Silent Night

December 22, 2025

Nothing is perfect, but the hymn Silent Night nearly perfectly expresses how we should picture what happened at the birth of Christ. Its melody soothes like a mother soothing a baby, and that melody is wedded to words that describe beautifully what took place at the birth of Jesus.

In a word, it was silent! No fireworks, no crowds, no shouts, no cameras, no press coverage, no social media, no proclamation that something earthshaking was happening. None of these. It was quiet, save for the occasional gentle sound of a baby crying; just an unknown couple in an animal shelter with a helpless newborn, stared at by a few mute animals.

That’s how God entered our world at Jesus’ birth, and that’s still how God normally enters our lives. Silently, quietly, helpless as a baby, having only the power of vulnerability, of innocence, of a moral tug that touches the higher angels inside us and asks to be picked up and nurtured.

God wasn’t born into our world as a self-sufficient adult, let alone as some superman or superstar. God was born as a helpless infant who could not feed himself or change his own diaper. And that’s the way God is normally present in our lives, as a helpless infant we need to pick up and nurture into adulthood. And, as a helpless infant, God can be ignored, though only at the cost of our own integrity and conscience.

Note this is also the pattern of Jesus’ earthly ministry, not least in how he gave his death to us. He never overpowered anyone. He never coerced anyone. He never performed miracles to impress anyone. He never tried to use divine power to prove that we have no other choice than to believe that God exists, that the Sermon on the Mount is the ultimate moral code, or that love lies at the center of all existence. The divine just lies there silently, an invitation, a constant moral pleading.

When he was taunted on the cross and challenged to show divine power, Jesus resisted, choosing instead to give himself over in silence and love rather than to physically overpower any earthly forces. Like the baby lying helplessly in a crib in Bethlehem, he hung helpless on a cross in Jerusalem. That’s how God is present in our world.

But that’s not how we want God’s presence and power in the world. Like our ancient faith ancestors who longed for and prayed for an earthly Messiah who would physically overpower the forces of evil, we too don’t want a helpless child as a Messiah. We want a Messiah who shows some earthly power, who dazzles, does miracles, brings about justice by force, gives us miracles whenever we need them, and constantly flashes divine power to show the world who’s really in charge. We want a Jesus who, when taunted, comes down off the cross by divine power and humiliates those who thought they had power over him. We don’t want an infant lying in silence, unable to speak. We want divine birth as a supersonic boom exploding all our doubts.

But that’s not what we got!

Daniel Berrigan once was asked to give a public lecture at a university on the topic of Where is God Speaking in our World Today? In words to this effect, he addressed the topic in less than three minutes: I now work in hospice, sitting with people who are dying. Right now, among those dying is a young man who is completely debilitated and helpless. He’s bedridden, unable to feed himself, mostly unconscious, and unable to speak. I try to sit with him for a good stretch of time each day, holding his hand and struggling to hear what he is saying – because he can’t speak, because that’s the only place where God is speaking in our world.

I’m not sure the university paid him a stipend for that two-minute presentation, but forty years later his words still stand out in my memory because of their radical challenge: We need to struggle to hear God’s voice in what’s unable to speak.

Joseph Mohr wrote the lyrics for Silent Night during a time of war and great social upheaval. Mohr, a young Austrian priest, was inspired to write these words after seeing a young mother in a hut on Christmas eve, sitting in silence, peacefully nursing a baby.

On the night he was born, the infant Christ-child spoke only in silence, in one that radiated peace.There’s an ancient poem that reads something like this: If you’re walking down the roads of life these days and looking for God, or for a piece of God, or for some spirit by which to guide your life, you should be looking down. For if God is going to be found these days, it’s going to be in small things, it’s going to be close to the ground, it may even be below the ground, it might even be in the silent face of an infant.

Who Would Have Thought It?

December 15, 2025

I once had the privilege of visiting the Holy Land. It’s a strangely different place. Soaked in history, in struggle, in religion, in blood. Virtually every inch of its soil has been soaked in blood, including the blood of Jesus. History leaps out at you from every stone.

Ancient things come to the surface there and mix with the things of today. When you stand in its sacred spots, you begin to understand why Moses was told to take his shoes off and why, through the centuries, so many wars have been fought over this small strip of desert. Aptly named the Holy Land, I walked its ground, barefoot in soul.

Of all the things I saw there, including the tomb of Jesus, few touched me as deeply as did the Church of the Visitation. It stands in sharp contrast to most of the other churches there that mark the key events in Jesus’ life.

Unlike most of the other churches, the Church of the Visitation is a very modest building. You don’t see any gold or marble. Its wooden walls and oak ceiling are plain and mostly bare. However, on the front wall, behind the altar, there is a painting that depicts the scene of the Visitation, and it was this painting that struck me deeply.

It’s a picture of two peasant women, Mary and Elizabeth, both pregnant, greeting each other. Everything about it suggests smallness, littleness, obscurity, dust, small town, insignificance.

You see two plain looking women, standing in the dust of an unknown village. Nothing suggests that either of them, or anything they are doing or carrying, is out of the ordinary or of any significance. Yet, and this is the genius of the painting, all that littleness, obscurity, seeming barrenness, and small-town insignificance makes you automatically ask the question: Who would have thought it? Who would ever have imagined that these two women, in this obscure town, in this obscure place, in this obscure time, were carrying inside of them something that would radically and forever change the whole world?

Who would have thought it? Yes. Who would have thought that what these obscure peasant women were gestating and carrying inside of them would one day change history more than any army, philosopher, artist, emperor, king, queen, or superstar ever would?

Inside them, they were gestating Jesus and John the Baptist, the Christ and the prophet who would announce him. These two births changed the world so radically that today we even measure time by the event of those births. We live in the year 2025 after that event.

There’s a lesson here: Never underrate, in terms of world impact, someone living in obscurity who is pregnant with promise. Never underestimate the impact in history of silent, hidden gestation. How can any of us have any real significance in our world when we live in obscurity, unknown, hidden away, unable to do big acts that shape history?

We can take a lesson from Mary and Elizabeth. We can become pregnant with promise, with hope, with the Holy Spirit and then, hidden from the world, gestate that into real flesh, our own. We too can reshape history.

If we can grasp this, there will be more peace in our lives because some of the restless fires inside us will torment us less. In brief, there’s a perpetual dissatisfaction inside us that can only be stilled by accepting something we might term the martyrdom of obscurity, that is, the self-sacrifice of accepting a life in which we will never have adequate, satisfactory self-expression. That acceptance can help still that pressure inside us which pushes us to be known, to make a difference, to make our lives count in terms of the big picture.

We all know the feeling of sitting inside of our own lives and feeling unknown, small time, undistinguished, and frustrated because our riches are unknown to others. We have so much to give to the world, but the world doesn’t know us. We yearn to do great things, important things, things that affect the world beyond the boundaries of the small towns we live in (even when we are living in large cities).

What can help bring some peace is the image expressed in that painting in the Church of the Visitation, namely, that what ultimately changes the world is what we give birth to when, in the obscurity and dust of our small towns and in the frustration of lives that forever seem too small for us, we become pregnant with hope and, after a silent gestation process, one not advertised or known to the world, we bring that hope to full term.

When I was teaching at Newman College in Edmonton, our president then was a Holy Cross priest who brought us some Maritime color. When surprised by something, he would exclaim: “Who would have thunk it?”

Yes, two pregnant women, two thousand years ago, of no status, isolated, standing in the dust, forever changing the world? Who would have thunk it?

