RonRolheiser,OMI

Making a Recessive Journey

August 8, 2022

In a particularly poignant passage in her poem, The Leaf and the Cloud, Mary Oliver pictures herself standing at the gravesite of her mother and father, reflecting on their lives. They were far from perfect and she doesn’t sugarcoat their faults. She openly names her mother’s heaviness of soul and her father’s immature faith. She knows that many of her own struggles have roots there. However, she isn’t visiting their graves to lay blame on them. She’s there to kiss them an honest goodbye, at peace finally with both their less-than-perfect lives and their influence on her. She thanks them for everything, the good and the bad, wishes them well in the deep earth, and then says, “But I will not give them the kiss of complicity. I will not give them the responsibility for my life.”

All of us might do well to make this kind of recessive journey in terms of revisiting our early religious training. An interesting gravesite. Unfortunately, many of us don’t ever tarry there long enough to truly sort out what blessed us and what wounded us when some very fallible human agents introduced God to us. Today it is common (almost fashionable) for people to look back only negatively on their early religious training. Indeed many speak of being “in recovery” from it and often blame every kind of unhappiness and neurosis in their lives on their early religious training.

No doubt, some of this is valid, early religious training does leave a permanent mark on us. However, we owe it to ourselves, our parents, our early teachers, and to honesty to sort out the positives and negatives of our early religious background and, like Mary Oliver, make peace with it, even if we cannot give it the kiss of complicity.

What’s my own story? For me, awakening to consciousness and awakening to God and church were inextricably linked. The Roman Catholicism of the time was the air I breathed as a child and this was Roman Catholicism prior to Vatican II, a Catholicism replete with both positives and negatives. The spirituality of my childhood was one of absolute truths, of non-negotiable rules, of strong demands, of tribalism, and of narrow inclusivity. We, and we alone were the one true faith. Moreover, all of this was underwritten by a God who kept a scrupulous watch on your every action, didn’t easily give you permission to make a mistake, held the sixth commandment above all others, used shame as a weapon, and was frowning a lot of the time.

But, that was far from all of it. There was a whole other side. The family, community, and church that christened me had communal bonds that most communities today can only envy. You truly were part of a body, a family, and a community that incarnated a sense of transcendence that made faith something natural, and community part of your very identity. You knew you were a child of God and you knew too that you were a moral creature with real responsibilities to others and to God. You knew your eternal significance, your essential dignity, and the moral responsibility that came with that and you couldn’t exempt yourself from it.

What all of this did was ground you existentially in a very fundamental, non-negotiable human, moral, and religious truth, namely, that your life was not simply your own to do with whatever you wished. You knew in a way that you could not ignore, except by way of infidelity, that you were constitutively social, interdependent, ecclesial, and that God put you on this earth not just to make a good life for yourself. You had a vocation, a certain duty to serve, and God, family, community, and church could ask you to give your life over. Today, I see this particular brand on my soul as one of the most precious of all gifts that I received from the spirituality of my childhood. Whatever demons came along with that were worth it.

Besides demons can be cast out and most of those buried inside the catechesis of my childhood have slowly been exorcised through the years. What did it? Lots of things: years of studying and teaching theology, reading good literature, having good spiritual directors, seeing a robust and joyous health in women and men of faith, persevering in my own dogged (and far-from-perfect) attempt to be faithful to prayer, the Eucharist, and church community through seven decades, and, not least, the grace of God.

Today I look back on my early religious training in a way wherein the negatives are eclipsed by the positives. I am thankful for it all, even its initial rigidity, timidity, tribalism, fearfulness, and false fears of God, because something inside all of that grounded me and taught me what is ultimately important. Indeed, rigidity, timidity, tribalism, and excess caution aren’t a bad place to start from because after they loosen their grip, you are free for the rest of your life.  No small gift!

Disarmed and Dangerous

August 1, 2022

After his first arrest, the peace activist Daniel Berrigan went into hiding. After four months, he was captured, but during those months underground, although a threat to no one, he was put on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list. There’s an irony here that did not go unnoticed. Someone put up a poster of him with this caption: Wanted – Notorious consecrator of bread and wine. Disturber of wars and felonious paper burner! The fugitive has been known to carry the New Testament and should be approached with extreme caution. Disarmed and dangerous.

Disarmed and dangerous! Corny as that may sound, it expresses the real threat to injustice, violence, and war. Disarmament is dangerous. Someone who is genuinely unarmed is ultimately the one who poses the greatest danger to disorder, immorality, and violence. Violence can withstand violence, but it can be brought down by non-violence.Here are some examples.

In our own generation, we have the example of Christian de Cherge, one of the seven Cistercian monks who were kidnapped and later killed by Islamist extremists in Algeria in 1996. His journey, and that of the other monks who died with him, is chronicled in a number of books (including some of his own letters and diaries) and in the awarding-winning film, Of Gods and Men. Living within a small community of nine monks in a remote Muslim village in Northern Algeria, Christian and his community were much loved by that Muslim community and, being French citizens and enjoying the protection of that citizenship, their presence constituted a certain protection for the villagers against Islamic terrorists. Alas, the situation was not to last.

On Christmas Eve, 1995, they received a first visit from the terrorists with the clear warning that they had best leave before they would become its victims. Both the French and the Algerian governments offered them armed protection. Christian, acting alone at first, against the majority voice in his own community, categorically refused armed protection. Instead, his prayer became this: In face of this violence, disarm us, Lord. His response to the threat was complete disarmament. Eventually, his entire community joined him in that stance.

Six months later they were kidnapped and killed, but the triumph was theirs. Their witness of fidelity was the singular most powerful gift they could have given to the poor and vulnerable villagers whom they sought to protect, and their moral witness to the world will nurture generations to come, long after this particular genre of terrorism has had its day. Christian de Cherge and his community were disarmed and dangerous.

There are innumerable similar examples of other persons who were disarmed and dangerous. Rosa Parks, disarmed and seemingly powerless against the racist laws at the time, was one of the pivotal figures in ending racial segregation in the USA, as was Martin Luther King. The list of dangerous unarmed persons is endless: Mahatma Gandhi, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Desmond Tutu, Oscar Romero, Franz Jagerstatter, Dorothy Stang, Daniel Berrigan, Elizabeth McAlister, Michael Rodrigo, Stan Rother, and Jim Wallis, among others. Not least, of course, Jesus.

Jesus was disarmed and so dangerous that the authorities of his time found it necessary to kill him. His complete non-violence constituted the ultimate threat to their established order. Notice how both the civil and religious authorities at the time did not so much fear an armed murderer as they feared an unarmed Jesus … Release for us, Barabbas! We prefer to deal with an armed murderer than with an unarmed man professing non-violence and telling people to turn the other cheek! Give them credit for being astute. Unconsciously, they recognized the real threat, someone who is unarmed, non-violent, and turning the other cheek.

However, turning the other cheek must be properly understood. It is not a passive, submissive thing. The opposite. In giving this counsel, Jesus specifies that it be the right cheek. Why this seemingly odd specification? Because he is referring to a culturally-sanctioned practice at the time where a superior could ritually slap an inferior on the cheek with the intention not so much of inflicting physical pain as to let the other person know his or her place – I am your superior, know your place! The slap was administered with the back of the right hand, facing the other person, and thus would land on the other person’s right cheek. Now, in that posture, its true violence would remain mostly hidden because it would look clean, aesthetic, and as something culturally accepted.

However, if one were to turn the other cheek, the left one, the violence would be exposed. How? First, because now the slap would land awkwardly and look violent; second, the person receiving it would be sending a clear signal. The change in posture would not only expose the violence but it would also be saying, you can still slap me, but not as a superior to an inferior; the old order is over.

