How do we search for God?

It is easy to misunderstand what that means. We are forever searching for God, though mostly without knowing it. Usually, we think of our search for God as a conscious religious search, as something we do out of a spiritual side of ourselves. We tend to think of things this way: I have my normal life and its pursuits and, if I am so inclined, on the side, I might have a spiritual or religious pursuit wherein I try through prayer, reflection, and religious practices to get to know God. This is an unfortunate misunderstanding. Our normal search for meaning, fulfillment, and even for pleasure, is in fact our search for God.

What do we naturally search for in life? By nature, we search for meaning, love, a soulmate, friendship, emotional connection, sexual fulfillment, significance, recognition, knowledge, creativity, play, humor, and pleasure. However, we tend not to see these pursuits as searching for God.  In pursuing these things, we rarely, if ever, see them in any conscious way as our way of searching for God. In our minds, we are simply looking for happiness, meaning, fulfillment, and pleasure, and our search for God is something we need to do in another way, more consciously through some explicit religious practices.

Well, we are not the first persons to think like that. It has always been this way. For instance, St. Augustine struggled with exactly this, until one day he realized something. A searcher by temperament, Augustine spent the first thirty-four years of his life pursuing the things of this world: learning, meaning, love, sex, and a prestigious career. However, even before his conversion, there was a desire in him for God and the spiritual. However, like us, he saw that as a separate desire from what he was yearning for in the world. Only after his conversion did he realize something. Here is how he famously expressed it:

“Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you! You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you. In my unloveliness I plunged into the lovely things which you created. You were with me, but I was not with you. … You called, you shouted, and you broke through my deafness. You flashed, you shone, and you dispelled my blindness.”

This is an honest admission that he lived a good number of years not loving God; but it is also an admission that, during those years, he had massively misunderstood something and that misunderstanding lay at the root of his failure. What was that misunderstanding?

Reading his confession we tend to focus on the first part of it, namely, on his realization that God was inside of him all the while, but that he was not inside of himself. This is a perennial struggle for us too. Less obvious in this confession and something that is also a perennial struggle for us, is his recognition that for all those years while he was searching for life in the world, a search he generally understood as having nothing to do with God, he was actually searching for God. What he was looking for in all those worldly things and pleasures was in fact the person of God.  Indeed, his confession might be recast this way:

Late, late, have I loved you because I was outside of myself while all the while you were inside me, but I wasn’t home, and I had no idea it was you I was actually looking for in the world. I never connected that search to you. In my mind, I was not looking for you; I was looking for what would bring me meaning, love, significance, sexual fulfillment, knowledge, pleasure, and a prestigious career. Never did I connect my longing for these things with my longing for you. I had no idea that everything I was chasing, all those things I was lonely for, were already inside me, in you. Late, late, have I understood that. Late, late, have I learned that what I am so deeply hungry and lonely for is contained inside of you. All these years, I never connected my restlessness, my seemingly selfish and lustful pursuit of things, with you. Everything I am lonely for is inside of you and you are inside of me. Late, late, have I realized this.

We are fired into life with a madness that comes from the gods. So say the Greek Stoics. They are right. Our whole life is simply a search to respond to that divine madness inside us, a madness Christians identify with infinite yearnings of the soul. Given those yearnings, like Augustine, we plunge into the world searching for meaning, love, a soulmate, friendship, emotional connection, sexual fulfillment, significance, recognition, knowledge, creativity, and pleasure, and that earthy pursuit, perhaps more than our explicit religious pursuits, is in fact our search for God.

Best to realize this early, so we do not have to write: “Late, late, have I loved you!”

Most of us are familiar with the story of Zorba the Greek, either through Nikos Kazantzakis’ famous book or through the movie. Well, Zorba was not a fictional character. He was a real person, Alexis Zorba, who had such a larger-than-life personality and energy that when he died, Kazantzakis found his death very difficult to accept, incredulous that such energy, verve, and color were mortal.

On learning of Zorba’s death, this was Kazantzakis’ reaction: “I closed my eyes and felt tears rolling slowly, warmly down my cheeks. He’s dead, dead, dead. Zorba is gone, gone forever. The laughter is dead, the song cut off, the santir broken, the dance on the seaside pebbles has halted, the insatiable mouth that questioned with such incurable thirst is filled now with clay. … Such souls should not die. Will earth, water, fire, and chance ever be able to fashion a Zorba again? … It was as though I believed him to be immortal.”

