RonRolheiser,OMI

God’s Anger – And our Feelings of Guilt and Shame

November 28, 2022

My early religious training, for all its strengths, placed too heavy an emphasis on fear of God, fear of judgment, and fear of never being good enough to be pleasing to God. It took the biblical texts about God being angry and displeased with us literally. The downside of this was that many of us came away with feelings of guilt, shame, and self-hatred, and understood those feelings religiously, with no sense that they might have more of a psychological than a religious origin. If you had feelings of guilt, shame, and self-hatred, it was a signal that you were not living right, that you should feel some shame, and that God was not pleased with you.

Well, as Hegel famously taught, every thesis eventually spawns its antithesis. Both in the culture and in many religious circles today, this has produced a bitter backlash. The current cultural and ecclesial ethos has brought with it a near-feverous acceptance of the insights from contemporary psychology vis-à-vis guilt, shame, and self-hatred. We learned from Freud and others that many of our feelings of guilt, shame, and self-hatred are really a psychological neurosis, and not an indication that we are doing anything wrong. Feelings of guilt, shame, and self-hatred do not of themselves indicate that we are unhealthy religiously or morally or that God is displeased with us.

With this insight, more and more people have begun to blame their religious training for any feelings of guilt, shame, and self-hatred. They have coined the term “Christian neurosis” and have begun speaking of “being in recovery” from their churches.

What’s to be said about this? In essence, some of this is healthy, a needed corrective, though some of it also suffers from its own naiveté. And, it has landed us here. Today, religious conservatives tend to reject the idea that guilt, shame, and self-hatred are mainly a neurosis (for which our religious training is responsible), while religious liberals tend to favor this notion. Who is right?

A more balanced spirituality, I believe, combines the truth of both positions to produce a deeper understanding. Drawing on what is best in current biblical scholarship and on what is best in contemporary psychology, a more balanced spirituality makes these assertions.

First, that when our biblical language tells us that God gets angry and unleashes his fury, we are dealing with anthropomorphism. God doesn’t get angry with us when we do wrong. Rather what happens is that we get angry with ourselves and we feel as if that anger were somehow “God’s wrath”. Next, most psychologists today tell us that many of our feelings of guilt, shame, and self-hatred are in fact unhealthy, a simple neurosis, and not at all an indication that we did something wrong. These feelings only indicate how we feel about ourselves, not how God feels about us.

However, that being admitted, it is too simple to write off our feelings of guilt, shame, and self-hatred as a mere neurosis. Why? Because even if these feelings are completely or largely unmerited, they may still be an important voice inside us, that is, while they don’t indicate that God is displeased or angry with us, they still can be a voice inside us that won’t be silent until we ask ourselves why we are displeased and angry with ourselves.

Here’s an example. There is a wonderfully enlightening exchange in the 1990s movie, City Slickers. Three men are having a conversation about the morality of having a sexual affair. One asks the other, “If you could have an affair and get away with it, would you do it?” The other replies: “No, I still wouldn’t do it.”  “Why not?” he is asked, “nobody would know.” His response contains a much-neglected insight regarding the question of guilt, shame, and self-hatred. He replies, “I would know, and I would hate myself for it!”

There is such a thing as Christian “guilt neurosis” (which incidentally is not limited to Christians, Jews, Muslims and other religious persons, but is universal among all morally sensitive people). However, not all feelings of guilt, shame, and self-hatred are neurotic. Some are trying to teach us a deep moral and religious truth, that is, while we can never do a single thing to make God angry with us for one minute, we can do many things that make us angry with ourselves.  While we can never do anything to make God hate us, we can do things that have us hate ourselves. And, while we can never do anything to make God withhold forgiveness from us, we can do things that make it difficult for us to forgive ourselves. God is never the problem. We are.

Feelings of guilt, shame, and self-hatred do not of themselves indicate whether we have done something wrong, but they do indicate how we feel about what we have done – and that can be an important moral and religious voice inside us.

Not everything that bothers us is a pathology.

You Have Less Love in You Now Than When You Were Young

November 21, 2022

The first chapter of the Book of Revelation contains a powerful challenge that’s hidden within the overall esoteric language of that book. John, its author, speaking in the voice of God, says something to this effect: I have seen how hard you work, I have seen your fidelity and your hunger for the truth; but I have this against you, “you have less love in you now than when you were young.” That stings!  

It’s easy to be blind to this inside of ourselves. We change, we grow, we age, and sometimes we don’t look at ourselves closely to see what those changes are doing to us. Hence, we can be dedicated, hard-working, truth-seeking, sincere persons, virtuous in most every way, except that this goodness has become encrusted inside an anger, bitterness, and hatred that wasn’t so evident in us when we were young. As we age, it’s easier to be committed to the right causes than to remain loving and not let bitter judgment and subtle hatred infect our character.

It’s important to have the right causes and to fight for the right truth, but as T.S. Eliot warns, “The last temptation is the greatest treason, to do the right deed for the wrong reason”. If the author of the Book of Revelations came back today and scrutinized us, conservatives and liberals alike, I suspect, he might say the same thing he said to those Christians in Asia all those years ago, You are dedicated, that’s good – but you have less love in you now than when we were young. Our causes may be right and our motives good, but there is also in us now some hatred of others and demonization of them that wasn’t as evident when we were younger. We need to own this. 

Someone once quipped that we spend the first half of our lives struggling with the Sixth Commandment, with the fire of eros, and then spend the second half of our lives struggling with the Fifth Commandment, with the fire of disappointment, anger, and hatred. When I was young and immature, I used to confess to having “bad thoughts” (to do with the Sixth Commandment). Now, aged and more mature, I confess to having “bad thoughts” (to do with the Fifth Commandment).

There is, I fear, less love in me now than when I was young. I went to the seminary at the age of seventeen and for the next eight years lived in a large community (forty-fifty of us). We were young and immature, but our community life together was mostly wonderful. These were happy years. Today, all of us in that group are in our seventies and are mature. However, if we tried to live together now, we would kill each other. We are more mature – though perhaps with less love in us now than when we were young.

Admittedly, this can be a simplistic judgment. Are we really less loving? Is love simply to be identified with warm energy, friendliness, and being nice to each other? It is more than that. Genuine love can also be prophetic, angry, and hard. Moreover, many things conspire to naturally callous our youthful sensitivity, exuberance, and energy, and harden our faces. Our spontaneity, bounce, and ease in hospitality are calloused simply through the natural loss of our naiveté and through the inevitable blows which life deals us: disappointment, failure, rejection, the death of loved ones, the loss of health, and the growing sense of our own mortality. Those things also take the bounce out of our step and make us less pleasant to be around than when we radiated youthful exuberance, and that isn’t necessarily a loss of love.

Still, I’m haunted by an image Margaret Laurence gives us in the person of Hagar Shipley in her novel, The Stone Angel. As Hagar ages, she grows ever more bitter and critical of others, without ever recognizing how much she has changed. One day, ringing a doorbell, she overhears a little girl telling her mother “that horrible old woman is at the door.”  Hearing this, stung to her roots, she goes to a bathroom, turns on all the lights, and for the first time in years examines her face in the mirror and is taken aback by what she sees. She no longer recognizes her own face. It has become something other than how she pictures herself. Her face now is that of a bitter, hateful old person.

We need to do what she did, have a good look at our faces in a mirror. Better yet, lay out a series of photographs of yourself from childhood, through adolescence, through young adulthood, through middle age, to your present age and study your face over the years to see how it has changed from when you were younger.  Sadly, you will probably see there some hardening that is less attributable to natural aging than it is to bitterness, jealousy, and hatred.

