For fifteen years, I taught a course entitled The Theology of God. The students in that course were predominately seminarians preparing for ministry, along with a number of lay students who were preparing to serve as ministers in various capacities in their churches. I would always teach what the curriculum called for: the key biblical revelations about the nature of God and God’s actions in history, some salient perspectives from the Patristics on God’s nature and actions, the historical development of the dogmatic definitions about God, plus some speculative notions on the trinity, ranging from Saint Augustine to Karl Rahner to Catherine Lacugna. But my overriding emphasis, like a leit motif, was always this. I would tell the students: whatever else you do in your pastoral practice and preaching, try not to make God look stupid!

Nothing is as important in our teaching, preaching, and pastoral activities as is the notion we convey of the God who underwrites it all. Every homily we preach, every catechetical or sacramental teaching we give, and every pastoral practice we engage in reflects the God who undergirds it. If our teaching is narrow and petty, we make God look narrow and petty. If our pastoral practice lacks understanding and compassion, we make God lack understanding and compassion. If we are legalistic, we make God legalistic. If we are tribal, nationalistic, or racist, we make God tribal, nationalistic, and racist. If we do things that befuddle common sense, we make God the enemy of common sense.  Crassly stated, when we do stupid things in our ministry, we make God look stupid. 

In all of our preaching, teaching, and pastoral practice we need to work at rescuing God from arbitrariness, narrowness, legalism, rigidity, racism, tribalism, nationalism, and everything that’s narrow, legalistic, and petty that, through us, gets associated with God. Anything we do in the name of God reflects God.

It’s no accident that atheism, anti-clericalism, and most of the negativity leveled against the church and religion today can always point to some bad theology or church practice on which to base itself. Atheism is always a parasite, feeding off bad religion. So too is most of the negativity towards the churches which is prevalent today. Anti-church attitudes feed on bad religion and thus we who preach, teach, and minister in the name of God need to scrutinize ourselves in the light of those criticisms.

As well, we need the honesty to admit that we have seriously hurt many persons by the rigidity of some of our pastoral practices that do not reflect a God of understanding, compassion, and intelligence, but instead suggest that God is arbitrary, legalistic, and not very intelligent.

I say this in sympathy. It’s not easy to reflect God adequately, but we must try, try to reflect better the God that Jesus incarnated. What are the marks of that God?

First, that God has no favorites. No one person, race, gender, or nation is more favored than others by that God. All are privileged. That God is also clear that it’s not only those who profess God and religion explicitly who are persons of faith, but also those, irrespective of their explicit faith or church practice, who do the will of God on earth.

Next, that God is scandalously understanding and compassionate, especially towards the weak and towards sinners. That God is willing to sit down with sinners without first asking them to clean up their lives. Moreover, that God asks us to be compassionate in the same way to both sinners and saints and to love them both equally. That God does not have preferential love for the virtuous.

In addition, that God is critical of those who, whatever their sincerity, try to block access to him. That God is never defensive, but surrenders himself to death rather than defend himself, never meets hatred with hatred, and dies loving and forgiving those who are killing him.

Finally, and centrally, that God is first of all good news for the poor. Any preaching in God’s name that isn’t good news for the poor is not the gospel.

Those are the attributes of the God who Jesus incarnated and we need to keep that God in mind in all of our preaching, teaching, and pastoral practices, even as we are sensitive to proper boundaries and the demands of orthodox teaching.  

Complex pastoral questions will always be with us and this is not suggesting that these issues be resolved simplistically. The truth sets us free and the demands of discipleship are, by Jesus own admission, harsh. However, with that being admitted, the compassion, mercy, and intelligence of God need always still to be reflected in every pastoral action we do. Otherwise, God looks arbitrary, tribal, cruel, and antithetical to love. Christianity, as Marilynne Robinson says, is too great a narrative to be underwritten by any lesser tale and that should forbid especially its being subordinated to narrowness, legalism, lack of compassion, and lack of common sense.

