Theologian-poet, John Shea, once commented on the resurrection appearances of Jesus:

            “On the road that escapes Jerusalem

            and winds along the ridge to Emmaus

            two disillusioned youths

            drag home their crucified dream.

            “They had smelled messiah in the air

            and rose to the scarred and ancient hope

            only to mourn what might have been.

            And now a sudden stranger falls upon their loss

            with excited words about mustard seeds

            and surprises hidden at the heart of death

            and that evil must be kissed upon the lips

            and that every scream is redeemed for it echoes

            in the ear of God and do you not understand

            what died upon the cross was fear.

            “They protested their right to despair but he said,

            ‘My Father’s laughter fills the silence of the tomb.’

            Because they did not understand, they offered him food.

            And in the breaking of the bread

            they knew the impostor for who he was –

            the arsonist of the heart.”

                                                            –The Hour of the Unexpected

The resurrection of Christ challenges us to new life – to believe, precisely, that there are surprises hidden at the heart of death: that every scream, tear and cry is redeemed, and that God’s laughter is stronger than death. Ultimately, belief in the resurrection asks us to believe that, despite a strong experience to the contrary, reality is gracious, light does triumph over darkness, love over self-interest, justice over oppression, peace over chaos, fulfilment over hunger. Faith in the resurrection is the trust that, in the end, everything is good.

But it is hard, almost impossible, to believe that. Why? Because experience constantly belies it. At least, so it seems. Despair comes easier than faith. Too often self-interest, loneliness, oppression, greed, bitterness and darkness triumph in our world. It seems naive not to believe that they represent our Omega, our final unresurrected, non-redeemed destiny. The disciples of Jesus, themselves, experienced a lot of doubt, even on the original Easter Sunday. They, like us, were mourning crucified dreams.

What reversed this? What moved them from despair to new hope?

It was not just the fact of the resurrection that changed them, for they doubted, huddled in fear, locked doors, despaired and tried to go back to their old ways of life even after they had seen the empty tomb. What brought resurrection faith was the in-the-flesh appearance of the resurrected Christ. Slowly, gently, through these appearances, Christ built up their faith until they no longer needed these appearances. We are built up in faith through appearances of Christ in the flesh. Where does the resurrected Christ have flesh in our world?

The resurrected Christ appears to us in the flesh in those persons who are arsonists of the heart, who truly make our hears burn within us. What kind of persons burn messianic holes within us? Those who speak of mustard seeds, who tell us about the value of what’s hidden, small and insignificant; those who tell us that pain can bring deep meaning and redemption; those who tell us that, despite all, reality is gracious and we can trust and love. They are those who tell us that we should be less afraid, that paranoia is an illness, metanoia is salvation; who tell us that bitterness is not noble, it’s hell, that cynicism and stoicism are forms of despair, that life is not tragic, that tears are redemptive, that the Christian call is to celebration.

They are those who tell us that it is not too late for us, that there is still plenty of time to live anew, to become what we were meant to be, beyond self-interest. They are those who tell us to make merry and dance, for all is well. These kinds of words stir what’s best within us, burn holes in us, stir faith, roll stones back from tombs, show us the resurrected Christ in the flesh.

And that flesh always looks ordinary. The arsonist of the heart invariably looks like someone we know, an ordinary somebody, like the resurrected Christ in his appearances – a gardener, a cook, a stranger.  It is interesting to speculate as to why the disciples so often didn’t recognize Christ after the resurrection. After all, he had only been dead for a day and a half when he first appeared. Yet Mary Magdala, who surely knew him well, took him for a gardener. Later, on the road and on the shore, his disciples took him to be a stranger, then a cook. Only in the breaking of the bread did they recognize him as the Christ.

That is why as we journey together, mourning so many of our crucified dreams, we would do well to be attentive to what causes arson in the heart. We should learn to look more closely at each other’s faces during the breaking of the bread.

Perhaps the most demanding asceticism within life is the discipline of joy. Rarely is this recognized. For most of us, the word joy itself rings superficial. It speaks of empty victory celebrations, mindlessness, lack of full awareness, naiveté and lack of depth. There is a cynical adultness in our reaction to joy: “If you knew better, if you were fully awake, you wouldn’t be this happy!”

