Passing On The Spirit

November 29, 1983

Eighteen years ago I walked out of our family home to begin life on my own. Minutes before I left my dad blessed me. It was short and simple. I doubt it took 30 seconds. He made me kneel on the stark and faded tiled floor of our simple living room and, placing his hands on my head, blessed me. My father was a fairly articulate man and might have said a lot. He chose not to. The gesture of blessing needs few words. Of itself it says what is important and imparts something beyond words, a person’s spirit. I was 17 at the time, an anomalous mixture of cockiness and piety, and the blessing meant little to me then.

Five years later, my dad died. I had seen him in those interim years, on vacations and during some of his own brief visits to the seminary, and we had talked, perhaps more deeply than ever before since he now considered me an adult and related to me in a new way. But, unlike the time previous to me leaving home, he no longer tried to instruct and admonish me, or run an audit on my values and prayer life. What he had wanted to say to me had already been said, many times. I knew how he felt, what he thought, and what his values were. There was no need to say it again. He had given me his blessing. What had he given me? What is a blessing? What is implied in it? What is its power? Why is it important? Part of our current cultural and spiritual poverty stems from the fact that blessing each other is both a lost ritual and a lost reality. For most of us a blessing is little more than a pious goodbye, a quasi-superstitious gesture. We are poorer for that misconception.

A blessing is a way of remaining permanently present to someone. It is a way of giving someone our love, our insight, our strength, our presence, in a word, our spirit, in our physical absence. It is always based upon a prior relationship. We can only authentically bless someone we have shared something with and, the deeper and more profound the prior sharing, the deeper and more profound the blessing. This is best illustrated by an example: Imagine a mother and a father raising a child. For years they try to love that child into ever-fuller life, coaxing, encouraging, spanking, admonishing, trying to give their own strength, values, vision, and spirit to that child. The process is fraught with pain and setbacks, on both sides. There is the constant hopping back and forth between presence and absence, acceptance and rejection, learning and falling away, loving and hating. It is a long process. Everything needs to be said again and again, repeated, and there is the paramount need for physical presence, for the parents and the child to be together, talking, arguing, sharing, hammering things out.

However, at a point, always, the need for more words, more admonition, more physical presence stops. Symbolically, it is time for the ascension. Enough has been said. There has been enough physical presence. Symbolically put, the child is grown. This is true of all relationships, not just of those that exist between parents and a child. What is called for now is a blessing and a concomitant backing away which leaves the child both free and empowered. Further words and physical presence can now be suffocating and counter-productive. Values and love have been spoken, gestured and shown sufficiently. We need to give the other our blessing, through whatever gesture or symbol we might choose. Then we need to back away, continue to live our values and love that other, and let that other be free.

This is the mystery of the ascension and pentecost, of letting go and imparting the spirit. Jesus himself illustrated it. He came and he shared, but, at a point, it was enough. The child was grown. He left us with his blessing. His spirit, the Holy Spirit, is received by all who receive that blessing. Through that spirit, Jesus is present to us in a way that is far deeper than he was ever present to his disciples when he was physically with them. Today we badly need to bless each other. The disease of our age is that nothing seems to last. Love, friendship, what we accomplish through ministry, inevitably breaks down. Given physical separation, what we have shared with each other in friendship and ministry invariably crumples and falls apart. The vision, the values, the shared spirit, in a word, the love, we have so painstakingly arrived at, crumples and we go our separate ways. Why? We haven’t blessed each other. There has been no ascension and, accordingly, there can be no pentecost. We’ve shared each others’ physical presence, but we’ve never received each others’ spirits for, if we had, no amount of time or distance, not even death itself, could crumple the shared vision, the shared values, the shared love.

The Bad Time Comes

November 21, 1983

“The bad time comes” writes Doris Lessing, “and we don’t know why.” Lately it’s been the bad time. Some of the steady and walkable ground around me has done some crumpling. It’s a mixture of small and large things: An overtiredness, a misunderstanding, one friend is diagnosed as terminally ill, another has a nervous breakdown, then there is a note telling why our concierge went home one night and blew his head off, and suddenly a lot of earth starts shifting. People are leaving – life, Louvain, each other; people are dying, people are breaking down, friendships and marriages are crumpling, and all around there is illness, death, fear, and pretense and silence. I sat myself down the other day, it was my birthday no less, to ponder this heaviness and to ponder my own steady and foolish self – me, so steady in my foolishness and so foolish in my steadiness.

Life, it would seem, has its seasons. Our hearts, interwoven with spring and autumn, winter and summer, beat warm, then heavy, and our moods would follow the flow of the sea. It’s all so complex, beyond us, and yet so simple: An eternal rhythm, a repetition, living then dying, and then, a break in the rhythm, a surprising freshness, living anew. It’s a mystery, a wonder, so unbelievable, this life! Day in and day out we feel its many joys, and, underneath them all, there is the sheer exultation in being alive, in using our bodies and minds in loving, of sensing, in eating, in being. We call it health. The sun shines and we feel well, and we neither ask nor know why. We are at peace. The ground we walk is steady, full of innocence. We grin and there is confidence. The human game seems unfair. We sense it is less fair for some others, and an all-too-easy compassion flows from us as we feel for life’s wounded and it’s fragile.

But the bad time comes, and we don’t know why; almost as if a too bright sun inevitable brings on clouds. A sadness catches us and, as if gazing from a ship which is suddenly tossed by an unexpected wave, our horizon abruptly changes. Things darken, health becomes fragile, as does friendship, and reality changes complexion. We sense how unlovable we are and begin to believe that no one loves us. The slightest things now give us reason to complain, to be jealous, to reproach. The very world looks different. The innocent eyes, the bold cheeks, the confident grin – the human face, so radiant – now radiates need, guilt, the tear, and we walk and wander, talk and tire, among small and large lies, trusting the cry of the child no more than that of the hawker. Everyone, it would seem, has their angle. Three billion faces, lives, loves, hearts, potential smiles, stained yet beautiful – the treasures of our human race – pass by, our eyes embrace, one, then another: Who, we have to wonder, keeps them all close and dear?

We scan the faces, each a mirror, and there is the dampening fear that perhaps nothing holds us near. Our eyes drop and, imprisoned in self-focus, we wonder why Beethoven went deaf and why fate takes these strange delights. Why is it this way? We don’t understand. What huge impersonal forces rip through us, rip through our bodies and minds, and heave and toss and contract our lives and loves as the oceans are heaved and contracted and rolled in their beds by the moon? What is this electricity that flows through us, charging us with dissatisfied energy? A thousand volts of something! Of what? Love, hatred, confusion, sex, compassion, fear, faith? Where does it come from? Like the oceans, are we contracted and rolled in our beds by mere gravity? But no storm lasts forever. The bad time too passes and we don’t know why. We look up one day and it is gone. There’s a different ebb and flow. Sunshine has returned and, with it, health – the confident grin, the innocence, the sense of being lovable. The ground beneath us quickens and steadies again, and the lies disappear, those of the child and those of the hawker. But we are left wondering.

Is this the way it will always be? A repetition, a perpetual rhythm: good times then bad, storms then sunshine? Ah, but there is more. Dimly we sense it both in the bad time and in the sunshine. Faintly, in both, a different kind of light burns. A curious light, no more visible in the darkness than in the sunshine; a surprising light for it should not be there, it goes against the rhythm. The difference is one word, an extraordinary word, Christ; at times, perhaps little more than a word. But it brings light; not much, to be sure, certainly not enough to take away the bad times, nor, indeed, to make itself visible beyond the sunshine. But it is a clear light: a beam, tiny, dim, but powerful; enough to walk a few steps by. It gives a different kind of steadying – hope. We don’t feel so foolish anymore.

