The Scent of Humility

September 9, 2019

According to Isaac the Syrian, a famous 7^th Century bishop and theologian, a person who’s genuinely humble gives off a certain scent that other people will sense and that even animals will pick up, so that wild animals, including snakes, will fall under its spell and never harm that person.

Here’s his logic: A humble person, he believes, has recovered the smell of paradise and in the presence of such a person one does not feel judged and has nothing to fear, and this holds true even for animals. They feel safe around a humble person and are drawn to him or her. No wonder people like Francis of Assisi could talk to birds and befriend wolves.

But, beautiful as this all sounds, is this a pious fairytale or is it a rich, archetypal metaphor? I like to think it’s the latter, this is a rich metaphor, and perhaps even something more. Humility, indeed, does have a smell, the smell of the earth, of the soil, and of paradise.

But how? How can a spiritual quality give off a physical scent?

Well, we’re psychosomatic, creatures of both body and soul. Thus, in us, the physical and the spiritual are so much part of one and the same substance that it’s impossible to separate them out from each other. To say that we’re body and soul is like saying sugar is white and sweet and that whiteness and sweetness can never be put into separate piles. They’re both inside the sugar. We’re one substance, inseparable, body and soul, and so we’re always both physical and spiritual. So, in fact, we do feel physical things spiritually, just as we smell spiritual things through our physical senses. If this is true, and it is, then, yes, humility does give off a scent that can be sensed physically and Isaac the Syrian’s concept is more than just a metaphor.

But it’s also a metaphor: The word humility takes its root in the Latin word, humus, meaning soil, ground, and earth. If one goes with this definition then the most humble person you know is the most-earthy and most-grounded person you know. To be humble is to have one’s feet firmly planted on the ground, to be in touch with the earth, and to carry the smell of the earth. Further still, to be humble is to take one’s rightful place as a piece of the earth and not as someone or something separate from it.

The renowned mystic and scientist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, expressed this sometimes in his prayers. During the years when, as paleontologist, he worked for long stretches in the isolated deserts of China he would sometimes compose prayers to God in a form he called, A Mass for the World. Speaking to God, as a priest, he would identify his voice with that of the earth itself, as that place within physical creation where the earth itself, the soil of the earth, could open itself and speak to God. As a priest, he didn’t speak for the earth; he spoke as the earth, giving it voice, in words to this effect:

Lord, God, I stand before you as a microcosm of the earth itself, to give it voice: See in my openness, the world’s openness, in my infidelity, the world’s infidelity; in my sincerity, the world’s sincerity, in my hypocrisy, the world’s hypocrisy; in my generosity, the world’s generosity in my attentiveness, the world’s attentiveness, in my distraction, the world’s distraction; in my desire to praise you, the world’s desire to praise you, and in my self-preoccupation, the world’s forgetfulness of you. For I am of the earth, a piece of earth, and the earth opens or closes to you through my body, my soul, and my voice.

This is humility, an expression of genuine humility. Humility should never be confused, as it often is, with a wounded self-image, with an excessive reticence, with timidity and fear, or with an overly sensitive self-awareness. Too common is the notion that a humble person is one who is self-effacing to a fault, who deflects praise (even when it’s deserved), who is too shy to trust opening himself or herself in intimacy, or who is so fearful or self-conscious and worried about being shamed so as to never step forward and offer his or her gifts to the community. These can make for a gentle and self-effacing person, but because we are denigrating ourselves when to deny our own giftedness, our humility is false, and deep-down we know it, and so this often makes for someone who nurses some not-so-hidden angers and is prone to being passive aggressive.

The most humble person you know is the person who’s the most-grounded, that is, the person who knows she’s not the center of the earth but also knows that she isn’t a second-rate piece of dirt either. And that person will give off a scent that carries both the fragrance of paradise (of divine gift) as well as the smell of the earth.

Late Migrations

September 2, 2019

Jesus says that if we follow him, the cross, pain, will find us.

That message is chronically misunderstood. Maybe we would understand it better if Jesus had worded it this way: The more sensitive you become, the more pain will seep into your life. We catch the connection then. Sensitive person suffer more deeply, just as they also drink in more deeply the joys and beauties of life. Pain enters them more deeply for the same reason that meaning does. They’re open to it. The calloused (by definition) are spared of both, deep pain and deep joy.

With this as a backdrop I would like to introduce readers to a new book by Margaret Renkl, Late Migrations – A Natural History of Love and Loss.

This book manifests a rare sensitivity. Some people are gifted intellectually, others artistically, others romantically, and still others emotionally. Renkl is gifted with all of these; particularly with an emotional intelligence which she combines with the refined aesthetics of an artist and then further combines those two with the skill of a gifted, natural writer. It makes for a good package. Content is only part of the gift of this book. Beyond its message, it’s a great piece of writing and a nice piece of art as well.

It’s also a book about faith, though Renkl does not express this very explicitly. She writes primarily as a naturalist, an urban Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, someone who admires nature, spends a lot of time with it, understands well its prodigal character and its innate cruelties, and understands too how those cruelties (where, within nature, life can seem cheap and easily taken) are connected to the deepest forces undergirding all life, including our own. She shares a certain complexity of character with the great paleontologist, mystic, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who was fond of saying that he was born with two incurable loves, a natural love of the pagan world and all its beauties and an equally strong love for the mystical, the other world, that is, the God behind this world. However, unlike Teilhard who is very explicit about his sense of God and the centrality of faith, Renkl’s faith is more inchoate, though clearly manifest in her understanding of nature and in how she intuits the finger of God working inside the stories she shares.

The book is a compilation of short essays, alternating between wonderfully aesthetic descriptions of the life of the birds she feeds and the gardens she tends to equally sensitive descriptions of her own life and that of her family, particularly in terms of loss and grief as inextricably intertwined with love. A few examples:

On our shortcomings in life: “Human beings are creatures made for joy. Against all evidence, we tell ourselves that grief and loneliness and despair are tragedies, unwelcome variations from the pleasure and calm and safety that in the right way of the world would form the firm ground of our being.”

On the lessons to be learned from observing nature: “Every day the world is teaching me what I need to know to be in the world.”

On how sentimentality makes for a one-sided compassion: “The story of one drowned Syrian boy washed up in the surf keeps us awake at night with grief. The story of four million refugees streaming out of Syria seems more like a math problem.”

On nature’s beauty and its cruelty: “Inside the nest box, the baby birds are safe from the hawks, sheltered from the wind, protected from the sharp eye of the crow and the terrible tongue of the red-bellied woodpecker. [But …] Inside the nest box, the baby birds are powerless, vulnerable to the fury of the pitched summer sun, of the house sparrow’s beak. Bounded on all sides by their sheltering home, they are a meal the rat snake eats at its leisure.”

On taking care of our aging loved ones until they die: “The end of caregiving is freedom. The end of caregiving is [also] grief.”

On responding to a woman who insinuated that she, Renkl, was a coward because she much feared the loss of loved ones: “It occurred to me to wonder if she had ever, even once, loved anyone enough to fear the possibility of loss, but that thought was as ugly as her own, and in any case she was not wrong.”

Richard Rohr suggests that we are forever dealing with the twin truths of great suffering and great love. During the course of this book, Renkl shares how her mother, a woman who could in certain areas of her life exhibit extraordinary energy and zest, would sometimes suffer through periods of paralyzing depression and how she herself is not immune to that same experience. There’s a logic to that since, as Jesus says, sensitive persons drink in things very deeply, both suffering and love and the former can paralyze you in grief, even as the latter can give you extraordinary energy and zest.

This book deserves to be read.

A Lesson in Aging

August 26, 2019

We live in a culture that idealizes youth and marginalizes the old. And, as James Hillman says, the old don’t let go easily either of the throne or the drive that took them there. I know; I’m aging.