Mary Gordon captures this excellently in her novel, Final Payments. She describes her feelings upon entering a room in which some university students were having a party: “I would look among the faces of the students for a face I could love. I would look for something original, something arresting in the shape of the chin or in the eyes, something that suggested the belief that there was residual pain that could not be touched by legislation. But they all looked so relentlessly happy and healthy that they did not interest me. I realized I was looking for someone who was sad, and I was angry at myself for making the equation, my faith’s equation, the church’s equation, between suffering and value.” (Final Payments, Page 139)  There is, too often, an equation, in the church and in the world in general, between depth and heaviness, joy and superficiality. This is a curious, but understandable, algebra.

Former Christian spiritualities tended to focus on the incompleteness of life…We live “mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.” There was great strength, and some real wisdom, in that. It gave people permission to cry, to taste life’s bitterness without feeling that there was something fundamentally wrong with them, and it helped people accept the truth that in this life all symphonies must remain unfinished. In this way, it helped stem frustration and allowed people to suffer the martyrdom of an incomplete and inconsummate life more calmly and heroically. But from saying that life will always be incomplete and full of inevitable pain, it is an easy, though false, step to affirm that therefore depth and maturity lie in being heavy, grim and stoic. Unfortunately, that has often happened and Christian asceticism has too often lost its link to joy. Newer spiritualities, generally, have fared no better. Superficial affirmations that we are a resurrection people and therefore should always be bouncy, upbeat, enthusiastic and never down, help re-enforce the false equation that joy means superficiality because the components are impossible to live. To live on this side of eternity means tears, incompleteness, bitter loneliness, and seasons of life wherein it is simply impossible to be bouncy and upbeat.

Other current spiritualities, at least as they are frequently lived out, affirm the equation between joy and superficiality by emphasizing anger, indignation, righteousness, and an undue sense of purpose and urgency about everything. In such a view, just as is the case in Marxism, joy again becomes something superficial, naive, and even something that positively stands in the way of genuine conversion and growth. Then, just as in the older view that life is a “valley of tears,” living becomes a grim, humorless, joyless and often bitter affair. These last words – grim, humorless, joyless and bitter – describe to some degree the church and secular circles we move in. Most frequently, these circles are sombre, anxious, over-burdened, cynical, humorless, heavy places, hard untender places. There is an undue sense of urgency and precious little childlikeness, freedom and simple joy. Worse still, and this is the real un-joy, our circles are also characterized by melancholy, distrust, anger, bitterness, suspicion, jealousies, and an unhealthy adultness and realism that lets us characterize laughter and play (as C.S. Lewis so aptly puts it) as a “disgusting and direct insult to the realism, dignity and austerity of hell.” (The Screwtape Letters, Page 58) As Christians, we need to be reminded that real asceticism lies in joy itself.

It is far easier, and it takes infinitely less discipline, to be heavy than to be light. Heaviness, resentment, anger, grudges, moroseness and lack of joy come naturally; light-heartedness, forgiveness, long-suffering, humor and joy have to be worked at. They require discipline and asceticism.

A commentator recently looked at the world and the church and remarked: “Crabby contentiousness is here to stay!” It is – so long as we confuse joy with superficiality and depth with heaviness of spirit.

Several years ago, after the pope had been heckled during his visit in Holland, a Belgian newspaper ran an editorial that commented as follows: The difference between the Dutch and the Belgians can be seen in their separate reactions to the pope. In Holland, people don’t keep the commandments, but they still want to be saints, so they demand that the commandments be changed. In Belgium, we don’t keep the commandments, either, but we know we aren’t saints and so we admit it and ask for redemption. Perhaps there is bias in that comment as it relates to the differences between the Dutch and the Flemish, but it is insightful in another way.

Our culture struggles with honesty, with admitting weakness. Much within us and around us invites us to rationalize, to make excuses, to demand that standards be changed or re-integrated because we cannot live up to them. Less and less, even in prayer and confession, do we find searing honesty and contrition. This proclivity to rationalize and not admit weakness and sin is, singularly, the most deadly temptation facing each of us. Failure to admit weaknesses and acknowledge our sin as sin is infinitely more damaging than weakness and sin themselves. Failure in self-honesty is the start of the sin against the Holy Spirit, the only sin that can never be forgiven. We are familiar with Christ’s warning that there exists a sin, a certain blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, which can never be forgiven. What is this sin?

