Gloria Steinem once confessed that, while never having been overweight, she has always been concerned about her weight because the genes she inherited from her parents predisposed her in that direction. So, she says, I think of myself as a fat woman who is slim at the moment. Her comment helped me to understand something I misunderstood years before in a classroom.

Early on in my seminary studies, taking a course on the sociology of poverty, I was struggling to accept our professor’s explanation as to why poverty isn’t always the consequence of personal failure, but is often the product of unchosen circumstances, accidents, and misfortune.  Many of us in the class weren’t buying it, and this was our logic. Most of us had come from very humble economic backgrounds and believed that we had pulled ourselves up by our own bootstraps. Why couldn’t everyone else do the same?

So we protested: we grew up poor. We didn’t have any money. We didn’t get free school lunches. We had to work to pay for our clothes and books. Our parents never took any handouts. Nobody helped them – they took care of themselves. So have we, their kids. We resent those who are getting things for nothing. Nothing came to us free! We’ve earned what we have.

Our professor answered by telling us that this is precisely why we needed a course on the sociology of poverty. He wasn’t buying the notion that we had grown up poor and had earned things by our own hard work. Then, this surprising phrase: “None of you were poor as kids; you were rich kids who grew up without money; and where you are today isn’t just the result of your own hard work, it’s also the result of a lot of good fortune.” 

It took me years (and Gloria Steinem’s comment) to understand he was right. I was a rich kid who grew up in a family without money. Moreover, so much of what I naively believed that I’d earned by my own hard work was in fact very much the product of good fortune.

I doubt our society understands that. A number of popular clichés have us believe that one’s background should never be an excuse for not being a success in this world, that success is open equally to everyone. We’ve all inhaled the clichés.  Any poor kid can grow up to be President of this country! Any poor kid can go to Harvard! Anybody industrious can make a success of his or her life! There’s no excuse for any healthy person not having a job!

Is this true? Partially, yes; kids from poor economic backgrounds have become president, thousands of poor kids have found entrance into the best universities, countless kids who grew up poor have been highly successful in life, and people who are motivated and not lazy generally do make a success of their lives. However, that’s far from the whole story.

What really makes for the separation of rich and poor in our world? Is everyone really on equal footing? Is it really virtue that makes for success and lack of it that makes for failure?

In a best-selling book, Elderhood, Louise Aronson, makes this comment about her mother and Queen Elizabeth, both who aged wonderfully and gracefully: “They both were born into privilege: white, citizens of developed countries, wealthy and educated. Both were gifted with great genetic DNA, and both had the good fortune of not ever having been assaulted, abused, felled by cancer, or in a debilitating car accident. … These advantages are not a matter of character. Indeed, willpower and capacity for wise decisions are often by-products of fortunate lives.” (Emphasis, mine)

Success isn’t predicated only on personal character, hard work, and dedication. Neither is failure necessarily the result of weakness, laziness, and lack of effort.  We aren’t all born equal, set equally into the same starting blocks, have equally gifted or abusive childhoods, are allotted equally the same opportunities for education and growth, and then are parceled out equally the same measure of accidents, illness, and tragedy in life.  However, it’s because we naively believe that fortune is allotted equally to all that we glibly (and cruelly) divide people into winners and losers, judge harshly those we deem losers, blame them for their misfortunes, and congratulate ourselves on what we have achieved, as if all the credit for our success can be attributed to our own virtue. Conversely, we see those who are poor as having only themselves to blame. Why can’t they pull themselves up by their bootstraps? We did!

But … some of us have genes that predispose us to become fat, some of us are rich kids who grow up without money, and willpower and capacity for wise decisions are often the products of a fortunate life rather than a matter of character. Recognizing that can make us less cruel in our judgments and far less smug in our own successes.

Imagine a young couple intoxicated with each other in the early stages of love. Imagine a religious neophyte in love with God, praying ecstatically. Imagine an idealistic young person working tirelessly with the poor, enflamed with a thirst for justice. Are this young couple really in love with each other? Is that religious neophyte really in love with God? Is this young social activist really in love with the poor?  Not an easy question.

Whom are we really loving when we have feelings of love? The other? Ourselves? The archetype and energy the other is carrying? Our own fantasy of that person? The feelings this experience is triggering inside us?  When we are in love, are we really in love with another person or are we mostly basking in a wonderful feeling which could be just as easily triggered by countless other persons?