In Exile – Marking an Anniversary

November 14, 2022

Forty years ago in November of 1982, I began writing this column while a doctoral student in Belgium. I chose to call it “In Exile” for two reasons.  Superficially, I chose this title because I was living in Europe, far from much of what I considered as home. While I was not pretending to be Robert Browning, writing Home-Thoughts, From Abroad, I did take an amateur’s delight in the small parallel. For much more significant reasons, I chose this title because all of us live our lives in exile. We live our lives (as St. Paul says) seeing “as through a glass, darkly.” We live in our separate riddles, partially separated from God, each other, and even from ourselves. We experience some love, some community, some peace, but never these in their fullness. Our individual existence places a certain barrier between us and full community. We live, truly, as in a riddle. God, who is omnipresent, cannot be physically sensed; others, who are as real as we, are always partially distanced and unreal; and we, in the end, are fundamentally a mystery even to ourselves.

In that sense, all of us are far from home, in exile, longing to know more fully and to be known more fully, distanced from so much. And, while on this pilgrimage, our perspectives are only partial; our vision, even at best, that of the “foreigner,” one out of the mainstream, who does not fully see nor understand.

From this exiled perspective, I have for forty years offered my reflections. The column has taken a variety of forms. As Margaret Atwood once said: “What touches you is what you touch!” I have touched on a whole lot of things; but all of them, in their own fashion, were in one way or another trying to untangle the riddle, to end the exile, to help to get a pilgrim home!

Initially, the column ran in only one newspaper, the Western Catholic Reporter. In 1987, the Green Bay Compass picked it up, and one year later the Portland Sentinel began to publish it. In 1990, the column got a major break. It was picked up by the Catholic Herald in London, England, a national paper in the United Kingdom that, at the time, was privately owned by Otto Herschan who also owned the Irish Catholic, a national paper in Ireland, and the Scottish Catholic Observer, a national paper in Scotland. With that, the column now had a home in six newspapers in five countries, nationally in three of them. Moreover, with lax copyright laws in Asia that are not as rigorous, nor as enforced, as here and, soon, a number of dioceses in Asia began to pirate the column and publish it.

The early 1990s brought more breakthroughs for the column: The Catholic Register and the Prairie Messenger, both national papers in Canada, picked up the column in 1992. To my mind, that was circulation enough. However, after the publication of The Holy Longing in the USA in 1999, the column’s circulation exploded. Within three years, it was being carried by more than sixty newspapers in more than ten countries. That has since grown to more than eighty papers.  Since 2008, the column has also been published in both Spanish and Vietnamese and is finding a readership in Vietnam, in Mexico, and in parts of Latin America.

I owe a debt of gratitude to a lot of people but need to single out several to thank specially. First, a deep thanks to the Western Catholic Reporter (in Edmonton, Canada)and its then editor, Glenn Argan. It was the first newspaper and Glenn Argan was the first editor to take a chance on me, an unknown prairie boy with little in the way of sophisticated credentials or contacts. Because of this, through all these forty years, I have always coded the column as WCR because, before anyone else, I was writing it for the Western Catholic Reporter. Today, each week, when it is emailed to some eighty plus newspapers, it goes out under the coded label “WCR”. I suspect none of the editors receiving it know what that means, but now you know.

A special thanks to Delia Smith for taking the column to the Catholic Herald in London and to Otto Herschan its then owner and publisher. From 1990 until his death, Otto made sure that any newspaper he published had my column in it. As well, deep thanks to JoAnne Chrones, my tireless Executive Secretary for these past 28 years, to Kay Legried, who pitched the column to various newspapers, and to Doug Mitchell who lays a critical, proofreading eye, to every column.

Truth be told, when I first began writing this column, I was probably more solicitous about bringing a column to birth than about helping bring God’s kingdom to birth. Our motivation is perennially in need of purification. I hope that I have matured in this area during these forty years and my biggest thank you of all goes out to you, the reader.

Can Anything Good Come from Okarche Oklahoma?

November 7, 2022

It is not enough merely to have saints; we need saints for our times! An insightful comment from Simone Weil. The saints of old have much to offer; but we look at their goodness, faith, and selflessness and find it easier to admire them than to imitate them. Their lives and their circumstances seem so removed from our own that we easily distance ourselves from them.

So, I would like to propose a saint for our times, Stanley Rother (1935-1981), an Oklahoma farm boy who became a missionary with the poor in Atitlan, Guatemala, and eventually died a martyr. His life and his struggles (save perhaps for his extraordinary courage at the end) are something to which we can easily relate.

Who is Stanley Rother? He was a priest from Oklahoma who was shot to death in Guatemala in 1981. He has been beatified as a martyr and is soon to become the first male born in the United States to be canonized. Here, in brief, is his story.

Stanley Rother was born to a farming family in Okarche, Oklahoma, the oldest of four children. He grew up helping work the family farm and for the rest of his life and ministry he remained forever the farmer more than the scholar. Growing up and working with his family, he was more at home tilling the soil, fixing engines, and digging wells than he was reading Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. This would serve him well in his work with the poor as a missionary, though it served him less well when he first set out to study for the priesthood.

His initial years in the seminary were a struggle. Trying to study philosophy (in Latin) as a preparation for his theological studies proved a bit too much for him. After a couple of years, the seminary staff advised him to leave, telling him that he lacked the academic abilities to study for the priesthood. Returning to the farm, he sought the advice of his bishop and was eventually sent to Mount St. Mary’s Seminary in Maryland. While he didn’t exactly thrive there academically, he thrived there in other ways, ways that impressed the seminary staff enough that they recommended him for ordination.

Back in his own diocese, he spent the first years of his priesthood mostly doing manual work, redoing an abandoned property that the diocese had inherited and turning it into a functioning renewal center. Then, in 1978, he was invited to join a diocesan mission team that had begun a mission in Guatemala. Everything in his background and personality now served to make him ideal for this type of work and, ironically, he, who once struggled to learn Latin, was now able to learn the difficult language of the people he worked with (Tz’utujil) and become one of the people who helped develop its written alphabet, vocabulary, and grammar. He ministered to the people sacramentally, but he also reached out to them personally, helping them farm, finding resources to help them, and occasionally giving them money out of his own pocket. Eventually he became their trusted friend and leader.

However, not everything was that idyllic. The political situation in the country was radically deteriorating, violence was everywhere, and anyone perceived to be in opposition to the government faced the possibility of intimidation, disappearance, torture, and death. Stanley tried to remain apolitical, but simply working with the poor was seen as being political. As well, at a point, a number of his own catechists were tortured and killed and, not surprisingly, he found himself on a death list and was hustled out of the country for his own safety. For three months, back with his family in Oklahoma, he agonized about whether to return to Guatemala, knowing that it meant almost certain death. The decision was especially difficult because, while clearly he felt called to return to Guatemala, he worried about what his death there would mean to his elderly parents.

He made the decision to return to Guatemala, fired by Jesus’ saying that the shepherd doesn’t run when the sheep are in danger. Four months later, he was shot to death in the missionary compound within which he lived, fighting to the end with his attackers not to be taken alive and made “to disappear”. Instantly, he was recognized as a martyr and when his body was flown back to Oklahoma for burial, the community in Atitlan kept his heart and turned the room in which he was martyred into a chapel.

A number of books have been written about him and I highly recommend two of them. For a substantial biographical account, read Maria Ruiz Scaperlanda, The Shepherd Who Didn’t Run. For a hagiographical  tribute to him read Henri Nouwen, Love in a Fearful Land.

We have patron saints for every cause and occasion. For whom or for what might Stanley Rother be considered a patron saint? For all of us ordinary people of whom circumstance at times asks for an exceptional courage.