Simply put, it is the sin of lying to oneself until one becomes so warped that one believes one’s own lie. Falsehood becomes truth. The reason this sin cannot be forgiven is not that God does not want to forgive it, but rather that the person no longer sees the need for forgiveness. Living in darkness is seen as living in light; sin is seen as grace; perversion as virtue. The person living in this state feels a certain disdain for what is genuinely virtuous, innocent and happy. S/he would not accept forgiveness were it offered.  This sin begins always with rationalization, with the failure to admit to sin. And much within our world and ourselves feeds this temptation to rationalize, to take ourselves off the hook, to make ourselves look good by denying our weakness and sin.

We see this everywhere, in our tendency to avoid confession of all kinds, in our inability to take personal responsibility for our own unhappiness, and in our tendency to not admit our moral misery. We see it, too, in our inability to be searingly contrite in confession – whether in a church or elsewhere. More and more, our confessions are more protests against moral authority and rationalizations than they are honest admissions of simply being human and sinning. More common than genuine contrition is anger towards moral authority, especially towards the church. In my opinion, this does not augur well. The heart of anger, as someone once wisely stated, is a rebellion against what it means to be human.

Too rare, today, is the confession of the publican: “I’m a sinner! I’m a mess! I am morally inept, unable to live what I believe. I do dumb things because I am weak. There’s no excuse. And, God, I’m miserable, be merciful!” More common is the tendency to blame the church, its moral authorities, or our past religious training for the fact that we suffer from guilt and un-freedoms which leave us less than happy.

Ruth Burrows, in her “Guidelines for Mystical Prayer,” states: “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 the complacent but unexpressed assumption that we lived for God.” (Page 69)

She goes on to tell the stories of two nuns with whom she lived. The first was a sister who was not faithful to her life of prayer. She lived in mediocrity for most of her life. However, she admitted it. She never played games, pretending she was anything other than what she was – mediocre. As she grew older, she made more of an effort at fidelity, but habits die hard and she died before she fully succeeded. But she died a happy death, a sinner asking God to forgive her a life of human weakness. The second sister also lived a life of mediocrity and infidelity in charity and prayer. Unlike the first sister, however, she never admitted this. To herself and to others, she postured saintliness. The result was a sad lie; harmful, most of all, to herself.

Only a saint can afford to live and die that role. The rest of us must live and die in searing contrition, sinners asking God and others to forgive us a life of weakness. In such honesty lies redemption. In anything less honest lie seeds, which, if allowed to grow, lead one to begin to blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.

We crave few things as deeply as self-expression. Deep within the eros that makes us restless and dissatisfied lies the incurable need to express ourselves, to be known, recognized, understood, and seen by others as unique and as having deep riches inside of us. Self-expression, being known and being experienced in our depth, is vital to living and loving. A heart which is unknown, unappreciated in its depth and lacking in meaningful self-expression is always a restless and frustrated heart. It is normally, too, a competitive and bitter one. But meaningful self-expression is difficult and full self-expression is impossible.

In the end, all of us live in obscurity, unknown, frustrated. Our lives are always smaller than our needs and our dreams. Ultimately, we all live in small towns, no matter where we live; and, save for a few brief moments of satisfaction, spend most of our lives waiting for a fuller moment to come, waiting for a time when we will be less hidden. From this frustration stems a tremendous restlessness and dissatisfaction. Each of us would like to be the famous writer, the graceful ballerina, the admired athlete, the movie star, the cover girl, the renowned scholar, the Nobel Prize winner, the household name. But, in the end, each of us is just another unknown, living with other unknowns, collecting an occasional autograph.

Our lives always seem too small for us. We sense ourselves as extraordinary persons living very ordinary lives. Because of this sense of obscurity, we are seldom satisfied, easeful and happy with our lives. There is always, too, much still inside of us that wants expression, that needs recognition, that feels that something very precious, unique and rich is living and dying in futility.  And, in truth, seen only from the perspective of this world, much that is precious, unique and rich is living and dying in futility. Only a rare few achieve meaningful self-expression.

