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.

From Grateful to Giving

November 1, 1985

An idealistic young priest once visited Thomas Merton at the Trappist monastery in Kentucky and spoke to him about his agony over social justice issues. “I know it’s wrong,” he said, “and sometimes I can hardly face myself in the mirror for going along with things as they are. Yet I don’t know what to do. What can I do?”

“Don’t do a damned thing,” replied Merton. “Just take the time to become what you profess to be. Then you will know what to do.” If Merton had less credentials in the area of social justice, his answer could easily be seen as a rationalization, an excuse to escape involvement. Given his record, however, it is a profound answer. The answer of a saint to the agonizing question: What can I do in the area of social justice?

What can we do? In the circles that I move in, on this question, there is enough talk, enough agonizing and enough guilt, but little in the way of practical action. At our roots, many of us feel that we need to do something about injustice and poverty. We feel guilty about being affluent, but we feel helpless: “I have enough problems of my own! I have trouble paying my own mortgage, how can I save the world!” Or, as a friend of mine recently said: “I don’t know what to do. So I go to a lot of meetings and read a lot about poverty and the Third World. It’s making me more sensitive and assuaging my guilt somewhat, but, in the end, I am still not doing anything concretely.”

What finally can we do?

Merton’s answer is that if we don’t know what to do, then we are still not ready to do anything. If we are still asking what to do, if our own problems are still too distracting, and if we are having trouble looking at ourselves in the mirror, then we are still too caught up in our own neuroses, ambitions, woundedness and false values to be of much help to the poor. We are still too poor ourselves. Our lives are not yet lives of praise and gratitude, lives that, by necessity, spill over and pour out graciousness. Our service, our prophecy and our resistance are still too self-seeking, too motivated by guilt, too distracted by wound and bitterness and anger.

To be a prophet of justice, an instrument of peace and a channel of graciousness necessitates that one be living more in gratitude than in anger, more in the posture of praise than the posture of paranoia.

But this isn’t easy. Too often our prophecy, our service and our resistance are motivated by guilt over our own affluence or by anger at our own culture. When that is the case, we do not truly help anyone. Our actions are simply self-aggrandizing and, in the end, serve to extend our own neuroses, ideologies and bitterness to the poor. There is no outflow of graciousness.

Resistance, prophecy and service must flow from a life which is full of gratitude, celebration, deep friendship and contemplative prayer. When these elements are there, graciousness automatically spills over. One knows what to do!

That is what is implied in Merton’s answer. Only when a person has grown in prayer, friendship and gratitude so that the bitter need to kill, to defend self, to be jealous and to be angry because one has been wounded, disappears, will one truly be able to resist, prophesy and serve.

Saints and prophets aren’t characterized by bitterness, guilt or anger. These do not serve the poor. Saints and prophets are recognized by the warmth of their love and their sense of God’s presence. That is why Merton tells that young man: “Take the time you need to become what you profess to be…don’t rush wounded, self-preoccupied, ill-prepared and badly motivated into the crisis.”

In a crisis, at an accident or a fire, things are not made better, nor is anyone helped, by someone who is too full of personal crisis and self-interest to be self-forgetful enough to genuinely give himself over to the task at hand. Persons caught in self-interest are more part of the problem than of the solution – both at fires and in social justice.

This answer is not a dangerous privatization of morality, an escape clause for the rich, a shutting of the ears to the urgency of the cry and hunger of the poor. It’s a refusal of the blind to lead the blind. It’s the admission that it is hard to save the world when one must still be engaged in the humbler task of growing up. It is a taking seriously of one’s woundedness and narcissism. Most important, it is a challenge to move beyond present complacency, to begin the painful task of uprooting bitterness, resentments, paranoia, self-pity, jealousy, self-interest, laziness, neuroses, and rerooting in prayer, gratitude and friendship, so that when the poor cry out we know what to do.

In the meantime, many of us are reduced to a certain impotence as we live the question.

The Unfinished Symphony

October 31, 1985

Strange what meaning lies in paradox and anomaly! In defeat there is a victory, in humiliation there is glory, in confusion there’s always a new clarity, in the absurd one finds meaning, in tears lie relief, and in virtually every death there is new and deeper life. Recently, I wrote an article about a young woman making her perpetual commitment as a religious sister. I stated both how much I admired her for the courage and vision to make such vows within a culture that rejects them and how much these vows themselves have a clarity and beauty precisely because they make the truth they express repellent and so drive all who witness them inward, forcing them to assimilate the truth in a new way. I have been the recipient of some strange looks and questions since: Repellent vows? Really! I am not without gratitude for this critique because it has forced me to clarify something I had just dimly felt, but could not express, until now. Now, with some help from an answer Thomas Merton once gave to an interviewer who asked him how he felt about celibacy, I want to spell out what is inchoately expressed in that term “repellent.” I will focus on just one of the vows, celibacy, because it is generally within that vow that one experiences this repellence in all its poignancy – and it is within that vow that the greatest danger for pathology lies. The principle involved in living that vow applies as well to poverty and obedience.

A celibate life is of itself an absurdity, pure and simple. Man without woman and woman without man is absurd. “It is not good for the man to be alone!” When God spoke those words he meant them for everyone forever. To be celibate is to live in incompleteness, unwholeness and inconsummation, in a loneliness that God himself has damned. Further, this is not merely a matter of celibates having or not having good interpersonal relation. A vision prevalent today contends that good heterosexual or homosexual friendships and a supportive community can and should offset the pain and unnaturalness of celibacy. After all, sexuality is more than just having sex and celibates need not be excluded from the realm of loving. There is some truth in that, some wisdom, but also a lot of naiveté. Friendship and supportive community are critical, in the long run more important then sex.

But that fact does not offset the emotional crucifixion of celibacy because it cannot bypass the fact that however deep an unmarried friendship might be and however good and supportive community may be, within these, the members do not make a one, nor come to a consummation, in a way that satisfies the condition of Genesis: “that is why a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife and the two become one flesh.” In a sexual relationship within a marriage, a man and a woman make a one in a way that a man and woman (or a woman and a woman or a man and a man) do not make in any unmarried friendship or community, however deep these latter relationships may be. Hence, outside of a married sexual relationship, one will always live in a loneliness which has been condemned by the Creator himself. However, I suspect, and I know from my married friends, that this loneliness exists too within marriage, even within the best of marriages.

