Under a Bridge in Austin

September 6, 2021

Recently at a workshop, a woman shared her anxiety about the death of her brother. Her older brother had died from the Covid virus before there were vaccines for it, and had died because he had dangerously exposed himself to catching the virus. However, he had exposed himself to that danger for a worthy reason. A military veteran, living alone, he used much of his salary and savings to cook meals and take them to feed homeless people living under a bridge in his hometown, Austin, Texas.

That certainly seems like a noble, Christian death, except that in his adult life he had lost any explicit faith in God and in Jesus, and self-defined as an agnostic (though with no antipathy towards religion). He simply didn’t believe in God or go to church anymore. His sister who shared this story, loved him deeply, admired his feeding the homeless, but worried about his dying outside of an explicit faith and the church. Her anxiety was compounded by her other brother, a Christian fundamentalist, who is firm in the belief that dying outside of the church puts one eternally outside of salvation; in brief, you end up in hell. At a gut-level, his sister knew that this could not be true. Still she was anxious about it and wanted some assurances that her fundamentalist brother was wrong and that her anxiety about her brother’s eternal salvation was a false fear.

What does one say in the face of that? A number of things might be said. First, that the God who Jesus incarnated and revealed is a God who is in every way the antithesis of fundamentalism and of this sort of false fear about salvation. Jesus assures us that God reads the heart in all its complexity, including its existential complexity. A fundamentalist reads only a written rubric, not the goodness of a heart. As well, scripture describes God as ‘a jealous God’. This doesn’t mean God gets jealous and angry when we are preoccupied with our own things or when we betray God through weakness and sin. Rather, it means that God, like a solicitous parent, never wants to lose us and seeks every possible means to keep us for slipping away and hurting ourselves. Moreover, in the abstract language of academic theology, God has a universal will for salvation, and that means for everyone, including agnostics and atheists.

More specifically, Jesus gives us three interpenetrating perspectives that expose the narrowness of all fundamentalist thinking regarding who goes to heaven and who goes to hell.

First, he gives us a parable of a man who has two sons and he asks them both to work in his field. The first son says that he will not do it, but in fact ends up doing it; the second son says he will do the work, but ends up not doing it. Which is the true son? The answer is obvious, but Jesus reinforces the parable with this comment: It is not necessarily those who say ‘Lord, Lord’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but those who do the will of God on earth.

What this parable highlights is what theologians (from John Henry Newman through Karl Rahner) have tried to teach, namely, that someone can have a notional faith that in fact rings hollow in the light of true faith. Conversely, someone can explicitly deny what we hold in our notion of faith and yet in the light of what a genuine faith demands, have real faith since this is not necessarily manifest in one’s notion of faith but in the fruits of one’s life.

As well, we have Jesus’ shocking warning in Matthew 25 about how we ultimately will be judged for heaven or hell, namely, on whether or not we served the poor. This warning does not suggest that explicit faith and church attendance are of no consequence; they have their importance, but it is warning that there are things that are more important.

Finally, and perhaps most far-reaching in this regard, Jesus gives us the power to bind and loose. As parts of the Body of Christ, our love, like Jesus’ love, keeps a loved one connected to the community of salvation. As Gabriel Marcel puts it, to love someone is to say, you can never be lost. This woman’s love for her brother assures that he is not in hell.

All of this I might have said, but instead I simply referred to a wonderful quote from Charles Peguy the noted French poet and essayist. Peguy once suggested that when we die and appear before God, each of us will be asked this one question: “Where are the others?” (“Ou sont les autres?”). I assured the anxious woman she need not worry about her brother’s eternal salvation, despite his dying outside of an explicit faith and the church. When he stood before God and was asked the question (Where are the others?) he had a very good answer: They are under a bridge in Austin.

Different Ways of Being Spiritual but Not Religious

August 30, 2021

Nothing so much approximates the language of God as does silence. Meister Eckhart said that.

Among other things, he is affirming that there is some deep inner work that can only be done in silence, alone, in private.

He’s right of course, but there’s another side to this. While there is some deep inner work that can only be done in silence, there is also some deep, critical, soul work that can only be done with others, in relationship, in family, in church, and in society. Silence can be a privileged avenue to depth of soul. It can also be dangerous. Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, lived in silence, alone, as have many other deeply disturbed individuals. Mental health professionals tell us that we need interaction with other people to keep us sane. Social interaction grounds us, balances us, and anchors our sanity. I look at some of our young people today who are interacting with others (in person and through social media) every hour of their waking lives and worry for their depth, though not for their sanity.

We need each other. Jean-Paul Sartre once famously stated, “hell is the other person”. He couldn’t be more misguided. In the end, the other is heaven, the salvation for which we are ultimately destined. Utter aloneness is hell. Moreover, this malevolent aloneness can sneak up on you wearing the best altruistic and religious disguises.

Here’s an example: I grew up in a very close-knit family in a small rural community where family, neighbor, parish, and being with others meant everything, where everything was shared, and you were rarely alone. I feared being alone, avoided it, and was only comfortable when I was with others.

Immediately after high school, I joined a religious order, the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, and for the next eight years lived in a large community where, again, most everything was shared and one was seldom alone. As I approached final vows and permanent commitment to religious life and priesthood, what I feared most was the vow of celibacy, the loneliness it would bring. No wife, no children, no family, the isolation of a celibate life.

Things turned out very differently. Celibacy has had its cost, admittedly; and admittedly it is not the normal life God intended for everyone. However, the loneliness I feared (but for brief moments) seldom ensued – the opposite. I found my life overly full of relationships, interaction with others, flat-out busyness, daily pressures, and commitments that took up virtually every waking hour. Rather than feeling lonely, I found myself almost habitually longing for solitude, for quiet, to be alone, and I grew quite comfortable with being alone. Too comfortable in fact.

For most of the years of my priesthood, I have lived in large religious communities and they, like any family, have their demands. However, when I became president of a School of Theology, I was assigned to live in a house designated for the president and for a period of time lived alone. At first, I found it a bit disorienting, never having lived alone before; but after a while it grew on me. I really liked it. No responsibilities at home to anyone but myself.

Soon enough though, I perceived its dangers. After one year I ended the arrangement. One of the dangers of living alone and one of the dangers of celibacy, even if you are living faithfully, is that you don’t have others to call you out daily and put every kind of demand on you. You get to call your own shots and can avoid much of what Dorothy Day called “the asceticism of living inside a family”. When you live alone, you can too easily plan and live life on your own terms, cherry-picking those parts of family and community that benefit you and avoiding the difficult parts.

There are certain things that begin as virtues then easily turn into a vice. Busyness is an example. You sacrifice being with your family in order to support them by your work and that keeps you from many of its activities. Initially, this is a sacrifice – eventually, it’s an escape, an inbuilt dispensation from having to deal with certain issues inside family life. Vowed celibacy and priesthood court that same danger.

We all know the expression, I am spiritual but not religious (which we apply to people who are open to dealing with God but not open to dealing with church). However, we struggle with this in more ways than we might think. At least I do. As a vowed, celibate priest, I can be spiritual but not religious in that, for the highest of reasons, I can avoid much of the daily asceticism demanded of someone living in a family. However, this is a danger for all of us, celibate or married. When, for every kind of good reason we can cherry-pick those parts of family and community we like and avoid those parts we find difficult, we are spiritual but not religious.

