RonRolheiser,OMI

God Overcomes Scrambled Eggs

January 2, 1988

Some years ago, a young man came to me for confession. It was a difficult confession for him. He had been having an affair with a girl and she had become pregnant. For a series of reasons, marriage was out of the question. The pregnancy would, irrevocably, disrupt both lives; hers and his, not to even mention the life of the child who would be born. Being a sensitive person, he needed no reminders that he had been irresponsible. He made no attempts to rationalize, to offer excuses, or to escape blame and responsibility. He recognized that he had sinned. He also recognized that he had helped create a situation that was irrevocable, a certain ease and innocence had been destroyed, some things would never be quite the same again. He ended his confession on a note of sadness and hopelessness: “There is no way I’ll ever live normally again, beyond this. Even God can’t unscramble an egg!” What this young man was saying was that, for him, there would always be a skeleton in the closet. Ordinary life would, in its own way, limp along, but he would remain forever marked by this mistake.

Living beyond

Today we live in a world and a church in which this kind of brokenness and attitude are becoming more the rule than the exception. For more and more people, there is a major something to live beyond, some skeleton in the closet: a broken marriage, an abortion, a religious commitment that didn’t work out, a pregnancy outside marriage, a betrayed trust, a broken relationship, a soured affair, a serious mistake, a searing regret; sometimes with a sense of sin, sometimes without it. Sadly, for many, this comes, as it did for the young man, coupled with a hopelessness, a sense that something irrevocable has happened.

What we need today, in the church, perhaps more than anything else, is a theology of brokenness that relates failure and sin seriously enough to redemption. Too often, what is taught as redemption is little more than the strict law of karma: one chance per lifetime, salvation through getting it right, happiness and innocence only when there is nothing to be forgiven. We have too much fear; in the end, of God. Ultimately, we look at the scrambled egg, at our own mistakes and sins, and believe that the loss of a certain grace is irrevocable, that a mistake hangs us. Basically, we do not believe that there is a second chance, let along 70 x 7 chances, that can be just as life-giving as the first one.

I was raised in a Catholicism which was deeply moral. It took commitment seriously and called sin sin. It was, on most moral issues, brutally uncompromising. It asked you not to betray, not to sin, not to make mistakes. I have no regrets about that. In fact, I feel pain for so many today that are being raised in a moral relativism which excuses too much and challenges too little. However, if the Catholicism that I was raised in had a fault, and it did, it was precisely that it did not allow for mistakes. It demanded that you get it right the first time. There was supposed to be no need for a second chance. If you made a mistake, you lived with it and, like the rich young man, you were doomed to be sad, at least for the rest of your life. A serious mistake was a permanent stigmatization, a mark that you wore like Cain.

I have seen that mark in all kinds of people: divorcees, ex-priests, ex-religious, people who have had abortions, married people who have had affairs, people who have had children outside of marriage, parents who have made serious mistakes with their children, and countless others who have made serious mistakes. There is too little around to help them. We need a theology of brokenness.

God lets us live

We need a theology which teaches us that even though God cannot unscramble an egg, God’s grace lets us live happily and with renewed innocence far beyond any egg we might have scrambled. We need a theology that teaches us that God does not just give us one chance, but that every time we close a door, God opens another one for us. We need a theology that challenges us not to make mistakes, that takes sin seriously, but which tells us that when we do sin, when we do make mistakes, we are given the chance to take our place among the broken, among those whose lives are not perfect, the loved sinners, those for whom Christ came. We need a theology which tells us that a second, third, fourth, and fifth chance are just as valid as the first one. We need a theology that tells us that mistakes are not forever, that they are not even for a lifetime, that time and grace wash clean, that nothing is irrevocable. Finally, we need a theology which teaches us that God loves us as sinners and that the task of Christianity is not to teach us how to live, but to teach us how to live again, and again, and again.

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God Speaks Through Children

January 1, 1988

We live by images, and we never have enough of them. Artists don’t sleep because there is always that restlessness to capture an image, to create a symbol. The rest of us move around in a more inchoate dissatisfaction, staring more blankly at life, more content to be dissatisfied.

Somebody once asked two workmen at a construction site what they did for a living. The first man’s reply had some life in it: ‘I am helping to build a cathedral!” The second man, in a more tired voice, replied “I lay bricks!”

Images and symbols make a difference. They give meaning. They define experience, shape it, and, ultimately, decide whether we will touch life and each other deeply or superficially. The deeper the symbol, the deeper the contact. They also tempt us towards hope and despair.

Hope and despair. Looking at the image of the year just gone by, 1987, you can see reasons for both.

Year of Awakening

It was a year of adultness and disillusion. We woke up somewhat in 1987. Some of our naiveté died and with that some of ourselves. Iran-gate, Ronald Reagan, Oliver North, Gary Hart, Jimmy Bakker, Haitian terrorists, and crashing stock markets and bankrupt banks, among other things, each in its own way helped open our eyes. In bits, piecemeal, we woke up a bit and some of the child in us died.

But 1987 offered other images as well.  In mid-summer, a tragic airline crash just off the runway in Detroit killed more than 130 people. There was a sole survivor, a child, Cecelia. There was something special in the sole survivor being a child.  It was like the miracle of birth itself, except that in this case the whole world became a midwife and helped deliver a new life from that fiery womb. In October, in Midland, Texas, an eighteen-month-old toddler, Jessica, fell down a well. She should have died, from the fall, from exposure, from a myriad of other causes. She didn’t. She defied the laws of medicine and logic and lived, a miracle in a world short of them.

Again, it was the child who survived, who defied the odds, made it a special miracle, something the world would rally around. Then, in December, one of the worst accidents in recent history occurred in the Philippines. A ferryboat struck an oil tanker and more than 2000 people died. Several days later, a 4-year-old boy was found, alive, hanging onto a piece of debris. He too should have died, but he defied the odds. He survived. Again, there was something special in that he was a child. The world stopped for a brief moment, everyone watched together, felt together, pulled together, prayed together, gave thanks together, hoped together, and felt a common consolation. That’s a miracle too!

When Jesus was born, Scripture tells us that a bright star came and stood over the place where the child was.

Messages from God

Three times this year, on international television, the star stood over the child and the world, like the magi, stopped and offered its gifts to Cecelia, Jessica, and the unnamed Filipino child. There is something deeply symbolic in that. For me, the survival of those three children and our world’s response shows both that our religious instincts are not dead and that God is still active and doing miracles in our lives. Our religious instincts are still alive because the world still worships at a crib. We are still moved by vulnerability, helplessness, innocence, and childlikeness. Christ is still born in them.

When the world looks for its meaning in a child, there is reason for hope. This year it did: bankers, presidents, truck drivers, housewives, movie stars, professors, farmers, plumbers, car salesmen, accountants, civil servants, journalists and janitors beat a path to the crib to see the child. Only the very sophisticated, like the Pharisees in Scripture, stood back to judge and criticize and disdain the worship of those who do not have their religious smarts. A deeper image still, however, is simply the survival of these children. They lived when everything dictated that they should die. In that, God spoke.

God doesn’t send us typewritten letters from heaven, nor, ordinarily, part the Red Sea. But, ordinarily, God does give us signs, the signs of Jonah, the phoenix rising from its own ashes, people walking away from war, tragedy, heartbreak, brokenness, and even from death, to new life. Life goes on, we live to see another day. Annie Dillard says that when we awake, we can never slip back and be free of ourselves again. This year we awoke to a new adultness. But God gave us a sign, Cecelia, Jessica, and an unnamed Filipino child so that we could slip back and be free of ourselves again.

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Single Life Offers Opportunities

December 2, 1987

“The refusal of woman is fault in my chastity…and all my compensations are a desperate and useless expedient to cover this irreparable loss which I have not fully accepted.

“I can learn to accept it in the spirit and in love and it will no longer be ‘irreparable.’ The cross repairs and transforms it. The tragic chastity which suddenly realizes itself to be mere loss, and the fear that death has won – that one is sterile, useless, hateful. I do not say this is my lot, but in my vow I can see this as an ever-present possibility.”

Those are the words of Thomas Merton as he reflects upon the dangers of not marrying. (Quoted by J.H. Griffin, Follow the Ecstasy, Page 44) In sexual inconsummation, be it a deliberately chosen state or one imposed by circumstance, there is always the feeling, seldom far from the surface, that there is something sterile within one’s existence. Merton designated this as “a fault in one’s chastity,” a fault which can either be tragic or transformed by the cross.