For most of my life, I’ve been able to think of myself as young. Because I was born late in the year, October, I was always younger than most of my classmates, graduated from high school at age seventeen, entered the seminary at that tender age, was ordained to the priesthood at age twenty-five, did an advanced degree within the next year, and was teaching graduate theology at age twenty-six, the youngest member on the faculty. I was proud of that, achieving those things so early. And so I always thought of myself as young, even as the years piled up and my body began to betray my conception of myself as young.

Moreover, for most of those years, I tried to stay young too in soul, staying on top of what was shaping youth culture, its movies, its popular songs, its lingo. During my years in seminary and for a good number of years after ordination, I was involved in youth ministry, helping give youth retreats in various high schools and colleges. At that time, I could name all the popular songs, movies, and trends, speak youth’s language, and I prided myself in being young.

But nature offers no exemptions. Nobody stays young forever. Moreover, aging doesn’t normally announce its arrival. You’re mostly blind to it until one day you see yourself in a mirror, see a recent photo of yourself, or get a diagnosis from your doctor and suddenly you’re hit on the head with the unwelcome realization that you’re no longer a young person. That usually comes as a surprise. Aging generally makes itself known in ways that have you denying it, fighting it, and accepting it only piecemeal, and with some bitterness.

But that day comes round for everyone when you’re surprised, stunned, that what you are seeing in the mirror is so different from how you have been imagining yourself and you ask yourself: “Is this really me? Am I this old person? Is this what I look like? ” Moreover you begin to notice that young people are forming their circles away from you, that they’re more interested in their own kind, which doesn’t include you, and you look silly and out of place when you try to dress, act, and speak like they do. There comes a day when you have accept that you’re no longer young in in the world’s eyes – nor in your own.

Moreover gravity doesn’t just affect your body, pulling things downward, so too for the soul. It’s pulled downward along with the body, though aging means something very different here. The soul doesn’t age, it matures. You can stay young in soul long after the body betrays you. Indeed we’re meant to be always young in spirit.

Souls carry life differently than do bodies because bodies are built to eventually die. Inside of every living body the life-principle has an exit strategy. It has no such strategy inside a soul, only a strategy to deepen, grow richer, and more textured. Aging forces us, mostly against our will, to listen to our soul more deeply and more honestly so as to draw from its deeper wells and begin to make peace with its complexity, its shadow, and its deepest proclivities – and the aging of the body plays the key role in this. To employ a metaphor from James Hillman: The best wines have to be aged in cracked old barrels. So too for the soul: The aging process is designed by God and nature to force the soul, whether it wants to or not, to delve ever deeper into the mystery of life, of community, of God, and of itself. Our souls don’t age, like a wine, they mature, and so we can always be young in spirit. Our zest, our fire, our eagerness, our wit, our brightness, and our humor, are not meant to dim with age. Indeed, they’re meant to be the very color of a mature soul.

So, in the end, aging is a gift, even if unwanted. Aging takes us to a deeper place, whether we want to go or not.

Like most everyone else, I still haven’t made my full peace with this and would still like to think of myself as young. However I was particularly happy to celebrate my 70^th birthday two years ago, not because I was happy to be that age, but because, after two serious bouts with cancer in recent years, I was very happy just to be alive and wise enough now to be a little grateful for what aging and a cancer diagnosis has taught me. There are certain secrets hidden from health, writes John Updike. True. And aging uncovers a lot of them because, as Swedish proverb puts it, “afternoon knows what the morning never suspected.”

Imagining Grace

August 19, 2019

Imagine this: A man, entirely careless of all moral and spiritual affairs, lives his life in utter selfishness, pleasure his only pursuit. He lives the high life, never prays, never goes to church, has numerous sexual affairs, and has no concern for anyone but himself. After a long life of this, he’s diagnosed with a terminal illness and, on his deathbed, tearfully repents, makes a sincere confession, receives the Eucharist, and dies inside the blessing of the church and his friends.

Now, if our reaction is, “Well, the lucky fellow! He got to live a life of selfish pleasure and still gets to go to heaven!”, then (according to Piet Fransen, a renowned theologian on Grace) we haven’t yet, at all, understood the workings of grace. To the degree that we still envy the amoral and wish to exclude them from God’s grace, even as we count ourselves in, we are the “Older Brother” of the Prodigal Son, standing outside the Father’s house, heaven, in envy and bitterness.

I teach in a seminary that prepares seminarians for ordination. Recently our professor of Sacramental Theology shared this: He’s been teaching a course on the Sacrament of Reconciliation for more than forty years and only in the last few years have the seminarians asked: “When do we have to refuse giving someone absolution in confession?”

What’s betrayed in this concern? The seminarians asking the question are, no doubt, sincere; they’re not trying to be rigid or hard. Their anxiety is rather about grace and mercy. They’re sincerely anxious about perhaps dispensing God’s mercy too liberally, too cheaply, too indiscriminately, in essence, too unfairly. Their fear is not so much that God’s mercy is limited and that there’s only so much grace to go around. Not that. Their concern is more that by giving out grace so liberally they’re being unfair to those who are practicing faithfully and bearing the heat of the day. Their fear is about fairness, justice, and merit.

What’s at stake here? That grace is not something we merit. After the rich young man in the Gospels turns down Jesus’ invitation to leave everything and follow him, Peter, who watched this encounter and who, unlike the rich young man, hasn’t turned down Jesus’ invitation and has given up everything to follow him, asks Jesus what those who do give up everything are going to get in return. In response, Jesus tells him the parable of the generous land owner and the vineyard workers who all arrive at different times, wherein some work for many hours and some for virtually no time at all, and yet they all receive the same reward, leaving those who worked the full day and bore the heat of the sun bitter with sense of unfairness. But, the vineyard owner (God) points out that there’s no unfairness here since everyone has in fact received an over-generous return.

What’s the deep lesson? Whenever we’re protesting that it isn’t fair that those who aren’t as faithful as we but are still receiving the full mercy and grace of God we are some distance from understanding grace and living fully inside it.

My dental hygienist knows I’m a Catholic priest and likes to ask me questions about religion and church. One day she shared this story: Her mother and father had both, as far as she knew, never attended church. They’d been benign enough about religion, but not interested themselves. She, their daughter, had begun practicing as a Methodist, mainly through the influence of friends. Then her mother died and as they talked about plans for a funeral, her father revealed that her mother had been baptized as a Roman Catholic, though she had not practiced since her middle-school years. He suggested they try to arrange a Roman Catholic funeral for her. Given all those years of absence, it was with some trepidation that they approached a priest at a nearby parish to ask whether they might have a Roman Catholic funeral for her. To their surprise, the priest’s response was non-hesitant, warm, and welcoming: “Of course, we can do this! It will be an honor! And I’ll arrange for a choir and a reception in the parish hall afterwards.”

No price was exacted for her mother’s life-long absence from the church. She was buried with the full rites of the Church … and her father, well, he was so touched by it all, the generosity of the church and the beauty of the liturgy, that he has since decided to become a Roman Catholic.

One wonders what the effect would have been had the priest refused that funeral, asking how they could justify a church funeral when, for all these years, they weren’t interested in the church. One wonders too how many people find this story comforting rather than discomforting, given a strong ecclesial ethos today wherein many of us nurse the fear that we are handing out grace and mercy too cheaply.

But grace and mercy are never given out cheaply since love is never merited.

Intelligence versus Wisdom

August 12, 2019

There’s a huge difference between being bright and being wise, between brilliance and wisdom. We can be highly intelligent, but not very wise. Ideally, of course, we should strive to be both, but that isn’t always the case, particularly today.