The Fading of Forgiveness

August 23, 2021

In a recent issue of Comment Magazine, Timothy Keller, theologian and pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, wrote an insightful essay entitled, The Fading of Forgiveness, within which he highlights how, more and more, forgiveness is being seen as a weakness and a naivete.

He begins by pointing to a couple of highly publicized incidents of forgiveness. In 2015, Dylann Roof shot nine members inside an African American church in South Carolina and was publicly forgiven by the relatives of his victims. And in 2006, when a gunman shot ten Amish children in a school room in Pennsylvania and then killed himself, the Amish community there not only forgave him, they went to visit his family and expressed sympathies to them for their loss. What was the general response? Admiration for extraordinary selflessness and virtue? No, not that. More generally, these instances of forgiveness were judged as naïve fundamentalism and as unhelpful. Why? Why would these instances not be recognized instead both for what is most noble within humanity and for what is highest within religious virtue?

Keller suggests that there are a number of reasons for this, but he singles out two in particular. We are a “therapeutic culture” (where only our own truth and feelings matter) and a culture that has a “religion without grace” (its vision and virtue go no further than what echoes in our emotions and willpower). Hence, our culture sees forgiveness more negatively than positively. For it, forgiveness allows oppression to maintain its power and thus permits the cycle of violence and abuse to go on. Like a family refusing to stand up to an alcoholic member, it enables rather than stops the abuse and allows a sick situation to continue. Forgiveness then is a further injustice to the one who has been violated and can lead to a form of self-loathing, an acceptance of a humiliation destructive of one’s self-image, a further loss of dignity. Moreover, the moral pressure to forgive can be a further burden on the victim and an easy escape for the perpetrator. Is this logic correct?

From a purely emotional point of view, yes, it feels right; but it is wrong when scrutinized more deeply. First, it is evident that vindictiveness will only produce more vindictiveness. Vindictiveness will never soften a heart and help change it. Only forgiveness (analogous to dialysis) can take violence and hatred out of a relationship. As well, in the words of Martin Luther King, anyone devoid of the power of forgiveness is also devoid of the power of love. Why? Because each of us will get hurt by others and will hurt others in every one of our relationships. That is the price of community inside human inadequacy. Hence, relationships at every level, personal and social, can only sustain themselves long term if there is forgiveness.

Moreover, with Jesus, forgiveness becomes singularly the most important of all virtues. It decides whether we go to heaven or not. As Jesus tells us when he gives us the Lord’s Prayer, if we cannot forgive others, God will not be able to forgive us. Why? Because the banquet table, eternal community of life, is only open to everyone who is willing to sit down with everyone. God cannot change this. Only we can open our hearts sufficiently to sit down with everyone.

Recently, given some of our ecclesial infighting, various groups have attempted to single out one specific moral issue as a litmus test for Christian discipleship. For many, this litmus test is abortion; others pick church attendance or some other issue. What might serve as a litmus test for Christian discipleship? Precisely this: the willingness to forgive. Can I forgive someone who has wronged me? Can I forgive someone whom I hate and who hates me? That challenge lies most central in Jesus’ teaching.

That being said, it must also be said that forgiveness is not simple or easy. That is why in the Judeo-Christian spirituality of Sabbath, there is a (too-little-known) spirituality of forgiveness. As we know, the command to celebrate Sabbath asks us to honor this cycle in our lives: Work for six days – rest for one day. Work for 7 years – rest for one year. Work of seven times seven (forty-nine) years – have a major rest (sabbatical). Work for a lifetime – and then be on sabbatical for eternity.

Well that is also the cycle for forgiveness. In the spirituality of Sabbath: You may hold a minor grudge for six days – then you need let it go. You may hold a major grudge for seven years – then you need to let it go. You may hold a soul-searing grudge for forty-nine years – then you need to let it go. You may hold a grudge that ruined your life until your deathbed – then you need to let it go. That is the final Christian moral imperative. Desmond Tutu once said, “without forgiveness there is no future”. True – on both sides of eternity.

The Richness of the Eucharist

August 16, 2021

What is the Eucharist? What is supposed to happen when we gather to celebrate the ritual that Jesus gave us at the Last Supper and asked us to perpetuate until his return? Is this meant to be a family meal or a re-enactment of Jesus’ sacrificial death? Is it meant to look like the old Latin mass or like it looks in most churches today?

There are no simple answers to these questions because there is no one theology (to the exclusion of all others) of the Eucharist, even in the New Testament. Rather there are various theologies of the Eucharist, complementary to be sure, but each emphasizing different aspects of a reality that is too rich to capture in a single concept. What is the Eucharist?

In essence, the Eucharist is a reality with these interpenetrating dimensions.

The Eucharist is God’s physical embrace of us. Without the Eucharist, as Andre Dubus asserts, God becomes a monologue. The Eucharist is where God touches us physically. It is the place where God is still taking on physical flesh.
The Eucharist is a meal we share together. The Last Supper was many things, but it was also a meal, a time of human fellowship, a celebration at table. So too for the Eucharist, it is many things, but it is also a table for a family to gather around, where joy can be shared and where it is safe to break down in sorrow.
The Eucharist is an intensification of our union with each other inside the Body of Christ. As disciples of Jesus, we too constitute the Body of Christ. At a Eucharist, not just the bread and wine are meant to be changed into the body and blood of Christ, so too we, the people. That is why St. Augustine, when giving out communion, would sometimes say, “Receive what you are.”
The Eucharist is a sacrifice. It is a making memorial (Zikkaron) of the saving event of Jesus’ death. In short, it is the Christian Passover supper. The Eucharistic prayer does not just ask God to change the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, it also asks God to make the saving event of Jesus’ death available for us to participate within today.
The Eucharist is the new manna. Just as God fed his people in the desert with manna each day, so now, daily, God feeds his people with bread from heaven. (This motif is particularly strong in John’s Gospel.)
The Eucharist is a vigil act. Jesus told us to celebrate the Eucharist so as to wait for his return. We celebrate Eucharist as a vigil. As Gerhard Lohfink puts it: “The early apostolic communities cannot be understood outside of the matrix of intense expectation. They were communities imminently awaiting Christ’s return. They gathered in Eucharist, among other reasons, to foster and sustain this awareness, namely, that they were living in wait, waiting for Christ’s return.” At the Eucharist, we meet with each other in vigil to stay awake for Jesus’ return.
The Eucharist is a washing of each other’s feet. The Gospel of John does not mention bread and wine at the Last Supper; instead, where the other Evangelists and St. Paul highlight Jesus changing the bread and wine into his body and blood, John substitutes a basin and towel for the bread and wine. Why? Among other reasons, to teach that this kind of humble action towards each other, washing each other’s feet, is one of the major meanings of the Eucharist.
The Eucharist is a prayer for the world, making Christ’s flesh food for the life of the world. It is a prayer for God’s help for the whole world. Akin to a “Quaker Silence”, it brings the helplessness of the world to God and asks God to do for it what it cannot do for itself -bring about peace and justice.
The Eucharist is a sacrament of reconciliation and forgiveness. We go to Eucharist to have our sins forgiven, to be as sinners at table with Jesus.
Finally, the Eucharist is the ultimate religious ritual through which we sustain ourselves in faith, discipleship, and community. We gather for Eucharist in order to stay alive. A Eucharist gathering is analogous to an Alcoholics’ Anonymous meeting. We gather because without this regular ritual gathering, our faith, discipleship, and community would eventually fall apart. In the words of Ronald Knox, the Eucharist is our one great act of fidelity to Jesus. Truth be told, we are not ever really faithful to the Gospels; we don’t love our enemies and don’t turn the other cheek, but we are faithful in one major way, we keep the Eucharist going – and that single act is going to save us.

