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.

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?

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 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!