We’re living in a culture that rewards brilliance above wisdom and within which we pride ourselves first of all in being brighter than each other. Who has the highest degree? Who went to the most elite university? Who’s the most entrepreneurial? Who’s the most popular? Who’s the cleverest scientist, researcher, writer, journalist, television personality, or wit at the office or family table? Who’s the most brilliant? We never ask: Who’s the wisest? Today intelligence is valued far above wisdom, and that’s not always good. We’re a highly informed and intelligent people, but our compassion is not nearly on par with our brilliance. We’re bright, but not wise.

What’s the difference between intelligence and wisdom? Wisdom is intelligence that’s colored by understanding (which, parsed to its root, means infused with empathy). In end, what makes for wisdom is intelligence informed by empathy, intelligence that’s grasps with sympathy the complexity of others and the world, and this has implications.

Learning, to be truly helpful, must be matched by an equal growth in empathy. When this isn’t happening, then growth in intelligence is invariably be one-sided and, while perhaps providing something for the community, will always lack the kind of understanding that can help bind the community together and help us better understand ourselves and our world. When intelligence is not informed by empathy, what it produces will generally not contribute to the common good. Without a concomitant empathy, intelligence invariably becomes arrogant and condescending. True learning, on the other hand, is humble, self-effacing, and empathic. When we develop ourselves intellectually, without sufficient empathy, our talents invariably become causes for envy rather than gifts for community.

Ironically, at the end of the day, intelligence not sufficiently informed by empathy will not be very bright, but instead will be an arrested intelligence wherein its fault will not be in what it has learned (for learning itself is good) but in where its learning stopped. It will suffer from a hazard aptly named by Alexander Pope, where “a little learning is a dangerous thing”, where we have read one book too many but one book too few!

One might object here and make a plea for science and scientific objectivity. Isn’t empirical science the product of a pure intellectual pursuit which refuses to be colored by anything outside itself? Isn’t the ideal of all learning to be purely objective, to not have a bias of any sort? Where does empathy play a role in pure research? Doesn’t an eye turned towards empathy fudge pure objectivity?

Pure objectivity doesn’t exist, in science or anywhere else. Science today accepts that it can never be purely objective. All measurement has its own agenda, its own angle, and cannot help but interfere (however infinitesimally perhaps) with what it measures. Everyone and everything, including science, has a bias (euphemistically, a pre-ontology). Thus, since all learning necessarily begins with an angle, a bias, pre-ontology, the question is not: How can I be purely objective?” But rather: What serves us best as an angle from which to learn? The answer is empathy. Empathy turns intelligence into wisdom and wisdom turns learning into something that more properly serves community.

However empathy is not to be confused with sentimentality or naiveté, as is sometimes the case. Sentimentality and naiveté see a fault within intellectuality itself, seeing learning itself as the problem. But learning is never the problem. One-sided learning is the problem, namely, learning that isn’t sufficiently informed by empathy, which seeks knowledge without understanding.

I teach graduate students who are mainly preparing for ministry within their churches and so, for them, graduate learning is, by definition, meant to be more than just scoring high marks, graduating with honor, being informed and educated, or even just satisfying their own intellectual curiosities and questions. By their very vocation, they are striving for wisdom more than for mere intelligence. But even they, like most everyone else in our culture, struggle to not be one-sided in their learning, to have their studies bring them as much compassion as knowledge. We all struggle with this. It’s hard to resist a temptation that’s as endemic in our culture as certain bacteria are in our waters, that is, the temptation to be clever and bright, more informed than everyone else, no matter if we aren’t very compassionate persons afterwards.

And so this column is a plea, not a criticism: To all of us, whether we’re doing formal studies; whether we’re trying to learn the newest information technology; whether we’re trying to keep ourselves informed socially and politically; whether we’re writing articles, books, or blogs; whether we’re taking training for a job; or whether we’re just mustering material for an argument at our family table or workplace, remember: It’s not good merely to be smart, we must also be compassionate.

Divine Understanding

August 5, 2019

A number of years ago at a symposium on faith and evangelization, one of the speakers made a rather startling statement. She, a Christian activist, ended her presentation with words to this effect: I work for the poor and I do it out of my Christian faith. I’m committed to this because of Jesus, but I can go for three years on the streets without ever mentioning his name because I believe that God is mature enough that he doesn’t demand to be the center of our conscious attention all the time.

Like many others in the audience, I’d never heard a spiritual writer or preacher ever say this so bluntly. I’d heard biblical scholars speak of God’s self-emptying in the incarnation, of Christ’s burying himself into anonymity, and of God’s patience in being ignored, but I’d never heard anyone say so plainly that God doesn’t mind that we don’t give him explicit attention for long periods of time.

But is this true? Is God okay with this kind of neglect?

There’s an important truth here, though only if it’s sufficiently qualified. Taken as it stands this can be used to justify too many things (spiritual laziness, selfishness, excessive self-preoccupation, culpable resistance to deeper thought, excessive procrastination with what’s important, and countless other things) that are not good. But here’s its truth: God understands! God is a loving parent who understands the inattentiveness and self-preoccupation of his children.

God has not put us into this life primarily to see if we can keep our attention focused on him all the time. God intended for us to immerse ourselves in the things of this world without, of course, forgetting that these things are, at the end of the day, passing and that we’re destined for a life beyond this world. We’re not on this earth to be always thinking of the eternal, though we’re not on earth either to forget about the eternal.

However, because the unexamined life is less than human, we also need to have moments where we try to make God the center of our conscious awareness. We need regular moments of explicit prayer, of meditation, of contemplation, of worship, of Sabbath, of explicit acknowledgement of God and of explicit gratitude to God. We do need moments when we make ourselves consciously aware that there is a next life, an eternal one, beyond this present one.

But, in the end, that’s not in competition with or in contradiction to our natural focus on the things of this life, namely, our day-to-day relationships, our families, our work, our concerns for health, and our natural focus on news, sports, entertainment, and enjoyment. These are what naturally draw our attention and, done in good will and honesty, will in the end help push our attention towards the deeper things and eventually towards God. The great mystic, John of the Cross, tells us that if we’re sincere and honest as we focus on the mundane things in our lives, deeper things will happen, unconsciously, under the surface and we will grow closer to God.

For example, the famed monk, Carlo Carretto, shares this story: After living many years alone as a hermit in the Sahara desert and spending countless hours in prayer and meditation, he went back to Italy to visit his mother. She was a woman who had raised a large family and who had gone through years of her life when she was too burdened with responsibility and duty to spend much time in explicit prayer. What Carretto discovered to his surprise was that she was more contemplative than he was, not because all those hours of explicit prayer as a monk weren’t good, but because all those selfless tasks his mother did in raising her family and caring for others were very good.

And God understands this. God understands that we’re human, spiritually frail, busy, and instinctually geared towards the things of this world so that we don’t naturally move towards prayer and church, and that even when we are at prayer or in church, we’re generally still distracted, tired, bored, impatient, thinking of other things, and longing for prayer and church to be over with.

It’s not easy to keep God as the center of our conscious attention; but God both knows this and is not unsympathetic.

Kate Bowler, coming at this from the Mennonite tradition, comments on what the Church calls “Ordinary time”, that is, those times during the year when, unlike the Advent, Lenten, Christmas, or Easter seasons, there is nothing special to celebrate. What happens then? Well, what happens then is that things get “ordinary”: “There is no birth at the manger or death on the cross, just the ponderous pace of people singing, praying, and keeping their kids quiet during the sermon. The magic fades and reveals the church for what it is: a plain people in a boring building who meet until kickoff.”

Yes, most of the time that’s us, plain people in boring buildings waiting for the kickoff. And God understands perfectly.