Complexity and Paradox

August 9, 2021

Reading the Letters of Dorothy Day recently, I ran into this line, “doubtless we need a Savonarola as well as a St. Francis.” She was speaking about what spirituality needs in order to be healthy and balanced. That triggered something inside me, something I have never been able to sort out. I have always been comfortable, perhaps too much so, in both circles of piety and circles of iconoclasm. I’m drawn to the warmth of the Sacred Heart even as I am stimulated by Nietzsche, and I see Merton’s raw sense of humor as issuing forth from the same unique place within him as his faith, one leaning on the other.

One of my favorite spiritual writers is the Italian monk and hermit, Carlo Carretto. When you are reading a Carretto book, you are never sure what you will meet next in terms of either piety or its (seeming) opposite. On one page, he might be offering a handmade toy to the Blessed Virgin Mary to give the infant Jesus and a page or two later he will be offering a blistering critique of clericalism or calling on the Pope to shut present-day seminaries because he believes those training for the priesthood should be living with everyday families. Many of us are familiar with his “Ode to the Church” within which both his piety and his iconoclasm are manifest.

How much I must criticize you, my church and yet how much I love you!
How you have made me suffer much and yet owe much to you.
I should like to see you destroyed and yet I need your presence.
You have given me much scandal and yet you alone have made me understand holiness.
Never in this world have I seen anything more obscurantist, more compromised, more false, and yet never in this world have I touched anything more pure, more generous, and more beautiful.
Many times I have felt like slamming the door of my soul in your face – and yet how often I have prayed that I might die in your sure arms!

Not many spiritual writers have this range on their keyboard. As Ernst Kasemann once said, the problem in the church and in the world is that the pious are not liberal and the liberal are not pious. Carretto was both. He could love the church, fiercely, piously, with childlike devotion, even as inside of that very devotion he could critically acknowledge and speak out against her faults. That’s a rare capacity, seen in some saints.

Dorothy Day, not unlike Carretto, was an exceptionally pious woman, a unanimity-minus-one defender of chastity in the circles she moved in, and a woman who believed that reverence was a non-negotiable moral virtue. Yet, like Carretto, she could be blistering in her criticism of piety whenever it was blind to injustice, racism, violence, and war. Small wonder her favorite saint was Therese of Lisieux, a pious nun tucked away in an obscure convent in France, writing mystical treatises on how much Jesus loves us.

Moreover, that patron saint Therese was herself a wonderful example of a piety that can look saccharine and yet have a disarming capacity for critical insight. Therese of Lisieux is the same person who, while posturing in her writings as a little girl, someone of no consequence, the Little Flower, can pivot radically and suddenly become the wise, aged Sophia, dishing out hard spiritual counsel: “Be careful not to seek yourself in love, you will end up with a broken heart that way. I felt it more valuable to speak to God rather than to speak about Him, for there is so much self-love intermingled with spiritual conversations. There are no miracles, no raptures, no ecstasies – only service.” Therese had a keyboard that could play very diverse melodies.

The late Irish biblical scholar Jerome Murphy-O’Connor used say (partially tongue in cheek) that consistency is the product of small minds. What he was highlighting of course was that great minds aren’t simple, that they know the importance of nuance, that they don’t work in terms of black and white, that they can hold things in tension without prematurely resolving that, and that they can shock you equally in their capacity for reverence and for iconoclasm.

Jesus fits that description. He scandalized his contemporaries and continues to scandalize us with what seem like inconsistencies, but are really the capacity of a great mind and heart to hold truth in paradox, in tension. Small wonder there are so many Christian denominations today. We, his followers, cannot hold the whole truth together as he did and so we live out pieces of it rather than the whole Gospel. The same might be said for other great figures in history, like St. Augustine, who is cited alternately as the root for both orthodoxy and heresy in theology.

There are indeed real contradictions and genuine inconsistencies; but there is also the paradox seen in great minds, minds who know exactly when to honor an icon and when to smash it.

Who is Close to God’s Heart?

August 2, 2021

Who has God’s sympathy? For whom especially should we be praying? For whom should we be asking God’s blessing?

We are in the middle of the Olympic Games. What we see there are the healthiest bodies in the world, beautifully adorned with colorful spandex and youthful smiles. The Olympic Games are a celebration of health. Whatever else might surround or lie underneath these games (commercialism, ambition, illegal drugs, whatever) our first reaction to them may only be one of blessing: “Wow! Beautiful! This says something wonderful about life and about God.”

Moreover, what we see there are not just the athletes. They are surrounded by spectacular billion dollar venues, a host country showcasing its finest, television networks sending out colorful coverage around the world, and everywhere the carefully calculated display of youth, health, beauty, and affluence, as if it were these alone that made the world go round.

Sadly, health, beauty, and affluence are not born equally, distributed equally, and shared equally. Flip a channel or two on your television and you see the polar opposite: news channels replete with images of suffering, poverty, injustice, hunger, devastation, millions fleeing violence, millions living in squalor, and millions living with little hope on our borders everywhere. And, that’s just what we see openly on the news. What we don’t see are the millions of sick, the millions of unemployed, the millions who are victims of violence and abuse, the millions with physical and mental challenges of every kind, and the millions with terminal diseases facing imminent death. What do these lives and these bodies say matched against the lives and bodies of our Olympic athletes? A good question.

How does one assess this seemingly bitter contrast between what we see in the Olympic Games and what we see on world news? Where does this leave us in terms of our prayer and sympathy? Does the suffering of the poor so spiritually dwarf the health of the rich that our hearts and prayers are meant to embrace only the poor? If so, would this not cast negative light on the wonderful gifts of health and wholeness?

We can learn something here from the offertory prayers at a Eucharist. At a Eucharist, the priest offers two elements to God to represent bread, wine, and us asking God to bless each equally. They represent two very different aspects of our world and of our lives. To quote Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: “In a sense the true substance to be consecrated each day is the world’s development during that day – the bread symbolizing appropriately what creation succeeds in producing, the wine (blood) what creation causes to be lost in exhaustion and suffering in the course of that effort.”

In essence, the offertory prayer asks for a double blessing, God of all Creation, we hold up for you today all that is in this world, both of joy and of suffering. We offer you the bread of the world’s achievements, even as we offer you the wine of its failure, the blood of all that’s crushed as those achievements take place. We offer you the powerful of our world, our rich, our famous, our athletes, our artists, our movie stars, our entrepreneurs, our young, our healthy, and everything that’s creative and bursting with life, even as we offer you those who are weak, feeble, aged, crushed, sick, dying, and victimized. We offer to you all the pagan beauties, pleasures, and joys of this life, even as we stand with you under the cross, affirming that the one who is excluded from earthily pleasure is the cornerstone of the community. We offer you the strong, along with the weak, asking you to bless both and then stretch our hearts so that they, like you, can hold and bless everything that is. We offer you both the wonders and the pains of this world, your world.”

God has a preferential love for the poor, the suffering, the sick, and the weak, and so must we. Our faith assures us that the poor enter the Kingdom more easily than the rich and the strong. However, while that is true, this does not imply that somehow it is bad to be affluent, healthy and strong. These bring dangers, for sure. Being young, healthy, strong, physically attractive, and talented is often (though not always) a formula for a conceit that sees its own life as more special than the lives of others. Few people carry extraordinary gifts well.