Disarmed and dangerous. To carry no weapon except moral integrity is the ultimate threat to all that is not right.

Why is There Something Instead of Nothing?

July 25, 2022

The Belgian theologian Jan Walgrave, who directed my doctoral thesis, was a true intellectual and a rare one. True, in that his thought naturally, instinctually gravitated towards the huge philosophical questions of essence and existence. Why are we here? Who are we really?  Moreover, he was also a rare intellectual in that he was an uncommon mixture of hard intellectual scrutiny and childlike piety. He could be equally disarming both in his intellectual sophistication and in his childlikeness.

In one of our meetings, he asked me this, “Do you ever sit on a park bench and ask yourself, why is there something instead of nothing?” I answered honestly, “In truth, I can’t ever remember doing that very explicitly. Like everyone else, I often wonder where we came from and how there is a God behind all of this, but I have never very explicitly contemplated your question.” “Well,” he replied, “then you are not a philosopher!  He went on, “I think about this question all the time; it is the most important of all questions.” (He consoled me for the fact that I could never be a true philosopher by telling me that I had a “fertile mind”, which he told me is its own gift.)

Why is there something instead of nothing? Surely, that is the ultimate question. How did it all begin? Who or what was there at the beginning and started it all?  Moreover, where did this who or what come from, who gave it a beginning?

Contemporary science cannot answer that question. It can tell us what happened at the origins of our universe, the Big Bang, but that doesn’t get us any nearer answering the bigger question, namely, who or what gave origin to that initial explosion nearly fifteen million years ago that lies at the origins of our universe and gave birth to billions of galaxies? How was this force itself in existence?

As people of faith, we believe it was God and believe that God had no beginning. However, that can neither be conceptualized nor imagined. What gave birth to God? No matter whether we believe in God or not, we are all still left with the question, Walgrave’s question, “why is there something instead of nothing?” Moreover, that question is complicated further by the fact that creation, at least vast segments of it, have a clear intelligent design. Given that fact, the most credible postulate vis-à-vis who or what lies at the origins of everything, demands that this something or someone (from which everything takes its origins) is not some blind, brute force but one that is highly intelligent and personal.

Thomas Aquinas, who did have a true philosophical mind, once proposed a number of logical arguments to try to “prove” that God exists. Among his arguments, we find this one: Imagine walking down a road and finding stone on the ground and asking yourself, ‘who put that stone there?’ You could simply conclude that it has always been there and think no further about it. However, imagine walking down a road and finding a clock that is still keeping time, and asking yourself, ‘who put that clock there?’ In this case, you could not simply say it has always been there and leave it at that. Why? Because the clock has a clear intelligent design that demands that some intelligence designed it. As well, it is still keeping time, which means that it could not always have been there. Someone put it there, and at some clear point in time. Thus, Aquinas concluded that since many things in the universe have an intelligent design, there must be an intelligent designer at its origins.

Today most people might consider that logic a bit naïve, but perhaps the naiveté is on their part. Someone no less than Albert Einstein affirmed this: The harmony of natural law reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is utterly insignificant reflection.

He is right, and the harmony he speaks of is not just the unfathomable ecological harmony that the various elements of the physical world appear to have with each other and how nature continues to regenerate itself despite everything we do to destroy its ecology. Further still, that harmony of natural law (as Einstein calls it) also includes an undeniable oneness between the laws of nature and the moral order. The law of karma and the law of nature are one and same thing, all of one piece, as is the law of gravity and the Holy Spirit. The physical and the moral are part of a single symphony. The air we breathe out into the universe is the air we are going to inhale – physically and morally. Rarely do I sit on a park bench and ask myself, “why is there something instead of nothing?” But then as Jan Walgrave said, I’m not a philosopher. My hope is that this little excursion into philosophy isn’t proof of that!

The Temptations of the Good Person

July 18, 2022

Many of us are familiar with an often-quoted line from T.S. Eliot; The last temptation is the greatest treason; to do the right deed for the wrong reason. This, he suggests, is the temptation of the good person. What’s the temptation?

In John’s Gospel, Jesus asks his listeners this question, “How can you believe who receive glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from God?” What’s Jesus’ challenge here? This: We can do all the right things, be doggedly faithful, resist every kind of compromise, and even accept martyrdom – but why? To be respected? To be admired? To win approval? To win a permanent good name for ourselves?

Aren’t these good, noble enough reasons?

They are. However, as T.S. Eliot suggests in Murder in the Cathedral, a temptation can present itself as a grace, and that can be the case in terms of being virtuous. He illustrates this through the struggles of his main character, Thomas a Beckett.  Beckett was the Archbishop of Canterbury from 1162 until he was murdered in his own Cathedral in 1170. As Eliot presents him, Beckett does all the right things. He is altruistic, radically faithful, resists all compromise, and is ready to accept martyrdom. However, as Eliot highlights, these can be “the temptations of the good person”, and it can take some time (and a deeper maturity) to distinguish certain temptations from grace. Hence, Eliot coined these now-famous lines:

                           Now is my way clear; now is the meaning plain:

                       Temptation shall not come in this kind again.

                      The last temptation is the greatest treason:

                        To do the right deed for the wrong reason. …

                        For those who serve the greater cause

Make the cause serve them.

Those who serve the greater cause can easily make the cause serve them, blind to their own motivation.

Don’t we all know it! Those of us who work in ministry, in teaching, in administration, in the media, in the arts, and those of us who are habitual good Samaritans helping out everywhere, what ultimately drives our energy as we do all this good?

Well, motivation is rarely simply straightforward. We are a complex, often tortured creatures of motivation. Here’s a little parable vis-à-vis motivation from the Sufi tradition that suggests that we don’t have a single motivation but have multiple motivations. The parable runs this way.

There was a holy man, a guru, renowned for his wisdom who lived near the top of a mountain. One day three men showed up at his door, seeking counsel. He questioned the first one: “Did you climb up this mountain to see me because I’m famous or because you truly are interested in gaining some wisdom?” The man answered, “To be truthful, I came to see you because of your fame, though, of course, I’m also interested in receiving some counsel.”  The guru dismissed him, “You aren’t yet ready to learn.” He turned to the second man and asked him the same question, “What’s the real reason you climbed up this mountain to see me?” This man’s answer was different. “It’s not your fame that drew me here,” he said, “I’m not interested in that. I want to learn from you.” Surprisingly, the Guru also dismissed him, telling him that he was not yet ready to learn.

He turned to the third man, “Did you climb this mountain to see me because I’m famous or because you truly seek some counsel?” The man replied, “To be honest, it’s for both reasons, and probably for a good number of other reasons that I am unaware of.  I did want to see you because you are famous and I do really want to learn from you, and I am not even sure that either of them is the real reason I came to see you.” “You’re ready to learn”, said the holy man.

T.S. Eliot presents his main character in Murder in the Cathedral as a man who does all the right things, is recognized for his goodness, but is someone who still has to examine himself as to his real motivation for doing what he does. What Eliot highlights is something which should give all of us who are trying to be good, virtuous, faithful persons, pause for reflection, scrutiny, and prayer. What’s our real motivation? How much is this about helping others and how much is about ourselves, about gaining respect, admiration, a good name – and having a good feeling about ourselves?

This is a hard question and perhaps not even a fair one, but a necessary one which, if asked, can aid us in our quest for a deeper level of maturity. In the end, are we doing good things because of what it does for others or because of what it does for us?

As we stand somewhat naked and exposed before this question, we can take some consolation in the message contained in the Sufi parable. This side of eternity our motivations are pathologically complex and mixed.