Our Grandiosity and Our Wounds

July 29, 2019

We wake up into life with the incurable sense that we’re special, that we’re the center of the universe. And, subjectively, we are! In our awareness we’re the center of the universe and life does revolve around us. Our own being is what’s most massively real to us. As Descartes famously said, the only thing that we know for sure is real is our own selves; I think, therefore, I am. We may be dreaming everything else.

Spirituality has perennially judged this negatively. Egocentricity, feelings of grandiosity, self-centeredness, and pride were seen as the result of the corruption of human nature through original sin. We called it, The Fall. Our first parents attempted to overreach, to be more than God intended them to be, and this irrevocably corrupted their nature and we, their children, inherit this. So we, adult children of Adam and Eve, too instinctually tend to overreach, to puff up in self-importance, to fill with pride, and think first about ourselves.

That doctrine of original sin has something important to say, but it isn’t first of all to shame us in our natural pride and sense of specialness. The real reason why pride and grandiosity are incurably ingrained inside us is because God built us that way, and that, of itself, is not a fault or a corruption but instead constitutes what’s highest and most precious inside us. Both Christianity and Judaism take as dogma that we’re born, every one of us, in the image and likeness of God. That’s not to be imagined piously as some beautiful icon stamped inside our souls but rather as fire, divine fire, which because it is godly brings with it a sense of the preciousness, dignity, and uniqueness, of our lives. But with that too comes (as part of the same package) pride and grandiosity. Simply put, we can’t have Godliness inside us and not feel ourselves as special.

And that makes for a less-than-serene situation for the planet. We’re now seven and half billion people on this earth, each one with the same innate sense that he or she is the center of the universe and that his or her own reality is what’s most real. That’s the real cause behind what you see happening on the world news each night, for worse and for better. Grandiosity is the source of human strife, but equally the source of human greatness.

Important in our understanding of this is that our innate sense of godliness is also the place where we suffer our deepest wounds. What most wounds the image and likeness of God inside us? These things: humiliation, lack of adequate self-expression, the perennial frustration of bumping up against the limits of life, and the martyrdom of obscurity.

Each of us, by our nature, possesses a divinely-given uniqueness and dignity and thus nothing wounds us more than being humiliated and shamed in our struggle to live this out. A shameful humiliation, even as a very young child, can scar us for the rest of our lives. It’s one of the reasons why we have mass killings. Likewise, as Iris Murdoch once said, the greatest human pain is the pain of inadequate self-expression. There’s a great artist, composer, teacher, athlete, and performer inside each of us, but few people can ever give that satisfying expression. The rest of us have to live with perennial frustration because what’s deepest in us lies unexpressed. As well, we’re forever bumping up against the real limits of our own lives and limits of life itself. In Karl Rahner words: In the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable, we ultimately learn that here in this life there is no finished symphony. In the end, all of us die with a life that was never fully consummated. And that isn’t easily accepted! Everything inside us militates against this. Finally, almost all of us live a certain martyrdom of obscurity, recognized and famous only inside our own daydreams, our greatness hidden from the world. That too isn’t easily accepted.

What’s to be taken away from this? Since we secretly nurse thoughts of specialness should we also nurse a secret shame? Is our innate pride something that sets us against holiness? Is our grandiosity a bad thing? Is our frustration with the limits and inadequacy of our lives something that displeases God? Are our daydreams of uniqueness and greatness something which taints our contemplation and prayer? Is our nature, of itself, somehow corrupt? Must we somehow step outside of our own skin to be saints?

Each of these questions can be answered in two ways. Grandiosity, pride, shame, frustration, and daydreams of greatness, can indeed be our downfall and turn us into awful persons, selfish, jealous, spiteful, and murderous. But they can also be the source of greatness, of nobility of soul, of generosity, of selflessness, of generativity, of true prayer, and can turn us into selfless martyrs of faith, hope, and charity. Our godliness is very mixed blessing; but it is, no doubt, our greatest blessing.

What Does it Mean To Be Born Again?

July 22, 2019

What does it mean to “be born again, to “be born from above”? If you’re an Evangelical or Baptist, you’ve probably already answered that for yourself. However, if you’re a Roman Catholic or a mainline Protestant then the phrase probably isn’t a normal part of your spiritual vocabulary and, indeed, might connote for you a biblical fundamentalism which confuses you.

What does it mean to “be born again”? The expression appears in John’s Gospel in a conversation Jesus has with a man named, Nicodemus. Jesus tells him that he “must be born again from above”. Nicodemus takes this literally and protests that it’s impossible for a grown man to re-enter his mother’s womb so as to be born a second time. So Jesus recasts the phrase metaphorically, telling Nicodemus that one’s second birth, unlike the first, is not from the flesh, but “from water and the Spirit”. Well … that doesn’t clarify things much for Nicodemus, or for us. What does it mean to be born again from above?

Perhaps there are as many answers to that as there are people in the world. Spiritual birth, unlike physical birth, doesn’t mean the same thing for everyone. I have Evangelical friends who share that for them this refers to a particularly powerful affective moment within their lives when, like Mary Magdala in the Garden with Jesus on Easter Sunday, they had a deep personal encounter with Jesus that indelibly affirmed his intimate love for them. In that moment, in their words, “they met Jesus Christ” and “were born again”, even though from their very childhood they had always known about Jesus Christ and been Christians.

Most Roman Catholics and mainline Protestants do not identify “knowing Jesus Christ” with one such personal affective experience. But then they’re left wondering what Jesus meant exactly when he challenges us “to be born again, from above”.

A priest that I know shares this story regarding his understanding of this. His mother, widowed sometime before his ordination, lived in the same parish where he had been assigned to minister. It was a mixed blessing, nice to see her every day in church but she, widowed and alone, began to lean pretty heavily upon him in terms of wanting his time and he, the dutiful son, now had to spend all his free time with his mother, taking her for meals, taking her for drives, and being her one vital contact with the world outside the narrow confines of the seniors’ home within which she lived. During their time together she reminisced a lot and not infrequently complained about being alone and lonely. But one day, on a drive with her, after a period of silence, she said something that surprised him and caught his deeper attention: “I’ve given up on fear!” she said, “I’m no longer afraid of anything. I’ve spent my whole life living in fear. But now, I’ve given up on it because I’ve nothing to lose! I’ve already lost everything, my husband, my youthful body, my health, my place in the world, and much of my pride and dignity. Now I’m free! I’m no longer afraid!”

Her son, who had only been half-listening to her for a long time, now began to listen. He began to spend longer hours with her, recognizing that she had something important to teach him. After a couple of more years, she died. But, by then, she had been able to impart to her son some things that helped him understand his life more deeply. “My mother gave me birth twice; once from below, and once from above,” he says. He now understands something that Nicodemus couldn’t quite grasp.

We all, no doubt, have our own stories.

And what do the biblical scholars teach about this? The Synoptic Gospels, scholars say, tell us that we can only enter the kingdom of God if we become like little children, meaning that we must, in our very way of living, acknowledge our dependence upon God and others. We are not self-sufficient and that means truly recognizing and living out our human dependence upon the gratuitous providence of God. To do that, is to be born from above.

John’s Gospel adds something to this. Raymond E Brown, commenting on John’s Gospel, puts it this way: To be born again from above means we must, at some point in our lives, come to understand that our life comes from beyond this world, from a place and source beyond out mother’s womb, and that deeper life and deeper meaning lie there. And so we must have two births, one that gives us biological life (births us into this world) and another that gives us eschatological life (births us into the world of faith, soul, love, and spirit). And sometimes, as was the case with my friend, it can be your own birthmother who does the major midwifing in that second birth. Nicodemus couldn’t quite get past his instinctual empiricism. In the end, he didn’t get it. Do we?

