Alive With Prophetic Pain

August 1, 1986

Recently, I had a lengthy talk with a friend of mine who is a Catholic feminist. Articulate and not afraid to express her anger, she talked openly about her pain. She is frustrated; frustrated with inequality in the church, frustrated that she can never be ordained. The tears flowed freely; she wanted to leave the church she had grown up in, but something held her back.

A day later, quite by chance as I was doing a marriage interview, a young woman about to be married spoke tearfully about the same pain. She, too, was considering leaving the church. In telling their stories, both commented that what was really pushing them to consider leaving the church was the pain they experienced while attending the Eucharist. Both spoke of how, especially while at Eucharist, they filled with pain, anger and bitterness and were reduced to tears. Superficially, one might conclude that their pain is most acute at Eucharist because a man, a male, presides there. This however, I submit, is a secondary explanation. Their pain touches on something deeper, on something that must send a signal to the whole church. The pain they are experiencing, irrespective of the fact that it is mixed with other pains, is the pain of the prophet.

Scripture states that prophets die somewhere between the altar and sanctuary. Given that, should it be so surprising that people will experience their deepest pains at liturgy? Given that, too, the church had best be looking at and listening to those who feel killed at Eucharist, namely, those who have to die a little to stand in the sanctuary. For the sake of the church and its health, we had best embrace those persons and this pain…and we had better tell those persons how important it is that they not leave us. Both women I mentioned earlier were seriously considering leaving because they were convinced that this kind of pain at Eucharist indicates that it is best that they leave. However, as I suggested earlier, their pain is prophetic. It indicates that something is amiss, but amiss with the whole body, not just with one individual. Their pain also indicates that the Eucharist, in fact, is effective. By its very nature, it is meant to be a place of anguish as well as a place of celebration. The Eucharist is meant to break us open, to break us down, to grind and transubstantiate us into one community of love. Since we come to Eucharist far from united, each of us trapped in his or her own narcissism and selfishnesses, we need to be broken down before unity and community can take place. This doesn’t happen without pain and anguish.

However, it is not necessarily those who feel the most anguish who most need to be broken down or changed. Their pain indicates that there is something wrong in the body. I am heartened in the faith, even if not delighted emotionally, when I hear of somebody who fills with anguish at Eucharist. It means that s/he is sincere; that s/he has deep roots within the Eucharist community, and that the Eucharist is still working. And these, the ones who fill with pain, need be specially embraced and listened to. Those who feel oppressed, excluded, and who die (in whatever way) in the sanctuary are most often the prophetic voices even if they themselves are inarticulate. Their pain is not.

Karl Barth once stated that, in the incarnation, God descends, moving from “height to the depth, from victory to defeat, from riches to poverty, from triumph to suffering, from life to death.” In those who suffer, God is revealed… and this is nowhere more true than at the Eucharist. Pain is a word. Like God’s spirit it gives expression to what is too deep for words. Pain, accepted without final bitterness and persevered in, is prophecy. It’s God’s voice in a calloused church and world. It comes from conscience and speaks to conscience.

In the Eucharist, among other things, the passion and death of Christ are being re-enacted. Obviously, those who are suffering the most and who are doing some dying are the Christ figures. That is why it is so important those who feel like these women, those who fill with pain and tears at the Eucharist, remain in the church and remain at the Eucharist. Without prophetic tears, we grow ever more deaf.

And prophets die somewhere between altar and sanctuary. But their groan is a word, a voice, that cannot be killed.

Friendship Is Liberating, Too

July 2, 1986

I was raised to believe that prayer and private morality were the foundations of the spiritual life. They were non-negotiable. You were considered a good Christian if you prayed, privately and liturgically, and if your private morals were in order. The Catholicism I was raised on, while never denying the importance of social justice, rarely impressed upon me the fact that involvement with the struggle of the poor was just as non-negotiable as prayer and private morality.

The conscience of Christianity has changed. Perhaps the most critical development within all of Christianity these past years has not been the changes brought in by Vatican II, but the re-emergence of the idea that there can be no spiritual health without social justice. Liberation theologians from the Third World and social justice advocates within our own culture have helped irrevocably re-impress into the Christian conscience the idea that social justice is non-negotiable, that it’s not an extra we can choose to get involved in or not, just as prayer and private morality are not optional.

To be a healthy Christian means to pray, to live a good moral life, and to be involved with the poor. All three of these are non-negotiable. But this is not so easily conceded by all, as recent tensions within the church show. Social justice movements are often accused of not emphasizing sufficiently private conversion, private prayer and private morality. The criticism is made that they are producing a spirituality with an underdeveloped private conscience – that is, it doesn’t matter whether you pray, hold grudges, are one-sided, live sexually beyond the 6^th commandment, or attend church or not, as long as you work for the right causes.

Conversely, on their part, they make the criticism that, for the most part, Christianity has dangerously privatized conversion and produced a spirituality with an underdeveloped social conscience – namely, you are a good Christian as long as you say your prayers and attend church and obey the church’s sexual commandments, irrespective of whether you are ignoring or even positively exploiting the poor. There is some truth and some exaggeration in the accusations of both sides, though at this time, because of an imbalance in the direction of private conversion, I submit, the church must be more sensitive to the criticism made by the proponents of social justice. Their criticism, save for a few exaggerated expressions, is correct and biting: Why is it that a Christian may not, in good conscience, ignore the teachings of Scripture and the church regarding prayer and private morality, and yet s/he may, in good conscience, ignore the social teachings of Scripture and the church?

Thus, for example, the church’s teachings which have to do with sexual ethics (e.g. Humanae Vitae) tend to be seen as the deciding criteria determining who is good or bad as a Christian, while the church’s teaching on social issues (e.g. Mater et Magistra), which have equal moral and dogmatic authority, can be largely ignored in good conscience. That’s an imbalance in need of correction. But there is still a further imbalance: Through much pain, we have come to realize that prayer alone is not enough, social justice is also needed. Now, through more pain, we are coming to realize that prayer and social justice, together but alone, are also not enough.

Why do I say this? Because too many persons who both pray and do social justice are angry, bitter, lacking in gratitude and joy, and full of hate. What is lacking? In a word, friendship. A healthy spiritual life is anchored on three pillars, prayer, social justice, and friendship. The latter is as critical, and non-negotiable, as the former. Without the warming and mellowing that good friendship brings into life, we invariably lose gratitude and joy.

To pray and to do social justice is to be prophetic. But that’s a lonely and hard business. Prophets are persecuted, are powerless and are rejected. Because of this, it is all too easy to get angry, to feel self-righteous, to fill with bitterness, to become selective in our prophecy and to hate the very people we are trying to save. When this happens, gratitude and joy disappear from our lives and we are unable to live without the need to be angry. Invariably, then, both our prayer and social action become perverse. We become recognized not for our joy and love, but for our anger and bitterness. Our prophetic words are spoken not out of love and grief, but out of indignation. We turn poverty into an ideology by losing sight of the end of the struggle – namely, celebration, joy, play, embrace, forgiveness.

Only friendship can save us. Loving, challenging friends who can melt our bitterness and free us from the need to be angry are as critical within the spiritual life as are prayer and social justice. To neglect friendship is to court bitterness and perversion.

There are three key questions to ask ourselves when we are evaluating spiritual health:

– Do I pray every day?

– Am I involved with the struggle of the poor?

– Do I have the kinds of friendships in my life which move me beyond bitterness and anger?

