The movie Million Dollar Baby tells the story of a young woman who becomes a professional boxer. Young, strong, and physically very attractive she captures your heart as, against all odds, she eventually rises to the top in her sport. But then the story turns tragic; she is unfairly hit by an opponent and ends up paralyzed, her body broken and with it her health and attractiveness. And her condition is permanent, there is no cure. She chooses to end her life through euthanasia.

I had gone to this movie with a young couple, both solidly committed to their church and their faith. Yet both of them were in strong sympathy with how this young woman chose to die. Perhaps it was more their emotions than themselves speaking when they justified her manner of death: “But she was so young and beautiful! It wouldn’t have been right for her to spend the rest of her life in that terrible state!” In their young eyes, her debilitated state stripped her of her essential dignity.

What is dignity? When and how is it lost?

Dignity is a promiscuous term, constantly shedding different partners. It is also a sneaky term. Sometimes it no longer means what it used to mean and nowhere is this truer than when the term is applied today to “death with dignity”?  What defines death with dignity?

Shortly after Brittany Maynard died by euthanasia in a case that caught wide public attention, Jessica Keating wrote an article in America magazine assessing that death from various points of view. At one point she takes up the question of dignity and writes: “The use of the term dignity to describe this death is deeply problematic, since it masks the reality of fear and equates dignity exclusively with radical autonomy, choice, and cognitive capability. The result is a not-so-subtle implication that the person who chooses diminishment and suffering dies a less dignified death.”  (America, March 16, 2015)

In much of our talk about death with dignity today there is in fact the not-so-subtle implication that the person who chooses diminishment and suffering over euthanasia dies a less dignified death. That is hard to deny, given the dominant ethos of a culture wherein physical diminishment and suffering are seen as a very assault on our dignity. This has not always been the case; indeed in former times sometimes the opposite was true, an aged, physically diminished body was seen as something dignified and beautiful. Why is our view of dignity different today?

They are different because of how we conceive of dignity and beauty. For us, these have to do mainly with physical health, physical vitality, and the physical attractiveness of the human body. For us, aesthetics is a house with one room – physical attractiveness. Everything else assaults our dignity. That makes it difficult for us to see any process that diminishes and humbles the human body by robbing it of its vitality and physical attractiveness as being a dignified one. And yet that is normally how the death process works. If you have ever journeyed with someone dying from a terminal disease and been at their bedside when he or she died, you know that physically this is not pretty. Disease can do horrible things to the body. But does this destroy dignity? Does it make one less beautiful?

Well, that depends on one’s spirituality and on what one considers as dignified and beautiful. Consider Jesus’ death. By today’s concept of dignity, his was not a very dignified death. We have always sanitized the crucifixion to shield ourselves from its raw “indignity”, but crucifixion was humiliating. When the Romans chose crucifixion as a method of capital punishment they had more in mind than just ending someone’s life. Besides wanting to make a person suffer optimally and they also wanted to totally and publicly humiliate him by humiliating his body. Hence the person was stripped naked, with his genitals exposed, and when he went into spasms in the moments before death, his bowels would loosen. What can be more humiliating? What can be less beautiful?

Yet, who would say that Jesus did not die with dignity? The opposite. We are still contemplating the beauty of his death and the dignity displayed in it. But that is within a different aesthetics, one that our culture no longer understands. For us, dignity and beauty are inextricably tied to physical health, physical attractiveness, and lack of humiliating diminishments within our physical body. Within that perspective there is, seemingly, no dignity to Jesus’ death.

I am the first to admit that the issue of death with dignity is an extremely complex one that raises legal, medical, psychological, familial, societal, ethical, and spiritual questions for which there are no simple answers.  But inside all of these questions there still lies an aesthetic one: what, ultimately, makes for beauty? How, ultimately, do we see dignity? Does a person with a still attractive, undiminished, physical body who voluntarily chooses to die before that beauty is despoiled by disease die more dignified than did Jesus?

At the risk of being simplistic, I want to say something about prayer in a very simple way.

While doing doctoral studies, I had a professor, an elderly Augustine priest, who in his demeanor, speech, and attitude, radiated wisdom and maturity. Everything about him bespoke integrity. You immediately trusted him, the wise old grandfather of storybooks.

One day in class he spoke of his own prayer life. As with everything else he shared, there were no filters, only honesty and humility. I don’t recall his exact words, but I remember well the essence of what he said and it has stayed with me for the nearly forty years since I had the privilege of being in his class.

