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!

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.

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. 

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.