Workaholism and Greed

October 31, 2022

There’s only one addiction for which we are praised – overworking. With every other addiction, concerned others are looking to put you into a clinic or into a recovery program, but if your addiction is work, generally it’s seen as virtue. I know of what I speak. I’m a “recovering workaholic”, and not exactly in full sobriety at the moment. However, I recognize the disease. Here are its symptoms: we are forever short of time with too many things to do. Our days are too short.

In his autobiography, movie critic Roger Ebert, writes, “I have filled my life so completely that many days there is no time to think about the fact that I am living it.” Many of us know the feeling. Why do we do this to ourselves?

The answer may surprise us. When our lives are so pressured that we never have time to savor the fact that we are alive and living it, when we are always short of time with too many things to do, we are suffering from greed, one of the classical deadly sins.

We have a simplistic notion of greed. When we think of a greedy person, we imagine someone who is stingy, selfish, rich in money and material things, hoarding those riches for himself. Few of us fit that category. Greed, in us, has infinitely subtler forms. What most of us who are generous, unselfish, and not rich in money or property suffer from is greed for experience, greed for life itself, and (if this doesn’t sound too heretical) greed even in our generosity. We are greedy to do more (even good things) in our lives than time allows.

Where do we see this? We see it in ourselves whenever there is never enough time to do what we (seemingly) need to do. There is always pressure that we should be doing more. When we think that somehow God made a mistake with time and didn’t allot us enough of it, we are suffering from greed. Henri Nouwen once described it this way: “Our lives often seem like over packed suitcases bursting at the seams. In fact, we are almost always aware of being behind schedule. There is a nagging sense that there are unfinished tasks, unfulfilled promises, unrealized proposals. There is always something else we should have remembered, done, or said. There are always people we did not speak to, write to, or visit.”

But … God didn’t make a mistake in giving us time. God gave us enough time to do what is asked of us, even in generosity and selflessness. The issue is on our side and the problem is greed. We want to do more in life than life itself allows.

Moreover, in most cases, this is easy to rationalize. If we are burning out while serving others, we can easily look at our over-extension, tiredness, and our haunting sense that we are not doing enough and see it as virtue, as a form of martyrdom, as selflessness, as giving our lives away for others. Partly this is true, there are times when love, circumstance, or a particular season in our lives can demand that we hand it all over to the point of radical self-abnegation; even Jesus was overwhelmed at times and tried to sneak away for some solitude. However, that is not always the case. What a mother needs to do for an infant or a young needy child is quite different from what she needs to do when that child is grown and is an adult. What is virtue in one situation can become greed in another situation.

Being too busy generally begins as a virtue, and then often turns into vice – subtle greed. What was once necessary to serve others now begins more to serve our own self-image and reputation. As well, it functions as a convenient escape. When we are consumed with doing work for others, we don’t have to face our own inner demons nor the demons that need to be faced in our marriages, vocations, and relationships. We are simply too busy; but this is an addiction, the same as all other addictions, except that this particular addiction is seen as a virtue for which we are praised.

This is one reason why God gave us the Sabbath, ordering us to stop working one day each week. Sadly, we are losing the very notion of Sabbath. We have turned a commandment into a light lifestyle suggestion. This can be a good thing to do, if you can manage it! However, as Wayne Mueller writes in his very challenging book on the Sabbath: “If we forget to rest, we will work too hard and forget our more tender mercies, forget those we love, forget our children and our natural wonder. … So God gave us the commandment to observe then Sabbath – ‘Remember to rest.’ This is not a lifestyle suggestion, but a commandment, as important as not stealing, nor murdering, not lying.”

Overwork is not a virtue.

Risking God’s Mercy

October 24, 2022

Shortly after ordination, doing replacement work in a parish, I found myself in a rectory with a saintly old priest. He was over eighty, nearly blind, but widely sought out and respected, especially as a confessor. One night, alone with him, I asked him this question: “If you had your priesthood to live over again, would you do anything differently?” From a man so full of integrity, I fully expected that there would be no regrets. His answer surprised me. Yes, he said, he did have a regret, a major one: “If I had my priesthood to do over again, I would be easier on people the next time. I wouldn’t be so stingy with God’s mercy, with the sacraments, and with forgiveness. You see what was drilled into me in my formation was the phrase, The truth will set you free, and I believed that it was my responsibility to challenge people to protect that. That’s good, but I fear I’ve been too hard on people. They have pain enough in their lives without me and the church laying further burdens on them. I should have risked more God’s mercy!”

I was struck by this because less than a year before, as I took my final exams in the seminary, one of the priests who examined me, gave me this warning: “Be careful,” he said, “never let your feelings get in the way of truth and be too soft, that’s wrong. Remember, tough as it is, only the truth sets people free!” Sound advice, it would seem, for a young priest beginning his ministry.

However, as every year goes by in my own ministry, I feel more inclined to the old priest’s advice. We need to risk more God’s mercy. Admittedly, the importance of truth may never be ignored, but we must risk letting the infinite, unbounded, unconditional, undeserved mercy of God flow freely. The mercy of God is as accessible as the nearest water tap and we, like Isaiah, must proclaim a mercy that has no price tag: “Come, come without money and without virtue, come everyone, drink freely of God’s mercy!”

What holds us back? Why are we so hesitant in proclaiming God’s inexhaustible, prodigal, indiscriminate mercy?

Partly our motives are good, noble even. We have a legitimate concern over some important things: truth, justice, orthodoxy, morality, proper public form, proper sacramental preparation, fear of scandal, and concern for the ecclesial community that needs to absorb and carry the effects of sin. Love needs always to be tempered by truth, even as truth must be moderated by love. However, sometimes our motives are less noble and our hesitancy arises out of timidity, fear, jealousy, and legalism – the self-righteousness of the Pharisees or the hidden jealousy of the older brother of the prodigal son. No cheap grace is to be dispensed on our watch!

Nevertheless, in doing this, we are misguided, less than good shepherds, out of tune with the God that Jesus proclaimed. God’s mercy, as Jesus revealed it, embraces indiscriminately, the bad along with the good, the undeserving with the deserving, the uninitiated with the initiated. One of the truly startling insights that Jesus gave us is that the mercy of God cannot not go out to everyone because it is always free, undeserved, unconditional, universal in embrace, reaching beyond all religion, custom, rubric, political correctness, mandatory program, ideology, and even beyond sin itself.

For our part then, especially those of us who are parents, ministers, teachers, catechists, and elders, we must risk proclaiming the prodigal character of God’s mercy. We must not spend God’s mercy, as if it were ours to spend, dole out God’s forgiveness as if it were a limited commodity, put conditions on God’s love as if God were a narrow tyrant or a political ideology, or cut off cut access to God as if we were the keepers of the heavenly gates. We are not! If we link God’s mercy to our own assessment of things, we then link it to our own limits, wounds, and biases.

It is interesting to note in the gospels how the apostles, well-meaning of course, often tried to keep certain people away from Jesus, as if they weren’t worthy and were somehow an affront to his holiness and purity. Repeatedly, they tried to send away children, prostitutes, tax collectors, known sinners, and the uninitiated of all kinds and always Jesus over-ruled their attempts with words to this effect: “Let them come! I want them to come to me.”

Little has changed. Always in the church, we, well-intentioned persons, with the same motives as the apostles, keep trying to keep certain individuals and groups away from God’s mercy as it is available in word, sacrament, and community. God doesn’t need (nor want) our protection. Jesus wanted every kind of person to come to him then and he wants them to come to him now. God wants everyone, regardless of morality, orthodoxy, lack of preparation, age, or culture, to come to the unlimited waters of divine mercy.