Images for Advent

December 8, 2025

Advent should never be confused with Lent. Lent is a penitential season. Its color is purple and its symbol is ashes. Unlike Lent, Advent is not about fasting and penance. It’s about waiting. Advent is a time to get in touch with longing, with desire, with what it means to wait. Its color is crimson, the color of desire.

With that in mind, here are some images for Advent.

Every tear brings the Messiah closer! That’s an axiom drawn from Jewish apocalyptic literature which highlights that the Messiah can only be born into our lives when we have created the proper space within which to receive him. And that space is created through longing, through waiting, through aching, through tears, through letting frustration and tension stretch our hearts and our vision enough that the Messiah can come, not as superman who is the hero in a Hollywood movie, but as a helpless Christ Child who manifests what love actually is by the way he lives, suffers, dies, and forgives.

For something to be sublime, there first must be some sublimation! The word sublime takes its roots in the word sublimation. For something to be sublime there first must have been some tension. And the greater the tension, the more sublime it will be if that tension is carried to its proper end and is not resolved prematurely. Gestation cannot be rushed, healing demands its proper season, soulful consummation is predicated on prior waiting, and even wine demands a sufficient time to mature.

In our longing and loneliness, we intuit the Kingdom of God! We are all familiar with St. Augustine’s dictum: You have made us for Yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You. What can we do when we feel lonely, as unanimity-minus-one, when the pain of our aloneness is most acute? We can use that moment, that painful sense of our distance from intimacy, to intuit the Kingdom of God, that is, to let that pain stretch our hearts enough to give us a truer sense of what really constitutes the Kingdom of God.

Our longing and aching can help raise our psychic temperature! This is an image drawn from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Teilhard, a scientist and a mystic, draws a spiritual lesson from the chemistry lab.Sometimes a scientist will put two chemicals together in a test tube, but they won’t unite. Instead, they simply lie beside each other, unable to fuse into one. Now if the scientist applies heat to the test tube, they often, at a higher temperature, will fuse and become one. Teilhard applies this to human relationships. Sometimes, for all kinds of reasons, we refuse meaningful relationships with each other and like two chemicals in a test tube remain separate, too cold to unite. However deep longing, aching, hurt, loss, and bitter waiting can, in Teilhard’s words, raise our “psychic temperature” to a point where it melts our coldness and opens us to union. Advent is a season to raise our psychic temperature, through letting our longing, loneliness, and frustrations make us less cold, judgmental, and selfish.

A damp log must first sizzle in a fire before it can burst into flame! This is an image from John of the Cross. When you throw a damp log into a fire it does not catch flame immediately. It must first lie in the fire and sizzle until the heat dries it out sufficiently. Only then will it burst into flame. John suggests that in our longing and our frustrated desires we are metaphorically “sizzling” inside the fire of love (human and divine). In a manner of speaking, the pain is “drying us out”, so that at a point we too can burst into flame in love. Advent is a time to let our unfilled longings and our bitter frustrations “sizzle” within us, so as that the flame of love might eventually catch fire within us.

In the end, these images say the same thing. Advent is about proper waiting, about not resolving tension prematurely, about patiently carrying it to let divinity, intimacy, the Messiah, and the sublime, be born more deeply into our lives. Perhaps the one word that summarizes all this is the word patience. Advent is the season to practice patience.

Carlo Carretto was a monk who for a long stretch of his life lived in the Sahara Desert as a desert hermit, where he wrote a series of deeply challenging books. After he had been in the desert for a number of years, a journalist interviewed him and asked him this question: After all these years of silence and prayer, if you had to send one message back to the world, what would it be? What do you hear God saying to the world?

Carretto’s answer: God is telling us to learn to wait! To wait for many things! To wait for God!

That’s the challenge of Advent.

How Do We Know God Exists?

December 1, 2025

Recently I was listening to a religious talk show on the radio when a caller asked: How do we know that God exists? A good question.

The radio host answered by saying that we know it through faith. That’s not a bad answer, except what needs to be teased out is how we know this through faith.

First, what does it mean to know something? If we believe that to know something means to be able to somehow picture it, understand it, and imagine its existence, then this side of eternity, we can never know God. Why?

Because God is ineffable. That’s the first and non-negotiable truth we need to accept about God and it means that God, by definition, is beyond our imagination. God is infinite and the infinite can never be circumscribed or captured in a concept. Try imagining the highest number to which it is possible to count. God’s nature and existence can never be conceptualized or imagined. But it can be known.

Knowing isn’t always in the head, something we can explicate, own in a picture, and give words to. Sometimes, particularly with things touching the deepest mysteries in life, we know beyond our head and our heart. This knowing is in our gut, something felt as a moral imperative, a nudge, a call, an obligation, a voice which tells us what we must do to stay true. It’s there we know God, beyond any imaginative, intellectual, or even affective grasp.

The revealed truths about God in scripture, in Christian tradition, and in the witness of the lives of martyrs and saints, simply give expression to something we already know, as the mystics put it, in a dark way.

So, how might we prove the existence of God?

I wrote my doctoral thesis on exactly that question. In that thesis, I take up the classical proofs for the existence of God as we see these articulated in Western philosophy. For example, Thomas Aquinas tried to prove God’s existence in five separate arguments.

Here’s one of those arguments: Imagine walking down a road and seeing a stone and asking yourself, how did it get there? Given the brute reality of a stone, you can simply answer, it’s always been there. However, imagine walking down a road and seeing a clock still keeping time. Can you still say, it’s always been there? No, it can’t always have been there because it has an intelligent design that someone must have built into it and it is ticking away the hours, which means it cannot have been there forever.

Aquinas then asks us to apply this to our own existence and to the universe. Creation has an incredibly intelligent design and, as we know from contemporary physics, has not always existed. Something or someone with intelligence has given us and the universe a historical beginning and an intelligent design. Who?

How much weight does an argument like this carry? There was once a famous debate on BBC radio in England between Frederick Copleston, a renowned Christian philosopher, and Bertrand Russell, a brilliant agnostic thinker. After all the give and take in their debate, they agreed, as atheist and believer, on this one thing: If the world makes sense then God exists. As an atheist, Russell agreed to that, but then went on to say that ultimately the world doesn’t make sense.

Most thinking atheists accept that the world doesn’t’ make sense; but then, like Albert Camus, struggle with the question, how can it not make sense? If there isn’t a God then how can we say that is better to help a child than to abuse a child? If there isn’t a God, how can we ground rationality and morality?

At the end of my thesis, I concluded that existence of God cannot be proven through a rational argument, a logical syllogism, or a mathematical equation, albeit all of those can give some compelling hints regarding God’s existence.

However, God is not found at the end of an argument, a syllogism, or an equation. God’s existence, life, and love are known (they are experienced) inside a certain way of living.

Simply put, if we live in a certain way, in the way all religions worthy of the name (not least Christianity) invite us to live, namely, with compassion, selflessness, forgiveness, generosity, patience, long-suffering, fidelity, and gratitude, then we will know God’s existence by participation in God’s very life – and whether or not we have an imaginative sense of God’s existence is of no importance.

Why do I believe in God? Not because I’m particularly persuaded by proofs from great philosophical minds like Aquinas, Anselm, Descartes, Leibnitz, or Hartshorne. I find their proofs intellectually intriguing but existentially less persuasive.

I believe in God because I sense God’s presence at a gut level, as a silent voice, as a call, an invitation, a moral imperative which, whenever listened to and obeyed, brings community, love, peace, and purpose.

That’s the real proof for the existence of God.