Religion, Sex and Suffering

October 24, 1983

Religion, sex and suffering make, perhaps, the most constant trinity of human experiences. They send their tentacles out in all directions, coloring virtually all of life in their particular shades. Religion deals with mystery, with origins, with death, and with our relationships in between. Sex is both god-like and animal; it creates life and brings with it forms of death. Suffering torments, and no person is spared his or her own understanding of the crucifixion.

This trinity – religion, sex and suffering – form the basis of Morris West’s new novel, The World is Made of Glass. West has written some fine novels in the past, but this is his masterpiece and, by any standards, is a masterpiece. West is one of a handful of quality novelists who make no bones about the fact that they are religiously involved. A novelist of distinction, he sees no reason to disguise his religious interests nor indeed to be particularly apologetic about them.

He is a mature thinker – religiously and otherwise. He handles religious questions when they arise just as he handles questions of sex and suffering. When something is urgent, he treats it, without apologies or masks. For him the religious question is always urgent. The World is Made of Glass is both an actual history and a work of fiction. It is based upon a psychoanalytic case history found in the files of Carl Jung which West researched as thoroughly as possible and then used his myth-creating genius to fill in the rest. The story is set in 1913: Carl Jung, the renowned psychologist, is at the height of his brilliant career, but at a crisis point in his own life. He is becoming estranged from his master, Sigmund Freud, is in danger of losing his wife and family, and is struggling through his own psychoanalysis and an affair with his former pupil and life-long lover, Toni Wolff. He is also in the process of attempting a risky and frightening inward journey into the more chaotic and dark regions within his own mind, hoping, at the risk of his own sanity, to travel through the darkest parts of the human psyche and then return with healing herbs for others. But it is all too much for him and he senses he is losing his grip on reality and sliding into madness.

Into the middle of this crisis walks Magda Liliane Kardoss, a brilliant, beautiful and overly-complex woman who is on the edge of madness herself. Her own moral depravity, sexual excess and lack of any sense of guilt has begun to frighten her. Their meeting is a collision of destiny: Jung and Magda are too much for each other. Immediately, and in ways that cannot be understood, they begin to scratch deep dark hidden shadows inside each other, buried archetypes of which they have been previously unaware. They torment and challenge each other and eventually both hover on the verge of collapse, on the verge of madness, on the verge of sexual encounter with each other and on the verge of despair. Paradoxically, through all of this, both are brought to the verge of genuine hope. Their torrid encounter centers precisely on religion, sex and suffering: What brings life and what brings death? Which is the true God – the God of the church or the dark blind god of sex? Which is the true commandment, the “thou shalt not” of the Decalogue or the “thou shalt” of the phallus? Which brings life and which stifles it?

THIS QUESTION, along with the related question of what brings redemption, dominates their encounter, just as it dominates our own religious struggles. Thus, for example, in a poignant exchange Magda defends her sexual excess before Jung: “At least when I’m there, I know I’m alive. I may be half out of my mind with lust, but I’m celebrating life, not death!” Stung to the quick and suddenly unsure of himself, Jung shouts back, pronouncing his own judgment on her sexual excess: “You’re a liar…For you, every love story ends in a chamber of horror. Your own dreams tell you the truth. You’re wedded, not to life, but to death!”

For reasons not fully explicable, even to himself, Jung senses that Magda’s struggle is not to clarify confusion, but to make a confession. He tells her this and advises, almost along religious lines, a penance: amendment, atonement for her sins. She rejects his analysis and this solution and sarcastically asks towards whom this atonement must be made: “To some non-existent god?” Angry, frightened of each other and fatigued to the point of despair, they mutually agree to break off the analysis. They part, convinced that their encounter has been an unfortunate disaster for each of them. Hindsight will render a different verdict: Jung is inexplicably strengthened; Magda, just as inexplicably, begins to make atonement for her sins. She discovers, for the first time in her life, a deep peace and learns one of the most profound of all of life’s and religion’s lessons: When we sin, we must repay a debt. Not to God or even to others, but to ourselves for having cheated ourselves out of so much!

T.S. Eliot once remarked that we can only swallow the truth in small dosages. The World is Made of Glass delivers a dosage of truth too large to swallow whole.

Taming The Bad Dog Within

October 17, 1983

There is a story told of a young boy who would persistently do vicious things to his classmates. His concerned teacher kept him after school for a talk. In reply to her question: “Why are you always so difficult?” he answered, “I have two dogs fighting inside of me, a bad one and a friendly one. When the bad one wins, then I do bad things!” When the teacher asked why the bad one seemed to win more often than the friendly one, he replied: “Because I feed it more!”

That is a rich parable. The hardest struggle that you and I have in coming to community and celebration is our struggle with resentment, with the bad dog inside of us. We all have resentments, deep painful blistering hurts. They started when we were very little. We hollered from the crib and nobody paid attention. Left to ourselves, we began imagining things and the bad dog got his first feeding.

Then, as five and six-year-olds, they sent us into the jungle of school and playground where we were laughed at, excluded, bullied, passed over, misunderstood, not treated tenderly and found to be slow, fat, inferior, poorly complexioned, cross-eyed and not wearing the correct clothes nor having the right smarts. By the time we reached adulthood we were already carrying a lot of hurtful baggage.

Adulthood brought new opportunities for growth, but also new opportunities for resentment and paranoia: All of us, despite close friends and loved ones, find ourselves regularly excluded, slighted, betrayed, missing out, taken for granted and made to feel inferior. As a result we grow resentful and begin to nurture an image of ourselves as a cheated and unloved person. Sometimes this resentment flares forth and we vent it on someone; sometimes we take it out on a scapegoat, some person or group whom we judge vulnerable enough to hurt without fear that they will hurt us in return; and sometimes it remains hidden, but we grow colder and more suspicious than we would like to be.

“Belive me,” wrote Henry W. Longfellow, “every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad.” The end product is that we lose the Holy Spirit, that love between the Father and the Son which makes us feel like embracing others instead of hurting them.

Like the little boy in the story, too frequently we are under the influence of the bad dog…and we feed him! We nurse and nurture our resentments like a gardener trying to bring his prize rose to bloom. We magnify, re-examine, re-run, re-gurgitate and simply wallow in our hurts until we hurt all over and are convinced that nobody loves us and that everyone is taking us for granted. But that type of thinking leads us into deeper exile. We end up creating in ourselves a bottomless pit into which people around us can pour years of loving and kindness without results. Eventually there isn’t enough love in the whole world to satisfy us. Only forgiveness can lead us out of this and into life. But how do we move beyond our hurts and resentments? There is no painless, or quick, solution. It is a process of gestating and giving birth to forgiveness.

We need first of all to become pregnant with the desire to move into love and celebration with others. Then we need to gestate that hope, that holy spirit, into concrete flesh. It will be a slow organic process with its setbacks and its morning sicknesses but, if persevered in, eventually will lead us to the real labor, that of giving birth. The forgiveness which we gestated so warmly and tenderly inside of ourselves will not emerge into the outside world easily. Like a woman in labor, we will be forced into perspiration and tears as we scream in agony as forgiveness pushes though the birth passage in an attempt to come to light outside its womb. In the agony of birth, there will be those moments when we feel it isn’t possible, that the passage is too small to allow the new child to be born.

To vary the metaphor: In Tibetian Buddhism the bowl is the image for resentment. It contains all our bitterness, disappointment, hardness and disillusionment. We sit holding that bowl in front of us. We can either pour it forwards, allowing the whole resentful mess to flow away from us, or we can tip it the other way, allowing the poison to infect us. It is an important choice; perhaps the most important one we will ever make. The struggle between heaven and hell, between the Holy Spirit and the spirit of despair will, at least, not be centered on the flesh with its propensities of sex, laziness and passion. It will be centered on paranoia and resentment. We will make it or break it depending upon whether we can move beyond the resentment which poisons the Holy Spirit and makes us unable to forgive and move on to new life.

