RonRolheiser,OMI

The Little Way

January 13, 2020

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.

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The Best Ten Books That Found Me in 2019

December 30, 2019

There’s a Latin axiom which argues that there’s no accounting for taste, de gustibus non est disputandum. I reference it as to preamble to my annual list of the ten books I most enjoyed this past year because, admittedly, taste is somewhat subjective. I chose these particular books because they’re the ones that spoke most deeply to me. Perhaps they won’t speak to you in the same way. Fair enough. There’s no accounting for taste.

So, here are the authors and the books that spoke to me most deeply during this past year …

  1. Bernardo Olivera, How Far to Follow? The Martyrs of Atlas. This bookhelps tell the inside story of the Trappist monks who were martyred by Islamic extremists in Algeria in 1996. Similar to the movie, Of Gods and Men, it focuses on the deep struggles these men underwent in making the decision not to leave their monastery and, instead, face martyrdom.
  2. Donald Senior, Raymond E. Brown and the Catholic Biblical Renewal. Well-researched and well-written, this is a biography of the renowned scripture scholar, Raymond E. Brown, who stood out both for his scholarship and for his exemplary discipleship and priesthood. The book is more of an intellectual history of Brown than a chronicle of his life. It’s interesting too because, by sharing Brown’s intellectual history, Senior also highlights the particular theological and ecclesial struggles of Brown’s generation. For many of us this will be hauntingly familiar.
  3. Rachel Held Evans: This past year, scanning book reviews, I discovered the writings of Rachel Held Evans. I cite three of her works here that spoke to me very deeply: Searching for Sunday, Loving, Leaving, and Finding Church; Inspired, Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again; and A Year of Biblical Womanhood. Rachel grew up a cradle Evangelical with a deep and solid faith, but adulthood brought its own challenges, particularly for someone of her courage and honesty. These books chronicle Rachel’s struggle with her religious mother-tongue, her falling out of her faith story, and her particular way of finding her way back in. Her story articulates the struggle of millions. It’s an invaluable read, irrespective of one’s religious mother-tongue. She’s also an exceptionally gifted writer. Sadly, she died in May at the age of 37. We lost a needed religious voice, but what she left us can help many a person sort through his or her religious struggles.
  4. Jean Bosco Rutagengwa, Love Prevails, One Couple’s Story of Faith and Survival in the Rwandan Genocide.  Someone once said that if you want to understand the tragedy of the Second World War you can read a thousand books about it and watch a thousand hours of film – or you can read the Diary of Anne Frank. This is such a “diary”, written inside the horrors of the Rwandan Genocide.
  5. Robert Ellsberg, A Living Gospel, Reading God’s Story in Holy Lives. The lives of the saints are our living gospel and Robert Ellsberg is the foremost hagiographer in the English language today. This, wonderfully readable, book teaches us both what hagiography is and why it’s important.
  6. Margaret Renkl, Late Migrations, A Natural History of Love and Loss. This is a unique kind of book, a poetics of sorts on love, nature, adoration, family life, death, dying, and human resiliency. This is a piece of art.
  7. Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ. This book will challenge you and will, with a sound scriptural theology, challenge mainline theology in its popular conception of both the intent and the scope of the incarnation. An important read.
  8. Ruth Burrows, Before the Living God. This is Ruth Burrows’ autobiography. I first read it thirty-two years ago. It moved me then and it moved me even more thirty-two years later. In her story, you will better understand your own story and the movement of God in your life.
  9. David Brooks, The Second Mountain, The Quest for a Moral Life. Brooks’ Second Mountain very much corresponds to what spiritual writers like Richard Rohr call the Second-Half of Life. Drawing upon his own story and creatively mixing secular and religious perspectives, Brooks lays out a challenging vision of what it means to mature, to move from being the hungry child to becoming the blessing adult. An excellent read.
  10. Mary Jo Leddy, Why Are We Here, A Meditation on Canada. Not least, a book from a Canadian. Mary Jo Leddy, the Founder and Director of Romero House for refugees in Toronto has always been a prophetic voice. In this book, she submits that every country has its “original sin”, some primal fault in its origins that now taints its present. For Canada, she argues, it was how it treated its indigenous peoples as it formed itself into a nation. Canada is not unique in having such an “original sin”. Every country has it.  Everyone should read this book.

I apologize that this year’s list, again, does not include any novels.

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Deep Incarnation – Another Meaning of Christmas

December 16, 2019

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.

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Justice and Charity – Revisited

December 9, 2019

We’re all familiar, I suspect, with the difference between justice and charity. Charity is giving away some of your time, energy, resources, and person so as to help to others in need. And that’s an admirable virtue, the sign of a good heart. Justice, on the other hand, is less about directly giving something away than it is about looking to change the conditions and systems that put others in need.

No doubt, we’re all familiar with the little parable used to illustrate this difference. In brief, it goes like this: A town situated on the edge of a river finds itself confronted every day by a number of bodies floating downstream in the river. The townsfolk tend to the bodies, minister to those who are alive and respectfully bury the dead. They do this for years, with good hearts; but, through all those years, none of them ever journey up the river to look at why there are wounded and dead bodies floating in the river each day. The townsfolk are good-hearted and charitable, but that in itself isn’t changing the situation that’s bringing them wounded and dead bodies daily. As well, the charitable townsfolk aren’t even remotely aware that their manner of life, seemingly completely unconnected to the wounded and dead bodies they’re daily attending to, might in fact be contributing to the cause of those lost lives and dreams and that, good-hearted as they are, they may be complicit in something that’s harming others, even while it’s affording them the resources and wherewithal to be charitable.

The lesson here is not that we shouldn’t be charitable and good-hearted. One-to-one charity, as the parable of the Good Samaritan makes clear, is what’s demanded of us, both as humans and as Christians. The lesson is that being good-hearted alone is not enough. It’s a start, a good one, but more is asked of us. I suspect most of us already know this, but perhaps we’re less conscious of something less obvious, namely, that our very generosity itself might be contributing to a blindness that lets us support (and vote for) the exact political, economic, and cultural systems which are to blame for the wounded and dead bodies we’re attending to in our charity.

