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.

The renowned spiritual writer, Ruth Burrows, begins her autobiography with these words: “I was born into this world with a tortured sensitivity. For long I have puzzled over the causes of my psychological anguish.”

Unfortunately, to our loss, too many spiritual biographies don’t begin like this, that is, by recognizing right at the start the bewildering, pathological complexity inside our own nature. We’re not simple in heart, mind, and soul, nor indeed even in body. Each of us has enough complexity within us to write our own treatise on abnormal psychology.

And that complexity must not only be recognized, it needs to be respected and hallowed because it stems not for what’s worst in us but from what’s best in us. We’re complex because what beguiles us inside and tempts us in every direction is not, first of all, the wiliness of the devil but rather the image and likeness of God. Inside us there’s a divine fire, a greatness, which gives us infinite depth, insatiable desires, and enough luminosity to bewilder every psychologist. The image and likeness of God inside us, as John of the Cross writes, renders our hearts, minds, and souls “caverns” too deep to ever be filled in or fully understood.

It’s my belief that Christian spirituality, at least in its popular preaching and catechesis, has too often not taken this seriously enough. In short, the impression has too much been given that Christian discipleship shouldn’t be complicated: Why all this resistance within you! What’s wrong with you!  But, as we know from our own experience, our innate complexity is forever throwing up complications and resistances to becoming a saint, to “willing the one thing”. Moreover, because our complexity hasn’t been recognized and honored spiritually we often feel guilty about it: Why am I so complicated? Why do I have all these questions? Why am I so often confused? Why is sex such a powerful impulse? Why do I have some many temptations?   

The simple answer: Because we are born with a godly fire within. Thus the source of so many of our confusions, temptations, and resistances comes as much what best in as from the wiles of the Satan and the world.

What should we do in in the face of our own bewildering complexity?

Some Counsels for the Long Haul:

• Honor and hallow your complexity: Accept that this is a God-given gift inside you and, at the end of the day, it’s what is best inside you. It’s what separates you from plants and animals. Their nature is simple, but having an immortal, infinite soul makes for lots of complications as you struggle to live out your life within the finitude that besets you.

• Never underestimate your complexity – even as you resist massaging it: Recognize and respect the “demons and angels” that roam freely inside your heart and mind. But don’t massage your complexity either, by fancying yourself as the tormented artist or as the existentialist who’s heroically out of step with life. 

• Befriend your shadow: It’s the luminosity you’ve split off. Slowly, with proper caution and support, begin to face the inner things that frighten you.

• Hallow the power and place of sexuality within you: You’re incurably sexual, and for a godly reason. Never deny or denigrate the power of sexuality – even as you carry it with a proper chastity.

• Name your wounds, grieve them, mourn your inconsummation. Whatever wounds that you don’t grieve will eventually snakebite you. Accept and mourn the fact that here, in this life, there is no finished symphony.

• Never let the “transcendental impulse” inside you become drugged or imprisoned. Your complexity continually lets you know that you’re built for more than this life. Never deaden this impulse inside you. Learn to recognize, through your frustrations and fantasies, the ways you often imprison it.

• Try to find a “higher love” by which to transcend the more immediate power of your natural instincts. All miracles begin with falling in love. Hallow your spontaneous impulses and temptations by searching for that higher love and higher value towards which they’re pointing. Offering others your altruism and the gaze of admiration will feel so good and right that it will bring to fulfillment what you’re really yearning for.

• Let your own complexity teach you understanding and empathy. By being in touch with your own complexity you will eventually learn that nothing is foreign to you and that what you see on the newscasts each day mirrors what’s inside you.

• Forgive yourself often. Your complexity will trip you up many times and so you will need to forgive yourself many times. Live, knowing that God’s mercy is a well that’s never exhausted.

• Live under God’s patience and understanding. God is your builder, the architect who constructed you and who is responsible for your complexity. Trust that God understands. Trust that God is more anxious about you than you’re anxious about yourself. The God who knows all things also knows and appreciates why you struggle.

Thirty years ago, John Jungblut wrote a short pamphlet entitled, On Hallowing Our Diminishments. It’s a treatise suggesting ways we might frame the humiliations and diminishments that beset us through circumstance, age, and accidents so that, despite the humiliation they bring, we can place them under a certain canopy so as to take away their shame and restore to us some lost dignity.