I’ve thought about this a lot lately, not just as it pertains to my own celibate existence, but especially as it pertains to persons living a single life in the world. For many of them, life can seem particularly unfair. Society is set up for couples. They are alone. Society has accepted and made a place for consecrated religious. However, singles in the world, while sharing the celibate lot of consecrated religious, share virtually none of their security or advantages. Moreover, unlike married persons and consecrated religious, singles in the world are rarely given a thriving set of symbols which can provide a symbolic hedge within which to understand their inconsummation.

Too often single persons in the world feel like they are looking in at life from the outside, that they are abnormal, that they are missing fundamentally something within life. Consequently, unlike married persons and consecrated religious, few single persons feel that they have positively chosen their state of life. They feel victimized into it. Few single persons feel relaxed, easeful, and accepting of their lot. The feeling, instead, is always that this must be temporary. Rarely can a young single person project his or her future acceptingly to the end and see him or herself growing old and dying single and happy. Invariably the feeling is this: Something has to happen to change this! I don’t choose this! I can’t see myself for the rest of my life like this!

There are immense dangers in these feelings. First of all, there is the danger of simply never fully and joyfully picking up one’s life and seeing it as worthwhile, of never choosing to be what one is, of never accepting the spirit that fits the life that one is actually living. As well, there is the danger of panicking and marrying simply because marriage is seen as a panacea and no possibility of real happiness is seen outside of it.

Some of these feelings are good. The truth sets us free and so it is not good to pretend. Pious lies, denial, or spiritualities of espousal with God which do little to placate the emotions, cannot erase the facts: “It is not good for the man to be alone.” The universe works in pairs, the absence of consummation creates a fault in one’s chastity which the creator, himself, has condemned. To be single is to be different, more different than we often dare admit. But it is in the admitting that truth can set us free. However, for that to happen, certain things must be understood and accepted.

Sexuality is a dimension of our self-awareness. We awake to consciousness and feel ourselves, at every level, as cut off, sexed, lonely monads separated and aching for unity. Celibacy is a fault in our chastity. However, to be single is not necessarily to be asexual or sterile. Today sometimes the impression is given that sexual union is happiness and no happiness is possible outside of that. That is a superficial and dangerous algebra.

Sexuality is the drive in us towards connection, community, family, friendship, affection, love, creativity, and generativity. We are happy and whole when these things are in our lives, not on the basis of whether or not we sleep alone. The single celibate life offers its own unique opportunities for achieving these. God never closes one door without opening a few others. In recognizing that it is easier to find a lover than a friend, we also recognize that human sexuality and generativity are more than biological.

Biology is one thing, but there are other ways of being deeply sexual, other ways of getting pregnant and impregnating, other kinds of sexual intimacy, and other ways of being mother and father. There is a mysterious dynamic within separation and community. Sexuality and community function at various levels.

I remember a young man I worked with several years back. He was discerning between religious life and marriage. At one point he commented: ‘I have always been afraid of being a priest because it will mean dying alone. My father died when I was 15 and he died in my mother’s arms. I have always rejected the celibate state because I want to die like my father died…in a woman’s arms.

“However, one day I was meditating on Christ’s life and it struck me powerfully that he died alone, loved, but in nobody’s arms. He was really alone, though he was powerfully linked to everyone in a different way. It struck me that this could also be a good way to die!”

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Make Space For Christ In Life

December 1, 1987

At the beginning of this Advent, someone handed me a batch of stickers which read: Keep Christ in Christmas. “Do something with these,” he lamented, “put them on your car, give them to people, whatever! We have to do something to fight all the commercialism which is destroying Christmas.”

I am rather agnostic about slogans, banners, and posters as a means of changing people’s lives and so the stickers lie untouched, collecting dust in my office. However, looking at them has sparked some thoughts about keeping Christ in Christmas.  Generally, what is blamed for the absence of Christ in Christmas is, precisely, commercialism. Elaborate decorations appear by mid-November and the sales start. Santa Claus is in every store, carols speak more of ivy, holly, and sleigh bells than of Jesus, and Advent becomes a time for shopping and partying rather than a time for spiritual preparation.

Putting Christ back into Christmas is, then, connected mainly with protests against all the hoopla associated with Christmas decorations, Christmas sales, Christmas parties, and Santa. However valid these products might be, I suggest that they miss the main point. Putting Christ back into Christmas involves, first of all, creating a space for hospitality wherein Christ can be born. It involves avoiding doing what the innkeeper did at that first Christmas when he turned Mary and Joseph away.

Let me explain: I have always been struck, reading the Christmas story, at the seemingly unbelievable act of the innkeeper. Who could turn away someone pregnant with Christ? The story doesn’t suggest that the innkeeper was malicious or inhospitable. It says only that “there was no room in the inn.” In short, the man was booked up, full, there was no room for further guests, he already had all he could handle.

No room! No place for more guests! Booked up! No space for hospitality! In these expressions, I see the real reason why there is so little of Christ left in Christmas. It is not so much, I believe, our excesses in shopping, decorating, or partying that deprive Christ of a place, as it is our busyness, preoccupations, hurriedness, and agendae which fill the inn and leave no place for him. Our hearts and lives are too full for Christ to have a place.

That sounds like a harsh judgment, and it is. Looked at from the outside, our lives often do look selfish, inhospitable, idiosyncratic, and un-Christian. However, we are not bad people, nor are we, deep down, inhospitable. Beneath all the hurry, pressure, and preoccupations, our hearts are warm, unselfish and welcoming. Then why aren’t we more warm and hospitable? In brief, because we haven’t the time. There is not enough space within our lives for Christ.

Thomas Merton was once asked what he felt was the single worst problem confronting our civilization. He answered simply: “Efficiency!”  Most of us attach no moral or religious connections whatever to that word, yet it is the real canker. Everywhere, from the monastery to the federal government, the plant must be kept running. We have jobs to do, deadlines to meet, tasks to complete. The mortgage must be paid, the papers must be written, the classes must be taught, the kids must be fed, the meetings must be run, the supper must be cooked, the bus needs to be caught, the shopping has to be done, the kids must be picked up, there are all these things to do. The show must go on.

In all this, in doing so many things which seemingly have to be done, Christ begins to disappear. It is not decorations, shopping, and excessive partying that have taken Christ out of Christmas, it’s blind efficiency. Christ, himself, told us that it is the poor, the unimportant, the helpless, and those with nothing important to do in their lives who accept him and welcome his kingdom. They are the blessed. Why? Isn’t it truer to say that the rich, the talented, the achievers, the important, the influential, those whose lives make a difference, are blessed? After all, they are the ones we all envy?

I have often pondered this question, precisely because nobody envies the poor, the helpless, the unimportant, and the uninfluential. What do we gain in being these things, and what do we lose when we become more important, influential, and less helpless? We always think that what we lose is humility. Perhaps that is true, though it is not always so obvious. What is obvious is that we lose the time and space to be hospitable, unselfish, and welcoming.

Simply put, to be these things takes real time and real space. Love and hospitality are not abstract.  To have Christ in our lives, to put him back into Christmas, involves something much more than protesting commercialism. It involves creating time for him, time for the poor, time for hospitality, time for celebration, time for prayer, time for the itinerant couple who show up unannounced on a busy night. To make a holiday is to, ultimately, make a holy day. We must create some room in the inn!

Merry Christmas.

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A Recipe For Life’s Blender

November 2, 1987

Cross-fertilization always makes for interesting combinations, novel sparks. Recently, I ran a number of very different kinds of writers, C.S. Lewis, John Updike, G.K. Chesterton, Iris Murdoch, William Auden, Keith Clark, Anne Frank, John of the Cross, H. Belloc, Catherine Doherty, Paul Ricoeur, Thomas Merton, Virginia Wolf, Sheila Cassidy, Henri Nouwen, Margaret Atwood, Andrew Greely, Sheldon Vanauken, Eric Mascall, Ruth Burrows, Blaise Pascal, T.S. Eliot, Alfred North Whitehead, Peter Maurin, Democratis, and H.W. Longfellow through a blender.