Speaking Truth in Parables

November 24, 2025

Jesus was once asked why he spoke in parables. His answer is more than a little curious: I speak in parables . . . lest they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart and turn again, and I should heal them.

At first glance, it would seem that Jesus is being deliberately vague so that people would not understand the truth—and so could remain ignorant and obstinate.

The opposite is true. His studied imprecision is a gentleness, a deep compassion that recognizes that because people’s lives are complex, the truth should only be spoken in a certain way. How?

It is not enough just to have the truth. Truth can set us free, but it can also freeze hearts further if it is presented carelessly. Here’s a poignant example:

Novelist Joyce Carol Oates once published a book called Them. Although a novel, the book is based on the life of real person, a young woman whom Oates once taught in a college classroom and to whom she gave a failing grade.

Sometime after she had given this young woman a failing grade, Oates received a letter from her. The woman shared much of her own story, which was very checkered and painful. She had come from a bad home, been abused as a young girl, and had spent a number of years trying to deal with her wounded self through mindless and anonymous sex.

At the time she wrote this letter, she was trying to pull herself out of both her past and her destructive patterns of coping. In her letter she complained bitterly that she was not helped much by the class she took from Oates. Here, with a few slight redactions, is an extended quote from her letter:

“You once said in one of your classes: ‘Literature gives form to life.’ I remember you saying that very clearly. And now I want to ask you something: ‘What is form? And why is that better than the way life happens by itself?’

I hate all that, all those lies, so many words in all those books. What form is there to the way things happen? I wanted to run up to you after class and ask you that question, cry it out at you, shout it into your face because your words were wrong! You were wrong!

And yet I envy you. I have envied you since I first saw you. You and others like you. Your easy way with words and people. The way you can talk to others, like friends.

One day before class I saw you walking into the building with another teacher, the two of you, well-dressed, talking, smiling, like that was no accomplishment whatsoever. And another time I saw you driving away from school in a blue car.

And I hate you for that. For that and for your books and for your words, and for your knowing so much about what never happened in any perfect form.

I even see your picture in the newspapers sometimes. You, with all your knowledge, while I have lived my life already, turned myself inside out and got nothing out of it. I have lived my life and there is no form to it. No shape.

I could tell you about life. I and people like me. All of us people who lie alone at night and squirm with a hatred we cannot get straight, into a shape. All of us women who give themselves to men without knowing why, all of us who walk fast with hate, like pain, in our bowels, terrified. What do you know about that?

Like the woman I am sitting across from right now in the library as I write this letter. She is fat, heavy, thick cream-colored fat-marbled old legs, cracked with varicose veins. People like her and me know things you don’t know, you teachers and writers of books.

We are the ones who wait around libraries when it is time to leave and sit drinking coffee alone in the kitchen. We are the ones who make crazy plans for marriage, but have no one to marry. We are the ones who look around slowly when we get off the bus; but don’t know what we are looking for.

We are the ones who leaf through magazines with colored pictures and spend long hours sunk in our own bodies; thinking, remembering, dreaming, waiting for someone to come and to give form to so much pain. And what do you know about that?”

Yes, what do we know about that, we teachers, preachers, and writers of books? Her letter tells us why Jesus spoke in parables.

The truth can set us free. Indeed, it can give form to life. But can also be spoken unthinkingly, without heart, and then it serves mostly to rub our own inadequacy and shame into our face.

We need to speak our truth in parables. Truth is not something we can play with, fast and easy.

What Makes Us Family – Biology or Faith?

November 17, 2025

In one sense, we might say that Christianity invented religion in that before Christianity, communities of faith were mostly ethnically and tribally based. Jesus defined a family of faith differently, telling us that it is not the womb you were born out of, but the womb that you were reborn from that defines your family. For Jesus, real family is not grounded in biology, ethnicity, or nationality. It is grounded in faith.

Where does Jesus teach this? It is almost everywhere present as a motif underlying his teaching. However, it is made explicit a number of times in how he defines his relationship to his own mother and her place and status within the faith community.

There are several instances in the Gospel where Jesus seems to distance himself from his own mother. For instance, in one incident someone comes up to him and says, “your mother and brothers are standing outside, wanting to speak to you.” But Jesus replies, “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” Then pointing to his disciples, he said, “Here is my mother and my brothers.”

In another instance, he is addressing a crowd when a woman cries out, “Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breasts that nursed you!” Only to have Jesus say, “blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and keep it.”

That exchange might be recast this way. A woman in the crowd is especially moved by Jesus and shouts: “You must have had a wonderful mother!” Jesus’ answer: “Yes, she was wonderful, more wonderful than you think. All mothers are wonderful in their biology. But my mother was even more wonderful in her faith!”

These incidents can be confusing at first glance because it can seem like Jesus is distancing himself from his own mother. He is not. Instead, he is redefining his relationship to his mother in a way that gives her a different (and more exalted) status: Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and keep it. The Gospels make it clear that Mary was in fact the first person who did this. Her faith in saying “let it be done to me according to your word” is what made her more special than her biology.

In the Gospels, Mary has a special status within the apostolic community not first of all because she was the biological mother of Jesus, but because she was the first one to truly hear the word of God and keep it. Her faith, more than her biology, gave her special status.

Moreover, with these responses Jesus is fundamentally redefining what constitutes true family, that is, faith more than biology determines who is your mother and who are your brothers and sisters. Real family is not determined by biology, but by faith. For Christians, it is not the womb you were born out of, but the womb that you were reborn from that defines your family. True family no longer has its base in ethnicity, biology, tribe, or nation. None of these makes us brothers and sisters in the truest sense of the word family.

There are far-reaching challenges flowing from this, challenges we perennially tend to ignore. Simply put, we perennially resist defining family that widely. Instead, our propensity is to forever identify the family of faith with our own biological, ethnic, national, denominational, or ideological family, thus making God our own tribal, national, denominational, or ideological God. This gives us not only a false notion of family but also a false notion of God. In a phrase borrowed from Nikos Kazantzakis, when we do this, the bosom of God becomes a ghetto.

“Who is my mother? Who are my brothers and sisters?” Who is my real family?

In answering this, faith must ultimately override references to biological family, ethnicity, nationality, denominational, or ideological affinity. Those who are hearing the word of God and are keeping it are “mother, brother, and sister” to us.

Jesus’ redefinition of what constitutes family is, I believe, a much-needed challenge for us today as increasingly we are separating ourselves from each other through ideological, national, and ethnic differences and are defining family very differently than Jesus did. Identifying the family of faith with biological, ethnic, national, denominational, or ideological family is what underlies the concept of Christian nationalism and other kinds of tribalism which try to cloak themselves with Jesus and the Gospel. Those notions, however sincere, are misguided and in significant ways antithetical to Jesus and the Gospel. In Christ, as scripture assures us, we are all baptized into one body, whether Jew or Greek, slave or free, and we were all given one Spirit to drink. In the family of faith there is no Johnson or Rolheiser, American or Mexican, British or French, white or colored, liberal or conservative. Our real family, our family in Christ, transcends all of that – and not withstanding a healthy loyalty to biological family, denomination, and nation, asks each of us to also transcend that.

Letting People into Our Stingy Heaven

November 10, 2025

John Muir once asked: “Why are Christians so reluctant to let animals into their stingy heaven?”

