Mary Magdala’s Easter Prayer

April 1, 1985

I never suspected

Resurrection

and to be so painful

to leave me weeping

With Joy

to have met you, alive and smiling, outside an empty tomb

With Regret

not because I’ve lost you

but because I’ve lost you in how I had you –

in understandable, touchable, kissable, clingable flesh

not as fully Lord, but as graspably human.

I want to cling, despite your protest

cling to your body

cling to your, and my, clingable humanity

cling to what we had, our past.

But I know that…if I cling

you cannot ascend and

I will be left clinging to your former self

…unable to receive your present spirit.

Expressing Our Affection

March 2, 1985

Certain questions bring us pain. The question of love is frequently one of them. Have you ever experienced a love that gave you the sense that you were lovable despite everything that is weak and lacking in you? Have you ever been loved unconditionally? Often times these questions make us ache. We look at our lives and see a searing lack of unconditional love. The impression is that nobody loves us in a way that assures us at our deepest levels that we are lovable. Our friendships, our loves, our families, our marriages appear to be anything but matrixes of unconditional love. At least, so it seems. But there is a confusion here. When we think of love, we think of affection. These are not always the same thing.

One kind of love is generally expressed through affection, through positive stroking, physical caressing, emotional affirmation and sexual intimacy. But our experience of these is usually weak, only rarely is there enough physical touch, emotional stroking, expressed affection or satisfying sexual expression in our lives. Because of this, most times we feel unloved and perhaps even unlovable. But these gestures of love are not identical with love. Sometimes in our friendships, marriages, families and communities, there is beneath the lack of physical and emotional stroking, beneath the sexual frustrations, and beneath the harsh and angry words which are frequently exchanged, an unconditional concern and commitment. There is unconditional love. Unfortunately, because the love isn’t expressed in affection, that love remains largely unperceived.

When that happens then we do not feel that we are loved and there are negative consequences for our self-image. One part of us – the physical, emotional, sexual and affective part of us – begins to lose confidence and progressively atrophies. We begin to feel that nobody loves us and we begin to identify love entirely with what we are lacking, namely, with physical, emotional, sexual and affective stroking. Just recently I dealt with a middle-aged lady who felt like this. She had grown up in a family in which care and stability abounded, but physical affection was never expressed. She had remained single and, save for a few dissatisfying sexual encounters which had been entered into because of depression and desperation, had never expressed physical affection in her life. Now she was convinced that she had never been loved. When she thought of love she filled with pain, aching and bitterness. Yet, when she was able to move beyond the hurt and look at her life objectively, she saw some things which surprised her. She had always been loved, solidly, deeply, unconditionally. She was also very lovable.

Her strict Irish family had never been able to tell her through words, physical touch or emotional stroking that they loved her. But they had in fact loved her despite being affectively inarticulate. Their love had expressed itself in commitment, generosity, concern and fidelity. But these were given too starkly, without affection being expressed, and this experience had remained constant throughout the rest of her life. In her friendships and relationships invariably the same pattern resurfaced. She had indeed been loved through more than 50 years but, at one level of her being, had not known it. But at another level of her being she had known it. While she protested that she had a weak self-image and felt unlovable, she radiated stability and confidence and lovableness at every level of her being, save the physical and sexual one. There she felt insecurity and lacked confidence. Her story is a paradigm for all of us, God’s poor, the little ones who go through life too-starved for affection, convinced that we aren’t loved nor lovable, burdened with a bad self-image. We think we are not loved, but beneath it all we are strongly loved and lovable and possess a tremendous confidence and stability because of it.

Equally as tragic is the reverse: Many persons have a lot of physical, emotional and sexual affection in their lives. Yet, underneath that, they do not feel loved nor lovable.In their case, the self-image inflicts the opposite demon upon them. It lets them operate with considerable social, affective and sexual confidence, but it strips them of confidence and stability in virtually every other area. There are many lessons in all of this, not the least of which is that we need to express affection, we need to touch each other physically and we need to affirm each other more explicitly. We need to express affection more, to stroke each other physically and emotionally into wholeness. But we need also to realize that love is more than this. Even when there isn’t a satisfying affection in our lives, our eyes need not fill with tears every time we contemplate whether or not we are loved.

Jesus Was A Good Loser

March 1, 1985

It is hard for us to love each other. Our relationships are too charged with competition, jealousy and violence. Win! Be the best at something! Show others you are more talented and classier than they are! Leave the competition behind! Strut your stuff! Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing! Show me a good loser and I will show you a loser. These phrases are not merely cheerleaders’ rhetoric meant to inspire us to do better things, they are viruses infecting our culture and psyches. From infancy onwards we are infected with the drive to out-do, to out-achieve and to out-hustle each other. From this comes competition, violence and jealousy. We structure our lives around competition and most of our meaning comes from achieving. When we achieve, win, when we are better than others at something, our lives seem fuller. Our self-images inflate and we feel confident and worthwhile. Conversely, when we cannot stand out, when we are just another face in the crowd we struggle to maintain a healthy self-image.

In either case, we struggle continually with jealousy and dissatisfaction. We envy and secretly hate the talented, the beautiful, the powerful, the rich, the achievers, the famous, the winners. Moreover, we make ourselves miserable by constantly comparing our own lack of talent, beauty and achievement with their successes. We were infected with this disease, unhealthy competitiveness, when we were still very young. From the time we started school, and even before, everything around us (and many things within us) pushed us to achieve, to set ourselves apart from others. So we pushed ourselves to stand out, to be at the top of the class, to be the best athlete, the best dressed, the best looking, the most musically talented, the most popular, the most experienced, the most travelled, the one who knew the most about cars, or movies, or history, or sex, or the stars or whatever. At all costs though the drive was to find something at which we could beat others. At all costs the idea was to somehow set ourselves apart and above. That idea is deeply rooted in us. Because of it, our relationships are too-charged with violence, competition and jealousy. How can we love each other and accept each person in respect and equality when we must first out-achieve each other?

How can we love each other when every achievement is cause for jealousy and resentment? How can we love each other when an overly competitive spirit makes us unable to see with the heart and the mind of Christ? To love is to be vulnerable. To love is to see the other as equal. To love is to let others’ talents and achievements enhance our lives. But we are generally incapable of these things. We are too infected with competition to allow ourselves to be vulnerable, to see others as equals and to not let the achievements and talents of others threaten us. Because of this we develop our talents, not to share our gifts and enhance others’ lives, but to measure ourselves, to strut our wares, to stand out. Likewise, because of this, we divide people into two groups, winners and losers, achievers and failures. We admire and hate the former and despise the latter. Because of this we also are constantly sizing each other up, rating each others’ bodies, hair, intelligence, clothing, talents and achievements. As we rate, we become unhealthily depressed when others outscore us and unhealthily inflated when we appear superior to them.

The enigma separating us from each other becomes ever more difficult to penetrate as we become more and more obsessed with ourselves and our need to be special, to sit above. We live in jealousy, competition and violence. The other is perennially perceived as a threat. We need to let the mind and heart of Christ exorcise this demon from our lives. In the mind and heart of Christ we will perceive ways of relating beyond competition, jealousy and violence. In the mind and heart of Christ there is no need to stand out and be special. There the other’s special talents are not seen as a threat, but as something that enhances all of life, our life included. What is the mind and heart of Christ? It is the acceptance of the fact that everyone is special and therefore all are equal. Nobody sits above the rest and nobody has a right to feel that he or she should sit above the rest. This is true for nations as well as for individuals. If individuals accepted this there would be much less jealousy, competition and violence among us. If nations accepted it, our world would not be poised on the brink of economic and nuclear destruction. Show me a good loser and I will show you a loser! Jesus was a good loser. In his underachieving we all achieved salvation. In his mind and heart lie the seeds that can bind us into one heart beyond jealousy, competition and violence.

