A Diet Of Antiseptics

September 2, 1984

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

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

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

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

Symbols Give Us Meaning

August 2, 1984

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

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

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

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

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

Praying Through A Crisis

July 31, 1984

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

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

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

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

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

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

Passion Is God’s Fire In Us

July 2, 1984

Fifty years ago, T.S. Eliot predicted the death of passion, poetry, fidelity and historical consciousness. Today, tragically, that prediction is coming true. As Christians, we need to recognize that fact and respond, in order to defend passion and challenge people to it. That sounds strange and it is. Passion has, at least so it seems, always been distrusted in religious circles and extolled in secular ones. Indeed, the secular world tended to claim passion as its own, as something irreligious, as the very force which is rebellious against religion and which, if responded to, frees one from the shackles of religion. Preachers, priests, spiritual writers, and church leaders tended to help this idea along. The church, it seemed, was forever lashing out against passion, pointing out its dangers and forbidding people to allow themselves to feel and enjoy the full emotional, psychological, and instinctual force of their eros. Passion was made to seem at odds with religion.

How wrong we were! And, how wrong the secular world has discovered itself to be! There has been a strange and ironic reversal. Today, the secular world is trying to rid itself of all passion and the church is suddenly, much to its own surprise, finding itself in the novel position of having to defend passion. Why this turn of events? Because the secular world has discovered passion to be a very inconvenient thing. Passion, romance, poetry, aesthetics, all these things, challenge infidelity. Thus, our culture has begun to classify passion as it classifies other religious things, namely, as something medieval, the product of naïveté, as something which people need to be freed from. How deliciously ironic! The very force that it had so long claimed as uniquely its own, trumpeted as its victory, has, when given rein, proved to be an inconvenient embarrassment. Passion, in the end, is only for religious persons. Why?

Because our world exalts a false kind of freedom. In our society today we are exhorted daily to hang loose, to run from involvement, to run away from anything that might tie us down. We are invited to live as “free spirits,” soaring, fulfilled, unencumbered. Passion and romance always spell death for that kind of freedom. Passion means involvement, attachment, surrender, a loss of control and freedom, commitment. If sustained, it means fidelity. For this reason, it is no accident that, for the most part, secular wisdom today considers passion in the same way it considers religion – as kid’s stuff, for the naive. Today, passion and romance are seen as things we need therapy from. In his astute and very disturbing book, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, Philip Rieff, a man who is no friend of religion, points out that in our present culture passion and romance are “archaic and dispensable.” They are what Freud calls “erotic illusions” and, as Rieff goes on to say, it is time we stopped organizing our personalities and our communities around them. Love and hatred, the products of passion, are, in his words, obsolete as organizing modes of personality. In a culture of contacts and infidelity, passion and romance are experienced as tyranny. Bottom line, today romantic love is considered a neurosis, a sickness or, at best, something for the very young or very naive, a hangover from former ages, as is religion.

For this reason it is important that Christians and the Christian churches, rush to the defence of passion and romance. They are part of God’s fire in us, a great gift, to be channelled prudently it is true, but, nonetheless, to be ever perceived precisely as a gift from God. Today they are badly needed. They challenge infidelity. When T.S. Eliot predicted the death of poetry, passion, fidelity and historical consciousness, it is no accident that he placed all of these together. They flow from each other. Passion and poetry, when released and given, bond us to each other and to history in a way that makes infidelity and false freedom much more difficult. In a culture characterized by flightiness, lack of commitment, hanging loose, infidelity, cynicism and programmed boredom, we need fire, passion and romance. They, perhaps more than anything else, can help turn the tide and become the vaccine which immunizes us against the infectious bacteria set loose by the cynicism and infidelity of our age. The fire of passion comes from God. Eros is at the root of human soul and body. In the Hasidic tradition there is a famous parable about a man who wanted to be a blacksmith. So he bought a hammer, an anvil and bellows. But he could not bend any iron. There was no flame, no heat in his forge. He had everything except the thing he most needed – the spark, the fire, the heat that makes things malleable. In a world in which fidelity and historical consciousness are dying and being replace by infidelity and programmed boredom, in a world in which true romance and true sexuality are being replaced by schizophrenic sex and pornography, we need fire in the forge, passion and romance. Christians need to arise in the defence of eros.

A Summer Of Centering

July 1, 1984

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.