And we all suffer diminishments. Certain things are dealt to us by genetics, history, circumstance, the society we live in, or by the ravages of aging or accidents that, seen from almost every angle, are not only bitterly unfair but can also seemingly strip us of our dignity and leave us humiliated.  For example, how does one deal with a bodily defect that society deems unsightly? How does one deal with being discriminated against? How does one deal with an accident that leaves one partially or wholly paralyzed? How does one deal with the debilitations that come with old age? How does one deal with a loved one who was violated or killed simply because of the color of his or her skin? How does one deal with the suicide of a loved one? How do we set these things under some canopy of dignity and meaning so that what is an awful unfairness is not a permanent source of indignity and shame? How does someone hallow his or her diminishments?

Soren Kierkegaard offers this advice. He, who was sometimes publicly ridiculed during his lifetime, including newspaper cartoons that made sport of his physical appearance (his “spindly legs”), offers this counsel: In the face of something like this, he says, it’s not a question of denying it, covering it up, or trying various distractions and tonics to deaden it or keep its sharpness at bay. Rather we must make ourselves genuinely aware of it, “by bringing it to complete clarity.” By doing this, we hallow it. We bring it out of the realm of shame and give it a certain dignity. How is this done?

Imagine this as a paradigmatic example: A young woman is walking alone along a deserted road and is forcibly picked up by a group of drunken men who rape and kill her and leave her body in a ditch. Her shocked and horrified family and community do as Kierkegaard counsels.  They don’t try to deny what happened, cover it up, or try various distractions and tonics to deaden their pain. Instead, they bring it to “complete clarity”.  How?

They pick up her body, wash it, clothe her in her best clothing, and then have a three-day wake that culminates in a huge funeral attended by hundreds of persons. And their ritual honoring of her doesn’t stop there. After the funeral they gather in a park near where she lived and after some hours of testimony that honors who she was, they rename the park after her.

What they do, of course, does not bring her back to life, does not erase in any way the horrible unfairness of her death, does not bring her killers to justice, and it does not fundamentally change the societal conditions that helped cause her violent death. But it does, in an important way, restore to her some of the dignity that was so horribly ripped away from her. Both she and her death are hallowed. Her name and her life now will forever speak of something beyond the unfairness and tragedy of her death.

We see examples of this on the macro level in way the world has handled the deaths of people like Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Malcolm X, Jamal Khashoggi, and others who were killed by hatred. We have found ways to hallow them so that their lives and their persons are now remembered in ways that eclipse the manner of their deaths. And we see this too in how some communities handle the deaths of loved ones who have been senselessly shot by gang members or by police, where their manner of death belies everything that’s good. The same is true for how some families handle the diminishments of their loved ones who die by drug overdose, suicide, or dementia. The indignity of their death is eclipsed by proper clarity around the very diminishmentthat brought about their death.  Their memory is redeemed. In short, that’s the function of any proper wake and any proper funeral. In bringing to clarity the very indignity that befalls someone we restore her dignity.

This is true not only for those who die unfairly or in ways that leave those they left behind grasping for ways to give them back some dignity. It’s also true for every kind of humiliation and indignity we, ourselves, suffer in life, from the wounds of our childhood which can forever haunt us, to the many humiliations we suffer in adulthood. We cannot change what has happened to us, but we can hallow it by “bringing it to clarity” so that the indignity is eclipsed.

Recently on the popular television program, Saturday Night Live, a comedian made a rather colorful wisecrack in response to an answer that Nancy Pelosi had given to a journalist who had accused her of hating the President. Pelosi had stated that, as a Roman Catholic, she hates no one – and this prompted the comedian to make this quip: “As a Catholic, I know there’s always one person you hate – yourself.”

I’m not someone who’s easily upset by religious jokes. Humor is supposed to have an edge and comedians play an important archetypal role here, that of the “Court Jester” whose task it is to deflate whatever’s pompous. Religion is often fair game. Indeed, I appreciated the wit in this wisecrack. Still, something bothers me about this particular wisecrack because it plays into a certain stereotype that’s, unfortunately, very common today wherein people from all kinds of religious backgrounds (this is not specific to Roman Catholics) blame their religious upbringing for the struggles they have with self-hatred and guilt feelings.

How true is this? Is our religious upbringing the root cause of our struggles with self-hatred and guilt feelings?

Obviously our religious upbringing does play some role here, but it’s far too simplistic (and not particularly helpful) to blame all of this, or even most of it, on our religious upbringing. Psychologists and anthropologists assure us that the issue of self-hatred and free-floating guilt is infinitely more complex, especially since we see it playing out in people of every kind of religious background as well as in people who have no religious background at all. Struggles with self-hatred and guilt is not a particularly Roman Catholic phenomenon, Protestant phenomenon, Evangelical phenomenon, Jewish phenomenon, or Moslem phenomenon; it’s a universal phenomenon that makes itself felt in most every sensitive person. Moreover that struggle is not always unhealthy.