Just Too Busy To Bow Down

July 1, 1986

Theologian Jan Walgrave, recently commented that our present age constitutes a virtual conspiracy against the interior life. That is a gentle way of saying that, within our culture, distraction is normal, prayer and solitude are not. There is little that is contemplative within our culture and within our lives. Why is this? We are not, by choice or ideology, a culture set against solitude, interiority and prayer. Nor are we, in my opinion, more malicious, pagan or afraid of interiority than past ages. Where we differ from the past is not so much in badness as in busyness, in hurriedness. We don’t think contemplatively because we never quite get around to it.

Perhaps the most apt metaphor to describe our hurried and distracted lives is that of a car wash. When you pull up to a car wash, you are instructed to leave your motor running, to take your hands off the steering wheel and to keep your foot off the brake. The idea is that the machine itself will suck you through. For most of us, that’s just what our typical day does to us, it sucks us through. We now have radios within our alarm clocks that go off before the alarm actually wakes us. Hence, we are already stimulated before we fully awake. Then we rise to a radio to shower and dress and ready ourselves for work, stimulated by news, music, commentary. Breakfast and the drive to work follow the same pattern. We listen to the radio, engage in conversation, plan our agenda, stimulated and preoccupied. We spend our day working, necessarily preoccupied, our minds on what we are doing. When we return home, there is TV, conversation, activities and preoccupations of all kinds. Eventually, we go to bed, where perhaps we read or watch a bit more TV. Finally, we fall asleep.

When, in all of this, did we take time to think, to be contemplative, to pray, to wonder, to appreciate, to simply enjoy, to be restful, to be grateful just for being alive, to be grateful for love, for health, for God? The day just sucked us through. I suspect that your coffee circles are similar to mine. Where I live, in the few contemplative moments that we do take, we sit around talking: “It’s a rat race. We should do something. We drive too hurriedly, we live too impatiently, we eat too fast, we work too hard, we are too preoccupied, too busy; we don’t take time to smell the flowers!” But nothing changes.

As Mark Twain once said: “It’s like the weather – everyone complains about it, but nobody does anything about it.”

Socrates once commented “the unexamined life is not worth living.” I suspect that our age would counter with “the unlived life is also not worth examining.” Lately, though, we have taken to examining our lives less and less. The effect of this is the same everywhere. We see it in the way we eat, in the way we drive, in our inability to relax, in our lack of humor and reflectiveness, and – need I say it? – in our lack of prayer. I do not want to be judgemental, but I suspect that most persons in our culture pray very little, at least in terms of private prayer. I suspect that the average person’s prayer life consist of a short hurried prayer in the morning, an even more distracted and hurried prayer before meals, and another hurried prayer before retiring at night. That’s precious little. But our inability to be contemplative doesn’t just show itself in our lack of private prayer. That is merely a symptom of something more deeply amiss. What our hurried lifestyle and our propensity for distraction is really doing is robbing us of solitude. As solitude diminishes, life seems less and less worth living.

Ironically, most of us crave solitude. As our lives grow more pressured, as we grow more tired, and as we begin to talk more about burnout, we fantasize about solitude. We imagine it as a peaceful, quiet place, us walking by a lake, watching a peaceful sunset, smoking a pipe in a rocker by the fireplace. But even here, we make solitude yet another activity, something we do. We attempt to take solitude like we take a shower. It’s understood as something we stand under, endure, get washed by… and then return to normal life. Solitude, however, is a form of awareness. It’s a way of being present and perceptive within all of life. It’s having a dimension of reflectiveness in our ordinary lives that brings with it a sense of gratitude, appreciation, peacefulness, enjoyment and prayer. It’s the sense, within ordinary life, that ordinary life is precious, sacred and enough.

How do we develop such a dimension within our lives? How do we foster solitude? How do we get a handle on life so that it doesn’t just suck us through? How do we begin to lay a foundation for prayer in our lives? How do we come to gratitude and appreciation within ordinary life?

Eric Fromm was once asked to give a simple recipe for psychic health in a culture that is as pressured as ours. “A half-hour of silence once a day, twice a day if you can afford the time. That will do marvels for your health,” he answered. Fromm’s answer wasn’t intended to be a religious one. He was no Thomas Merton. But his answer might have come from Merton. I can think of no better spiritual advice to give to a culture that conspires against interiority.

Try prayer and silence. One half-hour a day. Twice a day, if you can afford the time. It will do marvels for your health. As well, in a culture that conspires against the interior life, it will be a political act.

Dare To Be One In A Thousand

June 2, 1986

Recently, I was giving a talk to a group of young adults preparing for marriage and was trying to challenge them with the Christian teaching on love and sexuality. They were objecting constantly. When I’d finished speaking, a young man stood up and said: “Father, I agree with your principles, in the ideal. But you are totally unrealistic. Do you know what is going on out here? Nobody is living that stuff anymore. You’d have to be one person in a thousand to live what you’re suggesting. Everyone is living differently now.” I looked at him, sitting beside a young woman whom he obviously loved deeply and hoped to marry, and decided to appeal to his idealism. I asked him: “When you marry that lady beside you, what kind of marriage do you want, one like everyone else’s, or one in a thousand?” “One in a thousand,” he answered without hesitation. “Then,” I suggested, “you’d best do what only one in a thousand does. If you do what everyone else does, you will have a marriage like everyone else. If you do what only one in a thousand does, you can have a one-in-a-thousand marriage.” That’s not complex theology, it’s simple mathematics, but it needs to be said. More and more, as I lecture and write, I am being challenged by people, young and old, who are protesting against idealism. This protest takes many forms. Most commonly, it sounds something like this:

“Whether certain principles and values are true or false is not so relevant. What is relevant is that virtually everyone has decided to ignore them and live in a different way. Nobody is living like that anymore…everyone is living in this way now!” Implicit in this is that if everyone is living in a certain way, then this way must be right. Values by common denominator. Principles by Gallup poll.

Occasionally, this critique takes a more cynical bent: “Idealism is naive, for kids. The mature, the realistic, do not live with their heads in the clouds. Hence, adjust, update, recognize what is there and accept it; live like everyone else is living.” What an incredible and tragic loss of idealism! Such a philosophy voices despair because the deepest demand of love, Christianity, and of life itself is precisely the challenge to specialness, to what is most ideal. Love, Christianity and life demand that we take the road less taken, that we be in restless cogitation for a higher eros, that we be one in a thousand.

Our culture, on the other hand, is rejecting this and is swallowing us whole. The current culture is reversing Robert Frost’s famous adage and telling us “to take the road more taken.” Prophecy is seen as unrealistic, idealism as immature. We are growing ever more dumb. Hence, our task today is to be leaven, to be idealistic and in that way to be prophetic. Our culture’s demand that everyone be like everyone else is not so much malicious as it is despairing. The death of idealism is a child of despair, always. People are content to settle for an attainable second best only when, for whatever reasons (hurt, bad self-image, lack of hope) they have given up on ever attaining what is ultimately best. Today we need prophets. We need people who, when speaking of love, economics, values, sexuality and aesthetics, are compassionate enough to be empathetic to our real struggles.

In being prophetic in this way, we can show the world that we truly love it because, ultimately, nobody wants a homogenized culture, nobody wants the lowest common denominator within relationships, love and sexuality, nobody wants to despair that we can feed the hungry and create a more just world, and nobody wants a world which despairingly says: “The best, what’s truly special, cannot be reached, so simply settle for what is happening. Do what everyone else is doing, that’s good enough!” It’s not good enough. What’s truer and deeper inside of us knows that there is more and wants more. The purpose of this column is to appeal for a prophetic idealism.