Coping with our own Souls

July 11, 2022

We have many photographs of Therese of Lisieux. Her sister Celine loved using a camera and took many photos of Therese, but there’s an interesting thing to note in those photos. The British Carmelite Ruth Burrows once did a study of those photos and commented that in all of them, Therese is always somehow alone, by herself, even when in a group photo.   

Here’s the anomaly. Therese was a warm, friendly person with good social skills, who was loved by many. Yet in almost all the photographs of her, even when she is pictured together with family members whom she loved deeply, there is always a certain loneliness, an aloneness, that’s evident. However, the loneliness she exhibits there is not the aloneness of someone at odds with family and community, but a certain distance of soul, something that might be termed moral loneliness.  What is this? Can our souls be lonely even while we are bathed in friendship, love, and family?

Yes, that’s true for all of us, was true for Therese of Lisieux, and was true for Jesus.

Looking at the Gospel narratives that describe Jesus’ passion and death, we see that what they emphasize in not Jesus’ physical suffering. While those sufferings must have been horrific, the gospels never dwell on them. What they highlight is Jesus’ emotional suffering, his aloneness, his loneliness of soul as he endured his suffering and death. They point out how, in his neediest hour, while alone, abandoned, betrayed, misunderstood, humiliated, and in effect unanimity-minus-one, he was suffering more in soul than in body. 

Luke’s Gospel tells us that his agony took place in a garden. This too is revealing. Jesus had agonies elsewhere, in the temple, in the desert, and in his hometown, but his most searing one took place in a garden. Why a garden? As we know, in archetypal literature, gardens are not for growing vegetables, but for delight. The archetypal garden is the mythical place of delight, where lovers meet, where friends drink wine together, and where Adam and Eve were naked, innocent, and didn’t know it. The Jesus who sweats blood in the garden of Gethsemane is not Jesus the Teacher, Jesus the Magus, Jesus the Healer, or Jesus the Miracle-worker. In the garden, he is Jesus the Lover, the one who delights in love and who suffers in love – and it’s to this garden of suffering, intimacy, and delight to which he calls us.

The gospels emphasize that what Jesus suffered most deeply in his crucifixion was not the pain of being scourged and having nails driven through his hands, but a deep loneliness of soul that dwarfs even the most intense physical pain. Jesus wasn’t a physical athlete, but a moral one, doing battle in the arena with soul.

What’s moral loneliness?

I first encountered this term in the writings of Robert Coles, who used it to describe Simone Weil. What it suggests is that inside each of us there’s a deep place, a virginal center, where all that’s tender, sacred, cherished, and precious is held and guarded. It’s there that we are most genuinely ourselves, most genuinely sincere, most genuinely innocent. It’s where we unconsciously remember that once, long before consciousness, we were caressed by hands far gentler than our own. It’s where we still sense the primordial kiss of God.

In this place, more than any other, we fear harshness, disrespect, being shamed, ridiculed, violated, lied to. In this place we are deeply vulnerable and so we are scrupulously careful as to whom we admit into this space, even as our deepest longing is precisely for someone to share that place with us. More than we yearn for someone to sleep with sexually, we yearn for someone to sleep with there, morally, a soulmate. Our deepest yearning is for moral consummation.

But this isn’t easy to find. Rare is the perfect moral partner, even inside of a good marriage or friendship. And so we perennially face a double temptation: Resolve the tension by settling for certain compensations, tonics, that help us make it through the night or, perhaps worse, because the pain is too much to live with, giving ourselves over to bitterness, anger, and cynicism, thus denigrating the great dream. Either way, we sell ourselves short and settle for second best.

What’s to be learned from Jesus’ struggle with moral loneliness? This: he refused both the road of compensatory tonics and that of soul-hardening cynicism. He stayed the course and carried the tension to term.

Our own moral loneliness can be tyrannical. However, that’s not a license or invitation to begin jettisoning commitments, responsibilities, morals, and whatever else it takes to try to find that elusive soulmate for whom we yearn so deeply. What Jesus (and persons like Therese of Lisieux and Simone Weil) model is how to carry that tension ideally, how to carry our solitude at a high level, and how to resist, no matter the pain, calling second-best by any other name than second-best.

Our Fellow Believers – Friends not Foes

July 4, 2022

Denominational identity in me runs deep. Born, baptized, and raised a Roman Catholic, Roman Catholicism is my second nature, like a brand on my skin. I have no regrets about the congenital grip this has on me, even though now I think of it more as a foundation than as an endpoint in my faith journey.

The Roman Catholicism in which I was raised inserted me into the mystery of Christ – Jesus, the church, the sacraments, the Sermon on the Mount. For this, I couldn’t be more grateful.  It also taught me to be slow in judging anyone. However, it also taught me (with some allowances for Protestants) that basically only Roman Catholics would go to heaven, that the Roman Catholic Eucharist is the only one that yields the full “real presence”, and that Roman Catholicism is the only fully authentic way of being Christian. Moreover, non-Christians (those not baptized) could not go to heaven, except by grave exception. Only later did I learned that a number of other Christian denominations and world religions returned the favor and saw Roman Catholicism as deviant.

Things have changed for me and for many others. I am still unwaveringly a Roman Catholic, but now I am living out my faith and my Roman Catholicism in communion with Anglicans, Episcopalians, Protestants, Evangelicals, Jewish believers, and Muslims, all of whom are now cherished faith companions for me. At this stage of my life, I appreciate very deeply the truth (that Ephesians affirms) that ultimately there is one Lord, one faith, one baptism, and one God who is Father of all, especially as I come more and more to appreciate that all of us who share this one God also share the same heartaches.

Several years ago, I met with a group of Divinity students at Yale University. The students came from a variety of Christian backgrounds and denominations, but shared a common goal; all were training for some kind of ministry, lay or ordained, in their particular denomination. It was an open discussion where they asked me questions. Two questions dominated the discussion. The first was a practical one, “How do you get a job in the church?” The second pertained to our topic. A number of the students asked this question, “Can I belong to more than one denomination at the same time? Can I be an Evangelical and Roman Catholic at the same time? Can I be at one and the same time a Protestant Evangelical Roman Catholic if I value aspects of all three faith traditions?”

I was without hard answers and their questions left me with my own questions which I am encountering daily in the school where I teach. The Oblate School of Theology where I teachhas a PhD program in spirituality that draws students from a variety of Christian denominations. These students are together in the same classes, the same dining halls, and the same social circles for the years they are studying here, all within a Roman Catholic institution. Very quickly, in months rather than years, as they study, pray, socialize, and share with each other their common ideals and struggles, denominational issues basically disappear. Nobody quite cares what denomination anyone else belongs to anymore. Not that they make light of it and that there is some generic melting down of the various denominational identities. That hasn’t been happening. The opposite – in the ten years we have had this program, not a single student has converted to another denomination.

However, their view of other denominations and of their own denomination has changed; in essence, it has been enlarged. There is a universal respect for each other’s denominations, and more than that. As these students focus on spirituality, they find that this can take them to a place where each can be affectively supportive of other denominations, even while more deeply valuing his or her own.

The deep lesson is this: there is a fellowship and an intimacy in faith that we can have with each other, and an affective support we can give each other that lies beyond our denominational differences. By studying together and sharing a common faith (one that lies beyond denominational differences) we are realizing that what is common to us is infinitely greater (and more important) than what separates us. We are also realizing that we all have the same heartaches.

 Moreover, this isn’t just a rarified experience happening in some divinity schools. More and more, this is becoming the common Christian experience.

So why the continued suspicion of each other? Why are we defending more our own denominational specificity than proactively moving towards embracing each other in a common faith, especially since this can be done without threatening our own denominations and separate ecclesiologies?