Within a good marriage, there are moments in which loneliness is transcended, but these moments are brief and usually point to a further, more difficult, place where, ultimately, two lonely and unconsummated, though married, persons elect to save one another from absurdity by being absurd together – for life. Hence, what I write here applies as well to married persons. At this point, I suspect the tone of this article must sound masochistic. But this is not a masochistic answer. It is in freely accepting the limit, this pathos, that we rise above ourselves and become more human, because it is then that we let go of those imaginings and unrealistic expectations that prevent us from living in advent for God’s kingdom.

But this implies that we stop lying. The celibate condition, in the course of time, has become encrusted with pious lies, just as the married one has become encrusted with a false romanticism. The lies and the romanticism serve to hide the real pain, the real tragedy, and the real meaning and nobility of both vocations because they hide the fact that in both celibacy and marriage the symphony remains unfinished. A damned loneliness always exists. We remain painfully sexed, separate, partially always alone. Only when this foolishness is recognized does inconsummation become thirst for a wider love, then self-pity turns into hope, confusion into clarity, foolishness into beauty. Then absurdity becomes a centre of peace and there, finally, things begin to make some sense and both marriage and celibacy become possible and beautiful.

Falling Into God’s Arms

October 1, 1985

We live in too much fear of God, trusting too little that God understands and accepts us as we are, with all our adolescent mistakes, betrayals and weaknesses. As an illustration, I offer you a rather poignant incident I was associated with some time back. I was officiating at the funeral of a man in his early 20s who had been killed, while drunk, in a motor accident. Death because of irresponsibility and drunkenness! Moreover, during the last few years of his life he had been away from the church and the sacraments and had been living, unmarried, with his girl friend. This is hardly what classical spirituality calls “a happy death.” This young man had come from a good and faith-filled family who, despite the fact that his last years had been filled with turbulence and immaturity, loved him very deeply.

Looking at faces at that funeral, it was evident that there was more than sorrow in them. Fear was present, real fear that this young man whom we all knew, loved, understood, and knew to have a good heart despite the fact that he had been irresponsible and away from the church, was somehow going to be excluded from heaven and condemned to hell because he had, for a few brief years of adolescence, been mixed up and somewhat irresponsible. Strange and sad that we should be worried that God did not understand. We, with our limited minds and limited hearts, understood. We, with all the fogginess that clouds our understanding, knew that, beneath it all, despite the circumstance of his life and death, he had a good heart, a warm heart, a loving heart that needed just a bit more time and love to burst into charity, chastity and faith. Strange that we should feel that God did not recognize this.

We knew how good was this young man’s heart. We knew too that his irresponsibility was, in the end, little more than a combination of adolescent immaturity, laziness, peer pressure, and the infectious influence of an amoral culture. Deep down this young man wasn’t bad, immoral, a candidate for condemnation. He was little more than a child, irresponsible, struggling, feeling his oats, showing off, insecure, merely looking for acceptance and love. On that basis, can we seriously think that he might be excluded from the community of life? How utterly absurd! A child in this state needs, perhaps, a spanking, a challenge, a shock, but that is light years from hellfire.

I knew this young man’s parents. Because they were good Christians, they were deeply hurt by his immaturities, his irresponsibility, his straying from the church and his disregard for the teachings of the church on sexuality. The last years of his life and especially his death made a deep wound. Yet, standing at his graveside, if they could have reached him, even for one second, there would have been no scolding, no bitterness, no demand for an explanation and an apology. There would have only been one powerful embrace. They would have wrapped their arms around him as they would a wounded child and conveyed to him in a language deeper than words that they understood. Like the father of the prodigal son, they would not demand nor want any atonement before they would let go of their own hurt. They would simply be overwhelmed in the joy that they again had their son.

God is a God of infinite compassion. Even more than this young man’s parents, God understood the goodness of this young man’s heart. I am sure that God greeted him with an embrace that was as accepting and healing as was the embrace of the father for the prodigal son. I suspect that the only thing condemned that day was another fatted calf…for the feast!

The purpose of this article is not to dwell on this particular example, but to challenge us to believe more deeply that God understands. Crassly put, God isn’t stupid! If we, with our limits, can see beyond wound and struggle to a goodness that lies still deeper within a human heart, how much more does God see our goodness, understand our struggles and forgive our weaknesses. If we could believe this, then we would let God walk with us through all the patches of our lives, however dark and perverse. Not believing it leads us to the worst religious mistake of all: We run away from God whenever we need him the most. It is precisely at those times when we have fallen, when we are morally impotent, bankrupt, struggling, and stand, unclean, with our sin on our hands, that we most, like a wounded child need the embrace of a mother or father.

Unfortunately, too often, that is precisely when we quit praying, quit going to church, quit receiving the sacraments and quit putting ourselves in God’s arms. Why? Because we feel we must first, by our own efforts, clean our house a bit and get our lives in order before we can approach God’s arms…as if to approach God first requires a basic moral minimum. First clean the house, then call in the cleaners!

From Fantasy To Fulfilment

September 30, 1985

There is something so nice about daydreaming. There, our dreams can come true and we attain that one-in-a-billion specialness that we ache for. In our daydreams, we are the superstars: We write the songs, score the goals, dance the ballets and are so successful, beautiful, great and impressive that all our critics are silenced and all the persons we desire most fall in love with us. It is no accident that we so often escape into the world of daydreams because there we can live life without tears, without limits and without failure. In fantasy, we achieve salvation, consummation and vindication.