There are different answers to that question. John of the Cross would say it is all of these things; we are in fact really loving that other person, loving a fantasy we have created of that person, and basking in the good feeling this has generated inside us. That is why, invariably, at a given point in a relationship the powerful feelings of being in love give way to disillusionment – disillusionment (by definition) implies the dispelling of an illusion, something was unreal. So for John of the Cross, when we are in love, partly the love is real and partly it is an illusion. Moreover, John would say the same thing about our initial feelings of fervor in prayer and in altruistic service. They are a mixture of both, authentic love and an illusion.

Some other analyses are less generous. In their view, all initial falling in love, whether it be with another person, with God in prayer, or with the poor in service, is mainly an illusion. Ultimately, you are in love with being in love, in love with what prayer is doing for you, or in love with how working for justice is making you feel. The other person, God, and the poor are secondary. That is why, so often, when first fervor dies, so too does our love for its original object. When the fantasy dies, so too does the sense of being in love. We fall in love without really knowing the other person and we fall out of love without really knowing the other person. The very phrase “falling in love” is revealing. “Falling” is not something we choose, it happens to us.  Marriage Encounter spirituality has a clever slogan around this: marriage is a decision; falling in love is not.

Who is right?  When we fall in love, how much is genuine love for another and how much is an illusion within which we are mostly loving ourselves? Steven Levine answers this from very different perspective and throws new light on the question. What is his perspective?

Love, he says, is not a “dualistic emotion”. For him, whenever we are feeling authentic love we are, at that moment, feeling our oneness with God and with all that is. He writes, “The experience of love arises when we surrender our separateness into the universal. It is a feeling of unity … It is not an emotion, it is a state of being … It is not so much that ‘two are as one’ so much as it is the ‘One manifested as two.’”  In other words, when we love someone, in that moment, we are one with him or her, not separate, so that even though our fantasies and feelings may be partially wrapped up in self-serving affectivity, something deeper and more real than our feelings and fantasies is occurring. We are one with the other in our being – and, in love, we sense it.   

In this view, authentic love is not so much something we feel; it is something we are. At its root, love is not an affective emotion or a moral virtue (though these are part of it). It is a metaphysical condition, not something that comes and goes like an emotional state, nor something that we can choose or refuse morally. A metaphysical condition is a given, something we stand within, that makes up part of what we are, constitutively, though we can be blissfully unaware. Thus, love, not least falling in love, can help make us more conscious of our non-separateness, our oneness in being with others.

When we feel love deeply or passionately, then perhaps (like Thomas Merton describing a mystical vision he had on a street corner) we can awake more from our dream of separateness and our illusion of difference and see the secret beauty and depth of other people’s hearts. Perhaps too it will enable us to see others at that place in them where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes.

And wouldn’t it be wonderful, Merton adds … “if we could see each other that way all the time.”

Why do sincere people so often find themselves at odds with each other?  The issue here is not about when sincerity meets insincerity or plain old sin. No. The question is why sincere, God-fearing people can find themselves radically at odds with each other.

There’s an interesting passage in Nikos Kazantzakis’ autobiography that intimates far more than it reveals at first glance. Commenting on Greek mythology and the many conflicts there among the gods and goddesses, Kazantzakis writes this: “The heroes in ancient Greek tragedies were no more or less than Dionysus’s scattered limbs, clashing among themselves. They clashed because they were fragments. Each represented only one part of the deity; they were not an intact god. Dionysus, the intact god, stood invisible in the center of the tragedy and governed the story’s birth, development, and catharsis. For the initiated spectator, the god’s scattered limbs, though battling against one another, had already been secretly united and reconciled within him. They had composed the god’s intact body and formed a harmony.”

In Greek mythology, the supreme god, Dionysus, was intact, containing all the scattered pieces of divinity that took particular incarnations in various gods, goddesses, and human persons. Inside Dionysus, the intact god, there was harmony, everything fitted together, but everywhere else various pieces of divinity wrestled and sparred with each other, forever in tension and in power struggles.

That image is a fertile metaphor shedding light on many things. Among other things, it can help us understand what’s at the root of many of the conflicts between sincere people and why we have a lot of religious differences.