Here’s what he shared: prayer isn’t easy because we’re always tired, distracted, busy, bored, and caught up in so many things that it’s hard to find the time and energy to center ourselves on God for some moments. So, this is what I do: no matter what my day is like, no matter what’s on my mind, no matter what my distractions and temptations are, I am faithful to this: Once a day I pray the Our Father as best I can from where I am at that moment. Inside of everything that’s going on inside me and around me that day, I pray the Our Father, asking God to hear me from inside of all the distractions and temptations that are besetting me. It’s the best I can do. Maybe it’s a bare minimum and I should do more and should try to concentrate harder, but at least I do that. And sometimes it’s all I can do, but I do it every day, as best I can. It’s the prayer Jesus told us to pray.

His words might sound simplistic and minimalistic. Indeed the church challenges us to make the Eucharist the center of our prayer lives and to make a daily habit of meditation and private prayer. As well, many classical spiritual writers tell us that we should set aside an hour every day for private prayer, and many contemporary spiritual writers challenge us to daily practice centering prayer or some other form of contemplative prayer. Where does that leave our old Augustinian theologian and his counsel that we pray one sincere Our Father each day – as best we can?

Well, none of this goes against what he so humbly shared. He would be the first to agree that the Eucharist should be the center of our prayer lives, and he would agree as well with both the classical spiritual writers who advise an hour of private prayer a day, and the contemporary authors who challenge us to do some form of contemplative prayer daily, or at least habitually. But he would say this: at one of those times in the day (ideally at the Eucharist or while praying the Office of the Church but at least sometime during your day) when you’re saying the Our Father, pray it with as much sincerity and focus as you can muster at the moment (“as best you can”) and know that, no matter your distractions at the moment, it’s what God is asking from you. And it’s enough.

His advice has stayed with me through the years and though I say a number of Our Fathers every day, I try, at least in one of them, to pray the Our Father as best I can, fully conscious of how badly I am doing it. What a challenge and what a consolation!

The challenge is to pray an Our Father each day, as best we can. As we know, that prayer is deeply communitarian. Every petition in it is plural – “our”, “we”, “us” – there’s no “I” in the Our Father. Moreover, all of us are priests from our baptism and inherent in the covenant we made then, we are asked daily to pray for others, for the world. For those who cannot participate in the Eucharist daily and for those who do not pray the Office of the Church, praying the Our Father is your Eucharistic prayer, your priestly prayer for others.

And this is the consolation: none of us is divine. We’re all incurably human which means that many times, perhaps most times, when we’re trying to pray we’ll find ourselves beset with everything from tiredness, to boredom, to impatience, to planning tomorrow’s agenda, to sorting through the hurts of the day, to stewing about who we’re angry at, to dealing with erotic fantasies. Our prayer seldom issues forth from a pure heart but normally from a very earthy one. But, and this is the point, its very earthiness is also its real honesty. Our restless, distracted heart is also our existential heart and is the existential heart of the world. When we pray from there, we are (as the classical definition of prayer would have it) lifting mind and heart to God.

Try, each day, to pray one sincere Our Father! As best you can!

Discernment isn’t an easy thing. Take this dilemma: When we find ourselves in a situation that’s causing us deep interior anguish, do we walk away, assuming that the presence of such pain is an indication that this isn’t the right place for us, that something’s terminally wrong here? Or, like Jesus, do we accept to stay, saying to ourselves, our loved ones, and our God: “What shall I say, save me from this hour?”

At the very moment that Jesus was facing a humiliating death by crucifixion, the Gospel of John hints that he was offered an opportunity to escape. A delegation of Greeks, through the apostle Philip, offer Jesus an invitation to leave with them, to go to a group that would receive him and his message. So Jesus has a choice: Endure anguish, humiliation, and death inside his own community or abandon that community for one that will accept him. What does he do? He asks himself this question: “What shall I say, save me from this hour?”

Although this is phrased as a question, it’s an answer. He is choosing to stay, to face the anguish, humiliation, and pain because he sees it as the precise fidelity he is called to within the very dynamic of the love he is preaching. He came to earth to incarnate and teach what real love is and now, when the cost of that is humiliation and interior anguish, he knows and accepts that this is what’s now being asked of him. The pain is not telling him that he’s doing something wrong, is at the wrong place, or that this community is not worth this suffering. To the contrary: The pain is understood to be calling him to a deeper fidelity at the very heart of his mission and vocation. Until this moment, only words were asked of him, now he is being asked to back them up in reality; he needs to swallow hard to do it.  