A Theologian’s Problems

June 2, 1984

I should have been a theologian 25 years ago. Things were simpler then. Theologians published books and catechisms which clearly explained everything. Everyone knew what the church taught and what was right and wrong. It’s all changed now. Biblical and historical criticism and a half dozen kinds of hermeneutics have come along, like the atomic bomb, and theologians live under that cloud. Nothing will ever be simple again. I attended a theology conference recently. We were discussing something which should have been simple, the first question in the Baltimore Catechism: “Who made you? … God made you!” It wasn’t simple at all! “God made you,” it says. But what do these three words – “God,” “made,” “you” – mean? A renowned linguist, a Dr. Barrett English, teed off first:

“Since Wittgenstein and Ayer, anyone even remotely acquainted with philosophical analysis knows that it is nonsensical to naively use the word God as it had a simple empirically verifiable referent. Moreover, the very word ‘God’ is already a linguistic confusion, mixing as it were a generic and an individual referent.” I was very impressed. I had never thought of that. The good doctor went on: “A recent article in the Journal of Applied Grammatology hints at some of the consequences latent in this type of undifferentiated approach: To begin a catechism without first seriously looking into the grammar of the word, ‘God’ launches a theological endeavour which remains ambiguous and arbitrary. “Besides one wonders whether it is indeed wise to attempt a catechism at all in the English language. The structure of all Indo-European languages renders theological thinking difficult. Amerindian and Chinese are much more ideal.” I was stunned. I know neither Chinese nor Amerindian. But there was more. A Claude-Levi French was having some trouble with the concept of God “making” us.

“When one says ‘God made you’ what precisely is implied here? We see in the creation accounts in Genesis that the Hebrew word BARA is used to depict God’s creative activity. “Now, prescinding entirely from the ex nihilo controversy, that verb remains fundamentally problematic. Does it imply an action which happened for once and for all, with a definitive terminus ad quem, or does it connote an on-going action? “Examining the Septuagint translation we see that the Greek text has the verb in either the global or the inceptive aorist. Now, if the verb is an inceptive aorist, and the suspicion lies in that direction, then the implications for our creative activity are enormous and constitute a virtual catechesis in themselves. “Is God making us in the global or inceptive aorist sense? And, more importantly, if the author had intended the global aorist why did he not use a perfect or even a pluperfect tense?

“It is the uneducated Catholic’s proclivity to render BARA in the global or pluperfect sense that has so impoverished our theology of creation. Small wonder we are little more than eschatological runts!”

How awful! And to think my mother died thinking BARA was global or pluperfect! How could we have been that wrong! The final demolition of my first naiveté of faith was left to a Klaus Niederstrasse. He had less trouble with the phrase “God made,” but he had difficulties with the word “you.” Quoting from a recent article he had published in the prestigious German Journal Der Anknupfungspunkt, he scored the following point: “One would have thought that after Husserl’s definitive demolition of the isolated cogito of Descartes, a contemporary catechism would be more sensitive to the whole issue of social context and structuralism. Until Husserl, we naively believed that we could speak of an isolated ego, a simple ‘I,’ or a definite ‘you.’ “That, as the phenomenological method has irrevocably demonstrated, is quite impossible. Heidegger’s Dasein is not ein mensch, but ein mit-mensch. We are not simple persons and may not so simply use the word ‘you.’”

“I fail to grasp why Father Baltimore would revert implicitly to a Cartesian outlook. One cannot hope that a catechism which lacks a firmly hermeneutically disciplined consciousness can ever hope to appl7 to the ordinary believer. “But, then, what can one expect when the final control of catechesis lies in the hands of the bishops and not in the hands of the theologians!” At this point I needed a beer. Stumbling from the conference room, humiliated and worrying about my mother’s eternal salvation, I found myself in the local theological watering-hole, a place called Aqua Sanctissima. I whispered desperately to the bartender: “A beer please.” “Generic or premium?” asked the obviously hermeneutically disciplined bartender. “Forget it!”

Remembering As Surgery

June 1, 1984

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!

Saying ‘Yes’ To Santa Claus

May 3, 1984

If you ask a naive child: “Do you believe in Santa Claus?” he replies “Yes!” If you ask a bright child the same question, he replies “No!” However, if you ask yet an even brighter child that question, he replies “Yes!” In my previous column, I described our need for what I termed “revirginization,” our need to again way “yes” to the question of Santa Claus. But how do we revirginize? How do we move towards a second naivete? We do it by touching the nerve of novelty, by purging ourselves of the illusion of familiarity. We must, as Chesterton once put it, “Learn to look at things familiar until they look familiar again.” We do this by making a deliberate and conscious effort at assuming the posture of a child before reality. We must work at regaining the primal spirit, a sense of wonder, the sense that reality is rich and full of mystery, that we do not yet understand and that we must read chastely, carefully, and discriminately, respecting reality’s contours and taboos. Concomitant with this effort comes the deliberate and conscious attempt at purging ourselves of all traces of cynicism, contempt, and all attitudes which identify mystery with ignorance, taboo with superstition, and romance and ideals with naivete.