We seldom admit to each other that we have daydreams and that we escape into them. We are ashamed of our fantasies, ashamed that, as adults, we resort to such a childish and egoistical escape. Imagine what others would think if they could tune into our fantasies! But a certain escape into fantasy and daydreams is natural and even healthy. Daydreaming can be a way of relaxing. There is little difference between a tired person inserting a musical cassette tape into a stereo and sitting back to forget life’s problems and another tired soul inserting her favorite daydream into her imagination and sitting back to relax. Both can be healthy escape from over-intensity and there shouldn’t be more shame in one than in the other. Moreover, a healthy fantasy life can positively help spawn creativity because our daydreams put us in touch with the goodness and potential that is inside us.

In our daydreams, we are never small petty persons, but heroes and heroines, special persons who change worlds, radiate specialness, are truly creatures in God’s image and likeness, and are aesthetic and pedagogical incarnations of life’s infinite potential. Nobody with a healthy fantasy life stagnates, because his daydreams make him too restless to simply vegetate. However, daydreams can also be bad, not because we should be ashamed that, like children, we resort to fantasy, or because at times our imaginings are erotic and sexual, but because too great a reliance on fantasy fixates us. Simply put, if we daydream too much, we become unhealthily self-preoccupied. Too much fantasy dulls full attentiveness to the present, to others, to prayer and to God. Too much daydreaming leaves us distracted and dissipated with too much of our perception and thought centred upon our own agenda and our own obsessions.

We become like a preoccupied and anxious man who takes a walk in a beautiful forest. Because his thoughts are obsessively fixed upon himself and his worries, he sees virtually nothing. All of nature’s beautiful colors, its multi-scents and million sounds are blocked out. He is lost in his own world oblivious to the richness and beauty around him. He truly sees “as through a glass, darkly.” Our perception, too, is limited, dulled and dissipated when we daydream too much. What should we do about our daydreams and our fantasy life? To the extent that our daydreams are healthy, we may enjoy them. However, more and more as we mature in life and prayer, we must actively work at turning away from fantasy towards prayer. How do we do this?

First of all, we need to understand something about prayer: Prayer is more than just saying prayers. Radical prayer is contemplation and contemplation itself should not be understood simply as good feelings we have when we gaze at something which moves us. We contemplate every time we see something as it really is, nakedly, face to face. When we genuinely perceive, when we see, hear, smell, touch or taste anything that is other than ourselves and do not manipulate it, we are contemplating, we are praying. (This of course does not preclude other methods of praying.) When prayer is understood in this wide sense, then we see, too, how our daydreams can hurt us; namely, to the extent that when we daydream we, ultimately, focus our awareness upon ourselves thereby limiting how much we see, hear, feel, touch and smell. Daydreaming gets in the way of prayer. How concretely do we turn from daydreams to prayer?

You begin by avoiding the common misunderstanding that would identify contemplation with a blank state of mind. We contemplate when we let our perception and thought form and flow freely without the manipulation that our preoccupations and obsessions normally impose. Contemplation is stream of awareness and stream of consciousness. This is different from fantasy. When we daydream, we actively manipulate our thoughts and imagination. In effect, we play a program in our minds. Contemplation is awareness without manipulation. Such awareness, as great spiritual writers have always assured us, is prayer. It is enjoyable to daydream, but it is ultimately more enriching to pray.

More Tantrums Than Tears

September 2, 1985

Every tear brings the Messiah closer. Tears and messiahs, so seldom do we connect these two! Our age is characterized by impatience, by an unwillingness to ache, to long, to yearn, to sweat lonely tears in the garden as we wait for new birth. More and more, we are becoming a culture which is incapable of remaining within emotional suffering. We are moving to the point where inconsummation of all kinds is inconceivable. A strange and frightening incident several years ago helped highlight this for me. I was journeying to the U.S.S.R. with a group of western tourists.

We arrived in Moscow on a blizzardy December evening. We entered the airport, cleared customs and moved toward our connecting flight to Leningrad. Then, for reasons never explained to us, we were made to wait… wait for 28 hours, without explanation and without food. Thousands of other people also waited in that airport that night. Everyone was without explanation, but only our group, the Westerners, appeared to be angry and in panic. We rushed angrily from desk to desk, demanding explanations and phoning embassies. Blood pressures and tempers ran high and, within our group, there was the constant indignant expression: “Nobody may do this to us! We don’t have to put up with this!” What was enlightening in this experience was that, fairly soon, one was able to pick out every Westerner in that airport. All of us from the West were angry, impatient, indignant and contemptuous.

The Eastern Europeans waited much more passively, without anger and impatience. Obviously, they were more used to waiting.

Like the rest of the Western tourists, I was also impatient. Twenty-eight hours later, again without explanation, our flight for Leningrad was announced and our vigil was over. Except that it hadn’t been a vigil. From the beginning to the end, we had fought the waiting, we had been angry and contemptuous, and we had felt that our rights were slighted. Later, much later, in a reflective moment, I saw in this incident a parable of Western culture. Stated simply, the lesson is this: Just as we rushed about that airport refusing to wait, impatient, convinced that nothing had a right to deny us what we wanted, so too we rush about our lives refusing to ever wait for things, refusing to remain in emotional tension. The effect of this impatience is the same everywhere: We see it in our economics, in our sexual morality, in our infidelities and in every proclivity to seize, as by right, what is gift and love.

Impatience, our inability to live with tension and longing, lies at the root of so much pathos within our lives. We see it, for instance, in our sexual lives. Today, fewer and fewer persons are waiting until marriage to have sex. Why? Because sex is such a powerful tension and we have never been taught to wait.

Increasingly, for both adult and teenage groups, I find it futile to even speak of confining sex to marriage. When one is unable to live in tension, it is totally unrealistic to suggest that tension as poignant as inconsummate sexuality must be lived with for long periods of time. The same impatience lies at the root of so much of what is wrong with us economically today. We feel we have right to all the good things we want. They are there, so why should we have to wait? So we mortgage and borrow and demand higher wages and, one way or the other, get what we want. Our economy is in trouble because virtually everyone is living beyond their means and our culture itself resembles a group of impatient children stamping their feet, each demanding a huge share of the candy right now! Especially, however, we see this impatience in our inability to handle tension within relationships and within our lives in general.