Any morally sensitive person, unlike someone who’s morally calloused, will constantly be self-assessing, often anxious as to whether she’s being selfish rather than good, and perennially worrying that some of her words and actions may have hurt others and damaged her relationship with God. To experience this kind of anxiety is precisely to be struggling with feelings of self-hatred and guilt; but, at one level, this is in fact healthy. When we’re anxiously self-assessing, there’s far less danger that we will take others, take the gift of life, or the take the goodness of God for granted. Moral sensitivity is a virtue and, like aesthetic sensitivity, it keeps you healthily fearful lest in ignorance and insensitivity you paint a moustache on the Mona Lisa.

Some of this, of course, is unhealthy. As Freud taught us, our conscience doesn’t tell us what’s right and what’s wrong, it only tells us how we feel about our actions. And when we have guilt feelings about what we have just done or left undone those feelings are, no doubt, often powerfully influenced by the social and moral standards that have been put into us as children by our parents, our teachers, our culture, and our religious upbringing. Our religious and moral upbringing does leave us struggling with some false guilt.

But, that being admitted, there are deeper causes as to why we struggle with self-hatred and free-floating guilt and why we just never quite feel good enough.

If we could review our lives in a video, we would see the countless times we were in, every kind of way, told that we’re not good, not adequate, not loveable, not valued, not precious. We would see the countless times we were shamed in our enthusiasm; and this, I submit, more than any other factor, lies at the root of our self-hatred, our free-floating feelings of guilt, and the bitterness we so frequently feel towards others.

It starts in the highchair when, as toddlers, in our blind energy, we eat too enthusiastically and are told not to eat like a pig. Likewise, as toddlers, full of food and zest, we shout and throw some food on the floor and are told to stop it, to shut up, that our natural energies aren’t healthy. Then, as a preschooler, we are often further shamed in our enthusiasm. Eventually things move on to the playground, the classroom, and into our family circles where our uniqueness and preciousness are not often sufficiently recognized or valued, where we’re frequently ignored, put down, treated unfairly, bullied, made aware of our inferiorities and failures, and, in ways subtle and not-so-subtle, told that we’re not good enough. This sets us up for the rejections we absorb in adulthood, for the jealousies we feel when the lives of others look so much richer than our own, for the unexpressed bitterness we nurse because of our own inadequacies, and for the guilt we feel because of our own betrayals.

It isn’t primarily because of our religious training that we hate ourselves and are haunted by a lot of free-floating guilt.

 Yes, most of us Catholics do hate ourselves. Sadly, would it were otherwise, so too does everyone else.

Most of us have heard of St. Therese of Lisieux, a French mystic who died at age 24 in 1897 and who is perhaps the most popular saint of the last two centuries. She’s famous for many things, not least for a spirituality she called her “little way”.  What’s her “little way”?

Popular thought has often encrusted both Therese and her “little way” within a simple piety which doesn’t do justice to the depth of her person or her spirituality. Too often her “little way” is understood simply to mean that we do little, hidden, humble, acts of charity for others in the name of Jesus, without expecting anything in return. In this popular interpretation we do the laundry, peel potatoes, and smile at unpleasant people to please Jesus. In some ways, of course, this is true; however her “little way” merits a deeper understanding.

Yes, it does ask us to do humble chores and be nice to each other in the name of Jesus but there are deeper dimensions to it. Her “little way” is a path to sanctity based on three things: Littleness, Anonymity, and a Particular Motivation. 

Littleness: For Therese “littleness” does not refer first of all to the littleness of the act that we are doing, like the humble tasks of doing the laundry, peeling potatoes, or giving a simple smile to someone who’s unpleasant.  It refers to our own littleness, to our own radical poverty before God. Before God, we are little. To accept and act out of that constitutes humility. We move towards God and others in her “little way” when we do small acts of charity for others, not out of our strength and the virtue we feel at that moment, but rather out of a poverty, powerlessness, and emptiness that allows God’s grace to work through us so that in doing what we’re doing we’re drawing others to God and not to ourselves.  

As well, our littleness makes us aware that, for the most part, we cannot do the big things that shape world history. But we can change the world more humbly, by sowing a hidden seed, by being a hidden antibiotic of health inside the soul of humanity, and by splitting the atom of love inside our own selves. And yes, too, the “little way” is about doing little, humble, hidden things.