It also entails the willingness to put off gratification, to live in tension, to accept being unfulfilled. It entails, in every sense of the term, refusing to sleep with the bride before the wedding night. We revirginize by learning to wait – sexually, economically, emotionally, spiritually. Finally, revirginization and coming to second naivete involves recovering again a certain chastity in experiencing. It involves recovering and respecting the sense that we ourselves and that reality around us is full of sacredness. Perhaps the process of revirginization might best be described by two metaphors: The image of weather revirginizing a geographical terrain: Imagine a geographical terrain that has been ravaged by natural disaster and despoiled by human beings. Its waters are dirty and polluted, its vegetation is dead and its natural beauty is destroyed. However, given time and weather – the sun, the rains, the winds, the storms, the frost and snow – it, in a manner of speaking, revirginizes. Its waters again grow clear and pure, its vegetation returns to life and eventually its natural beauty returns. In a manner of speaking, its chastity returns, making it again “virgin territory.” So too with our hearts and minds: as soon as we stop despoiling them through the illusion of familiarity and indiscriminate experience, they too regain, gradually, their virginity and begin again to blush in the wonder of knowing and loving. A chastity in knowing and loving returns. The image of fetal darkness: Imagine the gestation process of a human being in the womb. The process begins with a mere egg, a cellular speck which is being gestated, formed, cared for, shaped by things around it and nourished by a reality infinitely larger than itself. The process takes place in darkness, in a dark peace. Eventually the child has grown sufficiently and emerges for the first time. The sheer overwhelmingness of the mystery of reality is so overpowering that it takes a long time, years of time, for the child’s senses and mind to harden sufficiently for the child to even begin to understand. Initially the child simply looks and wonders.

So too the process of coming to second naivete, of revirginizing. We must truly be born again. We must, metaphorically speaking, make a recessive journey, a voyage to the sources, to the fetal darkness of the womb to be reduced to a mere egg, to be gestated anew in darkness (in the darkness of an understanding that understands more by not understanding than by understanding) so that we can again open our eyes to a new awareness that is so wild, so startling, so agnostic, and so overpowering that we are unable to name and number, but are reduced, as it were, to having to ponder and to wonder. G.K. Chesterton expresses this in a poem, beautifully:

When all my days are ending

And I have no song to sing,

I think I shall not be too old

To stare at everything;

As I stared once at a nursery door

Or a tall tree and a swing…

(Chesterton, A Second Childhood)

We may never grow too old, too sophisticated, too unchildlike, too unvirginal, to stare at everything as we “stared once at a nursery door.”

The Real Loss Of Virginity

May 2, 1984

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.

On Sensible And Stupid Risks

May 1, 1984

Love is all about risking. However not all risks are well founded. Falling in love is like falling over a cliff. It is a letting go, an abandonment, a release of some brakes. When we fall in love we expose our deeper and more sensitive parts and lay ourselves naked to both deep hurt and deep healing. In a word, we become vulnerable, extremely so. We let another person penetrate deeply into our life, our heart, our psyche, our spirit and perhaps even our body. It is a powerful and threatening experience, an experience which can make or break us. Indeed, nothing has power to transform a life so totally, for heaven or for hell, as does love. It always leaves one either deeply hurt or deeply healed, more redeemed or more damned. Love carries with it the healing fire of God and his Holy Spirit. Because of this it can heal wounds, fill emptiness and give meaning in a way that nothing else can. Conversely, it can also wound and damage in very deep ways.

It is a risk which needs to be taken, though never lightly. Love needs to be calculated. I say this last line with tongue in cheek. I am aware that few things are as challenged as is that last statement, namely, that love needs to be calculated. Without immediate qualification, it is a dangerous and irresponsible statement. Heaven knows, and we know too, that we go through life too uptight, too unrisking, too timid about love and about exposing ourselves. We all would love to love, but we are so afraid of rejection, of hurt, of losing control, of abandoning ourselves, of being vulnerable, that we seldom take the risk. As well, many of us have already been hurt and, burnt once, we do not want to approach the fire again. Thus, we need constant challenge to move out and risk. However, with that being submitted, I want to submit another item here, a cautionary one: More persons are being hurt, degraded and burnt by over-risking (in stupid ways) than are being genuinely healed by love’s redemptive fire. Love implies risk, but risk implies trust. Trust must be well founded. One can only trust another person if that other is mature, genuinely respectful, and capable of commitment.

When we let ourselves fall over a cliff it is imperative that the person designated to catch us is capable in fact, and not just in fantasy, of catching us so that we do not bruise or hurt ourselves too deeply. In brief, there is too much foolish abandonment and destructive letting go in the name of love. We abandon ourselves emotionally, sexually, spiritually and psychologically to each other when there is not nearly a sufficient basis of trust and maturity present. Hurt, not healing, results. Recently a friend of mine told me why he was breaking up with his girl friend. “She’s too controlled,” he submitted. “She will never let go of the final brake. She’s too uptight! She needs to control her own life. I can’t handle a girl like that!” Knowing his immaturity, sexual impatience and self-preoccupation, I suspect his girl friend is rather fortunate that this particular relationship is ending. Her uptightness, in this situation, is not a fault. Rather it should be called by its proper name – virtue. The final sin against the Holy Spirit is a closing off of oneself from love, a final refusal to be vulnerable, to let others penetrate and share our being.