Indeed, why? Especially since St. Paul tells us in the Epistle to the Romans that all creation (mineral, plant, animal) is groaning to be set free from its bondage to decay to enter eternal life with us. How? How will minerals, plants,, and animals go to heaven? That’s beyond our present imagination, just as we cannot imagine how we will enter heaven: “Eye has not seen, nor ear heard. Nor has it entered the heart of man the things God has prepared for those who love Him.” Eternal life is beyond our present imagination.

What John Muir asks concerning animals might be asked in a wider sense: are we too stingy about who gets to go to heaven?

What I mean by “stingy” here is how we are so often obsessed with purity, boundaries, dogma, and religious practice that we exclude millions from our church doors, our church programs, our sacramental programs, our Eucharistic tables, and from our notion of who will be going to heaven. This is true across denominational lines. As Christians, we all tend to create a stingy heaven.

However, I can appreciate the instinct behind this. Following Jesus must mean something concrete. Christian discipleship makes real demands and churches need to have real boundaries in terms of dogma, sacraments, membership, and practice. There is a legitimacy in creating a dividing line between who is in and who is out. The instinct behind this is healthy.

But its practice is often not healthy. We often make heaven stingy. Metaphorically, we are too often like that group in the Gospel who is blocking the paralytic from coming to Jesus, so that he can only get to Jesus by entering through a hole in the roof.

Our instinct may be right, but our practice is often wrong. We, those of us who are invested deeply in our churches, need to be strong enough in our own faith and practice to be anchors of a spirituality and ethos that welcomes in and dines with those who are not invested. How so? Here’s an analogy.

Imagine a family of ten, now all adults. Five of the children are deeply invested in the family. They come home regularly for visits, have meals together every weekend, check in with each other regularly, have regular rituals and celebrations to ensure that they stay connected, and make it their family business to see that their parents are always okay. They might aptly be called “practicing” members of the family.

Now, imagine that five of the children have drifted from the family. They no longer cultivate any regular meaningful connection with the family, are dissociated from its everyday life and ethos, aren’t particularly concerned with how their parents are doing, but still want to have some connection to the family to occasionally share an occasion, a celebration, or meal with them. They might aptly be described as “non-practicing” members of the family.

This poses the question: Do the “practicing members” of the family refuse them entry into their gatherings, believing that allowing them to come jeopardizes the family’s beliefs, values, and ethos? Or do they allow them to come, but only on condition that they first make a series of practical commitments to regularize contact with the family?

My guess is that in most healthy families the “practicing” members would happily welcome the “non-practicing” members to a family event, gathering, or meal, grateful they are there, graciously accepting them without initially asking for any practical promises or commitments. Nor would they feel threatened by them joining the celebration and taking a seat at the table, fearful that the family’s ethos might somehow be compromised.

As “practicing” members of the family they would have a steady confidence that their own commitment sufficiently anchors the family’s ethos, standards, and rituals so that those who are present and uncommitted aren’t threatening anything but are making the celebration richer and more inclusive. That confidence would be grounded on knowing (in terms of this particular family) that they are the adults in the room and can welcome others without compromising anything. They would not be stingy with the gift and grace of family.

There’s a lesson here, I submit: We who are “practicing” Christians, responsible for proper church practice, proper doctrine, proper morals, and the authentic continuation of preaching and Eucharist, should not be stingy with the gift and grace of Christian family.

Like Jesus, who welcomed everyone without first demanding conversion and commitment, we must be open in our welcome and wide in our embrace. Inclusion, not exclusion, should always be our first approach. Like Jesus we should not be threatened by what seems impure, and we should be prepared to occasionally scandalize others by whom we are seen with at table. Let’s not be stingy in sharing God’s family, especially since the God we serve is a prodigal God who isn’t threatened by anything!

All Saints and All Souls

November 3, 2025

At a conference which I attended, a psychiatrist shared this story. A woman came to see him in considerable distress. Her anguish had to do with her last conversation with her husband before he died. She shared how they had enjoyed a good marriage for more than thirty years, with never more than a minor quarrel between them. Then one morning they had a quarrel over some trivial thing (she couldn’t even remember the substance). Their argument had ended in anger, and he had stomped out the door to go to work – to die of a heart attack that day, before they had a chance to talk again.

What awful luck! Thirty years without an incident of this kind and now this, anger in their last words to each other! The psychologist first, humorously, assured her that the fault all lay on her husband, in his choosing to die at that unfortunate moment, leaving her with that guilt!

More seriously, he asked her, “if your husband was here right now, what would you say to him?” She answered that she would assure him that after all their years together this little incident meant nothing, that their love for each other utterly dwarfed that mini moment. He assured her that her husband was still alive in the communion of saints and was with them right now. Then he said to her, “why don’t you sit in this chair and tell him what you just shared, that your faithful love for each other completely obliterates your last conversation. Indeed, share a laugh over its irony.” Fanciful thinking? No.

As Christians we have a doctrine which asks us to believe that we are still in live, conscious contact with those who have died. This doctrine, The Communion of Saints, is enshrined in our creeds and is celebrated explicitly on two days each year, All Saints and All Souls Days.

Among other things, this doctrine invites us to pray for the dead. Not surprisingly, some people balk at this, protesting that God doesn’t need to be reminded to be merciful and forgiving. They are right. However, in the end that is not the reason we pray for our deceased loved ones.

The real intent of our prayer for the dead is for us to stay in touch with them, to continue to be in a conscious communication, to maintain our relationship of love, to finish unfinished business, to apologize to them, to forgive them, to ask them to forgive us, to remain mindful of the special oxygen they breathed into the planet during their lives, and to occasionally share a celebratory glass of wine with them.

Thus, among other things, our belief in the communion of saints gives us a second chance, and that is a much-needed consolation. No matter who we are, we are all inadequate in our relationships. We can’t always be present to our loved ones as we should; we sometimes say things in anger and bitterness that leave deep scars; we betray trust in all kinds of ways; and mostly we lack the maturity and self-confidence to express the affirmation we should be conveying to our loved ones. None of us ever fully measures up.

At the end of the day, all of us lose some loved ones in ways similar to how that woman lost her husband, with unfinished business, with bad timing. There are always words that should have been said and weren’t said, and there are always things that shouldn’t have been said and were said.

But that’s where our faith comes in. Indeed, we aren’t the first ones to come up short. At the time of Jesus’ arrest, trial, and death, virtually all his disciples had deserted. The timing here was also bad. Good Friday was bad long before it was good. But, and this is the point, as Christians, we don’t believe there will always be happy endings in this life, nor that we will always be adequate in life. Rather, we believe that the fullness of life and happiness will come to us through the redemption of what has gone wrong, not least with what has gone wrong because of our own inadequacy and weakness.

G.K. Chesterton once said that Christianity is special because in its belief in the communion of saints, even the dead get a vote. They get more than a vote. They still get to hear what we’re saying to them.

So, if you’ve lost a loved one in a situation where there was still something unresolved, where there was still a tension that needed easing, where you should have been more attentive or where you feel badly because you never adequately expressed the affirmation and affection that you might have, know it’s not too late. It can still be done!

And, in having that make-up conversation, don’t be afraid to share a laugh about how the inadequacy of our human situation has the devilish habit of fudging our best intentions.

The Psalms as Prayer

October 27, 2025

“God behaves in the psalms in ways he is not allowed to behave in systemic theology.”

That quip from Sebastian Moore might be highlighted at a time when fewer people want to use the psalms as a form of prayer because they feel offended that the psalms speak of murder, revenge, anger, violence, war-making, and patriarchy.