God’s Finger in Our Lives

July 15, 2019

The problem in the world and in the churches, Jim Wallis suggests, is that, perennially, conservatives get it wrong and liberals (over-reacting to conservatives) then don’t get it at all. Nowhere is this truer, I believe, than in how we discern the finger of God in the events of our lives.

Jesus tells us to discern the finger of God in our lives by reading the signs of the times. What’s meant by that? The idea isn’t so much that we look to every kind of social, political, and religious analysis to try to understand what’s going on in the world, but rather that we look at every event in our lives, personal or global, and ask ourselves: What’s God saying to me this event? What’s God saying to us in this event?

An older generation understood this as trying to attune itself to the workings of “divine providence”. That practice goes back to biblical times. When we read the bible, we see that for God’s people nothing happened that was understood as being purely secular or religiously neutral. Rather in every event, be it ever so accidental and secular, they saw the finger of God. For example, they believed that if they lost a war, it wasn’t because the other side had superior soldiers, but rather that God had somehow engineered this to teach them a lesson. Or if they were hit by drought it was because God had actively stopped the heavens from raining, again to teach them a lesson.

Now it’s easy to misunderstand this because, frequently, in writing this up, the sacred authors give the impression that God actively caused the event. That’s their wording, though not their intent or meaning. The bible does not intend to teach us that God causes wars or stops the heavens from raining; it accepts that they’re the result of natural contingency. The lesson is only that God speaks through them.

And it’s here where conservatives tend to get it wrong and liberals tend to miss the point. A recent example of this is the reaction of certain religious circles, conservative and liberal, to the outbreak of AIDS. When AIDS first broke out, a number of strong conservative religious voices spoke out saying that AIDS was God’s punishment on us for our sexual promiscuity, particularly for homosexuality. Liberal religious voices, for their part, were so turned off by this that their response was: God has nothing to do with this!

Both need a lesson on the workings of divine providence. Religious conservatives are wrong in their interpretation: God does not cause AIDS to punish us for sexual promiscuity. Conversely, religious liberals are also wrong in saying that this has nothing to do with God. God doesn’t cause AIDS (or any other disease) but God speaks through AIDS and every other disease. Our religious task is to discern the message. What’s God saying to us through this?

James Mackey teaches that divine providence is a conspiracy of accidents through which God speaks. Frederick Buechner teases this out a little further by saying: “This does not mean that God makes events happen to us which move us in certain directions like chessmen. Instead, events happen under their own steam as random as rain, which means that God is present in them not as their cause but as the one who even in the hardest and most hair-raising of them offers us the possibility of that new life and healing which I believe is what salvation is.”

God is always speaking to us in every event in our lives. For a Christian, there’s no such a thing as a purely secular experience. The event may be the result of purely secular and contingent forces but it contains a religious message for us, always. Our task is to read that message.

And one further note: Mostly, it seems that we hear God’s voice only in experiences that are deeply painful for us rather than in events that bring us joy and pleasure. But we shouldn’t misread this. It’s not that God speaks only through pain and is silent when things go right. Rather, in the words of C.S. Lewis, pain is God’s microphone to a deaf world. God is always speaking, mostly we aren’t listening. It’s only when our hearts start breaking that we begin to attune ourselves to the voice of God.

Divine providence is a conspiracy of accidents through which God speaks and we must be careful to get both parts of the equation right. God doesn’t cause AIDS, global warming, the refugee situation in the world, a cancer diagnosis, world hunger, hurricanes, tornadoes, or any other such thing in order to teach us a lesson; but something in all of these invites us to try to discern what God is saying through them. Likewise, God doesn’t cause your favorite sports team to win a championship; that too is the result of a conspiracy of accidents. But God speaks through all of these things – even your favorite team’s championship win!

Needed – Particular Kinds of Saints

July 8, 2019

Simone Weil once commented that it’s not enough today to be merely a saint; rather “we must have the saintliness demanded by the present moment.”

She’s surely right on that second premise; we need saints whose virtues speak to the times.

What kind of saint is needed today? Someone who can show us how we can actually forgive an enemy? Someone who can help us come together across the bitter divide within our communities and churches? Someone who can show us how to reach out to the poor? Someone who can teach us how to actually pray? Someone who can show us how to find “Sabbath” inside the bombardment of ten thousand television channels, a million blogs, and a billion tweets? Someone who can show us how to sustain our childhood faith amidst the sophistication, complexity, and agnosticism of our adult lives? Someone who, like Jesus, can go into singles’ bars and not sin? Someone who radiates a full-bodied humanity, even as he or she is, by faith, set apart? Someone who’s a mystic, but with a robust sense of humor? Someone who can be both chaste and healthily sexual at the same time?

The list could go on. We’re in pioneer territory. The saints of old didn’t face our issues. They had their own demons to conquer and aren’t rolling over in their graves, shaking their fingers in disgust at us in our struggles and infidelities. They know the struggle, know that ours is new territory with new demons to conquer and new virtues asked for. The saints of old remain, of course, as essential templates of Christian discipleship, living gospels, but they walked in different times.

So what kind of saints do we need today?

We need saints who can honor the goodness of the world, even as they honor God. We need women and men who can show us how to walk with a living faith inside a culture which believes that world here is enough and that the issues of God and the next life are peripheral. We need saints who can walk with a steady, adult faith in the face of the world’s sophistication, its pathological restlessness, its over-stimulated grandiosity, its numbing distractions, and its overpowering temptations. We need saints who can empathize with those who have drifted away from the church, even as they themselves, without compromise, hold their own moral and religious ground. We need young saints who can romantically re-enflame the religious imagination of the world, as once did Francis and Clare. And we need old saints, who have walked the gamut and can show us how to meet all the challenges of today and yet retain our childhood faith.

As well, we need what Sarah Coakley calls “erotic saints”, women and men who can bring chastity and eros together in a way that speaks of the importance of both. We need saints who can model for us the goodness of sexuality, who can delight in its human joys and honor its God-given place within the spiritual journey, even as they never denigrate it by setting it against spirituality or cheapen it by making it simply another form of recreation.

Then too we need saints today who can, with compassion, help us to see our blind complicity with systems of all kinds which victimize the vulnerable in order to safeguard our own comfort, security, and historical privilege. We need saints who can speak prophetically for the poor, for the environment, for women, for refugees, for those with inadequate access to medical care and education, and for all who are stigmatized because of race, color, or creed. We need saints, lonely prophets, who can stand as unanimity-minus one, and who can wage peace and who can point our eyes to a reality beyond our own shortsightedness.

And these saints need not be formally canonized; their lives need simply be lamps for our eyes and leaven for our lives. I don’t know who your present-day saints are, but I find have found mine among a very wide range of persons, old, young, Catholic, Protestant, Evangelical, liberal, conservative, religious, lay, clerical, secular, faith-filled, and agnostic. Full disclosure, the names I mention here are not persons whose lives I know in any detail. Mostly, I know what they’ve written, but their writings are a lamp which lights my path.

Among those of my own generation, I’m indebted to are Raymond E. Brown, Charles Taylor, Daniel Berrigan, Jean Vanier, Mary Jo Leddy, Henri Nouwen, Thomas Keating, Jim Wallis, Richard Rohr, Elizabeth Johnson, Parker Palmer, Barbara Brown Taylor, Wendy Wright, Gerhard Lohfink, Kathleen Dowling Singh, Jim Forest, John Shea, James Hillman, Thomas Moore, and Marilynne Robinson.

Among the younger voices whose lives and writings speak as well to a generation younger than mine, I would mention Shane Claiborne, Rachel Held Evans, James Martin, Kerry Weber, Trevor Herriot, Macy Halford, Robert Barron, Bryan Stevenson, Robert Ellsberg, Bieke Vandekerckhove, and Annie Riggs.