The concept of chastity has fallen on hard times.

Several years ago, I was invited to speak to a group of students at a Catholic university. The invitation came with a request and a caveat. I was to speak on chastity, but ideally, I was to avoid using the word. The Dean of Theology, who had invited me, had appraised the situation this way: perhaps more than anything else, the students need a challenge to chastity, but they are so turned off by the word that if we mention it in the title, very few will show up.

His hunch was right on both scores: the need for chastity in their lives and their aversion to the word. That’s also true for our culture.

For many today, the word chastity has negative connotations. Outside of a constantly shrinking number of select church circles, the word chastity sets off mostly negative alarms. Within our highly secularized and sophisticated world, for the most part chastity is identified with naiveté, with sexual timidity, with religious fundamentalism, with a toxic over-emphasis on sexual purity, with a lack of sophistication, and with something that perhaps made more sense in another age. Commonly, the notion is ridiculed, even in some religious circles. Very few people today dare talk about saving sex for marriage or about chastity as virtue. 

What’s behind this? Why this negativity and disdain towards the word chastity?

Partly this is based on a number of popular perceptions. Chastity is often seen as grounded in a religious fundamentalism, which our culture today either disdains or pities (“Chastity for Jesus”). As well, the notion of chastity is seen as a product of the church’s long-standing, one-sided emphasis on virginity and celibacy and its failure to articulate a healthy, robust spirituality of sex. It’s hard to argue with perceptions, except to say that the reasons for the demise of the concept of chastity in our culture are much more complex than this.

Admittedly, our catechesis about chastity is part of the problem. My suspicion is that a good number of people are negative vis-à-vis the notion because of how the concept has been presented to them. Our churches and moral teachers have to assume some of the blame and admit that far too often the concept of chastity has been presented, however unintentionally, precisely as a naiveté, a repression, and as an over-emphasis on sexual purity. There’s a parallel here to how atheism finds its ground. Just as so much atheism is a parasite feeding off bad religion, so too much of the negativity towards the concept of chastity is a parasite feeding off unhealthy religious teaching. 

However, our culture’s negativity towards the notion of chastity feeds off more than a less-than-healthy catechesis. The culprit? Sophistication as a virtue that is an end in itself. In short, our culture prizes personal sophistication above most everything else, and when sophistication is so highly prized, chastity easily looks like naïvete and ignorance.

Is it? Is chastity a naïvete, an ignorance? At the end of the day, is the notion of chastity a sexual repression, an unhealthy timidity, a toxic over-emphasis on sexual purity, a religious fundamentalism, a pitiable pre-sophistication?  Admittedly, that can sometimes be the case. However, here’s the case for chastity.

In 2013, Donna Freitas, the author of a number of books on sexuality and consent, published a study entitled, The End of Sex: How Hookup Culture is Leaving a Generation Unhappy, Sexually Unfulfilled, and Confused about Intimacy. That title is the book in caption. Nowhere in the book (and for this she has been unjustly criticized by some church groups) does she ever say that what is happening in our culture today in terms of soulless sex is wrong or sinful. She doesn’t have to. She simply spells out the consequences – unhappiness, confusion, sexual depression.

A generation earlier, the renowned educator Allan Bloom, writing out of a purely secular perspective, came to the same conclusion. Looking at the bright, very-sophisticated young students he was teaching, he concluded that the very unbridled sophistication they so prided themselves in (which he termed “the absence of chastity in their lives”) had this effect in their lives: it left them “erotically lame”.

And so I submit that chastity merits another look from our culture. There’s first-naïvete (childishness) and there’s second-naïvete (childlikeness). There’s hook-up sex and there’s soul-sex. There’s religious fundamentalism and there’s the wisdom of divine revelation. There’s the over-emphasis on sexual purity and there’s the dehumanizing disrespect for others (that the #Me Too is standing up to). There’s a certain ennui and fatigue in an ultra-sophistication that believes all taboos may be broken, and there’s a vibrancy and happiness that’s felt in keeping your shoes off before the burning bush. Note, in every one of these dualisms, chastity speaks for soul, for wisdom, for respect, and for happiness.