That our own good works of charity can help blind us to our complicity in injustice is something highlighted in a recent book by Anand Giridharada, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World. In a rather unsettling assertion, Giridharada submits that generosity can be, and often is, a substitute for and a means of avoiding the necessity of a more just and equitable system and fairer distribution of power. Charity, wonderful as it is, is not yet justice; a good heart, wonderful as it is, in not yet good policy that serves the less-privileged; and philanthropy, wonderful as it is, can have us confuse the charity we’re doing with the justice that’s asked of us.  For this reason among others, Giridharada submits that public problems should not be privatized and relegated to the domain of private charity, as is now so often the case.

Christiana Zenner, reviewing his book in America, sums this up by saying: “Beware of the temptation to idealize a market or an individual who promises salvation without attending to the least among us and without addressing the conditions that facilitated the domination in the first place.”  Then she adds: When we see the direct violation of another person, a direct injustice, we’re taken aback, but the unfairness and the perpetrator are obvious. We see that something is wrong and we can see who is to blame. But, and this is her real point, when we live with unjust systems that violate others we can be blind to our own complicity because we can feel good about ourselves because our charity is helping those who have been violated.

For example: Imagine I’m a good-hearted man who feels a genuine sympathy for the homeless in my city. As the Christmas season approaches I make a large donation of food and money to the local food bank. Further still, on Christmas day itself, before I sit down to eat my own Christmas dinner, I spend several hours helping serve a Christmas meal to the homeless. My charity here is admirable, and I cannot help but feel good about what I just did. And what I did was a good thing! But then, when I support a politician or a policy that privileges the rich and is unfair to the poor, I can more easily rationalize that I’m doing my just part and that I have a heart for the poor, even as my vote itself helps ensure that there will always be homeless people to feed on Christmas day. 

Few virtues are as important as charity. It’s the sign of a good heart. But the deserved good feeling we get when we give of ourselves in charity shouldn’t be confused with the false feeling that we’re really doing our part.

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Anchoring Ourselves within God’s Goodness

December 2, 2019

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.

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What Constitutes Fidelity?

November 25, 2019

It’s becoming increasing difficult in today’s world to trust anything or anybody, for good reason. There’s little that’s stable, safe to lean on, trustworthy. We live in a world where everything is in flux, is flux, where everywhere we see distrust, abandoned values, debunked creeds, people moving on from where they used to be, contradictory information, and dishonesty and lying as socially and morally acceptable. There is little left of trust in our world.

What does this call us to? We’re called to many things, but perhaps nothing more important than fidelity, to be honest and persevering in who we are and what we stand for. Here’s an illustration.

One of our Oblate missionaries shares this story. He was sent to minister to a cluster of small Indigenous communities in Northern Canada.  The people were very nice to him but it didn’t take him long to notice something. Basically every time he scheduled an appointment the person wouldn’t show up. At first, he attributed this to miscommunication, but eventually he realized the pattern was too consistent for this to be an accident and so he approached an Elder in the community for some counsel. “Every time a make an appointment with someone,” he told the Elder, “they don’t show up.” The Elder smiled, knowingly, and replied: “Of course, they won’t show up, the last thing they need is to have an outsider like you organizing their lives for them!”  So the missionary asked: “What do I do?” The Elder replied: “Well, don’t make an appointment, just show up and talk to them! They’ll be nice to you. More importantly though, this is what you need to do: Stay here for a long time and then they will trust you. They want to see whether you’re a missionary or a tourist. Why should they trust you? They’ve been betrayed and lied to by most everyone who’s come through here. Stay for a long time and then they’ll trust you.”

Stay for a long time and then they’ll trust you. What does it mean to stay for a long time? We can hang around and not necessarily inspire trust, just as we can move on to other places and still inspire trust. In its essence, staying around for the duration, being faithful, has less to do with never moving from a given location than it has to do with staying worthy of trust, with staying faithful to who we are, to the creed we profess, to the commitments and promises we have made, and to what’s truest inside us so that our private lives do not belie our public persona.

The gift of fidelity is the gift of a life lived honestly. Our private honesty blesses the whole community, just as our private dishonesty hurts the whole community. “If you are here faithfully,” writes Parker Palmer, “you bring great blessing.” Conversely, writes Rumi, “If you are here unfaithfully, you bring great harm.” To the degree that we are true to the creed we profess, the family, friends, and communities we’ve committed to, and to the deepest moral imperatives within our private soul, to that degree we are faithfully with others, and to that degree we are “staying with them for a long time”.  The reverse is also true, to the degree that we are not true to the creed we profess, to the promises we’ve made to others, and to the honesty innate in our own soul, we are being unfaithful, moving away from others, being the tourist not the missionary.

In his Epistle to the Galatians, St. Paul tells us what it means to be with each other, to live with each other, beyond geographical distance and other contingencies in life that separate us. We are with each, faithfully, as brothers and sisters, when we are living in charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, long-suffering, mildness, perseverance, and chastity. When we are living inside these, then we are “staying with each other” and not moving away, no matter any geographical distance between us. Conversely, when we are living outside of these we are not “staying with each other”, even when there is no geographical distance between us. Home, as poets have always told us, is a place inside the heart, not a place on a map. And home, as St. Paul tells us, in living inside the Spirit.

And it is this, I believe, that ultimately defines fidelity and perseverance, separates a moral missionary from a moral tourist, and indicates who’s staying and who’s moving away.

For each of us to stay faithful, we need each other. It takes more than a village, it takes all of us. One person’s fidelity makes everyone’s fidelity easier, just as one person’s infidelity makes everyone’s fidelity more difficult. So, inside a world that’s so highly individualistic and bewilderingly transient, when it can feel as if everyone is forever moving away from you, perhaps the greatest gift we can give each other is the gift of our own fidelity, to stay for a long time.

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Saints for a New Situation

November 18, 2019

Everywhere in church circles today you hear a lament: Our churches are emptying. We’ve lost our youth. This generation no longer knows or understands the classical theological language. We need to announce Jesus again, as if for the first time, but how? The church is becoming evermore marginalized. 

That’s the situation pretty much everywhere within the secularized world today. Why is this happening? Faith as a spent project? Secularity’s adolescent grandiosity before the parent who gave it birth, Judeo-Christianity?  The “buffered self” that Charles Taylor describes? Affluence? Or is the problem mainly with the churches themselves? Sexual abuse? Cover-up? Poor liturgies? Poor preaching? Churches too liberal? Churches too conservative?