Sometimes it’s hard to believe that a certain person can die because of the life and energy that he or she incarnated. We simply cannot imagine that life-pulse dead, stilled, forever gone from this planet. Certain people seem exempt from death because we cannot imagine such energy, color, generosity, and goodness dying.  How can such wonderful energy just die?

I have felt that many times in my life; most recently this past week when two former colleagues, both specially spirited, colorful, witty, and generous men, died. Kazantzakis came to mind, and his struggle to accept Zorba’s death, along with the way he tried to deal with that death. He decided he would try to “resurrect” Zorba, bring him back to life, by taking his story to the world in such a way so as to transform his life into a myth, a dance, and a religion.

Kazantzakis believed this is what Mary Magdala did in the wake of Jesus’ death, when she left his tomb and went back to the world. She resurrected Jesus by telling his story, creating a myth, a dance, and a religion. So, in the wake of Zorba’s death, Kazantzakis said to himself: “Let us give him our blood so that he can be brought back to life, let us do what we can to make this extraordinary eater, drinker, workhorse, woman-chaser, and vagabond live a little longer – this dancer and warrior, the broadest soul, surest body, freest cry I ever knew in my life.”

Bless his effort! It made for a great story, a gripping myth, but it never made for a religion or an eternal dance because that’s not what Mary Magdala did with Jesus. Nonetheless, there’s still something to be learned here about how to deal with a death that seemingly takes some oxygen out of the planet. We must not let that wonderful energy disappear, but keep it alive. However, as Christians, we do this in a different way.

We read the Mary Magdala story quite differently. Mary went to Jesus’ tomb, found it empty, and went away crying; but … but, before she got to tell anyone any story, she met a resurrected Jesus who shared with her how his energy, color, love, person would now be found, namely, in a radically new modality, inside his spirit. That contains the secret of how we are to give life to our loved ones after they have died.

How do we keep our loved ones and the wonderful energy they brought to the planet alive after they have died? First, by recognizing that their energy doesn’t die with their bodies, that it doesn’t depart the planet. Their energy remains, alive, still with us, but now inside us, through the spirit they leave behind (just as Jesus left his spirit behind). Further still, their energy infuses us whenever we enter into their “Galilee”, namely, into those places where their spirits thrived and breathed out generative oxygen.

What’s meant by that? What’s someone’s “Galilee”? A person’s “Galilee” is that special energy, that special oxygen, which he or she breathes out. For Zorba, it was his fearlessness and zest for life; for my dad, it was his moral stubbornness; for my mom, it was her generosity. In that energy, they breathed out something of God. Whenever we go to those places where their spirits breathed out God’s life, we breathe in again their oxygen, their dance, their life.

Like all of you, I have sometimes been stunned, saddened, and incredulous at the death of a certain person. How could that special energy just die? Sometimes that special energy was manifest in physical beauty, human grace, fearlessness, zest, color, moral steadiness, compassion, graciousness, warmth, wit, or humor. It can be hard to accept that beauty and live-giving oxygen can seemingly leave the planet.

In the end, nothing is lost. Sometime, in God’s time, at the right time, the stone will roll back and like Mary Magdala walking away from the grave, we will know that we can breathe in that wonderful energy again in “Galilee”.

Today, the common question in spiritual circles is not, “What is your church or your religion?” But, “what is your practice?”

What is your practice? What is your particular explicit prayer practice? Is it Christian? Buddhist? Islamic? Secular?  Do you meditate? Do you do Centering prayer? Do you practice Mindfulness? For how long do you do this each day?

These are good questions and the prayer practices they refer to are good practices; but I take issue with one thing. The tendency here is to identify the essence of one’s discipleship and religious observance with a single explicit prayer practice, and that can be reductionist and simplistic. Discipleship is about more than one prayer practice.

A friend of mine shares this story. He was at a spirituality gathering where the question most asked of everyone was this: what is your practice? One woman replied, “My practice is raising my kids!” She may have meant it in jest, but her quip contains an insight that can serve as an important corrective to the tendency to identify the essence of one’s discipleship with a single explicit prayer practice.

Monks have secrets worth knowing. One of these is the truth that for any single prayer practice to be transformative it must be embedded in a larger set of practices, a much larger “monastic routine”, which commits one to a lot more than a single prayer practice. For a monk, each prayer practice is embedded inside a monastic routine and that routine, rather than any one single prayer practice, becomes the monk’s practice. Further still, that monastic routine, to have real value, must be itself predicated on fidelity to one’s vows.