It is a staggering challenge; too much for us to do. To resent is human, to forgive is divine. But, casting ourselves into grace’s mercy, we must let divine help move us beyond ourselves. Our metanoia will lead to life; our paranoia to madness!

Christ Still Has Human Flesh

October 3, 1983

A man who was entirely careless of spiritual things died and went to hell. And he was much missed on earth by his old friends. His business agent went down to the gates of hell to see if there was any chance of bringing him back. But, though he pleaded for the gates to be opened, the iron bars never yielded. His priest went also and argued: “He was not really a bad guy, let him have another chance!” Many other friends of his went also and pleaded with Satan saying: “Let him out, please!” The gates remained stubbornly shut against all their voices. Finally his mother came, she did not beg for his release. Quietly, and with a strange catch in her voice, she said to Satan, “Let me in.” Immediately the great doors swung open upon their hinges. For love goes down through the gates of hell and there redeems the damned.

Several months ago in this column (WCR, June 20) I considered how we should react when some of our loved ones cease externally to practice as Christians. I suggested that because of the power given us by the incarnation (“Whatsoever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven. Whose sins you shall forgive they are forgiven”), our love and forgiveness binds our loved ones to the Body of Christ and forgives them, even if externally they have wholly or partially severed their relationship to church. Among other things, I stated no one can go to hell if they are loved by someone within the Body of Christ, providing they do not actively reject that love. I have received a lot of reaction, emotional and reflective, positive and negative.

For instance, a letter to the editor (WCR, July 18) warns: “The Bible tells us that Jesus, the Lamb of God, takes away the sins of the world. The Bible does not tell us that we will be saved by accepting the love from someone in the Body of Christ. “Jesus is the only way to salvation…if you do not believe in the Son of God, you will not have eternal life with God but you will go to hell (no matter who loves you).” Another lady writes: “I firmly believe that, when we pray for the salvation of our loved ones, they will be saved – but because the Holy Spirit leads them to repent and not because we love them and somehow can expiate their sinfulness on our own. “Love does cover a multitude of sins, but the sins covered are our own, not those of others!” These critiques, as they are written, are wholly correct. I have only admiration both for the instinct behind them and for their actual phrasing. I do not for one second dispute that it is only Christ, the Holy Spirit and personal repentance that can save. What I do dispute is the parameters within which these realities are often understood. Let me explain.

Only Christ saves, admittedly. But where is the reality of Christ? Was the incarnation only a 33-year experiment, a one-shot incursion by God into human history? No! The marvel of the mystery is that God took on human flesh and has never since ceased to have human flesh. In St. Paul’s words, “We are the body of Christ.” We don’t replace Christ’s historical body, we are not like his body, nor are we even his mystical body, we are his body; flesh, blood, tangible, in history, and to the extent that we live in grace, the on-going incarnation, God in flesh in history. There is a marvelous story told about a four-year-old child who awoke one night frightened. In the darkness he imagined all kinds of spooks and monsters in his room. In fear he got up and ran to his parents’ bedroom. His father calmed him and, taking him back to his own room, put on a light and reassured him with the words: “You needn’t be afraid. God is here in the room with you!” The child replied: “I know God is here, but I want someone here who has some skin!” God knows we need him in more than the abstract. We need skin! That is why he chose to become incarnate in it. But he didn’t shed his earthly skin after 33 years; once enfleshed, he has remained in skin. We are his body now. When we forgive, Christ is forgiving; when we bind, Christ is binding; when we console, Christ is consoling. When we suffer anguish over a loved one, the lamb of God is bleeding.

When people accept our love, they are accepting Christ’s love. When their hearts are warmed and moved because we love them, they are being moved, and repentance is taking place, through Christ and the Holy Spirit. That is the mystery of the incarnation! It is true! Nobody can go to hell if they are loved by someone within the Body of Christ, providing they do not actively reject that love. Does this all sound incredible? I hope so because then maybe we will begin to see the tip of the iceberg: the huge mysterious, powerful, earthly and incredible mystery of the incarnation. One lady wrote to me saying: “I would love to believe you, but it just seems too good to be true!” What a marvelous description of the incarnation!

Incarnation Imparts Power

September 26, 1983

There is a pain among us as Christians today that is too seldom talked about. It is the pain of losing a loved one, not through death or even through physical separation, but through the loss of a shared common faith, religious practice and morality. Let me explain with an example: you are a parent trying to live out your Christian life in a conscientious fashion. You go to church regularly, pray, and basically live a decent moral life. When they were young, your children naturally followed you and shared your convictions and practice. Then gradually, or perhaps suddenly, they stopped going to church, stopped sharing your views on sexuality and marriage, and defiantly or apologetically began to live in a way that contradicts what you believe and practice.

At first you challenged and fought. You demanded that they go to church and live as a Christian sexually, but to no avail. Eventually, in frustration, you arrived at an unhappy truce: You continue to practice, they don’t. As a priest I have met literally dozens of parents (in half a dozen countries) who are anxious with worry about their children in this state. However this is not just limited to parents worrying about children. This pain affects us all, deeply. None of us have not felt the deep pain of loss when a son or daughter, a friend, or a brother or a sister, who used to walk beside us, no longer does.

One of the deepest bondings of all is weakened and strained. We are pained: both because we feel a sense of loss and personal rejection and because we are worried about the other’s long-term happiness and salvation as well as their long-term bonding with us. This pain is very common, very deep, and too seldom talked about. How should we react? What can we do as parents, friends, brothers and sisters? What can we do as the body of Christ? Obviously we can pray and continue to live out our own lives according to our own deepest convictions, hoping to love and challenge with our lives more than with our words. This is what we must do….and, most times, is all we can do. But it is important to understand what we are really doing when we are doing this. Something deeper is happening than is seen on the surface. What? In John 20:22, Jesus tells the earliest Christian community: “Whose sins you forgive they are forgiven; whose sins you retain, they are retained.”

In Matthew 16:19, he tells Peter: “Whatever you bind on earth shall be considered bound in heaven; whatever you loose on earth shall be considered loosed in heaven.” The traditional interpretation of these texts takes their meaning to refer to the institution of the sacrament of reconciliation and to the giving of papal powers to Peter and his successors. They mean at least that much but much more is implied in these texts. What Jesus is doing here is giving the whole Christian community the power to forgive sins and the power of binding and loosing. What does this mean concretely?

It means that if we are truly members of Christ’s body then when we forgive sins, the person is forgiven. Likewise it means that if we love someone and hold them in our life, that person, regardless of his or her own actions, is not cut off from the body of Christ. If you continue to love somebody, they are bound. Hell is only possible when one has put oneself totally outside of the range of love and forgiveness of the Christian community, when one has rendered oneself incapable of being loved and forgiven in that she or he has actively rejected not only the religious and moral convictions of the Christian community, but, more importantly their love.

To make this concrete: If a child, or brother or sister or a loved one of yours strays from the church in terms of practice and morality, as long as you continue to love them, hold them in union, and forgive them, they are bound, still part of the church (because of your love). Irrespective of their official external relationship to the church and Christian morality they are in grace because you are part of the body of Christ and when someone touches you they are healed and forgiven, just as persons at the time of Jesus were healed by touching him. When you love someone, unless they actively reject that love, they are bound…bound to the body of Christ, sustained in salvation. And this is true even beyond death. If someone close to you dies in a state where, externally at least, he or she is not practicing as a Christian and is at odds morally with the body of Christ, your love and forgiveness will continue to bind them to the body and will continue to forgive them…even after death. To put the matter quite crassly: No one can go to hell if they are loved by someone who is within the body of Christ unless they refuse that love. It can be consoling to know that few persons will reject that type of love. It takes a strong person to go to hell!