What is the root cause when people are at odds with each other and there is no insincerity or sin involved, when both parties are honest and God-fearing? Today we speak of ideological differences, historical differences, political differences, and personal history as to why sincere people often see the world differently and are at odds with each other. We have a language for that. However, I’m not sure our current language (for all its sophistication) captures the heart of this as clearly as does that particular metaphor inside Greek mythology. In the end, aren’t we all grabbing our own piece of god and making it the be all and end all, without accepting that those we are fighting also have a piece of god, and we have divinity fighting divinity?

Boiled down to its root, isn’t that what lies at the base of the tension between “conservative” and “liberal”, between soul and spirit, between head and heart, between young and old, between body and soul, and between the other binaries that divide us? Haven’t each of us grabbed an authentic piece of divinity and (because we don’t have a vision of the intact God) let our piece of divinity become the prism through which everything else must be seen?

We are not an “initiated spectator” who, as Kazantzakis puts it, has enough of a vision of the intact God to see how all the pieces ultimately fit in harmony. So we continue in our disharmony.

Much too can be gleaned from this image in terms of how we view other religions. Writing around the year 200 AD, one of our renowned Church Fathers, Clement of Alexandria, wrote a book he entitled (in Greek), Stromata, a word which literally means “being strewn about”. His concept (carefully nuanced through his Christian lens) was that God, while revealed normatively in Jesus Christ, is also “strewn” (in pieces) in other religions and in nature itself. In essence, what he is saying is that there are pieces of God lying around everywhere, though Clement doesn’t elaborate on how these discrete pieces of divinity often fight with each other.

More recently, Raimondo Panikkar (died 2010), one of the major Christian commentators on world religions, again picked up this concept of God as “strewn” and applied it to world religions. For him, what Christianity sees as contained in the Trinity is experienced in pieces in by people in other faiths. For example, certain faiths, like Buddhism, make central the experience of contingency, awe, dependence, and self-effacement in the face of what they believe to be “God”. For Panikkar, these are religions of “God the Father”. Some other faiths, particularly Christianity but also Judaism and Islam, strongly emphasize “God, the Father”, but their scriptures and other beliefs have an incarnational principle, a “Christ”. Certain other religions such as Taoism and Hinduism focus much more on the experience of spirit, the “Holy Spirit”. Since we each emphasize one particular aspect of God, it is no surprise that, despite sincerity on all sides, we often don’t get along.

And so we, sincere, God-fearing people, are often at odds with each other; but it’s helpful to know (and acknowledge) that an “intact” God stands invisible in the center of our conflicts and watches us fight with “his scattered limbs”, knowing that in the end all these strewn pieces will be united again in harmony.

The world will be saved by beauty!  Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote that, Dorothy Day quoted it, and centuries before Jesus, Confucius made it central to his pedagogy. They were on to something.  Beauty is a special language that cuts through and sidelines all the things that divide us – history, race, language, creed, ideology, politics, economic disparity, gender, sexual identity, and personal wounds. Beauty melts down all differences. Its speech, like that of a newborn, has no explicit words, but is a language so perfect that it can only be soiled by violating oneself. Two things in this world cannot be argued with, beauty and a baby. They also cannot defend themselves, and have only their own vulnerability as protection.

In classical Western philosophy, beauty is seen as one of the transcendental properties of being, and therefore as one of the properties of God. God is understood as having four transcendental qualities, namely, as being One, True, Good, and Beautiful. Hence, beauty possesses a divine, sacred quality. Artists and everyone sensitive to aesthetics have always recognized this, not necessarily in that they affirm explicitly that beauty is a property of God, but that they recognize a godly quality in beauty; they sense a “blaspheme” whenever it is defaced, and feel the energy to create as divine.

Beauty, as we know, takes many forms. Who of us has not at times felt the stunning power of physical beauty? Who has not been momentarily transfixed by the beauty of a sunset, an ocean, a mountain range, the stars, a full moon, a desert landscape, a particular tree, a thunderstorm, fresh snow, a gentle rain, an animal in the wild, a work of art or architecture, or a human body?  Physical beauty is self-justifying. It cannot be argued with and may never be denigrated by an appeal to something higher and more spiritual. It is unequivocally real and thus needs to be recognized, affirmed, and blessed.  