Staying Home On A Friday Night

February 1, 1985

I am old enough to have known another time. Things were different when I was little. Many of life’s pleasures weren’t available and people made due, celebrating what there was to celebrate and not over-expecting. Back then, few expected or demanded the whole pie. Heaven was seen as something for later. My parents and their generation lived a simple spiritual philosophy: This life is but a short time of waiting, “mourning and weeping in a vale of tears!” It is not so important to be happy. Today there are sneers about their tears. But that sombre philosophy of theirs got them through life with their faith and loves intact and, ironically, probably equipped them with a greater capacity for enjoyment and happiness than we possess today. There is today too little talk, in our churches and in the world, about the “vale of tears” and the incompleteness of our present lives.

Spiritualities of the resurrection and psychologies of self-actualization, whatever their other strengths, no longer give us permission to be in pain, to be un whole, ill, unattractive, aged, unfulfilled or even just alone on a Friday night. The idea is all too present that we can only be happy if we somehow fulfil every hunger within us, if our lives are completely whole, consummated and we are never alone on a Friday night. Unless every pleasure that we yearn for can be tasted, we cannot be happy. Because of this we over expect. We stand before life and love in a greedy posture and with unrealistic expectations, demanding the resolution of all our eros and tension. However, life, in this world, can never give us that. We are pilgrims on earth, exiles journeying towards home. The world is passing away. We have God’s word for it. And we need God’s word for it! Too much in our experience today militates against the fact that here in this life all symphonies remain unfinished. Somehow, we have come to believe that a final solution for the burning tensions within us lies within our present grasp. I am not sure who or what gives us this idea.

Maybe it is the movie and television industries with their leading men and leading ladies who are presented to us as already redeemed, persons who are gorgeous, immersed in love and meaning, and who have the wherewithal within their grasp to taste whatever life has to offer. But something has led us to the belief that we need not put up with tension and frustration and that there are persons in this life who are already enjoying a redeemed life. That belief, however unconscious and unexpressed, lies at the root of much of our restlessness and unhappiness today. None of us are whole, not even our gorgeous leading men and ladies. Yet because we believe that somehow, we can or should be whole, we go through life denigrating what chances we have for rest and happiness.

A simple example serves to illustrate: In our culture we suffer from what might be termed “Friday Night Syndrome.” Few people can stay home quietly and rest on a Friday night. Why? Is it because we are not tired and ideally could not appreciate a nice quiet time. No! We cannot stay home quietly on Friday night because inside of us moves a restless demon that assures us that everyone in the whole world is doing something exciting on Friday night. Once that voice is heard, then our homes, our families and our commitments begin to look unexciting. Peace and restfulness slip away, and we are caught up in an insatiable restlessness. This example illustrates the basic principle: So much of our unhappiness comes from comparing our lives, our friendships, our loves, our commitments, our duties, our bodies and our sexuality to some idealized and non-Christian vision of things which falsely assures us that there is a heaven on earth. When that happens, and it does, our tensions begin to drive us mad, in this case, to a cancerous restlessness.

In a culture (and, at times, in a church) that tells us that no happiness is possible unless every ache and restlessness inside of us is fulfilled, how hard it is to be happy. How tragic it is to be alone! How tragic it is to be unmarried! How tragic it is to be married, but not completely fulfilled romantically and sexually! How tragic it is not to be good-looking! How tragic it is to be unhealthy, aged, handicapped! How tragic it is to be caught up in duties and commitments, small children and diapers and routine, which limit our freedom and relationships! How tragic it is to be poor! How tragic it is to go through life and not be able to taste every pleasure on earth! It almost isn’t worth living! There is wisdom and, yes, even comfort, in the old “mourning and weeping in this vale of tears” philosophy. Sometimes that expression was abused, and people forgot that the Creator did not just make us for life after death…He did also intend some life after birth! But those who lived that philosophy generally did not attempt to milk life for more than it could give them. Those who lived that philosophy were a lot less restless and greedy for experience than we are today. They could much more restfully enjoy God’s great gifts – life, love, youth, health, friendship and sexuality – even as they are limitedly given in this life. Those who lived that philosophy were, I am sure, much more restful on Friday nights!

The Eucharist Is An Embrace

There is a story told about a four-year-old Jewish boy, Mortakai, who refused to go to school to study Hebrew and the Torah. Every time his parents attempted to send him to school, young Mortakai would sneak off to the swings and play by himself. His parents tried every form of persuasion and threat, but nothing worked. The child failed to understand or acquiesce, silently and stubbornly refusing to stay in school. Eventually they even took him to see a psychiatrist. That too proved futile. He continued to sneak away from school at every opportunity. Finally, in desperation, they took him to the rabbi, an old and spiritually astute man. The rabbi listened while the parents explained the problem. Without a word, he picked up the child and held him closely to his heart for several moments. Then, still without a word, he put the child down. From then on, Mortakai stayed in school and there was no further problem. What do we do when our words are inadequate? What do we do when we feel tense and tired? What do we do when we feel inadequate to cope with the complexities and ambiguities of our lives and loves? What do we do when we need power from beyond ourselves to bring about a love, a wholeness, and a peace, which we cannot give ourselves? We generally do all kinds of things, not the least of which is that we often grow depressed, frustrated and despairing.

But there is something we can do. We can touch the hem of Christ’s garment. We can celebrate the Eucharist. In it, we are inexplicably given peace and strength because in that ritual God holds us to his heart. The scriptural story of the woman who touched the hem of Christ’s garment provides a paradigm for this. That woman, we are told, had been suffering from internal bleeding for many years. During those years she had tried everything within her power to come to healing. Nothing had worked. All her efforts had served only to worsen her state and leave her fatigued and discouraged. Finally, with her own resources spent and all that was humanly in view exhausted, she decided that she would sneak up and touch Christ. As she touched him she felt a power flow into her. She became whole. Something from beyond herself, something from beyond ordinary possibility, now flowed where formerly she haemorrhaged. Her explicit confrontation with Christ would come later. The Eucharist is meant to function like that. In it, we touch the hem of Christ’s garment and are held to his heart. What happens there is something beyond words and understanding, though not beyond love. Like love, the Eucharist does not need to be understood or explained, it needs only to be touched. In the Eucharist, as in love, the main thing is that we be held.

Perhaps the most useful image of how the Eucharist functions is the image of a mother holding a frightened, tired, and tense child. In the Eucharist, God functions as a mother. God picks us up; frightened, tired, helpless, complaining, discouraged, and protesting children and holds us to her heart until the tension subsides and peace and strength flow into us. A tense and tired child held to its mother’s breast eventually becomes calm and returns to the floor full again of the mother’s strength. Through an embrace the mother can impart to a child a peace and a strength that cannot be transmitted through words. This is also true for the embrace of friends and lovers. There is in an embrace something beyond what can be explained biologically or psychologically. Power is transmitted through love that goes beyond rational understanding. That is why when after Jesus had spent all his words he left us the Eucharist. That is also why when after we have spent all our words we should celebrate the Eucharist. When our own words, decisions, and actions are inadequate to relieve the aching in our hearts, we need the embrace of the mother, God. This happens in the Eucharist. It is a timeless ritual, an embrace. Like love, it is something that we can never fully understand or explain. But we need not understand it. We can let the ritual do its work. Ultimately we go to the Eucharist to let ourselves be held.

