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.

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.

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.

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!

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!