Our age understands this, but it too often uses this truth both as a weapon and as a camouflage. It uses it as a weapon to force premature and irresponsible submission in love. It uses it as a camouflage to cover its emotional, psychological and sexual immaturities. How many persons, of both sexes, have been had (sometimes for extended periods of time) because they believed that by not submitting they would somehow be judged, by themselves and by others, as uptight, Victorian, lifeless, dried up? Nobody wants to be these things. Yet nobody is going to convince me that some irresponsible, immature, self-seeking, sexually promiscuous and impatient person, capable of great risk and abandonment in love, is more loving, and more of an instrument of healing in God’s kingdom than are that infinite number of God’s genuine poor, the uptight, who go though life struggling, unable to fully abandon and let go. To love is to abandon oneself to the dance, but that is not easily nor often achieved. It requires great maturity, great chastity, great forgiveness and a long period of time. We are still young and we live in the unconsummated phase of the kingdom. Give yourself as gift only when you can do it respectfully, lovingly, and chastely. Otherwise, the love will not lead to hope, but to despair. You will not be healed, but further wounded. Risk loving, but calculate whether this particular relationship, this particular penetration of love, will leave within you the imprint of God’s spirit or of some other spirit.

Spring And The Resurrection

April 2, 1984

“It’s spring and I am blind.” I saw that written once upon the frayed lapel of a sightless beggar. That line struck me today, Easter Sunday, as I sat looking at our city on an unbelievably beautiful spring day. Easter in a wicked and holy city. It’s something to think about. Our city of so many gods, of narcissism and generosity, of drink and sex and Christ. How aware are we of spring and resurrection? Bad enough to be blind, but to be blind in spring! Bad enough to be lacking hope, but to be so hopeless at Easter! A religious holiday in a pagan city, it’s a strange mix. A mixed city it is, full of Pan, full of pride and pain, peace and promise. Church bells still ring here and people still pray.

Many still laugh and share and promise love and fidelity. Sincerity still stalks and there is still some self-sacrifice and some hope that is more real than despair. But it is all so mixed. Nothing comes pure, not today, not in this city. Cynicism, selfishness, hedonism, myopia, infidelity and self-preoccupation are stirred by the same straw that stirs hope. If Christ came out of a tomb in this city, would he be hugged or mugged, adored or ignored? Would he be surprised by the hockey playoffs? He certainly would have much to do. He would, I suspect, take a stroll along our streets. Perhaps he might even try a seven-mile walk from the Coliseum to St. Albert. It’s hardly the road to Emmaus, but he would find some disciples along the road. Like his first disciples, at that first Easter, he would find them talking both disillusionment and hope (when they weren’t talking hockey). If he gave them a few prods with the Scriptures he could, I am sure, burn holes inside of them. That’s a good sign.

Some would, I suspect, still be able to recognize him in the breaking of the bread. But how many? How many, like Magdala, still search for him at dawn on a Sunday morning? I looked at eyes today and they gave me some answer to that question. They didn’t focus too sharply, in one direction or another; cast down in prayer, cast up in hope, cast around in the hope of finding someone to pray or play with during spring’s mating season, lifeless in resignation, bitter in hurt, restless in search, closed in tiredness, sightless in preoccupation, they mirrored our city, its narcissism, its proclivity for distraction, its tiredness, and also its goodness, its searching and its hopes. Spring and resurrection, today was a day for both. Spring, the silent painter, was at work. By night, all was much greener. God, the silent leaven, was also at work. Of course, the Lord of the resurrection found his task more difficult than spring’s.Unlike the trees and the grass, the folks do not co-operate so automatically. God has to find openness in our awareness and in our freedom in order to fill us with new life, new blossoms, new warmth.

I think the trees and grass fared better today in being responsive to spring than we, the folks, fared in being aware of the resurrection or of spring. We weren’t too responsive to either. We all got up late, long after sunrise and never quite fully awoke. We ate our brunches distractedly, lounged in the afternoon, and waited for dinner, drinks and the hockey game. Spring and Easter were bursting around us, but, despite all that newness, they went basically unnoticed. I thought about spring and Easter today and tried to look at them. I realized how blind I was: “It’s spring and I am blind! It’s Easter and I am heavy in spirit! Everything is new and I am too distracted to notice! God is bursting forth and I am lounging, distracted, preoccupied, half-asleep! Resurrection is all around and I am feeling old!”

It’s a strange irony, a strange sickness. Are we horribly unfaithful or just too pressured? Are we sinful or merely wounded? Undeniably we are not awake. I wanted to tear scales from my eyes, preoccupations from my mind and heart. I wanted an angel of God to come with a heavenly trumpet and, literally and symbolically, blast the hell out of us, blast us all out of our lethargy, narcissism and asphyxiating preoccupations. I wanted God to wake me up, let me notice it is Easter, it is spring. The very sap of God is flowing through trees and veins and hearts and spirits. Fiat…and let us notice! Another blind beggar I once saw was sporting a sign which read: “Long Time, No See!” It’s spring and the resurrection, but for me, for us, may a compassionate and busy God understand and have patience and mercy, it has been too long a time of no see!