Because of this, we never give proper birth to anything, love, life or meaning. Pain is a pregnancy. Through it we conceive and gestate. Pregnancies must be carried to term. Today, we end most of our pain artificially, by caesarean. Virtually everything in our lives is born prematurely, not fully formed, unable then to survive. That is why our lives are full of infidelities, things gone sour and superficiality. When we are in pain, instead of asking: “Can I stay with this pain? Is there a pregnancy for rebirth in this tension?” We do whatever we can simply to relieve the tension. We never cry enough tears to bring the messiah to birth.

In East Coker, T.S. Eliot writes:

“But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

Wait without thought, for you are not yet ready for thought:

So the darkness shall be the light,

and the stillness the dancing.”

Becoming The Real Thing

September 1, 1985

One of the most debilitating aspects of life today is that we do not admit to each other the cost of struggle. Our real fears are seldom allowed to surface.

Yet we all struggle. Our lives are full of pain, little comes easy for us, and we make a living, remain healthy, remain attractive and achieve success only at great cost. Fear is always present. The fear of failure, of slipping, of having others see that life and success are not automatic, that life is had at the edges of sickness, unattractiveness, boredom, failure and sadness.

However we bury and hide struggle and fear. Rarely do we genuinely share how we really feel, what our fears are, and how difficult it is to be who we are. Rarely do we admit anyone into our inner space where fear, struggle and inadequacy make themselves felt. We all go through life posturing strength, pretending; lying really, giving off the impression that all is easy and that friendship, health, achievement and attractiveness are easeful and automatic. But that is dishonest and debilitating. Dishonest because it isn’t true. God knows, and we know, how precariously we are glued together! It is debilitating because when we are forced to hide our pain and fear, we are forced, too, to hide the very strands within which compassion can be found. In shared weakness and fear, there is a common meeting ground. Our weakness and fears, much more so than our achievements and successes, drive us inward and put us in touch with what is deepest, softest and most worthwhile within the heart.

In that part of the heart, we discover who we really are and there we understand that we are not what we achieve, but we are what is given to us. Outside of that, when we posture strength and lie and pretend, we learn falsely that life is not a gift to be shared, but a possession to be defended. The road to love and intimacy lies in a compassion born out of the perception of shared struggle and shared fear. When we genuinely see another’s wound and struggle, then that other enters a deeper, more real, part of us. But it is precisely here that the problem lies: More than anything else, we struggle not to reveal our pain and fears to others, for we have been falsely taught that community and love are grounded upon something else, namely, upon impressing each other. Perhaps the greatest obstacle to intimacy and community is that propensity to believe that others will love us only when we are impressive and strong.

Because of this, we go through life trying to impress others into liking us. Rather than sharing ourselves as we really are – vulnerable, tender, struggling, full of fear – we try to be so sensational that there can be no possible reason not to love us. Like the inhabitants of Babel, we try to build a tower that is so impressive that we overpower others. The result for us, as the result then, is counterproductive. Because of pretence, we go through life “speaking different languages,” that is, unable to find a common meeting ground upon which to understand each other. Understanding takes place through compassion and compassion is itself the fruit of shared vulnerability. Thus, so long as we hide our struggles and fears, we will not find intimacy.

When fears and struggle are hidden, when achievement, health, attractiveness and friendship are projected as automatic, then our talents, intelligence, wit, charms, beauty, and artistic and athletic abilities cannot be seen for what they are intended to be, namely, beautiful gifts which enrich life. They are projected, then, as objects of envy and they become forces which create jealousy and further wound. When there is no shared vulnerability, life becomes what we can achieve, and our talents are possessions to be defended. We must, therefore, admit to each other the cost of struggle. Our real fears must be allowed to surface. Intimacy lies in that. Intimacy will be achieved only when we are so vulnerable that others can see that we share with them a common condition.

Scripture reminds us that here, in this life, we see each other as less than fully real – “as through a glass, darkly, an enigma.” We contribute to the enigma, we make ourselves less real, precisely to the extent that we do not admit to each other that it is hard for us. It is only when we see each others’ fears and struggles that we become real to each other. The path home, out of exile, lies in vulnerability. The threads of compassion and a concomitant intimacy will appear automatically when we present ourselves as we really are, without false props, as tender.

Whose Kingdom, Lord?

August 1, 1985

Every so often, a book comes along that is truly moral. It challenges so deeply our moral conceptions that we end up in a certain darkness, punched to a new childlikeness, a new humility, a new reliance upon a dark faith. Graham Greene did that to us with his work, The Heart of the Matter. In that book, Greene empathetically shows us the heart and mind of a person who, according to all externals, deserves our condemnation. He betrays everything in his life and finally kills himself. But, having seen the inside of that man’s soul, we see that the issues of love and infidelity, success and failure, suicide and hope, are, in the end, largely beyond our judgement.

After reading The Heart of the Matter you can only walk away in the dark, hoping that, because God is still God, in the end, “all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.” That kind of book leaves you with a new moral understanding in which you understand more by not understanding than by understanding. Mary Gordon’s latest novel, Men and Angels, is that kind of book. It tunes and tightens our moral strings to the point of breaking and it leaves us humbled, wondering, more conscious than ever of how little we understand of love and grace. It throws us back upon a faith that makes sense of life only by hoping in God whose ways are not our ways. Her storyline is straightforward enough. Men and Angels is a book about two women, Anne and Laura, who have an entirely different grace inheritance. The story centres around Anne, an attractive, talented, happily married mother of two children. She is a lady at peace. At 38, Anne possesses youth’s natural attractiveness and zest as well as that calm reflective quality of mind that gives her the power to understand her experiences symbolically. She has everything going for her.