The invitation here is not to move towards an uncritical syncretism that blinds itself to genuine denominational differences, but rather to begin more and more to embrace all of our brothers and sisters in the faith, and not just our own kind.

Cheap Grace

June 27, 2022

There’s a tension among Christians today between those who would extend God’s mercy everywhere, seemingly without any conditions, and those who are more reticent and discriminating in dispensing it. The tension comes out most clearly in our debates concerning who may receive the sacraments: Who should be allowed to receive the Eucharist? Who should be allowed to marry inside a church? Who should be allowed a Christian burial? When should a priest withhold absolution in confession?

However, this tension is about a lot more than who should be allowed to receive certain sacraments. Ultimately, it’s about how we understand God’s grace and mercy. A clear example of this today is the growing opposition we see in some sectors to the person and approach of Pope Francis. To his critics, Francis is soft and compromising. To them, he is dispensing cheap grace, making God and His mercy as accessible as the nearest water tap. God’s embrace to all. No conditions asked. No prior repentance called for. No demand that there first be a change in the person’s life. Grace for all. No cost.

What’s to be said about this? If we dispense God grace and mercy so indiscriminately doesn’t this strip Christianity of much of its salt and leaven? May we simply embrace and bless everyone without any moral conditions? Isn’t the Gospel meant to confront?

Well, the very phrase cheap grace is an oxymoron. There’s no such a thing as cheap grace.  All grace, by definition, is unmerited just as all grace, by definition, doesn’t ask for certain preconditions to be met in order for it to be offered and received. The very essence of grace is that it is a gift, free, undeserved. And, though by its very nature grace often does evoke a response of love and a change of heart, it does not of itself demand them.

There’s no more powerful example of this than Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son and how it illustrates how grace meets waywardness.  We know the story. The prodigal son abandons and rejects his father, takes his unearned inheritance, goes off to a foreign land (a place away from his father) and squanders the money in the pursuit of pleasure. When he has wasted everything, he decides to return to his father, not because he suddenly has a renewed love for him, but, selfish still, because he is hungry. And, we know what happens. When he is still a long way from his father’s house, his father (no doubt longing for his return) runs out to meet him and, before his son even has an opportunity to apologize, embraces him unconditionally, takes him back into his house and prepares a special celebration for him. Talk about cheap grace!

Notice to whom this parable was spoken. It was addressed to a group of sincere religious persons who were upset precisely because they felt that by embracing and eating with sinners (without first demanding some moral preconditions) Jesus was cheapening grace, making God’s love and mercy too accessible, hence less precious. Notice as well the reaction of many of Jesus’ contemporaries when they saw him dining with sinners. For example, when he dined with Zacchaeus, the tax collector, the Gospels tell us, “All who saw it began to grumble.”  Interesting how that discontent persists.

Why? Why this anxiety? What undergirds our “grumbling”?  Concern for true religion? Not really. The deeper root of this anxiety is not religious but grounded rather in our nature and in our wounds. Our resistance to naked gift, to raw gratuity, to unconditional love, undeserved grace, stems rather from something inside our instinctual DNA that is hardened by our wounds. A combination of nature and wound imprints in us the belief that any gift, not least love and forgiveness, needs to be merited. In this life, no free meal! In religion, no free grace! A conspiracy between our nature and our wounds keeps forever reminding us that we are unlovable, and that love must be merited; it cannot be free because we are unworthy.

Overcoming that inner voice that is perpetually reminding us that we are unlovable is, I believe, the ultimate struggle (psychological and spiritual) in our lives. Moreover, don’t be fooled by protests to the contrary. People who glibly radiate how lovable they are and make protests to that effect are mostly trying to keep that fear at bay.

Saint Paul wrote his Epistle to the Romans as his dying message. He devotes its first seven chapters to simply affirming over and over again that we cannot get our lives right. We are morally incapable. However, his repeated emphasis that we cannot get our lives right is really a set-up for what he really wants to leave with us, namely, we don’t have to get our lives right. We are loved in spite of our sin, and we are given everything freely, gratuitously, irrespective of any merit on our part.

Our uneasiness with unmerited grace is rooted more in a human insecurity than in any genuine religious concern.

Suicide and Our Misunderstandings

June 20, 2022

Margaret Atwood once wrote that sometimes a thing needs to be said, and said, said again, until it doesn’t need to be said anymore. That’s why I write a column annually on suicide, mostly saying the same things over and over again. The hope is that, like a note put into a bottle and floated out to sea, my little message might find someone needing consolation after losing a loved one to suicide.

What’s needs to be said, and said again, about suicide? Four things.

First, that it’s a disease and perhaps the most misunderstood of all diseases. We tend to think that if a death is self-inflicted, it is voluntary in a way that death through physical illness or accident is not. For most suicides, this isn’t true. A person who dies by suicide dies, as does the victim of a terminal illness or fatal accident, not by his or her own choice. When people die from heart attacks, strokes, cancer, AIDS, and accidents, they die against their will. The same is true for suicide, except that in the case of suicide the breakdown is emotional rather than physical – an emotional stroke, an emotional cancer, a breakdown of the emotional immune system, an emotional fatality.

This is not an analogy. There are different kinds of heart attacks, strokes, cancers, breakdowns of the immune system, and fatal accidents. However, they all have the same effect; they all take someone out of this life against his or her own will. No one who dies through suicide actually wants to die. He or she only wants to end a pain that can no longer be endured, akin to someone jumping to his death out of a burning building because his clothes are on fire.

Second, we should not worry unduly about the eternal salvation of a suicide victim, believing (as we used to) that suicide is the ultimate act of despair and something God will not forgive. God is infinitely more understanding than we are and God’s hands are infinitely safer and gentler than our own. Imagine a loving mother having just given birth, welcoming her child onto her breast for the first time. That, I believe, is the best image we have to picture how a suicide victim (most often an overly sensitive soul) is received into the next life. God is infinitely understanding, loving, and gentle. We need not worry about the fate of anyone, no matter the cause of death, who exits this world honest, oversensitive, gentle, over-wrought, and emotionally crushed. God has a special love for the broken and the crushed.

Knowing all of this however, doesn’t necessarily take away our pain (and anger) at losing someone to suicide; but faith and understanding aren’t meant to take our pain away but rather to give us hope, vision, and support as we walk within our pain.

Third, we should not torture ourselves with second-guessing when we lose a loved one to suicide: “What might I have done? Where did I let this person down? If only I had been there? What if …?” It can be natural to be haunted with the thought, “if only I’d been there at the right time.” Rarely would this have made a difference. Indeed, most of the time, we weren’t there for the exact reason that the person who fell victim to this disease did not want us to be there. He or she picked the moment, the spot, and the means precisely so that we wouldn’t be there. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that suicide is a disease that picks its victim precisely in such a way so as to exclude others and their attentiveness. This is not an excuse for insensitivity, especially towards those suffering from dangerous depression, but it should be a healthy check against false guilt and fruitless second-guessing.

We’re human beings, not God. People die of illness and accidents all the time and sometimes all the love and attentiveness in the world cannot prevent a loved one from dying. Love, for all its power, is sometimes powerless before a terminal illness.

Fourth, when we lose a loved one to suicide, one of our tasks is to work at redeeming that person’s memory, namely, to put that person’s life into a perspective wherein his or her memory is not forever tainted because it is viewed through the prism of suicide.

A proper human and faith response to suicide should not be horror, fear for the victim’s eternal salvation, guilty second-guessing about how we failed this person, and a hushed, guarded tone forever afterwards when we speak of him or her. Suicide is indeed a horrible way to die, but we must understand it (at least in most cases) as a sickness, a disease, an illness, a tragic breakdown within the emotional immune system. Most of all, we must trust God, God’s goodness, God’s understanding, God’s power to descend into hell, and God’s power to make all things right, even death by suicide.

