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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.