Hence, the question “what is your practice?” is a good one if it refers to more than just a single explicit prayer practice. It must also ask whether you are keeping the commandments. Are you faithful to your vows and commitments? Are you raising your kids well? Are you staying within Christian community? Do you reach out to the poor? And, yes, do you have some regular, explicit, habitual prayer practice?

What is my own practice?

I lean heavily on regularity and ritual, on a “monastic routine”. Here is my normal routine: Each morning I pray the Office of Lauds (usually in community). Then, before going to my office, I read a spiritual book for at least 20 minutes.  At noon, I participate in the Eucharist, and sometime during the day, I go for a long walk and pray for an hour (mostly using the rosary as a mantra and praying for a lot of people by name).  On days when I do not take a walk, I sit in meditation or Centering prayer for about fifteen minutes. Each evening, I pray Vespers (again, usually in community). Once a week, I spend the evening writing a column on some aspect of spirituality. Once a month I celebrate the Sacrament of Reconciliation, always with the same confessor; and, when possible, I try to carve out a week each year to do a retreat. My practice survives on routine, rhythm, and ritual. These hold me and keep me inside my discipleship and my vows. They hold me more than I hold them. No matter how busy I am, no matter how distracted I am, and no matter whether or not I feel like praying on any given day, these rituals draw me into prayer and fidelity.

To be a disciple is to put yourself under a discipline.  Thus, the bigger part of my practice is my ministry and the chronic discipline this demands of me. Full disclosure, ministry is often more stimulating than prayer; but it also demands more of you and, if done in fidelity, can be powerfully transformative in terms of bringing you to maturity and altruism.

Carlo Carretto, the renowned spiritual writer, spend much of his adult life in the Sahara Desert, living in solitude as a monk, spending many hours in formal prayer. However, after years of solitude and prayer in the desert, he went to visit his aging mother who had dedicated many years of her life to raising children, leaving little time for formal prayer. Visiting her, he realized something, namely, his mother was more of contemplative than he was! To his credit, Carretto drew the right lesson: there was nothing wrong with what he had been doing in the solitude of the desert for all those years, but there was something very right in what his mother had been doing in the busy bustle of raising children for so many years. Her life was its own monastery. Her practice was “raising kids”.

I have always loved this line from Robert Lax: “The task in life is not so much finding a path in the woods as of finding a rhythm to walk in.” Perhaps your rhythm is “monastic”, perhaps “domestic”. An explicit prayer practice is very important as a religious practice, but so too are our duties of state.

Funny how God invariably shatters the containers of our expectations. We have a notion of how God should act and God ends up acting in a way that shatters all of those expectations and yet fulfills our expectations in a deeper way. That’s certainly true of what happened in Bethlehem at the first Christmas.

For centuries, men and women of faith, aware of their helplessness to rectify everything that’s wrong in life, had been praying for God to come to earth as a Messiah, a Savior, to clean up the earth and right all that’s wrong with it. Exactly how this was to happen was perhaps more of an inchoate longing for justice, a hungry hope, than any kind of clear vision, at least until the great Jewish prophets came along. Eventually prophets like Isaiah began to articulate a vision of what would happen when the Messiah came. In these visions, the Messiah would usher in a “Messianic Age”, a new time, when everything would be made right. There would be prosperity for the poor, healing for the sick, freedom from every type of enslavement, and justice for all (including punishment for the wicked). The poor and the meek would inherit the earth because the long-sought Messiah would simply overpower all evil, drive the wicked off the face of the earth, and make all things right.

And after all those centuries of waiting, of longing, what did we get? What did we get? A helpless, naked baby, unable to feed himself. That wasn’t the way anyone expected this to happen. They had expected a Superhuman, a Superstar, someone whose muscle, intellect, physical stature, invulnerability, and invincibility would simply dwarf all the powers on the planet in a way that there could be no argument, no resistance, no standing against its presence.

That’s still the way, mostly, we fantasize how God’s power should work in our world. But, as we know from the first Christmas, that’s not normally the way God works. What was revealed in Bethlehem is that normally we meet the presence and power of God in our world as a helpless infant lying in the straw, vulnerable, seemingly powerless, touching us subliminally.