What shall I say, save me from this hour? Do we have the wisdom and the generosity to say those words when, inside our own commitments, we are challenged to endure searing interior anguish?  When Jesus asks himself this question, what he is facing is a near-perfect mirror for situations we will all find ourselves in sometimes. In most every commitment we make, if we are faithful, an hour will come when we are suffering interior anguish (and often times exterior misunderstanding as well) and are faced with a tough decision: Is this pain and misunderstanding (and even my own immaturity as I stand inside it) an indication that I’m in the wrong place, should leave, and find someone or some other community that wants me? Or, inside this interior anguish, exterior misunderstanding, and personal immaturity, am I called to say: What shall I say, save me from this hour? This is what I’m called to! I was born for this!

I think the question is critical because often anguishing pain can shake our commitments and tempt us to walk away from them. Marriages, consecrated religious vocations, commitments to work for justice, commitments to our church communities, and commitments to family and friends, can be abandoned on the belief that nobody is called to live inside such anguish, desolation, and misunderstanding. Indeed, today the presence of pain, desolation, and misunderstanding is generally taken as a sign to abandon a commitment and find someone else or some other group that will affirm us rather than as an indication that now, just now, in this hour, inside this particular pain and misunderstanding, we have a chance to bring a life-giving grace into this commitment.

I have seen people leave marriages, leave family, leave priesthood, leave religious life, leave their church community, leave long-cherished friendships, and leave commitments to work for justice and peace because, at a point, they experienced a lot of pain and misunderstanding. And, in many of those cases, I also saw that it was in fact a good thing. The situation they were in was not life-giving for them or for others. They needed to be saved from that “hour”. In some cases though the opposite was true. They were in excruciating pain, but that pain was an invitation to a deeper, more life-giving place inside their commitment. They left, just when they should have stayed.

Granted, discernment is difficult. It’s not always for lack of generosity that people walk away from a commitment. Some of the most generous and unselfish people I know have left a marriage or the priesthood or religious life or their churches. But I write this because, today, so much trusted psychological and spiritual literature does not sufficiently highlight the challenge to, like Jesus, stand inside excruciating pain and humiliating misunderstanding and instead of walking away to someone or some group that offers us the acceptance and understanding we crave, we instead accept that it is more life-giving to say: What shall I say, save me from this hour?

John Updike, after recovering from a serious illness, wrote a poem he called, Fever. It ends this way: But it is a truth long known that some secrets are hidden from health.

Deep down we already know this, but as a personal truth this is not something we appropriate in a classroom, from parents or mentors, or even from religious teaching. These just tell us that this is true, but knowing it does not itself impart wisdom. Wisdom is acquired, as Updike says, through a personal experience of serious illness, serious loss, or serious humiliation.

The late James Hillman, writing as an agnostic, came to the same conclusion. I remember hearing him at a large conference where, at point in his talk, he challenged his audience with words to this effect: Think back, honestly and with courage, and ask yourself: What are the experiences in your life that have made you deep, that have given you character? In almost every case, you will have to admit that it was some humiliation or abuse you had to endure, some experience of powerlessness, helplessness, frustration, illness, or exclusion. It is not the things that brought glory or adulation into your life that gave you depth and character, the time you were the valedictorian for your class or the time you were the star athlete. These did not bring you depth. Rather the experience of powerlessness, inferiority, is what made you wise.

I recall too as a graduate student sitting in on a series of lectures by the renowned Polish psychiatrist, Kasmir Dabrowski who had written a number of books around a concept he termed, “positive disintegration”. His essential thesis was that it is only by falling apart that we ever grow to higher levels of maturity and wisdom. Once, during a lecture, he was asked: “Why do we grow through the disintegrating experiences such as falling ill, falling apart, or being humiliated? Would it not be more logical to grow through the positive experiences of being loved, being affirmed, being successful, being healthy, and being admired? Shouldn’t that fire gratitude inside us and, acting out of that gratitude, we should become more generous and wise?”