Women, Inequality, and Feminism

June 13, 2022

There are still people everywhere who believe there’s no longer any issue regarding the status of women. Widespread is the belief that today, at least in democratic countries, women enjoy full equality with men. As well, for many, feminism is a bad word, politically charged, representing a radical liberal ideology whose agenda is at odds with traditional family values. What’s to be said about this?

First off, feminism, like Christianity, is a wide term that includes both healthy and strident expressions. There are good feminists and there are strident ones, as is true too of Christians.  Be that as it may, my main purpose here is to suggest that nothing can be further from the truth than the naïve belief that gender equality has been achieved – anywhere. It hasn’t, not by a long shot.

Why do I say this? Before offering more substantial evidence, let me highlight just one example. I live in the West, in the United States, in America, in Texas, in San Antonio (a very Christian and compassionate city), in a democratic culture that prides itself and believes itself to be a beacon to the world vis-à-vis human rights and women’s equality. Yet, as I read our daily newspaper, rarely does a single week go by wherein there isn’t the report of a woman dying because of domestic violence. Moreover, these are only reports of women being murdered by a domestic partner; the numbers are no doubt astronomically higher in terms of women suffering physical and sexual abuse in our homes. Note, in 90% of these cases it’s the woman who dies.

However, to substantiate the claim that women still suffer, massively and disproportionately, from inequality, let me cite a series of comments from a recent book Awakening, by Joan Chittister:

  • “The fact is that two-thirds of the poor of the world are women, two-thirds of the illiterate of the world are women and two-thirds of the hungry of the world are women. Oppression of half the human race cannot be explained by accident. … Women are most of the poor, most of the refugees, most of the uneducated, most of the beaten and most of the rejected of the world.”
  • “The history of women is one of historical and universal oppression, discrimination and violence. In Buddhism, women who have led lives of total spiritual dedication are trained to take orders from the youngest of the male monks. In Islam, women are required to veil their heads and cover their bodies to express their unworthiness and signal the fact that they belong to some man. In Hinduism, women are abandoned by their husbands for higher pursuits and larger dowries or held responsible for his death by virtue of a woman’s bad karma. In most forms of Judaism, women are denied access to religious ritual and education. In Christianity, until recently and in many sectors yet, the legal rights of women have been equated with those of minor children; wife-beating is protected by domestic right and even the spiritual life of women is dictated, directed, and controlled by the men of the faith.”

Moreover, Chittister highlights an irony that generally goes unrecognized and, worse still, is often used to camouflage our failure to accord women equal status. Here’s the irony. Many of us nurture, consciously or unconsciously, an attitude that might aptly be called a romantic feminism wherein we over-idealize and over-exalt women and, ironically but understandably, by that very token end up denying them full equality. This is how Chittister puts it: “on no other class, surely has so much poetry, so much music, so many flowers, so much adulation, so much tolerance, so much romantic love and so little moral and intellectual, spiritual and human respect been lavished.” In essence, an over-idealization of women, tells them: you’re so special and wonderful that you shouldn’t be treated in same way as men!

I’m old enough to have lived through a couple of generations of feminism. In the 1980s and 1990s, when I taught theology in a couple of universities, feminism, both healthy and strident, was very strong within the faculty and in much of the student body. I confess that I wasn’t always at ease with it, particularly with its often-militant tone. I sensed its legitimacy, even as I feared its stridency. 

Well, times have changed. Today, in the classrooms I teach, more and more, I’m meeting women, younger women, who have little sympathy or use for the feminism of the 1980s and 1990s. There’s almost a patronizing attitude towards those women who pioneered the feminist agenda. Partly, it’s a generational thing that’s understandable. Partly, however, it’s also a naiveté, an unfounded belief that the battle has been won, that women have now achieved full equality, that there’s no need any longer for the old-style battles.

So, when I read Chittister’s grim statistics and read about domestic violence almost daily in our newspapers, I long for those feisty feminists I once met in classrooms and at faculty meetings all those years ago.

God’s Sense of Humor

June 6, 2022

If we genuinely trust scripture, our own experience, and our own sanity, we can only conclude that God has a sense of humor, and a robust and sneaky one at that.  Where’s the evidence?  

A generation ago, Peter Berger wrote a remarkable little book entitled, A Rumor of Angels. Unlike Aquinas, Anselm, Descartes, and a number of renowned philosophers, he didn’t try to “prove” the existence of God through logic and argumentation. Rather, he simply examined a number of very ordinary human experiences and pointed to what’s hidden inside and behind the walls of those experiences. For instance, when a mother soothes and calms a frightened child at night, assuring the child that there is nothing to fear, she does this in good faith only because at some deep level she intuits that ultimately everything is all right. In effect, unconsciously, she is praying a Creed.

Now, one of the experiences Berger highlights is the experience of humor. Here’s his thesis: no matter how oppressive and dire the circumstance, human beings always have the capacity to make light of it, to view it through the prism of irony and humor. For example, martyrs have joked with their executioners and, no doubt, there was some banter, sarcasm, irony, and bitter humor at times inside extermination camps. The fact that people can do this, and do in fact do it, shows that there is always something transcendent inside us, something over which no human oppression has power, something that sets us above any situation within which we find ourselves. Our sense of irony and humor manifests that something in our soul sets us above anything that can beset us.

And, this can have its source in only one place, inside of the Creator who made us. Thus, not only must God have a sense of humor, humor must be something inherent within the nature of God, since humor is good and God is the author of all that is good.

There’s a school of classical philosophy that believes God has four transcendental properties. God, it teaches, is One, True, Good, and Beautiful – to this we can add, Humorous. Moreover, this can be inferred from more than just the fact that sometimes we sense that humor manifests our transcendence within a given situation. More importantly, we can infer that humor has some godliness from examining the component parts of love. God is love, and humor is undeniably an important part of love.

When the classical Greek philosophers defined love, they highlighted a number of components within it, namely, erotic attraction, obsession, friendship, pragmatic arrangement, and altruism. However, they also highlighted another component, playfulness/banter/humor.  How insightful. Humor along with healthy banter and playful teasing are part of the grease that enables us to sustain relationships long term, despite the inevitable over-familiarity, hurt, disappointment, and boredom that beset even the most loving relationships. Humor helps make it all work. Thus, since it is an innate part of love, it is an innate part of God.

Sadly, we don’t often picture God that way. Christianity, Judaism, and Islam have this in common. We all picture God as male, celibate, solemn – and humorless. How might we picture God differently?

If you were to draw up a composite face representing God, whose face would you include in this picture? The pious face of the gentle, blond-haired Jesus with a lamb on his shoulder we see in our holy pictures? Images of a serenely composed and quiet Mary that we see depicted in our statues of her? The face of Mother Teresa? The face of Therese of Lisieux? The face of Dorothy Day? Of Martin Luther King? Of Oscar Romero? Of Billy Graham? Of Henri Nouwen? Of Rachel Held Evans? The face of your mother or father? Would you also include the face of your favorite comedian or favorite wit? Jerry Seinfeld? Bette Midler? Rowan Atkinson? The mischievous face of your colorful uncle telling a joke?

Any picture of God’s face needs to manifest an inner soul that is One, True, Good, Beautiful, but also Humorous and Mischievous. Funny, while I believe that God is the author of humor, I’ve never been enamored by the various artistic depictions of Jesus as laughing uproariously. Good idea, good intention, good theology, but to my taste, lacking the right nuance. That kind of laughing face has an ephemeral quality that too easily gives way to something else after it’s had its moment. God’s face, I suspect, has a quieter, sneakier, more permanent mischievousness to it.