Pornography is the biggest addiction in the world today, and by a wide margin. Mostly it afflicts men, but is also a growing addiction among women. Much of this of course is driven by its easy and free availability on the internet. Everyone now (not least our own young children) have immediate access to it from the privacy of their phones or laptops, and in anonymity. No more having to sneak off to some seedy section of the city to watch the forbidden. Today pornography is gaining more mainstream acceptance. What’s the harm or shame in it?

Indeed, what’s the harm or shame in it? For a growing number of people today there is no harm or shame in it. Their view is that, whatever its downside, pornography is a liberation from former religious sexual repression. Indeed, many people see it as a healthy expression of sexuality (surprisingly this includes even some feminist writers).  Characters on mainstream television joke about their pornography collection, as if it were as innocent as a collection of favorite old albums, and I have colleagues who argue that our resistance to it simply betrays sexual repression. Sex is beautiful, they argue, so why are we afraid to look at it?

What’s wrong with pornography? Most everything, and not just from a moral perspective.

Let’s begin with the argument: sex is beautiful, so why are we afraid to look at it? That logic is right about one thing, sex is beautiful, so beautiful in fact that it needs to be protected from its own power. To say that it can be looked at as one might gaze at a beautiful sunset is naïve, religiously and psychologically. Religiously, we are told no one can look at God and live. That’s also true for sex. Its very luminosity needs shrouding. Moreover, it’s psychologically naïve to argue that this kind of deep intimacy can be put on public display. It can’t and it shouldn’t. Public display of that kind of intimacy violates all laws of propriety and respect for those engaged in this intimacy and those looking on. Like all things deeply intimate, it needs proper shrouding.

Next, when talking about the beauty of sex and the human body, we need to make a distinction between nudity and nakedness. When a good artist paints a nude body, the nudity serves to highlight the beauty of the whole person, body and soul, including his or her sexuality. In a nude painting, sexuality is connected to wholeness, to soul; how much to the contrary with nakedness. It exposes the human body in a way that obliterates its integrity, detaches its soul, and splits off sex from one’s whole person. When this happens, and that is precisely what happens in pornography, sex becomes something soulless, split off, mechanical, devoid of deep meaning, bipolar, something from which you need to return to your real self. And, when that happens, all profundity disappears and then, as W.H. Auden writes, we all know the few things that we, as mammals, can do.

Sadly, today for many of our young people, especially for boys, pornography is their initial sex education, and it is one that can leave a permanent imprint in them. That imprint can have long-term effects in the way they understand the meaning of sex, how they respect or disrespect women, and how they grasp or don’t grasp the vital soulful link between sex and love. Pornography, and not just in the young, can leave scars that are hard to overcome. The argument against this is that pornography might well initially deform the vision of an adolescent but that this will be cured once he matures and truly falls in love. My hope is that this is true, but my worry is that the initial imprint can, long term, taint the way a person falls in love and especially how he understands the radical mutuality asked for of sex within love. Such is the potential power of pornography.

Beyond all this, a strong argument might be made that pornography (in its production and its viewing) is violence against women and that pornography subtly and not-so-subtly promotes violence against women.

Finally, in a culture that prides itself above all else on its sophistication and liberation, not least on its liberation from many of our former religious taboos, one hesitates to even mention the word “chastity” in this context. Dare one even say that pornography is bad because it is the very antithesis of chastity? Dare one use chastity as an argument when for the most part our culture disdains chastity, pities it, and reserves a particular cynicism for religious groups who still advocate the old adage, “save it for your partner in marriage”? Worse still, is today’s cynicism vis-a-vis the idea of remaining chaste for Jesus. But, the ideal of chastity embeds sex within romance, sacredness, commitment, community, and soul, whereas pornography portrays it as soulless and embeds it in a sick privacy. So I leave you with the question: which one makes sex something dirty?