The Scent Of Unseen Roses

September 12, 1983

The scent of finding life, wrote George Macdonald, is “to smell the scent of unseen roses. I doubt we understand that very well, caught as we are in the tyranny of the seen rose, the visible, the healthy, the pretty.

We suffer from a very shallow and destructive concept of beauty and worth: We do not really appreciate the beauty of the rose, which we do see because we fail to grasp the scent of the ones that support it. But this is metaphorical and obscure. Let me explain:

Our world revolves around those who are strong, attractive and active. We see beauty and worth in the pretty, the un-sick, the young and the talented. They are the roses whose attention, affection, and autographs we court. It is they we would put on our mantel. Conversely, we find the sick, the handicapped, the aged, the unattractive, the wounded and the non-achievers a nuisance.

We feed them, tolerate them, and perhaps even, through some residual mixture of insight, guilt, and fairness, give them some of our attention and affection. But they are not the roses! There is little place for them on our mantels, nor in our vision of what is important. The perversity of that sends its poison out, both ways, depriving the weak of a sense of worth and depriving the strong of depth, insight and genuine understanding of life and beauty. In our world, sickness and agedness, non-attractiveness and non-utility of all kinds, are seen, both by those afflicted with them and those observing, as a useless burden, sheer wastage in the system. A sick person, an old person, a handicapped person is made to feel that he or she is a misfortune and that his or her condition makes no sense and helps no one. Thus, surrounded by youth, health, vigor, attractiveness and usefulness, such a person is made to feel small, insignificant, a cripple, a burden and, in the end, is made to feel guilty as well.

Save for being surrounded by extraordinary friends or gifted with extraordinary grace, such a person cannot help but have a horrible self-image: a faded flower among the attractive, unimportant to the mainstream of life. But that is far from being true! Only a society which has all but lost its capacity to see depth can render so shallow and wrong a judgment – and live with itself after imposing it upon its sick and weak members! Real insight, St. Paul tells us, is seeing “face to face,” beyond the “glass, darkly.” The enigma, he calls it. We are in exile, partially distanced from each other, God and the truth. Behind that enigma, we do not see things as they really are. The type of knowledge that ends our exile, by resolving the enigma, sees not just the visible roses, but it scents the unseen ones as well. It scents that humanity is not a bunch of flowers, artificially set together in the interests of the aesthete’s palate, with all the unpretty and faded ones weeded out to keep the bouquet lovely. Rather it sees humanity as it really is, a great and aged tree whose flowers are not artificially chosen but are parts of one great whole, organically dependent one upon the other, with the pretty and the unpretty, the healthy and the sick, all part of one body.

In a bouquet of flowers, because one flower is not dependent upon another, all the unattractive, faded and sickly blooms are carefully eliminated. In a tree, as in life, this is not possible. All is woven together in a body, that body shows its many struggles to come to life and to grow. The ravages of time, sickness, and outside elements have made for broken branches, bruised blossoms, gnarled surfaces, and shriveled and faded parts. But they are all necessary. There can be no beautiful blossoms and no fruit without the bruised and faded, the gnarled and the aged. The weak, sick, aged, and unpretty are as necessary to life as are the pretty and healthy. They reflect the struggle to come to life and to grow. Teilhard de Chardin, in an insight purged under a desert sun, explains it as follows:

“The world is an immense groping, an immense search… it can only progress at the cost of many failures and many casualties. The sufferers, whatever the nature of their suffering, are the reflection of this austere but noble condition.

They are not useless and diminished elements. They are merely those who pay the price of universal progress and triumph…

It is exactly those who bear in their enfeebled bodies the weight of the moving world who find themselves, by the just dispensation of providence, the most active factors in that very progress which seems to sacrifice and shatter them.” (Le Traite d’union)

“When you give a lunch or dinner, do not ask your friends, brothers, relations or rich neighbors,” Jesus tell us. “No, when you have a party, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind.”

That’s divine insight! In the sickness and fadedness, in the smell of need, age, wound and uncleanliness, can be grasped the scent of the unseen roses!

The Paradox Of Priesthood

August 29, 1983

Recently I celebrated the 10^th anniversary of my ordination. Ten years as a priest! A time for some reflection! I can say it out loud: They’ve been good years, full enough of giving and receiving. I have enjoyed the ministry and have been able to help some even as I have been helped by others. There have been too some incredibly special moments, depth moments clearly touched with transcendence, and I have also tasted sufficient agony. I’ve no regrets. My initial fears upon entering the seminary had centered around loneliness and boredom. Those two issues have been non-issues. The specters of pressure, over-intensity and burnout cast a much more threatening shadow. But I’ve survived, and survived with enough enthusiasm to hoist a few beers to celebrate the event and to look forward to the future. As I look ahead, I would like to offer a reflection to the Catholic community vis-à-vis its priests. Put quite simply it is this: Stop pressuring your priests to be less than fully human. Let me explain:

Roman Catholics still understand a priest too much in terms of his cultic role. There is undue significance given to the cultic powers a priest has to preside at Eucharist and other sacraments. Partly because of this the priest is too easily cast in the role of the tribal medicine man, the guy who can do magic and who has a ritual (‘hocus-pocus”) power which we do not understand and somehow fear. Like the medicine man he is respected and revered because he is, ultimately, feared. He is never genuinely loved, nor understood, because he is never perceived and accepted as being fully like us. Too frequently, with all but our very closest friends, we are made to feel out-of-the-ordinary, medicine men! More serious still is the Catholic community’s understanding of the priest as a relational sexual being. Bottom line, a priest is expected to act as if he were not a sexed male being full of erotic impulse and sexual complexity. Please do not misunderstand me here: What I am pleading for is not that the Catholic community invites or condones erotic weakness and irresponsibility in its priests. Nor should it invite its priest to be “simply one of the boys.” The issue is one of accepting a priest’s full humanity, including his sexuality and the necessary complexity that follows from this. The priest need not be handed a license to be irresponsible, but he desperately needs to be handed the feeling that he is understood and accepted fully as he is, including his complexities and sexuality.

Unfortunately that is rarely afforded to us and, consequently, we must pretend….pretend that we are eunuchs. No eunuch can preach effectively to the full-blooded. That is why we are politely listened to even as it is taken for granted that we have nothing vital to say. In this area, a priest often finds himself in a no-win situation. If he seemingly understands life too clearly, including its earthier aspects of sex, eros and sin, then he draws the wrath and suspicion of the Catholic community (witness Andrew Greeley). Conversely, if he radiates the innocence and naiveté that the community demands, he is relegated to the realm of the insignificant; still allowed to do his hocus-pocus, but no full-blooded person turns to him for a genuine understanding or guidance. It is an interesting speculation as to why the Catholic community wants its priests to radiate naiveté and non-complexity. I suspect that is because, deep down, we are all afraid of our own darker side, our complexity (our shadow, in the Jungian sense). We deny this darker side in us and, somehow, if father goes through life pretending that no shadow exists, we can also more easily pretend it does not exist in us.

