is to be open to many things, darkness as well as light, hatred as well as love, despair as much as hope.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the great philosopher of phenomenology, based an entire philosophy on the dictum: Ambiguity is the fundamental fact within experience. That’s the philosopher’s way of saying that it’s not simple out there, that our heads and hearts are full of too many things, and that life is mostly about sorting things out.

And sorting things out is seldom easy. Many voices inside of us and around us beckon with their own truth – instinctual truth, higher truth, head truth, heart truth, Christian truth, yuppie truth, economic truth, spiritual truth – what is truth? Which voice speaks truth when so many voices vie with each other? We are called in every direction.

Deep inside us the call is to be a saint, to believe that meaning and happiness lie in generosity and self-forgetfulness; yet other voices, also deep inside us, demand other things, they would have us experience every sensation of the sinner, securing things for ourselves, building a name and a nest.

Which of these voices speaks truth? Does the truth lie in gratitude? Bitterness? Trust? Paranoia? The voices contradict each other and yet each holds its own promise of life, rest, realism, meaning. Small wonder that living can become a tiring enterprize!

So life has its questions…As we struggle to love each other, what is real?

Is the distance between us expanding or is it shrinking?

Are we touching each other’s neuroses, or depth?

Are we falling ever more into despair, or is it love?

Do we say the same words too often, or not often enough?

Are we bonded to each other by neurotic pain giving, or by painful life-giving?

In our obsessions are we bewailing a universal inconsummation, or are we filling in what is lacking in the suffering of Christ?

In our often frayed emotions are we tasting hell, or are we experiencing birth pangs?

Do our frustrations in love unleash our deepest angers, or do they cauterize our worst sins?

Does love itself demand more distance from each other, or does it need more mouth-to-mouth resuscitation?

Does passion turn love into idolatry, or into holy icon?

Is the pain of non-requited love the pain of hell or is it the pain of purgatory, which feels like hell when heaven cannot be touched?

Questions, love’s questions, questions which pose other questions of faith and hope:

Can Christ be believed?

Does dying produce new life?

Does purgatory turn into heaven?

Can what doesn’t seem to be real be, in the end, the most real?

Can spirit really triumph over instinct, heart over groin?

Can hope find the infinitely small gap through which the future can break into our lives in a new and marvelous way?

Can tombs be opened – and reopened – and reopened?

Do we really have 70 x 7 x 7 chances?

Will the smell of fresh fish invariably greet us after a night of emptiness?

Can our wounds really turn into sure proofs of the resurrection, silencing our doubts as they silenced Thomas?

Can, when all the emotions, angers, obsessions, jealousies, insecurities, and immaturities die down, love really last?

Can the ideal really take on flesh?

In the end, that is really the only question – and how we answer it will fundamentally fashion or distort us as human beings.

A Heart With One Room

November 1, 1988

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.

Church Needs More Laughing Fools

October 2, 1988

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!

Love Is Coming Home

October 1, 1988

The human heart is complex. Many of us have learned this through much pain. It can give us the assurance that what we are experiencing is truly love and then, itself, abandon the very feeling that it led us to believe was love. Most of us, I suspect, have had the experience of making a mistake in love – of mistaking infatuation for love, or having love go sour, or of having one love wilt before another infatuation.

Too late, we realize that the feeling we felt would last forever simply changed or disappeared and we were left with a sense of bitterness, disillusionment, and betrayal. Given that, and given the human tragedies we call divorce, broken friendship, and love gone sour, it is not surprising that there is a certain pain surrounding the question: How do I know what real love is? How do I know whether my heart is playing tricks on me? How do I know whether this person will make a good marriage partner, or friend, for me? How do I know whether I am just infatuated, or naive, or even using someone?

There is no simple way to answer those questions since love is always partly mystery, partly blind, and partly inexplicable. However, it is not totally blind and our responsibility towards others and ourselves requires that we do try to discern real love from that which is more ephemeral. What is real love? Real love is what we experience when we have the sense that we are coming home. Let me try to explain:

Robert Frost once commented that home is a place where they have to take you, it’s not a place you have to earn or deserve. Henri Nouwen, speaking about his experience of living with handicapped adults in L’Arche, recently remarked: “What is so unique about living in L’Arche is that here I am loved by people who are in no way impressed with me.”

What is contained in these comments can be very helpful in answering the question: How do I know what real love is? Real love is always a coming home, it’s not a place we deserve or earn, it’s coming to a place where you sense others will love you without necessarily being impressed with you. Thus, real love is always experienced as a security, a safe place, home, a safe harbor which we sail into. It’s a place of rest. For this reason, it is experienced as a place from which you don’t want to, or need to, go home.

Conversely, infatuation and other kinds of bonding that can feel like real love, are places of insecurity, of deep restlessness, places which “don’t have to take us,” places which we have to earn, places where we have to perform and impress, and places from which, ultimately, we go home. It is interesting how, in love and friendship, we can be infatuated and obsessively drawn to someone who is very different from ourselves – into whose heart we can never sail as into a safe harbor. It can be exciting and titillating being with that person. Perhaps, as in cases of infatuation, we might even need obsessively to be with that person, like a drug addict needs a fix. But, in the end, in spite of the excitement and obsession, after we have had our fix, we need to, and want to, go home. That person’s heart can never, ultimately, be home for us.