Yet for centuries the psalms have been central to both Jewish and Christian prayer. They form the very heart of the Divine Office (the Church’s prayer for the world), are sung in Vespers’ services, are prayed daily by millions of men and women, and have been chanted by monks for centuries as a central part of their prayer.

Why the objection to the psalms? Some ask: “How can I pray with words that are sometimes full of hatred, anger, violence, and speak of the glories of war and of crushing one’s enemies in the name of God?” For others, the objection is to the patriarchal nature of the psalms. For yet others, the offense is aesthetic: “They’re terrible poetry!” they say.

Perhaps the psalms aren’t great poetry and they do, undeniably, smack of violence, war, hatred of one’s enemies in the name of God, and the desire for vengeance. They’re also patriarchal in character. But does that make them poor language for prayer? No, to the contrary.

One of the classical definitions of prayer suggests that “prayer is lifting mind and heart to God.” Simple, clear, accurate. Our problem is that we too seldom actually do this when we pray. Rather than lifting to God what’s actually on our minds and in our hearts, we treat God as someone from whom we need to hide the real truth of our thoughts and feelings. Instead of pouring out mind and heart, we tell God what we think God wants to hear – not murderous thoughts, desire for vengeance, or our disappointment with him.

But expressing those feelings is the whole point. What makes the psalms so apt for prayer is that they do not hide the truth from God and they express the whole gamut of our actual feelings. They give honest voice to what’s actually going on in our minds and hearts.

Sometimes we feel good and our spontaneous impulse is to speak words of praise and gratitude. The psalms give us that voice. They speak of God’s goodness – love, friends, faith, health, food, wine, enjoyment. But we don’t always feel that way. Our lives also have their cold, lonely seasons when disappointment and bitterness smolder under the surface. The psalms then give us honest voice and we can open all those angry feelings to God.

At other times, we fill with the sense of our own inadequacy, with the fact that we cannot measure up to the trust and love that’s given us. The psalms give us voice for this, asking God to have mercy, to soften our hearts, to wash us clean, to give us a fresh start. And then still there are times when we feel disappointed with God himself and need in some way to express this. The psalms give us this voice (“Why are you so silent? Why are you so far from me?”) even as they make us aware that God is not afraid of our anger and bitterness, but, like a loving parent, only wants us to come and talk about it.

The psalms are a privileged vehicle for prayer because they lift the full range of our thoughts and feelings to God.

But we tend to struggle with that. First, because our age often fails to grasp metaphor and taken literally, some of the images within the psalms are offensive. Second, we are often in denial about our true feelings. It’s hard to admit that we feel some of the things we sometimes feel: grandiosity, sexual obsessions, jealousies, desire for revenge, murderous thoughts. Too often our prayer belies our actual thoughts and feelings and tells God what we think God wants to hear. The psalms have more honesty.

As Kathleen Norris puts it: If you pray regularly “there is no way you can do it right. You are not always going to sit up straight, let alone think holy thoughts. You’re not going to wear your best clothes but whatever isn’t in the dirty clothes basket. You come to the Bible’s great book of praises through all the moods and conditions of life, and while you feel like hell, you sing anyway. To your surprise, you find that the psalms do not deny your true feelings but allow you to reflect them, right in front of God and everyone.” Feel good aphorisms that express how we think we ought to feel are no substitute for the earthy realism of the psalms which express how we actually do feel at times. Anyone who would lift mind and heart to God without ever mentioning feelings of bitterness, jealousy, vengeance, hatred, and war, is better suited to write greeting cards than to give out spiritual counsel.

The Perfect Posture for Prayer

October 20, 2025

In her autobiography The Long Loneliness, Dorothy Day shares how she once prayed at a low time in her life.

Dorothy Day, as you know, grew up without faith. An intellectual, moving in Marxist and anti-church circles, she entered her twenties convinced that if anyone had the courage to look life square in the eye, she or he would not believe in God. She had support in that. The love of her life at the time was a man who shared her views. She moved in with him and bore his child outside of marriage. The birth of this child, a daughter, changed her in ways she had not foreseen. Holding her infant daughter, she was so overcome with awe and gratitude that she prayed spontaneously: “For so much joy, I need to thank someone!” Her faith was born from that, from the purest spring of all, gratitude.

She took some instructions, was baptized, and became a Catholic. The father of her child, upset by the change in her, warned that if she had their child baptized, he would leave her. Her daughter was baptized and he did leave her. Many of her friends reacted similarly. So, even though now she was buoyed up by her newfound faith, she found herself very much alone, without most of her former friends and her usual support systems, a single mother, living on her own, lacking money, and without any vision of what she should do.

She floundered like this for a time, feeling ever more alone and unsure of herself. One day she decided she needed to address this. She left her young daughter in the care of friends and took a train to Washington, D.C. where she spent some hours praying at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. Her prayer that day was one of complete helplessness. In essence, this was her prayer to God: “I’ve given up a lot for you, and you haven’t done anything for me! I’m lost, alone, unsure of what to do, and running out of energy and patience. I need help – need it now, not in some distant future! Help me! Help me now! I can’t go on like this!”

When she got back to New York a man was waiting to see her. He told her he had heard about her, had an idea, and he needed her help. He then explained to her the concept of “The Catholic Worker.” The man’s name was Peter Maurin and the rest is history. From that moment on, she had a vision for the rest of her life.

Not everyone gets so quick and clear an answer in prayer, although more people than you would suspect have similar stories. Martin Luther King, for instance, shares how he once prayed at a low point in his life:

“One night toward the end of January, I settled into bed late, after a strenuous day. Coretta had already fallen asleep and just as I was about to doze off the telephone rang. An angry voice said, `Listen, nigger, we’ve taken all we want from you, before next week you’ll be sorry you ever came to Montgomery.’ I hung up, but I couldn’t sleep. It seemed that all of my fears had come down on me at once. I had reached the saturation point.

I got out of bed and began to walk the floor. Finally, I went to the kitchen and heated a pot of coffee. I was ready to give up. With my cup of coffee sitting untouched before me I tried to think of a way to move out of the picture without appearing a coward. In this state of exhaustion, when my courage had all but gone, I decided to take my problem to God. With my head in my hands, I bowed over the kitchen table and prayed aloud. The words I spoke to God that midnight are still vivid in my memory:

‘I am here taking a stand for what I believe is right. But now I am afraid. The people are looking to me for leadership, and if I stand before them without strength and courage, they too will falter. I am at the end of my powers. I have nothing left. I’ve come to the point where I can’t face it alone.’ At that moment I experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never experienced Him before.” (MLK, Stride Towards Freedom)

Christina Crawford, the author of Mommy Dearest, a memoir of what it was like growing up in Hollywood as the daughter of a famous movie star, shares how at a certain point in her life she felt hopelessly and completely lost; but then adds: Lost is a place too!

She’s right. And lost is a place from where we are especially invited to pray. When we hurt all over, feel hopeless and helpless, and are on our knees because we are too weak to stand, we’re in the perfect posture for prayer. Lost is a place for prayer!

Celibacy and Marriage Need Each Other

October 13, 2025

“Why did early Christianity alight on the ideal of virginity, when an intelligent or even just a suspicious Roman could see that its adoption would undermine the very fabric of ancient society?” That’s a comment from historian Kate Cooper and it poses some questions worth examining.

Does the single state, celibacy, (vowed or otherwise) undermine something inside the fabric of society? Is it somehow a statement against marriage? Does it go against something within nature itself where there is an innate imperative to “increase and multiply”?