Philosophies, theologies and spiritualities which proclaim “do what everyone else is doing and that is good enough: break the fifth commandment which says: “Thou shalt not kill!” John Paul II, in an address in West Germany in 1980, called on Christians to be prophets in this sense. Our culture, he stated, tends to declare “human weakness a fundamental principle, and so make it a human right. Christ, on the other hand, taught that a person has above all a right to his or her own greatness.”

Thirteen-year-old Anne Frank concurred: “That is the difficulty in these times: Ideals, dreams and cherished hopes rise within us, only to meet the horrible truth and be shattered. It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I must uphold my ideals, for perhaps the time will come when I will be able to carry them out.” (July 15, 1944, third-last entry into her diary.)

May we have the courage to uphold our ideals, even when we cannot fully live them.

A Life Handcrafted By God

June 1, 1986

A soul is not something that is given us; it’s something that’s formed. Lately, I’ve taken to looking at who and what helped shape me. What lives and incidents, love and bitternesses, inspirations and sins have helped mold the complex mix of sin and redemption that I am? One of the significant good persons that God put into my life was an aunt of mine, my Aunt Katie. She died this month and we gathered and said goodbye. She deserved more than we gave her – a short obituary, a large funeral, the regular compliments, a last liturgy, but these had to be true to her life and so were modest. God will give her the rest.

Her obituary will attract little attention. There’s nothing extraordinary in it. Like millions of others like herself, women who raise a family, suffer through hard times and bad health, and then die unnoticed by the world at large, there is nothing on the surface to attract attention. Her obituary describes her well:

“Catherine was an active CWL member. She also served the community by assisting with Christian ethics at the local school. For many years, she was involved in home care and enjoyed looking after the elderly in their homes. “Catherine loved her home and family. She enjoyed cooking and baking. Anyone who dropped in was treated to coffee and goodies, and you couldn’t leave until you had tasted one of each. She was especially gifted in handicrafts and sewing. All her children’s homes reflect her talent, in many quilts and crocheted items and handcrafted articles. Christmas morning was always a special treat with parcels of the newest hand-made goodies. Not only her children and grandchildren but her many friends and relatives received many of these items. She was a happy person with a great sense of humor. She enjoyed her life despite her many illnesses and will be missed by all of us.”

Nobody reading this obituary would think such a person extraordinary, as spiritually gifted. Yet she was one of those persons to whom one might safely have entrusted the fate of the world. Her gifts were not the kind that history usually records; certainly not Western history, which never uses words like “goodies” and “handcrafts.” Her life never made a huge noise. Her success was merely her life itself. There she succeeded splendidly, living and dying without bitterness despite hard times and more than enough occasion for frustration. Her family, her relatives, her friends and her parish community were her only trophies. We were her crown of glory and her crown of thorns, often bringing pride or tears to her eyes. To us, she brought her gifts, a deep faith, an extraordinary insight into Providence, a rare moral fibre, a warm compassion, and a talent for humor and teasing. Her life struck others as gentle, as having a peaceful rhythm to it.

There was reason. She was a contemplative, she talked to God in private. That was her secret, her centre. From that centre, she challenged and teased and understood us. Her life was hardly charmed. There was poverty, drought, bad crops, the ’30s, six kids to bear and raise, and a small Saskatchewan farm with too many rocks and too much work. For years, her life revolved around her stove, her kitchen table, her garden and her parish community. Always there was work to do, and she learned the rare art of celebrating within it. And in all of that, in the countless tedious hours of weeding gardens and picking berries, of cooking and cleaning, of canning vegetables and baking bread, of washing clothes and mending them, of feeding kids and going to church, of making do with bad health and bad crops, there was always the smile, the humor, the teasing, the concern about others. Always, too, there was hospitality and an open door. She fed, charmed, teased, humored and challenged whoever crossed her threshold. Like Jesus, she enjoyed table fellowship and good conversation.

She believed in the seamless garment, no loopholes or sabbaticals within religion and morality. And the anchor of it all, the centre that held it all together, was her faith. For her, there were no accidents, there was no fate, no luck, good or bad. There was only divine Providence, God’s finger. Everything, good or bad, was part of a conspiracy of accidents to bring about God’s will. If the crops were good and there was prosperity, God was blessing us. If drought or hail or bad luck left us with less, then this was another kind of blessing from God.

Some years before she died, the unity and charity within the parish community of which she was a part was torn by a bitter fight over an issue to do with the local school. In the middle of all the anger and dissension, their church burned down. Her interpretation was that of Abraham: “There, now, we have a signal from God that we have to stop fighting and get along!”

She died this month, without headlines, a widow in a small town, one of God’s little ones. But her life wasn’t small. She blessed many and helped shape souls. In God’s hidden plan, God’s bigger plan, she played an important role. A life like hers is a word from God.

Catherine R. (1915-1986), mother, grandmother, aunt, friend of many, parish member, minister of Christ’s hospitality and compassion, RIP. You fought a good fight.

No Salvation In Sexology

May 2, 1986

A nun I know was travelling one day by airplane and found herself engaged in a conversation with a lively young man. The young man had a myriad of questions, many concerning celibacy. At a certain point, he remarked: “Looking at you, what intrigues me is that you are obviously a person who has a zest for life. Now think, Sister, how much richer your life could be if you also had sex!” The nun simply replied: “Looking at you, what intrigues me is that you are obviously a person who is sincere and is searching for love. Love and sex aren’t always the same thing. Now think how much richer your life could be if you understood that!”

This incident can help us understand why Christ chose to incarnate his sexuality in the manner that he did, namely, as virgin. By living and loving as virgin, Christ was not in any way trying to teach – as has sometimes been taught in the past – that consecrated celibacy is superior to marriage, or that there is something within sexual relations that works against the spiritual life. Rather, his point, put crassly for the sake of clarity, is that the kingdom of God is more about the human heart than it is about the human groin.

Within Christ’s perspective, the kingdom of God is about love, the non-exploitive meeting of human hearts. It consists of God and all persons of sincere will coming together in an all-in-one-heart-and-flesh community of life within which hearts are bonded in friendship, love, celebration and playfulness. Sex has a place within that, a beautiful and intensely poignant place. But it is not the kingdom, and to be the beautiful gift it was created to be, it must always be linked to a chaste and permanent meeting of human hearts. It may never just be, as poet Margaret Atwood put it, “a dentistry, the slick filling of aches and cavities.”

Few messages are as urgently needed by our age as this challenge from Jesus to properly sort through the relationship between love and sex. We are a society that has all but turned sexology into a doctrine of salvation. The classical language of salvation (which is the language of love) – “paying the price of sin,” “giving until crucifixion,” “suffering unto death” – has, for the largest part, been replaced by the language of sex. Love and salvation are talked about more in the language of Masters and Johnson than they are in the language of Christ.

Accordingly, for too many of us, love and salvation are seen more as the temporary mating of human bodies than as the permanent meeting of human hearts. The price we pay for this is loneliness. It is no mere accident that we are probably the loneliest society in the recorded history of humankind. We are also probably the most sexually active. Somehow, the increase in sexual activity has not translated itself into an alleviation of loneliness and restlessness. For all our sexual freedom and sophistication, we are caught up ever more deeply in restless chaos. There is salvation in love alone. There is no justification in sex alone. The algebra of Christ’s virginity is that, among other things, friendship and love, celebration and community, happiness and the kingdom, lie in the coming together of hearts. Sexuality contributes to the building up and the consummation of this community of hearts only when it helps lead to the joy and order that come from fidelity and chastity.