Finally, we tend to leave no room for our priests to be weak. I am not speaking here of weak in the moral sense, but weak in the way Jesus was weak and in the way any truly compassionate person is: vulnerable, not always together, emotionally wounded, over-extended and prone to cry very needy tears at times. We demand instead someone who projects that all is well at all times and who bleeds only ichor. If a priest shows emotional weakness, shows his own needs, or gets too involved in the lives and loves of those he is friends with and ministers to, he is suspect. And so my plea is this: Please don’t, consciously or unconsciously, ask your priest to dress in medieval clothes, to stay in the sanctuary, and to be so timorous so as to be unable to dare the perilous task of living. Let him be himself…complex, weak, sexed, masculine, involved, needy, and free not to pretend. Priests are tired of dressing in the clothing (psychological and physical) of senility while everyone is crying to be young; tired of living as eunuchs with no blood, sinew and passion. Small wonder nobody wants to join us!

We need, priests and community together, to risk some new directions. There are dangers involved, but, as Goethe once put it: “The dangers of life are infinite and safety is among them.”

Theologian Hard To Recognize

August 15, 1983

Recently I helped plan and direct a seminar by Edward Schillebeeckx. I have rubbed shoulders with some famous persons before but I was a bit more nervous this time. An aspiring teacher in theology, I was like a hungry kid from a small town stepping on the hockey rink and meeting Wayne Gretsky in the flesh. I was all eyes and ears, looking at the “great one.” A lot of folks look in awe at Edward Schillebeeckx. Famous and infamous, he is loved by some, hated by others and known by all.

His book, Christ, the Sacrament of the Encounter with God, has sold over a million copies (a remarkable achievement for any book, but incredible for a specialized book on Roman Catholic sacramentology) More recently he published a book on ministry and three books on Christology and has been called to Rome a couple of times to answer accusations of heterodoxy at the holy office. The media, always anxious for something with an edge, has jumped on his case both positively and negatively. Certain elements paint him as a radical antihero, the misunderstood and persecuted Christ-figure, the badly needed catalyst to challenge a growing conservatism in the church. Opposing elements paint him as the “enfant terrible,” the John-McEnroe-super-brat of the church, the heretic after his own glory, ruthlessly driving his talent and scholarship without concern for where the pieces might fall.

Being so surrounded with these myths, it was obviously with some awe, trepidation and curiosity that I set out to pick him up at the train station. What would the real Schillebeeckx be like? Saint or heretic? Spoiled child or persecuted hero? A strange thing happened: I didn’t recognize him. I thought I knew what he looked like. I had seen scores of photographs of him, seen him on TV and even met him once (for a brief minute or two) at a conference. But when I approached a man that fitted my mental description of him and timidly asked: “Are you Father Edward Schillebeeckx?” a very surprised man answered in the non-affirmative. As things would have it that was not an inappropriate omen. He lectured on Christology and answered our questions. I sat there listening, looking, measuring: The male in me was sizing up the body, the build, the dress, the grooming. The teacher and theologian in me was assessing his message and pedagogy; the Roman Catholic in me was judging his orthodoxy; the priest in me was scrutinizing with all kinds of questions about prayer and commitment.

And perhaps not least, the Saskatchewan farm-boy in me was watching theology’s superstar. It was immature and unfair, but I couldn’t stop myself! The information flowed: Yes, Jesus did rise! Yes, he was the Son of God! Yes, he did pre-exist! We breathed a sigh of relief. Then regarding himself: Yes, he did go to Rome on heresy charges and, no, it was not a cherished experience! But, yes, he did consider himself a loyal son of the church. Yes, he was clear of the charges. Yes, there were still tensions, but no, he had nothing personal against John Paul II. Yes, there was room for both of them in the same church, but, no, that doesn’t mean they would always agree. It went on with lots of yeses and nos, basically all at the right places. Things were clearing out but they weren’t clear. Sometimes our hearts burned within us as we listened to him. Finally we abandoned the classroom for wine and cheese and scotch. We were looking at a man, flesh, blood, full of both fear and strength, like all of us, struggling (perhaps with more overt talent) to find the key that leads out of exile. In the drinking of the scotch we recognized him as neither a spoiled child nor a prosecuted hero, but as a man, a priest, a committed Christian, a son and brother in a family, a hard worker, a searcher. I suspect that a goodly number of folks would not recognize Edward Schillebeeckx. Many of us, I suspect, think we know what he looks like, but if we approached someone who fitted that mental description and asked: “Are you Edward Schillebeeckx?” we would in all likelihood, to our surprise, find that we were talking to someone who doesn’t even know Edward Schillebeeckx.

The Death Of A Soldier

August 1, 1983

One of the most precious of all experiences is being with a person when he or she is dying. Paradoxically, death clarifies so many things about life and the dying often generate community in ways that the living cannot. Today a group of us were with a young American soldier as he died. That group was a curious mixture of persons: A commanding officer with no church affiliation, an agnostic American doctor, two German doctors (of whose backgrounds I know nothing), a young American couple and myself, a Catholic priest. We were all there, for different reasons, to watch Sgt. Mark die.

Mark had been fatally injured in an accident two days previous and his life was being sustained by life support machines. The German doctors had now decided to unhook those machines since there was no longer any brain function and, according to German law, a person is then legally dead and a hospital need no longer use extraordinary means to sustain that life. His parents had been telephoned and had reluctantly consented to have the machines removed. They requested three things: that a Catholic priest be present, that an American doctor verify that Mark’s condition was truly hopeless and that Mark’s closest friend, a fellow GI in Germany, be present. The commanding officer gathered us and we met in his car on route to the hospital. It was awkward and strained. We were meeting each other for the first time, the situation itself was sufficiently tense, and we were very different kinds of persons.

The commanding officer was used to commanding and his attitudes and clothing showed it. The doctor was all business, talking of tests and legalities. Mark’s friends, Danny and his wife Patty, were in sharp contrast to the officer and the doctor. They were simple folk, casually dressed, religious and pious, down-to earth and very scared, praying and crying. However, they would soon enough show a courage which would help us all. I was the unknown priest, summoned for the occasion, not used to commanding officers or watching life support systems being turned off; also scared and praying. We arrived at the hospital where Mark lay; a boy of 22, in a foreign country, without his family, soon to die. The American doctor grimly checked the tests and retained that grimness as he nodded to the German doctors and to us. The German doctors approached me: “Jetzt – Should we do it now?”

I looked at Danny and Patty and we asked for some time to pray. The three doctors and the officer stood back. I clutched the book of rites and led prayers for the dying. Danny clutched Patty with one hand and Mark’s near lifeless hand with his other and we prayed like we’ve seldom prayed before: the prayers for the dying, the Lord’s Prayer, some Hail Marys. When we’d finished, Danny, a tall man (six feet five inches – most of it honest heart) put his head on Mark’s chest. He began to cry. I nodded to the German doctors; all business in their medical uniforms. Four or five turns of a valve and the machines stopped. It was as simple as turning off a heating radiator. When it was over, Danny’s tears stopped. Releasing Mark’s hand, he stood tall and pounded Mark’s chest: “Sgt. Mark, congratulations! You are the first of all of us to make it home! Goodbye!” He spoke the words loudly, with strength. Afterwards we walked from the room. Outside, through a glass paneling, we saw the German doctors slowly removing the machines and tubes. Danny, Patty and myself stopped for a last few Hail Marys. Then we hugged each other, dried tears and walked to the waiting room where we sat to compose ourselves and to wait for the officer and the American doctor to finish signing forms. There was a different atmosphere on route homewards. The commanding officer was less commanding, his tie was loosened considerably and so was his heart. The doctor now talked no more of tests and legalities, for we all talked of meaning and purpose in life. Danny and Patty no longer looked out of place in their denims and blue jeans. They clutched each other’s hands and the rest of us regretted only that for the sake of pride and proper appearance we were prevented from joining hands as well.