The latter question is easier to answer. The human race has now exceeded eight billion. There is much less need to ensure that there are enough people in the world to ensure our biological survival. In former times, indeed in biblical times, there was a strong, quasi-sacred imperative that people marry and have children. Remaining unmarried was looked upon negatively, as an abnormality. Nature is not being honored or fulfilled here. Why is this person not doing his or her duty in terms of having children? That’s one of the reasons why Jesus’ choice of celibacy stands out as something abnormal in his world.

Next, does single life, celibacy, somehow speak against marriage? Does it, simply by definition, undermine the fabric of society? Doesn’t God, at the creation of the human race, pronounce that it is not good for the human person to be alone?

That question deserves more than a hurried answer. God did say this, and God meant it. We are meant to live inside family, in community, and not live alone. Thus, the single life has its dangers. Thomas Merton was once asked by a journalist what it was like to live as a celibate. His answer: It’s hell. You live in a loneliness that God Himself condemned. But, then he quickly added that this was a loneliness that could be very fruitful.

Still the question remains, is the single life, celibacy, somehow a statement against marriage? It can be. Choosing not to be married can be a statement that marriage isn’t the best way to live, that it is a container (a prison) which unhealthily restricts human freedom and human maturity. Single life in that instance (which is then often far from celibate) is a statement against marriage.

Healthy marriage and healthy single life in fact support each other. There’s an axiom which says: If you are here faithfully, you bring us health and support. If you are here unfaithfully, you bring us restlessness and chaos.

Fidelity in either marriage or in celibacy is a marathon with temptations of every kind along the way. It demands the capacity to sweat blood at times to remain faithful to what you have promised and to what is best in you. But it needs the support and witness of others. In neither vocation are you meant to go it alone, to be the lonely, stoic, ascetic hero. You are meant instead to be buoyed up and held by the support and faithful witness of others.

Thus, when a celibate sees fidelity being lived out inside a marriage, it becomes easier for him or her to remain faithful inside celibacy. Conversely, when a celibate sees infidelity inside of a marriage, he or she feels more isolated and alone inside celibacy and lacks a certain grace (which comes through witness) to sweat blood in terms of being faithful inside of celibacy.

The same dynamic holds true for a married person. If he or she sees a celibate faithfully and fruitfully living inside the single life, he or she is graced through that witness to find both some insight and strength to be true to his or her commitment. Conversely, if a married person sees a celibate living unfaithfully, he or she will lack a special grace that comes from witnessing fidelity which can help him or her sweat the blood that is sometimes required in order to remain faithful in a commitment.

As curious as this may sound, Marriage and Celibacy need each other. We need each other’s witness. We need to see, and feed off, each other’s fidelity.

And that’s true beyond just seeing each other being faithful. There’s a deeper reality undergirding this, a mystical one. As Christians, we believe that we are all part of one body, the Body of Christ, and that our unity there is not simply a corporate one (one team). Rather we are an organic unity, all part of one living organism. Hence, what one part does affects all the parts. If we are faithful, we are a healthy part of the immune system inside the Body of Christ. If we are unfaithful, in either marriage or celibacy, we are an unhealthy virus, a cancer cell, inside the body.

For Christians, there is no such a thing as a private act. We are either a healthy enzyme or an unhealthy virus inside a single body, where our fidelity or infidelity affects everyone else.

And so, we need each other’s fidelity – in marriage and in celibacy.

The World Will be Saved by Beauty

October 6, 2025

In the movie The English Patient there’s a very heartwarming scene.

A number of people from various countries are thrown together by circumstance in an abandoned villa in post-war Italy. Among them are a young nurse, attending to an English pilot who’s been badly burned in an air crash, and a young Asian man whose job is to find and defuse landmines. The young man and the nurse become friends and, one day, he announces he has a special surprise for her.

He takes her to an abandoned church in which he has set up a series of ropes and pulleys that will lift her to the ceiling where, hidden in darkness, are beautiful mosaics and wonderful works of art that cannot be seen from the floor. He gives her a torch as a light and pulls her up through a series of ropes so that she swings like an angel with wings, high above the floor and is able with the help of her torch to see beautiful masterpieces hidden in the dark.

For her, the experience is one of exhilaration; she has the sensation of flying and of seeing wonderful beauty all at the same time. When she’s finally lowered back to the floor she’s flushed with excitement and gratitude and covers the young man’s face with kisses, saying over and over again: “Thank you, thank you, thank you for showing this to me!”

And from her expression, you see too that she is expressing a double thanks: “Thank you for showing me something that I could never have come to on my own and thank you for trusting me enough to think that I would understand this, for trusting that I would get it!”

There’s a lesson here?

The Church needs to do for the world exactly what this young man did for his nurse friend; it needs to show the world where to look for a beauty it would not find on its own, a beauty that is hidden in darkness. And it needs to trust that people will “get it,” will appreciate the richness of what they are being shown.

Where might the Church find such hidden beauty? In the deep rich wells of its own history, and in nature, in art, in science, in children, in the energy of the young, and in the wisdom of the old. There are treasures of beauty hidden everywhere. The Church’s task is to point these out to the world. Why?

Because beauty has the power to touch and transform the soul, to instill wonder and gratitude in a way that few things have. Confucius understood this. That’s why he suggested that beauty is the greatest of all teachers and why he based his philosophy of education on beauty. People can doubt almost anything, except beauty.

Why can’t beauty be doubted? Because beauty is an attribute of God. Classical Christian philosophy and theology tell us that God has four transcendental properties, namely, God is “One, True, Good, and Beautiful.” If this is true, then to be touched by beauty is to be touched by God; to admire beauty is to admire God; to be shown beauty in hidden places is to be shown God in hidden places; to be in awe of beauty is to be in awe of God; and to feel that awe is to feel a homesickness for heaven.

The renowned theologian Hans Urs Von Baltasar highlighted how beauty is a key component in how God speaks to us and how that should color how we speak about God to the world.

However, we shouldn’t be naïve in our understanding of this. Beauty isn’t always pretty in the way that popular culture perceives it. Granted, beauty can be seen in the spectacular colors of a sunset, or in the smile and innocence of a child, or in the perfection of a Michelangelo sculpture, but it can also be seen in the wrinkles of an old woman and in the toothless smile of an old man.

God speaks through beauty and so must we. Moreover, we must believe enough in people’s sensitivity and intelligence to trust that they, like the nurse in The English Patient, will appreciate what they are being shown.

In a famous line (often quoted by Dorothy Day) Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky writes: The world will be saved by beauty. What’s the logic here? How might beauty cure the many ills which beset us?

Here’s Dostoevsky’s algebra: In the face of brutality, what’s needed is tenderness; in the face of hype and ideology, what’s needed is truth; in the face of bitterness and curses, what’s needed are graciousness and blessing; in the face of hatred and murder, what’s needed are love and forgiveness; in the face of the kind of familiarity that breeds contempt, what’s needed are awe and wonder; and in the face the ugliness and vulgarity that pervades our world and our evening news, what’s needed is beauty.

A Tradition of the Heart – Roman Catholic Devotions

September 29, 2025

Growing up in a Roman Catholic home, devotions were always a vital part of our religious diet. While our family saw the Eucharist as more important than devotions, we nourished our spiritual lives a lot on devotions, as did many Roman Catholics back then.

Among other things, we prayed the rosary every day, prayed the Angelus daily, prayed special litanies (St. Joseph in March, Mary in May and October, and the Sacred Heart of Jesus in June), prayed the Stations of the Cross each Friday in Lent, were anxious to attend Eucharist on First Fridays and First Saturdays to obtain special promises from God, and said special prayers to obtain indulgences.