The resulting mix offers the following perspectives:

On Hospitality:

  • What touches you is what you touch! Create a Christ-room within your home and heart. Make sure there is “room in the inn,” somebody pregnant with Christ is bound to knock.
  • Be easy on others, we all have our secret sorrows which the world knows not and often we are called cold when we are only sad.
  • Be less paranoid, it is absurd to be so hard on others when their lives are as arduous and difficult as our own. Chastize only what you deeply love.

On Prayer:

  • God instituted prayer in order to lend creatures the dignity of causality.
  • Ask God to hang onto you, lest you slip away from him.
  • Know that we have but one ultimate choice, genuflection or self-destruction and that it is only when we make a holy day for God that we make a holiday for ourselves.
  • Pray unceasingly, there is no end of it, the voiceless wailing, the withering of withered flowers, the movement of pain that is painless and motionless, the drift of the sea and the drifting of wreckage.
  • But don’t confuse prayer with narcissism, neurosis is clinging to self, prayer is clinging to God.
  • Don’t look for quick answers; we will spend most of eternity thanking God for those prayers of others that he didn’t answer.

On Eros:

  • The universe is full of divine discontent, of tiny deities, sparks from the anvil of God.
  • Eros is God’s hold on us and, as such, remains good. Turned upside down, blackened, distorted and filthy, it still bears the traces of divinity.
  • All miracles begin with the act of falling in love and have their root in eros. But have a metaphysics of sex because all of us know the few things that man, as a mammal, can do.
  • Practice the discipline of the slow demanding generosity of genuine experience knowing that monogamous sex is but a small price to pay for so exclusive and deep a union.
  • Wait patiently in expectation for that is the foundation of the spiritual life.

On Faith:

  • Know that it is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of a living God and that those who do so find there a peace quite different than that described in tourist brochures.
  • Know that faith is an assent that implies restless cogitation and risk, darkness, and blood. In the invisible shedding of blood we can find both the seeds for a new faith and those of a lost one.

On the Earthiness and Paganity of Christianity:

  • Christianity is the only religion that has preserved the pleasure of paganism. God is neither plastic, pious, nor metaphysical. A God who appears in religion under the frigid title of first cause will be appropriately worshipped in sterile churches.
  • Take full account of your own humanity, your sofas and chairs know secrets about you that your lovers don’t.

On Revirginization:

  • Slip, daily, back into a fetal darkness in which you learn to understand more by not understanding than by understanding.
  • Know that the greatest of all illusions is the illusion of familiarity and the truth is lost in the intermediate condition of fatigue and lost innocence. So learn to look at things familiar until they look unfamiliar again.
  • Know too that a great person is the person who has the heart of a child and that we are as much engaged in the task of unlearning as in learning.
  • In the end, our aim is to arrive again at the place from which we started and know that place for the first time, in second naivete, beyond the deserts of criticism and lost innocence.

On Friendship:

  • Friendship is salvation, grace incarnate, enfleshed, Scripture’s written page alive in life.
  • God gives us many friends, and each of them plays a unique role in our thinking, feeling, speaking and acting.
  • In friendship we taste, a little, the love that launched the universe in a vast bang. The taste is slight…a bit of light in the gloom, a bit of life in the entrophy, a bit of love in the indifference; maybe it’s enough, maybe it’s everything.

On Honesty:

  • Sin bravely! Know that only a saint can afford to die a saint’s death and that the rest of us need to go out in our own eyes and in the eyes of our entourage as the sinners that we are.
  • Admit mistakes: “It seemed like a good idea at the time!”
  • Do not let anything come between your soul and its sin, it is too dangerous.
  • The universe rings true when you test it honestly. A fall, honestly admitted, is an opportunity to identify with God’s little ones and to start again. Claim your place among the broken and among those whose loyalties are so torn as to leave them asking for forgiveness.

On Gratitude and Joy:

  • It is the duty of every Christian to be as happy as s/he can.
  • A saint is someone who is motivated by gratitude.
  • Remember it is easier to be heavy than light, resentful than forgiving, morose than joyful.
  • The asceticism of joy is the ultimate mortification.

On Hope and Happy Endings:

  • Art and life must be kept separate.
  • Life ends not in unreal romanticism nor in the unresolved tension of stoicism, but in an embrace of God where all manner of being will be well and the fire and the rose will be one.
  • Do not then be troubled by the increasing forces already in dissolution, you have mistaken the hour for night, it is already morning.
  • Hang onto your ideals, the day will come when, despite all you will be able to live them.
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Taking The Sting Out Of Life

November 1, 1987

“Mother tended to become riveted on what she felt as a personal slight or insult but she would not discuss it with you…She silently brooded over the incident and carried it with her inside. She remembered only the insult, however accidental, and it grew as time passed.

“Usually such a misunderstanding fades away with time. But for Mother, the process was the opposite. She clung to the image of the old hurt, to her own secret image as the deprived somehow cheated and unloved person.

“That image was a bottomless pit into which you could pour years of loving, kindness, and attempts at reconciliation without visible results. It failed to erase the one mistake.

“It put you at a permanent disadvantage. Your unpremeditated error in judgment became part of a larger aberration that existed privately in the far reaches of her childhood deprivation, her own alienation and loneliness, her insatiable need for love.

“There just wasn’t enough love in the whole world to fill her need. She didn’t allow enough space for other human beings to be themselves and give her anything real. She demanded such constant reassurance of devotion that she left no room for love. It was impossible to satisfy her.

“Over the years, most of the people who really did love her, in spite of her demands were pushed away because she seemed unable to accept others as totally separate from herself.” (Christina Crawford, Mommie Dearest, Berkley Edition, Pages 189-190)

“What is it that I want from Uncle William? I want some hesitation at the door, as if he isn’t sure he is welcome. I want him to take me aside and tell me he knows that he has done me harm.

“I want him to sit, if he must sit, at my table, silent and absorbed. I don’t demand that he be hounded: I don’t even want him to confess. I simply want him to know, as I want the Irish sailor to know, that a wrong has been done me.

“I want to believe that they remember it with at least regret. I know that things cannot be taken back, the forced embrace, the caresses brutal underneath the mask of courtship, but what I do want taken back are the words, spoken by these two men, that suggest that what they did was all right, no different from what other men have done, that it’s all the same, the touch of men and women; nothing of desire or consent has weight, body parts touch body parts; that’s all there is.

“I want them to know that because of them I cannot ever feel about the world the way I might have felt had they never come near me.” (Mary Gordon, Violation, in Temporary Shelter, Page 195)

Hurt, resentment, the inability to really forgive and forget, the hook of the past in our present, the universal condition of need, the chain of neuroses that stretches back to Adam and Eve, the need for a redemptive healing embrace from outside of us are what is captured in these quotes.

In the first of them, Christina Crawford describes her mother, Joan Crawford, and her mother’s inability to move beyond her childhood hurts. It’s a haunting statement because all of us, in some way, share her condition, present hurts invariably touch the deeper recesses where lie the wounds of our childhoods. We fill with paranoia and resentment far too easily.

Mary Gordon, in her powerful essay on sexual violation, first describes how she, twice, was sexually violated; once by an anonymous Irish sailor and, another time, by her own Uncle William. Now, years later, she finds that feelings of resentment and sadness still fill her at times and rob her ordinary life of some of its full richness for enjoyment. As she is writing this essay she is reflecting upon the feelings that have been triggered in her by the announcement that her Uncle William is coming with her parents for lunch at her house. Trying to pinpoint what is still unresolved within her after all the years, she summarizes all in one line: “Because of them I cannot ever feel about the world the way I might have felt had they never come near me.”

An entire metaphysics of resentment is contained in that single line: Every hurt, every violation, every undeserved bruise gives us a new way of knowing, a wisdom and a bitterness. After every wound we begin to feel about the world differently than we would have…had this not come near us.

That’s an enlightening insight, but to what purpose?

Freud held strongly that self-knowledge brings freedom, knowing why we act in a certain way helps us to act in a different way. Perhaps that is not as true as Freud supposes, but, as every recovering alcoholic can vouch for, self-knowledge is a necessary starting point. Until one looks in a mirror honestly nothing much will change. Hence I offer these quotes as a mirror. In it, we see ourselves…our woundedness, our resentment, our neurotic inability to love simply and joyfully, our paranoia, our propensity for self-pity, our insatiable need for reassurance, and our limitless capacities for hurting each other. But this is not meant to be a stoic mirror, within which one sees all the elements realistically, but does not resolve the conflict. Rather it is meant to be the mirror of humility within which we recognize our connectedness with everything and everybody.