Maybe these aren’t your saints, fair enough. So lean on those who help light your path.

An Important New Book

July 1, 2019

Each year, I write a column sharing with readers the title and a brief synopsis of the ten books that touched me most that year. Occasionally, however, I judge a book to be exceptional enough to merit its own column. Robert Ellsberg’s new book, A Living Gospel – Reading God’s Story in Holy Lives, is such a book.

Robert Ellsberg is the publisher and editor-in-chief of Orbis Books and in that role has shepherded into print some of the more challenging spiritual writings of our generation. Among others things, he has edited the selected writings, diaries, and letters of Dorothy Day (whom he had the privilege of being in community with during the last five years of her life). But beyond publishing the thoughts of others, Ellsberg has himself, quietly, produced a huge treasury of writings on the lives of the saints. He has three major books on the lives of the saints (All Saints; The Saints’ Guide to Happiness; and Blessed Among Women) and, each day, writes an account of the life of a saint for the booklet, Give Us This Day.

Ellsberg is what’s technically termed a hagiographer, namely, someone who writes up the lives of various saints so that they may serve as inspirations for the rest of us. Anyone familiar with the history of Christian spirituality knows how important this has been. The Gospels themselves are, in a manner of speaking, hagiography, the life of Jesus written up for our inspiration and imitation. Then, in the early church, we have the lives of the martyrs and after that a parade of saints through medieval and modern times down to our own age. We’ve always been told the stories of the saints.

Many of us, I suspect, are familiar with Alban Butler’s classic, four-volume series, Lives of the Saints. These famous mini-biographies were published 200 years ago but they employed the literary genre of the time apposite to writing up the lives of saints. That genre, hagiography, on principle, distorted somewhat the literal reality so as to highlight essence and this often left the reader with the impression that the saints being described were devoid of normal human weakness and limitation. Our age no longer understands this and so a new kind of hagiography is needed, one that brings out essence without sacrificing the literal facts. Robert Ellsberg is that new kind of hagiographer and we need such hagiography today.

When I was young, the lives of the saints were one of the major ways within which spirituality was taught. We each had a patron saint, every city had a patron saint, every parish had a patron saint, we all read the lives of the saints and were inspired to higher ideals by the likes of saints such as Tarcisius, stoned to death for protecting the Blessed Sacrament; Marie Goretti, willing to die rather than sacrifice her personal integrity; St. George, who by the power of faith could slay dragons; and St. Christopher, whose providential eye could you keep you safe while traveling.

Of course, looking back, one can see now where those who wrote up these stories often took liberties with historical fact to highlight essence. Indeed, both St. George and St. Christopher are now relegated more to the realm of fable than fact. No matter, their stories, like those of the other saints we read, lifted our eyes a little higher, put a bit more courage in our hearts, gave us real life examples of Christian discipleship, and helped fix our eyes on what’s more noble.

Today we have a different version of the lives of the saints. The rich, famous, and successful have effectively replaced the saints of old. Butler’s Lives of the Saints has been replaced by People Magazine, biographies, television programs, and websites that picture and detail for us the lives of the rich and the famous. And these lives, notwithstanding the goodness you often see there, don’t exactly focus our eyes and hearts in the same direction as do the lives of Tarcisius, Marie Goretti, St. George, or St. Christopher. In a culture which deifies celebrity, we need some different celebrities to envy. Robert Ellsberg is pointing them out.

In this book, among other things, Ellsberg chronicles the lives of four contemporary “saints”, Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Henri Nouwen, and Charles de Foucault (none of whom are yet canonized or might ever be.) But, their lives, he believes, can help us define what following Jesus might mean inside the complexities of our own generation.

And this is true too for the Church as a whole. Commenting on the life of Charles de Foucauld, Ellsberg writes: “In an age when Christianity is no longer synonymous with the outreach of Western civilization and colonial power, the witness of Foucauld – poor, unarmed, stripped of everything, relying on no greater authority than the power of love – may well represent the future of the church, a church rooted in the memory of its origins and of its poor founder.”

The saints have something for everyone!

The Loss of Heaven and The Fear of Hell

June 24, 2019

Growing up as a Roman Catholic, like the rest of my generation, I was taught a prayer called, The Act of Contrition. Every Catholic back then had to memorize it and say it during or after going to confession. The prayer started this way: Oh, my God, I am truly sorry for having offended thee and I detest all of my sins because I dread the loss of heaven and the pains of hell. …

To dread the loss of heaven and fear the pains of hell can seem like one and the same thing. They’re not. There’s a huge moral distance between dreading the loss of heaven and fearing the pains of hell. The prayer wisely separates them. Fear of hell is based upon a fear of punishment, dreading the loss of heaven is based upon a fear of not being a good, loving person. There’s a huge difference between living in fear of punishment and living in fear of not being a good a person. We’re more mature, humanly and as Christians, when we’re more worried about not being loving enough than when we’re fearful that we will be punished for doing something wrong.

Growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, I breathed in the spirituality and catechesis of the Roman Catholicism of the time. In the Catholic ethos then (and this was essentially the same for Protestants and Evangelicals) the eschatological emphasis was a lot more about the fear of going to hell than it was about being a loving person. As a Catholic kid, along with my peers, I worried a lot about not committing a mortal sin, that is, doing something out of selfishness or weakness that, if unconfessed before I died, would send me to hell for all eternity. My fear was that I might go to hell rather than that I might not be a very loving person who would miss out on love and community. And so I worried about not being bad rather than about being good. I worried that I would do something that was mortally sinful, that would send me to hell; but I didn’t worry as much about having a heart big enough to love as God loves. I didn’t worry as much about forgiving others, about letting go of hurts, about loving those who are different from me, about being judgmental, or about being so tribal, racist, sexist, nationalistic, or narrow in my religious views that I would be uncomfortable sitting down with certain others at the God’s banquet table.

The heavenly table is open to all who are willing to sit down with all. That’s a line from a John Shea poem and it spells out succinctly, I believe, a non-negotiable condition for going to heaven, namely, the willingness and capacity to love everyone and to sit down with everyone. It’s non-negotiable for this reason: How can we be at the heavenly table with everyone if for some reason of pride, wound, temperament, bitterness, bigotry, politics, nationalism, color, race, religion, or history, we aren’t open to sit down with everyone?

Jesus teaches this too, just in a different way. After giving us the Lord’s Prayer which ends with the words, “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us”, he adds this: “If you forgive others when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others, your Father will not forgive you.” Why can’t God forgive us if we don’t forgive others? Has God arbitrarily singled out this one condition as his pet criterion for going to heaven? No.

We cannot sit at the heavenly banquet table if we are still selective as to whom we can sit down with. If, in the next life, like here in this life, we are selective as to whom we love and embrace, then heaven would be the same as earth, with factions, bitterness, grudges, hurt, and every kind of racism, sexism, nationalism, and religious fundamentalism keeping us all in our separate silos. We can only sit at the heavenly banquet when are hearts are wide enough to embrace everyone else at the table. Heaven demands a heart open to universal embrace.

And so, as I get older, approach the end of my life, and accept that I will soon face my Maker, I worry less and less about going to hell and worry more and more about the bitterness, anger, ingratitude, and non-forgiveness that still remains in me. I worry less about committing a mortal sin and more about whether I’m gracious, respectful, and forgiving towards others. I worry more about the loss of heaven than the pains of hell, that is, I worry that I could end up like the older brother of the prodigal son, standing outside the Father’s house, excluded by anger rather than by sin.

Still, I’m grateful for the Act of Contrition of my youth. Fear of hell isn’t a bad place from which to start.

What Makes for Christian Communion?