On The Road To Emmaus

April 1, 1984

Nearly 2,000 years ago, two disillusioned youths consoled each other as they walked that seven-mile stretch of road separating Jerusalem from Emmaus. They moved slowly, depression having taken the spring from their steps. A double feeling clung to their hearts that day. They were hurting and there was reason. Their messiah and their dreams had just been crucified. A deep dark disappointment dampened their spirits. And there was fear. Most of all, there was fear. Not fear that they themselves might be crucified. That prospect loomed more welcome than the thought of going on. Theirs was that more horrible fear, the fear that comes from the realization that perhaps nothing makes a difference after all, maybe our dreams and our hopes point to nothing more real than Santa and the Easter Bunny. Maybe hope is only for children and the naive? They had been so excited, so full of hope. The uncrucified Christ had filled them with a dream. With that dream had come a new innocence, a freshness, an energy, a feeling absent since they had been children and which, prior to meeting Jesus, they had, long ago, unconsciously despaired of ever feeling again.

One weekend, one black Friday, had changed it all. They walked now, realistic again, more than 48 hours older, their dreams, like their messiah, dead, entombed. They had grown up a lot in one weekend. Their naiveté had died as it hung exposed, mocked and ridiculed by the wise. There was a lesson hard learned, but it brought a hurt and a disappointment beyond words. But another feeling clung to them too, like a demon refusing to be exorcised. The dream still burned holes in their hearts. Mocked and dead – maybe it didn’t matter? Maybe something was more real than even death! Hurt beyond words, confused beyond doubts, they searched for words, grasped for trust. Then a stranger caught their step and caught their mood. They didn’t recognize him. How could they? In their loss of trust, their messiah had died.

But the stranger begins to find the words: “Do they not yet understand the ways of God? Isn’t it always when they don’t understand, and have to trust, that they understand the most deeply? Wasn’t it necessary for naiveté to be so exposed and ridiculed? Is that not its glory?” His words burned in them, touching and soothing that same deep part of the heart where the dream had lain. But they were only words, a balm, a momentary salve, nothing more. The doubt, the hurt, the fear, these lingered on. Emmaus and twilight appeared at the same time. The stranger had been a consolation. Why not ask him to stay? They continued to share, bread and consolation. Suddenly their eyes were opened. Their minds and hearts were opened even further. They understood. Jesus was with them again. The dream exploded anew like an atom split. They split, immediately, for the ends of the earth, hanging their naiveté and their dreams on crosses everywhere. The dream never died again. Easter Sunday had eclipsed a godless Friday. Christianity goes through multiple moods and feelings. Each age must struggle with its own emotions. Today, in terms of feeling, we live in that time between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. We are trudging along the road to Emmaus. Like the two disciples, we live with crucified dreams. Aesthetically, romantically, ethically, and religiously, we are surrounded by despair and its child, cynicism.

Dreams are giving way before the caveat of the cynic; faith is daily being displaced by doubt; and perseverance and long-suffering are all but extinct in a culture and church of release and enjoyment. Worst of all, there is fear, an unconscious fear whose tentacles are beginning to color every facet of life. It is the fear that perhaps our Christian hopes and dreams point to nothing beyond our own hopes and dreams. Perhaps faith is, after all, only a naiveté. Isn’t Christ as dead as he was on Good Friday? Who, save perhaps for a few good thieves, is still turning to a cross for salvation? Yet there is something else: The dream still clings to us, refusing to let us go. It burns holes in us still, hanging on to us, even when in infidelity and despair we can no longer hang on to it. Hope is still more real than death. In our hurt, we are struggling for words and grasping for trust. We need to remain on the road to Emmaus. The stranger still stalks that same road. In his company we need to discuss our doubts, discuss the scriptures and continually offer each other bread and consolation. At some moment too, our eyes will be opened. We will understand and we will recognize the risen Lord. Then the dream will explode anew like a flower bursting in bloom after a long winter. We will be full of a new innocence. Easter Sunday will happen again.

Splitting The Atom Of Love

March 2, 1984

In recent years the issue of social justice has edged its way to centre stage within Christian spirituality. This may not be seen as simply another post-Vatican II phase that the church is going through. It must be seen for what it is, namely, a truer and more radical response to the Gospel of Jesus. Nuclear disarmament, injustice and exploitation in the Third World, and unemployment and abortion in the First World, are not issues any Christian may be indifferent to. It is not good enough to simply say one’s prayers, mind one’s own business, and leave these things to the politicians and lawmakers. However, our involvement here, like most blessings, comes mixed. In our movement into social justice, there frequently stalks a subtle demon. Our involvement in these mammothly important issues too easily gives us the impression that the moral issues we do battle with in our own private lives, the mini-demons, are not so significant.

It is all too easy to conclude that it does not matter how we live our lives in the recesses of our own private worlds, as long as we are doing battle with the right causes on the social front. How important are our piddling little private moral concerns when one considers the threat of nuclear war or when one looks at injustice and exploitation in the world? How important is the commitment to private prayer, to the Eucharist or to a Christian sexual morality in the face of these globally important issues? Do we really believe that God cares much whether we gossip a bit, slander someone, pray in private or refuse to reconcile with each other over some petty dispute? As Morris West so graphically puts it in his Clowns of God: “Do you really believe that God cares whether you hop in and out of bed a couple of times with someone not your wife or husband, given the important concerns of the world?” The answer is yes. God does care about the little things as much as he cares about the great ones. He cares because we care. It makes a difference to him because it makes a difference to us. More importantly, he cares because the little things shape the big things. Social morality is simply a reflection of private morality. The global picture is what the microcosm of the human heart looks like when it is magnified.