Her relationship to her husband is good, tested, mellow, mature. Her relationship to her children is pure joy. And, in all this, she is a kind, humble person, gratefully aware of her good luck. When her husband must leave for a year’s sabbatical in France, she hires Laura to be her live-in babysitter while she spends part of her time writing. Laura is Anne’s opposite. Just as Anne has always graced life and others just by existing, Laura was always irritated. Unwanted as a child, abused and hated by her mother, made to feel inferior and unlovable, Laura grows up having to constantly apologize just for being. Eventually, in her hurt, she turns fanatically and pathologically to religion. As a compensation for the human love she has never received, she seizes onto God in a sick way, believing that God has chosen her to be a special prophet of a purer, less human, message of love to the world. She withdraws into a dream world in which God’s armor of light protects her from the world’s rejection and hurts. In the end, she becomes a very sick and withdrawn girl. But she falls for Anne’s human warmth, Anne’s attractiveness, Anne’s grace. More than anything else she wants to love Anne, be loved by Anne and convert Anne to her own vision of God’s purer love.

But her love is pathetic and Anne, despite herself, cannot help but be repulsed, irritated, constantly strained and angry. In the end, Anne rejects her. Laura kills herself and she does it in such a way that her very blood will mark Anne, Anne’s home, Anne’s children, and Anne’s relationships with everything and everybody, just as Abel’s blood marked Cain. In trying to assuage a guilt she neither deserves nor understands, Anne goes to visit Laura’s parents. In seeing the mother’s hatred for her own daughter, Anne’s moral blood stirs. In clarity, she sees how unfair it all is. She sees how this woman had hated her daughter from the moment of her conception. She recalls how warmly she had held her own babies, her cheeks against their cheeks, their mouths on her breast. How monstrous and unfair that a baby, Laura in this case, could be hated. Small wonder that Laura was so pathetic, so withdrawn. How could she be otherwise?

And Anne realizes that she herself did not love Laura, that she was incapable of loving someone that wounded. It leaves her weeping and wondering. The reader also wonders. Is everyone really created equal? Where is God in all of this? Will the standards of the kingdom really reverse all of this? Do the poor, the unattractive, the unwanted, the pathetic, really inherit the earth?

Mary Gordon’s Men and Angels touches raw moral nerves. It humbles and darkens the understanding as faith does, and, like faith, it opens us up to new unthought-of possibilities.

Married To Sacrifice

Recently, I was asked to preach at a liturgy within which a young woman made her final vows as a religious sister. A rare event. But she is a rare person. Rarer and rarer is becoming the case where a young person whose life is full of every opportunity for marriage, sexual intimacy, career, and worldly wealth and success pledges to live a lifetime of poverty, chastity and obedience. This is not an easy time to make religious vows. Many are predicting the death of religious life as we have known it. On the surface, at least, there seems some foundation to the prophecy.

More are leaving religious life than are entering it. In the past 20 years, perhaps one-quarter to one-third of all religious in the western world have left religious life. Relatively few have entered. Poverty, chastity, and obedience are out of tune in our culture, vocation recruiters are frustrated. Religious life appears to be in deep trouble. That’s one view. There is another: Far from dying, religious life today is undergoing an immense purification, a pruning, a clarification which will serve to make it again a thing of challenge, prophecy, importance, witness and indeed a thing of beauty. What we are witnessing today is not the death of religious life but a metamorphosis, a paschal passage, a painful but fruitful wandering through the desert that has brought us to the edges of the promised land. A religious life is being born within which there will be few numbers, but greater witness. It is all very paradoxical. Formerly, there were too many religious. Religious life was not presented as the unique and rare call that it is. I say this without in any way casting negative reflections in the direction of those who have left it. Almost all those who did leave were, and remain, very generous and sincere persons, persons whose sojourn in religious life was willed by God. They should feel free and feel good about the years they spent within a religious community.

Indeed, religious life is, in my view, intended to be a rare vocation, something for just a few. All Christians are intended to be prophets, but religious are intended to be prophets in a special sense. Of these latter kind of prophets, God doesn’t need thousands. He only needs a few… though these need to be clearly seen and heard. As I witnessed this young woman’s vows, I envied her because, despite the decline in numbers and the predictions of gloom and doom, this is, I believe, the best time in centuries to be making vows as a religious. Precisely because the call is rare it becomes, if it is responded to, a glorious opportunity to speak with a clarity, a beauty and a power that is less accessible to others. But God needs more married prophets than he needs vowed celibate ones. Marriage is for the many, religious life for the few. Why?

Because religious life is a call to be uniquely lonely, uniquely paradoxical and to enflesh a unique compassion. To be called to religious life is to become an anomaly. It is to sleep alone even while believing that “it is not good for the man to be alone.” It is a call to watch at night, alone, lonely, crying over Jerusalem, envying the foxes who have homes of their own. It’s having the whole world for a family while having nobody to really call your own. That is a unique vocation. To be called to religious life is to become a paradox. The vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, pronounced within a culture that reflects them, and pronounced out of a mind and heart which more than anything else wants intimate love, husband, wife, children, ownership and freedom, makes the truth they express repellent and so drives all who witness them inward, forcing them to assimilate the truth in a new way. The vows, precisely because they are repellent, of themselves, force one to live in such a way that his/her life would not make sense if God did not exist. For this reason, the vows enable the one who takes them to live in a special compassion with those who, because of circumstances beyond themselves, cannot get married, cannot have children, cannot own things, and cannot actualize themselves and do with their lives what they would like.

It promises sleepless nights, and meaningful days; it delivers cold seasons of loneliness, but spawns new kinds of intimacy; it strips some of everything and then gives back the whole world in return; it makes one curse its unfairness and then brings one to one’s knees in gratitude for its privilege. It is a rare, strange, dreadful and wonderful vocation.

As I witnessed that young woman’s vows, I realized that religious life is far from dead. It is not dying. It is being wonderfully reborn.

Our Greed Pulls The Trigger

July 2, 1985

It is getting to be frightening to watch the news. Terrorism is everywhere, and daily we appear less capable of protecting ourselves against it. Still fresh in our minds is the recent hijacking of the TWA jet by Lebanese Shiites, but that was merely one incident, resulting in just one death. Terrorism itself is spreading like a mushroom cloud, ominous, out of anyone’s control, a new kind of ultimate threat.