If we can do this honestly then we will begin to feel the ache for redemption and we will have the humility to reach out for the embrace which can make all things well and make the fire and rose one…and enable us to meet the universe and each other with a sympathy born of the fact that life, for everyone, is an arduous and difficult struggle. 

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Pagan Saints For Modern Sinners

October 2, 1987

The idea of invoking the saints for help has fallen on hard times. Most Christians have no patience whatsoever with this concept. Generally, saints within the church are either benignly neglected or treated with a positive cynicism and disdain. However, within Christianity as a whole, not just within Roman Catholicism, there has existed a time-honored practice of asking the saints to help us. We have always had a litany of the saints. As well, though this is less well known, there has always existed among us as believers the idea of pagan saints, that is, the idea that certain persons, while not explicitly Christian, by the way they live their lives are, like Christian saints, canonized and trustworthy examples of what life lived under God should be.

We still need to invoke the saints for help, our Christian saints and our pagan saints. With this in mind, I offer a brief litany of some of my favorite saints, Christian and non-Christian.

Jerzy Popieluszko, farmer’s son, solidarity leader, spiritual father and friend of your people, Catholic priest, you were courageous enough to die for what you believed in, even when, like Christ, you screamed out in fear and pain and let your captors see you weak…Pray for us…help us to be less intimidated by our own fears and weaknesses.

Eleni Gatzoyiannis, mother, wife, woman victim, object of jealousy and hatred, misunderstood martyr, you were shorn of your pride and hair and tortured…Pray for us…help us to endure the tragic, the stupid, and the unfair in life without losing our love, our decency, and our willingness to die for others.

Anne Frank, child of dreams, child of vision, child of romance, child of pure heart, martyred at 14…Pray for us…help us to keep faith in the hope you had when you wrote: “Even in this time of cruelty I must uphold my ideals for perhaps the time will come when I will be able to carry them out.”

Davy Jean Vanauken, wife, romantic, passionate lover, convert to Christ…Pray for us…teach us what you taught your husband, that life must be held with an open hand, that the paschal mystery asks us to let go even of the greatest loves so that they might be transformed in Christ.

Dorothy Day, friend of the poor, friend of all, conscience of America, you loved both Marx and Jesus and you enjoyed a good smoke and a good raunchy story at 84…Pray for us…open our hearts to the poor, stir our consciences, and our senses of humor and celebration.

Martin Luther King, man of fidelity, you who never gave up on others even when they gave up on themselves, you stayed with your own until the end…Pray for us…help us to live in such a way that, when we die, they will say about us what they said about you: “S/he was faithful, s/he never gave up!”

Stan Rather, missionary, challenger of oppression in Central America, martyr, you were raised in a culture of MacDonald’s hamburgers, Bonanza, and Monday Night Football…Pray for us…help us to move beyond the comforts of affluence and privilege to, like you, cast our lot with the poor.

Thomas Merton, contemplative, torn, complex man…Pray for us…help us in our complexity to channel our erotic hearts and become single-minded and find that peace that comes from centering in God.

Catherine de Hueck Doherty, community builder, lover of simplicity, woman of non-compromise, lady of Gospel-risk…Pray for us…help us to see, as you often said, that it is in the invisible shedding of blood that we find the seeds both of a new faith and of a lost one.

Peter Maurin, pilgrim, orator, failed Saskatchewan farmer, founder of the Catholic Worker, mentor of Dorothy Day, friend of all workers, generator of endless energy…Pray for us…may we all end our lives as you did, loved by a community, still sharing visions, still concerned, grateful to the earth just for giving you a room.

Malcolm X, militant martyr, agitator for equality, promoter of new consciousness…Pray for us…help us to be less timid, less small, less ghetto-ish.

Oscar Romero, victim, priest, Christ-figure, lamb of sacrifice, you died at the altar…Pray for us…help us to not grow bitter and fill with resentment when we meet opposition. Help us to be joyful and celebrating in the face of opposition and death.

C.S. Lewis, humorist, philosopher, storyteller par excellence, most reluctant convert in England, wine drinker and friend of many…Pray for us…help us to keep our vision clear, our hope strong, our hearts wide, our consciences honest, and our sense of humor sharp.

Gregory Dix, youthful daredevil, adult monk, hopeless idealist…Pray for us…give us your sense of life, your ideals, your scholarship, and your sense of what is important.

Mahatma Gandhi, true fighter, peacemaker, advocate of non-violence, and Hindu lover of Christ…Pray for us…teach us the path of non-violence, of true ecumenism of the heart, of understanding, and of courage.

All you saints of God, you saints of conscience, Christian and non-Christian, old and new, pray for us.

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God Beats Small-Time Blues

October 1, 1987

Sigmund Freud once stated that neurosis is the disease of the normal person and that everyone is neurotic to some degree. This is true if one defines neurosis as he did, simply as meaning that one suffers more than one needs to. Neurosis, for him, is more a dis-ease than a disease. For Freud, this dis-ease comes about because of the repression of sex. In his understanding, we are so hopelessly and incurably sexed, with such limited access for sexual expression, that we are forced to repress most of our erotic energies. Eventually these repressed energies dominate and preoccupy our lives in a negative way. Everyone, subsequently, lives in a fundamental disease. There is certainly some truth in that.

More recently, thinkers such as Martin Heidegger and Ernest Becker have argued that we are all neurotic, but have suggested that the root of our dis-ease is not so much repressed sexuality as the repression of our fear of death. For them, we have a deep sense of our own mortality and, consciously and unconsciously, repress it. Eventually this causes a neurosis which robs us of the full joy of living because we are afraid of dying. Again, obviously there is much truth in this. More recently still, a number of psychologists and novelists, among others, have suggested that there is a different reason why we are fundamentally dis-eased.

For them, while repressed sexuality and fear of death certainly unsettle our lives and cause untold restlessness, they are not the real reason why our lives are seldom peaceful and contented. They submit that our neurotic restlessness has another cause. In our western world, we live in a culture that stresses the importance and significance of the individual, while at the same time downplaying the importance of God. These two emphases, the significance of the individual life and the absence of God, cannot go together without creating an intolerable restlessness inside each of us. Because a fundamental dis-ease results when the truths that are revealed by God are taught in a world that postures independence of God.

What happens when we are raised to believe that we are, each of us, precious, special, and meant to leave a lasting mark on this earth…and we live in a world in which we are obscure, unknown, homogenized, taken-for-granted, and deprived of meaningful self-expression?

What happens when we are taught that our lives have deep significance and that our personalities, our dreams, our pains, our joys, and our loves have infinite importance…and we live in a world which cannot give us this sense?

What happens inside of us when we sense how precious are our individual stories, in all their unique intricacies, and we live in a world which is not interested in our stories and is bored when we begin to speak of ourselves?

What happens when we are told by our world that our daydreams are true and that we are infinitely precious, but that same world, precisely because it no longer relies on God to give us that preciousness, cannot offer us a sense of specialness?

What happens? In brief, we get very restless. We become deeply and hopelessly dissatisfied. The joys that our lives do give us tend to pale and be insignificant because we feel that they, and we, are small-time, small-town, obscure, too little known and recognized.

We end up frustrated, feeling trapped in a domesticity that excludes us from where we would like to be and from whom we would like to be with. Our families and friends do not satisfy us because they, like ourselves, seem small-time. They are too much like us to be of help in our restlessness. We crave relationships with the famous, the powerful, the achievers, with those who have attained significance in the world’s eyes and whose stories the world deems precious and interesting. We become obsessed with the need for self-expression, with the need for achieving something that is unique and lasting. We fear dying without leaving a permanent mark. Our daily lives seem poor and uninteresting, and we live so much of our lives waiting, waiting for someone or something or some moment to come along and give us significance and preciousness.

Our world teaches us that we are significant and precious, but then deprives us of the one thing that can make us so, God. This sets off an incurable ache. A sense of our individual significance and a lack of a sense of God cannot go together without creating a restless and intolerable dis-ease. Only God can give us the sense of our own preciousness and ultimate significance. Only in a life rooted deeply in prayer, where we can live contentedly hidden in Christ and, there, accept the martyrdom of obscurity, will our aching and dissatisfaction cease and our dis-ease give way to restful contentment.