Real love and real friendship are home – you don’t go home from them! Whenever we experience love, however powerful, from which we need to go home, that love can be valuable and good in our lives, but it can never be a love upon which we can build a marriage or a truly intimate friendship. Hence the criterion to use when choosing someone for marriage, or even just for intimate friendship, is the sense of coming home. Love is home. Ultimately, if we cannot really be of one heart and mind with someone, however interesting and exciting that person might be, then that other will become just part of our world and we will grow apart and go our separate ways, that is, to our separate homes.

Given the complexities of the human heart, we can be obsessed with someone, painfully and hopelessly even, and yet, in that relationship, not be at our right place in the universe. In the end, our completeness, real love, home, lies elsewhere. But the heart needs to be scrutinized carefully before it will tell us that. It has, as Pascal once said, its own reasons.

Yet, at a certain level, it rings true and will tell us where our true rest lies, namely, at that place where we don’t have to impress or perform, or earn or win, where we feel safe and secure, and where we are at home.

Worldly Evil: The Faith Test

September 2, 1988

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.

Controversial Film Misunderstood

September 1, 1988

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Much controversy has surrounded the movie, “The Last Temptation of Christ.” Directed by Martin Scorsese, a Roman Catholic and former seminarian, this film, based upon Nikos Kazantzakis’ novel of the same name, has met with indignation from religious and artistic critics alike. What’s to be said for it?

Negatively, it has been criticized for being too long, too gory, too irreverent, of having weak dialogue and weird characterization, and of portraying a Christ who appears more interested in power than in love and who seems more intent on winning converts to an earthly kingdom that in revealing the heart of God. More specifically, the film has been especially criticized for portraying a Christ who is radically tempted to abandon his mission and who has a prolonged fantasy of getting off the cross, marrying a number of women, making love, raising children, and burying himself in ordinary life. The value of each of these criticisms is a point of debate. Certainly the movie suffers from a number of weaknesses, artistic as well as religious.

With that being said, however, it is, in my mind, a good movie, despite its weaknesses.

First of all, it is not an irreverent film. Some parts are earthy, shocking, and offensive to piety. But Jesus’ life was, in fact, those things. It is quite simply impossible to picture God in human flesh, beset with human weaknesses, living among human persons, without offending and shocking. The film could have been more aesthetically sensitive at times, but, in the end, it is in fact quite a fundamentalistic portrayal of Christ’s life.

Second, vis-a-vis the criticism that it is too gory and suffers from weak dialogue and weird (e.g., John the Baptist) characterization, an important clarification needs to be made. Kazantzakis intended the novel to be more of a painting than a story. This is an artist’s picture of Jesus, not a novelist’s or an evangelist’s one. This explains the excess of form, the gore, the lack of dialogue, the exaggerated characterizations, and the overall reliance on picture rather than word. “The Last Temptation of Christ” is not a biography of Jesus, it is a painting of him.

Finally, and most importantly, what’s to be said about the temptation of Christ to get off the cross, marry a series of women, make love, raise children, and bury himself in life’s ordinariness? To my mind, reviewers in general have trivialized and misunderstood both Kazantzakis’ and Scorsese’s conception here. By and large, this has been seen as a sexual temptation, pure and simple – Jesus, the frustrated celibate, longing for the fling he never had! This misses entirely the point and, precisely, renders the movie cheap and offensive. But that is not what Kazantzakis and Scorsese had in mind.

During the movie the temptation that Jesus is fighting is one which would have him move away from his displacement, his baptism. In essence, the temptation is this: At one level of his person, Jesus feels himself extraordinarily called by God. That extraordinary call, precisely, spells the death of all that is ordinary – home, wife, children, cooking, domestic cares, family celebrations and arguments. At another level, Jesus literally lusts after precisely the humility of the ordinary. He wants to be an ordinary person, with ordinary pleasures, ordinary joys, and ordinary concerns. He wants to marry, father children, build a home, raise sheep, work in a carpenter’s shop, and relate to the domestic God more than to the monastic one.

Kazantzakis, himself, describes the temptation like this: “Jesus grew pale, closed his eyes, saw Magdalene’s firm body along the shores of Lake Gennesaret, saw her gaze toward the river Jordan and sigh. She extended her hand – she was seeking him; and her bosom was filled with children: his own.

“He had only to twitch the corner of his eye, to give a sign, and all at once: what happiness! How his life would change, sweeten, become more human! This was the way, this! He would return to Nazareth, to his mother’s house, would become reconciled with his brothers.

“It was nothing but youthful folly – madness – to want to save the world and die for mankind. But thanks to Magdalene, God bless her, he would be cured; he would return to his workshop, take up once more his old beloved craft, once more make plows, cradles, and troughs; he would have children and become a human being.