Why? Why doesn’t the all-powerful Creator of the universe flex more muscle? Why is God normally revealed more in the body of an infant than in that of Superstar? Why? Because the power of God works to melt hearts rather than break them, and that’s what vulnerability and helplessness can do. That’s what infants can do. God’s power, at least God’s power to draw us into intimacy with each other, doesn’t normally work through might, muscles, and cool (invulnerability). It works through a lot of things, but it works with a special power through vulnerability and helplessness. Intimacy is predicated on vulnerability. You cannot overpower another person so as to make him or her love you, unless you overpower his or her heart the way an infant does.  We can seduce each other through attractiveness, draw admiration through our talents, and intimidate each other through superior strength, but none of these will ultimately provide the basis for a shared community of life for long … but the powerlessness and innocence of a baby can provide that.

God’s power, like a baby sleeping in its crib, lies in our world as a quiet invitation, not as a threat or coercion. When Christ took on flesh in our world in Bethlehem two thousand years ago and then died seemingly helpless on a cross in Jerusalem some thirty years later, this is what was revealed: the God who is incarnated in Jesus Christ enters into human suffering rather than stands clear of it, is in solidarity with us rather than standing apart from us, manifests that the route to glory is downward rather than upward, stands with the poor and powerless rather than with the rich and powerful, invites rather than coerces, and is more manifest in a baby than in a superstar.

But that isn’t always easy to grasp, nor accept. We are often frustrated and impatient with God who, as scripture tells, can seem slow to act. Jesus promised that the poor and the meek would inherit the earth and this seems forever belied by what’s actually happening in the world. The rich are getting richer and the poor don’t seem to be inheriting much. What good does a helpless infant do apropos to this? Where do we see messianic power acting?

Well, again the containers of our expectations need to be shattered. What does it mean “to inherit the earth”? To be a superstar? To be rich and famous? To have power over others? To walk into a room and be instantly recognized and admired as being significant and important? Is that the way we “inherit the earth”? Or, do we “inherit the earth” when a coldness is melted in our hearts and we are brought back to our primal goodness by the smile of a baby?

When I was a young boy growing up in a Catholic community, the catechesis of the time tried to inspire the hearts of the young with stories of martyrs, saints, and other people who lived out high ideals in terms of virtue and faith. I remember one story in particular that caught my imagination and inspired me, the story of a third-century Christian martyr, St. Tarcisius.

As legend (or truth) has it, Tarcisius was a twelve-year-old acolyte during the time of the early Christian persecutions. At that time, Christians in Rome were celebrating the Eucharist in secret in the catacombs. After those secret masses someone, a deacon or an acolyte, would carry the Eucharistic species, the Blessed Sacrament, to the sick and to prisoners. One day, after one of those secret masses, young Tarcisius was carrying the Blessed Sacrament on route to a prison when he was accosted by a mob. He refused to hand over the Blessed Sacrament, protected it with his own body, and was beaten to death as a result.

As a twelve-year-old boy that story enflamed my romantic imagination. I wanted to have that kind of high ideal in my life. In my young imagination, Tarcisius was the ultimate hero whom I wanted to be like.

We’ve come a long way from there, both in our culture and in our churches. We’re no longer moved romantically much by either the saints of old or the saints of today. Yes, we still make an official place for them in our churches and in our highest ideals, but now we’re moved romantically much more by the lives of the rich, the famous, the beautiful, the pop stars, the professional athletes, the physically gifted, and the intellectually gifted. It’s they who now enflame our imaginations, draw our admiration, and who we most like to imitate.

In the early nineteenth century, Alban Butler, an English convert, collected stories of the lives of the saints and eventually set them together in twelve-volume set, famously know as Butler’s Lives of the Saints. For nearly two hundred years, these books inspired Christians, young and old. No longer. Today, Butler’s Lives of the Saints has effectively been replaced by People magazine, Sports Illustrated, Rolling Stone, Time magazine, and the multiple other magazines which chronicle the lives of the rich and famous and stare out at us from every newsstand and grocery-store check-out line.