I was no longer awkward nor scared, and it felt oh so good to be a priest! There we sat, strangers, though not quite anymore, all so different, but now bound warmly because of what we had shared. Yes we sat now, seeing life and each other with a clarity and charity so seldom given. We had prayed for Mark and those prayers, I am sure, had helped him. But they had also helped us. It was a rare grace.

Congratulation, Sgt. Mark!

Weakness Leads To Strength

July 18, 1983

Two years ago I was given a very mixed blessing: I got sick. Oh, I had been sick before: the usual acceptable sorts of things, appendicitis, a couple of ripped-up knees from sports, colds and viruses. This time it was different. The physical cause was not so evident. I had ulcers! I lost some weight, some friends, and a lot of self-confidence. Ulcers, or so it is believed, are caused by psychosomatic factors. Translated, that means that super-normal folks should not have them. You get them and your friends start wondering about you and you start wondering about yourself. You examine your lifestyle, your work, your emotions, your relationships.

You look at a whole lot of things differently and sense that others are looking at you differently: Is he really sick? Is he a hypochondriac? Does he want to be sick? He was always so intense I knew that this would happen! He is unhappy in his state in life! He is simply looking for attention and sympathy! There is something he cannot face! You pick up the reactions and soon you begin to ask yourself the same things. It all gets frightening because you do not know the answers and, deep down, you sense that any or all of those things could be true. We are pretty complex critters! The physical illness is not all that serious, but you get pretty serious. Well, not at first. First you do the normal things. You see doctors, hopeful always that some medicine or treatment will very quickly restore you to normal health.

Then as time drags, and you do not get better, and friends no longer seem concerned (or are perhaps even suspicious) you get angry and impatient: with doctors, with medicines, with friends, with yourself. Then, when that doesn’t help, your strength begins to break and for the first time you are actually sick. Initially the symptoms are all bad: self-pity, anger at friends, impatience with everything. Your old confidence and strength is gone. At this stage you are genuinely ill, though the physical illness has been mostly lost in the new emotional lesions. But things slowly change, Ulcers heal, the scars disappear; first the physical ones, and, later, much more slowly, the emotional ones. You feel strength again and old friends and old circles begin to open up again.

Health returns but it is different. Some of the old self-confidence is gone, replaced by a new sense of vulnerability and relativity that is immensely freeing. You realize more clearly what is gift and what is earned. You know that you, on your own, cannot guarantee your own health, nor your attractiveness and desirability in love and friendship. Stripped naked, weakened, and greatly humbled, you stop fighting, first because you are defeated, but later, when strength and resources return, because you realize that there is no reason to fight. Life, health, love it’s all pure gift! You take less for granted and your old need to perform, to achieve, to dominate, to possess and impress, to win by effort what can only be received as gift, has been dealt a blow. It is painful, but freeing: painful because you realize that there is so little you can do; freeing because you realize that there is so little you have to do.

You begin to beg for conversion (even as you sense how difficult it is) because you would want to transvaluate all your values and prioritize your whole self and life anew. Even so, you know you are still a long ways from home. There is still a lot of turf between you and the promised land. But, like Moses and Abraham, you have been given a “glimpse from afar.” When one is wandering in a wilderness it is helpful to know in what direction the milk and honey lies. You will still spend most of your life wandering, wondering how to enter the promised land. But with an anonymous poet from the past, you realize that God is finally taking you in hand:

I asked for strength that I might achieve;

I was made weak, that I might learn humbly to obey.

I asked for health, that I might do greater things;

I was given infirmity, that I might do better things.

I asked for riches, that I might be happy;

I was given poverty, that I might be free…

I asked for power, that I might have praise from men;

I was given weakness, that I might feel the need for God.

I asked for all things that I might enjoy life;

I was given life, that I might enjoy all things.

I got nothing I asked for, but everything that I had hoped for.

Almost despite myself, my unspoken prayers were answered.

I am among all men the most richly blessed.

Keep passing the open windows!

Zorba and Religion

July 4, 1983

Zorba and Religion 070483

I am not sure how often I have read Nikos Kazantzakis’, Zorba the Greek. It is a haunting book with a strange power to ignite and excite in a mixed way. Most of us know the story. An intense, reflective, morally uptight and very cautious young writer meets Zorba. In him the young writer sees the key to celebration, freedom and joyful living. Zorba is a man who is totally spontaneous. He lives freely, loves freely, and sings and dances spontaneously.

No given to ponderousness and reflectiveness, he is also not given to heaviness of spirit or body. He takes life as a child, trustingly, without remorse and declares that the only truly unforgivable sin against the Holy Spirit is not to abandon in love (in some less acceptable version of that phrase!). The book haunts me because, measured against Zorba, most of us appear as emotional and psychological cripples, uptight, non-celebrating, very inhibited persons. Moreover recent studies have shown there is a direct co-relation between how autonomous a person is in life and how religious he or she is. The more people are autonomous, the less they are religious, and the more religious they are, the more they are unfree and inhibited. It would seem that religion and freedom are incompatible.

Where does that leave us? Abandon the Gospels for Zorba? Can Zorba challenge us to bring a higher synthesis out of Jesus’ message to celebrate, to abandon more, to be less inhibited and simply to take life and love less reflectively? Does Christian morality, if taken seriously, rob life of its richness and freedom? These questions haunt any reflective Christian. However there comes a point when the haunting must stop and some hard exorcism must take place because the philosophy of Zorba contains a fallacy, that of identifying pre-morality with genuine liberation. It confuses the mind of the child for the mind of the truly free person. That is a very subtle demon. Had it substituted anything else for true freedom its error would have been easier to detect. As it is, the book tortures a genuinely moral mind. Why?

Because it would have us believe that it is easy to celebrate and love and take life. It would have us believe that society’s rules, personal inhibitions and agreed upon standards are not important. In short, it would have us believe that we can live free as the birds, soaring, unencumbered by demands and expectations of others. Unfortunately, anyone who is even remotely moral experiences that this is not so easy, and is quite impossible in fact because as we try to share our lives in love and celebration without exploiting and raping each other, we run into an emotional, psychological, moral, sexual, and spiritual complexity that makes the studies of a brain surgeon look like elementary arithmetic. Only two types of persons do not know or respect this: the amoral-immoral (who ignore or flaunt the moral structure) and the pre-moral, the children, who are insufficiently developed to recognize morality.

When a child’s spontaneity and unchecked zest for life pushes her into uninhibited enjoyment, irrespective of the consequences, there are no elements of rape of others (because she is just a child) and we see the selfishness as being cute. What Kazantzakis proposes to us in Zorba the Greek is precisely that – the pre-moral actions of a child: cute, uninhibited, free, happy, but totally irresponsible in an adult. What masquerades as autonomy and celebration is the premoral spontaneity of a child. There is an immense difference between the spontaneous naive freedom of a child, acting happily, unaware of the consequences of its actions, and the true freedom of a moral adult. The latter must be sensitive to a moral and aesthetic structure which, because it respects everyone, induces constant hesitations, agonies, inhibitions, and frustrations in all those trying to love and celebrate. The kingdom of God can only come about when all of us can sit down at the same table and share food and wine, love, hearts, bodies, sexuality and spirit with each other. That coming together is not easy, as the cumulative frustration of mankind (not to mention our own personal frustrations) more than adequately attests to. It requires some elements of Zorba: spontaneity, abandonment, and a child-likeness which permits a simple enjoyment and is not paralyzed by an unhealthy frigidity and neurotic over-reflection. However it also requires a very “unchildish” discipline, respect for all others, chastity, patience and waiting.