In the world of the arts, they make a distinction between persons who create an artifact, an artist, a sculptor, or a novelist, and persons who write about artists and their works. We have novelists and literary critics, artists and art critics, and both are important. Critics keep art and literature from bad form, sentimentality, vulgarity, and kitsch; but it’s the artists and novelists who produce the substance; without them critical assessment has no function.

For example, the book The Diary of Anne Frank is a masterpiece. Countless books and articles have been written about it, but these are not the masterpiece, the substance, the artifact that so deeply touched the soul of millions. They are commentaries about the artifact.  Of course, sometimes a person can be both, a novelist and a literary critic, an artist, and an art critic, still the distinction holds. These are separate crafts and separate disciplines.

That same distinction holds true within the area of theology and spirituality, though it is often not recognized. Some people write theology and others write about theology, just as some people write spirituality and others write about spirituality. Right now, I’m writing about theology and spirituality rather than actually doing theology or spirituality.

Perhaps an example can help. Henri Nouwen was one of the most popular spiritual writers in the past seventy years. Nouwen wrote spirituality; he never wrote about it, he wrote it. He was not a critic; he wrote spiritual texts. Many people, including myself, have written about Nouwen, about his life, his works, and why he influenced so many people. Strictly speaking, that’s writing about spirituality as opposed to writing spirituality as Nouwen did. Truth be told, we don’t have an abundance of spiritual writers today the caliber of Nouwen. What we do have, particularly at an academic level, is an abundance of critical writings about spirituality.

I offered the example of a contemporary spirituality writer, Henri Nouwen, but the distinction is perhaps even clearer when we look at classical spiritual writers. We have in fact created a certain “canon” of spirituality writers whom we deem as classics: the Desert Fathers and Mothers, the Pseudo-Dionysius, Julian of Norwich, Nicholas of Cusa, Francis of Assisi, Dominic, Ignatius, John of the Cross, Theresa of Avila, Francis de Sales, Vincent de Paul, and Therese of Lisieux, among others. None of these wrote works of criticism in se, they wrote spirituality. Countless books have been written about each of them, critically assessing their works. As valuable as these books are, they are in the end not spirituality books, but books about spirituality.

The same is true for theology. We have infinitely more books written about theology than we have books that are actual theology. The word “theology” comes from two Greek words, Theos (God) and logos (word). Hence, in essence, theology is “words about God”. Most theology books and courses on theology contain some “words about God”, but these are generally dwarfed by “words about words about God.”

This is not a criticism, but a clarification. I have taught and written in the area of theology and spirituality for nearly fifty years and am blissfully unaware of this distinction most of the time, mainly because we need both and the two simply flow in and out of each other. However, there is a point where it becomes important not to confuse or conflate the critical assessment of an artifact with the artifact itself, and in our case to recognize that writing about theology and spirituality is not the same thing as actually doing theology and doing spirituality.  Why? Why highlight this distinction?

Because we need the artist and the critic to speak to different places inside of us and we need to recognize (explicitly at times) where we need to be fed or guided. The artist speaks to the soul with one kind of intent, namely, to inspire, to inflame, to deepen, to bring new insight, and to move us affectively. The critic speaks with a different intent: to guide, to keep us balanced, sane, robust, clear-headed, and within the bounds of decency, community, proper aesthetics, and orthodoxy. Both are important. One saves the other from unbridled sentimentality and the other saves the other from simply being an empty exercise. In a vast over-simplification, we might put it this way. Critics define the rules of the game and hold the players to the rule; but art, theology, and spirituality are the game. Games need to be refereed or they quickly degenerate.