Celebrating Fifty Years of Ordination

October 17, 2022

Fifty years ago, on an overcast, cold, fall day in the gymnasium of the local public high school, I was ordained to the priesthood. Beyond the grey sky, another thing marked the event. This was a tender season for my family and me. Both our parents had died (and died young) within a year and a half just prior to this and we were still somewhat fragile of heart. In that setting, I was ordained a priest.

Within the few words allowed in a short column, what do I most want to say as I mark the fiftieth anniversary of that day?  I will borrow from the novelist Morris West, who begins his autobiography this way: When you reach the age of seventy-five, there should only be three phrases left in your vocabulary, thank you, thank you, and thank you! I just turned seventy-five and reflecting on fifty years of priesthood, many thoughts and feelings come to mind; life, after all, has its seasons. However, the feeling that overrides all others is that of gratitude, thank you, thank you, and thank you! Thank you to God, to grace, to the church, to my family, to the Oblates, to the many friends who have loved and supported me, to the wonderful schools I have taught in, and to the thousands of people I have encountered in those fifty years of ministry. 

My initial call to the priesthood and the Oblate congregation was not the stuff of romance. I didn’t enter religious life and the seminary because I was attracted to it. The opposite. This was not what I wanted. But, I felt called, strongly and clearly, and at the tender age of seventeen made the decision to enter religious life. Today, people may well raise questions about the wisdom and freedom of such a decision at age seventeen, but looking back all these years later, I can honestly say that this is the clearest, purest, and most unselfish decision that I have yet made in my life. I have no regrets. I wouldn’t have chosen this life except for a strong call that I initially tried to resist; and, knowing myself as I do, it is by far the most life-giving choice that I possibly could have made. I say this because, knowing myself and knowing my wounds, I know too that I would not have been nearly as generative (nor as happy) in any other state in life. I nurse some deep wounds, not moral ones, but wounds of the heart, and those very wounds have been, thanks to the grace of God, a source of fruitfulness in my ministry.

Moreover, I have been blessed in the ministries that have been assigned to me. As a seminarian, I dreamed of being a parish priest, but that was never to be. Immediately after ordination, I was sent to do graduate studies in theology and then taught theology at various seminaries and theology schools for most of these fifty years, save for twelve years that I served as a provincial superior of my local Oblate community and on the Oblate General Council in Rome. I loved teaching! I was meant to be a religious teacher and religious writer and so my ministry, all of it, has been very satisfying. My hope is that it has been generative for others.

In addition, I have been blessed by the Oblate communities within which I lived. My ministry usually had me living in larger Oblate communities and through these fifty years, I estimate that I have lived in community with well over three hundred different men. That’s a rich experience. Moreover, I have always lived in healthy, robust, caring, supportive, and intellectually challenging communities that gave me the spiritual and human family I needed. There were tensions at times, but those tensions were never not life giving. Religious community is unique, sui generis. It isn’t family in the emotional or psychosexual sense, but family that is rooted in something deeper than biology and attraction – faith.

There have been struggles of course, not least with the emotional issues around celibacy and living inside a loneliness which (as Merton once said) God, himself, condemned. It is not good for someone to be alone! It is here too where my Oblate religious community has been an anchor. Vowed celibacy can be lived and can be fruitful, though not without community support.

Let me end with a comment that I once heard from a priest who was celebrating his eighty-fifth birthday and his sixtieth anniversary of ordination. Asked how he felt about it all, he said, “It wasn’t always easy! There were some bitter, lonely times. Everyone in my ordination class left the priesthood, every one of them, and I was tempted too. But I stayed and, now, looking back after sixty years, I’m pretty happy with the way my life turned out!”

That sums up my feelings too after fifty years – I’m pretty happy with the way it has turned out – and deeply, deeply grateful.

How to Pray When We Don’t Feel Like It

October 10, 2022

If we only prayed when we felt like it, we wouldn’t pray a lot.

Enthusiasm, good feelings, and fervor will not sustain anyone’s prayer life for long, good will and firm intention notwithstanding. Our hearts and minds are complex and promiscuous, wild horses frolicking to their own tunes, with prayer frequently not on their agenda. The renowned mystic, John of the Cross teaches that, after an initial period of fervor in prayer, we will spend the bulk of our years struggling to pray discursively, dealing with boredom and distraction. So, the question becomes, how do we pray at those times when we are tired, distracted, bored, disinterested, and nursing a thousand other things in our heads and in our hearts? How do we pray when little inside us wants to pray? Especially, how do we pray at those moments when we have a positive distaste for prayer?

Monks have secrets worth knowing. The first secret we need to learn from them is the central place of ritual is sustaining a prayer-life. Monks pray a lot and regularly, but they never try to sustain their prayer on the basis of feelings. They sustain it through ritual. Monks pray together seven or eight times a day ritually. They gather in chapel and pray the ritual offices of the church (Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, Vespers, Compline) or they celebrate the Eucharist together. They don’t always go there because they feel like it, they come because they are called to prayer, and then, with their hearts and minds perhaps less than enthusiastic about praying, they pray through the deepest part of themselves, their intention, and their will.

In the rule that St. Benedict wrote for monastic life there’s an oft-quoted phrase. A monk’s life, he writes, is to be ruled by the monastic bell. When the monastic bell rings, the monk is immediately to drop whatever he is doing and go to whatever that summons is calling him to, not because he wants to, but because it is time, and time is not our time, it’s God’s time. That’s a valuable secret, particularly as it applies to prayer. We need to go pray regularly, not because we want to, but because it’s time, and when we can’t pray with our hearts and minds, we can still pray through our wills and through our bodies.

Yes, our bodies! We tend to forget that we are not disincarnate angels, pure heart and mind. We are also a body. Thus, when heart and mind struggle to engage in prayer, we can always still pray with our bodies. Classically, we have tried to do this through certain physical gestures and postures (making the sign of the cross, kneeling, raising our hands, joining hands, genuflection, prostration) and we should never underestimate or denigrate the importance of these bodily gestures. Simply put, when we can’t pray in any other way, we can still pray through our bodies. (And, who is to say that a sincere bodily gesture is inferior as a prayer to a gesture of the heart or mind?) Personally, I much admire a particular bodily gesture, bowing down with one’s head to the floor which Muslims do in their prayer. To do that is to have your body say to God, “Irrespective of whatever’s on my mind and in my heart right now, I submit to your omnipotence, your holiness, your love.”  Whenever I do meditative prayer alone, normally I end it with this gesture.

Sometimes spiritual writers, catechists, and liturgists have failed us by not making it clear that prayer has different stages – and that affectivity, enthusiasm, fervor are only one stage, and the neophyte stage at that. As the great doctors and mystics of spirituality have universally taught, prayer, like love, goes through three phases. First comes fervor and enthusiasm; next comes the waning of fervor along with dryness and boredom, and finally comes proficiency, an ease, a certain sense of being at home in prayer that does not depend on affectivity and fervor but on a commitment to be present, irrespective of affective feeling.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer used to say this to a couple when officiating at their marriage. Today you are very much in love and believe that your love will sustain your marriage. It won’t. Let your marriage [which is a ritual container] sustain your love. The same can be said about prayer. Fervor and enthusiasm will not sustain your prayer, but ritual can. When we struggle to pray with our minds and our hearts, we can still always pray through our wills and our bodies. Showing up can be prayer enough.

In a recent book, Dearest Sister Wendy, Robert Ellsberg quotes a comment by Michael Leach, who said this in relation to what he was experiencing in having to care long-term for his wife suffering from Alzheimer’s. Falling in love is the easy part; learning to love is the hard part; and living in love is the best part.  True too for prayer.