I suspect it’s some combination of all of these, but single out one issue here to highlight, affluence. Jesus told us that it’s difficult (impossible, he says) for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven. No doubt, that’s a huge part of our present struggle. We’re good at being Christians when we’re poor, less-educated, and on the margins of mainstream society. We’ve had centuries of practice at this. What we haven’t had any practice at, and aren’t any good at, is how to be Christians when we’re affluent, sophisticated, and constitute the cultural mainstream.

So, I’m suggesting that what we need today is not so much a new pastoral approach as a new kind of saint, an individual man or woman who can model for us practically what it means to live out the Gospel in a context of affluence and secularity.  Why this?

One of the lessons of history is that often genuine religious renewal, the type that actually reshapes the religious imagination, does not come from think-tanks, conferences, and church synods, but from graced individuals – saints, wild men and women who, like Saint Augustine, Saint Francis, Saint Clare, Saint Dominic, Saint Ignatius, or other such religious figures can reshape our religious imagination. They show us that the new lies elsewhere, that what needs fixing in the church will not be mended simply by patching the old. What’s needed is a new religious and ecclesial imagination. Charles Taylor, in his highly-respected study of secularity, suggests that what we’re undergoing today is not so much a crisis of faith as a crisis of imagination. No Christians before us have ever lived within this kind of world.

What will this new kind of saint, this new St. Francis, look like?  I honestly don’t know. Neither, it seems, does anyone else.  We have no answer yet, at least not one that’s been able to bear much fruit in the mainstream culture.  That’s not surprising. The type of imagination that reshapes history isn’t easily found. In the meantime we’ve come about as far as we can along the road that used to take us there, but which for many of our children no longer does.

Here’s our quandary: We’re better at knowing what to do once we get people into a church than we are at knowing how to get them there. Why? Our weakness, I believe, lies not in our theological imagination where we have rich theological and biblical insights aplenty. What we lack are saints on the ground, men and women who, in a passion and fidelity that’s at once radically faithful to God and fiercely empathic to our secular world, can incarnate their faith into a way of living that can show us, practically, how we can be poor and humble disciples of Jesus even as we walk in an affluent and highly secularized world.  

And such new persons will appear. We’ve been at this spot before in history and have always found our way forward. Every time the world believes it has buried Christ, the stone rolls back from the tomb; every time the cultural ethos declares that the churches are on an irrevocable downward slide, the Spirit intervenes and there’s soon an about face; every time we despair, thinking that our age can now longer produce saints and prophets, some Augustine or Francis comes along and shows that our age, like times of old, can too produce its saints; and every time our imaginations run dry, as they have now, we find that our scriptures are still full of fresh insight. We may lack imagination, but we don’t lack hope.

Christ promised we will not be orphaned, and that promise is sure. God is still with us and our age will produce its own prophets and saints. What’s asked of us in the moment is biblical patience, to wait on God. Christianity may look tired, tried, and spent to a culture within which affluence and sophistication are its current gods, but hope is already beginning to show its face: As secularization, with its affluence and sophistication, marches unswervingly forward we’re already beginning to see a number of men and women who have found ways to become post-affluent and post-sophisticated. These will be the new religious leaders who will teach us, and our children, how to live as Christians in this new situation.

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Living out a Vocation

November 11, 2019

What does it mean to have a vocation? The term gets batted around both in religious and secular circles and everyone assumes its meaning is clear. Is it? What’s a vocation?

Karl Jung defined it this way: “A vocation is an irrational factor that destines a man to emancipate himself from the herd and from its well-worn paths.”  Frederick Buechner, a famed preacher, says: “A vocation is where your deep gladness meets the world’s hunger.”

David Brooks, a renowned journalist, reflecting on vocation in his recent book, The Second Mountain, gives us these quotes from Jung and Buechner and then writes:  A vocation is not something you choose. It chooses you. When you sense it as a possibility in your life you also sense that you don’t have a choice but can only ask yourself: What’s my responsibility here? It’s not a matter of what you expect from life but rather what life expects from you.  Moreover, for Brooks, once you have a sense of your vocation it becomes unthinkable to turn away and you realize you would be morally culpable if you did.  He quotes William Wordsworth in support of this:

My heart was full; I made no vows, but vows

Were then made for me; bond unknown to me

Was given, that I should be, else sinning greatly. 

Brooks suggests that any number of things can help awaken your soul to its vocation: music, drama, art, friendship, being around children, being around beauty, and, paradoxically, being around injustice. To this he adds two further observations: First, that usually we only see and understand all this clearly when we’re older and looking back on life and our choices; and, second, that while the summons to a vocation is a holy thing, something mystical, the way we actually end up living it out is often messy, confusing, and screwed up and generally doesn’t feel very holy at all.

Well, I am older and am looking back on things. Does my vocational story fit these descriptions? Mostly, yes.

As a child growing up in the Roman Catholic subculture of the 1950s and early 1960s, I was part of that generation of Catholics within which every Catholic boy or girl was asked to consider, with considerable gravity, the question: “Do I have a vocation?” But back then mostly that meant: “Am I called to be a priest, a religious brother, or a religious sister?” Marriage and single life were, in fact, also considered vocations, but they took a back seat to what was considered the higher vocation, consecrated religious commitment.

So as a boy growing up in that milieu I did, with all gravity, ask myself that question: “Do I have a vocation to be a priest?” And the answer came to me, not in a flashing insight, or in some generous movement of heart, or in an attraction to a certain way of life. None of these. The answer came to me as hook in my conscience, as something that was being asked of me, as something I couldn’t morally or religiously turn away from. It came to me as an obligation, a responsibility. And initially I fought against and resisted that answer. This wasn’t what I wanted.

But it was what I felt called to. This was something that was being asked of me beyond my own dreams for my life. It was a call. So at the tender age of seventeen I made the decision to enter a religious order, the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, and train to become a priest. I suspect that few counsellors or psychologists today would put much trust in such a decision, given my age at the time; but, looking back on it now, more than fifty years later, in hindsight, I believe this is the purest and most unselfish decision I’ve ever made in my life.

And I’ve never looked back. I’ve never seriously considered leaving that commitment, even though every kind of unsettling emotion, obsession, restlessness, depression, and self-pity have at times haunted and tormented me. I’ve never regretted the decision. I know this is what I’ve been called to do and I’m happy enough with the way it’s turned out.  It’s brought me life and helped me serve others. And given my personal idiosyncrasies, wounds, and weaknesses, I doubt I would have found as deep a path into life and community as this vocation afforded me, though that admittedly can be self-serving.