If this is true, if God not only has a sense of humor but is also the author of humor itself, then humor is an important quality within sanctity and holiness. What makes for wholeness, maturity, holiness, love, and for the kind of person you want beside you at the table, here and at the eternal one in heaven? Certainly, you want someone who manifests the qualities that Jesus asked for in the Sermon on the Mount – along with a warm, playful, and mischievous sense of humor.

What’s in a Farewell?

May 30, 2022

Farewells can be hard. When we love someone who is going away, there’s always a sadness, and a particularly heart-wrenching one when that loved one is going away in death.

Yet, we know from experience that at the end of the day farewells are not so much a death as a transition. One way of being present to each other is ending and giving way to another that is just beginning and will better serve love in the long run.

This may sound abstract. It’s not. We experience it daily in our lives. For example: consider a young woman graduating from high school and moving away from the family home to live on her own. For her parents, this can be a painful. Your little girl is no longer your little girl – and her goodbye to you as you drive away from helping her move into her new place will imprint in you that she is no longer little and she is no longer yours. Something fundamental has changed, and it can be hard to let go of how she had once been present to you. But, she isn’t dead. Far from it, rather her life is now opening up to a new richness; she is taking a major and necessary new step in her growth, even as that step includes a major change in how she will now be present to you.

How will she be present to you now that she has left your house and is living on her own? Paradoxically, she may be more present to you now than she ever was before, though in a different way. Now, as an adult, she has things to give you that the little girl who lived in your house could not give you. Granted, young children can trigger a very special love in their parents, but an adult daughter or son can trigger something else, that’s also very rich. That’s why every girl or boy eventually needs to speak to her or his parents the words Jesus spoke to his disciples on the night before he died, it is better for you that I go away.  If I don’t go away, you will always have a child in your house, but if I go away, I will come back to you as an adult and bring you a new richness.

The cold separation of a farewell can eventually give way to a warm, deeper coming together, one that no longer depends on physical proximity. An honest goodbye is a transition, not an ending.

This holds true in an even more poignant way vis-a-vis the farewell that takes place with death. We don’t lose our loved ones in death; we experience a transition in their presence. At a funeral, we are experiencing the same transition of presence and relationship that parents experience when a son or daughter grows up and moves out.  At a funeral, of course, the emotional stakes are much higher, but the dynamic is ultimately the same. A fundamental shift is taking place in the relationship. In the case of death, it generally takes some time, years perhaps, before we recognize that this was a transition not a death. Allow me a personal example.

When I was twenty-three years old, in the space of three months, both my father and mother died. They were still young (sixty-two and fifty-eight respectively). Our family was also still young, too young (by our own assessment) to be asked to absorb this. Hence, initially their deaths were felt as a cold, bitter severing, death rather than transition. However, time heals, and not just because irrespective of the depth of the pain eventually we move on. In our case, time also healed because eventually we began to sense our parents’ presence again, in a richer and deeper way than we had known before their deaths. They went away, but they came back, richer, warmer, and deeper.

In his farewell discourse at the Last Supper, Jesus tells his disciples not to fear or grieve too much his departure. He keeps repeating the words, it is better for you that I go away. If I do not go away, I cannot send you my spirit. He is like that young daughter who is leaving home to start her own life and is saying a painful goodbye to her parents, but a goodbye that is predicated on the fact that she will now be able to be present to them in a different and very rich way. Her farewell is not a death, but a transition.

Farewells and goodbyes, including those at funerals, are not unnatural relational ruptures that go against God’s plan and against how relationships are supposed to culminate. That can be the case, of course, when a farewell or goodbye is occasioned by anger, hatred, abuse, or violence. However, when the goodbye is the natural outgrowth of the cycle of life itself, the death experienced is really only part of the rich, ineffable, paradoxical mystery of love itself.

Naming the Present Moment – Some Metaphors to Digest

May 23, 2022

Not everything can be fixed or cured, but it should be named properly. Richard Rohr said that. James Hillman suggests something similar when he wrote that a symptom suffers most when it doesn’t know where it belongs.

Where does our present moment belong vis-à-vis our faith in God and the relevance of our churches? Are we post-Christian? Are we witnessing the death of God and our churches? Or, is our faith being purified by the very criticisms levelled against it and, despite a massive decline in church attendance, aren’t the churches making genuine moral progress on issues like racism, sexism, and social justice in general? Are we dying or maturing? How do we name our present moment?

By way of an answer, I would like simply to offer a series of “metaphors” gleaned from various commentators that attempt a naming.  Some of these seemingly contradict each other, but all of them merit some thought. I leave them for you to digest.

  1. Faith is a spent project! In essence, that’s the view of the Enlightenment thinkers, classically expressed in persons like Nietzsche, Freud, Feuerbach, and Marx, who suggest that faith and belief in God are something you eventually outgrow, like belief in Santa and the Easter Bunny. This belief was needed for a time, but it’s something we outgrow when we lose our naiveté. God and the churches have had their time in history, and that day is over. Today, this is the belief (or unacknowledged fear) of millions.
  2. Our world is still in diapers! Pierre Teilhard de Chardin suggests that far from faith being a spent project, it’s only in its infancy stage. In an evolutionary view of history and faith, we are still a world in diapers, emerging from the crib. Faith is far from spent! We are just beginning!
  3. A post-Christian West! That was the view of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger before he became pope. Interestingly, he never asserted it again explicitly after he became pope, namely, that the secularized world, particularly in North America and Western Europe, is now “post-Christian”.
  4. Faith in the secularized world is suffering a certain noonday fatigue! This is an image offered by Thomas Halik. In his view, faith and the churches aren’t dying; they are merely suffering “acedia”, the “noon-day devil”, the fatigue that the early Christian desert writers told us could afflict even the most committed believers.
  5. We are experiencing a crisis of the imagination, not of faith and fidelity. The conditions of belief have changed radically and our imaginations haven’t caught up. This is the view of the renowned philosopher on secularity, Charles Taylor. For him, as believers today we are pioneers, struggling to learn how to live in a (faith) country that we and no one else has ever before inhabited. Small wonder we are struggling.
  6. Secular culture is the adolescent child of Judeo-Christianity and in its adolescent grandiosity our culture sees only its parents’ faults. This is the view of the popular spiritual writer Kathleen Norris and is echoed by Yale philosopher Louis Dupre. As Norris puts it, if you want to visualize the relationship between our secular world and Christianity, watch how a seventeen year-old teenager who is out of sorts with her parents interrelates with them. To this, Dupre adds that grandiose adolescents aren’t bad, they just aren’t finished growing.
  7. Secularity is a fantasy indulged in by intellectuals. For ordinary people there are divine whispers behind every door. In real life, religion of some sort is unavoidable. This from French philosopher Chantel Delsol.
  8. Like Jonah, we are in the belly of the whale.  This is one of Richard Rohr’s preferred namings. Inside our contemporary doubt and confusion, God is taking us through a darkness to where we need to be.
  9. Christian vision in the West is the residue of a former seeing, before suffering a detached retina. This from Walter Kasper. His idea: if someone is born blind, he will not have visual images of outside objects inside of him. However, if someone goes blind sometime in life, he will retain the images of what he once saw, even though he is no longer seeing them. As Christians, we are living too much off past images, and no longer seeing directly with the eyes of faith.
  10. We need “The Benedict Option”. This from Rod Dreher. Heavily secularized culture is asphyxiating our faith. What’s needed to save and nurture it is the “Benedict option”. Like the great monastic founder, St. Benedict, those of us with a committed faith need to pull away from a culture that is eroding our faith and live out our faith in a “monastic” way, namely by withdrawing and building new kinds of “monasteries” within which to live out our faith and raise our children. Eventually, as has happened before, the world will come to us seeking help and meaning.