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Make Your Welcome Hearty

September 2, 1987

In October of 1933, Peter Maurin wrote the following poem and commentary in The Catholic Worker:

People who are in need

            and are not afraid to beg

            give to people not in need

The occasion to do good

            for goodness sake.

Modern society calls the beggar

            bum and panhandler

            and gives him the bum’s rush.

But the Greeks used to say

            that people in need

            are ambassadors of the gods.

Although you may be called

            bums and panhandlers

            you are in fact the ambassadors of God.

As God’s ambassadors

            you should be given

            food, clothing and shelter

By those who are able to give it.

Mohammedan teachers tell us

            that God commands hospitality

And hospitality is still practiced

            in Mohammedan countries.

But the duty of hospitality

            is neither taught nor practised

            in Christian countries.

The poor are no longer

            fed, clothed and sheltered

            at personal sacrifice

But at the expense of the taxpayers.

And because the poor

            are no longer

            fed, clothed and sheltered

            at personal sacrifice

The pagans say about Christians,

            “See how they pass the buck.”

Maurin goes on to comment that a church council of the 5th century obliged bishops to establish houses of hospitality in connection with every parish. These houses were open to the poor, the sick, the orphaned, the aged, and the needy of every kind. The idea was that one must always be ready to recognize Christ in the unfamiliar face and so every parish and every home was to have its “Christ room,” a room set aside to receive the ambassadors of God who appear in the form of the needy and the visiting.

 Hebrews 13, 2, asks us not to neglect hospitality, remarking that, in receiving strangers, “some have entertained angels without knowing it.”  Lately we have neglected hospitality. There’s been a bad slippage. No longer in our parishes, homes, and hearts is there a “Christ room.” Not only do we no longer see hospitality as a privilege, we no longer even see it as duty. Maurin is right, the Islamic world is doing much better at it than we are.

Why is this so? Are we more selfish? Are we busier? Is Christianity as a religion less hospitable than Islam? There are a number of reasons for the demise of our sense of hospitality. One of them, surely, is the one Maurin points out, we have turned the duty of hospitality over to government agencies, the taxpayer, social security, social services. They are asked to take care of the widow, the orphan, the aged, and the stranger. More importantly though, the demise of hospitality has occurred because we have developed a sense of privacy and efficiency that militate against it.

Our culture is becoming ever more narcissistic and idiosyncratic, that is, more and more we have the attitude that things are our own. We speak of my space, my time, my family, my home, my community, my room, my stereo, my plans, my agenda, my friendships, my effectiveness, and even, in a way, of my church. In such a context we allow other persons into our lives, our homes, our communities, and our churches, most selectively. We are hospitable to our own, to those who meet our standards and our timetables. This invariably excludes the poor from our hearts, homes, and churches, since they have no sense of our standards and timetables. Their problems are neither antiseptic nor conveniently scheduled.

Compounding this is the problem of efficiency. Thomas Merton was once asked what he thought the worst problem was facing Western civilization. Instead of answering with something like “injustice,” “moral decay,” or “lack of interiority,” he simply replied: “Efficiency!”

Our problem in the Western world, everywhere from the Pentagon to our monasteries, is that the plant must run! The classes must be taught, the crops must be sown and harvested, the kids need to be driven for their lessons, the meeting must run as scheduled, the supper must be cooked, the essay needs to be written, the mortgage needs to be paid, the plane needs to be caught, things must keep running, there is no other way, the show must go on, we need to do what we need to do!

In all that, partly, we are losing our souls because in it there is no space or time for hospitality and hospitality is the mark of a truly gracious soul.

Would that the hallmark of our Christian homes and churches be the graciousness of our welcome and would that when we die, each of us, might be most remembered for that, our hospitality, the graciousness of our welcome!

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Saying Goodbye Part Of Life

September 1, 1987

T.S. Eliot once said that home is where we start from. These words describe my feelings as summer draws to its close. For me, it’s been a summer away from home: trips, workshops abroad, lectures and teaching in various places, a summer of meeting new people and of saying goodbye to them. Saying farewell doesn’t get easier with time. There’s a death in every goodbye, one painful enough to make us wonder whether the initial shared time was worth it.

This summer, I taught in three different countries and shared deeply within the lives of very different groups of persons. At the end of each of these times there were goodbyes. That was always a sad time, a deeply restless time, a time when death hangs in the air. There were grateful smiles and au revoirs, but all of us knew that most of us would never see each other again and that, certainly, this particular group of persons would never be together like this again.

What does one do with that? Pretend it’s not hard? Put on the stoic’s face? Callous oneself so as not to bleed? Offer it up to God? Whatever else needs to be done, certainly the experience needs to be picked up and examined. The metaphysics of a farewell. What’s in a goodbye? What kind of symbols give vision and consolation at moments of parting?

There is a story told about a Jewish farmer who, through carelessness, did not get home before sunset one Sabbath and was forced to spend the day in the field, waiting for sunset the next day before returning home. Upon his return home he was met by a rather angry rabbi who scolded him for his carelessness. Finally, the rabbi asked him: “What did you do out there all day in the field? Did you at least pray?” The farmer answered: “Rabbi, I am not a clever man. I don’t know how to pray properly. What I did was to simply recite the alphabet all day and let God form the words.”

That parable sheds light upon many things. Here I use it to help understand what happens when a group, any group, meets and shares life and then must say goodbye. When we meet and share life, we come, each of us, as one piece of an infinite alphabet of personalities. Like a letter in the alphabet we each have our unique shape, our own background, and our own special set of dreams and heartaches. We bring uniqueness, but, together, we form a word, a community, a family, a melody, a something which is bigger and more significant than ourselves. But always, since home is where we start from, it is only for awhile. This side of eternity, no group lasts, every community, every marriage, every family, every gathering, every preciously shared moment, has an ending. The word breaks apart. There is always a death in that breaking; ideally, a paschal death, a death in which one loses the smaller circle, the smaller synthesis, the smaller life, to come, eventually, to something bigger, to a wider consummation. Christ taught us that in his death.

We begin leaving home when we are expelled from the womb and life is a series of farewells after that. We spend our lifetimes trying to create homes and communities, but eventually, always, these break apart. To live with that, without giving in to an unhealthy stoicism, nostalgia, or despairing depression, it is important that we understand both the dynamics of death and of Christian community. The death we experience in saying goodbye is not terminal, but paschal. We break up a word to become parts of a bigger one. Smaller circles give way to larger ones. Christian community and true intimacy are not lost. True community, like true friendship, is a shared spirit. It need not be lost when physical death, distance, and commitments break us apart.

Community is not, first of all, nor necessarily at all, a shared roof, a shared city, a shared task, or even an explicitly shared friendship. It’s a shared spirit, a shared way of life. Before Pentecost, the disciples were physically together under one roof, clinging to each other, but they were not in real community. After receiving the spirit, they were never together again under one roof or in one city, but they now were in community. Community, family, intimacy, these are constituted first of all by living in the same spirit, Christ’s spirit…charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, faithfulness, mildness, faith, and chastity. When we live within these, we are in deep intimacy with all others who are also living within them, irrespective of the separation that distance and time can cause.

Life has its seasons. There is a time to be together, of intimacy, of shared time and celebration, when God makes us into a word. However, there is also, always, a time when the demands of life, duty, and the Holy Spirit call us to move along. Then is the time for farewell, for pained embraces, for tears, and for the bitter restlessness that accompanies that. But, it’s not like we’d never met. What’s been shared, the word we made, breaks up only to become part of something larger…and we regain each other in that.

When we’ve shared a common spirit and keep that spirit, it no longer matters if we are thousands of miles apart, we remain part of each other, in deep intimacy, silently nurturing each other as we help bring about the final consummation within the body of Christ.

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Sitting At A Mystic’s Feet

August 1, 1987

Recently, while traveling in England, I was offered a rare and privileged opportunity. A former student of mine arranged for me to meet with Ruth Burrows, the Carmelite spiritual writer. A certain mystique surrounds Ruth Burrows. First of all, although she is one of the foremost spiritual authors of our time, very few people know her real name or know where precisely she lives. Ruth Burrows is her pen name.