I share my personal story here only because it might be helpful in illustrating the concept of a vocation.  But religious life and priesthood are merely one vocation. There are countless others, equally as holy and important.  One’s vocation can be to be an artist, a farmer, a writer, a doctor, a parent, a wife, a teacher, a salesman, or countless other things.  The vocation chooses you and makes the vows for you – and those vows put you at that place in the world where you’re best placed to serve others and to find happiness.

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Faith and Dying

November 4, 2019

We tend to nurse a certain naiveté about what faith means in the face of death. The common notion among us as Christians is that if someone has a genuine faith she should be able to face death without fear or doubt. The implication then of course is that having fear and doubt when one is dying is an indication of a weak faith. While it’s true that many people with a strong faith do face death calmly and without fear, that’s not always the case, nor necessarily the norm.

We can begin with Jesus. Surely he had real faith and yet, in the moments just before his death, he called out in both fear and doubt. His cry of anguish, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me”, came from a genuine anguish that was not, as we sometimes piously postulate, uttered for divine effect, not really meant, but something for us to hear. Moments before he died, Jesus suffered real fear and real doubt. Where was his faith? Well, that depends upon how we understand faith and the specific modality it can take on in our dying.

In her famous study of the stages of dying, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, suggests there are five stages we undergo in the dying process: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance. Our first response to receiving a terminal diagnosis is denial – This is not happening!  Then when we have to accept that it is happening our reaction is anger – Why me! Eventually anger gives way to bargaining – How much time can I still draw out of this? This is followed by depression andfinally, when nothing serves us any longer, there’s acceptance – I’m going to die. This is all very true.

But in a deeply insightful book, The Grace in Dying, Kathleen Dowling Singh, basing her insights upon the experience of sitting at the bedside of many dying people, suggests there are additional stages: Doubt, Resignation, and Ecstasy. Those stages help shed light on how Jesus faced his death.

The night before he died, in Gethsemane, Jesus accepted his death, clearly. But that acceptance was not yet full resignation. That only took place the next day on the cross in a final surrender when, as the Gospels put it, he bowed his head and gave over his spirit. And, just before that, he experienced an awful fear that what he had always believed in and taught about God was perhaps not so. Maybe the heavens were empty and maybe what we deem as God’s promises amount only to wishful thinking.

But, as we know, he didn’t give into that doubt, but rather, inside of its darkness, gave himself over in trust. Jesus died in faith – though not in what we often naively believe faith to be. To die in faith does not always mean that we die calmly, without fear and doubt.

For instance, the renowned biblical scholar, Raymond E. Brown, commenting on the fear of death inside the community of the Beloved disciple, writes: “The finality of death and the uncertainties it creates causes trembling among those who have spent their lives professing Christ. Indeed, among the small community of Johannine disciples, it was not unusual for people to confess that doubts had come into their minds as they encountered death. …The Lazarus story is placed at the end of Jesus’ public ministry in John to teach us that when confronted with the visible reality of the grave, all need to hear and embrace the bold message that Jesus proclaimed: ‘I am the life.’ … For John, no matter how often we renew our faith, there is the supreme testing by death. Whether the death of a loved one or one’s own death, it is the moment when one realizes that it all depends on God. During our lives we have been able to shield ourselves from having to face this in a raw way. Confronted by death, mortality, all defenses fall away.”

Sometimes people with a deep faith face death in calm and peace. But sometimes they don’t and the fear and doubt that threatens them then is not necessarily a sign of a weak or faltering faith. It can be the opposite, as we see in Jesus. Inside a person of faith, fear and doubt in the face of death is what the mystics call ‘the dark night of the spirit” … and this is what’s going on inside that experience:  The raw fear and doubt we are experiencing at that time make it impossible for us to mistake our own selves and our own life-force for God. When we have to accept to die in trust inside of what seems like absolute negation and can only cry out in anguish to an apparent emptiness then it is no longer possible to confuse God with our own feelings and ego. In that, we experience the ultimate purification of soul. We can have a deep faith and still find ourselves with doubt and fear in the face of death.  Just look at Jesus.

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The Frustrating Struggle for Humility

October 28, 2019

It’s hard to be humble, not because we don’t have more than enough deficiencies to merit humility, but rather because there’s crafty mechanism inside of us that normally doesn’t let us go to the place of humility. Simply put, as we try to be self-effacing, humble, and non-hypocritical, variably we take pride in that and then, feeling smug about it, we become judgmental of others.

Jesus gave us a wonderful parable on this but mostly we miss its lesson. We’re all familiar with the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican.  Jesus tells the story of two men standing before God in prayer. The first man, a devout Pharisee, is a man who took the pursuit of virtue seriously and he thanks God that he’s devout and moral and also thanks God that he’s not as amoral as the Publican who is in the temple with him. The second man, a Publican, recognizes (honestly and without any rationalization) that he is amoral, that he is a sinner, and, within that recognition, humbly asks God to forgive him for his weaknesses. We know how Jesus assessed the two men. The Pharisee didn’t really pray while the Publican did. Moreover the parable highlights the internal blindness of the Pharisee in a way that’s impossible not to see. Everyone hearing this story cannot help but see his lack of humility.

What’s challenging however is to examine our own reaction to the story. We instantly see the difference between false pride and genuine humility. We see how arrogant it is for the Pharisee to say: “Thank God, I am not like that man!” But, but then, I would venture to guess that 98% of us hearing that story spontaneously nurse this feeling: “Thank God, I’m not like that Pharisee!” And, in doing that, we are him! Exactly like him, we’re brimming over with our own sense of virtue and, because of that, begin judging others. Our prayer is in fact usually the opposite of the Publican’s prayer. We are not praying out of our own sinfulness, but rather praying: “I thank you, God, that I’m not as blind to self and as judgmental as so many other people are!” It’s hard to be the Publican.  Our very virtue and humility invariably coil back upon themselves and make us proud and judgmental.