He gave this response: Ideally, maturity and wisdom should grow out of experiences of strength and success; and maybe in some instances they do. However, as a psychiatrist, all I can say is that in forty years of clinical practice I have never seen it. I have only seen people transformed to higher levels of maturity through the experience of breaking down.

Jesus, it would seem, agrees. Take, for example, the incident in the Gospels where James and John come and ask whether they might be given the seats at his right hand and left hand when he comes into his glory. It is significant that he takes their question seriously. He does not (in this instance) chide them for seeking their own glory; what he does instead is redefine glory and the route to it. He asks them: “Can you drink the cup?” They, naïve as to what is being asked of them, responded: “Yes, we can!” Jesus then tells them something to which they are even more naïve. He assures them that they will drink the cup, since eventually everyone will, but tells them that they still might not receive the glory because being seated in glory is still contingent upon something else.

What? What is “the cup”? How is drinking it the route to glory? And why might we not receive the glory even if we do drink the cup?

The cup, as is revealed later, is the cup of suffering and humiliation, the one Jesus has to drink during his passion and dying, the cup he asks his Father to spare him from when in Gethsemane he prays in agony: “Let this cup pass from me!”

In essence, what Jesus is telling James and John is this: There is no route to Easter Sunday except through Good Friday. There is no route to depth and wisdom except through suffering and humiliation. The connection is intrinsic, like the pain and groans of a woman are necessary to her when giving birth to a child. Further still, Jesus is also saying that deep suffering will not automatically bring wisdom. Why not? Because, while there is an intrinsic connection between deep suffering and greater depth in our lives, the catch is that bitter suffering can make us deep in bitterness, anger, envy, and hatred just as easily as it can make us deep in compassion, forgiveness, empathy, and wisdom. We can have the pain, and not get the wisdom.

Fever! The primary symptom of being infected with the coronavirus, Covid-19, is a high fever.  Fever has now beset our world. The hope is that, after it so dangerously raises both our bodily and psychic temperatures, it will also reveal to us some of the secrets that are hidden from health. What are they? We don’t know yet. They will only be revealed inside the fever.

Most of us are familiar with Pope Francis’ comment that today the church needs to be a field hospital. What’s implied here?

First, that right now the church is not a field hospital, or at least not much of one. Too many churches of all denominations see the world more as an opponent to be fought than as a battlefield strewn with wounded persons to whom they are called to minister. The churches today, in the words of Pope Francis, have often reversed an image in the Book of Revelation where Jesus stands outside the door knocking, trying to come in, to a situation where Jesus is knocking on the door from inside the church, trying to get out.

So how might our churches, our ecclesial communities, become field hospitals?

In a wonderfully provocative article in a recent issue of America Magazine, Czech spiritual writer, Tomas Halik, suggests that for our ecclesial communities to become “field hospitals” they must assume three roles: A Diagnostic one – wherein they identify the signs of the times; a Preventive one – wherein they create an immune system in a world within which malignant viruses of fear, hatred, populism, and nationalism are tearing communities apart; and a Convalescent one – wherein they help the world overcome the traumas of the past through forgiveness.

How, concretely, might each of these be envisaged?

Our churches need to be diagnostic; they need to name the present moment in a prophetic way.  But that calls for a courage that, right now, seems lacking, derailed by fear and ideology. Liberals and conservatives diagnose the present moment in radically different ways, not because the facts aren’t the same for both, but because each of them is seeing things through its own ideology. As well, at the end of the day, both camps seem too frightened to look at the hard issues square on, both afraid of what they might see.

To name just one issue that both seem afraid to look at with unblinking eyes: our rapidly emptying churches and the fact that so many of our own children are no longer going to church or identifying with a church. Conservatives simplistically blame secularism, without ever really being willing to openly debate the various critiques of the churches coming from almost every part of society. Liberals, for their part, tend to simplistically blame conservative rigidity without really being open to courageously look at some of places within secularity where faith in a transcendent God and an incarnate Christ run antithetical to some of the cultural ethos and ideologies within secularity. Both sides, as is evident from their excessive defensiveness, seem afraid to look at all the issues.

What must we do preventatively to turn our churches into field hospitals? The image Halik proposes here is rich but is intelligible only within an understanding of the Body of Christ and an acceptance of the deep connection we have with each other inside the family of humanity. We are all one, one living organism, parts of a single body, so that, as with any living body, what any one part does, for disease or health, affects every other part. And the health of a body is contingent upon its immune system, upon those enzymes that roam throughout the body and kill off cancerous cells. Today our world is beset with cancerous cells of bitterness, hatred, lying, self-protecting fear, and tribalism of every kind. Our world is mortally ill; suffering from a cancer that’s destroying community.

