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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

This summer I set out to learn about Ignatius of Loyola and computers. It’s a strange mix, but it makes for a nice agenda. As the Gospels would have it, a good scribe reaches into his bag for the old as well as the new. So far I have not gotten to the new. Ignatius has been absorbing. My journey into the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius might have been profitably recorded, not because it is extraordinarily significant, but because it is, at least that is my hunch, extraordinarily typical. Most folks, I would guess, would undergo very similar things. I took up the Exercises of Ignatius for a typical reason. I was tired, felt dissipated, uncentred, emotionally and physically I needed a vacation. I looked for it in a prolonged prayer experience.  I entered a retreat house for 40 days of withdrawal and Ignatian prayer. The experience was very rich, though very painful. As spiritual writers have always pointed out, it is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of a living God and the peace which is found there is quite other than that which is described in travel brochures. The overriding experience is one of being slowly, painfully, though surely, centred. I want to share a bit of that experience of centering in the hope that it might help some of you in your own struggles to find a centre.

Through the Ignatian Exercises one thing becomes inconfusably clear: All rest, all freedom, all peace depends upon focusing upon God as centre. It does not take many days in the desert before a mirror starts revealing more. I began to see myself and my life more closely. What a curious mixture of things I am! I looked at the 10 years I have spent teaching and ministering and I saw some habitual patterns – perpetually tired, overextended, dissipated, behind and distracted in my work, driven compulsively to succeed, worried that I will disappoint, too busy to pray properly, too preoccupied to appreciate properly, tired but unable to relax, tired but emotionally unfree to pull away from relationships and work in order to enjoy a needed vacation, tired but unable to step off the treadmill, tired by still increasing the activity. When you see those patterns you become frightened, frightened by your attachments, frightened that you are not free, frightened that you are growing more tired and yet cannot do anything about it, frightened that you cannot relax emotionally, and frightened at how badly you are uncentered and at how badly you need certain things and persons.

After a few days in withdrawal with St. Ignatius, you realize that, like a rationalizing alcoholic, you have been sneaking far too many drinks in secret. But with that realization comes the beginning of healing because that brings the desire to change. Desire is always the beginning of surrender, even in our relationship with God. I began to look at what my life was centered on. What motivates me? What calls me out of myself? Relationships, work, the expectations of others, the fear of disappointing others, pride in what I do, greed for experience, love of honor and success, the desire to help others, the hunger to learn, to experience, to expand my horizons. You end up restless, compulsive, driven, unable to relax emotionally. You also end up habitually tired, but unable to rest. Like the tortured soul of Psalm 127, you end up getting up ever earlier and going to bed later so as to eat a very anxious, fragile and fleeting bread.

What is needed? The solution that God himself proposes to Israel, the SHEMA, the prayer which every pious Jew has nailed to his or her doorpost and which he or she prays three times daily: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and with all your might… “And these words which I command you this day shall be upon your heart; and you shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.  And you shall bind them as a sign upon your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. And you shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gate.” (Deut. 6:4-9) Under Ignatius’ influence, I wrote my own SHEMA. “Hear, O Rolheiser: The Lord our God is one Lord; you must put him before all else, then all else will fall into place. Brand that into your heart and into your mind. Teach it to your students; write it in your column and talk about it at table and to your friends. Put it on a sign by your mirror, and pray it daily, and mean it! Then, and only then, will your dissipation and tiredness turn to peaceful solitude, your compulsiveness to freedom and your restlessness to restfulness.”

When I pray that three times daily, there is a lot less compulsiveness.

There is a fine line between nostalgia and the longing for lost innocence. The latter is healthy; the former is not. Nostalgia is an unhealthy depression, an adolescent sentimentality which leaves us clinging to the past so as to be unable to enter the present with verve and vitality. In the end, it is a mummification, an unnatural embalming of something which is dead.  For a Christian there is the challenge to move beyond that, to let go, to not cling, to accept death, loss and corruption in order to be open to accept the new life and new spirit that the present brings.

Unfortunately, nostalgia comes upon us looking like the angel of light, with a power to touch our deepest parts in the same way as we are touched by real love and truth. But, in the final analysis, like masturbation, it merely deals with something which touches depth. Of itself, it is a turning away from reality in favor of fantasy. Not surprisingly, it carries with it the appropriate concomitant depression.

These words are harsh, but they need to stand as a preamble for what follows: We all need, occasionally, to make a recessive journey, to our origins, to our youth, to our innocence, to that place in time and in our hearts, before our sophistication, when we were truly young, simple and happy. Such a journey refocuses us and gives us a renewed sense of what is truest in us. But such a journey is not a sentimental voyage into the past in which we recall our youth, its simplicity and its innocence, and then bring appropriate lessons and guilts to bear upon the present. That would only lead to depression. The recessive journey, rather, is not so much a re-examination of our past as it is an examination of what is truest in us. In the deepest part of our hearts lie our real roots. At the end of that journey we find that our life has not been lost, blown, screwed up beyond hope or irrevocably wounded into melancholy by death, sin and loss. The journey to remember, to recall origins, is not sentimentality, it is a surgery, a cutting away of cancerous overlay to set the heart, in its primal and perennial vitality and innocence, free.

I made some such journeys lately. I did some remembering. Partly it was nostalgia; partly it was surgery. The recall of myself as a child is both humbling and humiliating; more the former. We were poor and many around an old wooden table in that immigrant district of rural Saskatchewan. On a farm too small we struggled, to learn a new language, to become educated, to do more than just make do, but, for years, we struggled just to survive. I am younger than the depression, but I can recall the winter of 1955. We were so poor then. We were always poor. My overriding memory of childhood is that of being hungry, not so much for food, but more for a world beyond that of economic and social poverty, for a world beyond a small isolated farm, for a life and an experience beyond a world in which there was no hot water on tap and in which there was not even the capability of speaking the language properly or dressing properly.