What’s the answer? How do we break the vicious circle? There’s only one way and the Publican shows us that way. How? He prays out of his own sinfulness, for real. He’s a sinner and he honestly admits it. For our part, when we speak of ourselves as sinners mostly we don’t really mean it! We admit that we have our weaknesses and that sometimes we do sin, but then, like the Pharisee, we’re immediately thankful that we don’t have the weaknesses and sins of others. Mostly we think this way: “Admittedly, I have my faults, but at least I’m not as ignorant and self-serving as that colleague of mine!” “For all of my shortcomings, I still thank God that I’m not as narcissistic as my boss!” “I may not have much religious faith, but at least I’m not as hypocritical as so many of those church people!” “I may be a bit of a mess, but thank God I don’t have Jack’s faults!” Pride is forever sneaking around our defenses and keeping genuine humility at bay.

But there’s one instance when it can’t do that and that is when we are genuinely acknowledging our own sinfulness. When we are truly standing inside of our own sinfulness, like the Publican, then we judge no one – not even our own selves. As a Roman Catholic priest who has been hearing confessions for some 47 years, I can say without hesitation that people are at their very best when they are honestly confessing their own shortcomings. When we are genuinely standing inside the recognition of our own sin, we judge no one. In that space we never think: “Thank God, I don’t have Jack’s faults!” We know that our own suffice.  Our prayer then becomes honest and, according to Jesus, it’s then that it’s heard in heaven.

And it’s precisely our sinfulness that we must existentially recognize and stand within. Our other weaknesses, our congenital and personal inadequacies, can be helpful in making us humble, but, since we aren’t personally or morally responsible for them, recognizing them doesn’t do the same thing for us as does recognizing our own sinfulness. We aren’t responsible for physical or psychological DNA. We aren’t responsible for our ethnicity or color. We aren’t responsible for the kind of family, neighborhood, and culture we were raised in. And we aren’t responsible for what happened to us in the playpen and on the playground when we were little. Yet all of these deeply impact both our weaknesses and our strengths. But since we aren’t responsible for these, ultimately we don’t have to be humble about them.

But we do have to be humble about our own sin.

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The Grace within Passivity

October 21, 2019

A friend of mine shares this story. She grew up with five siblings and an alcoholic father. The effect of her father’s alcoholism was devastating on her family.  Here’s how she tells the story: By the time my father died his alcoholism had destroyed our family. None of us kids could talk to each other anymore. We’d drifted apart to different parts of the country and had nothing to do with each other. My mother was a saint and kept trying through the years to have us reconcile with each other, inviting us to gather for Thanksgiving and Christmas and the like, but it never worked. All her efforts were for nothing. We hated each other. Then as my mother lay dying of cancer, in hospice, bedridden, and eventually in a coma, we, her kids, gathered by her bedside, watching her die, and she, helpless and unable to speak, was able to accomplish what she couldn’t achieve through all those years when she could speak. Watching her die, we reconciled.

We all know similar stories of someone in their dying, when they were too helpless to speak or act, powerfully impacting, more powerfully than they ever did in word or action, those around them, pouring out a grace that blessed their loved ones. Sometimes, of course, this isn’t a question of reconciling a family but of powerfully strengthening their existing unity.  Such was the case in a family history shared by Carla Marie Carlson, in her book, Everyday Grace. Her family was already closely-knit, but Carlson shares how her mother’s dying strengthened those family bonds and graced all the others who witnessed her dying: “Those who took the opportunity to be with my Mom during that journey have told me that their lives were forever changed. It was a remarkable time which I will always treasure. Lessons of acceptance and courage were abundant as she struggled with the realities of a dying body. It was dramatic and intense, but yet filled with peace and gratitude.” Most anyone who has ever sat in vigil around a loved one who was dying can share a similar story.

There’s a lesson here and a mystery. The lesson is that we don’t just do important things for each other and impact each other’s lives by what we actively do for each other; we also do life-changing things for each other in what we passively absorb in helplessness. This is the mystery of passivity which we see, paradigmatically, played out in what Jesus did for us.

As Christians, we say that Jesus gave his life for us and that he gave his death for us, but we tend to think of this as one and the same thing. It’s not. Jesus gave his life for us through his activity; he gave his death for us through his passivity. These were two separate movements. Like the woman described earlier who tried for years to have her children reconcile with each through her activity, through her words and actions, and then eventually accomplished that through the helplessness and passivity of her deathbed, so too with Jesus. For three years he tried in every way to make us understand love, reconciliation, and faith, without full effect. Then, in less than 24 hours, in his helplessness, when he couldn’t speak, in his dying, we got the lesson. Both Jesus and his mother were able, in their helplessness and passivity, to give the world something that they were unable to give as effectively in their power and activity.

Unfortunately, this is not something our present culture, with its emphasis on health, productivity, achievement, and power very much understands. We no longer much understand or value the powerful grace that is given off by someone dying of a terminal illness; nor the powerful grace present in a person with a disability, or indeed the grace that’s present in our own physical and personal disabilities. Nor do we much understand what we are giving to our families, friends, and colleagues when we, in powerlessness, have to absorb neglect, slights, and misunderstanding. When a culture begins to talk about euthanasia it is an infallible indication that we no longer understand the grace within passivity.

In his writings, Henri Nouwen makes a distinction between what he terms our “achievements” and our “fruitfulness”. Achievements stem more directly from our activities: What have we positively accomplished? What have we actively done for others? And our achievements stop when we are no longer active. Fruitfulness, on the other hand, goes far beyond what we have actively accomplished and is sourced as much by what we have passively absorbed as by what we actively produced. The family described above reconciled not because of their mother’s achievements, but because of her fruitfulness. Such is the mystery of passivity.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, in his spiritual classic, The Divine Milieu, tells us that we are meant to help the world through both our activities and our passivities, through both what we actively give and through what we passively absorb.

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Grieving as a Spiritual Exercise

October 14, 2019

In a remarkable book, The Inner Voice of Love, written while he was in a deep emotional depression, Henri Nouwen shares these words: “The great challenge is living your wounds through instead of thinking them through. It is better to cry than to worry, better to feel your wounds deeply than to try to understand them, better to let them enter into your silence than to talk about them. The choice you face constantly is whether you are taking your hurts to your head or to your heart.  In your head you analyze them, find their causes and consequences, and coin words to speak and write about them.  But no final healing is likely to come from that source. You need to let your wounds go down into your heart. Then you can live them through and discover that they will not destroy you. Your heart is greater than your wounds.”