As well, there were pilgrimages to Marian shrines for those who could afford them and most everyone wore medals from Lourdes or Fatima and had a special devotion to those shrines (with a special devotion in my own family and parish to Our Lady of the Cape, at Cap De Madeleine, Quebec). Devotions were a big part of our spiritual lives.

What’s to be said about devotions from a theological view and from the view of a culture that mostly distrusts them?

We might begin with the reaction of Martin Luther and the great Protestant reformers. They were fearful of two things in devotions. First, at that time, some devotions were too unbridled and were simply bad theology (famously, selling indulgences). Second, they saw devotions, not as necessarily bad in themselves, but as often displacing Jesus and God’s Word as our center and main focus. And so, they distanced themselves from basically all Roman Catholic devotions, the unbridled as well as the healthy.

For the most part that Protestant and Evangelical distrust of Roman Catholic devotions has come down right to our own day. While that distrust is breaking down today in some non-Roman churches today, it is still the prevalent attitude inside most Protestant and Evangelical circles. In brief, they distrust most devotions because they are seen not just as deflecting our focus from the centrality of Jesus and the Word, but also as potentially unhealthy contaminates, as junk food in our spiritual diet.

What’s to be said about that?

It’s a fair and needed warning to Roman Catholics (and others) who nourish their spiritual lives with devotions. Bottom line, devotions can easily ground themselves on shaky theology and can be a junk food contaminating our spiritual diet: where devotions replace scripture, Mary replaces Jesus as center, and certain ritual practices make God seem like a puppet on a string.

However, that being admitted, as Goethe once said, the dangers of life are many and safety is one of those dangers. Yes, devotions can be a danger, but they can also be a rich healthy supplement in our essential diet of Word and Eucharist.

Here’s how Eric Mascall (the renowned Anglican theologian at Oxford with C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Dorothy Sayers, and Austin Ferrar) spells out both the danger of devotions and the danger of not having devotions as part of your spiritual life: The protestant reformers (Luther, Calvin, Zwingli) were so afraid of contamination by Roman Catholic devotions, that they put us on a diet of antiseptics. When you’re on a diet of antiseptics, you won’t suffer from food poisoning, but you can suffer from malnutrition.

That’s an equal challenge to both those who practice devotions and those who fear them. The theology undergirding certain devotions admittedly can be sloppy (for example, Mary is not a co-redeemer with Jesus). However, inside many devotions (to Mary, to the saints, to Eucharist adoration, to the Sacred Heart) there can be a rich nutrition which helps nourish the center, namely, God’s Word and the Eucharist.

The late Wendy Wright in her book Sacred Heart: Gateway to God makes a wonderful apologia for Catholic devotional practices, particularly devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. For her, Catholic devotional practices are a tradition of the heart. While Jesus remains central and his resurrection remains the real anchor for our faith, devotions can give us something beyond just this raw essential.

Using devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus as an example, she writes: “In this devotion, we, and Jesus and the saints, exist in some essential way outside the chronology of historical time. The tradition of the heart makes this vividly, even grotesquely, clear. The divine–human correspondence is intimate. It is discovered in the flesh. Our fleshy hearts are fitted for all that is beyond flesh by conforming to the heart of Jesus. That divine–human heart is the passageway between earth and heaven. That heart is the tactile tracings of divine love on the created order. That heart is the widest, wildest longing of humankind’s own love.”The dangers of life are many and safety is one of those dangers. Devotions can deflect us from what’s more central and can take their root in some questionable theology, but they can also, in Wendy Wright’s words, be a blessed passageway for the heart between heaven and earth.

Everything is Wrong About Them, Except Themselves

September 22, 2025

Gilbert K. Chesterton, the renowned Catholic apologist, was great friends with George Bernard Shaw, the famous playwright, even though Shaw, an agnostic, had major issues with Chesterton’s belief in God and especially with him becoming a Roman Catholic. Indeed, when he heard that Chesterton had become a Roman Catholic, he wrote him a letter expressing his disappointment.

Ever the colorful writer, Shaw ended that letter describing to Chesterton a vision he had of him going to confession: “You will have to go to confession next Easter, and I find the spectacle – the box, your portly kneeling figure – all incredible, monstrous, comic. …. Now however I’m becoming personal (how else can I be sincere?).”

But these differences didn’t deter them from being great friends. They had a deep respect for each other and valued each other. Indeed, at one stage, Chesterton felt a need to defend Shaw from well-intentioned Christians who were vilifying him because of his agnosticism. Speaking in Shaw’s defense, he wrote: “There is one fundamental truth in which I have never for a moment disagreed with him. Whatever else he is, he has never been a pessimist or in spiritual matters a defeatist. He is at least on the side of Life. Everything is wrong about him except himself.”

Most of us, I suspect, have friends like that, people who no longer walk the path of explicit faith with us. From a certain Christian point of view, most everything is wrong with them, except themselves. They aren’t professed agnostics or atheists, but they don’t fit the description of a practicing Christian either. They rarely go to church, mostly disregard the church’s teaching on sex, pray only when in crisis, consider us church-goers naïve, and are too immersed in life here-and-now to think much about God, church, and eternity.

Yet they radiate life, often in ways that challenge us. There’s something about them that’s very right, inspiring even, and life giving. They may be practical agnostics and ecclesial atheists, but their presence often brings positive energy, goodness, love, intelligence, sunshine, and humor into a room.

Don’t read this wrong: This does not imply (as does an over- simplistic, rationalizing notion that’s popular today) that those who do go to church and try to follow the church’s rules are the naive and immature, while those who don’t go to church and make their own rules are the enlightened and the mature. No. There’s nothing enlightened about people drifting away from the church, thinking they are beyond church, living outside its rules, or believing that a passionate focus on this life justifies a neglect of the other world. That’s a fault in religiosity, and often a fault too in wisdom and maturity.

Simply put, the wonderful energy we see in the many good people we know who no longer go to church is precisely just that, wonderful energy, though not something to be confused with depth.

For example, I look at many of our talented pop musicians and see how they can make people dance, no small thing, a godly thing even. We dance too little and our spirits are often too heavy. But that doesn’t give us license to confuse playful energy (“Ob-la-dee, Ob-la-da, life goes on!”) with wisdom or depth. It’s a wonderful thing to make people dance, to bring sunshine into a room, to lift human hearts so they can drink in life a bit more, but that’s not the full menu, nor indeed the deeper part of the menu. It is what it is, a good thing in itself, but only that.

But it’s on the right side of things. It’s on the side of life. It helps bring divine energy into a room, and that needs to be blessed. That’s why, as Christians, we need to bless our good ecclesial agnostic friends and let ourselves be blessed by them.

That’s also why we should be more discriminating in our use of phrases like “a culture of life” and “a culture of death.” God is the ultimate author of all that is good, whether that goodness, sunlight, energy, color, and warmth is seen inside a church building or outside of it. And wherever that energy is good, there’s “a culture of life,” even if it might also be carrying some elements of “a culture of death.”

Richard Rohr says not everything can be fixed or cured, but it should be named properly. What’s wrong is wrong, and should be named as wrong, but what’s good is good, and should be named as good. I look at some of my “pagan” friends, at their energy, their warmth, what they bring into a room, and it helps lift my heart. Everything is wrong about them, except themselves. God also made their sunshine and their warmth. They don’t go to church, and that isn’t good; but they are often on the side of life and their implicit faith helps me to remain on the right side of things. And that is good.