There is a certain martyrdom in this. Iris Murdoch once said: “Art has its martyrs, not the least of which are those who have preserved their silence.” Lack of self-expression, whether chosen or imposed by circumstances, is a real death. Like all death, however, it can be paschal or terminal. If merely accepted as inevitable, it leads to bitterness and a broken spirit. If linked to the paschal mystery of Christ, if it is seen as an opportunity to enter the hidden life of Christ, it leads to a new ease in life, to restfulness, and it lays the axe to the root of our competitiveness, anger and bitterness.

Today we are called, as Christians, to the martyrdom of obscurity. Christianity always invites its adherents to martyrdom. To be a follower of Christ demands that one lay down one’s life. But this takes various forms. For Jesus and his apostles, as for many early Christians during the times of the persecutions, martyrdom meant physical death. They had to give up the possibilities that this life offered in order to remain true to a more distant possibility – permanent intimacy with God and each other. In dying, they entered the hidden life of Christ.

That type of martyrdom is still being asked of Christians in many parts of the world, notably in Latin America. In North America and Western Europe, however, at least of many of us, a different kind of martyrdom is being asked. Our culture persecutes its Christians in a different way. Affluence and leisure have created a higher psychic temperature. These have focused us on interpersonal, sexual, artistic, athletic and scientific achievement. In a word, they have focused us on self-expression. In our culture, meaningful self-expression is everything; lack of it is death. Yet, it is this death that paschally we must enter.

Not that we should, in the name of the Gospel, be uncreative, unresourceful, phlegmatic or stoic under-achievers. But we should, in the name of the Gospel, enter the hidden life of Christ within which that current of eros which drives us mercilessly toward self-expression can be more properly channelled, so that we do not go through life unhealthily competitive, bitter, angry, hopelessly restless, not at ease, and basically unhappy because we are ordinary and obscure. Only when we enter the martyrdom of obscurity will our ordinary lives be enough.

Thomas Merton, after experiencing solitude for several years in a hermitage, once wrote: “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 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’s no need to make an assertion of my life, especially so about its being mine, though doubtless it is not somebody else’s. I must learn to live so as gradually to forget program and artifice.” (quoted by J.H. Griffin, Follow the Ecstasy, Page 37)

Ordinary life can be enough for us, but only if we first undergo the martyrdom of obscurity and enter Christ’s hidden life. It’s not easy, however. In many ways, it is easier to sacrifice life itself than to sacrifice dreams.

Nikos Kazantzakis once commented: “People are impatient, but God’s not in a hurry!” That’s a good line to reflect upon as we enter into Advent. Looking at the religious history that leads up to the birth of Christ, we cannot help but be struck by the fact that God seemingly takes his time. The Old Testament is a history of longing and yearning: deep longing for running streams, hearts aching for consummation, people struggling for freedom. Yet, in the Old Testament, there is little fulfilment, there are few times where God intervenes directly. Mostly, it is a book about desire and frustration. And it is a long book.

Time passes, centuries pass, people grow old and pass on, and desires remain unfulfilled, frustration intensifies. Eventually, the cry arises: “Come, Lord, come! Save us! How much longer must we wait? When, Lord, when? Why not now?” The people grow ever more impatient, but God will not be hurried. Why not? Looking at that centuries-long first Advent, we might validly ask: Why didn’t God hurry? Why did he wait so long? Why all those centuries of longing and yearning, of frustration and tears? Does God have a cruel thirst for suffering? Can he afford to be so patient, so plodding in his plans, when we are suffering so much?

The Old Testament itself already answers these questions partly with its idea: “Every tear brings the messiah closer!” What is affirmed here is that there is an intrinsic connection between aching, pain and frustration, and the possibility of a messiah being born. Messiahs are born only after a long period of yearning. We see this already in human births. The process of gestation cannot be hurried. As well, in childbirth, there is an intrinsic connection between the pain the mother experiences and the possibility of new life.

This is also true of Christ’s birth. Advent, that centuries-long gestation period, could not be rushed. Tears, pain and countless prayers were needed to create the conditions for the pregnancy. They are still connected with the possibility of Christ appearing within life. God made the people wait for a messiah, not because he has a cruel thirst for suffering, but because the dynamics of love, life and birth demand Advent. They are realities that must be gestated. They, like messiahs, can only be born when people are ready for them – namely, when, through suffering and yearning and prayer, a space is created, a womb is formed. Further metaphors can be useful in understanding this:

John of the Cross, in trying to shed light on the process of coming to love, uses the image of a log coming to flame in a fireplace. When a green log is placed in a fire, it does not start to burn immediately. It needs first to be dried out. Thus, for a long time, it lies in the fire and sizzles, its greenness and dampness slowly drying out. Only when it reaches kindling temperature does it ignite and burst into flame. The log catches fire after an Advent. So, too, our entry into love, community, God’s kingdom. We become part of the fire, ignite into love only when we, damp logs that we are, are sufficiently dried out. We ignite in love only when we have sizzled sufficiently. We sizzle through desire and through aching. This is the meaning of Advent.