Lebanese shiites, Palestinian nationalists, Irish IRA extremists, Indian Sikhs, Central American death squads, Italian Red Brigades, German Baader-Meinhof gangs, Spanish Basque Nationalists, Filipino insurrectionists, Iranian extremists, Tamil separatists and their Sri Lankan counterparts, all of these groups bomb, kill, kidnap, and deal death and terror daily. This is not to mention hundreds of other groups, less internationally prominent, who do the same. Then there is still the isolated terrorist, the guy who goes berserk and shoots himself and his family, or who shoots people indiscriminately at bus stops or at a San Diego MacDonald’s. Violence of this kind is always wrong and we are right to be angry. But we are not right when we naively believe that terrorism is the work of a small number of sick and deranged persons. Too common, and spreading, is the belief that if a few Ayatollahs, Khadafy could be eliminated, then all would be peaceful. Terrorism, in this view, is seen as the product of individual fanaticism, a small accident of history, the product of isolated and deranged minds.

But terrorism is the natural by-product of our present way of life and the economic and social system upon which we depend. Like pollution, breakdown of relationships, sexual promiscuity, economic greed and high blood pressure, it is the inevitable result of a world structured like our own. As Russell Baker puts it, it is “one of the many embarrassing by-products of our blessings.” Bottom line, our way of life is based too much upon greed. We live believing that whatever we can attain, providing it is done lawfully, is ours by right and that the accumulation of excess is itself a sign of success. Everything within our culture exalts that idea and thus greed, like cancer, continues to grow. Crassly put, we try to suck as much out of life as we can get. The fact that others get less, are weak or have less access to the good life is not important. Then, after we have what we want, we want peace, we want to be protected, we feel enraged that anyone would dare take from us what is ours. But the problem is that we took from someone else and we are taking more than our share. There can be no peace without justice. Terrorism flows from that. As violent, frightening, morally abhorrent and wrong as it is, it is a voice of the poor; perhaps, at times, the only voice they’ve got left.

Because of this, our response to terrorism must be both compassionate and nuanced. Our reaction, in fact, must include resistance. The demands of terrorism should not be met and all precautions should be taken to prevent it. But such measures, while demanded in the short range, must be sharply dissociated from our natural instinct to silence terrorism by brute force, namely, by revenge, by brutal retribution, by counter violence and by excessively increasing security, police and security measures. Frightening in this regard is the stunning popularity of the movie Rambo, a film about terrorism which crassly depicts the triumph of good over evil in terms of a superman counteracting terrorists by brutally crushing them. The popularity of this film (not the least of whose fans is Ronald Reagan) shows how deeply engrained is the feeling that the roots of terrorism lie within a few very wicked people and that the answer to terrorism is simply to eliminate those few. Frightening, too, is the idea that our crushing of those few amounts to the triumph of good over evil. Rambo could be a good film, if there were justice in the world. As it is, it feeds what’s worst in us.

Terrorism may never be stopped by brute force. Perverse as this may sound, it has too many moral roots. It stems ultimately from injustice. Moreover, it can never be stopped by brute force. Terrorism will stop only when the poor are given enough to live for, so that they do not need to give up their lives in suicidal martyrdom. Terrorism will stop only when the poor have another voice that is actually heard. Terrorism will stop only when peace is secured on justice. None of these will happen if our present greed continues. As long as we feel we have a right to milk from life as much as we can take, we will always live in fear, in a fragile peace.

Closed To Love, Open To Hate

July 1, 1985

We live in a time of pain and division. Daily, in the world and in the church, hatred, anger and bitterness are growing. It is ever harder to live at peace with each other, to be calm, to not alienate someone just by being. There is so much wound and division around. Women’s issues, poverty and social justice, abortion, sexual morality, questions of leadership and authority, issues of war and peace, and styles of living and ministry, are touching deep wounds and setting people bitterly against each other. This is not even to mention issues such as personality conflicts, jealousy, greed and sin – which habitually divide.

Our psychic temperature is on the rise and with it, as Jesus predicted, son is turning against father, daughter against mother, sister against brother. We are being divided. It is no longer possible to escape taking a stand on these issues and, to take a stand on them, is to make enemies, to have someone hate you, to be accused of being narrow and to be alienated from other sincere persons. For anyone who’s sensitive, this is the deepest pain of all. Moreover, none of us ever approach these issues in complete fairness and objectivity. We are wounded, whether we admit it or not. Knowingly and unknowingly, in all these issues we have been either oppressor or oppressed and consequently we approach them either too full of wound or too defensive to see straight. In either case, the temptation is to become bitter and to give in to the propensity to feel that we have the right to be angry, to hate certain people, to be self-righteous, and to dissociate entirely sympathy and understanding from certain others. That is a tragic mistake. As valid, painful and imperative as these issues may be, reason, love, understanding and long-suffering, may never give way to a progressive and militant bitterness which can irrevocably alienate. That is the road to hell because bitterness is hell.

Yes, that is what is happening today. We are too easily giving into the temptation to think that because we have been wounded, or because others are wounded, we have the right to hate, to withdraw our empathy, to think in terms of black and white, and to be bitter. It is getting worse. Bitterness like cancer is slowly infecting more and more of Christ’s body. We need to read this, the sign of the times, and respond to it out of the Gospel. It is my submission that, given this bitterness, the Christian vocation today, for a time, will be that of letting ourselves bleed, in tears and tension, to wash out these wounds.

Let me illustrate what this means by way of an example: Just to be alive in the church today is to be caught in a painful tension. For example, the issues of women’s rights and social justice are, without doubt, two of the primary challenges that the Holy Spirit is giving our age. Yet Rome refuses to raise seriously the question of the ordination of women and it silences Leonardo Boff, a voice for the poor. With that comes a wave of resentment, bitterness and hatred.