For most of us, when we hear the word beauty, physical beauty is what comes to mind. Now, while that beauty is real, powerful, and can transform the heart, there are other kinds of beauty equally as powerful and transforming. I am not sure what language works in terms of what I am about to describe, so forgive me if my expression here is amateur and awkward, but we can speak, and need to, of beauty in the emotional and moral realm. There is something we might call emotional beauty or moral beauty.

Emotional beauty is not the beauty of a sunset or a great painting, but is the beauty of a particular expression of love, of empathy, or of compassion that, like a beautiful sunset, we are occasionally graced to witness. For example, we can be transfixed when seeing the miraculous rescue of a child, when seeing a helpless animal saved by rescuers, when seeing an elderly couple affectionately holding hands, or when hearing of a generous response by the public to a plea for help by a poor family. As with physical beauty, there is a divine quality here and, as with physical beauty, there is something here that only the most boorish of persons would dare smudge. However, whenever our emotions are involved there is always the danger of an unhealthy sentimentality also being present; but, that danger notwithstanding, our emotions, like our eyes, are also an opening to beauty.

Finally, not least, there is moral beauty, beauty of soul. The salient example here is martyrdom and every other kind of love that sacrifices its own wishes, desires, and life for something higher. While this does not always make for a beautiful body, it does make for a beautiful soul. In affirming this, I am not thinking, first, of its most salient examples, the religious martyrs who gave up their lives rather than deny their faith, or even of persons like Mohandas Gandhi, Albert Schweitzer, Martin Luther King, Dorothy Day, Maximillian Kolbe, Oscar Romero, and the many today who give up their lives for others. These are powerful examples of moral beauty, but many of us see this first-hand in our own families and circle of friends. For example, I look at my own mother and dad who for most of their lives sacrificed to provide for a large family and, especially, to provide that family with what is more important than food and clothing, namely, faith and moral guidance. There was a moral beauty in their sacrifice, though sometimes during those years, by Hollywood standards, my mom and dad looked more haggard than beautiful. Moral beauty, though, is measured by a different standard. That being said, there is also the need to be cautious here: while emotional beauty carries the risk of sentimentality, moral beauty carries the risk of fanaticism. Fanatics, serial killers, and snipers are also highly focused morally. Morality, like anything else, can be misguided.

The world will be saved by beauty! True, though I would employ the present tense, the world is being saved by beauty.

Among people of faith, there is the notion that if you are person of deep faith you can easily renounce the things of this world, see the world for all its ephemerality, not cling to things, and die more peacefully. Not true. That is naïve, at least a lot of the time.

James Hillman writes: We don’t let go easily of the throne, nor the drive that took us there. While that is obviously true, of itself it speaks more of human ego than of faith. So let me try another line. The famed novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch, confronts us with this fact: A common soldier often dies without fear; but Jesus died afraid.  

This was borne out in the death of my own father. My dad was a man of deep faith to which his whole life gave witness. He died young, at sixty-two, in faith – but he did not die easily. There was a deep sadness in him as he lay in palliative care waiting to bid his final goodbye to the rest of us. His sadness and its concomitant fear had nothing to do with fear of the next life, of what awaited him on the other side. His sadness and fear had to do with his giving up is place in this world, of dying to all the richness that is life. He was sad to be dying, to have to say goodbye to his wife, his family, his grandchildren, his friends, his faith community, his health, and all the things he enjoyed in this life. He died in faith, but did not die easily.

If we read the scriptures closely, we will see that this was also the case for Jesus. He too did not die easily, not because he feared what would meet him on the other side of death; however, like my dad, he deeply loved this life.  We see that clearly in his struggle in the garden of Gethsemane. Facing his death, the scriptures tell us that he literally “sweated blood” and begged his Father that he might somehow escape from dying. We (naively) tend to think Jesus was afraid because of the physical pain that awaited him, the scourging and the nails; but that is not what the Gospels portray. He sweats blood in a garden, not in an arena. Archetypally, gardens are the place of love. It is Jesus the lover, not the athlete, who is sweating blood. His fear of death is predicated on love, love for life, this life.