In effect, we have moved: fromSt. Tarcisius to Justin Bieber; from Therese of Lisieux to Taylor Swift; from Thomas Aquinas to Tom Brady; from St. Monica to Meryl Streep; from St. Augustine to Mark Zuckerberg; from Julian of Norwich to Marianne Williamson; and from the first African American saint, St. Martin de Porres, to LeBron James. It’s these people who are now enflaming our romantic imagination and inviting our imitation.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that these people are bad or that there’s anything wrong with admiring them. Indeed, we owe them some admiration because all beauty and talent take their origin in God who is the author of all good things. From a saint’s virtue, to a movie star’s physical beauty, to an athlete’s grace, there’s only one author at the origin of all that grace, God. Thomas Aquinas once rightly pointed out that to withhold a compliment from someone who deserves it is a sin because we are withholding food from someone who needs it to live on. Beauty, talent, and grace need to be recognized and acknowledged. Admiration is not the issue. The issue rather is that while we need to admire and acknowledge the gifts of the talented and the beautiful, these are not always the lives we should be imitating, unless they also radiate virtue and saintliness. We shouldn’t too easily identify human grace with moral virtue. But that’s a problem.

As well, one of the weaknesses in our churches today is that while we have vastly upgraded and refined our intellectual imagination and now have better and healthier theological and biblical studies, we struggle to touch hearts. We struggle to get people to fall in love with their faith and especially with their church. We struggle to enflame their romantic imagination as we once did by invoking the lives of the saints.

Where might we go with all of this? Can we find again saints to enflame our ideals? Can the fine work done today by Robert Ellsberg on hagiography (on the lives of the saints and other moral giants who have passed before us) become the new Butler’s Lives of the Saints? Can secular biographies of some moral giants in our own age draw our imitation? Is there a St. Tarcisius out there who can inspire the young?

Today, more than ever, we need inspiring stories about women and men, young and old, who have lived out heroic virtue. Without such ideals to emulate, we too quickly identify moral virtue with human grace and deprive ourselves of higher spiritual ideals.

Maturity has various levels. Basic maturity is defined as having essentially outgrown the instinctual selfishness with which we were born so that our motivation and actions are now shaped by the needs of others and not just by our own needs. That’s the basic minimum, the low bar for maturity. After that there are degrees and levels, contingent upon how much our motivation and actions are altruistic rather than selfish. 

In the Gospels, Jesus invites us to ever deeper degrees of maturity, though sometimes we can miss the invitation because it presents itself subtly and not as explicitly worded moral invitation. One such subtle, but very deep, invitation to a higher degree of maturity is given in the incident where Jesus weeps over Jerusalem. What’s inside this image?

Here’s the image and its setting. Jesus has just been rejected, both in his person and in his message and he sees clearly the pain the people will bring upon themselves by that rejection. What’s his reaction? Does he react in the way most of us would: Well the hell with you! I hope you suffer the full consequences of your own stupidity! No. He weeps, like a loving parent dealing with a wayward child; he wishes with every fiber in his being that he could save them from the consequences of their own bad choices. He feels their wound rather than gleefully contemplating their suffering.

There’s a double challenge here. First, there’s a personal one: are we gleeful when people who reject our advice suffer for their wrong-headedness or do we weep inside us for the pain they have brought onto themselves? When we see the consequences in people’s lives of their own bad choices, be it with irresponsibility, with laziness, with drugs, with sex, with abortion, with ideology, with anti-religious attitudes, or with bad will, are we gleeful when those choices begin to snake-bite them (Well, you got what you deserved!) or do we weep for them, for their misfortune?

Admittedly, it’s hard not be gleeful when someone who rejects what we stand for is then snake-bitten by his own stubborn choice. It’s the natural way the heart works and so empathy can demand a very high degree of maturity. For example, during this Covid-19 pandemic, medical experts (almost without exception) have been telling us to wear masks to protect others and ourselves. What’s our spontaneous reaction when someone defies that warning, thinks he is smarter than the doctors, doesn’t wear a mask, and then contracts the virus? Do we secretly bask in the cathartic satisfaction that he got what he deserved or do we, metaphorically, “weep over Jerusalem”?

Beyond the challenge to each of us to move towards a higher level of maturity, this image also contains an important pastoral challenge for the church.How do we, as a church, see a secularized world that has rejected many of our beliefs and values?  When we see the consequences the world is paying for this are we gleeful or sympathetic?Do we see the secularized world with all the problems it is bringing onto itself by its rejection of some Gospel values as an adversary (someone from whom we need to protect ourselves) or as our own suffering child? If you’re a parent or grandparent who’s suffering over a wayward child or grandchild you probably understand what it means to “weep over Jerusalem”.