We live constantly at the limits of our own capacities, where our words fail us, where our resources are not enough, and where we feel acutely our dullness, our failure, our moral impotence, our bitterness, and our distance from God and others. We are constantly helpless, helpless to heal and helpless to celebrate. In that fatigue and tension we need to abandon ourselves to the embrace, the Eucharist.

It is not important that we understand all that transpires there, nor even that we go to the Eucharist fully alert and enthusiastic – I doubt the apostles were that at the Last Supper. It is only important that we enter the ritual. In it, God holds us to her heart.

Compassion And Abortion

January 2, 1985

At the Democratic national convention in San Francisco last summer, Jesse Jackson ended his address with a plea to everyone to vote according to conscience. A vote for conscience, he stated, is a vote for truth “and when conscience and truth win, the poor win; and when the poor win, women win; and when women win, children win; and when children win, we all win because they are the future!” It is uncertain whether the problem lies in our voting or with our consciences, but lately children haven’t been winning. Abortion has. Abortion, like the word of God, divides. It slips between the bone and marrow, within conscience, within families, within bodies, within our culture and it separates, making the one into two. Most of the rational arguments on both sides of this issue have already been articulated. What I submit here is not an argument but a challenge and a plea to women to examine how the women’s movement may be unfairly coloring this issue. My challenge is this: Look at what is happening within the feminist movement and discriminate, separate what is legitimate from what is a temporary and unhealthy overreaction. The influence that women’s groups have had on women regarding the question of abortion falls into the latter category.

As it stands right now the women’s movement has seized the abortion issue as its own issue, a women’s issue. It has linked the right to freely choose to have an abortion to the right to full equality. This is a disastrous and unfortunate connection which leaves everyone poorer, children, women and men. The arguments vary a little, but always there is the common denominator: “This is a women’s issue!” “Men don’t get pregnant!” “We have a right to our own bodies!” “If men got pregnant, the abortion laws would have been changed years ago!” These arguments are the result of an overreaction and an unhealthy hypersensitivity that is temporarily clouding many women’s thinking and robbing them of one of their most precious qualities, compassion. Too many women, I submit, are being sucked in by an excessive feminism which is making them defend positions (in this case, the right to abortion by demand) which are far from their true feminine nature. Thus, for example, there is the argument that abortion is a women’s issue. As if men should decide issues of war, economics, politics and the like, and women should decide about drapes, kids, day care and abortion. There are no women’s issues, just as there are no men’s issues. All these issues are everyone’s issues. But that is a fringe point.

More salient is the issue of femininity itself and how it is desperately needed to bring sanity to the issue of abortion. Radical feminism argues: “If men became pregnant, they would have changed the abortion laws years ago!” Sadly that is probably true. But it is more a commentary on the callousness of men than on the justness of abortion on demand. Men would have probably changed the laws, but they would have done so because they, men, were selfish, insensitive and unwilling to let their lives be upset by pregnancy and young children. Women, fortunately, have always been the ones who have been less selfish, who have let their lives be upset by pregnancy and children. Accordingly, they have also been the ones who have had a deeper sense of the sacred, the sacredness of life and the sacredness of children. It has been women who have always been the ones sensitive to the young, the helpless, the aged. They were, and to a large extent still are, the humanizing component in a too-macho, too-cold and too-unfeeling world. As men shot each other, women protected the children and bound up the wounds. Their greater sense of compassion stems from that. But the males kept the females away from the places where important decisions were taken. Men decided the issues of war, politics, economics, law, education and religion. Little wonder females eventually grew frustrated and angry.

I don’t doubt that if men could become pregnant that they would have long ago liberalized abortion laws. But that would just have added to an already unjust, cold, macho and inhuman system. Knowing men and knowing our history, I fear for a society where women no longer protect the helpless and the unborn. And so my challenge to women is this: Through having your lives upset by pregnancy and child-rearing, you have developed a compassion that, for now, men can only envy. Don’t jettison that in order to imitate a macho insensitivity to the helpless. Equality will not come as a result of punishing men by punishing the unborn. Challenge men, not the helpless. Men need to be challenged to allow their lives to be upset by pregnancy, children, the helpless, the weak and the aged. That part of the feminist movement that challenges here is eminently healthy. That part which demands, in the name of feminism, abortion on demand is not. Jesse Jackson stated that “when women win, children win; and when children win, we all win because they are the future!” Lately women have been winning…but children haven’t and the future hasn’t been winning either.

Three Praises Of Fantasy

January 1, 1985

We have always been taught it is a bad thing to fantasize about sex, to have bad thoughts. That might be true, but it is virtually impossible, and perhaps unhealthy, not to think about sex. We are so incurably sexual. The word sex is derived from the Latin word secare, a verb that means to cut or divide. The word is appropriate. We experience ourselves precisely as sexed, divided from, cut off from, separated, unwhole, lonely pieces of something greater. So we ache for wholeness and, as we ache, we fantasize about that union which can end our aloneness. Our very condition spawns perpetual sexual temptations. That comes from God and is good. Sex is a powerful, huge thing. Like breathing, it is part and parcel of being alive and like breathing it is necessary for life. It is not one isolated part of ourselves. Sex is co-extensive with our personalities in that it is a dimension of our self-awareness.

It is the way we seek contact, community and unity beyond ourselves and our separate egos. It is an energy, a power for loving, a merciless tension which pushes us outward. As such it affects our whole being. All of our relationships and actions are sexually colored, tainted if you will, in some way. We do little, perhaps nothing, which is not affected, however inchoately, by the fact that we are cut off, divided, sexed. But to say that sexuality seeps through into nearly all we think and do need not be a shameful confession, it can be a statement of health. Hence, sexual fantasizing can also be an indication of health rather than automatically a sign of selfishness and perversion. But this needs considerable nuance: Our sexuality is developmental and so too should be its attendant fantasies. What follows is an outline of certain discernible phases of sexual maturation and their consequences for sexual fantasizing. This schema is developed for the male sexual cycle but, with certain variations, is equally true for women. The adolescent phase of sexuality begins with puberty and can last into the late 20s. At this stage, sexuality is dominantly genitally focused.

It can be quite indiscriminate in that its temptations and at times its actions can be frighteningly unmonogamous and it tends to be centered very much on pleasure, physical and emotional. One’s fantasy life generally follows suit. Bad thoughts during this time are generally pretty bad, namely, thoughts which are precisely genitally focused, thoughts which dwell on the bodily pleasures of sex. But this phase normally gives way, during the mid to late 20s, or in some cases earlier, to a sexuality which yearns much more for intimacy than for sheer sexual pleasure or indiscriminate sexual union. In the second stage, sexuality becomes less raw, more discriminate, more romantic. The fantasy of intimacy, of embrace, replaces cruder versions. At this stage sexual feelings widen to take in more aspects of the person. At this stage too it begins to become more difficult to consider sexual fantasies simply as bad thoughts. Somehow the fantasy of embrace suggests more goodness and wholeness than it suggests dirtiness and evil, unless of course it does not respect other persons’ privacy, chastity, marriages and commitments. But sexuality has yet a further phase. By one’s mid to late 30s the issues of procreation, children and wider community begin to take centre stage. Sexuality, at every level, body, mind, emotions, psyche, spirit, begins to demand that we give birth to something or, like Jephthah’s daughter, it begins to mourn and bewail its virginity. Sexual union, even intimacy with some loved one, however deep and true, is no longer enough. Our sexuality now has hungers beyond that. Our sexual energies, our erotic tensions, must now be poured out for a wider community. At this point in life, all sexual pleasure and sexual intimacy becomes unhealthily narcissistic if it does not accept this.