When the chaos that lies within the recesses of our private lives remains untouched and untamed, it will remain untouched and untamable in the world at large. As long as the demons and chaos within our hearts lie untouched and untamed, our social action is not worthy to be called spirituality. It is merely political action, nothing more. It is power doing battle with power. Ultimately it will be successful or unsuccessful on the basis of the Machiavellian principle of “might is right.” The kingdom of God does not work by this kind of power. It works by conversion. Conversion, in the final analysis, is an eminently personal act. Carlos Castanedo, the American Indian mystic, writes: “I come from Latin America where intellectuals are always talking about political and social revolution and where a lot of bombs are being thrown. But nothing has changed.” “It takes little daring to bomb a building, but in order to stop being jealous or to come to internal silence, you have to remake yourself. This is where real reform begins.”

Thomas Merton, in his celebrated dialogues with Rosemary Reuther during the Vietnam War, makes the same point. Reuther has accused him of being out of the mainstream, hidden away, living a sheltered and privileged, and ultimately useless, life. Of what value, she taunted, were his prayers and his private struggles and his little moral victories in stopping the war? She, at least, was in the front lines, manning the pickets. Stung by this criticism, Merton replied that, for her, his battle with his private demons “must seem like small potatoes.” However, he submitted, he was engaged in the real battle, that of changing hearts. When you change a heart, whether it be your own or that of someone else, you actually change something. All the rest is simply one power attempting to displace another. Private morality and all that comes with it, namely a deep commitment to prayer and honesty in the smallest, most secret and most internal of things, is the source from which spiritual energy ultimately flows. There is potentially more energy inside of one atom than could be generated if one harnessed every river, waterfall and ocean on earth. An emphasis on prayer and private morality is not a hangover from the days when the monastic ideal dominated Christianity. Nor is it an unaffordable luxury not available to the busy and the committed person. Nor, indeed, is it counterproductive to social justice. It is an attempt to create real energy, spiritual energy, by splitting the atom of love inside of ourselves.

Celebrating Our Alphabet

March 1, 1984

Perhaps the most frequent complaint one hears in church circles is that our liturgical gatherings are so uninspiring and boring. Usually the celebrant, the priest, is singled out as the culprit who is responsible and is asked to bear the brunt of the criticism. He is accused of being dead, uninspiring, bland, a poor preacher and just downright boring. As a priest, I take more than a casual offence to this critique. It is not that I deny its truth. Heaven knows, most of the time our celebrations are dull, uninspiring and boring. It is no wonder that people see church attendance as a grim duty rather than as a privilege. But the fault, when there is one, is not solely ours as priests. In fact, often there is no fault whatever, save the unrealistic expectations of those attending the celebration. Are liturgical gatherings meant always to be exciting, bouncy, enthusiastic celebrations? Is the celebrant the person who is solely, or even primarily, responsible for making the celebration enthusiastic and exciting?

The answers to those questions are not so obvious. First, not all liturgical gatherings can, nor should, be enthusiastic, bouncy, high celebrations. Good liturgy is good psychology. It flows with the psychological rhythms of those who are attending. As well, good prayer, in the classical definition, means “lifting mind and heart to God.” Given that, the issue grows suddenly very complex. Our psyches go up and down. We have our seasons and days of enthusiasm, bounce, joyfulness. Sometimes we feel like singing and dancing. Sometimes there is spring in our step. But we have other seasons too, cold seasons, bland seasons, seasons of tiredness, pain, illness, boredom. We try to get one foot in front of the next. If prayer is lifting heart and mind to God then clearly during those times we should be lifting something other than song and dance. We gather in liturgical celebration to be challenged by God’s word and to be nourished by his body, both as it is incarnate in the community and as it is in the Eucharist. But we bring something too. The celebrant’s role is not that of dictating what is to be lifted up to God. His role is to help gather it together and to direct it upward… as an incense smoke to God.

Thus, the best celebrant is not necessarily the one who conducts the most bouncy and enthusiastic celebration, nor even the one who delivers the best homily. Sometimes the celebrant’s very efforts to do this can do violence to the persons who are attending. It can mean a lack of respect, not to mention a secondary and superficial understanding of what is meant by redemptive joy, to tell an overtired, over-extended, emotionally wounded and bored person that he or she is not celebrating properly because they are not responding with vigorous enthusiasm. The best celebrant is the person who can act as a radar screen, the one who can lift up not just the bread and wine, but who can lift up all that the folks bring… including their tiredness, their hangovers, their woundedness, their emotional and sexual preoccupations, and their boredom. In the end, a celebrant is limited, sometimes severely, by what the people themselves bring to the celebration. Who is he celebrating for? The happy? The tired? The bouncy? The uptight? The bored? The hungover? The restless? The prayerfully attentive? The emotionally preoccupied? Whose heart and mind is he supposed to be lifting up to God? He must, I submit, gather it all together. He must offer it as it is, and not as he would like it to be.