Writing Your Own Obituary

October 3, 2022

There comes a time in life when it’s time to stop writing your resume and begin to write your obituary. I’m not sure who first coined that line, but there’s wisdom in it.

What’s the difference between a resume and an obituary? Well, the former details your achievements, the latter expresses how you want to be remembered and what kind of oxygen and blessing you want to leave behind. But, how exactly do you write an obituary so that it’s not, in effect, just another version of your resume? Here’s a suggestion.

There’s a custom in Judaism where as an adult you make out a spiritual will each year. Originally, this will was more in line with the type of will we typically make, where the focus is on burial instructions, on who gets what when we die, and on how to legally and practically tie up the unfinished details of our lives. Through time, however, this evolved so that today this will is focused more on a review of your life, the highlighting of what’s been most precious in your life, the honest expression of regrets and apologies, and the blessing, by name, of those persons to whom you want to say a special goodbye. The will is reviewed and renewed each year so that it is always current, and it’s read aloud at your funeral as the final words you want to leave behind for your loved ones.

This can be a very helpful exercise for each of us to do, except that such a will is not done in a lawyer’s office, but in prayer, perhaps with a spiritual director, a counsellor, or a confessor helping us. Very practically, what might go into a spiritual will of this sort?

If you are looking for help in doing this, I recommend the work and the writings of Richard Groves, the co-founder of the Sacred Art of Living Center. He has been working in the field of end-of-life spirituality for more than thirty years and offers some very helpful guidance vis-à-vis creating a spiritual will and renewing it regularly. It focus on three questions.

First: What, in life, did God want me to do? Did I do it? All of us have some sense of having a vocation, of having a purpose for being in this world, of having been given some task to fulfill in life. Perhaps we might only be dimly aware of this, but, at some level of soul, all of us sense a certain duty and purpose. The first task in a spiritual will is to try to come to grips with that. What did God want me to do in this life? How well or poorly have I been doing it?

Second: To whom do I need to say, “I’m sorry”? What are my regrets? Just as others have hurt us, we have hurt others. Unless we die very young, all of us have made mistakes, hurt others, and done things we regret. A spiritual will is meant to address this with searing honesty and deep contrition. We are never more big-hearted, noble, prayerful, and deserving of respect than when we are down on our knees sincerely recognizing our weaknesses, apologizing, asking where we need to make amends.

Third: Who, very specifically, by name, do I want to bless before I die and gift with some special oxygen? We are most like God (infusing divine energy into life) when we are admiring others, affirming them, and offering them whatever we can from our own lives as a help to them in theirs. Our task is to do this for everyone, but we cannot do this for everyone, individually, by name. In a spiritual will, we are given the chance to name those people we most want to bless. When the prophet Elijah was dying, his servant, Elisha, begged him to leave him “a double portion” of his spirit. When we die, we’re meant to leave our spirit behind as sustenance for everyone; but there are some people, whom we want to name, to whom we want to leave a double portion. In this will, we name those people.

In a wonderfully challenging book, The Four Things That Matter Most, Ira Byock, a medical doctor who works with the dying, submits that there are four things we need to say to our loved ones before we die: “Please forgive me,” “I forgive you,” “Thank you,” and “I love you.”  He’s right; but, given the contingencies, tensions, wounds, heartaches, and ups and downs within our relationships, even with those we love dearly, it isn’t always easy (or sometimes even existentially possible) to say those words clearly, without any equivocation. A spiritual will gives us the chance to say them from a place that we can create which is beyond the tensions that generally cloud our relationships and prevent us from speaking clearly, so that at our funeral, after the eulogy, we will have no unfinished business with those we have left behind.

Dying Alone in the Desert

September 26, 2022

Recently I received a letter from a friend who shared that she was afraid to accept a certain vocation because it would leave her too much alone. She shared this fear with her spiritual director who simply said, “Charles de Foucauld died alone in the desert!” That answer was enough for her. She went ahead with it. Is that answer enough for those of us who have the same hesitancy, the fear of being alone?

The fear of being alone is a healthy one. Jean-Paul Sartre famously wrote that hell is the other person. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Hell is being alone. All the major religions teach that heaven will be communal, an ecstatic coming together of hearts, souls, and (for Christians) bodies, in one union of love. There will be no solitaries in heaven. So, our fear of ending up alone is a healthy nagging from God and nature, perpetually reminding us of the words God spoke as he created Eve, it is not good for a person to be alone. Children are always mindful of that and feel insecure when they are alone. That’s one of the reasons why Jesus taught that they go to heaven more naturally than adults do.

But, is being alone always unhealthy? What can we learn from Charles de Foucauld who chose a life that left him to die alone in the desert? What can we learn from a person like Soren Kierkegaard who resisted marriage because he feared that it would interfere with a vocation, he intuited was meant to have him die alone? Not least, what can we learn from Jesus, the greatest lover of all, who dies alone on a cross, crying out that he had been abandoned by everyone and then, in that agony, surrenders his loneliness in one great act of selflessness in which he gives over his spirit in complete love?

In a recent book, The Empathy Diaries, Sherry Turkle reflects on, among other things, the impact contemporary information technology and social media are having on us. As a scientist at MIT, she is one of the people who helped develop computers and information technology as they exist today, so she in not someone with a generational, romantic, or religious bias against computers, smart phones, and social media. Yet, she is worried about what all of this is doing to us today, particularly to those who get addicted to social media and can no longer be alone. “I share, therefore I am!” She names a hard truth: If we don’t know how to be alone, we will always be lonely.

That’s true for all of us, though not all of us are called by either faith or temperament to a monastic quiet. What Jesus modelled (and what persons like Charles de Foucauld, Soren Kierkegaard, and countless monks, nuns, and celibates have felt themselves called to) is not the route for everyone. In fact, it is not the norm, religiously or anthropologically. Marriage is. Thomas Merton was once asked what it was like to be celibate, and he responded by saying, celibacy is hell. You live in a loneliness that God Himself condemned; but that doesn’t mean it can’t be fruitful.

In essence, that’s the response my friend received from her spiritual director when she shared her fear of taking up a certain vocation because she might end up alone. If you can be a Charles de Foucauld, you will be alone but in a very fruitful way.

There can even be some romance in proactively embracing loneliness and celibacy. Some years ago, I was doing spiritual direction with a very faith-filled, idealistic young man. Full of life and youthful energies, he felt the same powerful pull of sexuality as his peers, but he also felt a strong draw in another direction. He was reading Soren Kierkegaard, Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, and Daniel Berrigan and felt a romantic attraction towards celibacy and the loneliness and aloneness within which he would then find himself. He was also reading the Gospels, telling how Jesus died alone on a cross without any human person holding his hand. Like Jesus, he wanted to be a lonely prophet and die alone.

There’s some admirable idealism in that, though perhaps also a certain unhealthy pride and elitism in wanting to be the lonely hero who is admired for stoically standing outside the circle of normal intimacy. Moreover, as a lifelong celibate (and a publicly vowed one for more than fifty years) I would offer this word of caution. A romantic dream of celibacy, no matter how strongly rooted in faith, will meet its test during those seasons and nights when one has fallen in love, is tired, is overwhelmed, and has his or her sexuality (and soul) cry out that it does not want to die alone in the desert. To sustain oneself in the loneliness of Jesus, as Merton says, is sometimes a flat-out hell, albeit a fruitful one.

To die alone in the desert like Charles de Foucauld is answer enough.

On Being Jealous of God’s Generosity

September 19, 2022

“The cock will crow at the breaking of your own ego – there are lots of ways to wake up!”