Daily I move in circles where people are bitter about these issues and I find myself increasingly reluctant to defend Rome’s stance on them. On these two issues we are sitting on a powder keg and a deadly bitterness is flowing from them. Yet, no serious Catholic can be cavalier about the church as institution, as universal. Some 800 million Catholics cannot travel together without compromise, frustration, impatience, tears, rules and traditions which, at times, might seemingly strangle some of the life that the Holy Spirit is spawning. When a universal church moves forward, it can only be in baby steps. So what does the Christian who wants to be faithful today do? Ignore Rome? Consider the women’s movement and social justice as fads? Grow cynical? Mind his/her own business and let be what is? Say “the hell with them all”? Since nothing else is possible, for now, save for bitterness which must be rejected, the answer lies in a fidelity which accepts suffering. To be faithful today means to live in pain, in tension, in frustration, in seeming compromise, often hated by both sides.

Our call today is to reconcile by feeling the pain of all sides and by letting our pain and helplessness be a buffer that heals, the blood that helps wash the wound. As a simple start, we can test how open-minded we are on all of these issues by seeing how much pain we are in. Not to be in pain is not to be open-minded. It is a time of pain for the church, a time when we will all feel some hatred, a time when above all we must keep our peace of mind, our inner calm of spirit and our outer charity. Most of all, it is time to resist bitterness and that hardness of spirit which dampens the Holy Spirit.

Paschal Mystery: The New You

June 3, 1985

Following is the last of a two-part series on the paschal mystery.

Nothing in our culture prepares us to die. Invariably death takes us as conqueror, against our wills. We protest, grow bitter, bargain for time, give in to despair, and are eventually dragged protesting out of life. There is little within us which empowers us to let go peacefully, with some grace, and surrender life in gratitude for what has been and in hope for what will be. This is true not just of physical death, but of all the types of death that impale themselves upon us. Invariably, they catch us unprepared.

In my last column, I spoke of the refusal to cling as an entry into the paschal mystery, namely, as an entry into the kind of death which is an opening to new life and to the reception of new spirit. I want now to illustrate, with several examples, that it is the refusal to let go and to enter death in trust, the refusal to enter the paschal mystery; that is the cause of so much unhappiness, bitterness and despair in our lives. The first example concerns the death of our youth, health and sexual attractiveness. For many of us, long before we have to surrender our lives in death, we are forced to surrender these in a different kind of death. Youth, health and sexual attractiveness are good, gifts from God, but they do not last. Their loss is a real death, especially in a culture such as our own in which you have a place in the mainstream only if you possess them. For this reason, we do not let them go easily. We cling. Like the ancient Egyptians who mummified their dead, we attempt to mummify our youth and sexual attractiveness through contemporary forms of “embalming”: cosmetics, dyes, face-lifts, pretense and lies about our age. In my last column, I told of a man who, though dying of cancer, refused to die long after all was hopeless and only suffering remained. Eventually, his son had to challenge him: “Dad, die for God’s sake! Let go, it will be better then than it is now!”

When we are 50, 60 or 70 – or 40, and we are trying to be 20, someone must similarly challenge us: “Let go, for God’s sake! Be your age, it will be better then than it is now!” Old age is hell for those who cling and want to be young at all costs. It can be peaceful and full of joys, if we are willing to receive its spirit. God always gives us new life. We never die. Whenever something passes, be it youth, health or sexual attractiveness, something else takes its place. With that something else, God also sends a new spirit, a new pentecost. However, if, like Mary Magdala, we are unwilling to let go of what’s gone, then there can be no ascension to new life and to new pentecost of new spirit. Entry into the paschal mystery – namely, entry into the death that brings new life, new love, new friendship, new health, new attractiveness, new meaning and new depth – requires that we die, that we accept new life, and that we refuse to cling so that new life can ascend and new spirit can be given us. Ultimately, this depends upon trust. We must trust God enough to let ourselves die, to stop clinging, to believe that God will always give us something new and something better.

We must trust God enough to believe that nothing worthwhile will ever be lost and that he makes all things new. This also holds true for our lives of love and friendship. When we first meet, when love is young, there is a period of infatuation, of emotional electricity, of honeymoon. But all relationships grow and change and all honeymoons end. Too often when the honeymoon ends, the love begins to die, to grow sour, bland and resentful. Almost always a large part of the problem is the unwillingness to enter the paschal mystery. After the honeymoon, loves and friendships, like Jesus, need to rise on the third day, ascend to a new level, and release a new and deeper spirit.

This is also true for our dreams and hopes. When we go through life refusing to let go of a hope that can never be for us, when we refuse to accept that we are not as physically attractive, slim, athletic, talented, bright, unblemished, strong and connected as we would like to be, then we will always live in resentment and bitterness, frustrated and caught up in a daydream which prevents us from living by constantly saying: “if only…” In that daydream, we can never be happy because we are refusing to accept the spirit that God has given us for our own life. By refusing to die paschally to false dreams, we never in gratitude and joy pick up our own lives. How happy the person who accepts his/her life as it is with the spirit God has given for it!

Paschal Death: Letting Go

June 2, 1985

Following is the first of a two part series on the paschal mystery.

It’s cruel to talk about death, but it’s crueler still not to. Adult life is not child’s life. As adults, we are asked to die and, like Christ, we sweat blood about it. Physical death is only one part of it. We are dying all the time, struggling painfully to let go of youth, health, daydreams and possible dreams, infatuations, romances, honeymoons, and, in the end, of life itself. No one lets go easily. Ernest Becker contends that the denial of death is the primary repression within Western culture and that, from that repression, come the majority of our psychological ailments. He’s right.

We don’t accept death. We deny, daydream, mummify, pretend, cling, drug, refuse to wake up, and do everything except accept that we must let go. Two images describe us: The first is that of Mary Magdala on Easter morning wanting desperately to cling to the Jesus she had known rather than accepting the resurrected one. The second is that of mummification. Like the ancient Egyptians who reacted to death by embalming and mummifying their dead, we tend to embalm and mummify what has died in us. The proper response to death in all its kinds is not these postures, but the acceptance of the paschal mystery. But this needs to be explained. As Christians we need to distinguish between two kinds of death, paschal and terminal. Terminal death is death that ends life, ends possibilities. It brings dreams, health, honeymoons and happiness to final closure. Paschal death is real death. Something precious dies. However, in this kind of death, there is in the dying an opening to new life and new scripture.