Teilhard de Chardin called it the “raising of our psychic temperatures.” In chemistry, as we know, it is possible to place two elements in the same test tube and not get fusion. Sometimes it is only after they are heated to a higher temperature that certain elements will unite. People are no different. Often it is only when psychic temperatures are raised sufficiently that there is fusion, reconciliation, respect, love, patience, chastity, space. Prior to that, there is separateness, egoism, narcissism, selfishness. We raise our psychic temperatures through desire, through prayer, through learning to wait for God.

Advent is about all this. In Advent, we learn that the pains of inconsummation, the daily frustration of incompleteness, the aching for a wholeness we can never attain, are pains that can be incredible means of purification. Every tear brings the messiah closer. Every frustration can make us more ready to love, to forgive. Every longing can lead us to deeper prayer. Every time we groan in our incompleteness, we are closer to helping gestate a womb within which the messiah can appear. It is with much groaning of the flesh that the life of the spirit is brought forth. Preparing for Christmas is not just a matter of getting the shopping done, the cards out, the tree up, the lights strung and the gifts wrapped. This is the season to yearn, to sizzle in inconsummation, to pray a little more, to be in touch with our deeper longings, to raise our psychic temperatures. It is the season to try to stretch our hearts and minds so as to create the space, the womb, within which a messiah can be born.

Later is the season to be jolly!

There is a tradition, strong among spiritual writers, that we will not advance within the spiritual life unless we pray at least an hour a day privately. I was stressing this one day in a talk, when a lady asked how this might apply to her, given that she was home with young children who demanded her total attention. “Where would I ever find an uninterrupted hour each day?” she moaned. “I would, I am afraid, be praying with children screaming and tugging at my pant legs.”

A few years ago, I might have been tempted to point out to her that if her life was that hectic then she, of all people, needed time daily away from her children, for private prayer, among other things. As it is, I gave her different advice: “If you are home alone with small children whose needs give you little uninterrupted time, then you don’t need an hour of private prayer daily. Raising small children, if it is done with love and generosity, will do for you exactly what private prayer does.” Left unqualified, that is a dangerous statement. It, in fact, suggests that raising children is a functional substitute for prayer.

However, in making the assertion that a certain service – in this case, raising children – can in fact be prayer, I am bolstered by the testimony of contemplatives themselves. Carlo Carretto, one of our century’s best spiritual writers, spent many years in the Sahara Desert by himself praying. Yet he once confessed that he felt that his mother, who spent nearly 30 years raising children, was much more contemplative than he was, and less selfish. If that is true, and Carretto suggests that it is, the conclusion we should draw is not that there was anything wrong with his long hours of solitude in the desert, but that there was something very right about the years his mother lived an interrupted life amid the noise and demands of small children.

John of the Cross, in speaking about the very essence of the contemplative life, writes: “But they, O my God and my life, will see and experience your mild touch, who withdraw from the world and become mild, bringing the mild into harmony with the mild, thus enabling themselves to experience and enjoy you.” (The Living Flame, 2, 17) In this statement, John suggests that there are two elements that are crucial to the contemplative’s experience of God – namely, withdrawal from the world and the bringing of oneself into harmony with the mild. Although his writings were intended primarily for monks and contemplative nuns who physically withdraw from the world so as to seek a deeper empathy with it, his principles are just as true for those who cannot withdraw physically.