The Jesuit theologian, Michael Buckley, wrote an essay within which he compared Jesus to Socrates, purely as a study in human excellence. The surprising thing is that, purely in terms of human excellence, Jesus seemed to come up short in comparison to Socrates. Here is a poignant quote from that essay.

Socrates went to his death with calmness and poise. He accepted the judgment of the court, discoursed on the alternatives suggested by death and on the dialectical indications of immortality, found no cause for fear, drank the poison, and died. Jesus – how much the contrary. Jesus was almost hysterical with terror and fear; “with loud cries and tears to him who was able to save him from death.” He looked repeatedly to his friends for comfort and prayed for escape from death, and he found neither. … I once thought that this was because Socrates and Jesus suffered different deaths, the one so much more terrible than the other, the pain and agony of the cross so overshadowing the release of the hemlock.  … Now I believe that Jesus was a more profoundly weak man than Socrates, more liable to physical pain and weariness, more sensitive to human rejection and contempt, more affected by love and hate. Socrates never wept over Athens.” Jesus was incurably human.

Soren Kierkegaard in his journals confessed that he shuddered at the thought of dying to the world, dying to ordinary life: I love being a human being; I do not have the courage entirely to be spirit in that way. I still so much love to see the purely human delight that others take in life – something for which I have a better than ordinary eye, because I have a poet’s eye for it.

One of the early signs of clinical depression is a loss of buoyancy in one’s life, a loss of any sense of personal delight, and the detachment that comes with that, namely, the easy capacity to let go of all the things that used to energize us and bring us meaning and joy. On the outside that can look good religiously. Look how wonderfully detached he is! However, saintliness should not be confused with depression, nor faith with emotional resignation.

If you are healthy spiritually, do not be surprised if, like Jesus, you sweat some blood in the face of death in any of its forms, particularly if you love your life – more so if you have a poet’s eye.

You are as sick as your sickest secret! That’s a wise axiom. What’s sick in us will remain sick unless we open it up to others and to the light of day. As long as it’s a secret, it’s a sickness. However, perhaps the problem is not with what we keep secret, but that we keep it secret. Maybe the sickness is the secret rather than what we deem to be sick.

We all have our struggles, and we can thank God for that. The image and likeness of God inside us is not simply a beautiful icon imprinted in our souls. It’s fire, divine, insatiable, befuddling fire. By our very nature, there are complexities inside us that cannot make easy peace with the person we like to think we are. We all have wild fantasies and dark obsessions. Were our daydreams ever made public, they would reveal that we all nurse fantasies of grandiosity, of hatred, of vindication, and that we all are periodically caught up in the grip of various emotional and sexual obsessions. There are things in our daydreams about which we would be ashamed to speak. We all harbor fantasizes that are wild, earthy, grandiose, and egotistical. So we keep them secret and deal with them either by pathologizing them (relegating them to a sickness) or by denying them.

We relegate our fantasies to a sickness when we believe they are something we alone suffer from, something sick, shameful, and unique to us. They are something we never want others to know about us. As a result, our fantasies and obsessions become something to be ashamed of, a dark secret, a sickness beneath our normal self.

Another option is denial. We can consciously deny that we ever have these thoughts and feelings. Denial saves us from feeling shame, but we pay another price for this in the end. Denying our thoughts and feeling is akin to living on the ground floor of a house and taking any garbage or anything else we do not want to deal with and simply tossing it down into the basement and closing the door. Out of sight, out of mind. For a while. Garbage doesn’t cease to exist just because we have pushed it into the basement. Eventually it ferments and sends its poisonous gases up through the vents to contaminate the air we are breathing.

However, and this is the point, the complex yearnings, obsessions, and grandiosity inside our soul are not a sickness, nor something that we need to deny. Our soul, for all its wildness, is not sick. The problem is that we lack an understanding of the deeper part of our soul, our shadow, and believe there’s some sickness inside there – and it’s keeping this a secret that’s the actual sickness.

What is our shadow? Popular literature has given us a one-sided notion of what makes for our shadow. The popular notion is that our shadow is some dark, fearful place we are afraid to go, an inner desert we want at all cost not to venture into, inner demons that we want consciously to avoid. While we might at times feel those fears in the face of our own shadow, our shadow is not a dark thing at all. The opposite.