He’s right; your heart is greater than your wounds, though it needs caution in dealing with them. Wounds can soften your heart; but they can also harden you heart and freeze it in bitterness. So what’s the path here? What leads to warmth and what leads to coldness?

In a remarkable essay, The Drama of the Gifted Child, the Swiss psychologist, Alice Miller, tells us what hardens the heart and what softens it. She does so by outlining a particular drama that commonly unfolds in many lives. For her, giftedness does not refer to intellectual prowess but to sensitivity. The gifted child is the sensitive child. But that gift, sensitivity, is a mixed blessing.  Positively, it lets you feel things more deeply so that the joys of living will mean more to you than to someone who is more callous. That’s its upside.

Conversely, however, if you are sensitive you will habitually fear disappointing others and will forever fear not measuring up. And your inadequacy to always measure up will habitually trigger feelings of anxiety and guilt within you.  As well, if you are extraordinarily sensitive, you will tend to be self-effacing to a fault, letting others have their way while you swallow hard as your own needs aren’t met and then absorb the consequences. Not least, if you feel things deeply you will also feel hurt more deeply.  That’s the downside of sensitivity and makes for the drama that Alice Miller calls the “drama of the gifted child”, the drama of the sensitive person.

Further, in her view, for many of us that drama will only begin to really play itself out in our middle and later years, constellating in frustration, disappointment, anger, and bitterness, as the wounds of our childhood and early adulthood begin to break through and overpower the inner mechanisms we have set up to resist them. In mid-life and beyond, our wounds will make themselves heard so strongly that our habitual ways of denial and coping no longer work.  In mid-life you realize that your mother did love your sister better than you, that your father in fact didn’t care much about you, and that all those hurts you absorbed because you swallowed hard and played the stoic are still gnawing away bitterly inside you. That’s how the drama eventually culminates, in a heart that’s angry.

So where does that leave us? For Alice Miller, the answer lies in grieving. Our wounds are real and there is nothing we can do about them, pure and simple. The clock can’t be turned back. We cannot relive our lives so as to provide ourselves with different parents, different childhood friends, different experiences on the playground, different choices, and a different temperament. We can only move forward so as to live beyond our wounds.  And we do that by grieving. Alice Miller submits that the entire psychological and spiritual task of midlife and beyond is that of grieving, mourning our wounds until the very foundations of our lives shake enough so that there can be transformation.  

A deep psychological scar is the same as having some part of your body permanently damaged in an accident. You will never be whole again and nothing can change that. But you can be happy again; perhaps more happy than ever before. But that loss of wholeness must be grieved or it will manifest itself in anger, bitterness, and jealous regrets.

The Jesuit music composer and spiritual writer, Roc O’Connor, makes the same point, with the added comment that the grieving process also calls for a long patience within which we need to wait long enough so that the healing can occur according to its own natural rhythms.  We need, he says, to embrace our wounded humanity and not act out. What’s helpful, he suggests, is to grieve our human limitations. Then we can endure hunger, emptiness, disappointment, and humiliation without looking for a quick fix – or for a fix at all.  We should not try to fill our emptiness too quickly without sufficient waiting.

And we won’t ever make peace with our wounds without sufficient grieving.

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The Arrival of Refugees, Old and New

October 7, 2019

The religious congregation to which I belong, the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, has had a long relationship with the indigenous peoples of North America. Admittedly it hasn’t always been without its shortcomings on our side, but it has been a sustained one, constant through more than one hundred and fifty years. I write this out of the archives of that history.

In the mid-1800s, a group of young Oblates left France to work with the native peoples of Oregon and Washington State. Given the means of travel at the time, particularly the challenge of crossing the entire United States, much of it on horseback, it took them almost a year to get from Marseilles to the Oregon coast.  Among that group was a young missionary, Charles Pandosy.

In the summer of 1854, Governor Stevens had called for a meeting of Native chiefs to be held at Walla Walla to discuss the tension between the USA government and the Natives. One of the tribes was stubbornly rebelling, the Yakima, a tribe led by their chief, Kamiakin, with whom the Oblates and Fr. Pandosy had been working. At one point, Chief Kamiakin turned to Pandosy for advice.  

In a letter written to our Founder in France, Saint Eugene de Mazenod, dated June 5th, 1854, Fr. Pandosy summed up his conversation with the Yakima chief. Not knowing what Europe looked like and not knowing how many people lived there or what forces were driving people to come to North America, the Native Chief had asked Fr. Pandosy how many white men there were and when they would stop coming, naively believing that there couldn’t be that many of them left to come.

In his letter, Fr. Pandosy shares, verbatim, part of his conversation with Kamiakin: “It is as I feared. The whites will take your country as they have taken other countries from the Indians. I came from the land of the white man far to the east where the people are thicker than the grass on the hills. Where there are only a few here now, others will come with each year until your country will be overrun with them … you and your lands will be taken and your people driven from their homes. It has been so with other tribes; it will be so with you. You may fight and delay for a time this invasion, but you cannot avert it. I have lived many summers with you and baptized a great number of your people into the faith. I have learned to love you. I cannot advise you or help you. I wish I could.”

Sound familiar? One doesn’t have to strain any logic to see a parallel to the situation today as millions of refugees are crowding the borders the United States, Canada, and much of Europe, seeking to enter these countries. Like Chief Kamiakin, we who are living in those countries and passionately consider them our “own” are very much in the dark as to how many of people are looking to come here, what pressures are driving them here, and when the seeming endless flow of people will stop. As well, like those indigenous tribes who back then had their lives irrevocably altered by us entering their country we too tend to feel this an unlawful and unfair invasion and are resistant to allowing these people to share our land and our cities with us.

When people initially came to North and South America from Europe they came for various reasons. Some were fleeing religious persecution, some were seeking a way out of poverty and starvation, some were coming to work to send money back to support their families, some were doctors or clergy coming to minister to others, and, yes, some too were criminals bent on crime.

It would seem not much has changed, except the shoe is now on the other foot. We, original invaders, are now the indigenous tribes, solicitous and protective of what we consider as rightfully ours, fearful of the outsiders, mostly naïve as to why they’re coming.

This isn’t just the case in North America, most of Europe is experiencing the exact same pressures, except in their case they’ve had a longer time to forget how their ancestors once came from elsewhere and mostly displaced the indigenous peoples who were already there.