When we attend a liturgy we should be told: “Come as you are! Pray as you are! Tell it as it is! Lift up your heart and mind, not somebody else’s. Celebrate it all, your joys, your despairs, your woundedness, your tiredness, your boredom.”

There is a story told about a Jewish farmer who, through carelessness, did not get home before sunset one Sabbath and was forced to spend the day in the field, waiting for sunset the next day before being able to return home. Upon his return home he was met by a rather perturbed rabbi who chided him for his carelessness. Finally, the rabbi asked him: “What did you do out there all day in the field? Did you at least pray?” The farmer answered: “Rabbi, I am not a clever man. I don’t know how to pray properly. What I did was to simply recite the alphabet all day and let God form the words for himself.” When we come to celebrate we bring the alphabet of our lives. If our hearts and minds are full of warmth, love, enthusiasm, song and dance, then these are the letters we bring. If they are full of tiredness, despair, blandness, pain, and boredom, then those are our letters. Bring them. Spend them. Celebrate them. Offer them. It is God’s task to make the words!

All That Is Truly Masculine

February 15, 1984

Young screenwriter, Bruce Feirstein, recently published a book which sold so fast that the printing presses scarcely cooled between editions. It is an amusing, if superficial, attempt to insert laughter into the painful issues surrounding women’s liberation and the male proclivity for what is macho. Entitled, Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche: A Guidebook to all that is Truly Masculine, it submits, among other things, that real men don’t eat quiche because it is French, decidedly feminine and, moreover, looks like it already has been eaten! As well, real men do not wear designer clothing. That too is unmasculine. The book presents a list of caricatures, some humorous, others tasteless, which point out what real men will do and what they will not do. Perhaps it is unfortunate that the book is only meant to be amusing, that it has no serious intent whatever. Indeed there is need for just such a listing of what constitutes a healthy masculinity as opposed to what constitutes an oppressive and asphyxiating machoism.

What follows is a brief alternative list – a sometimes-less-than-amusing guide to all that is truly masculine:

Real men do not feel that their work is more important than their families; nor indeed do real men believe that their work is more important than their wives’ work.
Real men know what eight-10 hours a day alone with pre-schoolers, diapers and baby talk can do to someone’s energy, nerves, self-image and ability to be exciting. Accordingly, real men help with housework, do dishes, babysit kids regularly, encourage their wives to get out more and do not classify other men who do this as wimps.
Real men do not watch 36 hours of football each weekend. Real men do watch some football on weekends.
Real men cry occasionally and real men still feel the need to apologize when they do.
Real men do not consider religion and prayer as effeminate. Real men pray with their wives and families, instruct children religiously, attend church functions, make retreats and eventually go on a Marriage Encounter with their wives.
Real men are not scared of emotions, their’s nor anyone else’s. They do not buy the line that being masculine means never sharing your feelings and fears
Real men do not announce to a wife and kids frustrated by their perpetual absence that they are adored at work and that they might be suffering from “success-stress.”
Real men do not shout: “Hit the bastard!” at hockey games, particularly at minor league games.
Real men still get upset when young kids hear this at hockey games. Real men do enjoy good hitting at hockey games.
Real men do not consider the sign of peace at church as mushy. Real men never pretend that they are Alan Ladd acting in the movie Shane and that they are beyond the need for ordinary human intimacy and gesture. Real men, however, kiss only their wives on the lips at the sign of peace.
Real men know how to say “No” to unhealthy and excessive demands from their kids.
Real men also know how to say “No” to unhealthy demands from their sexuality. They do not buy the line that says: “Given the right circumstances, every full-blooded man will go for it!”
Real men can be trusted by their wives when they go on conventions and when they work with attractive members of the opposite sex.
Real men enjoy watching the Dallas Cowboys more than their cheerleaders. Real men do not have centrefolds hanging over their workbenches; they do not read Playboy, and neither want nor need a pin-up girl in the daily paper.
Real men understand and, qualifiedly, support women’s issues.
Real men are not gay-bashers. Real men are upset by militant gays, but understand the complexity of sexual orientation. Real men are self-assured enough within their own sexuality that they are not threatened by those whose sexual orientation is less clear.
Real men will occasionally wear designer jeans, but will never buy designer cat food. Real men do not ask their wives or girlfriends for a chainsaw or a flamethrower as a gift.
Real men accept at some stage in their lives that they will never be a professional athlete. Real men do not ruin minor league sports by playing out their own frustrations and unfulfilled fantasies through kids. Real men do get involved in little league sports, but they let the kids play them.
Real men do not live a sexual double standard. Real men do not call a sexually promiscuous male a “swinger” while dubbing the feminine counterpart “a slut.”
Real men never say: “I don’t care!” Real men know that only when they are strong can they be tender. They know that only fear, shame and weakness allow one to be hard and dispassionate.
Real men do not call women “broads,” they do not rate women’s bodies and have never seen the movie, Ten.
Real men can, very occasionally, enjoy going shopping with their wives.
Real men watch the Super Bowel, despite feminine protests.
Real men spend time with little kids.
Real men do send flowers.
Real men do apologize.
Real men let women love them.