Here’s how our shadow forms. When a baby is born, it is luminous, wonderfully open and aware, looking around, simply drinking in reality. However, at this stage of life, a baby cannot think because it lacks an ego and thus lacks self-awareness. In order to form an ego and become self-aware, the baby has to make a series of massive mental contractions, each of which shuts it off from part of its own luminosity. First, early on in life, it distinguishes between what is self and what is other; I am not my mommy.  Soon afterwards, it distinguishes between living and non-living; a puppy is alive, a stone is not. Sometime after that, it distinguishes between mind and body; a body is a hard, solid thing, thinking is different. Finally, and this is the critical piece in the formation of our shadow, at a point in its life, the baby will make a distinction between what it can consciously face inside of itself and what is too overwhelming to consciously face. In doing that, it forms its shadow by splitting off a huge part of its luminosity (the full image and likeness of God inside itself) from its own conscious awareness.  Notice that our shadow is made up of our light, not our darkness. As Marianne Williamson aptly puts it (in a phrase Nelson Mandela used in his inauguration address) it is our light not our darkness that frightens us. In a healthy person, dark secrets generally hide the things that emanate out of the excessive light, divine energy, infinite longings, and godly grandiosity inside of us. When we bring these into the light, we see that they are neither dark nor sick. The sickness lies only in not bringing them to light.

In his autobiography, Nikos Kazantzakis shares how in his youth he was driven by a restlessness that had him searching for something he could never quite define. However, he made peace with his lack of peace because he accepted that, given the nature of the soul, he was supposed to feel that restlessness and that a healthy soul is a driven soul. Commenting on this, he writes: “No force anywhere on earth is as imperialistic as the human soul. It occupies and is occupied in turn, but it always considers its empire too narrow. Suffocating, it desires to conquer the world in order to breathe freely.”

We need to be given permission, I believe, to accept as God-given that imperialism inside our soul, even as we need always to be careful never to trivialize its power and meaning. However, that is a formula for tension. How does one make peace with the imperialism of one’s soul without denigrating the divine energy that is stoking that imperialism? For me, this has been a struggle.

I grew up in the heart of the Canadian prairies, with five hundred miles of open space in every direction. Geographically, that space let one’s soul stretch out, but otherwise my world seemed too small for my soul to breathe. I grew up inside a tight-knit community in an isolated rural area where the world was small enough so that everyone knew everyone else. That was wonderful because it made for a warm cocoon; but that cocoon (seemingly) separated me from the big world where, it seemed to my young mind, souls could breathe in spaces bigger than where I was breathing. Moreover, growing up with an acute religious and moral sensitivity, I felt guilty about my restlessness, as if it were something abnormal that I needed to hide.

In that state, as an eighteen-year-old, I entered religious life. Novitiates in those days were quite strict and secluded. We were eighteen of us, novices, sequestered in an old seminary building across a lake from a town and a highway. We could hear the sounds of traffic and see life on the other side of the lake, but we were not part of it. As well, most everything inside our sequestered life focused on the spiritual so that even our most earthy desires had to be associated with our hunger for God and for the bread of life. Not an easy task for anyone, especially a teenager.

Well, one day we were visited by a priest who gave my soul permission to breathe. He gathered us, the eighteen novices, into a classroom and began his conference with this question: Are you feeling a little restless? We nodded, rather surprised by the question. He went on: Well, you should be feeling restless! You must be jumping out of your skin! All that life in you and all those fiery hormones stirring in your blood, and you’re stuck here watching life happen across the lake! You must be going crazy sometimes! But … that’s good, that’s what you should be feeling, it shows you’re healthy. Stay with it. You can do this. It’s good to feel that restlessness.

That day the wide-open prairie spaces I had lived my whole life in and the wide-open spaces in my soul befriended each other a little. And that friendship continued to grow as I did my studies and read authors who had befriended their souls. Among others, these spoke to me: St. Augustine (You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.); Thomas Aquinas (The adequate object of the human intellect and will is all Being); Iris Murdoch (The deepest of all human pains is the pain of the inadequacy of self-expression); Karl Rahner (In the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable, we ultimately learn that here, in this life, there is no finished symphony); Sidney Callahan (We are made to ultimately sleep with the whole world, is it any wonder that we long for this along the way?); and James Hillman (Neither religion nor psychology really honors the human soul. Religion is forever trying to save the soul and psychology is always trying to fix the soul. The soul needs neither to be saved nor fixed; it is already eternal – it just needs to be listened to.)