Admittedly, this isn’t easy to resolve, politically or morally: No country can simply open its borders indiscriminately to everyone who wants to enter; and yet, and yet, our scriptures, Jewish and Christian, are unequivocal in affirming that the earth belongs everyone and that all people have the same right to God’s good creation. That moral imperative can seem unfair and impractical; but how do we justify the fact that we displaced others to build our lives here but now find it unfair that others are doing the same thing to us.

Looking at the refugee crisis in the world today one sees that what goes around does eventually come around.

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Creating and Holding Space for our Brokenness

September 30, 2019

Some years ago I went on a weekend retreat given by a woman who made no secret about the fact that not being able to have children constituted a deep wound in her life. So she offered retreats on the pain of being unable to have children. Being a celibate and not having my own children, I went on one of these retreats, the only man to venture there. The rest of the participants were women, mostly in their 40s and 50s, who had not borne children of their own.

Our leader, using scripture, biography, poetry, and psychology, examined the issue of barrenness from many points of view. The retreat came to a head on Saturday evening with a ritual in chapel in which various participants went up a huge cross and spoke out their pain for Jesus and everyone else to hear. That was followed by us watching, together, the British movie, Secrets and Lies, within which one woman’s heartache at being unable to conceive a child is powerfully highlighted. Afterwards there was a lot of honest sharing of feelings – and lots and lots of tears! But after that painful sharing of pain and the over-generous tears which accompanied it, the entire atmosphere changed, as if some dark storm had just done its thing but left us still intact. There was relief, and plenty of laughter and lightheartedness. A storm had indeed passed us over and we were safe.

All pain can be borne if it can be shared. Art Schopenhauer is credited with saying that, but, irrespective of who said it first, it captures what happened at that retreat. A deep pain was made easier to bear not because it was taken away but because it was shared, and shared in a “sacramental” way. Yes, there are sacraments that don’t take place in a church, but still have sacramental power. And we need more of these.

For example, Rachel Held Evans writes: “Often I hear from readers who have left their churches because they had no songs for them to sing after the miscarriage, the shooting, the earthquake, the divorce, the diagnosis, the attack, the bankruptcy. The American tendency toward triumphalism, of optimism rooted in success, money, and privilege, will infect and sap of substance any faith community that has lost its capacity for holding space for those in grief.”

She’s right. Our churches aren’t creating enough space for holding grief. In essence: In the everyday, practical spirituality of community, prayer, liturgy, and Eucharist within our churches we don’t lean sufficiently on the fact that Christ is both a dying and a rising reality. We generally don’t take the dying part of Christ as seriously as we should. What are the consequences?

Among other things, it means that we don’t create enough communal, ritual celebrations in our churches within which people can feel free to own and express their brokenness and grief communally and in a “sacramental” way. Granted our churches do have funeral rites, sacraments of the sick, reconciliation services, special prayer services after a tragedy within a community, and other rituals and gatherings that are powerful spaces for holding grief and brokenness. However (with the exception of the sacrament of reconciliation which though is generally a private, one-to-one ritual) these are generally tied to a special, singular circumstance such as a death, a serious sickness, or an episodic tragedy within a community. What we lack are regular ecclesially- based, communal rituals, analogous to an Alcoholics  Anonymous meetings, around which people can come, share their brokenness, and experience a grace that can only  come from community.

We need various kinds of “sacramental” celebrations in our churches within which, to use Rachel Held Evans’ terminology, we can create and hold space for those who are grieving a broken heart, a miscarriage, an abortion, a dire medical diagnosis, a bankruptcy, the loss of a job, a divorce, a forced retirement, a rejection in love, the death of a cherished dream, the movement into assisted living, the adjustment to an empty nest within a marriage, barrenness, and frustrations of every kind.  

What will these rituals look like?  Mostly they don’t exist yet so it is up to us to invent them. Charles Taylor suggests that the religious struggle today is not so much a struggle of faith but a struggle of the imagination. Nobody has ever lived in this kind of world before. We need some new rituals. We’re pioneers in new territory, and pioneers have to improvise. Admittedly, pain and brokenness have always been with us, but past generations had communal ways of creating space for holding grief. Families, communities, and churches then had less of a struggle with the kind individualism that today leaves us mostly alone to deal with our brokenness. Today there’s no longer a sufficient communal and ecclesial structure to help us accept that, here in this life, we live “mourning and weeping in a valley of tears.”  

We need to imagine some new, sacramental rituals within which to help hold our grief.

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Jesus Christ – The Person and the Mystery

September 23, 2019

We quite naturally tend to think of the word “Christ” as Jesus’ second name. We think of the name “Jesus Christ” like we think of names like “Susan Parker” or “Jack Smith”.  But that’s an unhealthy confusion. Jesus didn’t have a second name. The word “Christ” is a title which, while it includes the person of Jesus, speaks of something wider than Jesus alone.  What’s the difference between “Jesus” and “Christ”?

Jesus refers to a concrete person who, though the Second Person within the Godhead, walked this earth for 33 years and is still today someone whom we understand and relate to as an individual person. Christ refers to something larger, namely, the huge mystery of both creation and salvation of which Jesus, as the Christ, plays the foundational role but which includes the Eucharist, the Christian community, the historical Christian churches, the community of all sincere people who walk this planet, and physical creation itself. Jesus is a person with whom we seek to be in a relationship with in friendship and intimacy, while Christ is a mystery of which we and all creation are part of and within which we participate.

This has huge implications, not least in how we understand spirituality and church. In essence, this is what’s at stake: What’s more central to us, what Jesus has done and asks of us or the person of Jesus himself? It’s interesting to look at the various Christian churches in terms of that question: Are they more focused on the teaching of Jesus or on the person of Jesus? Are they more focused on Jesus or on Christ?

In terms of a large over-generalization, we might say that Roman Catholicism and mainline Protestantism have tended to focus on the teachings of Jesus and the demands of discipleship that flow from those teachings  more than they have on the person of Jesus himself. The reverse is true for the Evangelical tradition, where the emphasis has been and continues to be on the person of Jesus and our individual relationship to him. In fairness, both traditions, clearly, also include the other dimension. Roman Catholics and mainline Protestants haven’t ignored the person of Jesus and Evangelicals haven’t ignored the teachings of Jesus; but, in both cases, one has been more central than the other. Roman Catholicism, for its part, also emphasized the dimension of one-to-one intimacy with Jesus but placed that within its devotional practice more so than within its mainline theology which is focused more on the mystery of Christ than on the person of Jesus.