And this is also true for our life of fantasy. As our sexuality widens and begins to be focused more on giving birth and on community, so too must our concomitant fantasies. At this stage of our lives, I dare submit, we must cultivate sexual thoughts, but they must be fantasies of how we can pour our sexuality, the tension and energy inside of us that is felt in our sense of being cut off and divided, into nurturing life, into new ways of producing life, into new ways of impregnating and being impregnated so as to help bring about new birth and new community. We will always fantasize and we will always fantasize sexually. To be human is to have a fertile mind and imagination. To be sensitive is to have fertile feelings and fertile fantasies. For better and for worse we are stuck with our “bad thoughts.” When are they a share in God’s hunger for a kingdom, something to be fostered, and when are they bad thoughts, something to be confessed? When are they healthy and when are they unhealthy? Perhaps there are no clear answers to those questions. However, even in a world in which the huge issues of social morality such as starvation, social injustice, abortion and the threat of nuclear war tend to make speculation on issues of private morality seem petty, these are worthwhile and ultimately important questions.

Incarnation As God With Us

December 1, 1984

For many of us, I suspect, it gets harder each year to capture the mood of Christmas. About the only thing that still warms us is memories, memories of younger more naive days when lights and carols, Christmas trees and gifts, still excited us. For me, the very memories of myself as a child anticipating Christmas are a virtual Christmas in themselves. But we are adult now and so it seems in our world. Any joy of anticipation of Christmas is blunted by a commercialism which, like everything else in American life, is characterized by excess. By late October we are affronted by Christmas decorations, Santa Claus is around for all of November and in December we are force-fed a series of Christmas parties which rival the New York Marathon as an endurance test. Christmas, 1984, can we crank up any real joy and genuine celebration?

It is not easy. Commercialism is a minor obstacle. More serious is 1984 itself. Can we, amid all the cruel revelations of this year, warm up to a season of tinsel and festivity? Can we sing Joy to the World in the face of India and Ethiopia? Does it mean anything to speak of peace even as we stockpile nuclear bombs and as strikes and unemployment leave millions embittered? And what about all this fuss about a 2,000 year-old baby when thousands of babies have had their lives aborted this year in our own true north strong and free? Are there any silent nights left? Too many nights in 1984 were punctured by an unsilence.

Moreover there are our own personal tragedies: lost health, lost loves, lost jobs, lost time, the death of loved ones, tiredness and frustration. How do we celebrate the birth of a redeemer in a world which appears shockingly unredeemed and with hearts which feel so heavy and unredeemed? The Christmas story is the most unusually potent story ever told. God comes down from heaven, takes on human flesh and ultimately ends all suffering. That story has altered the entire course of human history. Its power is unmatched.

But its power to survive and affect depends upon its truth and healing power and that truth and healing power can easily be distorted and perverted. Christmas is an incredible event, something which must be celebrated with kisses and drinks all around, with tinsel and lights and songs of joy. Anyone who really understands Christmas will want to be involved in an exchange of gifts. But it is not a magical event, a Cinderella story without midnight. When we understand it, we might well want to string up lights and sing its meaning in joyful carols. But we will see at the same time that, at its centre, lies an humiliation, a pain and a death which is not unlike what is being experienced in India, Ethiopia, on the strike lines, and in our own wounded and bored hearts. Incarnation is not yet resurrection. Flesh in Jesus, as in us, is human flesh, vulnerable, weak, incomplete and needy. Painfully full of limit, suffering. Christmas celebrates Christ’s birth into these things, not his removal of them. He redeems limit, evil, sin and pain. They are not abolished. There is a difference.

For this reason we can celebrate Christ’s birth without in any way denying or trivializing the real evil in our world and the very real pain in our lives. Christmas is a challenge to celebrate while still in pain.

The incarnate God is called Emmanuel, a name which means God-is-with-us. That fact does not mean immediate festive joy. Our world remains unwhole and the wars, strikes, selfishness and bitterness linger. Our hearts too remain unwhole and pain lingers. For a Christian, just as for everyone else, there will be incompleteness, illness, senseless hurt, broken dreams, cold hungry lonely days of bitterness and a virtual lifetime of inconsummation. Reality has its harshness and Christmas does not ask us to make-believe. The incarnation does not promise us heaven on earth. It promises heaven in heaven. Here, on earth, it promises us something else – God’s presence in our lives. This presence redeems because it is the sense that God is with us that empowers us to give up bitterness, to forgive and to move beyond narcissism. When God is with us then pain and happiness are not exclusive of each other and the agonies and riddles of life do not exclude deep meaning and deep joy.

As Avery Dulles once said: “Incarnation does not provide us with a ladder by which to escape from the ambiguities of life and scale the heights of heaven. Rather, it enables us to burrow deep into the heart of planet earth and find it shimmering with divinity.” George Orwell prophesied that 1984 would be a truly horrible year with torture, double-think and a broken human spirit characterizing our world. To some extent that is true. We are a long ways from being whole. We remain deeply in exile. However, I plan to celebrate Christmas 1984 heartily. Maybe I won’t feel the exact excitement I once felt as a child when I was so excited about tinsel, lights, Christmas carols, and special gifts and special food. Some of those feelings won’t crank up anymore. But something else does crank up, namely, the sense that God is with us in the flesh.

The word became flesh. That’s true, even for 1984 – so let’s have kisses and drinks all around.

Life Is A Messy Business

November 2, 1984

Atheistic philosopher, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, once commented on why he did not believe in God. The reason, he stated, is because ambiguity is the fundamental phenomenological fact within our existence and a belief in God is not consistent with that experience. That phrase, in an abstract way, expresses something we all experience, namely, life is utterly messy; so messy in fact that it can leave one wondering whether indeed there exists an all-powerful and caring God. Nobody goes through life antiseptically, without dirt, pain, mess and death. But, unlike Merleau-Ponty, I believe in God precisely for that reason. Life may be messy, but it is real, not plastic. We aren’t Swiss clocks, infallibly ordered, made to tick meticulously, precise and antiseptic. Rather our lives are anything but ordered and clocklike. We cannot live without messiness, complications, and much emotional and physical pain.

It begins when we are born. Birth is a messy process which causes pain, dictates involvement, and complicates peoples’ lives irrevocably. Living does too! Work, interrelations, love, sex, friendship, aging, all of these are complex, earthy, messy businesses which are always at least partially full of pain, pettiness, limit, compromise, and death. They are full of joy and meaning too, but these are seldom given purely. Moreover, no one goes through life without having his or her dignity, freedom, and dreams frustrated and stepped on. There is no antiseptic route through life. The whiteness of our baptismal robes, the purity of our hearts, minds and bodies, and the freshness of our youth, sully and dirty and bear the stain of living. As we grow older, Gerard Manley Hopkins’ words ring ever more true:

“And all is smeared with trade, bleared,

smeared with toil;

And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell;

the soil.”