Despite that, however, we must still affirm that God smiles, positively, with pride and with satisfaction, on vibrancy, on those places where life is flourishing, healthy, young, talented, and physically attractive. God smiles on our Olympic athletes. God’s preferential love for the poor doesn’t negate God’s love for the strong. Like a good parent, God is proud of his over-talented children, even as there is a special affection for the child who is suffering.

At every Eucharist, we hold up both, our Olympic athletes and our refugees on our borders.

Can We Prove that God Exists?

July 26, 2021

I wrote my doctoral thesis on the value of various philosophical arguments that try to prove the existence of God. Can there be such a proof? Brilliant philosophers, from Anselm, through Aquinas, through Descartes, through contemporary intellectuals like Charles Hartshorne, submit that the existence of God can be proven through rational argument. Except, except, a lot depends upon what exactly we mean by the word “prove”. How do we prove something?

There’s a legend about St. Christopher that’s pertinent here: Christopher was a man gifted in every way, except faith. He was physically strong, powerful, goodhearted, mellow, and well liked. He was also generous, using his physical strength to help others, but he found it hard to believe in God, even though he wanted to. For him, the physical was what was real and everything else seemed unreal. And so, as the legend goes, he lived his life in a certain honest agnosticism, unable to really believe in anything beyond what he could physically see, feel, and touch.

However, this did not prevent him from using his gifts, especially his physical strength, to serve others. This was his refuge, generosity and service. He became a ferryboat operator, spending his life helping to carry people across a dangerous river. One night, as the legend goes, during a storm, the ferryboat capsized and Christopher dove into the dark waters to rescue a young child. Carrying that child to the shore, he looked into its face and saw there the face of Christ. After that, he believed for he had seen the face of Christ.

For all its piety, this legend contains a profound lesson. It changes the perspective on the question of how one tries to “prove” God’s existence. Our attempt to prove God’s existence has to be practical, existential, and incarnate rather than mainly intellectual. How do we move from believing only in the physical, from believing only in the reality of what we can see, feel, touch, taste, and smell, to believing in the existence of deeper, spiritual realities?

There’s lesson in the Christopher story: Live as honestly and respectfully as you can and use your gifts to help others. God will appear. God is not found at the conclusion of a philosophical syllogism but as the result of a certain way of living. Moreover, faith is not so much a question of feeling as of selfless service.

There’s a further lesson in the biblical account of the apostle, Thomas, and his doubt about the resurrection of Jesus. Remember his protest: “Unless I can (physically) place my finger in the wounds of his hands and stick my finger into the wound of his side, I will not believe.” Note that Jesus offers no resistance or rebuke in the face of Thomas’ skepticism. Instead, he takes Thomas at his word: “Come and (physically) place your finger in the wounds of my hand and the wound in my side; see for yourself that I am real and not a ghost.”

That’s the open challenge for us: “Come and see for yourselves that God is real and not a ghost!” That challenge, however, is not so much an intellectual one as a moral one, a challenge to be honest and generous.

Skepticism and agnosticism, even atheism, are not a problem as long as one is honest, non-rationalizing, non-lying, ready to efface oneself before reality as it appears, and generous in giving his or her life away in service. If these conditions are met, God, the author and source of all reality, eventually becomes sufficiently real, even to those who need physical proof. The stories of Christopher and Thomas teach us this and assure us that God is neither angered nor threatened by an honest agnosticism.

Faith is never certainty. Neither is it a sure feeling that God exists. Conversely, unbelief is not to be confused with the absence of the felt assurance that God exists. For everyone, there will be dark nights of the soul, silences of God, cold lonely seasons, skeptical times when God’s reality cannot be consciously grasped or recognized. The history of faith, as witnessed by the life of Jesus and the lives of the saints, shows us that God often seems dead and, at those times, the reality of the empirical world can so overpower us that nothing seems real except what we can see and feel right now, not least our own pain.

Whenever this happens, like Christopher and Thomas, we need to become honest agnostics who use our goodness and God-given strengths to help carry others across the burdensome rivers of life. God does not ask us to have a faith that is certain, but a service that is generous and sustained. We have the assurance that should we faithfully help carry others, we will one day find ourselves before the reality of God who will gently say to us: “See for yourself, that I am real, and not a ghost.”

Can we prove that God exists? In theory, no; in life, yes.

Bruised and Wounded – Understanding Suicide

July 18, 2021

Some things need to be said and said and said again until they don’t need to be said anymore. Margaret Atwood wrote that. I quote it here because each year I write a column on suicide and mostly say the same thing each time because certain things need to be said repeatedly about suicide until we have a better understanding of it.

What needs to be said again and again?

First, that suicide is a disease, something that in most cases takes a person out of life against his or her will, the emotional equivalent of cancer, a stroke, or a heart attack.
Second, that we, the loved ones who remain, should not spend undue time and energy second-guessing as to how we might have failed that person, what we should have noticed, and what we might still have done to prevent the suicide. Suicide is an illness and, as with a purely physical disease, we can love someone and still not be able to save him or her from death. God also loved this person and shared our helplessness in trying to help him or her.
We need a better understanding of mental health. The fact is that not everyone has the internal circuits to allow them the sustained capacity for steadiness and buoyancy. One’s mental health is parallel to one’s physical health, fragile, and not fully within one’s control. Moreover just as diabetes, arthritis, cancer, stroke, heart attacks, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and multiple sclerosis, can cause debilitation and death; so too can mental diseases wreak havoc, also causing every kind of debilitation and sometimes death by suicide.
The potential role that biochemistry plays in suicide needs more exploration. If some suicidal depressions are treatable by drugs, clearly then some suicides are caused by biochemical deficiencies, as are many other diseases that kill us.
Almost invariably, the person who dies by suicide is a very sensitive human being. Suicide is rarely done in arrogance, as an act of contempt. There are of course examples of persons who are too proud to endure normal human contingency and kill themselves out of arrogance, but that’s a very different kind of suicide, not the kind that most of us have seen in a loved one. Generally, our experience with the loved ones that we have lost to suicide was that these persons were anything but arrogant. Rather, they were too bruised to touch and were wounded in some deep way that we could not comprehend or help heal. Indeed, often times when sufficient time has passed after their deaths, in retrospect, we get some sense of their wound and their suicide then no longer seems as surprising. There’s a clear distinction between being too bruised to continue to touch life and being too proud to continue to take one’s place within it. Only the latter makes a moral statement, insults the flowers, and challenges the mercy of God.
Suicide is often the desperate plea of a soul in pain. The soul can make claims that go against the body and suicide is often that.
We need to forgive ourselves if we feel angry with our loved ones who end their lives in this way. Don’t feel guilty about feeling angry; that’s a natural, understandable response when a loved one dies by suicide.
We need to work at redeeming the memory of our loved ones who die by suicide. The manner of their death may not become a prism through which we now see their lives, as if this manner of death colors everything about them. Don’t take down photos of them and speak of them and their deaths in hushed terms any more than if they had died by cancer or a heart attack. It’s hard to lose loved ones to suicide, but we should not also lose the truth and warmth of their mystery and their memory.
Finally, we shouldn’t worry about how God meets our loved one on the other side. God’s love, unlike ours, can go through locked doors, descend into hell, and breathe out peace where we cannot. Most people who die by suicide awake on the other side to find Christ standing inside their locked doors, inside the center of their chaos, gently saying, “Peace be with you!” God’s understanding and compassion infinitely surpass our own. Our lost loved ones are in safer hands than ours. If we, limited as we are, can already reach through this tragedy with some understanding and love, we can rest secure that, given the width and depth of God’s love, the one who dies through suicide meets, on the other side, a compassion that’s deeper than our own and an understanding that surpasses ours.