John Shea gave me those words and I understood them a little better recently as I stood in line at an airport: I had checked in for a flight, approached security, saw a huge lineup, and accepted the fact that it would take at least 40 minutes to get through it.

I was all right with the long wait and moved patiently in the line – until, just as my turn came, another security crew arrived, opened a second scanning machine, and a whole lineup of people, behind me, who had not waited the forty minutes, got their turns almost immediately. I still got my turn as I would have before, but something inside of me felt slighted and angry: “This wasn’t fair! I’d been waiting for forty minutes, and they got their turns at the same time as I did!” I had been content waiting, until those who arrived later didn’t have to wait at all. I hadn’t been treated unfairly, but some others had been luckier than I’d been.

That experience taught me something, beyond the fact that my heart isn’t always huge and generous. It helped me understand something about Jesus’ parable concerning the workers who came at the 11th hour and received the same wages as those who’d worked all day and what is meant by the challenge that is given to those who grumbled about the unfairness of this: “Are you envious because I’m generous?”

Are we jealous because God is generous? Does it bother us when others are given unmerited gifts and forgiveness?
You bet! Ultimately, that sense of injustice, of envy that someone else caught a break is a huge stumbling block to our happiness. Why? Because something in us reacts negatively when it seems that life is not making others pay the same dues as we are paying.

In the Gospels we see an incident where Jesus goes to the synagogue on a Sabbath, stands up to read, and quotes a text from Isaiah – except he doesn’t quote it fully but omits a part. The text (Isaiah 61,1-2) would have been well known to his listeners and it describes Isaiah’s vision of what will be the sign that God has finally broken into the world and irrevocably changed things. And what will that be?

For Isaiah, the sign that God is now ruling the earth will be good news for the poor, consolation or the broken-hearted, freedom for the enslaved, grace abundant for everyone, and vengeance on the wicked. Notice though, when Jesus quotes this, he leaves out the part about vengeance. Unlike Isaiah, he doesn’t say that part of our joy will be seeing the wicked punished.

In heaven we will be given what we are owed and more (unmerited gift, forgiveness we don’t deserve, joy beyond imagining) but, it seems, we will not be given that catharsis we so much want here on earth, the joy of seeing the wicked punished.

The joys of heaven will not include seeing Hitler suffer. Indeed, the natural itch we have for strict justice (“An eye for an eye”) is exactly that, a natural itch, something the Gospels invite us beyond. The desire for strict justice blocks our capacity for forgiveness and thereby prevents us from entering heaven where God, like the Father of the Prodigal Son, embraces and forgives without demanding a pound of flesh for a pound of sin.

We know we need God’s mercy, but if grace is true for us, it must be true for everyone; if forgiveness is given us, it must be given everybody; and if God does not avenge our misdeeds, God must not avenge the misdeeds of others either. Such is the logic of grace, and such is the love of the God to whom we must attune ourselves.

Happiness is not about vengeance, but about forgiveness; not about vindication, but about unmerited embrace; and not about capital punishment, but about living beyond even murder.

It is not surprising that, in some of the great saints, we see a theology bordering on universalism, namely, the belief that in the end God will save everyone, even the Hitlers. They believed this not because they didn’t believe in hell or the possibility of forever excluding ourselves from God, but because they believed that God’s love is so universal, so powerful, and so inviting that, ultimately, even those in hell will see the error of their ways, swallow their pride, and give themselves over to love. The final triumph of God, they felt, will be when the devil himself converts and hell is empty.

Maybe that will never happen. God leaves us free. Nevertheless, when I, or anyone else, is upset at an airport, at a parole board hearing, or anywhere else where someone gets something we don’t think he or she deserves, we have to accept that we’re still a long way from understanding and accepting the kingdom of God.

Our Real Demons

September 12, 2022

What’s in an image? An image can imprint itself indelibly into our consciousness so that we cannot not picture a thing except in a certain way. Take, for instance, Leonardo da Vinci’s famous painting of the Last Supper. Today if you close your eyes and try to picture the Last Supper, that image will spontaneously come to mind, even though scholars assure us that this is not how Jesus and his disciples would have been seated at that meal. Such is the power of art.

Sadly, this is also true for how we spontaneously picture devils and exorcisms. Movies about demon possession, like Rosemary’s Baby, have imprinted certain images inside of us so we picture someone possessed by a demon as a person with a wild, contorted, hate-filled face, floating up to the ceiling, spewing out sick mustard colored liquid from his mouth, in a room smelling of poisonous gases. Our picture of an exorcism then is that of a very ascetic-looking priest, dressed in heavy blacks, a stole around his neck, calling out Jesus’ name as he sprinkles holy water, with the devil shrieking aloud as he retreats. That’s our image of demon possession and exorcism. Such is the power of art!

But, normally that’s not at all how demon possession and exorcism look like. Indeed, picturing the devil and an exorcism in that way is more harmful than helpful because demons are more subtle and exorcisms are more demanding than that picture would have us believe.

What do demons inside of us actually look like? Well, an image of a contorted face spewing out poisonous gasses and shrieking out hate can in fact serve us well. As a metaphor, that works. However, in real life that contorted, hate-filled face is too often our own face, and the poison spewing out of us is really the hate-filled language we hurl at each other as we name-call across ideological, political, moral, and religious lines. As well, the exorcism required is not the sprinkling of literal holy water, but the sprinkling of the Holy Spirit.

What do demons actually look like?

There’s a very powerful one named paranoia who brings with him a series of other demons: distrust, suspicion, self-protection, and fear. When paranoia possesses us, we become suspicious and distrustful. Everyone begins to look like a threat, an enemy, and all our natural instincts begin to pressure us towards self-protection, and that begins to contort our faces and we begin to spew out distrust. This may be the hardest demon of all to exorcise because it is so deeply embedded inside us. It’s no accident that the word metanoia (which summarizes Jesus’ challenge to us) is the antithesis of paranoia.

Then there is a demon named pride, one that keeps us forever conscious of our own specialness, a demon that would have us prefer to be special rather than happy. This demon invariably brings with him a very nasty companion called envy, a demon that paralyzes our ability to admire others, bless them, and not be threatened by their successes.

Next, come the demons of gluttony and greed. Mostly these no longer tempt us towards over-indulging in food or drink and accumulating more and more possessions. Instead, these demons infect us with a greed for experience, with an obsession with drinking in everything, with an obsession to be networking socially twenty-four hours a day. Moreover, they bring with them the demon of lust; one that has us making others the object of our erotic desires and in a myriad of other ways has us not fully respecting them.

These are the actual demons that contort our faces and while none of them might make us look like the young child in Rosemary’s Baby, all of them have us spew out distrust and hatred rather than trust and understanding.

How are they exorcized? Well, these are not the kind that normally respond to a sprinkling of holy water. These need to be cast out by the Holy Spirit.

Scripture tells us the Holy Spirit “scrutinizes everything”. It tells us as well that the Holy Spirit is not some abstract force that cannot be known by us. St. Paul, in his letter to the Galatians, tells us precisely who and what the Holy Spirit is. He begins with the via negativa, telling us what the Holy Spirit is not and what the Holy Spirit should never be confused with, that is, with those demons just named: paranoia, distrust, suspicion, self-protection, fear, pride, envy, greed, gluttony, and lust. The Holy Spirit is the antithesis of all of these. To the contrary, the Holy Spirit is the spirit of charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, long-suffering, fidelity, mildness, and chastity.

Two contraries cannot co-exist inside the same subject and so an actual exorcism works this way. The more we embrace charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, long-suffering, fidelity, mildness, and chastity, the more we exorcize paranoia, distrust, fear, pride, envy, greed, gluttony, and lust – and less demonic hatred spews from our mouths.