Often this leaves us discouraged and questioning. More seriously, this often leads to a subtle despair. Stated simply, the algebra of this despair, and ultimately of all despair, reads like this: If all is muddled, then all is permitted. That attitude is viral and deadly. It is perhaps the worst temptation faced by an adult. Because of it we sell ourselves out, give up, throw dignity and dreams to the wind, and settle for second best. The single factor is perhaps at the root of most of the infidelity, sexual irresponsibility, and unbelief within our culture. When we sell out our dignity and dreams, then, like Merleau-Ponty, we will have trouble experiencing God. The Highest is more clearly experienced when we are giving ourselves over to what is highest. The messiness of life also leaves us tempted in another way, namely, we are tempted to try to live anitseptically.

Since we cannot live and love deeply without hurting, without pettiness, without enslaving and humiliating entanglements, without smear, we opt not to live and love deeply at all. So we hang loose, refusing depth. We stay away from all that might hurt – or heal – us deeply. In doing this we make life plastic – antiseptic, clean, without dirt and smell, but totally lifeless and without meaning, like a plastic rose. We need to accept the contours of our existence. We are not angels, free, soaring spirits, unencumbered by the limits of time and flesh. Our souls are born enfleshed in soil, pain, blood, and smell. We were never intended to be angels. But with that comes a special dignity, the dignity that a real rose possesses over a plastic one. Peter Meinke once wrote a sonnet honoring the death of the man who invented the plastic rose:

“The Man who invented the plastic rose is dead,

behold his mark.

His undying flawless blossoms never close

But guard his grave unbending through the

dark.

He understood nether beauty nor flowers,

Which catch our hearts in nets as soft as sky

And bind us with a thread of fragile hours;

Flowers are beautiful because they die.

Beauty without the perishable pulse

Is dry and sterile, an abandoned stage

With false forests. But the results

Support this man’s invention; He knew his age;

A vision of our tearless time discloses

Artificial men sniffing plastic roses.”
(Ladies Home Journal, 1964)

People Don’t Break Easily

November 1, 1984

Dan Berrigan once commented that if Jesus returned to earth he would take a whip and drive out both the patients and doctors from all counselling and psychologists’ offices with the words: “Take up your couch and walk! You’ve been given skin to survive in this world!” There is wisdom and challenge in those words. God covered our nerves with skin, we are not so hypersensitive. He has also given us a remarkable resiliency and an incredible capacity to heal. We are tougher and more elastic than we actually think. I remember my first surprising reminder of this. As a young child playing hockey I was bullied and hit by a bigger kid. I fell and began to cry, convinced that I was seriously hurt. I waited vainly for the world to stop and for everyone to come and examine my hurt. But the game went on and I lay on the ice, ignored, until someone came and challenged me with the fact that I was not really hurt at all. I was only feeling sorry for myself and was quite capable, if I wanted, of continuing to play. It came as a surprise to realize that I was not so fragile after all. I could take a lick. It was humiliating, to be sure, but I was quite capable of bouncing back.

As we get older, the games, the bullying and the hurts become less physical, more psychological, more sophisticated. But one dynamic remains constant, most often we are not as hurt as we think. Invariably there is more self-pity than actual wound. As human beings we are, in fact, gifted with an incredible resiliency. Skin, bones, psyches, hearts, when pushed to it, these have a remarkable bounce. They don’t break so easily and, when they do, they have an unbelievable capacity to heal. We can take a fall, a hurt, a cut, a rejection. It doesn’t kill us, we heal; there is seldom an excuse for paralysis, never one for despair. We are tougher than we think. It is when we forget this that we get ourselves into trouble and find ourselves far away from the feast, happiness and celebration that God has put at the heart of life. The most incredible and challenging of all of Christ’s teachings is that we can in fact be happy, that we can celebrate and enjoy life, even though we and the world we live in are far from perfect. Mostly we do not believe this. Mostly we go through life protesting our right to despair, partly paralyzed by self-pity and limping when there is not enough reason to limp.

Silently or out loud, we tell God and others: “If you knew how much I have been hurt, you wouldn’t tell me that I can be happy! If you only knew how fragile I am! If you only knew how sensitive I am and how easily I can be hurt! If you only knew how unfair it is for me. If you only knew how I have been rejected! If you only knew…! It is too late for me. I am too wounded!” But that posture and attitude is, in the end, a form of self-pity, a mini-masturbation which sells us short. It sells God short too for he endowed us with more than that. He gave us more resiliency, more bounce, more toughness, more capacity for healing and, God knows, more reason to hope than we allow ourselves in our hypersensitivity. It is good to be sensitive, but too often we are unhealthy hypersensitive. We think that our bones are broken when they aren’t, that our psyches and hearts don’t have any more bounce when they do, that a wound will never heal when it will, and that we are paralyzed when we aren’t. So we limp or lie down and offer a myriad of excuses which explain why we cannot be happy. The challenge is needed: take up your couch and walk, you’ve been given skin! We are tougher than we give ourselves credit for.

Knowing this should help us move out towards celebration, beyond our hurts. With the elasticity of body, psyche, and heart that God has given us we are not allowed to despair. Ultimately we can absorb anything and bounce back. Because of this we are allowed to make some mistakes and to take some bad falls. We will get hurt, but we may never say: “I hurt too much to enter the game of celebration again. I am beyond healing!” We are never beyond healing. Christ’s challenge to celebrate is uncompromising. It challenges us to our own capacities, to our own toughness, to love beyond hurt. It challenges us to risk great hurt. Nikos Kazantzakis starts his autobiography with these words:

“Three kinds of souls, three prayers: 1) I am a bow in your hands, Lord, draw me, lest I rot. 2) Do not overdraw me, Lord, I shall break. 3) Overdraw me, Lord, and who cares if I break!” When we know how resilient God has made us, we risk the third prayer.

Keeping Fire In The Eyes

October 2, 1984

Every so often we spend time in front of a mirror checking for signs of aging. We turn all the lights on and study ourselves. Are there wrinkles in our skin? Bags under our eyes? More grey hair? We scrutinize, examine. It’s a proper enough exercise. But we should be looking ourselves dead straight in the eyes when we do this exercise. In them we will see whether we are aging and whether or not there are any signs of senility. Scrutinize and examine, look for signs of aging, but spend that time looking into your eyes. What do they reveal? Are they tired, unenthusiastic, cynical, lifeless, lacking in sparkle, hardened? Is the jealousy of Cain there? Is there any fire there? Does passion still burn? Are they weary of experiencing, incapable of being surprised? Have they lost their virginity? Are they fatigued or excited? Is there still a young child buried somewhere behind them?

The real signs of senility are betrayed by the eyes, not the flesh. Drooping flesh means that we are aging physically, nothing more. Bodies age and die in a process as inevitable and natural as the law of gravity, but drooping eyes signify an aging spirit, a more deadly senility. That is less natural. Spirits are meant to be forever young, forever childlike, forever virgin. They are not meant to droop or die. But they can die, through boredom and its child – cynicism. They can die through a lack of passion, through the illusion of familiarity, through a loss of childlikeness and virginity, and through a fatigue of the spirit we commonly call despair. Despair is a curious thing. We despair not because we grow weary of the shortcomings and sufferings of life and, at last, find life too much to take. No. We despair for the opposite reason, namely, we grow weary of joy. Joy lies in experiencing life as fresh, novel and primal, as a child does, with a certain purity of spirit. This type of joy is not pleasure, though there is pleasure in it. Pleasure can be had without joy but that kind of pleasure is then the product of a lack of chastity in experiencing. That kind of pleasure, initially always experienced as a victory, as a throwing off of naiveté, a liberation, soon turns into defeat, that is, into dullness, boredom, loss and lack of passion.