As Christians, therefore, we must incarnate our sexuality into the world in such a way that it constantly shows that love and the heart are the central realities of life and the kingdom. We do this not by attempting to be asexual, or by setting the enjoyment of sex against the spiritual life, but rather by attempting to be sexual in the proper sense – namely, in the way that Christ was. This can be done whether we are celibate or married. If we are celibate, and chaste, and yet are persons who are interpersonally unfearful, clearly sexual and warmly human, then we cannot help but challenge an age which, for all its searching, lives in loneliness and pain. Celibacy, if properly lived, can be an important way to keep alive, visible and in the flesh, that part of the incarnation which tells us that, when one is speaking of love, the human heart is the central organ.

Marriage, if properly lived out, is also excellently suited to teach this. Married persons imitate and help keep incarnate Christ’s sexuality just as celibates do. Christ’s virginity was not intended to set the joys of sex against the spiritual life. Sexually consummated love, if it is respectful, aesthetic, and linked to fidelity is also a visible, enfleshed prolongation of the incarnation. Since married love puts sexuality and love into their proper relationship, it visibly prolongs and transubstantiates Christ’s sexuality. It not only helps keep incarnate the life-creating power of sexuality, but it challenges powerfully the misconstrued notion that suggests that sex, disembodied from chastity and commitment, can in any way play a meaningful role in bringing final happiness and fulfilment into human life…or, indeed, be of any use in the building up and consummation of God’s kingdom.

How much richer our lives could be if we understood that!

Hatred Is Not Always Bad

May 1, 1986

Our age is an angry one. Hatred abounds, both within the church and outside of it. A world rages in woundedness. Liberals hate conservatives, conservatives hate liberals; feminists tend to hate men and men, in turn, tend to hate feminists; the poor tend to hate the rich and the rich tend to despise the poor; an emerging laity in the church tends to hate clerics and clerics too often return the favor; countless people are angry about the past, about churches and governments in the past, about their upbringing, about their religious and moral training, and with persons and incidents which shaped and wounded them.

The times are not pleasant. Anger, hatred, indignation and bitterness are around and are no longer viewed as vices that one should apologize for. Rather, these are identified with passion for truth and justice. There is an overall atmosphere of hypersensitivity, the slightest unqualified statement can deeply offend someone.

There are two ways of interpreting what all this means. In one view, hatred is seen as mainly negative, as a sign of people’s immaturity and their unwillingness to recognize and deal with their own anger and woundedness. As Gail Sheehy sarcastically put it: Today it seems everyone needs a cause. Would that people were more honest and admit that they are engaged in a far humbler struggle – growing up! Obviously, there is some truth in this: if all of us were perfectly whole and mature, there wouldn’t be anger and hatred around. But the issue is not that simple. It is not just because of immaturity that many persons involved in personal and social struggle go through periods of intense hatred. It is not accidental that, at times, women can hate men, poor can hate rich, liberals and conservatives can hate each other, people can hate their pasts, local churches can hate central authority, and citizens can hate their country.

What is strange when one looks at this is that people, in fact, hate someone or something that they deeply love. That only appears to be schizophrenic. When one kind of love is not possible, another side of love – hatred – takes over. Several years ago, in this column, I wrote a piece entitled “Getting in Touch with Hate” (WCR, March 14, 1983). In that article, drawing upon the thought of Rollo May, I suggested that hatred is not the opposite of love, apathy and indifference are. Hatred, rather, is love’s way of grieving, it’s the way wounded love rages, it’s love’s refusal to resign. In that article, I suggest that hatred is not always wrong and un-Christian, it can be healthy, just as grieving can be an aid to regain health and resiliency after the death of someone close to us, so too hatred can be an aid to healing after being wounded by someone.

This can be understood by comparing hatred with grief. Hatred is like grief. It comes from the same part of us, the heart: is caused by the same thing, hurt; follows the same rules; and comes fraught with the same dangers if it degenerates into self-pity. There are rules for grieving and for hatred. Thus, for example, not all grief is healthy. Grief is unhealthy when (1) it is not in proportion with the event which triggered it; (2) when it is self-pitying; and (3) when it is protracted over too long a time. In these cases, grief does not help one regain one’s sense of health and bounce. It, instead, causes narcissism, depression and self-pity.

Hatred operates under the same rules. It can be healthy and a source of healing, but two rules must be respected: (1) It must be honest, and (2) it must not be protracted over too long a period. To be healthy, hate must be honest. Our biggest temptation when we are angry and bitter (and the greatest obstacle to healing) is our propensity to distort, to lie, and to let things get out of proportion. Because we are hurt and hateful, we invariably begin to paint the one who has hurt us as demon, devoid of all good.

When in hatred we begin to lie and to distort, hatred does not lead to health. Rather, it leads to self-pity and self-righteousness. We become bitter and bitchy. In dishonesty, we warp ourselves and put ourselves on the road toward sin against the Holy Spirit. Then, too, for hatred to be healthy and healing, it must have a definite time limit. A friend of mine tells the story of his older brother’s death. At age 19, his older brother was killed in a car accident. His mother became despondent. For two years afterwards, she cried habitually, withdrew from social life and was generally depressed.

One night, nearly two years after her son’s death, she was cooking supper and crying softly to herself. Her husband came up behind her, took her by the shoulder, and said firmly: “That’s enough! Enough crying! Let it go! You have to start living again.” From then on, she stopped crying and started living with some enthusiasm and vigor again. Looking at that example, we see that it was important that she had her cry, two years of it. Her tears were therapeutic. But it was also clear that at a point, someone – she or someone else – had to say: “Enough! Let it go!” No one should cry 20 years after a death (or, at least, there should be a different kind, a less bitter kind, of tears). The same is true for hatred.

Hatred…a complex phenomenon, good and bad, love’s tears!

A String Of Empty Tombs

April 2, 1986

Spring and Easter, a conspiracy between nature and religion, creation and redemption, to make newness, to thaw things out, to rejuvenate and re-virginize, to make sunshine, to warm frozen places, and to produce new buds on the trees and new enthusiasm in the heart! It’s the season of the resurrection. At the end of winter, sometime after the first equinox, God is hard at it, melting earth and melting hearts.

We celebrate many things with Easter. The resurrection is not just the mystery of Christ rising from the dead and of our future rising from the dead. It’s life’s spring, the event and power that brings new life out of what’s been crucified by winter, from what’s died, from what lies frozen and lifeless. Like nature needs spring each year, so, too, we need regular resurrections. Much in us lies frozen, crucified, lifeless. Elie Wiesel once said: “Life and death are not separate domains, they meet in us, though not in God. It is possible to live with death: all one needs to do is to turn one’s back on living. It is possible to be dead and not know it.” It is possible to be dead and not know it, to be asleep and still think we are awake, to be bitter as a slave and still think we are loving.

Physical death, for most of us, comes last. First, there is the long series of other deaths, of crucifixions, of freezings over. In this, too, we follow the pattern of what happened in Christ. Christ came as God’s perfect image, the most precious, most sensitive, most special human being ever. It was that, the uniqueness and goodness, which was crucified. It is that that still gets crucified, in us. It is precisely in those areas of our lives where we bear God’s image the most perfectly, where we are most precious, most sensitive and most special, that, invariably, we get crucified. What’s calloused, tough, homogenized, survives, living on, helping us go through the motions of life; our automatic pilot in death. But what is most precious in us ends up in a tomb: A dream crucified, a Christ entombed, a winter set in, a human being frozen over. Before being buried in our graves we are, largely, buried in our lives.