A Biblical Formula for Forgiveness

September 5, 2022

Nothing is as important as forgiveness. It is the key to happiness and the most important spiritual imperative in our lives. We need to forgive, to make peace with the hurts and injustices we have suffered so as not to die angry and bitter. Before we die, we need to forgive – others, ourselves, and God, for what happened to us in this life.

But, that isn’t easy to do; indeed, sometimes it is impossible to do. That needs to be said because today there is a lot of well-intended literature around, in every kind of circle, which gives the impression that forgiveness is simply a question of willing it and moving on. Let it go and move on!

It doesn’t work that way, as we all know. Wounds to the soul take time, a long time, to heal, and the process is excruciatingly slow, something that cannot be rushed. Indeed, the trauma from an emotional wound often affects our physical health. Healing takes time.

In looking at the question of healing and forgiveness, we can get a long-neglected, valuable insight from the Jewish and Christian spirituality of the Sabbath. Keeping the Sabbath holy isn’t just about honoring a certain day of the week; it’s also a formula for forgiveness. Here’s how it works.

The theology and spirituality of Sabbath teach us that God created the world in six days and then rested on the seventh day, the Sabbath. Moreover, not only did God rest on the Sabbath, God declared this a day of rest for everyone forever, and with that God set up a certain rhythm for our lives. That rhythm is supposed to work this way:

  • We work for six days, then rest for one day.
  • We work for seven times seven years, forty-nine years, then have a jubilee where the world itself goes on sabbatical.
  • We work for seven years, then rest for one year (a sabbatical).
  • We work for a lifetime, then enjoy an eternity of sabbatical.

Now, that rhythm is also intended as the rhythm for how we move towards forgiveness:

  • We can hold a mini-grudge of seven days, but then we need to give it up.
  • We can hold a major grudge for seven years, but then we need to give it up. (The “statute of limitations” is based on this.)
  • We can hold a massive soul-searing wound for forty-nine years, but then we need to give it up.
  • We can hold a massive soul-shattering wound until our deathbed, but then we need to give it up.

This highlights something which is too often absent in therapeutic and spiritual circles today, namely, that we need time to be able to forgive, and that the length of time needed is contingent upon the depth of the hurt. Thus, for example:

  • When we are slighted by a colleague at a meeting, we need a little time to sulk about that injustice, but normally a few days can help put it into perspective and enable us to let it go.
  • When we are coldly terminated at a job by an unfair employer, seven days or seven weeks will often not be enough time for us to put this into a larger perspective, to let it go, and to forgive. Seven years is a more realistic timeframe. (Note that the “statute of limitations” vis-a-vis this biblical insight.)
  • There are traumas we suffer which leave far deeper wounds than those left by an unfair employer who treated us unfairly. There are wounds we suffer from abuse, neglect, and years of injustice that need more than seven years to process. It may take forty-nine years, half a century, to make peace with the fact that we were bullied as children or were emotionally or sexually abused in our youth.  
  • There are wounds so deep and traumatic that it is only on our deathbeds that we can make peace with the fact that they happened to us, let them go, and forgive the person or persons responsible for them.
  • Finally, there can be wounds that are too deep, too disempowering, and too painful to ever process in this life. For them, thankfully we have the merciful healing embrace of God after death.

The ability to forgive is more contingent upon grace than upon willpower. To err is human, but to forgive is divine. This little slogan contains a deeper truth than is immediately evident. What makes forgiveness so difficult, existentially impossible at times, is not primarily that our egos are bruised and wounded. Rather, the real difficulty is that a wound to the soul works the same as a wound to the body; it strips us of our strength.

This is particularly true for those soul-searing and soul-shattering traumas that take forty-nine years or a lifetime to heal, or sometimes can never be healed in this lifetime. Wounds of this kind radically disempower us, particularly towards the person who did this to us, making it very difficult for us to forgive.

We need a spirituality of Sabbath to help us.

The Magnificat

August 29, 2022

A wise old Augustinian priest once shared this in class. There are days in my life when everything from the pressures of my work, to tiredness, to depression, to distraction, to flat-out laziness make it difficult for me to pray. But, no matter what, I always try to pray at least one sincere, focused Our Father every day.

In the Gospels, Jesus leaves us the Lord’s Prayer, the Our Father. This is the most precious of all Christian prayers. However, the Gospels also leave us another precious Christian prayer, one that is not nearly as well known or practiced as is the Lord’s Prayer. This is the prayer the Gospels place inside the mouth of Mary, the Mother of Jesus. Known as the Magnificat it is, for me, the most precious Christian prayer we have after the Lord’s Prayer.

The Gospel of Luke paints the scene. Mary, pregnant with Jesus, goes to visit her cousin, Elizabeth, who is pregnant with John the Baptist. Traditionally we call this “The Visitation” and what transpires between these two women is much more than what first meets the eye. This  is no simple gender-reveal party. Written more than eighty years after the event itself took place it is a post-resurrection reflection on the world-altering significance of what each of these women was carrying in her womb. As well, the words that they speak to each other also speak of a post-resurrection reality. It is in this context that the Gospels have Mary speak the words of the Magnificat. What are those words?

They are words which thank and praise God for having taken the side of the poor, the humble, the hungry, and the oppressed in this world, having lifted them up and given them victory, even as he toppled the powerful off their thrones and humbled them. However, her prayer puts this all into the past tense, as if it was already an accomplished fact,already a reality in our world.

However, as the cartoon character, Ziggy, once reminded God in a prayer, “The poor are still getting clobbered down here!” For the large part, this seems so. Looking at our world, we see that the gap between rich and poor is widening, hundreds of millions of people go to bed hungry every night, corruption and crime are everywhere, and the powerful seemingly can simply take whatever they want without repercussions. We have nearly one hundred million refugees on our borders around the world, and women and children are still victims of violence of all kinds everywhere.  Worse still, it would seem things are getting worse, not better. So where do we see that God has hast cast down the mighty from their thrones, lifted up the lowly, filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty?

We see it in the resurrection of Jesus and the vision of hope given us in that reality. What Mary affirms in the Magnificat is a deep truth we can only grasp in the faith and hope, namely, that even though at present injustice, corruption, and exploitation of the poor, seem to reign, there will be a last day when that oppressive stone will roll back from the tomb and the powerful will topple. The Magnificat is the ultimate prayer of hope – and the ultimate prayer for the poor.

Maybe it is my age, maybe it is the discouragement I feel most evenings as I watch the news, or maybe it is both, but, as I grow older, two prayers (outside of the Eucharist) are most precious to me, The Lord’s Prayer and The Magnificat. Like my old Augustinian mentor, I now make sure no day goes by where pressure, tiredness, distraction, or laziness keep me from praying at least  two prayers with focus and attention, The Lord’s Prayer and the Magnificat.

That hasn’t always been the case. For years, I looked at the Magnificat and saw there only the exultation of the Mary of piety, all the litanies and praises of Mary bunched into one. Not that there is anything wrong with that since the Mary of piety is someone to whom millions upon millions, not least the poor, turn to in need, seeking the guidance, comfort, and sympathy of a mother. Few would argue against the goodness of this since it constitutes a rich mysticism of the poor, and of the poor in spirit.

However, the Magnificat is not so much about Mary’s personal exultation as it is about the exaltation of the poor. In this prayer, she gives voice to how God ultimately responds to the powerlessness and oppression of the poor. Henri Nouwen once wrote that watching the evening news and seeing the suffering in our world can leave us feeling depressed and powerless. Depressed because of the injustice we see, powerless because it seems there is nothing we can do about it.