Julian of Norwich says, in the end all will be well, and all will be well, and every manner of being will be well. I shall be, even after suicide. God can, and does, go through locked doors and, once there, breathes out peace inside a tortured, huddled heart.

Why Stay in the Church?

July 12, 2021

Several weeks ago after giving a lecture at a religious conference, the first question from the audience was this one: How can you continue to stay in a church that played such a pivotal part in setting up and maintaining residential schools for the indigenous people of Canada? How can you stay in a church that did that?

The question is legitimate and important. Both in its history and in its present, the church has enough sin to legitimize the question. The list of sins done in the name of the church is long: the Inquisition, its support for slavery, its role in colonialism, its link to racism, its role in thwarting women’s rights, and its endless historical and present compromises with white supremacy, big money, and political power. Its critics are sometimes excessive and unbalanced, but, for the most part, the church is guilty as charged.

However, this guilt isn’t unique to the church. The same charges might be leveled against any of the countries in which we live. How can we stay in a country that has a history of racism, slavery, colonialism, genocide of some of its indigenous peoples, radical inequality between its rich and its poor, one that is callous to desperate refugees on its borders, and one within which millions of people hate each other? Isn’t it being rather selective morally to say that I am ashamed to be a Catholic (or a Christian) when the nations we live in share the same history and the same sins?

Still, since the church is supposed to be leaven for a society and not just a mirror of it, the question is valid. Why stay in the church? There are good apologetic answers on this, but, at the end of the day, for each of us, the answer has to be a personal one. Why do I stay in the church?

First, because the church is my mother tongue. It gave me the faith, taught me about God, gave me God’s word, taught me to pray, gave me the sacraments, showed me what virtue looks like, and put me in contact with some living saints. Moreover, despite all its shortcomings, it was for me authentic enough, altruistic enough, and pure enough to have the moral authority to ask me to entrust my soul to it, a trust I’ve not given any other communal entity. I’m very comfortable worshipping with other religions and sharing soul with non-believers, but in the church in which I was raised, I recognize home, my mother tongue.

Second, the church’s history is not univocal. I recognize its sins and openly acknowledge them, but that’s far from its full reality. The church is also the church of martyrs, of saints, of infinite generosity, and of millions of women and men with big, noble hearts who are my moral exemplars. I stand in the darkness of its sins; but I also stand in the light of its grace, of all the good things it has done in history.

Finally, and most important, I stay in the church because the church is all we’ve got! There’s no other place to go. I identify with the ambivalent feeling that rushed through Peter when, just after hearing Jesus say something which had everyone else walk away from him, Peter was asked, “do you want to walk away too?” and he (speaking for all the disciples) replied: “We’d like to, but we have no place else to go. Besides we recognize that, despite everything, you still have the words of everlasting life.”

In essence, Peter is saying, “Jesus, we don’t get you, and what we get we often don’t like. But we know we’re better off not getting it with you than going any place else. Dark moments notwithstanding, you’re all we’ve got!”

The church is all we’ve got! Where else can we go? Behind the expression, I am spiritual, but not religious (however sincerely uttered) lies either an invincible failure or a culpable reluctance to deal with the necessity of religious community, to deal with what Dorothy Day called “the asceticism of church life”. To say, I cannot or will not deal with an impure religious community is an escape, a self-serving exit, which at the end of the day is not very helpful, not least for the person saying it. Why? Because for compassion to be effective it needs to be collective, given the truth that what we dream alone remains a dream but what we dream with others can become a reality. I cannot see anything outside the church that can save this world.

There is no pure church anywhere for us to join, just as there is no pure country anywhere for us in which to live. This church, for all its checkered history and compromised present, is all we have. We need to own its faults since they are our faults. Its history is our history; its sin, our sin; and its family, our family – the only lasting family we’ve got.

What’s Inside the Face of God?

July 5, 2021

O God, for you I long; for you my soul is thirsting. My body pines for you like a dry, weary land without water.

We pray these words with sincerity. Do we ever really mean them? Can we honestly say that the heartaches that drive us to our knees are a longing to see God? When we’re obsessed with an ache that won’t let us sleep, can we honestly say we’re thirsting for God? At first glance, no. Our existential thirsts tend to be more earthy, more self-focused, and more erotic than would merit the claim that they are a longing for God. Only the rare mystic (or perhaps one of us in a rare moment) can, at a given time, examine her burning desires and say honestly, what I want is God. I’m longing for God.

However, there’s another side to this. We need to make a distinction between what we explicitly desire and what we implicitly desire within that same desire. Allow me an earthy example as an illustration. Imagine a man on a given night feeling restless and seeking out sex with a prostitute. Is he longing to see the face of God? Is he longing for union inside the body of Christ? Explicitly, no. That’s the furthest thing from his mind, at least from his conscious mind. However, there’s something else inside his awareness at that same time (which he in fact knows but of which he is not explicitly aware). His desire, which on this evening has constellated so strong sexually, is in its true intent a desire to see the face of God and to be in union with others inside the body of Christ. Implicit in what he is hungering for is what St. Augustine expresses in his famous axiom: You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you. He is longing to see the face of God.

In teasing out this distinction between what is explicitly intended in an act and what is implicitly contained in that same act, we should not conflate this with our notions of conscious and unconscious. These latter terms are psychological categories, valid and important in their own right, whereas explicit and implicit are philosophical terms, slightly different in meaning, with a particular insight into what is actually contained in any act. Again, perhaps an example can be helpful. Imagine yourself making a simple, elementary judgment. You look at a wall and say, this wall is white. That’s what you are aware of explicitly at that moment. However, for you to make that judgment (This wall is white) you also at the same time have to know, know implicitly, really, and as surely as you know that the wall is white, some other things. First, that the wall is not green or any other color; and, further, that you cannot say that the wall is not white without denying the truth of what you are seeing. These latter dimensions are something you in fact know, but of which you are not consciously aware.

Now, apply this to the man whose desire drives him to have sex with a prostitute. We see that what is on his mind explicitly at that moment is not any desire to see the face of God or to be in union inside the body of Christ. Far from it. However, as he is engaging in this act, he implicitly knows that this is not what he is really searching for and that he cannot pretend that it is. This implicit knowing of these other dimensions is not just a function of conscience, but a function of knowing itself.

There are multiple implications from this, beyond not feeling false guilt for the fact that, most times, we find ourselves congenitally incapable of making God the real focus, main object, and the All of our desires. Mostly we don’t see our obsessions and heartaches as having God as their real object. I suspect that this is because we do not conceive of God as containing the powerful allure, attractiveness, beauty, color, and sexuality that can so obsess us in this world. I wonder if anyone (outside of a mystic) has ever obsessed about seeing the face of God because he or she sensed that in God there was even a richer beauty, attractiveness, and sexual allure than can be found here on earth. Do we ever imagine God as infinitely more interesting and alluring than any sexual partner on earth?