Anonymity: Therese’s “little way” refers to what’s hidden, to what’s done in secret, so that what the Father sees in secret will be rewarded in secret. And what’s hidden is not our act of charity, but we, ourselves, who are doing the act. In Therese’s “little way” our little acts of charity will go mostly unnoticed, will seemingly have no real impact on world history, and won’t bring us any recognition. They’ll remain hidden and unnoticed; but inside the Body of Christ what’s hidden, selfless, unnoticed, self-effacing, and seemingly insignificant and unimportant is the most vital vehicle of all for grace at a deeper level. Just as Jesus did not save us through sensational miracles and headline-making deeds but through selfless obedience to his Father and quiet martyrdom, our deeds too can remain unknown so that our deaths and the spirit we leave behind can become our real fruitfulness.

Finally, her “little way” is predicated on a Particular Motivation. We are invited to act out of our littleness and anonymity and do small acts of love and service to others for a particular reason, that is, to, metaphorically, wipe the face of the suffering Christ. How so?

Therese of Lisieux was an extremely blessed and gifted person. Despite a lot of tragedy in her early life, she was (by her own admission and testimony of others) loved in a way that was so pure, so deep, and so wonderfully affectionate that it leaves most people in envy. She was also a very attractive child and was bathed in love and security inside an extended family within which her every smile and tear were noticed, honored, (and often photographed).  But as she grew in maturity it didn’t take her long to notice that what was true in her life wasn’t true of most others. Their smiles and tears went mostly unnoticed and were not honored. Her “little way” is therefore predicated on this particular motivation. In her own words:  

“One Sunday, looking at a picture of Our Lord on the Cross, I was struck by the blood flowing from one of his divine hands. I felt a pang of great sorrow when thinking this blood was falling on the ground without anyone’s hastening to gather it up. I was resolved to remain in spirit at the foot of the Cross and to receive its dew. …   Oh, I don’t want this precious blood to be lost. I shall spend my life gathering it up for the good of souls. …  To live from love is to dry Your Face.”

To live her “little way” is to notice and honor the unnoticed tears falling from the suffering faces of others.

Some years ago at a religious conference a man approached the microphone and after apologizing for what he felt would be an inappropriate question, asked this: “I love my dog. When he dies will he go to heaven? Do animals have eternal life?”

The answer to that might come as a surprise to many of us, but, looked at through the eyes of Christian faith, yes, his dog can go to heaven. It’s one of the meanings of Christmas. God came into the world to save the world, not just the people living in it. The incarnation has meaning for humanity, but also for the cosmos itself. We don’t know exactly what that means, and our imaginations aren’t up to the task of picturing it, but, because of the incarnation, dogs too can go to heaven. Is this fanciful? No, it’s scriptural teaching.

At Christmas was celebrate the birth of Jesus and see in his birth the beginning of the mystery of the incarnation unfolding in history, the mystery of God becoming human in physical flesh in order to save the world. What we tend to struggle with though is how we understand what’s meant by Christ saving the world. Most of us take that to mean that Christ came into the world to save the people, those of us with self-awareness and eternal souls.

That’s true, but our faith also asks us to believe that God’s saving activity in the Christ extends to more than only human beings and more than even animals and other living things. God’s saving activity in Christ reaches so deep that it saves creation itself – the oceans, the mountains, the soil that grows our food, the desert sands, and the earth itself. Christ came to save all of those things too, not just us, the people.

Where, you might ask, does scripture teach this? It teaches it most everywhere in implicit ways though it teaches it quite explicitly in a number of different places. For example, in the Epistle to the Romans (8, 19-22) St. Paul writes: I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.

This may come as a surprise to us since, until quite recently, our preaching and catechesis has not often made this explicit. However what St. Paul is saying here is that physical creation itself, the cosmic world, will, at the end of time, be transformed in some glorious way and enter into heaven, just as human beings do. He’s also saying that, like us, it too somehow senses its mortality and groans to be set free from its present limits.

We need to ask ourselves this question? What do we believe will happen to physical creation at the end of time? Will it be destroyed, burnt-up, annihilated? Or, will it simply be abandoned and left empty and deserted like a stage after a play has ended, while we go on to life elsewhere? Scripture informs us otherwise, that is, it tells us that physical creation itself, our planet earth, will also be transformed (“liberated from its bondage to decay”) and enter into heaven with us. How will this happen? We can’t imagine it, just as we can’t imagine our own transformed state. But scripture assures us that it will happen because, like ourselves, our world, physical creation, is also destined to die, and, like us, it intuits its mortality and groans under that sentence, aching to be set free from its limitations and become immortal.