Mainly because of this, we begin to sin. Our infidelities, our lack of gratitude, our lack of prayer, our propensity to misunderstand and to hurt each other, our need to lie and rationalize, and our excessive self-preoccupations, occur mostly because what’s best in us, the image of God, lies frozen (assets we cannot touch). Our poverty and bitterness come from that. And so we begin to settle for second best. We make do: a life without enthusiasm, without fire, with passion quieted, with joy frozen. We despair, not by suicide, but by protest, protesting that our lives are without new possibilities: “If you really knew what my life is like, you wouldn’t tell me I could be happy!” Eventually, hope fades into agnosticism. Agnosticism invariably turns to despair. Bitterly, we accept our limits: “This is the way I am, this is the way things are, this is the way it has always been. This is the way it will always be!” Nothing can surprise us anymore. We know what is possible for us, and what is possible in no way approximates our dreams.

So we live on, far from fully alive, on automatic pilot, the Christ in us lying in the tomb, what’s most precious in us frozen under bitterness. There is darkness at the end of the tunnel, save for one thing: Spring and resurrection! Every spring, a warm sun reappears and nature and ourselves are given the opportunity to unthaw, to resurrect. Some years back, I received an Easter card which contained only these simple words: “May you leave behind you a string of empty tombs!” That’s the challenge of Easter: To resurrect daily, to leave behind us a string of empty tombs, to let our crucified hopes and dreams be resurrected so that, like Christ, our lives will radiate that, in the end, everything is good, reality can be trusted, love does triumph over apathy and hatred, togetherness over loneliness, peace over chaos, and forgiveness over bitterness. We need regular resurrections. Spring and the resurrection are the season to let ourselves be unthawed, to revirginize, to come to second naivete, to think young again, to give the child in us scope again, to be open again to new possibilities, to surprise, to a new frolic under the sun after a cold bitter time.

Nature, all of it including ourselves, is incredibly resilient, incredibly resurrectable. Given any chance, life wins out, brokenness heals, bitterness melts, new seeds form and life bursts forth from what once appeared to be dead. Crucifixions, bitterness and winters will come, but spring and resurrection are arsonists, both of them. So, as a song once perfectly put it:

Just remember in the winter

Far beneath the bitter snows

Lies the seed that with the sun’s love

In the spring becomes the rose.

Spring and Easter, 1986. May we all leave behind us a string of empty tombs.

Love Through Locked Doors

April 1, 1986

Several years ago, a family I know well lost a daughter through suicide. She was in her late 20s and had become dangerously depressed. An initial attempt at suicide failed. The family then rushed round her. They brought her home, strove to be with her constantly, sent her to doctors and psychiatrists, and generally tried everything within their power to love and coax her out of her depression. It didn’t work. Eventually, she did commit suicide.

Looking at her death and their efforts to love her and save her life, one sees how, at a certain point, human love can be helpless. Sometimes all the effort, patience, and love in the world cannot get through to a frightened, sick, depressed person. In spite of everything, that person remains locked inside herself, or himself, huddled against love, unfree, inaccessible, bent upon self-destruction. None of us who have ever dealt with a situation like this have been immune to the deep feelings of discouragement, guilt, hopelessness and fear that ensue. Love, regardless of effort, seems powerless.

Fortunately, we are not without hope and consolation. We believe in the ultimate redeeming power of love, and in the power of a love beyond our own that can do that redeeming. God’s love is not stymied in the same way as is ours. Unlike ours, it can go through locked doors, enter closed hearts, and breathe peace and new life into frightened paralysed persons. Our hope and our belief in this is expressed in one of the articles of our creed: “He descended into hell.” What an incredible statement that is: God descended into hell. If that is true, and everything in Christ’s life and teaching suggests it is, then the very existence of an eternal hell is cast into doubt and the human heart has its ultimate consolation: Love will triumph.

We haven’t always understood those words to mean that, however. Mostly, we have taken them to mean that, between his death and resurrection, Jesus descended to some hell or limbo where lived the souls of all the good and just persons who had died since the time of Adam. Once there, Jesus took them with him to heaven. More recently, various theologians have interpreted this article of the creed to mean that, in his death, Christ experienced alienation from his Father and, thus, experienced in a real sense the pain of hell. Irrespective of the merits of these interpretations, the doctrine of the descent into hell is first and foremost a doctrine about love, God’s love for us, and the power of that love to go all lengths, to descend to all depths and to go through virtually every barrier in order to redeem a wounded, huddled, frightened, paranoid, alienated and unfree humanity.

By dying as he did, Christ shows that he loves us in such a way that he can descend into our private hells. His love is so empathetic and compassionate that it can penetrate all barriers that we construct out of hurt and fear and enter right into our despair and hopelessness. We see this idea expressed powerfully in John 20. Twice John presents the disciples as huddled behind closed doors, locked in because of fear. Twice John has Jesus come through the locked doors and stand in the midst of that frightened and depressed group and breathe peace into them. That image, Christ going through locked doors, is perhaps the most consoling image within our entire faith. Put simply, it means that God can help us even when we cannot help ourselves. God can empower us even when we are too weak and despairing to even, minimally, open the door to let him in. That is not only consoling, it is also corrective of a bad pelagian spirituality that many of us were raised on.

I remember a holy picture that was given to me as a child. I saved it for years and its message has haunted me always in my darkest times. The picture shows a man, huddled and depressed in fear, in the dark behind a closed door. Outside the door stands Jesus with a lighted lantern, knocking softly on the door. The door has a knob only on the inside, the man’s side. Jesus has no doorknob. He can only knock. Beneath the picture, and everywhere in it, is written the implication: Only you can open that door! Salvation depends upon your effort. That picture is not wholly without its merits, but ultimately what it says is untrue. Christ does not need a doorknob. Christ can enter closed doors. Christ can enter rooms and hearts that are locked out of fear.

The picture expresses a truth about human love. In the human arena, these are the dynamics of love; unless a heart opens from the inside, human love can only knock and it must remain outside. But that is not the case with God’s love, as John 20 depicts. God’s love can descend into hell. Unlike our love, it is not left helplessly knocking at the door of fear, depression, hurt and sickness. It does not require that a person, especially a sick person, first find the strength to make the initial move to open himself/herself up to health. In that lies ultimate consolation. There is no hell, no private hell of wound, depression, fear, sickness or even bitterness that God’s love cannot and will not descend into. Once there, it will breathe out the peace of the Holy Spirit.

Godlessness and Good Friday

March 2, 1986

The German, poet, J.C.F. Holderlin, once commented on the sad mood of our age. “Now is the night of the world,” he asserted. “God has withdrawn, as the sun sets below the horizon.” His words speak of discouragement, lost innocence, deep tiredness and despairing realism. But they capture a mood, one not only felt in our time but felt every time God appears to die in our lives, the mood of Good Friday.

We live too close to the edges of good Friday. Too often the sun does seem to set and leave us alone, hopeless and helpless against the godless, the chaotic. The powers of death constantly surround us.

What are the powers of death? What killed Jesus and caused the darkness and death of Good Friday? Generally, when we attempt to answer that, we zero in on the visible forces which we hold responsible for war, injustice, racism and poverty. These deal death. These are the godless. They crucify Christ. However, when we actually begin to name government and military leaders and pinpoint the ideologies and multinational corporations which we hold responsible, we realize that the real powers that crucify Christ lie beneath all this. What killed Christ then, and kills him now, is joylessness, unchildlikeness, childlessness, cynicism, woundedness, jealousy and the rationalization, dishonesty and lying that we do to prevent ourselves from seeing and accepting our own joylessness. Holderlin was right. We are a joyless and sad people. Our sun is setting, our mood is heavy, too heavy.