What is known about her is that she is a Carmelite nun, living somewhere in England. In her books, she is most careful to disguise places, dates and names. Nowhere do you see on the covers or dust jackets of her books particulars regarding her person, age, place of residence, involvements, and so on. She prefers, for many reasons, a certain anonymity. She is a Carmelite, trying to live the hidden life of Christ. More importantly, there is a mystique about her because she is, in some circles, much to her own chagrin, regarded as a mystical writer. In our age, that kind of insinuation creates its own mystique, usually a false and harmful one. Burrows, herself, rejects the label “mystic,” especially as the word is commonly understood. However, because of the nature of some of her writings, that title is destined to plague her. She does deserve some extraordinary label since her writings are, in fact, exceptional. She is one of the great, and deep, spiritual writers of our time. She is the author of more than a half dozen books, but is best known for three of them: Her autobiography, Before the Living God, which, perhaps more so even than Merton’s, Seven Storey Mountain, traces the struggles of a soul to come to single-mindedness in Christ; her Guidelines for Mystical Prayer, which gives a novel and systematic outline of the spiritual life; and her recent, Ascent to Love, which is the best commentary in English on John of the Cross.

By way of introducing you to her, I offer you here a small smorgasbord of quotes from her:

 On anger and bitterness:

  • “Bitterness is an infallible indication of selfishness.”
  • “The heart of trouble is the craving for attention, to have one’s own way.
  • “At the heart of anger lies the rebellion against what is truly human.”

 On suffering and desolation:

  • “In paschal suffering, we cling to God, in neurotic suffering we cling to ourselves. In clinging to God we experience Gethsemane, in clinging to ourselves we experience neurosis.”
  • “Christianity must never be allowed to degenerate into ‘Cross-tianity.’ We must never make an ideology out of suffering. That is the constant temptation, to think ourselves superior or deep because we suffer. Everything that can be said of consolation applies equally to suffering. True religious experience erases all sense of being special and superior, even in the area of suffering.”
  • “Suffering is not an infallible indication of growth, it can just as easily indicate neuroses. We must be careful not to cast a mystical garb over indigestion.”

On sloth and laziness:

  • “I am slothful when I feel that the total demands and promises of God are not for me and therefore I do not hold myself responsible in failing to meet them.”

On pride and honesty:

  • “I am shocked to see how little contrition, searing contrition, features in our living and dying. Only a saint can afford to die the death of a saint. The rest of us need to go out as sinners in our own eyes and in the eyes of our entourage, and our peace must come from trust in God’s goodness, not in the complacent but unexpressed assumption that I have lived for God.”
  • “The way we worry about spiritual failures, our inability to pray, our distractions, our ugly thoughts, and the temptations we can’t get rid of…it’s not because God is defrauded, for he isn’t, it’s because we are not so beautiful as we would like to be.”

Given all this, it was with considerable nervousness that I ventured into the ungrilled parlor of a small monastery in rural England. What kind of person would I meet? A writer larger than her words? A spiritual figure more powerful than her books? None of these questions now seem important enough to reflect upon. I met a woman of about 60, whose face, person, and words reflect everything her books talk about: Faith in God; exceptional prophetic vision; humor; the choice for life; the difficulties and pain in that choice, a pain that is not neurotic but which steadies, warms, and matures the heart; the importance of the ordinary, of the hidden life of Jesus, of the martyrdom of obscurity where Christ is all in all.

There is something deeply easeful in her person and manner. I was soon very much at ease. Never did I open my briefcase with its carefully prepared interview sheet. We talked of many things, the church, religious life, John of the Cross, the Carmelite reform, her ideas as expressed in Guidelines, and of her novices (her real pride and joy). Her books are strong. Everywhere they stare death, desolation, and chaos boldly in the face. It was not surprising to me; therefore, that the person I met radiated all that is antithetical to death, spiritually, intellectually and emotionally. Like her books, her person exudes consolation, hope, life and energy.

Reading Ruth Burrows, or meeting her, makes you realize more than ever that our Christian faith is far from dead. We are very much alive!

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Choosing Between Sacraments

July 2, 1987

Christianity is the most pagan of all religions. It is the most earthy religion because it believes that God has become incarnate in earth. What an astonishing belief! Ordinary life is sacrament. To live and relate ordinarily is to eat the body of Christ. It is impossible to exaggerate this mystery, the Incarnation. Whenever we neglect its full depth we lose perspective and, among other things, pit one kind of sacrament against another.

Let me illustrate with a few examples: For the past two years, I have been helping a friend discern between marriage and priesthood. My friend is extremely idealistic and prophetic by temperament. His choice has been a tortured one. He is deeply in love with a woman and is strongly attracted to marriage. At the same time, he feels strongly drawn to full time ministry within the church. An admirer of Dan Berrigan, Mother Teresa, and Jean Vanier, he yearns for a radically displaced and prophetic lifestyle. Reading Kierkegaard is, for him, more inviting than watching television, and the idea of being arrested regularly for social protest appeals to him more than holding season’s tickets to the opera or to a sporting event. Looking at marriage, he is attracted, but afraid; afraid that marriage will mean non-displacement and ordinariness, a drowning in the ordinary pressures of life, kids, diapers, shopping, mortgage payments, car pools, house cleaning, home and school meetings, bowling leagues, and lawn and garden work on weekends. Evenings will be spent on the floor entertaining toddlers, not reading Kierkegaard or plotting religious and social change. For my friend, it seems like the sacrament of marriage (and all that it implies) and the sacrament of ministry are, at a point, incompatible.

More recently, while preaching a retreat for Episcopalian priests in the U.S., I was approached by a young, idealistic, priest who was also discerning. He has been ordained for only two years. He loved the ministry but was the father of two young children. He felt that he did not have the energy and time to be responsibly present to both family and ministry. He was torn and forced into a choice he did not want to make. Tearfully he told me that he would probably resign from the ministry: “I have to pick between the two sacraments,” he stated. Sadly, there exists in the church, and within life in general, a false dichotomy that pits sacrament against sacrament, one part of life against another. True, we must make hard choices, sometimes, between full-time professional ministry and marriage and kids, or between a radical prophetic displacement or a more ordinary prophetic life. But the alternatives can be too strongly dichotomized. There is a real danger in thinking that we are doing ministry only when we are doing something which takes us beyond the ordinary life of marriage, kids, diapers, mortgage payments, bank lines, and decisions about drapes and carpets. Concomitantly, there is the danger of seeing our lives as meaningful and important only when we are doing certain kinds of important things.

Thus, for example, we take so much meaning from achievement and productivity. For many of us, meaning and self-worth come from producing, from succeeding in projects and things which society considers as important. The flip side of this is that we feel worthless and bored when we are not doing things that the world considers important. Hence, for example, the businessman completing an important deal feels important; the housewife at home with toddlers does not. More subtle, but more important, is how we falsely dichotomize what is important within the very rhythms of our daily living.

We tend to take our meaning from only one side of life, that side of life which stimulates us intellectually and emotionally. Thus, we live for good conversations, good books, good entertainment, stimulating friendships, interesting learning experiences, exciting courses, interesting trips, and for hobbies and involvements which make us feel creative. The rest of the things we do, shopping, cleaning, necessary meetings, paying bills, waiting in lines at the bank, and the other thousand and one odd things we have to do each day to keep daily life flowing, are seen as necessary, but meaningless. They give us nothing in terms of a sense of ministry, stimulation, or meaning. They are a necessary burden, like paying taxes, but we feel that we have more important things to do than wait in lines, wash dishes, or play babble-babble games with toddlers. When we feel like this then we have a one-sided understanding of both the body of Christ and of life itself.

Life is not just worthwhile and meaningful when there is stimulating friendship, entertainment, travel or creative involvement within our day. We are not just doing ministry when we minister professionally or when we are displaced radically from ordinary life as a Dan Berrigan or Mother Teresa might be. Christ is in the ordinary, incarnate within the earthiness of our lives. Family life can be life within the Trinity, the marriage bed can be the Eucharist, and the tedious tasks of dishes, picking out drapes and standing in lines at check-out counters can be as important in ministry as preaching and teaching. A life consumed by the demands of small children can be as radical a form of protest against the culture as is an arrest at a peace demonstration.

There is a place for professional full-time ministry, and there is a place for radically displaced prophets, the John the Baptists who radically challenge our culture, but their vocation is not any more important, nor indeed meaningful, than is the vocation of the ordinary, unrecognized, pressured-by-everyday-concerns prophet who must live more radically in the world of domesticity, mortgages, shopping and check-out counters. Within the body of Christ everything has its place, its meaning. Life doesn’t fight life, and sacraments do not fight each other.