Moreover the struggle to “weep over” our secularized world (or over anyone who rejects what we stand for) is compounded by yet another dynamic which militates against sympathy. There’s a perverse emotional and psychological propensity inside us which works this way. Whenever we are hurting badly we need to blame someone, need to be angry at someone, and need to lash out at someone.  And you know who we always pick for that? Someone we feel safe enough to hurt because we know that he or she is mature enough not to hit back!

There’s a lot of lashing out at the Church today. Granted, there are a lot of legitimate reasons for this. Given the church’s shortcomings, part of that hostility is justified; but some of that hostility often goes beyond what’s justified. Along with the legitimate anger there’s sometimes a lot of free-floating, gratuitous anger. What’s our reaction to that unjustified anger and unfair accusation? Do we react in kind? “You are way out of line here, go take that anger elsewhere! Or, like Jesus weeping over Jerusalem, can we meet unfair anger and accusation with tears of empathy and a prayer that a world that’s angry with us will be spared the pain of its own bad choices?

Soren Kierkegaard famously wrote: Jesus wants followers, not admirers! Wise words. In Jesus’ reaction to his own rejection, his weeping over Jerusalem, we see the epitome of human maturity. To this we are called, personally and as an ecclesial community. We also see there that a big heart feels the pain of others, even of those others who reject you.

God is erotically charged and the world is achingly amorous, hence they caress each other in mutual attraction and filiation.

Jewish philosopher Martin Buber made that assertion, and while it seems to perfectly echo the opening line of St. Augustine’s autobiography (“You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”) it hints at something more. St. Augustine was talking about an insatiable ache inside the human heart which keeps us restless and forever aware that everything we experience is not enough because the finite unceasingly aches for the infinite, and the infinite unceasingly lures the finite. But St. Augustine was speaking of the human heart, about the restlessness and pull towards God that’s felt there.

Martin Buber is talking about that too, but he’s also talking about a restlessness, an incurable pull towards God, that’s inside all of nature, inside the universe itself.  It isn’t just people who are achingly amorous, it’s the whole world, all of nature, the universe itself.

What’s being said here? In essence, Buber is saying that what’s felt inside the human heart is also present inside every element within nature itself, in atoms, molecules, stones, plants, insects, and animals. There’s the same ache for God inside everything that exists, from a dead planet, to a black hole, to a redwood tree, to our pet dogs and cats, to the heart of a saint.  And in that there’s no distinction between the spiritual and the physical. The one God who made both is drawing them both in the same way. 

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who was both a scientist and a mystic, believed this interplay between the energy flowing from an erotically charged God and that flowing back from an amorous world, is the energy that undergirds the very structure of the universe, physical and spiritual. For Teilhard, the law of gravity, atomic activity, photosynthesis, ecosystems, electromagnetic fields, animal instinct, sexuality, human friendship, creativity, and altruism, all draw on and manifest one and the same energy, an energy that is forever drawing all things towards each other.  If that is true, and it is, then ultimately the law of gravity and the Holy Spirit are part of one and the same energy, one and the same law, one and the same interplay of eros and response.

At first glance it may seem rather unorthodox theologically to put people and physical nature on the same plane. Perhaps too, it some might find it offensive to speak of God as “erotically charged”.  So let me address those concerns.

In terms of God relating to physical nature, orthodox Christian theology and our scriptures affirm that God’s coming to us in Christ in the incarnation is an event not just for people, but also for physical creation itself. When Jesus says he has come to save the world he is, in fact, talking about the world and not just the people in the world. Physical creation, no less than humanity, is God’s child and God intends to redeem all of his children. Christian theology has never taught that the world will be destroyed at the end of time, but rather (as St. Paul says) physical creation will be transformed and enter into the glorious liberty of the children of God. How will the physical world go to heaven? We don’t know; though we can’t conceptualize how we will go there either. But we know this: the Christ who took on flesh in the incarnation is also the Cosmic Christ, that is, the Christ through whom all things were made and who binds all creation together. Hence theologians speak of “deep incarnation”, namely, of the Christ-event as going deeper than simply saving human beings, as saving physical creation itself.

