(First of a two-part series)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What kind of lovers are we?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

“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!”

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.

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.