Sadly, the God of religions is hard to long for! That God, while philosophically perfect and alluring, is existentially devoid of the real beauty and eros that obsesses us on earth.

Therese of Lisieux, young doctor of the soul that she was, offers us this warning: Be careful not to seek yourself in love because you will end up with a broken heart that way. Thankfully, an implicit knowledge of what we are actually longing for can help save us from that.

Joy – A Sign of God

June 28, 2021

There is only one true sadness, not being a saint! French novelist, philosopher, essayist, Leon Bloy ends his novel The Woman Who Was Poor with that much-quoted line. Here is a less known quote from Leon Bloy which helps us understand why there is such a sadness in not being saint. Joy is a sure sign of the life of God in the soul.

Joy is not just a sure sign of the life of God in the soul, it is a sign of the life of God – period. Joy constitutes the inner life of God. God is joy. This is not something we easily believe. For lots of reasons we find it hard to think of God as happy, as joyful, as pleased, and (as Julian of Norwich says) as relaxed and smiling. Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, for all of our differences, have this in common. In our popular conception, we all conceive of God as male, as celibate, and as generally displeased and disappointed with us. We struggle to think that God is happy with our lives and, even more important, that God is happy, joyful, relaxed, and smiling.

Yet, how could it be otherwise? Scripture tells us that God is the author of all that is good and that all good things come from God. Now, is there a greater goodness in this world than joy, happiness, laughter, and the life-giving grace of a benevolent smile? Clearly not. These constitute the very life of heaven and are what makes life on earth worth living. Surely then they take their origins inside of God. This means that God is joyful, is joy.

If this is true, and it is, then we should not conceive of God as a disappointed lover, an angry spouse, or a wounded parent, frowning in the face of our inadequacies and betrayals. Rather, God might be imagined as a smiling grandmother or grandfather, delighting in our lives and energy, at ease with our littleness, forgiving our weaknesses, and forever gently trying to coax us towards something higher.

A growing body of literature today suggests that the purest experience of love and joy on this earth is not what is experienced between lovers, spouses, or even parents and their children. In these relationships, there is inevitably (and understandably) enough tension and self-seeking to color both its purity and its joy. This is generally less true in the relationship of grandparents to their grandchildren. That relationship, more free of tension and self-seeking, is often the purest experience of love and joy on this earth. There, delight flows more freely, more purely, more graciously, and mirrors more purely what is inside of God, namely joy and delight.

God is love, scripture tells us; but God is also joy. God is the gracious, benevolent smile of a grandparent looking with pride and delight at a grandchild.

However, how does this all square with suffering, with the paschal mystery, with a suffering Christ who through blood and anguish pays the price of our sin? Where was God’s joy on Good Friday as Jesus cried out in agony on the cross? As well, if God is joy, how do we account for the many times in our lives when, living honestly inside of our faith and our commitments, we do not feel joyful, happy, laughter, when we struggle to smile?

Joy and pain are not incompatible. Neither are happiness and sadness. Rather, they are frequently felt together. We can be in great pain and still be happy, just as we can be pain-free, experiencing pleasure, and be unhappy. Joy and happiness are predicated on something that abides through pain, namely, meaning; but this needs to be understood. We tend to have an unhelpful, superficial notion of what constitutes both joy and happiness. For us, they are incompatible with pain, suffering, and sadness. I wonder how Jesus would have answered on Good Friday as he hung on the cross if someone had asked him, “Are you happy up there?” I suspect he would have said something to this effect. “If you’re picturing happiness in the way you imagine it, then no! I’m not happy! Today, of all days, particularly so! But what I’m experiencing today amidst the agony is meaning, a meaning so deep that it contains a joy and a happiness that abide through the agony. Inside of the pain, there is a profound joy and happiness in giving myself over to this. Unhappiness and joylessness, as you conceive of them, come and go; meaning abides throughout those feelings.”

Knowing this still does not make it easy for us to accept that God is joy and that joy is a sure sign of the life of God in the soul. However, knowing it is an important start, one we can build on.

There is a deep sadness in not being a saint. Why? Because our distance from saintliness is also our distance from God and our distance from God is also our distance from joy.

What is Love Asking of Me Now?

June 21, 2021

Several years ago, a colleague of mine suffered a crushing disappointment. Her instinctual temptation was towards anger, towards shutting a series of doors and withdrawing. Instead, wounded in spirit, she asked herself the question, what is love asking of me now? In answering that, she found that despite her every instinct to the contrary, love was asking her to move away from bitterness and withdrawal, asking her to stretch her heart in ways it had never been stretched before.

What is love asking of me now? That is the question we need to ask ourselves every time the circumstances of our lives are shaken (by wound or by grace) to a point where we no longer want to respond graciously and lovingly because everything inside of us wants to shut down and withdraw.

Thus …

When I have just been through a bitter divorce, when I feel my heart hardening and find myself growing hateful towards someone I once trusted, the question becomes, what is love asking of me now?
When I have lost a loved one to suicide, not just to death but to a manner of death that becomes a prism that recolors every memory of that person so that my love turns to anger, the question becomes, what is love asking of me now?
When a colleague humiliates me at a meeting with insinuations that are untrue and my blood literally boils at the unfairness, the question becomes, what is love asking of me now?
When my own child rejects my faith and values, complete with the hint that I am naïve and out of step with the world and my temptation is to self-pity and (however subtle) to withdraw my love and support, the question becomes, what is love asking of me now?
When a medical diagnosis reveals that my health will be forever compromised and every fiber in my body and spirit wants to sink into anger and depression, the question becomes, what is love asking of me now?
When the church that is my mother-tongue, that gave me the faith, is found to be unfair, to be the bearer of sin, when I see its flaws and am left to ponder the question of how I can stay in a church with that history and those dysfunctions, the question becomes, what is love asking of me now?
When I am betrayed in a relationship, lied to by someone I trusted, when I am tempted in bitterness never to trust anyone again, the question becomes, what is love asking of me now?
When I myself betray a trust, when out of weakness I sin, when I want to wallow in self-hatred or rationalize or deny my weakness, the question becomes, what is love asking of me now?
When an election in the country produces a leader whose personality and policies go against everything I stand for, the question becomes, what is love asking of me now?
When the parochial world I grew up in begins to give way to a multilingual, multicultural, multiracial, and multi-religious world that leaves me feeling left behind, when paranoia and defensiveness have me desperately trying to hang on to what once was, the question becomes, what is love asking of me now?
When I live with someone in my family who is dysfunctional and my every desire is to avoid him and live my own life, the question becomes, what is love asking of me now?
When I have to deal daily with someone who hates me and everything inside me wants to respond in kind, the question becomes, what is love asking of me now.

However, it is not only negative things that upset us in this way, tempt us towards hatred and withdrawal, and leave us in a space that forces us to respond in a new way, huge grace can do the same thing.

Thus …

When I finally get that long longed-for promotion, complete with the big salary and a voice in decision-making and the temptation is to inflate and feel superior to those around me, the question becomes, what is love asking of me now?
When I am invited to be the valedictorian for my graduating class and am on the podium basking in the adulation of the crowd (aware of the jealousy of my classmates) multiple temptations will beset me, most of them unhealthy. The question then becomes, what is love asking of me now?
When someone blesses me in a deep way with love, gratitude, and affirmation and my temptation is to feed my ego with that blessing, the question becomes, what is love asking of me now?