In our churches today there is often a tension between those who are trying to create new insight, generate new enthusiasm, and speak more affectively to the soul, and those who are guarding the castles of academia, orthodoxy, liturgy, and good taste. Academic theology is often in tension with devotional life, liturgists are often in tension with pastors, and popular spiritual writers are often in tension with critics. One or the other may irritate us, but each is ultimately a friend.

Recently NASA launched the James Webb Space Telescope into space, the biggest and most expensive telescope ever built. It will take six months for it to travel a million miles from the earth, find its permanent place in space, and then start transmitting pictures back to earth. Those pictures will be such as have never seen before. The hope is that it will enable us to see much further into space than we’ve ever seen before, ideally to the very ends of our still expanding universe, right to the first particles that issued forth from the original explosion, the Big Bang, that began time and our universe.

Scientists estimate that our universe began 13.7 billion years ago. As far as we know, prior to that there was nothing in existence, as we understand that today (except for God). Then, out of this seeming nothingness, there was an explosion (the Big Bang) out of which everything in the universe including our planet earth formed. As with any explosion, the parts that were the most intimately intertwined with the expelling force are those driven furthest away. Thus, when investigators try to determine the cause of an explosion they are particularly interested in finding and examining those pieces that were most closely tied to the original force of the explosion, and generally those pieces have been blown furthest away.

The force of the Big Bang is still going on and those parts of our universe that were most intimately intertwined with its beginnings are still being driven further and further into space.  Scientists are investigators, probing that original explosion. What the James Webb Space Telescope hopes to see is some of the original parts from that unimaginable explosion that gave birth to our universe because these parts were there at the very beginning, at the origins of everything that exists. By seeing and examining them, science hopes to better understand the origins of our universe.

Looking at the excitement scientists feel around this new telescope and their hopes that it will show us pictures of particles from the beginning of time, can help us understand why the Evangelist, John, has trouble restraining his enthusiasm when he talks about Jesus in his first Epistle. He is excited about Jesus because, among other things, Jesus was there at the beginnings of the universe and indeed at the beginnings of everything. For John, Jesus is a mystical telescope through which we might view that primordial explosion that created the universe, since he was there when it happened.

Let me risk paraphrasing the beginning of the First Epistle of John (1, 1-4) as he might have written it for our generation vis-a-vis our curiosity about the origins of our universe:

You need to understand of whom and what I am speaking:

Jesus wasn’t just some extraordinary person who performed a few miracles

or even who rose from the dead.

            We are speaking of someone who was there at the very origins of creation,

                        who himself is the foundation for that creation,

                        who was with God when “the Big Bang” occurred,

                        and even before that.

            Incredibly, we actually got to see him in the flesh, with human eyes,

                        the God who created “the Big Bang”, walking among us!

            We actually touched him bodily.

            We actually spoke with him and listened to him speak,

                        he who was there at the origins of our universe,

                        there when “the Big Bang” took place!

            Indeed, he is the One who pulled the switch to set it off,

                        with a plan in mind as to where it should go,

                        a plan that includes us.

Do you want to probe more deeply into what happened at our origins?

            Well, Jesus is a mystical telescope to look through.

            After all, he was there at the beginning

                        and unbelievably we got to see, hear, and touch him bodily!

            Excuse my exuberance, but

                        we got to walk and talk with someone who was there at the beginning of time.

There are different kinds of knowledge and different kinds of wisdom, along with different avenues for accessing each of them. Science is one of those avenues, an important one. For far too long theology and religion did not consider it a friend. That was (and remains) a tragic mistake since science has the same founder and same intent as theology and religion. Theology and religion have been wrong whenever they have sought to undercut science’s importance or its claims to truth. Sadly, science has often returned the favor and viewed theology and religion as a foe rather than as a colleague. The two need each other, not least in understanding the origins and intent of our universe.

How do we understand the origins and intent of our universe? Science and Jesus. Science is probing those origins in the interest of telling us how it happened and how it is unfolding, while Jesus (who was there when it happened) is more interested in telling us why it happened and what it means.