Hence our ecclesial communities must become places that generate the healthy enzymes that are needed to kill off those cancer cells. We must create an immune system robust enough to do this. And for that to happen, we must first, ourselves, stop being part of the cancer of hatred, lying, fear, opposition, and tribalism. Too often, we ourselves are the cancerous cells. The single biggest religious challenge facing us as ecclesial communities today it that of creating an immune system that’s healthy and vigorous enough to help kill off the cancerous cells of hatred, fear, lying, and tribalism that float freely throughout the world.

Finally, our convalescent role: Our ecclesial communities need to help the world come to a deeper reconciliation vis-a-vis the traumas of the past. Happily, this is one of our strengths. Our churches are sanctuaries of forgiveness. In the words of Cardinal Francis George: “In society everything is permitted, but nothing is forgiven; in the church much is prohibited, but everything is forgiven.” But where we need to be more proactive as sanctuaries of forgiveness today is in relation to a number of salient “traumas of the past”. In brief, a deeper  forgiveness, healing, and atonement still needs to take place apposite the world’s history with colonization, slavery, the status of women, the torture and disappearance of peoples, the mistreatment of refugees, the perennial support of unjust regimes, and the atonement owed to mother earth herself. Our churches must lead this effort.

Our ecclesial communities as field hospitals can be the Galilee of today.

Jesus’ death washes everything clean, including our ignorance and sin. That’s the clear message from Luke’s account of his death.

As we know, we have four Gospels, each with its own take on the passion and death of Jesus. As we know too these Gospel accounts are not journalistic reports of what happened on Good Friday but more theological interpretations of what happened then. They’re paintings of Jesus’ death more so than news reports about it and, like good art, they take liberties to highlight certain forms so as to bring out essence. Each Gospel writer has his own interpretation of what happened on Calvary.

For Luke, what happened in the death of Jesus is the clearest revelation, ever, of the incredible scope of God’s understanding, forgiveness, and healing.  For him, Jesus’ death washes everything clean through an understanding, forgiveness, and healing that belies every notion suggesting anything to the contrary. To make this clear, Luke highlights a number of elements in his narrative.

First, in his account of Jesus’ arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane, he tells us that immediately after one of his disciples struck the servant of the high priest and cut off his ear, Jesus touched the man’s ear and healed him. God’s healing, Luke intimates, reaches into all situations, even situations of bitterness, betrayal, and violence. God’s grace will ultimately heal even what’s wounded in hatred.

Then, after Peter denied him three times and Jesus is being led away after his interrogation by the Sanhedrin, Luke tells us that Jesus turned and looked straight at Peter in a look that made Peter weep bitterly. Everything in this text and everything that comes after it suggests that the look from Jesus that caused Peter to weep bitterly was not one of disappointment and accusation, a look that would have caused Peter to weep in shame. No, rather it was a look of such understanding and empathy as Peter had never before seen, causing him to weep in relief, knowing that everything was alright and he was alright.

And when Luke records Jesus’ trial before Pilate, he recounts something that’s not recorded in the other Gospel accounts of Jesus’ trial, namely, Pilate sending Jesus to Herod and how the two of them, bitter enemies until that day, “became friends that same day.” As Ray Brown, commenting on this text puts it, “Jesus has a healing effect even on those who mistreat him.”

Finally, in Luke’s narrative, we arrive at the place where Jesus is crucified and as they are crucifying him, he utters the famous words: Father, forgive them for they know not what they do. Those words, which Christians forever afterwards have taken as the ultimate criterion as to how we should treat our enemies and those who do us ill, encapsulate the deep revelation contained in Jesus’ death. Uttered in that context as God is about to crucified by human beings, these words reveal how God sees and understands even our worst actions: Not as ill-will, not as something that ultimately turns us against God or God against us, but as ignorance – simple, non-culpable, invincible, understandable, forgivable, akin to the self-destructive actions of an innocent child.

In that context too, Luke narrates Jesus’ forgiveness of the “good thief”. What Luke wants to highlight here, beyond the obvious, are a number of things: First, that the man is forgiven not because he didn’t sin, but in spite of his sin; second, that he is given infinitely more than he actually requests of Jesus; and finally, that Jesus will not die with any unfinished business, this man’s sin must first be wiped clean.