A Father’s Blessing

September 15, 2025

My father died when I was twenty-three, a seminarian, green, still learning about life. It’s hard to lose your father at any age, and my grief was compounded by the fact that I had just begun to appreciate what he had given me.

Only later did I realize that I no longer needed him, though I still very much wanted him. What he had to give me, he had already given. I had his blessing.

I knew I had his blessing. My life and the direction it had taken pleased him. Like God’s voice at the baptism of his Jesus, he had already communicated to me: You are my son in whom I am well pleased. Not everyone is that lucky. That’s about as much as a person may ask from a father.

And what did he leave me and the rest of his offspring?

Too much to name, but among other things, moral steadiness. He was one of the most moral people I have ever known, allowing himself minimal moral compromise. He wasn’t a man who bought the line that we are only human and so it’s okay to allow ourselves some exemptions. He used to famously tell us: “Anyone can show me humanity; I need someone to show me divinity!” He expected you not to fail, to live up to what faith and morality asked of you, to not make excuses. If we, his family, inhaled anything from his presence, it was this moral stubbornness.

Beyond this, he had a steady, almost pathological sanity. Today we joke that moderation was his only excess. There were no hysterical outbursts, no depressions, no giddiness, no lack of steadiness, no having to guess where his soul and psyche might be on a given day.

With that steadiness, along with my mother’s supporting presence, he made for us a home that was always a safe cocoon, a boring place sometimes, but always a safe one. When I think of the home where I grew up, I think of a safe shelter where you could look at the storms outside from a place of warmth and security. Again, not everyone is that lucky.

And because we were a large family and his love and attention had to be shared with multiple siblings, I never thought of him as “my” father, but always as “our” father. This has helped me grasp the first challenge in the Lord’s Prayer, namely, that God is “Our” Father, whom we share with others, not a private entity.

Moreover, his family extended to more than his own children. I learned early not to resent the fact that he couldn’t always be with us, that he had good reasons to be elsewhere: work, community, church, hospital and school boards, political involvement. He was an elder for a wider family than just our own.

Finally, not least, he blessed me and my brothers and sisters with a love for baseball. He managed a local baseball team for many years. This was his particular place where he could enjoy some Sabbath.

But blessings never come pure. My father was human, and a man’s greatest strength is often too his greatest weakness. In all that moral fiber and rock-solid sanity, there was also a reticence that sometimes didn’t allow him to fully drink in life’s exuberance. Every son watches how his father dances and unconsciously sizes him up against certain things: hesitancy, fluidity, abandonment, exhibitionism, momentary irrationality, irresponsibility.

My father never had much fluidity or abandon to his dance step, and I have inherited that, something that can pain me deeply. There were times, both as a child and as an adult, when, in a given situation, I would have traded my father for a dad who had a more fluid dance step, for someone with a little less reticence in the face of life’s exuberance.

And that is partly my struggle to receive his full blessing. I’m often reminded of William Blake’s famous line in Infant Sorrow, where he mentions “Struggling in my father’s hands.” For me, that means struggling at times with my dad’s reticence to simply let go and drink in life’s full gift.

But, if there was hesitancy, there was no irresponsibility in his dance, even if sometimes that meant standing outside the dance. I was grieved at his funeral, but proud too, proud of the respect that was poured out for him, for the way he lived his life. There was no judgment that day on his reticence. I’m older now than he was when he died. My earthly days now outnumber his by fifteen years. But I still live inside his blessing, consciously and unconsciously, striving to measure up, to honor what he gave me. And mostly that’s good, though I also have moments when I find myself standing outside of life’s exuberance, looking in at the dance, reticent, his look on my face, feeling a certain envy of those who have a more fluid dance step – me, ever my father’s son.

Atheists, Dark Nights, Good Friday, and Revelation

September 8, 2025

The classical atheistic thinkers of the Enlightenment, philosophers such as Frederick Nietzsche and Ludwig Feuerbach, taught that all religious experience is simply human projection. God does not exist. We create God, and we create him in our image and likeness, ultimately to serve our needs. We create the notion of God because we need a God for our own purposes. Moreover, what we believe to be God’s word, divine revelation, (scriptures, creeds, and dogmas) is all ultimately human projection.

How true is this?

They are largely correct, not in that God doesn’t exist, but that we are forever shaping and distorting the idea of God and God’s word to serve our own needs. We have God’s word in Christ and in our scriptures, but we are forever shaping it to fit our needs. That’s why we have so many different religions and Christian denominations. That’s also why (by happy coincidence) God always hates the same people we do and always loves the same people we love.

When atheists tell us that God is a human projection to serve our needs, they are doing us a favor because they are holding up a mirror in which we can see that, in fact, we do perennially shape and distort divine revelation so that it works for our advantage. Their critique keeps pressure on us to clean up our notion of God and divine revelation.

But, while they may be 90% correct, they are 10% wrong, and that 10% makes all the difference. In that 10%, we allow God to flow into our lives in a way that we cannot shape or distort the experience but only receive it purely.

This happens in what mystics call “dark nights of the soul”, and that phrase refers to those times in our lives when our natural faculties of imagination, intellect, and affectivity (as they pertain to God and faith) are at an impasse, paralyzed, and unable to function. All our former ways of imagining and thinking about God now feel empty, counterfeit, useless. We can no longer imagine that God exists, feel like atheists, and are unable to think our way out of that helplessness.

That helpless condition, when we can no longer imagine God or affectively feel God’s presence, is in fact a gift. Why? Because when our natural faculties are paralyzed, we are also paralyzed in our ability to imagine God. Now we can only receive God as God is, not as we imagine God to be. We no longer have the power to shape or distort our experience.

The ultimate example of this, of course, is Good Friday, that time in history when the Gospels tell us it grew dark at midday. Good Friday was the ultimate “dark night of the soul” for Jesus’ followers.

They had been following him, listening to his word, his revelation; but, notwithstanding Jesus’ repeated attempts to correct their view, they had shaped and distorted his person and his words to fit their own notion of what they wanted in a Messiah. What they wanted was a divine superman who would destroy all their enemies, be dazzling in glory, and bring glory to them.

Good Friday completely devastated them. Jesus died in a horrible manner, stripped naked, shamed, beaten, powerless, seen as a criminal. That shattered all their expectations of how they imagined a Messiah should be. There was no earthly glory, only shame, and no overt display of divine power. That completely shattered their religious understanding.

They were stunned, literally. Every notion they had of what a Messiah should be was turned upside down. They were mute imaginatively, unable to imagine how any of this could make sense. Their religious world had turned dark in the middle of the day. Indeed, it took some years (and the insights of St. Paul) for light to appear again, before the meaning of Good Friday broke through to them, before it made sense.

But then it broke through cleanly, without distortion, because the religious dark night that paralyzed them on Good Friday had left them imaginatively, affectively, and intellectually disabled completely in terms of interpreting what was being spoken to them through Jesus’ unexpected shameful death. Consequently, they couldn’t distort their experience but only receive it.

In a remarkable book, The Crucified God, Jurgens Moltmann writes: “Our faith begins at the point where atheists suppose it must end. Our faith begins with the bleakness and power which is the night of the cross, abandonment, temptation, and doubt about everything that exists! Our faith must be born where it is abandoned by all tangible reality; it must be born of nothingness; it must taste this nothingness and be given it to taste in a way no philosophy of nihilism can imagine.” That was the experience of Good Friday, and that is the experience of what mystics call a “dark night of the soul”. And it is inside the frustrating darkness of that experience that God can flow into our lives without distortion.