Spirituality, not surprisingly, tended to follow the same pattern. Roman Catholics and mainline Protestants, unlike the Evangelicals, have not made one-to-one intimacy with Jesus the centerpiece of spirituality, even as they hold it up as the ultimate ideal. Their emphasis is on Christ. Evangelicals, on the other hand, focused on an affective, one-to-one, intimacy with Jesus in a way that often left Roman Catholics and mainline Protestants wondering exactly what Evangelicals meant when they asked us: “Have you met Jesus Christ?” “Is Jesus Christ your personal Lord and Savior?” “Have you been born again?” Conversely, Roman Catholics and mainline Protestants often looked critically at their Evangelical brothers and sisters, questioning whether their over-riding emphasis on personal salvation and personal intimacy with Jesus does not distract them from having to deal with some central teachings of Jesus that have to do with social justice and with wide faith embrace.  

Admittedly, both emphases are needed. We see that clearly in the preaching of the early church. The renowned scripture scholar, Raymond Brown, tells us that, beginning already with St. Paul, the earliest Christian preachers shifted the primary focus of their proclamation to Jesus himself, almost as if they could not announce the kingdom without first telling of him through whom the kingdom was made present.

Proclaiming a person himself (rather than just that person’s message) was novel for the early Christian preachers. Their proclamation of Jesus’ person was radically different from the way the Hebrew Scriptures honor Moses, in that they honor his message but never draw attention to his person in terms of asking anyone to relate to him. As an aside: There’s a lesson here in terms of how we often treat our saints and holy persons. We honor them through admiration when what’s really asked of us is that we imitate their actions.

Christian discipleship, clearly, asks for both, intimacy with Jesus and attention to what he taught, personal piety and social justice, firm loyalty to one’s own ecclesial family and the capacity to also embrace all others of sincere heart as one’s faith family. Soren Kierkegaard once suggested that what Jesus really wants is followers, not admirers. That’s spoken as a true mainline Protestant. Evangelicals wouldn’t disagree, but would argue that what Jesus really wants is an intimate relationship with us. The earliest preachers of the Gospel would agree with both Kierkegaard and the Evangelicals. We need to proclaim both, the message of Jesus and Jesus himself.

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Some Counsels on Faith and Religion for our Present Generation

September 16, 2019

It’s no secret that today we’re witnessing a massive decline in church attendance and, seemingly, a parallel loss of interest in religion. The former mindset, within which we worried, sometimes obsessively, about sin, church-going, and heaven and hell no longer holds sway for millions of people. As one parent, worried about the religious state of his children, shared with me recently, “our old religious concerns never ever darken their minds.”  What’s to be said in the face of this?

Admittedly, I may not be the person best-suited to offer that advice. I’m over 70 years old, a spiritual writer whose main focus of research and teaching right now is on the spirituality of aging, and I’m a Roman Catholic priest, a religious insider, who can be perceived as simply a salesman for religion and the churches.

But, despite that, here are some counsels on faith and religion for today’s generation.

First: Search honestly. God’s first concern is not whether you’re going to church or not, but whether you are staying honest in your search for truth and meaning. When the Apostle Thomas, doubts the reality of the resurrection, Jesus doesn’t scold him, but simply asks him to stretch out his hand and continuing searching, trusting that if he searches honestly he will eventually find the truth. The same is true for us. All we have to do is be honest, to not lie, to acknowledge truth as it meets us. In John’s Gospel, Jesus sets out only one condition to come to God: Be honest and never refuse to acknowledge what’s true, no matter how inconvenient. But the key is to be honest! If we’re honest we will eventually find meaning and that will lead us where we need to go – perhaps even to a church door somewhere. But even if it doesn’t, God will find us. The mystery of Christ is bigger than we imagine.

Second: Listen to what’s deepest inside you. Soul is a precious commodity. Make sure you honor yours. Honor the voice inside your soul. Deeper than the many enticing voices you hear in world inviting you in every direction is a voice inside you which, like an insatiable thirst, reminds you always of the truth of this prayer from Saint Augustine: You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you. Stay in touch with that voice. You will hear it in your restlessness and it will, in the words of Karl Rahner, teach you something that’s initially is hard to bear but eventually sets you free: In the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable, we eventually learn that here in this life there is no finished symphony.

Third: Beware the crowd! In the Gospels the word “crowd” is almost always pejorative. For good reason: Crowds don’t have a mind and the energy of a crowd is often dangerous. So beware of what Milan Kundera calls “the great march”, namely, the propensity to be led by ideology, group-think, the latest trend, the popular person or thing, the false feeling of being right because the majority of people feel that way, and the social pressures coming from both the right and the left.  Be true to yourself. Be the lonely prophet who’s not afraid to be alone on the outside. Dream. Be idealistic. Protect your soul. Don’t give it away cheaply.

Fourth: Don’t confuse faith with the churches – but don’t write off the churches too quickly. When they ask those without religious affiliation today why they aren’t religious invariably their answer is: “I just don’t believe it anymore.” But what’s the “it” which they no longer believe? What they don’t believe anymore isn’t in fact the truth about God, faith, and religion, but rather what they’ve heard about God, faith, and religion. Sort that out and you will find that you do have faith. Moreover, don’t write off the churches too quickly. They have real faults; you’re not wrong about that, but they’re still the best GPS available to help you find your way to meaning. They’re a roadmap drawn up by millions of explorers who have walked the road before you. You can ignore them, but then be alert to God’s gentle voice often saying: “Recalculating”. God will get you home, but the churches can help.

Fifth: Don’t forget about the poor. When you touch the poor, you’re touching God and, as Jesus says, at the judgment day we will be judged by how we served the poor. Give yourself away in some form of altruism, knowing, as Jesus puts it, that it’s not those who say Lord, Lord, who go to heaven but those who serve others.  In your search, you need to get a letter of reference from the poor.

Sixth: Look among your contemporaries for a patron to inspire you.Henri Nouwen, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Oscar Romero, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Simone Weil, Etty Hillesum, and Dag Hammarskjold, among others – they’ve all navigated your issues.

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