That kind of pleasure very soon becomes insipid, soybeans without salt, egg custard. Our palate loses its itch for tasting. With that, our enthusiasm dies and a fatigue of the spirit sets in. Our chief joy lies in an innocence and virginity in experiencing and when that joy is no longer sought, and we tire of pleasure, we grow listless, hardened, bitter, passionless. There is nothing left in us that is fresh and young. Our eyes begin to show this. They lose their sparkle, their childlikeness. In her poignant novel, Stone Angel, Margaret Laurence describes her heroine, a lifeless and despairing lady named Hagar, studying herself in a mirror: “I stood for a long time, looking, wondering how a person could change so much…So gradually it happens. The face – a brown and leathery face that wasn’t mine. Only the eyes were mine, staring as though to pierce the lying glass and get beneath to some true image, infinitely distant.” A good look in the mirror for most of us reveals the same, a lifeless face which is not really ours, and dull eyes, our own, but hidden deeply beneath a lying glass. Our eyes and face, leathery, ossified, blank, distant, devoid of innocence and virginity; somewhere (“so gradually it happens”) our fire went out! What’s to be done? My suggestion is that we take a good long look at ourselves in a mirror. Study the eyes; ,stare long and hard. Let what we see frighten us enough to move us towards the road of unlearning and revirginization.

Look in a mirror, look at your face until some of the self-preoccupation, the cynicism, the pseudo-sophistication, and the unchastity and adultness drop away. Stare into your eyes until the lying glass breaks and you see there again the little boy or girl who once inhabited that space. In that, wonder will be born, sparkle will return and, with it, a freshness and virginity that will make you feel young again.

Our eyes seldom grow tired, though they frequently get buried. It is the latter which causes the blank passionless stare. Bodies tire, but eyes are linked to spirits. They stretch and strain and sparkle in thirst before reality’s turbid deluge. Eyes are always eager to see. One of the great contrasts between Christianity and some other world religions has to do with the eyes. For example, the Buddhist saint is always depicted with his or her eyes shut, while the Christian saint always has them open. The Buddhist saint has a sleek and harmonious body, but his or her eyes are heavy and sealed with sleep. The medieval saint’s body is wasted to its crazy bone, but his or her eyes are frightfully alive, hungry, staring. The Buddhist is looking with a peculiar inwardness. The Christian’s eyes are staring with frantic intentness outwards.

Getting Angry With God

October 1, 1984

Recently a lady came to see me who was suffering from a curious resentment. She was angry at God. Her feelings were vague and not clearly focused, but she felt that somehow God was to blame for her unhappiness. Life, she felt, was rapidly passing her by and she had already missed out on many chances for really living it. She was, and had been, a good lady, religious, moral, generous, living for others, faithful to her commitments. Now in her mid-50s she felt anger and resentment growing within her, an anger and resentment she was unable to really explain, accept or control. She was confused and unhappy. On the one hand, she did not regret her past life. She had been faithful, unselfish and religious. Yet, with her youth, health, sexual prowess, and opportunities fading, she felt frustrated, unneeded, unfulfilled, used, locked-in, and haunted by the thought that perhaps she had never made a decision for herself in her whole life.

Viewed one way, her virtue seemed like an accident, a conspiracy of circumstances. She wondered whether she had really chosen this or whether it had been forced upon her. Whenever she felt like that then she filled with regret and resentment. She regretted that she had always been so moral, religious and proper. In these moments too she would have to admit to herself that she secretly envied the amoral, the unvirtuous, all those who never felt, as she did, the yoke of domestication that eventually comes with morality and religion. At the root of all this was the feeling that she had been had, seduced by God. God was to blame. He, she assured me, had always been just real enough to hold her, but never real enough to fulfil her, at least not emotionally. So she was angry, and angry with herself for being angry. She was full of resentment and full of guilt for being resentful. Prayer was very difficult for her because she could not admit to herself that she was angry at God and so whenever she did try to pray it seemed artificial and contrived.

What does one say to a person like that? One begins by pointing out that her resentment and anger are already a high form of prayer, at least potentially so. Too often we are under the impression that God does not want us to struggle with him, that he prefers sheep who docilely acquiesce (even as they swallow hard on the bitterness that so spontaneously arises in the emotional, psychological and sexual mechanisms which he built into them). But God wants to be wrestled with. As Rabbi Heschel points out, ever since the day that Abraham argued with God over the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah, and Jacob wrestled with the angel, those close to God have also occasionally engaged in similar arguments. The refusal to accept the harshness of God’s ways in the name of his love is an authentic form of prayer. Indeed, the prophets and saints were not always in the habit of simply saying, “Thy will be done.” They often fought, challenged, squirmed and begged as a way of saying “Thy will be changed!” I suspect that sometimes they did annul divine plans. God wants to be struggled with, especially if we have been living in his house for awhile.

Why? Why would he want this? How can wrestling be a form of prayer? Wrestling can be a form of prayer precisely because it can be a form of love. People who live together in love for a long time must resolve many tensions. There is constant wrestling, much anger and occasional bitterness. But the struggling together, if persevered in, always leads to new depth in love. The lady I was describing earlier was, in fact, standing at the very edges of a new phase of love. She needed to pray through her bitterness first. As she stood at the edges of that new phase bent under the weight of God’s yoke, bitter and with the jealousy of Cain in her eyes, the same Father who had pleaded with the older brother of the prodigal son was also pleading with her, pleading with her to enter a new circle, the circle of those who feel compassion for God. Rabbi Heschel tells the story of a Polish Jew who became bitter and stopped praying “because of what happened in Auschwitz.” Later, however, he began praying again. When asked, “Why?” he replied: “I felt sorry for God.” This man had reached a new phase of love, that of affinity, of compassion. God’s concerns, God’s cause, God’s house, were now his too. But such a point is only reached after struggle, when anger and bitterness are transformed.

God invites and, I dare say, enjoys the struggle. As Nikos Kazantzakis puts it: “Every person partakes of the divine nature in both spirit and flesh. The struggle between God and the human person breaks out in everyone, together with the longing for reconciliation. “Most often this struggle is unconscious and short-lived. A weak soul does not have the endurance to resist the flesh for long. It grows heavy, becomes flesh itself, and the contest ends. The stronger the soul and the flesh, the more fruitful the struggle and the richer the final harmony. God does not love weak souls and flabby flesh. The Spirit wants to have to wrestle with flesh which is strong and full of resistance.”

May we all win…by losing!

Hope at the time of death

September 10, 1984

Today I received the news that a close friend of our family was killed in an industrial accident. Nothing prepares you for that kind of news. Since the phone rang I have prayed. I have prayed for the victim, for his family and loved ones, and I have prayed for faith and hope and for the wisdom to know what to say when I speak at this man’s funeral. What does one say in the face of a death of this kind? What feeble lifeline of consolation can be clung to for perspective and courage? In what words lie the seeds of courage? We have the words of our faith: “He is in God’s hands! We believe in the resurrection and in life everlasting! Life is change not ended! Here we have no lasting city, we are pilgrims destined for an eternal city!” Rich words, true words, but words which when spoken in the face of actual death offer perhaps only an anaemic consolation. They can be said too easily. What can be said? Perhaps nothing should be said at all. To the extent that we have faith, we already know God cares, that our final hope lies beyond this life and that we are destined for resurrection. To the extent that we do not have faith, all words are inadequate to offer hope at the time of death.