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Leaving God’s Mark

July 1, 1987

“We nurse within our hearts the hope that we are different, that we are special, that we are extraordinary. We long for the assurance that our birth was no accident, that a god had a hand in our coming to be, that we exist by divine fiat. We ache for a cure for the ultimate disease of mortality. Our madness comes when the pressure is too great and we fabricate a vital lie to cover up the fact that we are mediocre, accidental, mortal. We fail to see the glory of the Good News. The vital lie is unnecessary because all the things we truly long for have been freely given us.” (Alan Jones, Journey into Christ, Page 57)

All of us, I am sure, know what is meant by those words. On the one hand, we sense that we are extraordinary, creatures under divine providence, precious and significant, irrespective of our practical fortunes in life. We intuit that we are not mere evolutionary accidents, simple victims of fate, chance, luck, randomness, and accident, doomed to disappear forever. Deep down there is the feeling that we are God’s children, under God’s providence, loved and called to a birth, life, meaning, and significance that is unique and infinitely precious. We sense too that we are precious not on the basis of what we accomplish or achieve during our lives, but simply on the basis of being created and loved by God.

But this intuition, however deeply felt, normally wilts under the pressure of trying to live a life that is unique and special in a world in which billions of others are also trying to do the same thing. Can billions be infinitely precious and utterly unique? In the end, mediocrity, anonymity, and mortality overwhelm us. We begin to fear that we are not precious, nor under divine providence. There is, instead, the sense that we are merely mediocre hacks, trying to make the world believe that we are something different. One among billions of others, clawing and scratching for a little uniqueness, meaning and immortality! When we feel like this, we begin to believe that we are precious and unique only when we accomplish something which precisely sets us apart and ensures that we are remembered. For most of us, the task of adult life is that of guaranteeing our own preciousness, loveableness, meaning, immortality, and sanctity.

In the end, we do not believe that we have these, independent of our own accomplishments. Hence, we cannot, without bitter frustration, live ordinary lives of anonymity, hidden in Christ. We try, instead, to stand out, to leave a mark, to accomplish something extraordinary, and so ensure the fact that we will be recognized and remembered. Few things torment us and are as destructive of our peace and happiness as is this problem: We have set ourselves the impossible, frustrating, task of assuring for ourselves something which only God can give us. Because of this ordinary life does not seem enough for us, and we live as restless, competitive, driven persons, who are forced, precisely, to fabricate a lie to cover up the fact that we are mediocre. Why is ordinary life not enough for us? Why does it always seem that our lives are small-town, small-time, too insignificant, not exciting enough? Why do we habitually feel mediocre, dissatisfied, unhappy at being like everyone else?

Why the propensity to leave our mark? Why is there such a torment in the insufficiency of everything attainable? Why does our own situation so often feel oppressively domestic? Why, like Jonathan Livingston Seagull, do we want to fly above the rest, to leave the pack behind, and to somehow be more special than others? Why can we not embrace each other as sisters and brothers and, in humility and gratitude, rejoice in each other’s gifts and each other’s existence? Why the feeling that the other is a rival?

Why the need for masks, for pretense, for hype, for all kinds of lies that let us project certain images about ourselves? Because we are trying to give ourselves something that only God can give us, ultimate uniqueness, significance, and immortality.

Protestantism has always proclaimed that the central part of Christ’s message is the statement: “Faith alone saves.” We are justified by faith alone. They are right. That simple line reveals the final secret, namely, that God gives eternal life. Preciousness, meaning, significance and immortality are free gifts from God. If we could believe that we would become a whole lot more restful, peaceful, humble, less competitive, grateful, and happy. We would no longer hopelessly pursue the search for the holy grail. Ordinary life, in all its domesticity, shared with billions of others, would contain enough to ensure our preciousness, meaning, and significance.

As Thomas Merton once said: “It is enough to be, in an ordinary human mode, with one’s hunger and sleep, one’s cold and warmth, rising and going to bed. Putting on blankets and taking them off, making coffee and then drinking it. Defrosting the refrigerator, reading, meditating, working, praying. I live as my Fathers have lived on this earth, until eventually I die. Amen. There is no need to make an assertion of my life, especially so about it as mine, though doubtless it is not somebody else’s. I must learn to live so as to gradually forget program and artifice.” (John Howard Griffin, Follow the Ecstasy, Pages 37-38)

Ordinary life is enough. Preciousness and significance come from being loved by God, not from what we can achieve. In the end we are not mediocre, and there is no need to fabricate the vital lie.

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Our Greed Pulls The Trigger

June 1, 1987

It is getting to be frightening to watch the news. Terrorism is everywhere, and daily we appear less capable of protecting ourselves against it. Still fresh in our minds is the recent hijacking of the TWA jet by Lebanese Shiites, but that was merely one incident, resulting in just one death. Terrorism itself is spreading like a mushroom cloud, ominous, out of anyone’s control, a new kind of ultimate threat.

Lebanese shiites, Palestinian nationalists, Irish IRA extremists, Indian Sikhs, Central American death squads, Italian Red Brigades, German Baader-Meinhof gangs, Spanish Basque Nationalists, Filipino insurrectionists, Iranian extremists, Tamil separatists and their Sri Lankan counterparts, all of these groups bomb, kill, kidnap, and deal death and terror daily. This is not to mention hundreds of other groups, less internationally prominent, who do the same. Then there is still the isolated terrorist, the guy who goes berserk and shoots himself and his family, or who shoots people indiscriminately at bus stops or at a San Diego MacDonald’s. Violence of this kind is always wrong and we are right to be angry. But we are not right when we naively believe that terrorism is the work of a small number of sick and deranged persons. Too common, and spreading, is the belief that if a few Ayatollahs, Khadafys could be eliminated, then all would be peaceful. Terrorism, in this view, is seen as the product of individual fanaticism, a small accident of history, the product of isolated and deranged minds.

But terrorism is the natural by-product of our present way of life and the economic and social system upon which we depend. Like pollution, breakdown of relationships, sexual promiscuity, economic greed and high blood pressure, it is the inevitable result of a world structured like our own. As Russell Baker puts it, it is “one of the many embarrassing by-products of our blessings.” Bottom-line, our way of life is based too much upon greed. We live believing that whatever we can attain, providing it is done lawfully, is ours by right and that the accumulation of excess is itself a sign of success. Everything within our culture exalts that idea and thus greed, like cancer, continues to grow. Crassly put, we try to suck as much out of life as we can get. The fact that others get less, are weak or have less access to the good life is not important. Then, after we have what we want, we want peace, we want to be protected, we feel enraged that anyone would dare take from us what is ours. But the problem is that we took from someone else and we are taking more than our share. There can be no peace without justice. Terrorism flows from that. As violent, frightening, morally abhorrent and wrong as it is, it is a voice of the poor; perhaps, at times, the only voice they’ve got left.

Because of this, our response to terrorism must be both compassionate and nuanced. Our reaction, in fact, must include resistance. The demands of terrorism should not be met and all precautions should be taken to prevent it. But such measures, while demanded in the short range, must be sharply dissociated from our natural instinct to silence terrorism by brute force, namely, by revenge, by brutal retribution, by counter violence and by excessively increasing security, police and security measures. Frightening in this regard is the stunning popularity of the movie Rambo, a film about terrorism which crassly depicts the triumph of good over evil in terms of a superman counteracting terrorists by brutally crushing them. The popularity of this film (not the least of whose fans is Ronald Reagan) shows how deeply engrained is the feeling that the roots of terrorism lie within a few very wicked people and that the answer to terrorism is simply to eliminate those few. Frightening, too, is the idea that our crushing of those few amounts to the triumph of good over evil. Rambo could be a good film, if there were justice in the world. As it is, it feeds what’s worst in us.

Terrorism may never be stopped by brute force. Perverse as this may sound, it has too many moral roots. It stems ultimately from injustice.  Moreover, it can never be stopped by brute force. Terrorism will stop only when the poor are given enough to live for, so that they do not need to give up their lives in suicidal martyrdom. Terrorism will stop only when the poor have another voice that is actually heard. Terrorism will stop only when peace is secured on justice. None of these will happen if our present greed continues. As long as we feel we have a right to milk from life as much as we can take, we will always live in fear, in a fragile peace.