Jesus was born outside of the city, outside of a hospital, outside of a normal house. The Gospels tell us he was born in a stable, outside the city because there was no room for them in the inn.

We have always vilified the infamous innkeeper who turned Mary and Joseph away, and the lesson we took from this was the need for less self-preoccupation in our lives, that we should not be so busy and preoccupied that there’s no room for the divine to be born in our lives.

Indeed, there’s a lesson there, one I need for my own life. Given the pressures of the past few weeks, so far this year I haven’t had the chance to give Christmas more than a passing thought. No room in my inn right now! And so, I nurse a lot of sympathy for that original innkeeper, knowing how easily we can over-pack our lives so that there’s no room left to welcome in a divine visitor.

Now, while that’s an important challenge, biblical scholars suggest there’s a deeper lesson in the fact that Jesus was born in a stable outside the city because there was no room for him in the inn. The real point the Gospels are making is not so much the seeming callousness of an innkeeper, but rather the fact that Jesus was born outside of a city, outside of what’s comfortable, outside of glamour and fame, outside of being recognized by the rich and the powerful, outside of notice by the everyday world. Jesus was born in anonymity, poor, outside of all notice, except by faith and God.

His birth outside the city also foreshadowed his death and burial. Jesus’ earthly life will end as it began, as a stranger, an outsider, crucified outside the city, buried outside the city, just as he was born outside the city.

Thomas Merton once gave a particularly poignant comment on this: Into this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for Him at all, Christ has come uninvited. But because He cannot be at home in it, because He is out of place in it, and yet must be in it, His place is with those others for whom there is no room. His place is with those who do not belong, who are rejected by power because they are regarded as weak, those who are discredited, who are denied status as persons, who are tortured, bombed, and exterminated. With those for whom there is no room, Christ is present in the world. He is mysteriously present in those for whom there seems to be nothing but the world at its worst.

Jesus was born into this world unnoticed, outside the city, outside of all persons and events that seemed important at the time. Two thousand years later, we now recognize the importance of that birth. Indeed, the world measures time by it. We are in the year 2021 since that unnoticed birth. However, at the time, almost no one took notice.

What’s the lesson? What’s the takeaway?  Among other things, this is meant to give us a different perspective vis-à-vis what’s ultimately important in this world and what isn’t. Who ultimately shapes history? The big movers and shakers or those on the outside?

Biblically speaking, most of us were born outside the city, meaning that in our lives we will forever be the outsiders, unknowns, anonymous, small-time, small-town, persons who are incidental to the big picture and the big action. Our photo and our story will never grace the headlines. Our names will never be up in lights and we will live and die in basic anonymity, not known by many outside of our own small circles.

Most of us will live out our lives in quiet obscurity, in rural areas, in small towns, and in the unknown parts of our cities, watching the big events of our world from the outside and always seeing someone other than ourselves as important. We ourselves, seemingly, will remain forever unknown and our talents and contributions will not be particularly noticed by anyone, perhaps not even by our own families. Figuratively, we will always be “outside the city”. We will live, work, and give birth to love and life in humble places.

Perhaps most painful of all, we will know the frustration of being unable to truly give our talents and gifts over to the world, but will find instead that the deepest symphonies and melodies that live within us will never find much expression in the outside world. Our dreams and our deepest riches will never find much of an earthly stage. There will never be a place in the inn for what’s best in us to be born. Our deep riches, like Jesus’ birth in our world, will remain “outside the city”, ultimately dying by the martyrdom of anonymity and inadequate self- expression (also “outside the city”).

Mary gave birth to the Christ in a barn outside the city because there was no room in the inn. This is a comment on more than just the inhospitality of one over-stressed innkeeper. It’s an important teaching on how we need to assess what ultimately shapes life. In essence, it tells us that it’s not necessarily those who seemingly preside at the center of things (the powerful, the rich, the famous, the government leaders, the entertainment celebrities, the corporate heads, the scholars, the academics) who will have time measured by their lives. What’s deepest, most meaningful, and most important in life is often born in anonymity, unnoticed by the powerful, tenderly swaddled in faith, outside the city.