I know that this is true of my own life and of the lives of many of those whose lives touch mine. There is too little joy in our lives. We are always so serious, intense, preoccupied, tired, jealous and angry at many things. In our lives, there is so little of the child (and, in fact, too few children). For most of us, the very word joy is considered as superficial. We associate it with empty celebrations, thoughtless chatter, charismatic highs and childish naiveté. Nobody ever quite dares express the equation, but, in the end, it is affirmed that to really understand, to be un-naive, is to be joyless. Happy people? Poor naive souls, if they really understood, they wouldn’t be happy! Joy is considered a naiveté, something mature persons eventually outgrow. If Good Friday can do anything for us this year, let us pray to God that it might help us see this, our joylessness, our non-admission of that, and the death that this deals. For it is precisely our refusal to admit our miserableness to ourselves, the refusal to see how sombre, preoccupied, angry and unchildlike we are, that makes us persons so capable of cynicism, but not of joy; of sneering, but not of laughing.

In our world, to borrow a phrase from C.S. Lewis, the phenomenon of laughter and play is too frequently considered a direct and disgusting insult to the realism and dignity of hell, that is, our own miserableness. It’s not that any of us want to be joyless. I remember as a child hating Good Friday, hating it because it meant fasting, being presented with images of a dying Christ, having to be sombre and having to abstain from play and celebration. The child in all of us still reacts the same way to Good Friday. In the end, we’d rather not have it. We hate it. None of us wants to be sombre and abstain from play and celebration. But as Holderlin says, and as our experience too frequently verifies, our sun does seem to be setting. We do appear ever more helpless to create community, to be joyful, to laugh and play as children. However, from this pain can come a new openness to healing. Our experience of godlessness, coldness, chaos and abandonment can create an awareness of the need for God. With Good Friday can begin the cry for Easter Sunday. As C.S. Lewis once said, there is only one difference between hell and purgatory, the admission of miserableness and need. Good Friday is an invitation for that admission.

If we can do that, if we can admit our joylessness and stop our pretenses, then Good Friday may have its day. Good Friday, godless Friday. Let the powers of death parade themselves as final. Let darkness have its hour. Death and darkness are not final. Way back when, they already had their day. Then the tomb opened, the unmovable moved. Death, like everything else, had had its 15 minutes of glory. Heaven turned hell to purgatory and then turned purgatory to heaven. Both the sun and the son rose again. There were alleluias that day. Darkness is always temporary, as is the suspension of play, celebration and joy.

O dark, black Friday, O feast of miserableness, O feast of hope, from your darkness may a new day emerge, may there be a new sunrise, new alleluias.

Veronica’s Veil

March 1, 1986

It was a Friday afternoon

But the day had not been marked

out for crucifixion

Because the sky was not black

And I, a professional Simon, was

rushing off to celebrate

Already done with my week’s work

Of helping others carry crosses.

That’s why I was so surprised

That you stopped me in high daylight

And wrestled a cross into full view

Letting it writhe live

Speaking

The struggle you could not articulate.

I tried to wrestle words

Onto your cross

When your pain wanted only a towel

To accept and soothe

And blot away, if only temporarily,

The pain that pulses from wound.

I will never forget your face

Neither will Veronica

Left with the towel, a shroud

Impressed, stamped, indelible

With the pain and the beauty

Of the suffering incarnate Christ.

The ‘Loser’ As Victor

February 2, 1986

Most of you, I am sure, will instantly recognize this name, Eleni – Eleni Gatzoyiannis, the Greek peasant woman killed by Communist guerrillas in 1948, the subject of Nicholas Gage’s extraordinary book, the subject of a major motion picture. Who is she? Why is her story, among the countless biographies, documentaries and motion pictures, more significant than most of the other stories?

Her story is more important than most in that her person was extraordinary and in that it gives us an extremely rare and privileged understanding. There are two ways to understand. The first is intellectual. We learn through study, through tracking down facts and then relating them into some mental picture, some model, of what has happened, what is happening, of what the truth is. But there is a deeper way of understanding. Philosophers call it connaturality, understanding through compassion. Here we learn by linking ourselves to someone else’s life and experience. That other’s heart is the instrument of research, the litmus paper thrown onto the acid. In sharing that person’s experience, we begin to understand contemplatively, in the understanding Socrates called for when he said: “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

We see this, for example, in The Diary of Anne Frank. Thousands of well-researched books have been written about World War II. Yet the memoirs of this 13-year-old girl, just by themselves, give us an exceptional understanding of the real nature of the Second World War, of its real tragedy. The same holds true for Sheila Cassidy’s The Audacity to Believe. You can read a hundred books on what is happening in Chile, or you can read Sheila Cassidy. These stories see the event through one heart and in that they capture the event in a way that historical facts alone, irrespective of how well they are researched, never can.

Nicholas Gage’s story of his mother’s struggle and her ultimate execution by Greek Communists in 1948 is such a story. Books like these are rare. They come along every decade or so.Eleni is the story of a woman, of a war, of a family, of jealousy, of an execution and of a son’s struggle to deal with the loss of his mother. But it is more: It’s the eternal story of woman, of war and violence, of virtue and sin, of patriarchalism, of ideology become unhinged and of love’s final triumph. It’s Christ’s story, too, more than full of death and resurrection. Its author, Nicholas Gage, was nine years old, living in the Greek mountain village of Lia, when Eleni, his mother, was brutally tortured and executed by Communist guerrillas.

Young Nicholas who had escaped with his four sisters is sent to America to join his father who is living there. As an adult, he becomes a journalist and eventually returns to Greece as the foreign correspondent for the New York Times. His mother’s death has always haunted him and now, back in Greece, it becomes an obsession. The obsession, however, is fixed mainly around the idea of revenge. He begins to search for his mother’s killers. Eventually he quits his job as a journalist and begins, full-time, to track down those responsible for his mother’s death. But in doing this, in piecing together his mother’s story and the reasons for her death, his motives change, the obsession switches from the desire for revenge to the desire to recapture, for himself and his sisters, his mother’s soul. And the story he uncovers unearths a woman, 30 years dead, of extraordinary soul.

Caught alone in a civil war with five young children, Eleni vows that at all cost, even at the cost of her own life, she would save her family and her own integrity. Eventually, it costs her her life .She dies the cruellest of all deaths, violated, broken by torture, betrayed by friends, shot and dumped into a public grave.

Nicholas eventually confronts the man who tried and sentenced her. But, in recovering his mother’s soul, he also recovered her spirit. The mother he had been deprived of in life, now in death, gives her son the ability to live beyond vengeance.

That’s the surface story, but underneath these facts lies a rare and privileged insight into other things: poverty, the struggle to survive jealousy, the strength of family ties, patriarchalism that perennially disprivileges women and the kind of faith in God that can sustain people.

In the end, this is a prayer book. Reading Eleni is Lectio Divina, spiritual reading, in the classical sense. Among other things, prayer is meant to give a certain type of insight, namely, the kind of insight that sees history as God sees it, that is, from the point of view of the losers. Eleni’s story, like Christ’s, is history written from the point of view not of the conqueror, but of the conquered. That’s always good spirituality.

Worshipping In Anguish

February 1, 1986

Frequently, the complaint is made that our Christian gatherings, especially our Eucharists, are boring and devoid of a vital connection to life. Immediately, the temptation is to respond by attempting to make our Eucharists more lively, more interesting, more full of song, more joyous. This, I submit, just as frequently compounds the issue as solves it. However good these things are in themselves, the root of the complaint is that, in the end, good singing and better homilies notwithstanding, real life remains untouched.