Perhaps the consolation and courage we seek at a time like this are found not in words at all, but in a simple presence to each other, in the simple gesture of hugging each other and silently sharing pain and helplessness. Shared pain and helplessness perhaps say all that needs to be said: “I am here. I care. There is nothing I can say to make things better. I know you do not expect me to say anything!” Maybe that’s enough. Perhaps in our stuttering and awkward inability to say anything meaningful, in the helpless silence and pointless small talk, lies the compassion that makes the lifeline through which the nurturing milk of consolation and hope can flow back and forth among us. I think that this is true. The deepest consolation we can offer each other lies in sharing helplessness. Too much is said at funerals. There is a need for less words. But beyond this there is a need for some speaking, for words which can clarify our relationship to the dead person and to each other, for words which can stimulate courage and faith, and for words which can help us celebrate that courage and faith. What words should be shared at the time of death of a loved one? Words that tell us that our hope lies in love, and not primarily in biological life. Psychologist John Powell submits that there are only two potential tragedies in life, and dying young in not one of them.

These are the two potential tragedies: (i) If we go through life and we do not love fully; and (ii) if we go through life and do not tell those whom we love that we love them. In the face of death, our own death or that of a loved one, there is always deep regret. But this regret is not a regret which focuses us back on the sins and shortcomings of our lives and, in the face of these, makes us fear eternal punishment. No. The regret is that so much love has been unlived, unexpressed, unappreciated, badly received and left unreconciled. In the face of death the deepest yearning is for more time, more time for reconciliation, more time to express love more fully. When we speak to each other at the time of a death, our words should express this. They should convey that death challenges us not to become morose, more withdrawn from life. Rather death challenges us to enter life more deeply in love, appreciation and especially in reconciliation. In the world, worse things can befall one than death. Christ warned of this when he said: “What does it profit one to gain the whole world and suffer the loss of one’s soul?” The loss he talked about is the loss of concern, the loss of conscience, the loss of one’s love for others, the loss of the hope for reconciliation. These can be snuffed out by a different kind of death, a bitterness or a selfishness or a dishonesty which kills compassion. When a person dies, if conscience, love and the desire for reconciliation remain, nothing is lost.

A year ago, I stood at the bedside of a young lady, Cathy, who was dying of cancer. She looked at us through tears and said: “This is hard, but I am not bitter, so it’s okay!” She died. New hope was born in us. Her few words were enough. We knew that nothing had been lost. Words need also be spoken to alleviate our guilt, the guilt of those of us who are not dying. Whenever someone close to us dies, we struggle through a deep guilt. Somehow we feel responsible and we think of the hundreds of things we can and should have done. Now it’s too late. We need to be reminded that God loves that person more than we do. God has his own way of writing straight with the crooked lines we have made. He has his own way of bringing this person’s partially frustrated life to fulfilment. God understands that given human nature, accidents, illness, complexity and sin we will always be inadequate. We do our best. For God, in faith, it’s enough. Our God is understanding, compassionate and powerful. Our life is eternal. We need to celebrate this, especially in the face of death. Like Cathy, we need to look at each other through our tears and say: “This is hard, but we’re not bitter, so it’s okay!” Love, conscience, shared life, the desire for reconciliation. In these lie life and hope. A man has died; none of these has been lost.

A Diet Of Antiseptics

September 2, 1984

In the church today we are witnessing the rise of a new legalism, a new pharisaism. Subtle, largely unrecognized and steadily growing in power, it is beginning to choke off life. The legalism of our age is the legalism of a scientific theologizing, a rigid historically based liturgics and a new canonicity and hunt for orthodoxy that are operating too much in isolation from creativity, imagination and piety. Don’t get me wrong. I am a theologian, solidly committed to defending scholarship. I will go to my grave defending the necessity of scientific scholarship in theology as well as the need for academic freedom for theological research. Heaven knows, our faith and piety are intellectually underdeveloped; a fact which should be daily decried. We are too much a people whose intellectual faith development has not kept pace with our other developments. Intellectually too often, our faith is infantile, we understand little more than we did on the day of our Confirmation. Small wonder that for so many of us our faith is unable to meet the test of an intellectually sophisticated modern life!

As well, if history has made one fact clear it is that every time there is a decline in scholarship and/or an anti-intellectualism in the church, the church declines, an imbalance sets in, and superstition replaces faith. So what is my point? We must be careful that the very scholarship which helped unseat a former legalism does not itself claim that idolatrous throne. Theological scholarship, the scientific and historical study of our faith, can easily become a new form of pharisaism. How? The salient aspect of a harmful pharisaism is that a pharisee is first of all totally confident that he/she is dealing the final truth and, thus, there is always a disdain for others who are less informed. That aspect is too present in some circles of today’s church. Moreover, the deadliest aspect of a harmful pharisaism is a self-blindness, the pharisee never suspects that he or she is a pharisee. Rather the feeling is that what he/she is teaching is precisely the way, truth and life. Today among the community of professional theologians and liturgists, and among the new breed of persons who are so suddenly keen on canon law, pharisaism is a real danger. Much good is happening as misunderstandings, superstitions, religious and liturgical accretions, and a lot of simple bad scholarship is being moved beyond.

However, what is less praiseworthy is that daily our church is growing less creative, less imaginative, less pious and more restrictive. Every day there is a little less room to move. When I look at theologians in the past, people such as Augustine and Origen for example, I see that their works are full of piety, metaphor, allegory, inaccuracies, wishful thinking and simple bad scholarship. Facetiously, one doubts that either Augustine or Origen would be able to get a Louvain or Harvard doctorate, unless they seriously curbed their imaginations and tightened up their scholarship. What thesis board would approve Augustine’s views on the Incarnation? Yet, what an inspiration they are! His words are full of flesh and blood, sin and sex, guilt and expiation, imagination and piety. How unlike so much of what appears in church circles today, stuff that reads like a computer printout, information without passion. Yet, heartless information of itself is not dangerous. The danger lies in a certain theological, liturgical, canonical and dogmatic Nazism, that is, in the guest for a purity, an eliteness, a super-race which becomes oppressive and death dealing. Our present over-infatuation with scientific scholarship, purity of doctrine, and strict canonical and liturgical norms, does to the church what an over-infatuation with the empirical sciences did to the world, namely, it starves the heart. It is like putting someone on a diet of antiseptics; one will never die of poisoning, but there is nothing to nourish the body!

It is interesting to note that even in the sphere of science, the greatest scientists of our age, Einstein, Heisenberg, Planck and Bohr, distinguished themselves not so much by their research skills as by their imaginations. Unlike their colleagues, who also had great research skills, they were able to construct imaginative models and use metaphors and analogy. What else is Einstein’s theory of relativity other than a good imaginative guess? The great Protestant theologian, F. Schleiermacher once said that “the guess” is still the best means of understanding. That is what this plea is for; namely, that theologians, Scripture scholars, liturgists, canonists and church leaders back off just a little and leave some room for “the guess,” for the heart, for the imagination, for a piety in which there is a lot of wishful thinking and a lot of guessing. Whenever that happens, we end up eating a whole lot more than just antiseptics; we end up eating some poison, that is true, but there is unleashed a flood of poetry, romance, emotion, mysticism and insight that comes from love’s eye.