I could never be a literary critic, not because I can’t tell good literature from bad, but because I lack the hard edge. If I dislike a book, I hesitate to say so. Conversely, if I like a book, I tend to be more its cheerleader than its critical assessor. Be that as it may, I want to strongly endorse Ashlee Eiland’s new book, Human(Kind) – How Reclaiming Human Worth and Embracing Radical Kindness Will Bring Us Back Together.

This is not some sentimental, feel good book on how we need to be kind to each other. It’s more like a Sermon on the Mount for our time, or at least how we might work towards living the Sermon on the Mount. How do we remain soulful, warm, and human inside all the things that tend to unhealthily either inflate or embitter our hearts? Here’s how she describes her book.

“This is my story – a story of a black woman who grew up in the South and who discovered some wholeness and some holes along the way. As I looked back over my life, there were moments I remembered so vividly. Upon reflection, they were vivid because they mattered. They marked me in both beautiful and painful ways. But as I sat with these moments and memories, I realized they mattered because they taught me to be kind to my own worthy self. Recalling them helped me acknowledge the good gifts I’ve been given, the gifts I now hope to give to others, and enabled me to see the painful and hard moments as opportunities to be more fully human, to remind myself to receive grace where there’s been grievance.”

The book is a series of stories from her life, all of them told by a gifted storyteller and all of them written with an aesthetics that never sinks into sentimentality or self-pity. And they are stories both of being graced and being wounded. Eiland’s life has been one of contrasts.

On the one hand, her life has been one of privilege – loving parents, the opportunity for a first-rate education, never economically desperate, and always with a supportive family and community around her. On the other hand, she has lived as a black woman inside a world of injustice and inequality. She has had to live as one who must forever be conscious of the color of her skin, who every time she walks into a room needs to look around to see how many others like her are in the room. She also had to endure the ultimate racial slur being shouted in her face. And so, as she says, she has been deeply scarred both in beautiful and painful ways.

For example, one of her stories recounts an incident in which she went out to a restaurant with some Asian friends for a Korean specialty of pork dumplings. The evening went well and driving back from the restaurant and laughing with each other in the car, she felt a life-long weight lift from her. “For the first time, I didn’t feel as if I had to qualify the conversation with a reminder to my friends – or to myself – of my actual race. … Before that day, I felt I had to tiptoe out of one world into another. But that kind of posture, I realized, is laced with shame. It allows the ‘not fully enough’ narrative to run rampant, terrorizing what is oftentimes the best part about sharing our lives with one another.”

We need her narrative. We live in a time of bitterness and division, when civil discourse and respect have broken down, where we demonize each other, where injustice, inequality, and racism still define us more than their opposites, and where kindness is often seen as a weakness. Moreover, there is an ever-intensifying hypersensitivity where even a well-intended word is a potential landmine. Paranoia has replaced metanoia, bringing out the worst in us.

Ashlee Eiland gives us a formula for bringing out what is best in us. How do we react to injustice, offense, and demonization? For example, here is how she reacted after trying to be good to someone and being repaid for her effort by the ultimate racial taunt being hurled in her face: “Humiliated, I went about my day, doing as much good as I could for an afternoon … but knowing that sometimes even doing good is not enough. Sometimes we just have to sit with what’s hard and humiliating about the difficult work of unity and do our best not to let it kill us. Instead, we need to let it shape us in some other way that sobers us up and forces us to take off our rose-colored glasses, to admit that sometimes moving closer and trying to do good and closing the gaps between us and others doesn’t work out the way we want. But maybe it’s worth showing up anyway.”

Lacking the critical edge, I’m not always sure of what constitutes “soul music”, but I can still recognize “soul literature”.