Certain vocations, e.g., raising children, offer a perfect setting for living a contemplative life. They provide a desert for reflection, a real monastery. The mother who stays home with small children experiences a very real withdrawal from the world. Her existence is certainly monastic. Her tasks and preoccupations remove her from the centres of social life and from the centres of important power. She feels removed. Moreover, her constant contact with young children, the mildest of the mild, gives her a privileged opportunity to be in harmony with the mild and learn empathy and unselfishness. Perhaps more so even than the monk or the minister of the Gospel, she is forced, almost against her will, to mature. For years, while she is raising small children, her time is not her own, her own needs have to be put into second place, and every time she turns around some hand is reaching out demanding something. Years of this will mature most anyone. It is because of this that she does not need, during this time, to pray for an hour a day. And it is precisely because of this that the rest of us, who do not have constant contact with small children, need to pray privately daily.

We, to a large extent, do not have to withdraw. We can, often, put our own needs first. We can claim some of our own time. We do not work with what is mild. Our worlds are professional, adult, cold and untender. Outside of prayer, we run a tremendous risk of becoming selfish and bringing ourselves into harmony with what is untender. Monks and contemplative nuns withdraw from the world to try to become less selfish, more tender, and more in harmony with the mild. To achieve this, they pray for long hours in solitude.

Mothers with young children are offered the identical privilege: withdrawal, solitude, the mild. But they do not need the long hours of private prayer – the demands and mildness of the very young are a functional substitute.

Recently, I attended a funeral of a young man, a relative of mine, who had been killed in an automobile accident. He was 18, had recently graduated from high school and was just beginning adult life. A death like his is hard. How does one begin the impossible task of understanding such an accident? What words, if any, have use as consolation? When someone is struck down when life is really just beginning, even words about resurrection and eternal life can sound hollow. A compulsory disconsolateness takes over. One can only, as the author of Lamentations puts it, put one’s mouth to the dust and wait. Later, after some time and healing, words about resurrection and fuller life can begin to take on more meaning.

Perhaps it is best not to speak too much at funerals. Our stuttering and our inarticulateness perhaps say what needs to be said: “I am here. I care. I’ll suffer with you; but, for now, there is nothing that can be said!” And yet there is a need for words, some words; words which help clarify our relationship to the person we are burying and to the God we believe in. When someone close to us dies, especially a young person, we experience more than simple shock and hurt. We are left as well with feelings of guilt and fear. At one level, we feel guilty because we go on living while someone else dies. At another level, a more painful one, we feel guilty about the incompleteness of our relationship with the person who has died, even if that relationship was essentially a good one. There is a painful incompleteness in all relationships and nowhere is this more felt than at funerals. When someone dies, immediately there is a guilt: “I should have done more! If only…If only there was more time. If only certain things had been said, or not said.” There is the feeling that, given more time, we could have had a more complete relationship, affection could have been expressed more deeply, a more complete understanding and reconciliation could have been achieved. Now everything seems frozen in this state of incompleteness.

Coupled with this, especially if the one who died is young, there are feelings of fear and anxiety. We sense an unfinishedness, an unreadiness and even a certain brutality: “He is so young, so fragile still, so unprepared to give up life and to be so finally separated from home and friends, to be made to face the judgement of an eternity that he didn’t have full time to prepare for.” Like a mother who worries about her child when s/he first leaves home, we worry about the young who die. They are too tender still to be subjected to death, to irrevocable separation, to a terrifying newness, to a final judgement. Acceptance of the death of the young comes hard. Understanding comes harder still. As we search among the strands of hope and grasp for something to hang on to in the face of such a death, perhaps we can do no better than to seize onto the words: He is in better hands than ours.

Those are words of faith and they assure us that the God who gave this young man life, who gave him a gentle mother, a loving family and friends, who gave him exuberance and the lively life of the young, can be further trusted to bring that life to completeness and to bring him gently into life everlasting. In understanding death, it is useful to look at birth. When a child is born, s/he is born into the arms and care of a mother. Save for the tremendous care, gentleness and attention of a mother, a child is radically unready to live in this world. Given a mother, everything changes. There is some trauma in being born, but it is brief. Very quickly, the gentleness, patience and tenderness of a mother erase the trauma of birth. In the care of a loving mother, the passage from birth to adulthood is not ungentle and traumatic, but a delightful adventure in awakening.