Finally, in Luke’s narrative, unlike the narratives of Mark and Matthew, Jesus does not die expressing abandonment, but rather dies expressing complete trust: “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit”. Luke wants us to see in these words a template for how we can face our own deaths, given our weaknesses. What’s the lesson? Leon Bloy once wrote that there is only one true sadness in life, that of not being a saint. At the end of the day when each of us face our own death this will be our biggest regret, that we’re not saints. But, as Jesus shows in his death, we can die in (even in weakness) knowing we are dying into safe hands.

Luke’s account of the passion and death of Jesus, unlike much of Christian tradition, does not focus on the atoning value of Jesus’ death. What it emphasizes instead is this: Jesus’ death washes everything clean, each of us and the whole world. It heals everything, understands everything, and forgives everything – despite every ignorance, weakness, infidelity, and betrayal on our part. In John’s passion narrative, Jesus’ dead body is pierced with a lance and immediately “blood and water” (life and cleansing) flow out. In Luke’s account, Jesus’ body is not pierced. It doesn’t need to be. By the time he breathes his last he has forgiven everyone and everything has been washed clean.

In 1985, Nobel Prize winning author, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, published a novel entitled, Love in the Time of Cholera. It tells a colorful story of how life can still be generative, despite an epidemic.

Well what’s besetting our world right now is not cholera but the coronavirus, Covid 19.  Nothing in my lifetime has ever affected the whole world as radically as this virus. Whole countries have shut down, virtually all schools and colleges have sent their students home and are offering classes online, we’re discouraged from going out of our houses and from inviting others into them, and we’ve been asked not to touch each other and to practice “social distancing”. Ordinary, normal, time has stopped. We’re in a season that no generation, perhaps since the flu of 1918, has had to undergo. Furthermore, we don’t foresee an end soon to this situation. No one, neither our government leaders nor our doctors, have an exit strategy. No one knows when this will end or how. Hence, like the inhabitants on Noah’s Arc, we’re locked in and don’t know when the flood waters will recede and let us return to our normal lives.

How should we live in this extraordinary time? Well, I had a private tutorial on this some nine years ago. In the summer of 2011, I was diagnosed with colon cancer, underwent surgery for a resection, and then was subjected to twenty-four weeks of chemotherapy. Facing the uncertainty of what the chemotherapy would be doing to my body I was understandably scared. Moreover, twenty-four weeks is basically half a year and contemplating the length of time that I would be undergoing this “abnormal” season in my life, I was also impatient. I wanted this over with, quickly.  So I faced it like I face most setbacks in my life, stoically, with the attitude: “I’ll get through this! I’ll endure it!”

I keep what might euphemistically be termed a journal, though it’s really more a Daybook that simply chronicles what I do each day and who and what enters my life on a given day. Well, when I stoically began my first chemotherapy session I began checking off days in my journal: Day one, followed the next day by: Day two. I had done the math and knew that it would take 168 days to get through the twelve chemo sessions, spaced two weeks apart.  It went on like this for the first seventy days or so, with me checking off a number each day, holding my life and my breath, everything on hold until I could finally write, Day 168.

Then one day, about half way through the twenty-four weeks, I had an awakening. I don’t know what specifically triggered it, a grace from above, a gesture of friendship from someone, the feel of the sun on my body, the wonderful feel of a cold drink, perhaps all of these things, but I woke up, I woke up to the fact that I was putting my life on hold, that I wasn’t really living but only enduring each day in order check it off and eventually reach that magical 168^th day when I could start living again. I realized that I was wasting a season of my life. Moreover, I realized that what I was living through was sometimes rich precisely because of the impact of chemotherapy in my life. That realization remains one of the special graces in my life.  My spirits lifted radically even as the chemotherapy continued to do the same brutal things to my body.

I began to welcome each day for its freshness, its richness, for what it brought into my life. I look back on that now and see those three last months (before day 168) as one of richest seasons of my life. I made some lifelong friends, I learned some lessons in patience that I still try to cling to, and, not least, I learned some long-overdue lessons in gratitude and appreciation, in not taking life, health, friendship, and work for granted. It was a special joy to return to a normal life after those 168 days of conscripted “sabbatical”; but those “sabbatical” days were special too, albeit in a very different way.