Symbols Give Us Meaning

August 2, 1984

A young man once wrote to the poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, complaining that he found life boring and unexciting. He lived in a small town where it seemed nothing much ever happened. Rilke replied: “If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches.” When we feel bored and dissatisfied, when there is a lack of novelty, excitement, love and depth in our lives, the temptation is to blame life and then rev the engines, move on, increase the dosage and seek new excitement. But this is a mistake. Excitement, depth, love and novelty are not found by constantly moving on or increasing the dosage. They are triggered by entering life correctly. We learn this by looking at children, poets, artists and saints. Their lives are never devoid of excitement and depth. They are always falling in love and life for them is constantly exciting even when on the surface it appears dull and ordinary. Why?

Because they surround it with its proper symbols. The entire difference between depth and superficiality, excitement and dullness, lies in this, namely, symbols. As humans we are distinguished from animals precisely on the basis of symbol-making ability. We make symbols, animals don’t. Because of this we experience things deeply and they do not. Humans and animals share many common activities. Like us, animals work, live in communities, eat, make love, give birth and take care of their young. But for us these things have, potentially at least, a far deeper meaning because we enter them differently and surround them with symbols. It is this that we must look to when we feel that our lives are dull and uninteresting. When our lives lack depth, the question becomes: Are our symbols adequate? Are we surrounding our activities with a proper symbolic hedge? Allow me an example: There are two ways a human being can eat, with symbols and without them. Often we eat without symbols. Eating then is little different than gassing up a car. We pull up to the table with an empty tank, quickly and non-reflectively (and without really tasting our food) gulp down a meal, and then, like a car pulling back onto the freeway, we leave the table to head back to our busy concerns.

We have nourished our bodies but it has been a very bland and superficial experience, little different than an animal eating. By way of contrast, eating with symbols, imagine this scenario: Two persons are deeply in love and set out to dine together. They spend time talking before the meal, perhaps having a drink. Then they approach a table which has been carefully laid out, complete with candles. They hold hands and say a special grace. Then slowly and reflectively, over the course of some hours, they eat a meal together. They conclude with a toast and another grace. Theirs is not a bland and superficial experience, one that can be had by animals. The difference between these two ways of eating lies in the symbols. In the latter case, the persons surrounded their eating with a symbolic hedge, namely, ritual, mystique, aesthetics, romance, divine providence.

The symbols made the difference, elevating what would have been a very ordinary activity into something very special. The more special the symbols, the more special the meaning! This is true of all human activity, namely, it has depth or superficiality depending entirely upon the symbolic hedge with which we surround it. People fall in love. If they surround this experience with symbols that link it to sacrality and ultimacy (“This is destiny!” “God arranged for us to meet!” “Our meeting has significance in God’s plan for us!”) then the experience comes laden with depth (not to mention romance, aesthetics and fidelity) which lifts it far above mere chemistry and accident. Conversely, if it is not surrounded by such symbols, this experience, while perhaps just as laden with intensity and sensation, will offer nothing beyond intensity and sensation (transient as these are).

Ultimately then, it is merely an accident, a confluence of circumstances, the right chemistry. There is no meaning beyond these. Meaning comes through symbols. The same is true for the experience of sexuality. Stripped of a symbolic hedge which links it to ultimacy and sacredness, it is reduced to a simple here and now experience, pleasurable in itself, as is eating a good meal, but devoid of power to trigger depth, ecstasy and encounter beyond the level of physical sensation. Small wonder that sexuality, when it is no longer symbolically enhedged by symbols of sacramentality, soon loses its aesthetics and is commonly called by a crasser name. Einstein once said: “Experience is not what happens to you, but what you do with what happens to you.” Thus, if your daily life seems poor and lacks in depth, let this question arise in your mind: Are your symbols thriving? Are you poet enough, artist enough, saint enough, child enough, to surround your ordinary activities with their proper symbolic hedge?

Praying Through A Crisis

July 31, 1984

We all have our moments of chaos and crisis. Loss, death, sickness, disappointment, hurt, loneliness, hatred, jealousy, obsession, fear, these come into our lives and often we find ourselves overwhelmed by the darkness they cause. What can we do about them? How can we pull ourselves out of the dark chaos they put us into? The simple answer of course is prayer. But that answer is given far too simplistically. We all have heard the phrases, so true in themselves: “Pray it through! Take your troubles to the chapel! Give it to God! God will help you!” I can speak only for myself, though I suspect that my experience has its parallels in other lives, and I have found that often when I try to pray through some deep hurt I find no relief and, at times, end up more depressed, more immersed in the chaos, and more obsessively self-preoccupied than before praying. Often I end up sucking the prayer into my own narcissism.

Too often we try to pray when hurting, the prayer serves not to uproot the hurt and the narcissism, but to root it even more deeply in self-pity, self-preoccupation and darkness. We end up further letting go of God’s Spirit and, instead, giving in to panic, fear, chaos, nonforgiveness, obsession and resentment, in a word, to the posture of masturbation, of nonprayer. Why? Is God not willing to help? Is it simply a question of patience, God will eventually help, but not yet? God is always willing to help and, yes, we must be patient, healing always takes time. But there is more involved. When we pray and our prayers do not help, then we are praying incorrectly. I have learned this painfully, through years of mistakes.

Prayer is a focus upon God, not upon ourselves. When we are hurting or obsessed, the problem is that we are able to think about only one thing, the object of our hurt or loss.

That concentration becomes depressive, oppressively focusing us so much upon one thing that we are unfree emotionally to think about or enjoy other things. Depression is an over-concentration. For this reason, whenever we are caught up in depression, it is important that our prayer be completely focused upon God and not upon ourselves. If we do what comes naturally when trying to “pray through a crisis” we will end up thinking about the crisis, wallowing in our own sufferings. Instead of freeing ourselves from the sense of loss or obsession, we will pull the wound inward, make the pain worse and the depression even more paralyzing. When we pray in a crisis we must force ourselves to focus upon God or Jesus or upon some aspect of their sacred mystery, and we must resist entirely the urge to relate that encounter immediately to our wounded experience.

Let me illustrate this with an example: Imagine yourself suffering the loss of someone you deeply loved. Hurt, unable to think about anything else, you go to pray. Immediately the temptation will be to focus upon your heart, your obsession. You will try to “talk it through,” however sincerely. But the result will be disastrous. You will find yourself becoming more fixed upon what you are trying to free yourself from. Your depression will intensify. Conversely, if you force yourself, and this will be extremely difficult, to focus upon God; for example, as he reveals himself in some mystery of Christ’s life, your depression will be broken. You will experience God, slowly but gently, widening again the scope of your heart and mind. With that will come an emotional loosening and freeing. When a wounded child climbs into its mother’s lap, it draws so much strength from the mother’s presence that its own wound becomes insignificant. So too with us when we climb into the lap of our great Mother, God. Our crisis soon domesticates and comes into a peaceful perspective, not because it goes away, but because the presence of God so overshadows us.

But this means we must genuinely climb into the lap of God. Like the wounded child we must be focused upon the mother, not upon ourselves. Concretely this means that, when praying in a crisis, we must refuse to think about ourselves at all, we must refuse even to relate the mystery we are mediating to ourselves and our wound. Like a child, we must simply be content to sit and be held by the mother. That will be hard, very hard, to do. Initially every emotion in us will demand that we focus ourselves back upon our hurt. But that is the key, don’t! Don’t, under the guise of prayer, wallow further in hurt. Rather focus upon God. Then, like a sobbing child at its mother’s breast, in silence, we will drink that which nurtures and brings peace. At the breast of God, we drink the Holy Spirit, the milk of charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, mildness, long-suffering, faith, chastity, hope and fidelity. In that nourishment lies peace.