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Longing Is Our Spiritual Lot

May 2, 1987

On Feb. 12, 1944, 13-year-old Anne Frank wrote the following words in her now-famous diary. “Today the sun is shining, the sky is a deep blue, there is a lovely breeze and I am longing-so longing-for everything. To talk, for freedom, for friends, to be alone.

“And I do so long…to cry! I feel as if I am going to burst, and I know that it would get better with crying; but I can’t, I’m restless, I go from room to room, breathe through the crack of a closed window, feel my heart beating, as if it is saying, ‘can’t you satisfy my longing at last?’

“I believe that it is spring within me, I feel that spring is awakening, I feel it in my whole body and soul. It is an effort to behave normally, I feel utterly confused. I don’t know what to read, what to write, what to do, I only know that I am longing.”

There is in all of us, at the very centre of our lives, a tension, an aching, a burning in the heart that is insatiable, non-quietable and very deep. Sometimes, we experience this longing as focused on a person, particularly if we are in a love that is not consummated. Other times, we experience this yearning as a longing to attain something. Most often, though, it is a longing without a clear name or focus, an aching that cannot be clearly pinpointed or described. Like Anne Frank, we only know that we are restless, full of disquiet, aching at a level that we cannot seem to get at.

When we look into history, philosophy, poetry, mysticism and literature, we see an astonishing variety of ways in which this aching is expressed.

For instance, many of us have read Richard Bach’s little parable, Jonathan Livingston Seagull. This book spoke deeply to millions of people. It is a very simple story: Jonathan is a seagull who, when he comes to consciousness, is not satisfied with being a seagull.

He looks at his life, and the lives of other seagulls, and he finds it too small: “All a seagull ever does is eat and fight!” So Jonathan tries to burst out.

He tries to fly higher, to fly faster, to do anything that might break the asphyxiating limits of being a seagull. He doesn’t know what he wants, he only knows that he is hopelessly restless, that he must break out.

Many times he crashes and almost kills himself, but he keeps trying.

This is a story obviously more of the human heart than of a seagull. It describes our search, our aching, our congenital propensity for the limitless, the free, the total embrace.

In more abstract ways, this has been expressed in history: Philosophers speak of “a desire of the part to return to the whole”; mystics speak of “the spark of the divine in us”; the ancient Greeks spoke of something they called “NOSTOS,” homesickness (a feeling of never being at home, even when you are at home).

The Vikings called it “wanderlust,” the insatiable need to push further and further into the horizon; Shakespeare talked of “immortal longings”; G.M. Hopkins called the human spirit “an imprisoned skylark”; Augustine prayed to God: “You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you”; E.E. Cummings, poet, once said: “For every mile the feet go, the heart goes nine.”

All of these feelings are in all of us. We are all deeply and hopelessly erotic and “dis”-eased, incapable in this life of finding lasting rest. This restlessness, however, must never be seen as something which sets us against what is spiritual, religious and of God.

In fact, this hopeless aching and lack of ease is the very basis of the spiritual life. What we do with the eros inside of us, be it heroic or perverse, is our spiritual life.

The tragedy is that so many persons, full of riches and bursting with life, see this drive as something which is essentially irreligious, as something which sets them against what is spiritual. Nothing could be further from the truth. Our erotic impulses are God’s lure in us. They are our spirit!

We experience them precisely as “spirit,” as soul, as that which makes us more than mere animals.

Our soul is not an invisible kind of tissue floating around within us, that stains when we sin and cleanses when we are in grace and which ultimately floats away from the body after death. Our soul is our eros, our minds and hearts in their deep restlessness.

Living the tension that arises out of that is the spiritual life. In that sense, everyone has a spiritual life – either a good one or a destructive one. Our spirits make it impossible for us to be static, we must move outside of ourselves.

That movement outward (which is experienced as a double tension: a hunger which drives us outward and an attractive outside person or object which draws us outward) is either beneficial to us or destructive. When it is beneficial, we have a good spiritual life; when it is destructive, we have a bad one.

It is important, therefore, that we do not identify the spiritual life with something which is exotic (for religious fanatics), extraordinary (for professional contemplatives), or as something which is not for those who are full-blooded and full of eros.

It is non-negotiable. If you are alive, you are restless, full of spirit. What you do with that spirit, is your spiritual life.

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Staring Chaos In The Face

May 1, 1987

We live in pain and division. In the world, in the church and within ourselves, there is much anger, hatred and bitterness. It seems ever harder to live at peace with each other, to be calm, to have simple joy within our lives and to not alienate someone just by being.  Within ourselves, despite the fact that we have virtually every practical reason to be happy – friends, health, material affluence – we experience anger, jealousy and woundedness. Seldom are we satisfied. Seldom are we truly free of bitterness, anger and feelings of being slighted and overlooked. Very seldom are we fully at peace with life and with others.

Beyond this, we live in a world that is full of painful division. It has its own wounds. Poverty, social injustice, the inequality of women, racism, abortion, sexual exploitation, narcissistic yuppies, untrustworthy political leaders, and simply millions and millions of persons caught up in excessive self-interest. It is hard for us, as adults in our world, to simply love, be understanding, and be at peace with others and with life. We are wounded, within and without. The temptation is towards bitterness, anger, withdrawal and paranoia. That is the road to hell because bitterness is hell.

What is needed to stop our slide toward this is reconciliation, at every level. What is reconciliation? It is reality that admits many levels. Here I want to speak of reconciliation as personal healing, as a coming inside of ourselves to a new wholeness and a renewed sense of childlike joy. Reconciliation, at this level, involves many things. First of all, it involves the recognition of our woundedness, our neuroses, our bitterness, our narcissism and narrow loyalties, and simply of our lack of joy. Just as for an alcoholic there can be no real change before there is the basic admittance of the condition of helplessness and need, so, too, in our struggle to come to personal healing. There can be no healing until we admit sickness. And we are ill: compulsive, angry, competitive, bitter, narcissistic, cynical, humorless, paranoid, self-pitying, jealous, sombre and joyless.

The roots of this woundedness stretch deep into our past, and beyond our past into the history of the world. We are not just part of the chain of love, but are likewise part of the chain of neuroses and wound that stretches back, ultimately, to Adam and Eve. We can sometimes point to certain events and persons that have hurt us deeply and blame much of our pain on them. However, these events and persons themselves point still further back to distant events and persons that wounded them. There was some original sin – and life has not been harmonious, nor seemed fair, ever since.

Reconciliation begins when we truly admit this. So long as we pretend otherwise, it is not even meaningful to use the word. When we claim our woundedness, however, we are brought face to face with our own helplessness, our need, our need for God. Then, as Henri Nouwen puts it, our hearts “become the place where the tears of God and the tears of God’s children can merge and become tears of hope.” (Love in a Fearful Land, Page 93) The first step in real reconciliation is the tearful acknowledgement of our woundedness, our helplessness, our sin. In this admission is a painful dying and a joyous rebirth.

Ashes make the best fertilizer. Tears wash away sin. Honesty induces the labor that gives birth to conversion. When we cry honest tears, we are flooded with the desire to pray, to forgive, to serve others, to build a just social order, to live more moral lives, to love beyond resentment and bitterness. That is the movement toward reconciliation and joy. Why? Because searing honesty brings us face to face with our own woundedness and helplessness; our helplessness, in turn, brings us face to face with a redeeming God. In that encounter, we learn that we are loved sinners. Gratitude is born. A genuine sanctity follows.

Novelist Iris Murdoch once stated that to be a saint is nothing less than to be warmed and vitalized by gratitude. Gratitude is the key to all. We come to personal healing and to reconciliation with others to the exact extent that we are warmed and vitalized by gratitude. To rid ourselves of resentment, bitterness, jealousy and paranoia requires a powerful fire. Only the gratitude that flows from knowing that we are loved, loved despite wound and sin, is a large enough flame to burn wound from our lives. The rest follows: When we are vitalized by gratitude we will automatically move toward deeper prayer, wider loyalties and a more embracing heart. Reconciliation begins when we stare our chaos in the face. In that, we will be brought face to face with our helplessness and our need for God. Prayer will then begin, crying out from the very depths of our being. We will be laid bare and will realize that we are loved sinners, in solidarity with other loved sinners like ourselves. Gratitude, reconciliation and healing will follow.

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