June 17, 2019

The question of intercommunion within our churches today is a big one, an important one, and a painful one. I’m old enough to remember another time, actually to remember two other times.

First, as a young boy growing up in the pre-Vatican II Church, intercommunion with other Christians, Non-Romans, was a taboo. It just didn’t happen. An individual maverick may have ventured it, but he or she would have been called out for doing it, were it known. Then things changed. In the early years of my ministry, I worked in dioceses where intercommunion, at least for special occasions such as weddings, funerals, and inter-church gatherings, was common, even encouraged. As a priest presiding at a Eucharist at these gatherings, I was allowed to positively invite non Roman Catholics to receive the Eucharist, as their own faith and sensitivities allowed.

Those times came to an end. Within the space of ten years, by the mid-1990s, those of us who presided at a Roman Catholic Eucharist were asked to positively disinvite non-Roman Catholics from receiving the Eucharist, irrespective of occasion. The rational given was that the Eucharist is the most intimate act that we, as Christians, can share with each other and that intimate sharing, analogous to the intimacy within a marriage, to be honest and meaningful, demands that we be in communion with each other and given our differences in doctrine, ecclesiology, and some issues of morality, we simply are not in sufficient communion. Further still, this argument suggests that accepting the pain of not being able to receive communion in each other’s churches should be the kick in the pants we need to stir us to make greater efforts to come together around dogma, church, and morality.

What’s to be said for this? First, it’s’ true and has its merits, save for the one, salient, idea that needs to be lifted out from this apologia and scrutinized more closely, namely, the notion that we are not in sufficient communion with each other to share the Eucharist because of our differences in dogma, ecclesiology, and some moral issues.

What does it mean to be in communion with each other, in faith, as Christians, at least in sufficient communion to receive the Eucharist from each other’s tables? What constitutes genuine intimacy in faith?

Theologically, it’s clear; baptism puts us into the family of faith. All Christians hold this and so too do the Gospels. St. Paul, admittedly, adds a qualification regarding receiving communion. However, beyond the theological issue involved there’s also an ecclesial one, namely, while we all share one Christian community through baptism, we do however belong to different faith families and families tend to eat in their own houses. True again. But then this question arises: When does eating in another family’s house make sense and when does it not?

The deeper question which needs to be asked regarding what constitutes intimacy inside the faith and what constitutes the kind of intimacy that justifies receiving the Eucharist together is not, first of all, one of doctrine or church affiliation but of oneness inside the Holy Spirit. What makes for oneness among us as Christians? When are we one family in faith?

Perhaps no text is clearer than St. Paul in the 5^th Chapter of his Letter to the Galatians. He begins by telling us what does not constitute oneness inside the Holy Spirit. We’re not living inside the Holy Spirit or in communion with each other, he submits, if we’re living in strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factionalism, envy, idolatry, sorcery, or adultery. These are infallible signs that we’re not in communion with each other. We are however in genuine communion, in intimacy in faith, in one family, when we’re living in charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, long-suffering, fidelity, mildness, and chastity. Living inside of these is what makes for Christian communion, oneness, for intimacy with each other. Differences on select issues of dogma, church, and morals are, in fact, secondary. More important is whether our heart is full of charity or anger, goodness or factionalism, peace or strife, impatience or chastity. We are more in communion, in a communion of faith, with someone of another ecclesial denomination whose heart is fueled by charity, patience, and goodness than with someone of our own church whose heart is angry, envious, and judgmental. Ecclesial difference isn’t the real criterion.

What constitutes the kind of intimacy that justifies intercommunion? I’m not a bishop and so the pastoral decision on that question is not mine to make. As a loyal son of the church, I need to trust that the Holy Spirit will work through the persons and offices entrusted to make that decision. As a theologian, however, I’ve also a task. My job is to look at issues like this and bring various theological and biblical perspectives to bear on them, accepting that the pastoral decision won’t be mine.

So I offer this perspective to those entrusted with making the pastoral decisions about what justifies and what does not justify intercommunion.

Rachel Held Evans, 1981-2019

June 10, 2019

No community should botch its deaths. Mircea Eliade wrote those words and they’re a warning: If we do not properly celebrate the life of someone who has left us we do an injustice to that person and cheat ourselves of some of the gift that he or she left behind.

With this in mind, I want to underscore the loss that we, the Christian community, irrespective of denomination, suffered with the death of Rachel Held Evans who died, at age 37, on May the 4^th.

Who was Rachel Held Evans? She defies simple definition, beyond saying that she was a young religious writer who wrote with a depth and balance beyond her years as she chronicled her struggles to move from the deep, sincere, childlike faith she was raised in to eventually arrive at a questioning, but more mature, faith that was now willing to face all the hard questions within faith, religion, and church. And in this journey, she was beset with opposition from within (it’s hard to courageously scrutinize your own roots) and from without (churches generally don’t like being pressed by hard questions, especially from their own young). But the journey she made and articulates (with rare honesty and wit) is a journey that, in some way, all of us, young and old, have to make to come to a faith that can stand up to the hard questions coming from our world and the even harder ones coming from inside of us.

Carl Rogers once famously said: “What is most personal is also most universal.” The journey Rachel Held Evans traces out from her own life is, I submit, by and large, the universal one today, that is, the naïve faith of our childhood inevitably meets challenges, questions, and ridicule in adulthood and that demands of us a response beyond the Sunday School and catechism of our youth. Not least among these questions and challenges is the one of church, of justifying belonging to one, given the propensity within our churches for infidelity, narrowness, judgmental attitudes, reluctance to face doubt, and the perennial temptation to wed the Gospels to their favored political ideology.

Rachel Held Evans struggled to make the journey from the naiveté of childhood, with all its innocence and magic, where one can believe in Santa and the Easter Bunny and take biblical stories literally, to what Paul Ricouer calls “second naiveté”, where, through a painful interplay between doubt and faith, one has been able to work through the conscriptive sophistication that comes with adulthood so as to reground the innocence and magic (and faith) of childhood on a foundation that has already taken seriously the doubt and disillusionment that beset us in the face of adulthood.

The Irish philosopher, John Moriarty, whose religious story plays out along similar lines as Rachel’s, coins an interesting expression to describe what happened to him. At one point in his religious journey, he tells us, “I fell out of my story”. The Roman Catholicism he had been raised into was no longer the story out of which he could live his life. Eventually, after sorting through some hard questions and realizing that the faith of his youth was, in the end, his “mother tongue”, he found his way back into his religious story.

Rachel Held Evans’ story is similar. Raised in the Southern USA Bible Belt inside a robust Evangelical Christianity she too, as she faced the questions of her own adulthood, fell out of her story and, like Moriarty, eventually found her way back into it, at least in essence.

In the end, she found her way back to a mature faith (which now can handle doubt), found a church (Episcopalian) within which she could worship, and, in effect, found her way back to her mother tongue. The church and faith of her youth, she writes, remain in her life like an old boyfriend. … Where, while not together anymore in the old way, you still end up checking Facebook each day to see what’s happening in his life.

Many Roman Catholics and mainline Protestants, I suspect, may not be very familiar with Rachel Held Evans or have read her works. She wrote four best-selling books, Inspired, Searching for Sunday, A Year of Biblical Womanhood, and Faith Unraveled. The purpose of this column is therefore pretty straightforward: Read her! Even more important, plant her books in the path of anyone struggling with faith or church:loved ones, children, spouses, family members, friends, colleagues.

Rachel Held Evans arose out of an Evangelical ecclesial tradition and out of the particular approach to Christian discipleship that generally flows from there. She and I come from very different ecclesial worlds. But, as Roman Catholic priest, solidly committed to the tradition I was raised in, and as a theologian and spiritual writer for more than 40 years, reading this young woman, I haven’t found a single line with which to disagree. She’s trusted food for the soul. She’s also a special person that we lost far too soon.