The coronavirus has put us all, in effect, on a conscripted sabbatical and it’s subjecting those who have contracted it to their own type of chemotherapy. And the danger is that we will put our lives on hold as we go through this extraordinary time and will just endure rather than let ourselves be graced by what lies within this uninvited season.

Yes, there will be frustration and pain in living this through, but that’s not incompatible with happiness. Paul Tournier, after he’d lost his wife, did some deep grieving but then integrated that grief into a new life in a way that allowed him to write:  “I can truly say that I have a great grief and that I am a happy man.”  Words to ponder as we struggle with this coronavirus.

We all fear judgment. We fear being seen with all that’s inside us, some of which we don’t want exposed to the light. Conversely, we fear being misunderstood, of not being seen in the full light, of not being seen for who we are. And what we fear most perhaps is final judgment, the ultimate revelation of ourselves.  Whether we are religious or not, most of us fear having to one day face our Maker, judgment day. We fear standing naked in complete light where nothing’s hidden and all that’s in the dark inside us is brought to light.  

What’s curious about these fears is that we fear both being known for who we are, even as we fear not being known for who we really are. We fear judgment, even as we long for it. Perhaps that’s because we already intuit what our final judgement will be and how it will take place. Perhaps we already intuit that when we finally stand naked in God’s light we will also finally be understood and that revealing light will not just expose our shortcomings but also make visible our virtues.

That intuition is divinely-placed in us and reflects the reality of our final judgment. When all our secrets are known our secret goodness will also be known. Light exposes everything. For example, here’s how the renowned poet and spiritual writer, Wendell Berry, foresees the final judgment: “I might imagine the dead waking, dazed into a shadowless light in which they know themselves altogether for the first time. It is a light that is merciless until they accept its mercy; by it, they are at once condemned and redeemed. It is Hell until it is Heaven. Seeing themselves in that light, if they are willing, they see how far they have failed the only justice of loving one another. And yet, in suffering the light’s awful clarity, in seeing themselves within it, they see its forgiveness and its beauty and are consoled.”

In many ways, this wonderfully captures it: When, one day, we stand in the full light of God, stripped naked in soul, morally defenseless, with everything we have ever done exposed, that light will, I suspect, indeed be a bit of hell before it turns into heaven. It will expose all that’s selfish and impure inside us and all the ways we have hurt others in our selfishness, even as it will expose its opposite, namely, all that’s selfless and pure inside us. That judgment will bring with it a certain condemnation even as it brings at the same time an understanding, forgiveness, and consolation such as we have never known before. That judgment will be, as Berry suggests, momentarily bitter but ultimately consoling.

The one nuance that I would add to Berry’s idea is a something taken from Karl Rahner. Rahner’s fantasy of our judgment by God after death is very similar to Berry’s, except that, for Rahner, the agent of that judgment will not so much be God’s light as it will be God’s love. For Rahner, the idea is not so much that we will be standing in an unrelenting light that sears and pierces through us, but rather that we will be embraced by a love so unconditional, so understanding, and so gracious that, inside that, we will know instantly all that’s selfish and impure inside us even as we know all that’s pure and selfless. Therese of Lisieux used to ask God for forgiveness with these words: “Punish me with a kiss!” Judgment day will be exactly that. We will be “punished” by a kiss, by being loved in a way that will make us painfully aware of the sin within us, even as it lets us know that we are good and loveable.

For those of us who are Roman Catholics, this notion of judgment is also, I believe, what we mean by our concept of purgatory. Purgatory is not a place that’s separate from heaven where one goes for a time to do penance for one’s sins and to purify one’s heart. Our hearts are purified by being embraced by God, not by being separated from God for a time so as to be made worthy of that embrace. As well, as Therese of Lisieux implies, the punishment for our sin is in the embrace itself. Final judgment takes place by being unconditionally embraced by Love. When that happens to the extent that we’re sinful and selfish that embrace of pure goodness and love will make us painfully aware of our own sin and that will be hell until it is heaven.

 As a lyric by Leonard Cohen puts it: Behold the gates of mercy, in arbitrary space, and none of us deserving the cruelty or the grace. He’s right. None of us deserves either the cruelty or the grace we experience in this world. And only our final judgment, the embrace of unconditional love, God’s kiss, will make us aware both of how cruel we’ve been and how good we really are.