“He would work the whole week and on Saturdays go to the synagogue in clean garments woven for him by his wife and he would sit and listen peacefully and indifferently while the seething, half-insane Scribes and Pharisees sweated and shivered to interpret the Holy Scriptures.

“He would snigger and look at them with sympathy. Where would they ever end up, these theologians! He was interpreting Holy Scripture quietly and surely by taking a wife, having children, by constructing plows, cradles, and troughs…”(Page 251)

The very word, church, “ecclesia,” means displacement, displacement from the ordinary. Christ’s temptation in this movie is, in fact, the perennial temptation of all of us, namely, to fight the extraordinary call of God because of our longing for the humility of the ordinary.

Perhaps Kazantzakis and Scorsese could have made this clearer, but that was their intent and, understood in that sense, this movie, despite its weaknesses, is a deeply religious one.

Can You Ever Really Leave Home?

August 1, 1988

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.

Living Under A Merciful God

July 2, 1988

In the past few years, both when teaching and writing, I have frequently been challenged by persons who feel that I am going soft on part of the Christian message. There are a number of variations to the critique, but generally it sounds like this: “You make it too easy! You sound as if it is easy to go to heaven. You talk as it there was no hell, or, at least, as if very few persons end up there. Doesn’t Scripture itself say that the road that leads to life is narrow…and few find it! Aren’t you leading people astray by giving them the impression that almost everyone is going to heaven?”

Not infrequently too have I been quoted the visions of a certain mystic who once saw souls going to hell like snowflakes. What to make of all of this? Is it true that the majority of people are going to hell while a minority are being saved? Is it true that there is somewhere, however this is conceived of, a great book, a law of karmic justice, within which all is noted and all will have to be accounted for?

Underneath this fear of making heaven too easy there generally lies a sound instinct. Like Jesus, it affirms that the choices we make in this life are serious; that sin is important and real; that the passage to life, life already in the here and now, is not easily found (as we can attest to from experience…who really is happy?). We can lose heaven. Hell is a real option.

What is less sound in this insistence upon the narrow road and the importance of preaching about the dangers of hell is the vision of God that undergirds it. In the end, any vision that sees souls going into hell like snowflakes is not one that takes seriously the God that Jesus talked about. To affirm that the majority of persons are being lost in terms of eternity denies the unconditional love of God and the power of that love to ultimately redeem sin and woundedness. Simply put, the love of the God that Jesus called his and our Father would not tolerate a situation within which the millions are going to an eternal hell, like snowflakes, while a mere few are finding the narrow way. This God would redo the incarnation…not to mention creation itself.

Christ’s coming to save us is not so much a story of some mysterious drama that God deemed necessary to be played out so that some alienation caused by our first parents could be overcome. No. The drama of the incarnation has as its central point the revelation of the heart of God…a heart of infinite love which can, even given human sin, bring about the salvation of most, perhaps of all, persons. What does this mean?

First of all, it means that God loves us unconditionally and that there is nothing we can do, sin included, that even for one second can change that. God is present to us, loving us, even in our twistedness and perversity. We can go to hell and, even there, God does not stop loving us. That is, in fact, the meaning of the phrase “he descended into hell.” We are loved unconditionally and forever, even in our sin. Hence we live under the law of mercy, not of justice. There is no great book, or great law, within which all sins are recorded and where a pound of retribution is demanded for a pound of sin. Sin need not be undone, nor even atoned for. It can be freely forgiven, washed clean without retribution.

It is interesting to note that among the great religions of the world, only Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, do not believe in reincarnation. Why? Because they all believe in the same God, a God who does not demand retribution but who can make everything clean with one embrace. There is no need to keep reliving life until one gets it right. We are loved unconditionally and forever. Salvation, going to heaven, is nothing other than accepting this. Of course, we can, and in this life we often do, reject this. That is why here, in this life, most of us have not yet found the road that leads to life. Few of us are really happy, actually redeemed by love. It is easy to go to hell in this life. It is not so easy, however, to stay there for eternity. Why? Because here, in this life, most often nobody can descend into our private hell – our woundedness, our fundamental alienation, our sin, our paranoia, our fantasy, and our fear – and breathe out there unconditional love, understanding, and acceptance.

Hence, in this life, we are often in hell, miserable, biting so as not to be bitten, sinning so as to compensate for being outside of love. However, God’s love can, as we see in Christ’s death and resurrection, descend into hell and embrace and bring to peace tortured and paranoid hearts. Our moral choices, in this life, are crucial. We can and frequently do, make choices that make it harder for us to accept unconditional love. Moreover, there is a real danger of not sinning honestly, of rationalizing and of warping ourselves so that a permanent hell becomes a real possibility. But this is, I submit, rare. Few people will, when confronted by an unconditional embrace, resist. That is why most people will go to heaven.

In saying that, I am not going soft on the Christian message. I am, I believe, affirming the greatest truth there is.

Be Brave, Admit Your Sinfulness

July 1, 1988

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!”