I can appreciate too that there will be some dis-ease in my speaking of God as “erotic”, given that today we generally identify that word with sex. But that’s not the meaning of the word. For the Greek philosophers, from whom we took this word, eros was identified with love, and with love in all its aspects. Eros did mean sexual attraction and emotional obsession, but it also meant friendship, playfulness, creativity, common sense, and altruism. Eros, properly understood, includes all of those elements, so even if we identify eros with sexuality, there still should be no discomfort in applying this to God. We are made in the image and likeness of God, and thus our sexuality reflects something inside the nature of God. A God who is generative enough to create billions of galaxies and is continually creating billions of people, clearly is sexual and fertile in ways beyond our conception. Moreover, the relentless ache inside of every element and person in the universe for unity with something beyond itself has one and the same thing in mind, consummation in love with God who is Love.

So, in reality, the law of gravity and the gifts of the Holy Spirit have one and the same aim.

What’s right and what’s wrong? We fight a lot over moral issues, often with a self-assured righteousness. And mostly we fall into that same self-righteousness whenever we argue about sin. What constitutes a sin and what makes for a serious sin? Different Christian denominations and different schools of thought within them lean on various kinds of biblical and philosophical reasoning in trying to sort this out, often bitterly disagreeing with each other and provoking more anger than consensus.

Partly that’s to be expected since moral questions must take into account the mystery of human freedom, the limitations inherent in human contingency, and the bewildering number of existential situations that vary from person to person. It’s not easy in any given situation to tell what’s right and what’s wrong, and even more difficult to tell what’s sinful and what’s not.

Intending no offense to how our churches and moral thinkers have classically approached moral questions, I believe there’s a better way to approach them that, more healthily, takes into account human freedom, human limitations, and the singular existential situation of every individual. The approach isn’t my own, but one voiced by the Prophet Isaiah who offers us this question from God: What kind of house can you build for me? (Isaiah 66, 1) That question should undergird our overall discipleship and all of our moral choices.

What kind of house can you build for me? Men and women of faith have generally taken this literally, and so from ancient times to this very day have built magnificent temples, shrines, churches, and cathedrals to show their faith in God. That’s wonderful, but the invitation Isaiah voices is, first and foremost, about the kind of house we’re meant to build inside ourselves. How do we enshrine the image and likeness of God inside our body, our intellect, our affectivity, our actions? What kind of “church” or “cathedral” is our very person? That’s the deeper question in terms of moral living.

Beyond a very elementary level, our moral decision-making should no longer by guided by the question of right or wrong, is this sinful or not?  Rather it should be guided and motivated by a higher question: What kind of house can you build for me? At what level do I want live out my humanity and my discipleship? Do I want to be more self-serving or more generous? Do I want to be petty or noble? Do I want to be self-pitying or big of heart? Do I want to live out my commitments in a fully honest fidelity or am I comfortable betraying others and myself in hidden ways? Do I want to be a saint or am I okay being mediocre?

At a mature level of discipleship (and human maturity) the question is no longer, is this right wrong? That’s not love’s question. Love’s question is rather, how can I go deeper? At what level can I live out love, truth, light, and fidelity in my life?

Allow me a simple, earthy example to illustrate this. Consider the issue of sexual chastity: is masturbation wrong and sinful? I once heard a moral professor take a perspective on this which reflects the challenge of Isaiah. Here, in a paraphrase, is how he framed the issue: “I don’t believe it’s helpful to contextualize this question as did the classical moral theology texts, by saying it’s a grave disorder and seriously sinful. Nor do I believe that it’s helpful to say what our culture and much of contemporary psychology is saying, that it’s morally indifferent. I believe that a more helpful way to approach this is not to look at it through the prism of right or wrong, sinful or not. Rather, ask yourself this: at what level do I want to live? At what level do I want to carry my chastity, my fidelity, and my honesty? At what point in my life do I want to accept carrying more of the tension that both my discipleship and my humanity ask of me? What kind of person do I want to be? Do I want to be someone who is fully transparent or someone who has hidden goods under the counter? Do I want to live in full sobriety?” What kind of “temple” do I want to be?  What kind of house can I build for God?

This, I believe, is the ideal way we should stand before the moral choices in our lives. Granted, this isn’t a spirituality for persons whose moral development is so weak or impaired that they are struggling still with the more fundamental demands of the Ten Commandments. Such persons need remedial and therapeutic help, and that’s a different (though needed) task.

And one further point, this moral choice comes to us, as do all the invitations from God, as an invitation, not as a threat. It’s through love and not threat that God invites us into life and discipleship, always gently asking us: what kind of house can you build for me?