Faith, Fear and Death

June 3, 2019

A common soldier dies without fear; Jesus died afraid. Iris Murdoch wrote those words which, I believe, help expose an over-simplistic notion we have of how faith reacts in the face of death.

There’s a popular notion that believes that if we have strong faith we should not suffer any undue fear in the face of death, but rather face it with calm, peace, and even gratitude because we have nothing to fear from God or the afterlife. Christ has overcome death. Death sends us to heaven. So why be afraid?

This is, in fact, the case for many women and men, some with faith and some without it. Many people face death with very little fear. The biographies of the saints give ample testimony to this and many of us have stood at the deathbed of people who will never be canonized but who faced their death calm and unafraid.

So why was Jesus afraid? And it appears he was. Three of the Gospels describe Jesus as far from calm and peaceful, as sweating blood, during the hours leading up to this death. Mark’s Gospel describes him as particularly distressed as he is dying: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me! What’s to be said about this?

Michael Buckley, the California Jesuit, once gave a famous homily within which he set up a contrast between the way Socrates faced his death and the way Jesus faced his. Buckley’s conclusion can leave us perplexed. Socrates seems to face death more courageously than Jesus does.

For example, like Jesus, Socrates was also unjustly condemned to death. But he faced his death with calm, completely unafraid, convinced that the just man has nothing to fear either from human judgment or from death. He discoursed very calmly with his disciples, assured them that he wasn’t afraid, imparted his blessing, drank the poison, and died.

And Jesus, how much to the contrary: In the hours leading up to his death he felt deeply the betrayal of his disciples, sweated blood in agony, and just minutes before dying cried out in anguish as he felt himself abandoned. We know, of course, that his cry of abandonment wasn’t his final moment. After that moment of anguish and fear, he was able to hand his spirit over to his Father. In the end, there was calm; but, in the moments before, there was a time of awful anguish within which he felt himself abandoned by God.

If one does not consider the inner complexities of faith, the paradoxes it contains, it makes no sense that Jesus, sinless and faithful, should sweat blood and cry out in inner anguish as he faced his death. But real faith isn’t always what it looks like from the outside. Many persons, and often times particularly those who are the most faithful, have to undergo a trial that the mystics call a dark night of the soul.

What’s a dark night of soul? It’s a God-given trial in life wherein we, much to our own surprise and anguish, can no longer imagine God’s existence or feel God in any affective way in our lives. In terms of inner feeling, this is felt as doubt, as atheism. Try as we might, we can no longer imagine that God exists, much less that God loves us. However, as the mystics point out and as Jesus’ himself gives witness to, this isn’t a loss of faith but actually a deeper modality of faith itself.

Up to this point in our faith, we have been relating to God mainly through images and feelings. But our images and feelings about God are not God. So, at some point, for some people, though not for everybody, God takes away the images and the feelings and leaves us conceptually empty and affectively dry, stripped of all the images we have created about God. While in reality this is actually an overpowering light, it is felt as darkness, anguish, fear, and doubt.

And so we might expect that our journey towards death and our face-to-face encounter with God might also involve the breaking down of many of the ways we have always thought about and felt about God. And that will bring doubt, darkness, and fear in our lives.

Henri Nouwen gives a powerful testimony to this in speaking about his mother’s death. His mother had been a woman of deep faith and had each day prayed to Jesus: Let me live like you, and let me die like you. Knowing his mother’s radical faith, Nouwen expected that the scene around her deathbed would be serene and a paradigm of how faith meets death without fear. But his mother suffered deep anguish and fear before she died and that left Nouwen perplexed, until he came to see that his mother’s lifelong prayer had indeed been answered. She had prayed to die like Jesus – and she did.

A common soldier dies without fear; Jesus died afraid. And so, paradoxically, do many women and men of faith.

Jean Vanier (1928-2019)

May 26, 2019

Our differences are not a threat but a treasure.

Jean Vanier, the Founder of A’Arche, who died in Paris on May 7^th wrote those words, but their truth is far from self-evident. One might question whether those words are simply a nice-sounding poetics or whether they contain an actual truth. Our differences, in fact, are often a threat.

Moreover, it’s one thing to mouth those words; it’s quite another thing to have the moral authority to speak them. Few have that authority. Jean Vanier did. His whole life and work testify to the fact that our differences can indeed be a treasure and can, in the end, be that precise element of community that serves up for us the particular grace we need.

Vanier saw differences, whether of faith, religion, culture, language, gender, ideology, or genetic endowment, as graces to enrich a community rather than as threats to its unity. And while Vanier gave witness to this in all aspects of his life, he was of course best known for how he appropriated that apposite among the differences that have, seemingly since forever, separated people with intellectual disabilities from the rest of the community, isolating them, assigning them second-class status, and depriving the rest of us of the unique grace they bring. Someone once described Vanier as initiating a new Copernican revolution in that, prior to him,we used to think of our service to the poor one-sidedly, we give to them. Now that we recognize our former arrogance and naiveté, the poor bring a great service to us.

One of the persons who gave a powerful personal testimony to that was Henri Nouwen, the renowned spiritual writer. Tenured at both Yale and Harvard, an immensely respected speaker, and a man loved and adulated by a large public, Nouwen, nursing his own disabilities, was for most of his life unable to healthily absorb very much from that immense amount of love that was being bestowed on him and remained deeply insecure within himself, unsure he was loved, until he went to live in one of Vanier’s communities. There, living with men and women who were completely unaware of his achievements and his fame and who offered him no adulation, he began for the first time in his life to finally sense his own worth and to feel himself as loved. That great grace came from living with those who were different. We have Jean Vanier to thank for teaching that to the rest of us as well.

I first heard Vanier speak when I was a twenty-two year-old seminarian. For many of my colleagues, he was a spiritual rock-star, but that idolization was a negative for me. I went to hear him with a certain bias: Nobody can be that good! But he was!

Admittedly that’s ambiguous. Talent and charisma can seduce us towards selfishness just as easily as invite us towards nobility of soul. Someone can be a powerful speaker without that charisma witnessing at all to that person’s human and moral integrity and without that seductiveness inviting anyone to what’s more-noble inside him or her. But Vanier’s person, message, and charisma, through all his years, suffered from no such ambiguity. The transparency, simplicity, depth, wisdom, and faith that were contained in his person and his word beckoned us only in one direction, that is, towards to all that’s one, good, true, and beautiful, which are the properties of God. Meeting him made you want, like the disciples in the Gospels, to leave your boats and nets behind and set off on a new, more-radical road. Few persons have that power.

Perhaps the best criterion by which to judge Christian discipleship is look at who’s moving downwards, who fits this description of Jesus: “Though he was in the form of God, he did not deem equality with God as something to be grasped at. Rather he emptied himself and took the form of a slave.” Jean Vanier was born into a world of privilege, blessed with exceptional parents, a gifted intelligence, a handsome body, enviable educational opportunities, financial security, and a famous name. Those are a lot of gifts for a person to carry and that kind of privilege has more often ruined a life than blessed it. For Jean Vanier, however, these gifts were never something to be grasped at. He emptied himself by immersing himself into the lives of the poor, letting his gifts bless them, even as he received a rich blessing in return. He modeled a true discipleship of Jesus, namely, stepping downward into a second-baptism, immersion into the poor, where community and joy are found. And to this he invited us.

In her poem, The Leaf and the Cloud, Mary Oliver wrote: “I will sing for the broken doors of the poor, and for the sorrow of the rich, who are mistaken and lonely.” Jean Vanier, through all the years of his life, stepped through the broken doors of the poor and found community and joy there. For him, our differences were not a threat but a treasure.