Guilt Thwarts Celebration

June 13, 1983

06/13/83

One of the hardest things to do is to celebrate. We want to, we need to, but we don’t know how to! Celebration does not come naturally to us. What do most of us do when we celebrate? We overdo: we take a lot of things we ordinarily do, drinking, eating, loving, talking, singing, humoring, and so on, and we simply take them to excess. We eat too much, drink too much, sing too loudly, tell one joke too many, simulate love too much, hoping that somehow in the excess we will touch celebration (whatever that means).

We try to attain ecstasy by pushing ourselves beyond our normal senses. But, for all our frenzied attempts, there is precious little genuine enjoyment. Occasionally we do succeed and we genuinely celebrate: we join others, feel ourselves being widened, made larger, in community, in playfulness, in love. But that happens seldom, and never in frenzy. Mostly the party is followed by a hangover, either physical, emotional, or psychological. The reasons for this are complex, deep, and too often hidden from us. I would like to try to flush out one of them.

The main reason why we find it so difficult to truly celebrate is that we lack the capacity to genuinely enjoy, to simply take life, pleasure, love and enjoyment as a gift from God, pure and simple. Perhaps I shouldn’t say we lack this capacity because we have it as a God-given gift in us. More correctly, our capacity to enjoy is too often buried under a mound of what psychologists would call collective neurotic guilt. That is a heavy term but it means simply that too often we cannot enjoy what is legitimate and given us by God to enjoy because somehow, consciously or unconsciously, we sense that all of our pleasures are “stealing from God.” This feeling wounds most of us. Somehow, in the name of God, we deprive ourselves of the right to enjoy.

Whatever the answer, we are stuck with the situation. We go through life deprived of our capacity to enjoy, alternating between rebellious enjoyment (“pleasure we steal from God”) and discipline and duty (which we do without enough love and enjoyment). We never seem to be able to genuinely celebrate. I say genuinely because, paradoxically, our incapacity to enjoy tends to push us into pseudo-celebration, hedonism and the pursuit of pleasure. Put simply, because we cannot enjoy we pursue enjoyment too much. Too often this leads to a dangerous confusion: we begin to confuse pleasure with enjoyment, excess with ecstasy, and the denial of self-consciousness with the heightened awareness that community brings. All the unfulfilling substitutes in the world won’t fill in what’s missing because we haven’t celebrated.

Why do we have such a need to celebrate? What causes that urge in us? We have a deep need to celebrate because certain moments and events of our lives (e.g., a birthday, a wedding, a graduation, a commitment, an achievement) demand that they be celebrated. They demand that we surround them with rituals which heighten and intensify their meaning and that we link ourselves with others as we live through them.

The same is true of many of our deep erotic, playful, and creative feelings. They demand to be celebrated: shared, heightened, widened, linked to others. We have an insatiable need to celebrate and it is good! Ultimately we have a need for ecstasy (EK STASIS, which means standing outside of ourselves in a heightened self-awareness). We go to celebrate in order to do this: to heighten events and feelings, to share them, expand them, link them to others, to be playful, to intensify and bring to ecstasy. But given our inability to do this simply, given our guilt complexes and our inhibitions, we make pseudo-celebration.

We try to find the expanded awareness in excess, the widened community in sex, and the ecstasy of heightened self-awareness in the frenzied denial of our consciousness. Small wonder we trudge home hung over, a bit more empty and a bit more tired and quite a bit more all alone. The hangover is always a sure sign that, somewhere back down the road, we missed a sign-post. But we must continue to try.

Christ came and declared a wedding feast, a celebration, at the very centre of life. They crucified him not for being too ascetical, but because he told us that we might enjoy. He told us that life will give us more goodness and enjoyment than we can stand, if we can learn to receive it without fear. But we are still in exile, without wedding garments, looking for the key to the room of celebration. Perhaps we need to be just a bit more earnest and sincere when we say the words: your kingdom come!

Emerging From Stone

June 6, 1983

A powerful and haunting piece of sculpture by Michelangelo is entitled: The Awakening Slave. It shows a body struggling to emerge from stone, to pull itself free. Part of the body is already clearly formed, the rest is still inchoate, hidden and imprisoned in stone. Few images capture as much the feeling of what it means to be human! Born as infants, we are helpless, with little self-consciousness, dependent, unable to speak, unable to really know ourselves and others, bound by countless limitations. In the moment of birth we partly emerge from the stone. The rest of our life is a struggle to be born further, to pull ourselves further free. But, very early, we sense that it is hard. We are so limited, in our intelligence, in our energy, in our psyches, in our emotions, in our moral abilities, in our relationships, and in our physical make-up. We push too hard and something breaks! There is only one place where we do not sense our limits, only one place where we can fly, free of stone…in our dreams.

In the kind of dreams that we dream in our ideals (not the kind we dream at night) we can truly dance, fly, love perfectly, be totally beyond our own and others’ limits. There are no limitations of energy, love, relationships or emotion in our dreams. There we can pull ourselves completely free from the stone and, then, turn around and look at our actual imprisonment. Unfortunately too many of us no longer dream. Dreaming is out of fashion. Realism, cynicism and despair are in vogue. To dream today is to be laughed at, ridiculed, to be regarded as naïve, childish and, ultimately, as pitiable. We see this, for example, in the common reaction to anything that is idealistic, romantic, virginal or contains the type of things we used to write poetry about. Nobody seems to be challenged be these things anymore to dream dreams, to push themselves into deeper and more special realms. Mostly these things are met with cynicism and disbelief, coupled with the urge to debunk and with the pitying condescension that we save for the especially naive. Kid’s stuff!

I am saddened by this critique. I have seen hopelessness, the lack of dreams, in 80-year-olds, in bad health, shunted off, unwanted, to die in auxiliary homes because nobody wants them any longer. It is justifiably hard for them to dream! But when I see, basically, the same hopelessness in gifted, beautiful, richly endowed young people with every practical reason in the world to be dreaming great dreams, I can only be saddened. Despair…and so young. Why? We’ve stopped dreaming. We have gotten sucked in by an un-virginal cynicism of an age that confuses despair with realism. We have stopped struggling and, bottom line; we have despaired that we can ever have a profound relationship, a real romance, genuine community, aesthetic love or full sexuality. Velief in them is like belief in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. That’s for kids! We have settled for what we can have, second best, and are cynical about any more idealistic realities. Those of us who are married are no longer trying to attain the optimum with our partner. We have settled for some less-demanding second best, or are looking elsewhere. Those of us who are celibate are no longer trying, with all the incredible tension this involves, to love genuinely, yet celibately. Our cynicism has declared that the ideal is impossible and so we become either a sterile old bachelor or maid, or we live a double standard.

All cynicism is despair, pure and simple. All refusal to dream dreams of something beyond is a giving up, a resignation to mediocrity, a self-imposed condemnation to remain partly unborn, in prison. Despair is simply the defeat of our dreams of greatness. Few things mire us as deeply in the stone as does our refusal to believe in the ideal. “There is only one real sin,” Doris Lessing once remarked, “and that is calling second best by anything other than what it really is, second best!” Moreover it is important that we do not just dream alone. Dreams need to be shared. What we dream alone remains a dream, what we dream with others becomes a reality! Pain and imprisonment result because people have no one to dream with. No person can cut themselves free of the stone by themselves. We achieve nothing truly in isolation. We need to dream and to share those dreams: Build dream castles in our minds, ideal loves and communities in our hearts. We cannot get fully out of the stone in fact, but we can in desire, in our dreams. They are the chisel which we can use to slowly cut away the stone and enable ourselves to emerge to further birth. Everything can be overcome if we dream. Through dreams we see the end of our exile.

Does all this sound like the ravings of an unrealistic dreamer? The naive daydreams and the wishful thinking of a young man out of touch with reality? The rantings of someone with delusions of grandeur? Perhaps! They are the dreams of a young man, a very idealistic one in fact. And, yes, he has delusions of grandeur! But they aren’t my dreams. You can read about them in the 17^th chapter of John’s Gospel.