Finally, real men have read Bruce Feirstein’s book. Real men have had a laugh but have not taken the book seriously. Real men have not told some of their women friends that they have read this book.

Real men do eat quiche, albeit only occasionally. A real man sees nothing incongruous in walking into the most French restaurant in town, winking at the waiter and saying: “Ta quiche designer, s’il vous plait!”

Receiving Truth As A Friend

February 3, 1984

Youth, health and sexual prowess are the axis upon which our culture turns. Lately it has taken to turning ever faster. Once we make an exception for Mark Twain’s remark that “there is nothing wrong with youth except that it is a shame that God chose to waste it on young people,” it must be admitted that youth, health, and sexual prowess are, in themselves, good; very good in fact. What’s bad is that , too often, we see nothing beyond them. We absolutize them, idolize them, and pin all our hopes for happiness upon them. When this happens, we lock ourselves into a dream which must daily grow more fragile. There is precious little in our culture that suggests that there is something beyond a meaning and happiness that can be had by being young, healthy, and full of sexual opportunity. In fact, there is precious little around to suggest that we believe in much beyond what is offered by the body.

I offer a tragic illustration: Recently, I attended the funeral of a person who died young. She was a very lovely and loved person – young , attractive, bubbling with health, vigorous, enthusiastic and full of goodness. Cancer and three short months changed most of that. She died, still young and, remarkably, still very full of goodness, but she died stripped, not only of a long life, but stripped, horribly and unfairly, of her physical attractiveness, her health, and her sexual prowess. For those of us who knew her, it was hard to take. We shook our heads and muttered those phrases of meaninglessness which express impotence and lack of understanding…“Unbelievable, tragic, unfair, this can’t be happening!”

But it was happening, and mostly we were mute, unaccepting. We grieved for awhile and then, since life must go on, went back to our own lives, haunted and stunned perhaps, but soon to forget. Memory of this kind is soon lost in the anxiety of our own pursuits; the youthful pursuits of a culture that stands muted before death in all its forms.

This is a strong example, but not an uncommon one. In the horror of it we see something we would rather not see, namely, that our culture, for all its seductiveness and promise, has a very fragile bottom.

It dangles life before our eyes, but the only life it can offer must be based upon youth, health and sexual promise. Good as these are, they are limited. But when we are young and healthy, they can seem enough. Who needs more? A healthy, youthful, and taut flesh has the feel of immortality. It holds the promise. Through it the chasm separating loneliness from community, hell from life, can be bridged.

When we are young and healthy, the dreams come easier. There are opportunities aplenty. But when these slip, when we age, when health breaks, when sexual attractiveness wanes, when we face death, the dreams stop. The opportunities too. Our culture stands strangely mute. It can say nothing; it can offer nothing. It abandons us to slip through its cracks, to disappear and to be forgotten. It once lured us into its seductive whirl and we went willingly, unabated. It seemed enough. Now that very whirl is what throws us out. We struggle to hang on, to get back in, but it is impossible. The vomit only goes one way.

Nature has its limits. It is for the young, the healthy, the taut of flesh. When these wane, we are left alone to age and die in a supremely solitary act. But whether our lives have a future beyond the middle years, beyond health, beyond sexual prowess, depends entirely upon our values. If we buy into our culture and make the value of the body supreme, we may as well resign ourselves to the fact that all experience, after a point, is downhill. With the advent of the middle years, we begin to see the darkness at the end of the tunnel. If motor activity is pre-eminent, if our image of ourselves and our opportunities for fulfilment are based upon teeth, hair, and a taut flesh, then life is very short, very fragile and, in the end, very shallow. Sheerly, as a mammal, our life has its pleasures, undeniably, but it is one long battle, a losing one, with death, the unfair intruder.

When youth and health slip, if we have nothing else of meaning , we will try to hold onto them by force, to mummify them by cosmetics, by pretence. When the fervor of desire slackens, when our body loses its sexual attractiveness, we will then try to revive it by artificial and perverse fuel. There will be the inability to let go, to age, to grow, to move on to new things, to not cling, to die. How dreadful and unfair seems age when we attempt to mummify youth! How awful is the waning of health and sexual prowess when we’ve nothing else! Yet how rich it could be, how full of the release of new life and new spirit, if we could let go, if we knew of meaning beyond these. But too often we know of nothing else. We struggle to hang on . Unable to recognize the inevitable as not only natural, but as good, we are not able to give up gracefully what must go to make room for what is ultimately better. Then we live in fear, waiting – waiting until it is snatched from us.

However as Tagore once remarked: “Truth comes as a conqueror only to those who have lost the art of receiving it as a friend.”