We cannot protect ourselves against the spontaneous feelings that beset us, both when things go well and when they go badly – and most of those feelings tempt us away from love. So, whenever either a depression or an inflation is tempting us away from what is best and most noble, the question becomes, what is love asking of me now?

A Eucharistic Prayer

June 14, 2021

As a seminarian, I was privileged one summer to take a course from the renowned liturgist, Godfrey Diekmann. This was back in those heady days shortly after Vatican II when it was very much in fashion to frown on prescribed ritual prayers and write your own. This was particularly true for the Eucharist Prayer, the “Canon” of the mass, which a number of priests began writing for themselves. Diekmann, it turned out, was not a great fan of this. Asked about it in class one day, he said, “It seems today that everyone who has a tiny bit of imagination and even less theology feels obliged to write a Eucharistic Prayer.”

Because of the Covid restrictions this year, I have often celebrated some form of the Eucharist virtually. At first, leading those services, my thought was, what’s the value of a Eucharistic prayer if there is to be no communion? Therefore, I simply jumped from the Liturgy of the Word straight to the Lord’s Prayer. Eventually though I deemed that something more might be offered. Thus (with Godfrey Diekmann’s words now forty years distant) I wrote a Eucharistic Prayer for a virtual mass.

What is a Eucharistic Prayer? Most people would say it’s that part of the Eucharist where the priest consecrates the bread and wine, but that’s only part of it. The Eucharistic Prayer is that part of the Eucharist where we make memorial (Zikkaron, in Hebrew) of the major event by which Christ saved us, in order to make that event present for us to participate in today. We come to the Eucharist not just to receive the body and blood of Christ, but (just as importantly) to participate in an event, namely, the saving action of Christ as he undergoes his Passion, Death, Resurrection, Ascension, and Pentecost. The Eucharist is the Christian Passover Supper and, like the Jewish Passover Supper, its purpose is to make a past event present to us.

How does this work? We don’t have a metaphysics within which to understand this. In sacred ritual, in the Eucharist, as in a Passover supper, something happens that transcends time. This doesn’t contradict the intellect, the imagination, or the laws of nature; it only takes them beyond their normal limits.

Here’s a Eucharistic Prayer for those times when there is no bread and wine to be consecrated.

Lord, God, you break into our lives in extraordinary ways to manifest your love and save us.

For your chosen people you miraculously parted the waters of Red Sea and led them to safety by suspending the laws of nature. Then, in the desert, you miraculously fed them with manna and revealed to them the law within your heart.

Since only one generation walked through the parted waters of the Red Sea and only that generation ate your manna in the desert, You, Lord God, instituted the Passover supper as a ritual through which every generation until the end time could walk through the parted waters of the Red Sea and eat your bread in the desert. The Passover supper calls these saving events to mind in a way that, in your timelessness, makes them real again for us today.

This is true too for the saving actions of your son, Jesus Christ. His Passion was a new bondage; his trust in Death a new faith; your raising of him in the Resurrection and his Ascension a new Exodus; and his sending of the Spirit at Pentecost a new entry into the Promised Land.

Therefore, Lord God, on the night before he died, your son left us the Eucharist as a Passover Supper through which you make these saving events present again.

We ask you, therefore, to send your Spirit upon all of us gathered here to make memorial of your Son’s saving acts. Grant that through this ritual remembrance each of us, and all of us as one community, may be united with Christ in his Passion, Death, Resurrection, Ascension, and in his Sending of the Spirit. You who are beyond time, grant us today the grace of being one with Christ in his sacrifice, one with him in his dying and rising.

As we celebrate this memorial, help us know that we are one with Your Son, our Lord, Jesus, united with him as he is undergoing his Passion, Death, Resurrection, Ascension, and Pentecost.

Lord, God, help us to know that the food of this Eucharist is the new manna by which You feed your people with heavenly food.

Lord, as we make this memorial, above all we ask you to help us break down everything that separates us from each other, all division in our world, so that You may be able to feed us all at one table, as one family, as one God of us all.

We pray all of this through, with, and in your son, Christ, our Lord … AMEN.

In the Eucharist, we don’t just eat the bread of life, we also die and rise with Christ.

More Than a House or a Place

June 7, 2021

Home is more than a house or a place on a map. It’s a place in the heart, the place where you most want to be at the end of the day. The metaphorical idea of home can help us sort out many things, not least how sex connects to love.

Sex can never be simply casual, purely recreational, something which does not touch the soul. Sex always touches the soul, for good or for bad. It’s either sacramental or harmful. It’s either building up the soul or tearing it apart. When it’s right, it’s making you a better person and when it’s wrong, it’s making you less of a person. Metaphorically, when it’s right, it’s taking you home; when it’s not, it’s taking you away from home. Sex is designed by God and nature to take you home. Indeed, it’s meant (metaphorically) to be your home. If you are going home after sex, something is very wrong. This is not, first of all, a moral judgment, but an anthropological one on behalf of the soul.

The soul, as we know, is not some invisible spiritual tissue floating inside our bodies. A soul cannot be pictured imaginatively, but it can be grasped as a principle. As we see in the insights of philosophers like Aristotle and Aquinas, the soul is a double principle inside us. It’s the principle of life (of all our energies) and it’s the principle of integration (what holds us together). This may sound abstract, but it’s not. If you have ever been present with someone who is dying, you know the exact moment when the soul leaves the body. Not because you see some spirit float up from the body, but because one minute the body is alive, an organism, and the next minute it is inert, lifeless, dead, and beginning to decompose. The soul keeps us alive and the soul keeps us glued together.

If this is true, and it is, then anything meaningful we do, anything that touches us at any depth, affects our soul, both its fire and its glue, either weakening them or strengthening them. Sex is no exception. Indeed, it’s the preeminent example. Sex is powerful and that’s why it can never be simply casual. It is either building up the soul or tearing it down.

Thirty years ago, teaching a night course at a college campus, I assigned my class a book of essays by Christopher de Vinck, Only the Heart Knows How to Find Them – Precious Memories for a Faithless Time. These essays are simple reflections by the author on his life as a young husband and father. They are warm, not unduly romantic, aesthetically crafted, and devoid of sentimentality. They make a strong case for marriage, not by making any apologetic arguments in its favor, but simply by sharing how marriage can make for a home, a calm place of mutual solitude that can take us beyond that overpowering restless search that besets us at puberty and drives us away from parents’ home in search of our own home. Marriage and the marriage bed can bring us home again.

At the end of the semester, a student in the course, a woman in her late twenties, came into my office to drop off her term paper. She was carrying de Vinck’s book and she shared this: This is the best book I’ve ever read. I grew up without a lot of religious or ethical guidance and I have slept my way through a couple of Canadian provinces; but now I know what I really want. I want what this man has! I want the marriage bed. I want my sex to take me home, to become home. Her insight merits repeating, not least today in a culture where sex is often divorced from marriage and home.

Earlier in my teaching and ministry, when I was still working more with young people who were sorting out what love means and who they might choose to marry and try to spend their lives with, the question often arose: how to does one recognize the kind of love on which you can build a marriage? It is a crucial question because love is not an easy thing to read or gauge. We can, and do, fall in love with all kinds of people, often with people who are all wrong for us, people we can enjoyably flirt with or have a honeymoon with, but with whom we could not share the rest of our lives.

What kind of love can you build a marriage on? It needs to be the kind of love that takes you home. You need a strong sense that with this other person you are at home because a marriage is quite different from a honeymoon. You go home from a honeymoon. In marriage, you are at home.