Who’s right? What best names both our symptoms and our moment? There is something to digest in each of these images.

Love, Not Excuses, Moves Things Forward

May 16, 2022

The excusable doesn’t need to be excused and the inexcusable cannot be excused.

Michael Buckley wrote those words commenting on Peter’s triple betrayal of Jesus. Here’s the context. Peter had betrayed Jesus in his most needy hour, not out of malice, simply out of weakness. Now, facing Jesus for the first time since that betrayal, Peter is understandably uncomfortable. What do you say after betraying someone?

Well, he didn’t need to say anything. Jesus took the initiative and, as Buckley highlights, he didn’t excuse Peter. Jesus didn’t say things like, it’s perfectly understandable to be afraid in a situation like that! You weren’t really yourself! I understand how that can happen! He didn’t even tell Peter that he still loves him. None of that. He simply asked Peter, “Do you love me?” and when Peter said yes, everything moved forward. No excuses were needed. The excusable doesn’t need to be excused and the inexcusable cannot be excused. Our humanity already explains why we are prone to betrayal; what needs to be spoken in its wake is a reaffirmation of love.

A couple I know had this happen in their marriage. They went to a party together one Friday night and the wife, partly through the influence of alcohol and drugs, left the party with another man. Her husband was unaware of this for a time but, upon finding out what had happened, was understandably very distraught. He went home alone and spent a sleepless night thinking, his thoughts moving through a series of vengeful fantasies to what (through grace) he eventually decided on.

He was sitting at the kitchen table midmorning the next day when his wife, sheepish and self-chastened, came home. She had her apologies rehearsed and was ready to face his justified anger and fury. She got something else. Her husband didn’t let her voice any apologies or excuses, nor did he explode in anger. Rather, calm and sad, he simply said this to her: “I’m going to move out of the house for a week, so you can think this through. You need to decide. Are you my wife or are you someone else?” He came back a week later to her apologies, but more importantly to her renewed, more radical commitment to their relationship. Their marriage has been solid and grace-filled since. She is now committed to a marriage in a way she never quite was before.

No doubt upon his return, this man’s wife did offer some tearful apologies and excuses. His refusal to let her voice them earlier may well have served a purpose long-term, but was admittedly somewhat cruel short-term. Even when something can’t be excused, we still need the opportunity to say we are sorry. Apologies are important, both for the person offering them and for the one receiving them. Until an explicit apology is made, there is always unfinished business. However, explicit contrition is not ultimately what moves things forward when a relationship has been wounded or fractured. What moves things forward is a renewed commitment to love, to a deeper fidelity.

The inexcusable cannot be excused. Strictly speaking, that’s true, though sometimes a deeper understanding of things somewhat excuses the inexcusable. Here’s an example.

Several years ago, this incident occurred in Australia. A Catholic School Board had just finished building a new multi-million dollar school. Not long after it’s opening, one of its students, a boy in high school, started a fire in his locker, unaware that the gas valves for the school’s heating system were right behind his locker. A huge fire started and the whole school burned down. To his credit, the boy summoned his courage and owned up to what had happened. Then, of course, a never-ending series of questions ensued: Why would he ever do that? Why would anyone start a fire in his locker? What accounts for that kind of reckless stupidity? What can excuse the inexcusable?

I very much appreciated an answer given to these questions by one of the Australian bishops. Speaking to a questioning group of teachers and school administrators, his short answer said it all. Why would this young student do something like that? Because he is a boy! Young boys have been (for no explicable reason) starting fires long before gas valves ever appeared on the planet. Moreover, there’s no excuse for it, save human nature itself.

Often times, that’s the excuse for the inexcusable: Because we’re human!  Indeed, this was the real excuse for the woman who under the influence of alcohol and drugs betrayed her husband, just as it was the real excuse for Peter when he betrayed Jesus.

But, this must be read correctly. This doesn’t give us permission to appeal to our morally inept human nature as an excuse for betrayal or stupidity. We’re human! Boys will be boys! The lesson rather is that whenever our moral ineptness has us fall into betrayal or stupidity, what ultimately moves things forward is not an apology or an excuse, but a renewed commitment in love.

Spirituality – A Place Where All Believers Can Come Together

May 9, 2022

Where can all of us believers come together beyond the divisions created by history, dogma, denomination, and religion? Where is there a place all people of sincere heart can find common ground and worship together?

That place is found in the ecumenical and inter-religious pursuit of spirituality, and our theology schools and seminaries need to create this place within their academic vision and structures.

What is spirituality as an academic discipline within our theology schools and seminaries? It has actually been around a long time, though under different names. In Roman Catholic circles, formerly it was handled piecemeal as moral theology, liturgy, ascetical theology, and as mystical and devotional literature. In Protestant and Evangelical circles (where, until recently, mystical and devotional literature were distrusted) there were courses on discipleship, worship, and Christian ethics.

So what is spirituality as an area of study? At the risk of a vast over-simplification, let me propose an analogy as a way of understanding how spirituality relates to theology and dogma. Spirituality is related to theology and dogma akin to how an actual game of sports is related to the rule book of that sport.

For example, for the game of baseball there is a rulebook, one initially codified and then periodically amended through the many years the game has been played. To play the game today one has to stay within those rules. There is no game outside those rules. However, while these rules critically dictate the lines within which the game has to be played, they are not the game itself. They merely dictate how it is to be played and ensure that it is played in a fair manner.

In essence, that is the critical role of theology and dogma. They are the rule book for how we need to discern faith and religious practice as we live out our discipleship, if we are legitimately to call ourselves Christian. But, while they make the rules, spirituality is the actual game; it’s how in actual practice we live out our faith and discipleship.

Thus, spirituality takes in morality and ethics, worship, ascetical theology, mystical theology, devotional theology, and everything else we do in living out our discipleship.  Theology makes the rules, while spirituality tries to instill the motivation, the fire, the hope, and the practical guidance for the game itself, lived discipleship.

I offer this little apologia for spirituality as an academic discipline in view of affirming that spirituality is that place where believers can come together in a common heart beyond the long-standing divisions created by history, dogma, ecclesiology, and different notions of faith. Spirituality is a place where we can meet in a communion of faith that takes us (at least in that place and moment) beyond our different histories, our different denominations, our different religions, and our different notions of faith.

I know this is true because I have seen and am seeing it first-hand. Oblate School of Theology, where I teach, has an Institute of Contemporary Spirituality in which I see Roman Catholics, Protestants, and Evangelicals of every persuasion studying together, searching together, and praying together in a way that denominational differences simply don’t enter into. Everyone, irrespective of denomination, is searching for the same things: What does it mean to be a disciple of Jesus today? How does one genuinely pray? How do we sustain faith in a secular world that so easily swallows us whole? How can we pass our faith on to our own children? How can we be both prophet and healer in our bitterly divided world? What is a faith-based response to injustice? How does someone age and die well? What insights and grace can we draw from the deep wells of Christian mysticism and hagiography to help guide our lives?  

Everyone has the same questions, and everyone is searching at the same places.

Denominationalism recedes when spirituality takes over.

Moreover, this doesn’t just pertain to being together beyond the differences of denominations among Christians; the same holds true vis-a-vis our separation from other world religions. The questions we are grappling with as Christians are the same questions that Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic, Taoist, and other believers are grappling with, and they are looking to us for help even as we are looking to them for help. In spirituality, Christians learn from Sufi Islamic mystics, even as Islamic believers delve into Mariology and Christian mysticism. Buddhist, Hindu, and Taoist believers pick up the Spiritual Exercise of St. Ignatius, even as Christians learn from various Buddhist and Hindu methods of meditation.