Perhaps today the real struggle is not so much to accept sacred permission to befriend the wild insatiability of the soul. The greater struggle today, I suspect, is not to trivialize the soul, not to make its infinite longings something less than what they are.

During the World War II, Jesuit theologians resisting the Nazi occupation in France published an underground newspaper. The first issue opened with this now-famous line: France, take care not to lose your soul. Fair warning. The soul is imperialistic because it carries divine fire and so it struggles to breathe freely in the world. To feel and to honor that struggle is to be healthy.

A colleague once challenged Pierre Teilhard de Chardin with this question. You believe that good will ultimately triumph over evil; well, what if we blow up the world with an atomic bomb, what happens to goodness then? Teilhard answered this way. If we blow up the world with an atomic bomb, that would be a two-million-year setback; but goodness will triumph over evil, not because I wish it, but because God promised it and, in the resurrection, God showed that God has the power to deliver on that promise. He is right. Except for the resurrection, we have no guarantees about anything. Lies, injustice, and violence may well triumph in the end. That is certainly how it looked the day Jesus died.

Jesus was a great moral teacher and his teachings, if followed, would transform the world. Simply put, if we all lived the Sermon on the Mount, our world would be loving, peaceful, and just; but self-interest is often resistant to moral teaching. From the Gospels, we see that it was not Jesus’ teaching that swayed the powers of evil and ultimately revealed the power of God. Not that. The triumph of goodness and the final power of God were revealed instead through his death, by a grain of wheat falling in the ground and dying and so bearing lots of fruit. Jesus won victory over the powers of the world in a way that seems antithetical to all power. He did not overpower anyone with some intellectually superior muscle or by some worldly persuasion. No, he revealed God’s superior power simply by holding fast to truth and love even as lies, hatred, and self-serving power were crucifying him. The powers of the world put him to death, but he trusted that somehow God would vindicate him, that God would have the last word. God did. God raised him from the dead as a testimony that he was right and the powers of the world were wrong, and that truth and love will always have the last word.

That is the lesson. We too must trust that God will give truth and love the last word, irrespective of what things look like in the world. God’s judgment on the powers of this world does not play out like a Hollywood film where the bad guys get shot in the end by a morally superior muscle and we get to enjoy a catharsis. It works this way: everyone gets judged by the Sermon on the Mount, albeit self-interest generally rejects that judgment and seems to get away with it. However, there is a second judgment that everyone will submit to the resurrection. At the end of the day, which is not exactly like the end of the day in a Hollywood movie, God raises truth and love from their grave and gives them the final word. Ultimately, the powers of the world will all submit to that definitive judgment.

Without the resurrection, there are no guarantees for anything. That is why St. Paul says that if Jesus was not resurrected then we are the most deluded of all people. He is right. The belief that the forces of untruth, self-interest, injustice, and violence will eventually convert and give up their worldly dominance can sometimes look like a possibility on a given night when the world news looks better. However, as happened with Jesus, there is no guarantee that these powers will not eventually turn and crucify most everything that is honest, loving, just, and peaceful in our world. The history of Jesus and the history of the world testify to the fact that we cannot put our trust in worldly powers even when for a time they can look trustworthy. The powers of self-interest and violence crucified Jesus. They were doing it long before and have continued doing it long after. These powers will not be vanquished by some superior moral violence, but by living the Sermon on the Mount and trusting that God will roll back the stone from any tomb in which they bury us.

Many people, perhaps most people, believe there is a moral arc to reality, that reality is bent towards goodness over evil, love over hate, truth over lies, and justice over injustice, and they point to history to show that, while evil may triumph for a while, eventually reality rectifies itself and goodness wins out in the end, always. Some call this the law of karma. There is a lot of truth in that belief, not just because history seems to bear it out, but because when God made the universe, God made a love-oriented universe and so God wrote the Sermon on the Mount both into the human heart and into the very DNA of the universe itself. Physical creation knows how to heal itself, so too does moral creation. Thus, good should always triumph over evil – but, but, given human freedom, there are no guarantees – except for the promise given us in the resurrection.