So too with sex. It’s meant to be something that takes you home and is your home rather than something from which you go home.

Losing the Song in the Singer

May 31, 2021

Often when listening to someone singing live or on television, I close my eyes to try to hear the song so as not to let the singer’s performance get in the way of the song. A song can be lost in its performance; indeed, the performance can take over so that the song is replaced by the singer.

When anyone is performing live, be it on a stage, in a classroom, at a podium, or in a pulpit, there will always be some combination of three things. The speaker will be trying to impress others with his talent; he will be trying to get a message across; and (consciously or unconsciously) he will be trying to channel something true, good, and beautiful for its own sake. Metaphorically, he will be making love to himself, making love to the audience, and making love to the song.

It is the third component, making love to the song, which makes for great art, great rhetoric, great teaching, and great preaching. Greatness sets itself apart here because what comes through is “the song” rather than the singer, the message rather than the messenger, and the performer’s empathy rather than his ego. The audience then is drawn to the song rather than to the singer. Good singers draw people to the music rather than to themselves; good teachers draw students to truth and learning rather than to themselves; good artists draw people to beauty rather than to adulation, and good preachers draw their congregations to God rather than to praise of themselves.

Admittedly, this isn’t easy to do. We are all human, so is our audience. No audience respects you unless you do show some talent, creativity, and intelligence. There’s always an unspoken pressure on the singer, the speaker, the teacher, and the preacher, both from within and from without. From within: I don’t want to disappoint! I don’t want to look bad! I need to stand out! I need to show them something special! From without, from the audience: What have you got! Show us something! Are you worth my attention? Are you bright? Are you boring? Only the most mature person can be free of these pressures. Thus, the song easily gets lost in the singer, the message in the messenger, the teaching in the teacher, and the message of God in the personality of the preacher.

As a teacher, preacher, and writer, I admit my own long struggle with this. When you first start teaching, you had better impress your students or you won’t have their attention or respect for long. The same with preaching. The congregation is always sizing you up, and you had better measure up or no one will be listening to you. Moreover, unless you have an exceptionally strong self-image, you will be a perennial prisoner of your own insecurities. Nobody wants to look bad, stupid, uninformed, or come across as talentless. Everyone wants to look good.

Moreover, not least, there is still your ego (and its power can never be underestimated). It wants to draw the attention and the admiration to itself rather than to what is true, good, and beautiful. There is always the temptation for the messenger to be more concerned about impressing others than about having the message come through in purity and truth. The subtle, but powerful, temptation inside every singer, teacher, speaker, preacher, or writer is to draw people to themselves rather than to the truth and beauty they are trying to channel.

I struggle with this in every class I teach, every article or book I write, and every time I preside at liturgy. Nevertheless, I make no apologies for this. It is the innate struggle in all creative effort. Are we trying to draw people to ourselves, or are we trying to draw them to truth, to beauty, to God?

When I teach a class, how much of my preparation and energy is motivated by a genuine concern for the students and how much is motivated by my need to look good, to impress, to have a reputation as a good teacher? When I write an article or a book, am I really trying to bring insight and understanding to others or am I thinking of my status as a writer? When I preside at mass and preach is my real motivation to channel a sacred ritual in a manner that my own personality doesn’t get in the way? Is it to lead people into community with each other and to decrease myself so Christ can increase?

There is no simple answer to those questions because there can’t be. Our motivation is always less than fully pure. Moreover, we are not meant to be univocal robots without personalities. Our unique personalities and talents were given by God precisely as gifts to be used for others. Still, there’s a clear warning sign. When the focus of the audience is more on our personalities than on the song, we are probably making love more to ourselves and our admirers than to the song.

The Binding Power of Hatred

May 24, 2021

Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. We know this works for love. Does it also work for hatred? Can someone’s hatred follow us, even into eternity?

In her recent novel, Payback, Mary Gordon poses that question. Her story centers on two women, one of whom, Agnes, has hurt the other, Heidi. The hurt had been unintentional and accidental, but it had been deep, so deep that for both women it stayed like a poison inside their souls for the next forty years. The story traces their lives for those forty years, years in which they never see each other, don’t even know each other’s whereabouts, but remain obsessed with each other, one nursing a hurt and the other a guilt about that hurt. The story eventually culminates with Heidi seeking out Agnes to confront her for some payback. And that payback is hatred, an ugly, pure hatred, a curse, promised to last until death, ensuring that Agnes will never be free from it for the rest of her life.

Agnes doesn’t know what to do with that hatred, which dominates her world and poisons her happiness. She wonders if it will also color her eternity: “Her last meeting with Heidi had troubled her belief in the endurance of the ties of love. Because if love went somewhere after death, where, then, was hate? She had understood, in Heidi’s case, that it was the other side of the coin of love. Even after death would Heidi’s hatred follow her, spoiling her eternity, the cracked note in the harmony, the dark spot in the radiance? Since Heidi had come back into her life, Agnes had, for the first time, been truly afraid to die. She had to make herself believe that the love of those who loved her would surround her always … keeping her from the hatred and ugliness that Heidi has shown her. She had to believe it; otherwise … the otherwise was too unbearable even to name.”

Gabriel Marcel correctly states that to love someone is to ensure that this person can never be lost, that he or she (as long as the love continues) can never go to hell. By that love, the other is connected (“bound”) always to the family of love and ultimately to the circle of love inside of God. However, is this true then too for hatred? If someone hates you, can that touch you eternally and contaminate some of the joy of heaven? If someone’s love can hold you for all eternity, can someone’s hatred do the same?

This is not an easy question. Binding and loosing, as Jesus spoke of it, work both ways, with love and with hatred. We free each other through love and constrict each other through hatred. We know that from experience and at a deep place inside us intuit its gravity. That is why so many people seek reconciliation on their deathbeds, wanting as their last wish not to leave this world unreconciled. But, sad fact, sometimes we do leave this life unreconciled, with hatred following us into the grave. Does it also follow us into eternity?

The choice is ours. If we meet hatred with hatred, it will follow us into eternity. On the other hand, if we, on our part, seek reconciliation (as much as is possible practically and existentially) then that hatred can no longer bind us; the chord will be broken, broken from our end.

Leo Tolstoy once said: There is only one way to put an end to evil, and that is to do good for evil. We see that in Jesus. Some hated him, and he died like that. However, that hatred lost its power over him because he refused to respond in kind. Rather, he returned love for hatred, understanding for misunderstanding, blessing for curse, graciousness for resentment, fidelity for rejection, and forgiveness for murder. But … that takes a rare, incredible strength.

In Gabriel Marcel’s affirmation (that if we love someone that person can never be lost), there is a caveat implied, namely, that the other does not willingly reject our love and choose to move outside of it. The same holds true for hatred. Another person’s hatred holds us, but only if we meet it on its own terms, hatred for hatred.

We cannot make someone stop hating us, but we can refuse to hate him or her and, at that moment, hatred loses its power to bind and punish us. Granted, this isn’t easy, certainly not emotionally. Hatred tends to have a sick, devilish grip on us, paralyzing in us the very strength we need to let it go. In that case, there’s still another salvific thing remaining. God can do things for us that we cannot do for ourselves.

Thus, in the end, as Julian of Norwich teaches (and as our faith in God’s compassion and understanding lets us know) all will still be well, hatred notwithstanding.