In paschal death, there is always a birth as well, just as in childbirth a woman loses her child even in giving it birth. The paschal mystery, the passage through death to new life, though normally associated with Christ’s death and resurrection, is in its widest sense a natural mystery. All reality grows and deepens through it. Christ’s life, however, offers its deepest modeling and his death and resurrection is a paschal drama that we can participate in. As an event in Christ’s life, the paschal mystery has four distinct movements to it. Together, these form one dynamic movement from death to life and together they form a psychology of love and growth. In a very simple schema, the paschal mystery, as an event and as a psychology, might be charted as follows:

Passion and death … “the loss of life”

Resurrection … “the reception of new life”

Ascension … “the refusal to cling, as ascending beyond the old life”

Pentecost … “the reception of new spirit for the new life”

What does all this mean concretely? It can better be understood through a series of stories.

A priest I know tells the story of a family whose father was dying of cancer. Big, tough, a welder, the man was not dying easily. For months he hung on, long after there was any hope. In intense pain, his body wasted away, the disease terminal, he still refused to die. He lay clinging to life. Each day his family spent their time with him. One day the oldest son sat by the bedside watching his dad suffering. Overcome by the pain and hopelessness of it, he squeezed his dad’s hand and said: “Dad, die for God’s sake! Let go! It’s got to be better there than here.” Almost immediately, his dad became calm and within minutes he died. The words his son spoke were paschal words, Christian words, words that trust God enough to be able to die in him and know that new life and new spirit will be born in the dying. When King David’s illegitimate son was dying, David put on sackcloth and began to fast and pray, begging God to save his son. However, messengers arrive and David learns that his son is already dead.

Upon hearing this, David arises immediately and puts aside the sackcloth and prayer and goes instead to his house where he bathes, anoints himself, eats, drinks, then sleeps with his wife, who conceives a new life, Solomon. When he senses that he has scandalized those around him who feel that he has not properly mourned his son, David speaks paschal words: “While the child was alive I fasted and prayed, imploring God to save the child. Now the child is dead. I must move on to create new life.” When we stop clinging, when we give ourselves over to God in trust, new life will be conceived and new spirit will be released. Death will be paschal and not terminal.

In my next column I will examine this mystery as it applies to the letting go of youth, dreams and honeymoons.

Making Room For Compassion

June 1, 1985

This column is a response to two letters I received recently: The first came from a lady whom I do not know. Among other things, she writes: “I appreciate your column, especially its title, In Exile. You see, Father, I suffer from emotional and mental illness and, in a society like ours, that puts me outside of life. “I always feel like I am in exile. Everyone keeps their distance from me, and they seem to actually blame me for being ill, as if I could make myself well just by wishing it.” Then, last week, I received a letter from a friend who has just been asked to leave religious life because she, too, struggles emotionally. She comments: “I am becoming more realistic about the attitudes that exist both inside of religious community and in the world outside, namely, that any person who has required any kind of psychiatric care is considered forever unstable, unproductive and unsuitable for a life of normal relationships and service.”

Both of of these letter, however gentle their language, contain harsh prophetic messages. Their words are the words of Christ who warns us that health and strength are gifts given from beyond and that when we become complacent, smug and self-sufficient about them, we risk missing the kingdom. The truth is that we, the healthy and strong, are too smug and complacent, and that we are too unfeeling and too judgemental toward those who struggle. In the end, we are too calloused. We are too full of ourselves, our health and strengths are blinding us to what is gift. We are self-preoccupied, adolescent and narcissistic. In that, there is no place for compassion. Our respect is only for those who, like ourselves, are strong, healthy and successful. But that excludes the sick, the emotionally and mentally handicapped, the aging, the dying, the poor, the unborn and unattractive.

Not only do we lack compassion and understanding toward these people, worse still, we blame them for their poverties, as if, as the lady comments, they could get strong and well simply by their own efforts. Moreover, we act as if our own strengths and health are the products of our efforts. Consciously and unconsciously, we have the attitude: “It’s their own fault! Anyone who is sick is sick because somehow they want to be sick or because they are not taking care of themselves properly. Anyone can help themselves!” This insensitivity is, in the end, an anomaly — for we are compassionate by nature. Compassion is an irrepressible instinct inside of us. Thus, it is not surprising that certain things (for example, Steve Fonyo’s Journey for Lives) draw such an enormous outburst of compassionate sentiment. Our underused instinct is taking its revenge. Such things as Fonyo’s run are very good, but for too many of us they can also be an opportunity to vent our moral spleens in such a way that we can then, without guilt, be insensitive and judgemental toward the sick and unattractive with whom we really deal.

There is compassion for an attractive personality with cancer, but a judgemental attitude toward someone we live with who struggles with emotional cancer. Compassion for helpless seal pups, but callousness toward the unwanted unborn within our own wombs. Four years ago, I was handed a mixed grace. I got sick. The illness could not have caught me at a better time. I was on a high – healthy, strong, successful enough, never lacking in friends, full of myself. During the months that I was struggling to regain some lost physical and emotional health, I was given the opportunity to see things from the other side. From the perspective of vulnerability and weakness, my own smugness and complacency was ever so evident. How quickly I judged others. How quickly I disdain weakness. How quickly I assume that others’ problems are their own fault.

How utterly unprepared I am to die. How unchildlike I have become. How smug and devoid of compassion I am I doubt that, despite my fault, I am atypical here. I suspect that I am, on this score, more of a microcosm of than an exception in our culture. So that leaves the question: How can we have become so unfeeling, so smug, so adolescent, so narcissistic, so full of ourselves to have lost our childlike-ness? Prophecy. We badly need it. So I share with you these two letters. They point out that only persons serving a pagan god, one absolutely antithetical to the God of Jesus, could so adolescentize the dictum: “God blesses those whom he loves!” to make it mean: “God loves the strong and attractive!” Thank God for the prophetic challenge of those who struggle. Perhaps they can help us reverse things before death.