Jesus assured us that in God’s house there are many rooms. Spirituality is one of those rooms. Spirituality is the room where all who are caught-up in a common need, common search, and common hope, can bracket for a time their denominational and religious differences and search together.

Don’t get me wrong, this doesn’t take away with our differences; but it gives us a place where we can be in a community of life and faith with each other, beyond those differences.

Managing an Ascension

May 2, 2022

A friend of mine, somewhat cynical about the church, recently remarked: “What the institutional church today is trying to do is to put its best face on the fact that it’s dying. Basically, it’s trying to manage a death.”

What he’s suggesting is that the church today, like a person struggling to accept a terminal diagnosis, is trying to reshape its imagination to eventually accommodate itself to the unthinkable, its own dying. 

He’s right in suggesting that the church today is trying to reshape its imagination, but he’s wrong about what it’s trying to manage. What the church is trying to manage today is not a death, but an ascension. What needs reshaping in our imagination today is the same thing that needed reshaping in the imagination of the first disciples in the forty days between the resurrection and the ascension. We need to understand again how to let go of one body of Christ so that it can ascend and we can again experience Pentecost. What’s at stake here? 

Among the elements within the paschal mystery, the ascension is the least understood. We are clearer about the meaning of the death and resurrection of Christ and the descent of the Spirit at Pentecost. We have less understanding of the ascension.

The forty days between the resurrection and the ascension were not a time of unadulterated joy for the first disciples. It was a time of some joy, but also of considerable confusion, despondency, and loss of faith. In the days before the ascension, the disciples were overjoyed whenever they recognized again their risen Lord, but most of the time they were confused, despondent, and full of doubt because they were unable to recognize the new presence of Christ in what was happening around them. At one point, they gave up completely and, as John put it, went back to their former way of life, fishing and the sea.

However, during that time, Jesus slowly reshaped their imaginations. Eventually they grasped the fact that something had died, but that something else, far richer, had been born, and that now they needed to give up clinging to the way Jesus had formerly been present to them so that he could be present to them in a new way. The theology and spirituality of the ascension is essentially contained in these words: Refuse to cling to what once was, let it go so that you can now recognize the new life you are already living and receive its spirit. The synoptic gospels teach this to us in their pictorial rendering of the ascension, where a bodily Jesus blesses everyone and then rises physically out of their sight. John gives us the same theology but in a different picture. He does this in his description of the encounter on Easter morning between Jesus and Mary Magdala when Jesus says, “Mary don’t cling to me!”

Today, the church is trying to manage an ascension, not a death. I can easily see where my friend can be confused because every ascension presupposes a death and a birth, and that can be confusing. So where, really, is the church today?

Edward Schillebeeckx once suggested that we are living in that same despondency that was felt by the early disciples between Jesus’ death and their realization of his resurrection. We are feeling what they felt, doubt and confusion on the road to Emmaus. The Christ we once knew has been crucified and we cannot yet recognize the Christ who is walking with us, more alive than before, though in a new way. Hence, just as those first disciples on the road to Emmaus, we also frequently walk with faces downcast, in a confused faith, needing Christ to appear in a new guise to reshape our imaginations so that we can recognize him as he is now present to us. 

I think Schillebeeckx is right about this, except that I would put it in another way. The church today is in that time between the resurrection and the ascension, feeling considerable despondency, with its imagination attuned to a former understanding of Christ, unable to recognize Christ clearly in the present moment. For many of us who grew up in a particular understanding of the faith, our former understanding of Christ has been crucified. But, Christ is not dead. The church is not dead. Both Jesus and the church are very much alive, walking with us, slowly reshaping our imaginations, reinterpreting the scriptures for us, telling us again: Wasn’t it necessary that the Christ (and the church) should so suffer ….

For many of us today, to live in faith is to be in that time between the death of Christ and the ascension, vacillating between joy and despondency, trying to manage an ascension.

On the road of faith, there’s always bad news and good news. The bad news is that invariably our understanding of Christ gets crucified. The good news is that Christ is always very much alive, present to us still, and in a deeper way.

Fear of Missing Out

April 25, 2022

It’s hard for a child to have to go to bed in the middle of an evening when the rest of the family is still celebrating. Nobody wants to go to bed while everyone else is still up. No one wants to miss out on life.

Remember how as a child, tired and unable to keep your eyes open, you still struggled against anyone who would try to put you to bed. Exhausted or not, you didn’t want to miss anything. You didn’t want to leave and go to sleep while so much life was going on.

We never really outgrow that. That resistance is congenital and still haunts us on our deathbeds.

One of our more painful anxieties is triggered by a sense that we are forever missing out on something. This is also one of our major fears about dying. For most people, the heaviness and darkness of dying come not so much from a fear of what they might meet in the next life, judgment and punishment, but from a fear of annihilation. Moreover, the fear here is not so much that their personal identity will be snuffed out (though that is a real fear) but rather that they will be taken away from all the life of which they have been part. The sadness lies in the having to let go, in knowing that life will now go on without us, of being taken off to bed while the party continues. And, this is deep inside us, so deep, that we find it difficult to imagine how the world can even go on without us.

However, this is not a sign that there is something wrong with us, some neurosis that needs fixing or some moral or religious issue that needs attention. It’s the human condition, pure and simple, and God is the architect of that. In short, we’re built to be part of a fabric, not single threads content in their isolation. 

I was twenty-three years old when I watched my dad die in a hospital room. He was still young, sixty-two years old, and ideally should have had a number of years still ahead of him. But, he was dying, he knew it, and despite a faith that gave him some comfort, was deeply sad about it.  What he struggled with in his dying was not with some fear of the afterlife or some amends he still needed to make in this life. None of that. There was no unfinished business with God, nor religious and moral issues still to mend. Nor were there unhealthy fears of the afterlife. His only unfinished business had to do with this life, and what he would now miss out on in terms of (figuratively) being put to bed early while the party was still going on. In addition, for him, the party was in full swing. His adult children were just beginning to establish their lives and give him grandchildren, and the younger half of his family were actively preparing to enter into their adult lives. He wasn’t going to be around to see how all of this turned out and he wasn’t going to be around to see most of his grandchildren. More important still, he had a wife, a soulmate, whom he would be leaving. It wasn’t a good evening to be sent to bed early.

Beyond all this, he still had his own siblings, neighbors, friends, a parish, civic involvements, sports teams, and countless other life-giving connections, and he was aware, not without huge heartache, that these were all about to end, at least on this side of eternity.

Why shouldn’t he have been sad? Indeed, why shouldn’t any of us be sad whenever we are facing a death of any kind, when we are being put to bed while the rest of life is still going on?

We are constitutively communitarian. As God himself said when he created the human family, it is not good for anyone to be alone. We are meant to be part of a family and a community, part of the fabric of life, and a fabric is made up of multiple threads. Thus, it’s understandably saddening whenever our single, fragile, lonely thread is being pulled away from the rest of the fabric. No wonder little children don’t want to be put to bed while everyone else is still carrying on with the evening.

Moreover, this isn’t just true for the sadness we experience when we face our deaths. The same dynamic is operative whenever we undergo the various mini-deaths that beset us as we age, lose our health, retire, get fired from jobs, lose people we love, lose marriages, are geographically dislocated, or in any other way are pushed out of the mainstream of life towards the margins.

So, it can be helpful to know that nothing is wrong here. Dying is hard. Letting go is hard. Being pushed aside is hard. Disappearing from life is particularly hard. That’s why little children don’t like being put to bed.

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