What can we do about it? We can pray the Magnificat each day giving voice to how God ultimately responds to the powerlessness of the poor.

Seeing What Lies Near Our Doorsteps

August 22, 2022

Henri Nouwen once suggested that if you want to understand the tragedy of the Second World War, you can read a hundred history books about it and watch a thousand hours of video documentaries on it, or you can read the Diary of Anne Frank. In that single memoir of young girl imprisoned and later executed by the Nazis you will see, first-hand, the tragedy of war and what war does to the human soul.

The same might be said about the refugee crisis now taking place everywhere on borders around the world. According to statistics from the United Nations, there are now over eighty million refugees, displaced, homeless, nationless, frightened, and often hungry people on our borders around the world. Two-thirds of these are women and children, and the vast majority are not there by choice, seeking a better economic opportunity in another country. The vast majority of them have been driven from their homes and their countries by war, violence, famine, hunger, ethnic and religious cleansing, and by fear for their lives.

For many of us, this is a faceless, abstract problem. We have a generic sympathy for their plight but not one deep enough to keep us awake at night, unsettle our conscience, or make us willing to sacrifice some of our own comfort and security to do something for them or to pressure our governments into action. Indeed, too often we are over-protective of our borders and the settled, comfortable lives we live inside our nations. This is our country! Our home! We worked hard for the things we have. It is unfair to us to have to deal with these people! They should go back to their countries and leave us alone!

We need a wake-up call. A recent book, a novel, by Jeanine Cummins, American Dirt, gives us a fictionalized account of a young Mexican woman who because of violence and fear of death had to leave her life behind and flee with her young son in an attempt to reach the borders of the United States as an undocumented immigrant. Full disclosure, the book has been heavily criticized by many because it doesn’t always measure up to the exact facts. Conversely, it has also been highly praised by many others. Be that as it may, the bottom-line is that this is a powerful story and a wake-up call, one meant to wake us up to the real tragedy of those who for reasons of poverty, violence, famine, fear, and hopelessness are forced to flee their countries in search of a better life (or any life at all!) elsewhere. Whatever the book’s imperfections, it helps shatter the abstractness we can lean on to protect ourselves against having to look at the issue of refugees today.

Admittedly, the issue isn’t simple. There are extremely complex issues involved in protecting our borders and in having millions of people freely enter our countries. However, as men and women who share a common humanity and a common planet with these refugees, can we remain callous to their plight? Moreover, as Christians, do we accept the fundamental, non-negotiable principle within Christian social doctrine that tells us that the world belongs to everyone equally and we may not adhere to any nationalistic belief that says, explicitly or implicitly, that our country is ours and we have no obligation to share it with others. To espouse this is unchristian and goes against the clear teaching of Jesus.

We might all, I submit, contemplate a certain parable of Jesus (Luke 16, 19-31) where he tells the story of a rich man who ignored a poor man sitting at his doorstep and refused to share his food with him. The poor man dies and finds himself in the bosom of Abraham. The rich man also dies and finds himself tormented by thirst in Hades. He begs Abraham to send the poor man, whom he had ignored during this lifetime, to bring him some water to quench his thirst, but it turns out this is not possible. Jesus tells us that there is an “unbridgeable gap” between the two of them. We have always simplistically assumed that this unbridgeable gap is the gap between heaven and hell, but that is not exactly the point the parable is making. The unbridgeable gap is the gap that already exists now between the rich and poor, and the lesson is that we had best try to bridge that gap now, in this life.

Notice that Jesus does not say that the rich man is a bad man, or that he didn’t earn his riches honestly, or that he wasn’t an upright citizen, or that he wasn’t going to church, or that he was unfaithful to his wife, or that he was a bad father to his children. It only says that he had one fault, a mortal one – inside his richness he did not respond to a hungry man sitting on the borders of house.

One God, One Guidance System, and One Road for Us All

August 15, 2022

At the end of the day, all of us, believers and non-believers, pious and impious, share one common humanity and all end up on the same road. This has many implications.

It’s no secret that today religious practice is plummetingradically everywhere in the secular world. Those who are opting out don’t all look the same, nor go by the same name. Some are atheists, explicitly denying the existence God. Others are agnostics, open to the accepting the existence of God but remaining undecided. Others self-define as nones; asked what faith they belong to they respond by saying none. There are those who define themselves as dones, done with religion and done with church. Then there are the procrastinators, persons who know that someday they will have to deal with the religious question, but, like Saint Augustine, keep saying, eventually I need to do this, but not yet! Finally, there’s that huge group who define themselves as spiritual-but-not-religious, saying they believe in God but not in institutionalized religion.

All of us know people who are in one or several of these categories and are anxious about them. What can we do, if anything, to nudge these people towards faith, religion, and church? What will happen if they die in this state? Where does God stand in the face of this?

I suspect that God doesn’t much share our anxiety here, not that God sees this as perfectly healthy (humans are human!), but rather that God has a larger perspective on it, is infinitely loving, and is longsuffering in patience while tolerating our choices. Why? What’s God’s larger perspective here?

First, the fact that our faith already baptizes those we love. Gabriel Marcel once famously stated, To say to someone ‘I love you’ is to say, ‘you will never be lost’. As Christians, we understand this in terms of our unity inside the Body of Christ. Our love for someone links him or her to us, and since we are part of the Body of Christ, he or she too is linked to the Body of Christ, and to touch Christ is to touch grace. Thanks to the marvels of the Incarnation, every sincere Christian can say, ‘my heaven includes this or that particular person whom I love.’ We used to call this “baptism by desire”, except that in this instance the desire for “baptism” is on our part, but still equally efficacious.

Next, we need to recognize that God loves these persons more than we do and is more solicitous for their happiness and salvation than we are. God loves everyone individually and passionately and works in ways to ensure that nobody gets lost.  Moreover, God is tricky! As good Christian apologists have always pointed out, God has his own schemes, loving traps, and means to lead persons to faith.

Moreover, God is infinitely patient. If we bracket piety for a moment, we might profitably

compare God to a GPS (a Global Positioning System) given how infinitely patient and yet persistent a GPS is in giving us directions. A GPS is built with the presumption that it will frequently not be obeyed and that it will have to make the necessary adjustments. We are all familiar with how this works. We are driving towards a destination and the GPS tells us that in order to get there we need to make a right turn at the next intersection. However, we ignore its instruction and drive straight through the intersection. There is a brief silence and then the GPS, taking into account the fact that we ignored its original directive, says, ‘recalculating’ and gives us a new instruction vis-à-vis getting to our destination.  And, it will repeat this cycle endlessly. A GPS, limitless in its patience, keeps ‘recalculating’, and keeps giving us a new instruction until we get to our destination. It never gives up on us.

God is the same. We have an intended destination and God gives us constant instructions along the way.  Religion and the church are an excellent GPS. However, they can be ignored and frequently are. But, God’s response is never one of anger nor of a final impatience. Like a trusted GPS, God is forever saying ‘recalculating’ and giving us new instructions predicated on our failure to accept the previous instruction. Eventually, no matter our number of wrong turns and dead ends, God will get us home.

One last thing. Ultimately, God is the only game in town, in that no matter how many false roads we take and how many good roads we ignore, we all end up on the one, same, last, final road. All of us: atheists, agnostics, nones, dones, searchers, procrastinators, those who don’t believe in institutionalized religion, the indifferent, the belligerent, the angry, the bitter, and the wounded, end up on the same road heading towards the same destination – death. However, the good news is that this last road, for all of us, the pious and the impious alike, leads to God.

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