Science agrees. It tells us that physical creation is mortal, that the sun is burning out, that energy is ever-so-slowly decreasing and that the earth as we know it will someday die. The earth is as mortal as we are and so if it’s to have a future it needs to be saved by Something or Someone from outside itself. That Something and Someone are revealed in the mystery of the incarnation within which God takes on physical flesh in Christ in order to save the world – and what he came to save was not just us, the people living on this earth, but rather, “the world”, the planet itself, and everything on it.

Jesus assured us that nothing is ever ultimately lost. No hair falls from someone’s head and no sparrow falls from the sky and simply disappears forever, as if it had never been. God created, loves, cares for, and ultimately resurrects every bit of creation for all eternity – including a beloved dog.

What would Jesus do? For some Christians, that’s the easy answer to every question.  In every situation all we need to ask is: What would Jesus do? 

At a deep level, that’s actually true. Jesus is the ultimate criterion. He is the way, the truth, and the life and anything that contradicts him is not a way to God. Yet, I suspect, many of us find ourselves irritated in how that expression is often used in simplistic ways, as a fundamentalism difficult to digest. Sometimes, in our irritation at this, we spontaneously want to say: Jesus has nothing to do with this! But, of course, as soon as those words escape our mouths we realize how bad that sounds! Jesus has a lot to do with every theological, ecclesial, or liturgical question, no matter its complexity. Granted, there’s the danger of fundamentalism here; but it’s equally as dangerous to answer theological, ecclesial, and liturgical questions without considering what Jesus might do. He’s still, and forever, a non-negotiable criterion.

But while Jesus is a non-negotiable criterion, he’s not a simplistic one. What did Jesus do? Well, the answer isn’t simple. Looking at his life we see that sometimes he did things one way, sometimes another way, and sometimes he started out doing something one way and ended up changing his mind and doing it in a different way, as we see in his interaction with the Syro-Phoenician woman. That’s why, I suspect, within Christianity there are so many different denominations, spiritualities, and ways of worship, each with its own interpretation of Jesus. Jesus is complex.

Given Jesus’ complexity, it’s no accident then that theologians, preachers, and spiritualities often find in his person and his teachings ways that reflect more how they would handle a situation than how he would. We see this in our churches and spiritualities everywhere, and I say this with sympathy, not with judgment. None of us gets Jesus fully right.

So where does this leave us? Do we simply rely on our private interpretation of Jesus? Do we give ourselves over uncritically to some ecclesial or academic authority and trust that it will tell us what Jesus would do in every situation?  Is there a “third” way?

Well, there’s a “third” way, the way of most Christian denominations, wherein we submit our private interpretation to the canonical (“dogmatic”) tradition of our particular church and accept, though not in blind, uncritical, obedience, the interpretation of that larger community, its longer history, and its wider experience, humbly accepting that it can be naïve (and arrogant) to bracket 2000 years of Christian experience so as to believe that our insight into Jesus is a needed corrective to a vision that has inspired so many millions of people through so many centuries.  

Still, we’re not meant to park the dictates of our private conscience, our critical questions, our unease with certain things, and the wounds we carry, at our church door either. In the end, we all must be true to our own consciences, faithful to the particular insights that God graces us with, and mindful of the wounds we carry.  Both our graces and our wounds are meant to be listened to and they, along with the deepest voices within our conscience, need to be taken into account when ask ourselves: What would Jesus do?

We need to answer that for ourselves by faithfully holding and carrying within us the tension between being obedient to our churches and not betraying the critical voices within our own conscience. If we do that honestly, one thing will eventually constellate inside us as an absolute: God is good!  Everything Jesus taught and incarnated was predicated on that truth.Anything that jeopardizes or belies that, be it a church, a theology, a liturgical practice, or a spirituality is wrong. And any voice within dogma or private conscience that betrays that is also wrong.

How we conceive of God colors for good or for bad everything within our religious practice. And above all else, Jesus revealed this about God: God is good. That truth needs to ground everything else, our churches, our theologies, our spiritualities, our liturgies, and our understanding of everyone else. Sadly, often it doesn’t. The fear that God is not good disguises itself in subtle ways but is always manifest whenever our religious teachings or practices somehow make God in heaven not as understanding, merciful, and indiscriminate and unconditional in love as Jesus was on earth. It’s also manifest whenever we fear that we’re dispensing grace too cheaply and making God too accessible.

Sadly, the God who is met in our churches today is often too-narrow, too-merciless, too-tribal, too-petty, and too-untrustworthy to be worthy of Jesus … or the surrender of our soul.

What would Jesus do? Admittedly the question is complex. However we know we have the wrong answer whenever we make God anything less than fully good, whenever we set conditions for unconditional love, and whenever, however subtly, we block access to God and God’s mercy.