Our greatest strength is often our greatest weakness. Sensitivity is a gift, but as any sensitive person will tell you, that gift can be a mixed blessing. Sometimes a thick, calloused skin can save you from a lot of suffering, particularly from heartache.

The popular spiritual writer Henri Nouwen was a highly sensitive person. That was both his gift and his curse. He suffered a lot because of his sensitivity. For instance, several times he fell hopelessly in love with someone, but because he was a vowed celibate and because those deep feelings were not mutual, he was left alone in that obsession, frustrated, emotionally paralyzed. These obsessive feelings so overpowered him that (to his honesty and to his credit) he sought clinical help. By his own admission, those were the darkest and most painful periods in his life.

There are many like him in this world and there is someone like him inside everyone who is highly sensitive. Indeed, one of Nouwen’s heroes was the famed Dutch painter, Vincent Van Gogh, who suffered from acute over-sensitivity for much of his life and at one point, suffering from an emotional obsession in love, cut off one of his ears and sent it to the person with whom he was obsessed. Another person who Nouwen idolized was the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, whose personal loneliness deeply colored his religious and philosophical writings. It’s no accident that so many highly creative persons (artists, writers, performers) are often caught in the grip of emotional obsession. I suspect that this is true for all of us to some degree.

What’s to be done when some emotional obsession literally paralyzes us?

I have twice posed this question to psychologists. In the first instance, it was to the renowned Dutch psychologist Antone Vergote. I twice had the privilege of being in his classroom and in one of those classes, I asked him this question. How do you help a person who is so paralyzed by some heartache or other pain that it leaves him or her suicidal? His response was humble. He began by saying this is singularly the most difficult situation we will ever deal with, inside ourselves, inside our families and friendships, and inside pastoral and counseling situations. He admitted that psychology was still grappling with what a helpful response might be and suggested that we might find some enlightening perspectives by reading the great novelists.

Then he offered this: emotional obsession is a form of over-concentration, a fixation that holds us in its grip until we somehow break its spell. What can be helpful (if anything can be helpful) is distraction, anything that can take that person’s mind off its fixation. This may sound crass, especially when our perennial religious counsel has been “take your troubles to the chapel”.  Shouldn’t prayer be the answer? Yes, it should, but that too has its dangers. If you are in the paralyzing grip of an obsession, alone in a chapel might be the last place you need to be. Alone and emotionally paralyzed, the darkness might well overpower you. In our darkest moments, it’s the incarnate God, the human touch of God through the care of someone, which constitutes the real chapel to which we need to go.

The second psychologist to whom I posed this question added this piece of advice. Never stay in this kind of darkness alone. Indeed, never enter it alone. Be with somebody – a friend, a mentor, a doctor, a guide, a fellow-sufferer, anyone. I remember an occasion some years ago when a young man came to me in the grips of this kind of obsession and suggested that he wanted to do was to drive off by himself into the mountains, rent a cabin, and “think this through”. I strongly advised him that it was the last thing he should do, in that being alone and isolated with his obsession would be dangerous. What he needed, I suggested, were things that could distract him – his work, his friends, his routines, his normal escapes.

Not everyone is Jesus who went into the darkness of his crucifixion alone. Except, except, he wasn’t alone. He was with his Father. If we trust our faith strongly enough to know that, respective of anything, we will know that God is there for us, then we can risk entering the darkness alone. Then we can take our emotional paralysis to the chapel and to remote cabins in the mountains. However, if we fear how our wounded selves might render us helpless and suicidal, we will want to hold fast to the hand of a trusted friend and look for any kind of distraction that can break the obsession paralyzing us.

On one of those occasions when Henri Nouwen had checked himself into a clinic for depression, he wrote a book, The Inner Voice of Love, to share how eventually he did cope. What he ultimately learned is that our hearts are greater than our wounds; but we don’t always know that in the darkness.