God is our real mother – more tender, more loving and more understanding than any earthly mother. Our birth into eternal life through the birth canal of death must be seen just as our birth into this life. Without a mother, the trauma would be too much. Given a mother, everything changes. Just as here, in infancy, our mother was ever so tender and patient with us, in death, even more so, is God. The hands that receive us at death are not the rough hands of our world. The heart that embraces us there will not let anything be too much for us. We will, children that we are, be gently, understandingly, and tenderly guided and coaxed into eternal life. Being born into God’s arms will surely be as gentle and tender an experience as was being born into our mother’s arms. Doubtless, there will always be guilt and fear when people close to us die.  Death takes our loved ones away with a finality that nothing in this life will ever match. But in this parting, we are saved the biggest worry of all. When people leave us in this life to move on to new places and new things, we have no assurance as to what they might be falling into. When they leave us in death, we have such an assurance: They are in better, and infinitely more gentle, hands than ours!

As a child, raised on the old catechisms, I was taught to believe in purgatory. In that concept, after death you went to heaven, hell or purgatory. Heaven and hell were final. Once there, you went to no place else. Purgatory was a transition state, a place separate from heaven. It was understood to be a place of suffering, of very intense suffering. We were constantly reminded to pray for the souls in purgatory. Suffering there was nearly as intense as in hell itself. However, unlike hell, purgatory was not permanent and the pains suffered there were purifying and not further embittering. This belief was more specifically Roman Catholic. Protestantism never quite bought into the concept. For them, there was no intermediate place between heaven and hell.

Today, many persons, Protestant and Roman Catholic alike, are benignly indifferent to the question of purgatory. It is seen as a remnant of an older system of thought that is not Scripturally based and that has nothing vital to say about our relationship to God and each other. Occasionally, though with an increasing rarity, one still hears the question: “Does purgatory still exist?” Purgatory does exist, not because it is dogmatically nailed down in any single Scripture text, but because it is impossible to formulate a science of love and community without it. Likewise, it is impossible to speak of the paschal mystery without mention of purgatory. But these statements imply a certain understanding of what purgatory is.

Purgatory is a stage of loving, the initial pain of entering into community. Mystics have classically defined purgatory as the pain of letting go of a lesser love and life in order to accept a deeper love and life. What is interesting in that definition is that purgatory is not a place separate from heaven, a place you go to in order to be punished for your sins so as to prepare you for heaven. Purgatory is the pain of entering heaven.

This can best be explained by way of an example. Several years ago, a young man came to see me. At the time, he was also seeing a psychologist who had, in fact, sent him to me, a priest, to help him deal with some of his guilt. His guilt centred on his past life and had been triggered by his falling in love.  He was in his mid-20s and had, more than a year before, become engaged to a young lady whom he deeply loved and who deeply loved him. She was an attractive and exceptionally good lady. She was his first serious love… and his first moral love. In the four or five years just prior to meeting her, he had lived irresponsibly. Although he had come out of a good family background, he had, during his university years, drifted away from the church, from prayer and from the church’s teachings on sexuality. During this period he had lived primarily by the pleasure principle

What is curious is that during this period of irresponsibility, his threshold of inner conflict and pain was minimal. He had been self-confident, cocky, seemingly without excess anxiety, solidly convinced of his own goodness and not particularly given over to guilt. That self-confident world collapsed soon after he fell in love. In love with a very good and moral person, he became aware of himself in a new way. Initially, he simply felt guilty about his past sexual affairs, disappointed that in the light of meeting and falling in love with such a beautiful person, he had not previously been faithful to that relationship. Eventually, his inner conflict became more encompassing. To his credit, he sensed that he needed help to deal with this. He postponed plans to marry until, as he put it, he could get a better grip on his own selfishness and could work through some of his past and his guilt. What seemed strange at the time was why he should be in such pain now, just when he had so beautifully fallen in love. But his pain was necessary, purgative and redemptively produced by the love itself. Her love was saving him. It was a light that was showing him the dark corners of himself and it was also a power that was enabling him to face that darkness. This is the experience of grace. Grace is eventually ecstatic, but initially it can literally be as painful as hell.

Purgatory, as this story illustrates, is the redemptive pain that follows falling in love. It is not an arbitrary punishment for sin. It is the pain of entering community. The pattern of love, community and salvation is not loneliness-falling in love-ecstasy, but loneliness-falling in love-a brief taste of ecstasy-a long painful conflictual purgative experience-ecstasy.  Morris West once remarked: “All miracles begin with the act of falling in love.” Salvation begins there. Purgatory sits between initial and final salvation.