Why?

Langdon Gilkey once commented that the task of Christian worship is not to celebrate the God of special religious places, but the God of ordinary places. This is equally true regarding ourselves. Worship must not just celebrate the heart that people feel they should bring to religious places, but the heart as it beats in ordinary places. Ordinary places contain some joy and some gratitude, but they also are filled with bitterness, suspicions, pettiness, paranoia, jealousy and more than enough heaviness. We come together from ordinary places with these things partially paralysing the joys of our hearts and, as we sit listening to the word and gather ’round the altar, these things do not automatically disappear. Our Eucharists, like our homes and places of work, are filled with suspicions, jealousies, judgements, paranoia and misunderstandings. We stand around the Eucharistic table with the same wounds we bring to our other tables. Worship, then, is meant not just to celebrate our joys and gratitudes: its task is also to break us open, to make us groan in anguish, to lay bare our paranoia, and to lessen the jealousies and the distance that sits between us. Here we are asked to be vulnerable before each other, to forgive and embrace each other. Bitterness, hatred, and suspicion are supposed to disappear..and liturgy is supposed to help that happen. It is on this point that our Eucharists are most anemic.

What’s wrong generally is not that people don’t sing and dance, but that people don’t break down. There is too little anguish in our Eucharists. To become one heart with each other involves anguish, the painful letting go of paranoia, selfishness, bitterness, hurt, jealousies, pettiness, narrowness of vision, aggressiveness, shyness and all those other things that keep us apart. If our Eucharists do not succeed in breaking down the barrier that separate us from each other, then we can never hope to succeed in breaking down these same barriers in the world. As Jim Wallis put it: “In worship, the community is edified…if it does not edify itself here, it certainly will not do so in daily life, nor in the execution of its ministry to the world.” Christ was effective because Christ was vulnerable. He was also often in anguish. It is interesting that the only ritual that Christ asks us to repeat over and over again is the Eucharist. In it, we remember him as broken, poured out, empty, heartbroken, frightened, humiliated, vulnerable, in anguish. To properly celebrate this ritual, we need to have in our hearts what Christ had in his at the first Eucharist. What was he feeling then?

Joy and thanksgiving. Yes. Love for those at the table with him. Surely. But beyond this, his heart felt anguish, deep longing and fear at the prospect of the pain that was now a certainty before intimacy and community could be achieved. It would perhaps do all of us good occasionally to leave the Eucharist and, instead of going off for a lively brunch with the folks, go off as Jesus did after the first Eucharist, to a lonely place to have an agony in the garden and to sweat some blood as we ask for the strength to drink from the real chalice – the chalice of vulnerability. Occasionally when St. Augustine would hand the Eucharist to a communicant he would, instead of saying, “the body of Christ,” say: “Receive what you are.” Augustine had perceived, for whatever reasons, that the words of consecration – “this is my body, this is my blood” – are intended more to change the people present than they are meant to change the bread and wine. For him, it was more important that the people become the real presence of

God, that they become food and drink for the worlds, than that the bread and wine do. That is, in fact, the real task of the Eucharist: to change people, to create out of us the real presence.

But this involves a painful breaking down of all that keeps us apart. At a Eucharist, we may not protect ourselves. Our hurts and hates must be revealed and absorbed. When this happens, hearts of stone will turn to hearts of flesh, bitterness to charity. But livelier liturgies, better homilies and more singing will not, by themselves, bring that about. The complaint that liturgy is meaningless goes deeper. At its root lies the fact that people will celebrate as a community only when self-protectiveness, mutual suspicion and macho posturing are first broken down. But that requires new birth.

In birth, there are tears and anguish. Before the real dance comes the anguish.

Keep Praying For The Dead

January 2, 1986

G.K. Chesterton once commented that tradition might be defined as an extension of the franchise. It gives a vote to the most obscure of all classes, the dead. It is a democracy that includes the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking around. All people who believe in equality object to certain persons being disqualified by accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by accident of death. Recently, a lady wrote asking me to write her aunt and explain the Christian teaching about the communion of saints and prayers for the dead. Her aunt’s son had been killed in an accident, and she had been dissuaded from having Masses said for her dead son. The question was: can we still pray for the dead? Well, if Chesterton is correct, and Christianity submits that he is, then we need to extend the franchise, we need to pray for the dead, both through liturgy and through private prayer.

Why? What possible good can it do? Looked at from a certain point of view, prayer for the dead can seem silly and superfluous. Why pray for the dead? To remind God to be merciful? God doesn’t need reminders. To point out to God that our loved one who died was not so bad? God already knows that. God is already as merciful as love allows, and already loves and understands our deceased loved one infinitely more deeply than we do. As a student of mine once cynically put it: “if the person we are praying for is in hell then we can’t help them, and if they are in heaven then they don’t need help!”

So why pray for the dead? For the same reason that we pray at all, we simply need to. The criticisms raised against praying for the dead might be used with equal logic against all prayer. God already knows everything; there is no need to remind God of anything. Yet God has asked us to pray, to pray always, in fact. Prayer, as we know, is not meant to change God’s heart, but ours. Thus, the first reason that we need to pray for the dead is because this prayer helps us, the living. We pray for the dead that, among other things, those of us left behind might be consoled.

As well, tied to this, we pray for the dead to assuage our own guilt, guilt about continuing to live while the other died, and guilt about our less-than-perfect relationship with the deceased. In praying for the dead, many of the shortcomings we had in relating to them are washed clean. We pray for them because, as we believe in the doctrine of the communion of saints, there is still a vital flow of life between themselves and ourselves. Love, presence and communication reach through death. We, and they, are still in one community of life. In a real way, we can still feel each other’s hearts.

Hence, we pray for the dead to remain in communication with them. Just as we can hold someone’s hand when they are dying, and this can be an immense consolation to them, so too, figuratively but really, we can hold a person’s hand beyond death. And now, much more so than when they were alive, our communication is washed clean, the understanding is deeper, the forgiveness can be total, the perspective is wider, the anger and the shortcomings are unimportant. Communication with the dead is privileged; it undercuts so much of what kept us apart. This, we believe, not only consoles us, but also offers real strength and encouragement to the dead person. How? In the same way as loving presence to each other offers strength and consolation here in this life.

Imagine a young child learning how to swim. The child’s mother and family cannot learn for the child, but if they are present and offering encouragement, the struggle and learning are easier. Art Schopenhauer once remarked: “Anything can be borne, if it can be shared.”By praying for the dead, we share with them the adjustment to a new life (which includes the pain of letting go of this life). In our prayers for the dead, we offer encouragement and love to them as they, just born from the womb of the earth, adjust to a new life. Classically, we said that, for awhile, our loved ones who die go to purgatory. That is true, though purgatory should not be understood as a place distinct from heaven. It is rather the pain of entering heaven and of being embraced by perfect love when we ourselves are less than perfect. Love itself can be a painful experience.

From my own experience of losing my parents and others whom I love deeply, as well as from what others have shared with me, I have found that usually, after a time, we sense that we no longer need to pray for our loved ones who have died. Now we just talk with them. What was for a time a cold, hurting absence becomes a warm presence. They are still with us.