Keeping One’s Perspective

May 25, 1983

I live and work with a lot of talented persons. The University of Louvain is one of the oldest and most renowned universities in the world. It has a unique international dimension and attracts talented persons from many parts of the world. You can easily lose perspective here. As soon as you stop being careful, scholarship quickly becomes a god, a false idol, invested with an undue significance which gives students and faculty alike the false notion that little else is important. By most standards, too, it is good scholarship, solid, largely immune from fads, and important in its own right. It is easy to get the feeling that you are close to what is important: Many of the professors are known worldwide, most have published many books, and conversations around classrooms, the library, and the faculty circles run the range from which publishing house you will send your next book to, to what transpired in your last conversation with Rahner, Schillebeeckx, Kung, or Boismard. Getting caught up in a false importance is an occupational hazard here.

Fortunately, the place is not without its humanity and its sanctity as well. Some do keep perspective. One who was exceptional in this regard was Karel Blockx, a man little known beyond the boundaries of Louvain. He taught church history and was a man so gentle that the hard-sounding consonants in the sound of his name belied the gentleness of the man who bore it. A brilliant doctor with the simplicity of a child, he loved his students with a warmth too seldom found in professional circles. All of us looked forward to his little tours around campus and the library. From desk to desk, office to office, he would make his visits, stopping to ask you about your work, asking if he could be of help, or just giving you a friendly pat on the shoulder and a word of encouragement. He moved slow, his health was bad. But his touch, gesture, and sound were always sincere. You knew he meant it. When he touched you, you were touched. He was not as famous as most of the others. Unlike them, he did not write a lot of books, nor give a lot of talks internationally. Even his area of specialty, church history, had a certain unglamor about it. So we were all happy for him when, several months ago, he entered the library very excited. In his hands was a manuscript, about to be published. He showed it with pride, excited as a child.

No matter that it would not be a bestseller! No matter that it would never make him as famous as his better-known colleagues! No matter that it had a title as abstract and unglamorous as “A Bibliographical Introduction to Church History.’ It was his, the product of years of hard and honest work, and it was a solid, if unexciting, book. It would make a contribution, however humble, and it was going to be published! Not long afterwards, he got up one morning, said his prayers as always, put on his teaching clothes, carefully packed his notes in his briefcase, and set out for class. He never made it. A massive heart attack felled him just as he got to the door of his classroom. Hi died with his boots on. Appropriately enough it was a Friday. Like his master who also died young, he left us at high noon on a Friday. His gentleness and warmth had already been a legend during his life. Now, as its reality slipped from us, it grew into a myth and we began to recognize and appreciate it, that which we had formerly so taken-for-granted, for the rare gift and the greatness which it was.We all got on chartered buses and descended on a sleepy Belgian village for his funeral. There was no irony in the location. The village was as warm and humble as the son it had produced.

People of all kinds, students and professors, farmers and housewives, university presidents and janitors, packed a little church. We came from all over: Belgium, Germany, Holland, England, Ireland, United States, Canada, Kenya, Nigeria, Mexico, Hong Kong, and other countries; an incredible assortment of persons, brought together, filled with a common emotion, intensely bonded for this once by one common fact: We all loved Karel. We said goodbye to a man and had a rare experience of church. We celebrated Christ’s word and his Eucharist in a simple manner. The simplicity was appropriate, considering the man we were burying. he homily, delivered by one of his colleagues, concluded with a quote from a homily which Karel had given to a group of sisters for whom he had celebrated the Eucharist daily. On this day we understood its meaning more clearly: “Some people are old or weak or in bad health; but it is quite possible that just these people mean much more in the great reality of life and in God’s eyes than do the so-called hardworkers.” The hardworkers got back on our chartered buses, in a hurry as always, to get back to our important work which, not inexplicably, did not seem so important anymore.

Author Tells Merton’s Story

May 9, 1983

In 1948 a young and very idealistic Trappist monk wrote the story of his own conversion. The story was classic: a young man, bursting with life and dreams, searches, desperately and intensely. He runs the gamut – booze, sex, jazz, art, writing, higher learning, travel, anything that can potentially offer respite to a painfully restless heart! He comes home empty, the thirst worse. He turns to God. The prodigal son comes home. In this case, to become a Trappist monk at the Cisterian Abbey at Gethsemani, Kentucky. Most of us read The Seven Storey Mountain. We met Thomas Merton there. But that was 1948. Merton changed, much else changed, in the 20 years until his death in 1968.

Most of us stopped reading Merton, except perhaps for a few of his more directly devotional treatises. We wondered what was happening to him. What we heard, mostly second-hand, left us uneasy. We heard he was struggling with his community, at odds with his abbot, was leaving or had left the Trappists, had neurotic problems, and was more interested in Eastern mysticism than in Christianity. The Trappists’ prize child, it seemed, had become their enfant terrible. Monica Furlong, in a recent biography of Merton (Merton: A Biography, Harper and Row, 1980), gives us a good look at the complex phenomenon which was Thomas Merton. It is a book I heartily recommend. It contains something for everyone. I say this despite the fact that the book has been severely criticized (and justly, so, I submit). For instance, John Eudes Bamberger, abbot of Genessee Abbey, Piffard, N.Y., who lived with Merton for nearly 20 years, contends that Furlong stylizes the facts to make them fit her own thesis, namely, that the Trappists stifled Merton and that he would have blossomed far more, both as writer and artist, outside of their monastic community. In the end, Furlong is out of sympathy with the monastic endeavor. She slants some of the facts accordingly.

Be that as it may, the book is a great one nonetheless. Furlong gives us a deep insight into Merton’s unconverted, prodigal years. She chronicles his struggles – his early rootlessness, the effect of his mother’s death, and his unsatisfying pilgrimage through sex, alcohol, and art – in a way which is far more honest (and thus ultimately more inspirational for us) than is Merton’s own autobiography which only hints in a generic way at his dark past. As such the book offers much to any heart whose restlessness has taken it down roads far from the Father’s house. Furlong’s description of Merton’s early struggles is good, honest, and interesting. It is, indeed, a description of Merton’s dark night of the senses. More interesting, however, is her outline of Merton’s post-Seven Storey Mountain struggles. The real mountain, for him, remained still to be climbed! The prodigal son who had found his way home had now to contend with the far less glamorous and more difficult task of remaining there – and finding there ways to express his energy and love. In the second half of the book, Furlong gives us an insight into the real grist from which Merton’s ultimate sanctity springs, his dark night of the spirit.

His struggle, as is evident, is not ultimately with his abbot, nor with his community, but is the struggle of the rich young man trying to enter the kingdom through the eye of a needle. And it is a love story, a true love story. Like all true love stories: In the beginning there is passion, in the middle there is much pain and doubt, in the end there is peace. Merton was a man gifted and rich in mind and heart. Talented and restless. After some prodigal years he turns up at his Father’s house – but he meets there not the glorified Christ of the resurrection but the Christ who is incarnated in flawed human flesh, in a concrete community. The love story follows, unglamorous but real: commitment, superiors, tasteless tasks, deadlines, community pettiness, narrowness, all interwoven with freedom, giving, dreams, and greatness. His heart pulls him on one way, his talent pulls him in another, his community pulls him in ways he would rather not go, and his God pulls him always. There is some giving and some taking, some good times and bad, some ulcers, some suspected neurosis, much frustration, occasional bitterness. He suffers, his community suffers; both grow. In the end there is peace, deep peace…with God, with his community, with the world community, and within himself. He made it! He sorted through the riddle. He found his way home from exile.

We can be helped by reading his story.