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.

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!”

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.”

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.

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.

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!

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.”

When I entitled this column In Exile, I had a double reason in mind. Superficially, the title was drawn from the fact that I was living abroad, away from much of what I considered as home. More significantly, however, it was chosen because we are in exile in a much deeper sense. We live “as through a glass, darkly,” in our separate riddles, as pilgrims looking for a home, separated from consummate community. Recently I experienced a homecoming of sorts, I returned from abroad after three years. The question arose: Will I continue to write In Exile? The answer is Yes! I will continue to write this column from its former perspective, that of the foreigner, the alien, the one not-at-home. Only the most superficial aspects of my exile have changed. I remain the traveller. Far more serious is the question: Why write at all? At least, why write words? Lately I have taken to pondering that question. The written word is limited and limiting.

Gutenberg’s press was in fact a press, but, I am afraid, not just a press for printing. Like a winepress, it works by compression, condensing things, squeezing the grape into juice, life into a few scribbles. The written word skims off a certain amount of life, draining the blood from the individual grape, mixing it with that of others, and, at last, leaving everything looking the same, like ashes, arranged in neat lettered rows. There is perhaps more to be said for leaving the grape on the vine, untouched and unsqueezed, amid the heat of the sun, the buzzing of insects, the sweat of the grapepickers, and the odors of life and rot. Moreover, the words we write in books and newspapers are not nearly as important as the ones we write on human hearts. The world is full of meaningful words, written ones: novels, poems, visions, romances, explanations, assorted prose; all of it sitting on shelves in waiting, waiting for someone who wants a food shot – an evasion, an insight, a vicarious thrill, an arousal, a scotch, a war. All those words on all those pages, written, typed, waiting! What are they for?

And meanwhile there is a paper of a different kind with too little written on it. The human heart. It also waits – for a word, a smile, a kind gesture, an undeserved love, a deed detached from price, a warm cloak for its journey. On it we need to write our important words. There are millions of hungry readers for these words. Words with flesh. So why write written words? For the same reason that a lost soul stranded on a lonely island puts notes into milk bottles and floats them out to sea. Who knows? Someone might actually find the note and read it. Rescue ships might be sent, the bottle might come back with a reply in it, or its finder, as helpless as you are, might take consolation in knowing there are other shipwrecked exiles. Instinct says put notes into bottles and float them. Obviously it has survival value.

And there is another reason, perhaps more telling, for writing. David taught it to Israel. To survive you need to fling stones, written words in our case. You need to look at your heart, your values, your vulnerability, the words which are deepest inside of you. And you need to hone them, press them, make them smooth as David’s pebbles, and, then, you need to fling them in the face of the giant. This doesn’t come from instinct, it’s part of revelation. David’s palmed-smooth stones saved Israel. In the face of the giant, we had best be honing our stones, picking our words, flinging them to save life, church, sanity. But the honing isn’t easy. Words which have flesh must also have blood, our blood. The words of the greatest writer of all time dripped from hands ripped by nails and from a body pressed by the most monstrous and merciless of winepresses. Words like that have power. They turn confusion to clarity, despair to hope, hatred to love. They become the map leading out of exile.

They also become stones, a shepherd boy’s stones, smoother than David’s, honed to a razor’s edge, filled with sacrament and prayer. They penetrate; they stun the giant. His head can be cut off later with his own sword. They also write on human hearts. Words that become flesh can write on flesh. The important words, the undeserved smile, the deed detached from price, the willingness to forgive or to suffer for others, are not written on pages of paper. They are David’s stones, lying deep in each of our shepherd’s pouches, waiting. Press them, palm them, hone them, fling them; they will penetrate the skull of the giant. With these thoughts that humble the writer of the written word, I begin a new year of comment In Exile.