Terror And Triumph

January 1, 1986

Ending one year and beginning another always brings with it a reflectiveness, a sobering, a curious steadying. Another year gone! 1985 over! It passed so quickly! We hardly had time to get used to it. Perhaps the dominant image we are left with looking back at 1985 is that of terrorism. In 1985, terrorism struck more violently, more randomly and more universally than ever before. We weren’t talking just about Northern Ireland, Lebanon, Israel and Iran anymore. Greece, Italy, Malta, Belgium, Vienna, London, Toronto, Vancouver, no place was safe.

It was also the year of airline disasters, the worst year for air travel in aviation history. The Middle East still boiled, as did Central and South America and Northern Ireland. South Africa exploded into violence. All in all, there was more war than peace.

Most of these events, for most of us, were events without faces. But there were faces, real human faces within these and other events in 1985. Millions lived 1985 in fear, in bitterness, in the midst of war, in desperate poverty, in persecution and in despair. Thousands took their own lives. Yet there was another face to 1985. Despite its terrors and deaths, its bitterness and despairs, much progress was also made. Arms talks resumed, the relationship between the superpowers appeared to improve, and there was a scaling-down of bitterness and violence on some fronts. Moreover, the world’s treasury of understanding and beauty was added to. Much was achieved in the realms of understanding and creativity. In understanding, in art, in music, in literature, in cinema, we were blessed with much newness. We are all richer than we were a year ago. Thus, globally seen, 1985 was an ambivalent year, good and bad. A time of happiness and despair, of growth and stagnation, of birth and death. It was that kind of a year. I suspect that most of our personal lives mirrored this pattern: stagnation-growth, bitterness-love, war-peace, illness-death, death-birth.

Perhaps 1985 was a year when someone close to you died; or maybe a new child was born in your family. Perhaps it was a year in which you made a fresh beginning, graduated from school, entered a new phase of life, got married, found new employment; or maybe it was a year when you retired, lost a job, divorced or ended a phase of your life. Perhaps it was a year when your health broke down, or a year in which some new medicine or operation gave you new health. Perhaps it was a year of trouble within your marriage, your family, your community; or maybe it was a year in which you began to appreciate your marriage, family, or community for the first time. Perhaps you lost a love in 1985, or maybe it was a year in which new love and friendship was found. Perhaps 1985 was a very frustrating year for you, or maybe it was a fulfilling one.

Probably, for most of us, it was all of these things; stagnation and growth, endings and beginnings, illness and health, bitterness and love, disillusionment and enthusiasm, frustration and creativity, loneliness and community, death and love. A year of paradox, of ups and downs, of ambivalence! Life’s like that, like 1985…ups and downs, Bethlehems and Calvaries, joy and pain at the same time; joy and pain so intertwined that you don’t know how to feel or which part of you to believe. Hopefully, as Christians, somehow it all makes sense. We should know how to feel. Christ, meaning, love, lie in that ambivalence. Christ has sanctified both Bethlehem and Calvary, both life and death. Life, with all its contradictions, riddles, unsolved ambiguities, frustrations and deaths is good, very good in fact. Ultimately it makes sense. Despite all, our lives are the place where love and beauty are found. The world is good after all. Deep within our planet earth, deep within its struggling life, deep within our own troubled hearts, there shivers divinity, naked infant divinity, shivering like the infant Jesus in that cold barn in Bethlehem. Yes, 1985 was a good year, despite all. Yes, life is good and our world is good, despite bitterness and shortcomings. Yes, Christ lives within us, despite so many indications to the contrary.

Finally, yes, we can choose hope even as terror fills the air and bitterness, hatred, illness and death are a constant threat. Within our hearts and our world, as in Bethlehem’s cold stall, lies a shivering Christ. We need not be naive about 1986. It will bring new terrors, new deaths. But it will bring new blessings and will, despite all, be a good year. One way or the other, when 1987 dawns we will all be somehow richer, irrespective of pain, for having lived in 1986.

Our Savior In The Flesh!

December 1, 1985

And the word was made flesh! Flesh. How that word explodes with connotations. Initially our flesh is virginal and pure; the naked unwhipped, unsullied, unwrinkled flesh of a baby, full of innocence, beauty, dignity. How natural that our baptismal rite holds up a baby and says: “Bring that dignity unstained into the everlasting life of heaven.” How natural it is to handle a baby gently, to cradle it. But from the beginning, our flesh is complex and needy. It needs desperately to be stroked, to be wanted, to be held in affection, to be singled out for special attention, to be joined to what is beyond itself. Even in innocence there is complexity, and even in a baby the needs of the flesh are too complex to be fully met.

Moreover, our flesh is vulnerable, exposed; naked always, it hurts easily, bruises, burns, cuts. And life, soon enough, brings its whip down on exposed flesh. It begins already when we are in the womb and in the cradle where others around us, living in their own wounds, cannot give us the sense that we are unconditionally loved and wanted. Already then our flesh begins to bruise, to tighten, grow nervous and to take on the diseases of uncradled flesh. This intensifies after we leave the cradle. We tug at the wrong things; lamps and boiling coffee pots come falling down on our heads and we skin knees and cut ourselves on jagged edges. Then it’s the playground with its fights, its hateful words, its taunts, its bullyings, its cynicism and its rejections! A whip on exposed flesh. After the cradle, only seldom is the flesh cradled. Early in life, very soon, our flesh becomes scarred, calloused, sullied, full of nervousness and tense with suspicion. Yet, even as all this happens, love, too, is cradling our flesh, healing scars, melting bitterness and turning nervousness into calm. Thus, human flesh, the flesh that God came to assume, is indescribably complex. What kind of flesh did God have in mind for the incarnation?

Relaxed, joyful flesh; frightened flesh; unstroked tense flesh; smooth young flesh, strutting in pride; aged wrinkled flesh; perfumed flesh; decaying flesh; flesh giving itself in love; flesh holding a gun; restless aching flesh; sexually satiated flesh; drugged flesh; flesh in the groans of childbirth; flesh slashing its own wrists; whipped flesh; flesh raping other flesh; tired flesh; ulcered flesh; flesh full of energy; flesh full of cancer; virgin’s flesh; prostituted flesh; cradled flesh; uncradled frigid flesh?

Whose flesh? What kind of flesh did the word become? In what flesh can we see the word incarnate today? Can the word ultimately cradle and calm and satiate the complex needs of flesh? Will tension ever leave human flesh? These are adult Christmas questions; perhaps ineptly asked at Christmas time. Maybe Christmas is, after all, a time to focus on what is innocent and pure in the flesh, the baby Jesus, the initial entry of God into the flesh.

Certainly, Christmas is a time to ponder the flesh and to take seriously God’s entry into it. It is also a time to pray for a continued incarnation of God in the flesh. In that spirit, I offer a Christmas prayer for 1985: It’s a prayer I’ve borrowed from Theresa of Avila, a saint who would occasionally be very bold with God. It’s a fleshy prayer, one befitting the incarnation. At those times when Theresa of Avila felt most bold with God she would pray: “Lord, kiss me full on the mouth!”

That’s a bold prayer that our world and our churches might aptly pray this Christmas time. For we are fatigued, distracted, tense, frigid, frightened and overwhelmed people. We stand, all of us, in sullied baptismal robes, our dignity far from intact. We live trapped by our own histories, victims of our own needs, caught in a chain of wound and neuroses that stretches back far beyond our own memories and our own lives. Despite our achievements and our growth, our hearts are ever closer to choosing despair over hope, resignation to darkness over the light of love, victimization over liberation and cynicism over childlike happiness. We are a child in need of a mother, a tension aching for consummation, flesh in need of an incarnation.

Come, Lord Jesus, be born in human flesh, cradle our flesh, assume all flesh…kiss us full on the mouth!

Merry Christmas.