I felt cursed then by the sense that I was poor. And I was, in some ways, moving in my patched, hand-me-down clothes, too often smelling of farmyard and barnyard. The shame of poverty hits hardest in the teen years. To step back into that now can still bring flushes of humiliation. To truly recall it, however, brings a healthy humbling coupled with a strength and a sense of richness that nourishes like Elijah’s jug. We were rich in fact, all of us growing up in poverty on those immigrant farms. Our houses and hearts contained all that is important. Dirty, barefoot, speaking in our multiple accents, we were full of excitement. Our hearts were keen, clear as crystal, eager to learn and full of appreciation. There was enough love and innocence around.

My life has been blessed with various kinds of riches and successes since. Through travel, lecturing, teaching and friendships, I have been given the opportunity to experience in reality most of what I dreamed about when I was a runny nosed, but wide-eyed, child. But with the success and experience has come a crippling pseudo-sophistication, an unfreedom, a lack of innocence, a certain fatigue of the spirit, and a fear that can make a recessive journey to my origins an event of depressive nostalgia. The verve, the happiness, the innocence, why are they too often lacking?

Lately, I’ve had to take to dreaming again. It is time when that happens,to take a recessive journey, to go back to the farm, to recall one’s origins. In remembering there is a surgery. When we were little boys and girls our hearts were so eager to learn, our spirits were so hungry and welcoming. So much was gift.

Lord, let it all be gift again!

Some years ago, while giving a retreat, a lady came to me for confession. Her confession was long and sincere. However, that sincerity and genuine contrition was constantly punctured by a cynicism, sarcasm and background experience which caused her to be constantly questioning whether she wanted to be sincere and contrite. She was very bright and very experienced. In virtually every sense of the word, she had been around. She was also very happy. When we had finished, she asked what I felt she needed to do. I suggested that she undergo a long and intensive process of revirginization. It was a suggestion which mildly shocked her, but it was what she really needed. Though young, she had been most everywhere, done most everything, and had, in a way of speaking, sophisticated herself into a huge unhappiness. There was not a childlike bone in her body, nor a childlike thought in her heart. She had lost most of her virginity.

That prescriptive counsel I gave to her, revirginization, is a counsel which I judge more and more needs to be given to all of us and to our age in general. We are horribly unvirginal persons. What is meant here? Virginity is, in its deepest sense, not so much a past sexual history as it is a present attitude. Whether one is a virgin or not has less to do with his or her past sexual experiences as it has to do with the posture with which he or she meets reality. What is the posture of virginity? It is comprised of three compenetrating elements:

First, virginity is the posture of a child before reality. A child has a very primitive, virginal spirit. In a child’s heart and mind, and in a virgin’s there is a sense of newness, of experiencing for the first time. There is too a capacity to be surprised.

There is no illusion of familiarity and there is a natural “fear of God,” love’s fear, the fear that is the beginning of wisdom. Because of this, there is in the child, or the virgin, a sense of mystery, a sense that some things are sacred, untouchable, beyond manipulation.  Second, virginity is living in a certain inconsummation, living with a desire for experience which is not fully satiated. To be a virgin is to live in tension, unfulfilled, longing, waiting for a time in the future when one will be fulfilled. The virgin does not prematurely enter the marriage bed. This is true not just in the area of sexuality, but in all of life.

Finally, virginity is living in such a way that there are certain areas of our personality and life which are revered and sacred and which are then shared only within a context which fully respects that sacredness. For a virgin there is a certain chastity in experiencing, in all areas of life including the sexual. Virginity opposes itself to promiscuity of all kinds. The virgin knows that the human heart, temple of the Holy Spirit that it is, is not cheap. As a precious gift, it may only be trustfully given.

This posture, virginity, is natural in a child. However, here it is dependent upon certain factors which are themselves natural in children, namely, ignorance, lack of experience, superstition, lack of opportunity, natural naivete, and a lack of criticalness and practicalness.  As we grow older, as our critical faculties sharpen and as we experience more, we naturally lose much of our virginity. Partly this is necessary, natural and healthy – to be adult and naive is not an ideal.  However, partially this loss of virginity is unnecessary and unhealthy. As was the case with the lady I described above, partly the loss of virginity is the result of giving in to the urge to experience indiscriminately, of stripping reality unduly of too many of its sacral dimensions, of illicitly breaking taboos (including sexual ones), and of letting impatience and despair drive us beyond chastity.  When this happens, and to a greater or lesser extent it happens in each of our lives, we develop a false familiarity with life and begin to live under the illusion of familiarity. This is the real loss of virginity, living in an unhealthy familiarity with life, others, sex.

In this state, all real love, real romance, and all aesthetics in love, die. Unvirginal persons never send flowers, nor love notes. That’s kids’ stuff! Ultimately, the loss of virginity is characterized by a sophisticated unhappiness, an unchildlikeness which, while miserable, refuses to admit its own misery and its cause. That is one of the qualities of being in hell, to be miserable and to refuse to admit it. With that comes a proclivity for the perverse. Why? Because as Chesterton so aptly puts it: “There comes an hour in the afternoon when the child is tired of pretending; when he is weary of being a robber or a Red Indian. It is then that he torments the cat.  “There comes a time in the routine of an ordered civilization when the man is tired of playing…the effect of this staleness is the same everywhere; it is seen in all the drug-taking and dram-drinking and every form of the tendency to increase the dose.”

Lately, as a culture, we have taken to tormenting the cat! How do we wake ourselves from the nightmare? My next column will offer some suggestions for revirginization.