Our Struggle for Proper Celebration

March 18, 2019

We don’t know how to celebrate things as they’re meant to be celebrated. We want to, but mostly we don’t know how. Generally we celebrate badly. How do we normally celebrate? By overdoing things; by taking a lot of the things we ordinarily do, drinking, eating, talking, singing, and humoring, and bringing them to excess. For most of us, celebration means eating too much, drinking too much, singing too loudly, telling one joke too many, and hoping that somewhere in all that excess we will find the secret to make this occasion extraordinary.

We have this odd idea that we can find special joy and delight by pushing things beyond their normal limits. But there’s precious little real delight in this. Heightened enjoyment is found in connecting with others more deeply, in feeling our lives expanded, and in experiencing love and playfulness in a special way. But that doesn’t happen in a frenzy. Hence our celebrations are mostly followed by a hangover, physical and emotional. Why? Why is genuine celebration so hard to do?

Perhaps the main reason is that we struggle congenitally to simply enjoy things, to simply take life, pleasure, love, and enjoyment as gracious and free gifts from God, pure and simple. It’s not that we lack this capacity for this. God has given us this gift. More at issue is the fact that our capacity to enjoy is often mixed with inchoate feelings of guilt about experiencing pleasure (and the greater the pleasure, the deeper our feeling of guilt.) Among other things, because of this, we often struggle to enjoy what’s legitimately given us by God because, consciously or unconsciously, we feel that our experience of pleasure is somehow “stealing from God.” This is an uneasiness that particularly afflicts sensitive and moral souls. Somehow, in the name of God, we struggle to give ourselves full permission to enjoy, and this leaves us prone to excess (which is invariably a substitute for genuine enjoyment).

Whatever the reasons, we struggle with this and thus many of us go through life deprived of a healthy capacity to enjoy and, since nature will still have its way, we end up alternating between rebellious enjoyment (“pleasure we steal from God”, but feel guilty about) and dutiful discipline (which we do without a lot of delight). But we’re rarely able to genuinely celebrate. We rarely find the genuine delight we are looking for in life and this pushes us into pseudo-celebration, namely, excess. Put simply, because we struggle of give ourselves permission to enjoy, ironically we tend to pursue enjoyment too much and often not in the right ways. We confuse pleasure with delight, excess with ecstasy, and the obliteration of consciousness with heightened awareness. Because we cannot simply enjoy, we go to excess, burst our normal limits, and hope that obliterating our awareness will heighten it.

And yet, celebrate we must. We have an innate need to celebrate because certain moments and events of our lives (e.g., a birthday, a wedding, a graduation, a commitment, an achievement, or even a funeral) simply demand it. They demand to be surrounded with rituals which heighten and intensify their meaning and they demand that they be shared in a special, highlighted way with others. What we cease to celebrate we will soon cease to cherish.

The same is true of some of our deeper loving, playful, and creative moments. They too demand to be celebrated: highlighted, widened, and shared with others. We have an irrepressible need to celebrate, that’s good. Indeed the need for ecstasy is hardwired into our very DNA. But ecstasy is heightened awareness, not obliterated consciousness. Celebration is meant to intensify our awareness, not deaden it. The object of celebration is to highlight certain events and feelings so as to share them with others in an extraordinary way. But, given our misunderstandings about celebration, we mostly make pseudo-celebration, that is, we overdo things to a point where we take our own awareness and our awareness of the occasion out of the equation.

We have a lot to overcome in our struggle to come to genuine celebration. We still need to learn that heightened enjoyment is not found in excess, deeper community is not found in mindless intimacy, and heightened awareness is not found in a frenzied deadening of our consciousness. Until we learn that lesson we will still mostly trudge home hung-over, more empty, more tired, and more alone than before the party. A hangover is a sure sign that, somewhere back down the road, we missed a sign post. We struggle to know how to celebrate, but we must continue to try.

Jesus came and declared a wedding feast, a celebration, at the centre of life. They crucified him not for being too ascetical, but because he told us we should actually enjoy our lives, assuring us that God and life will give us more goodness and enjoyment than we can stand, if we can learn to receive them with the proper reverence and without undue fear.

Lessons Through Failure

March 12, 2019

What’s to be learned through failure, through being humbled by our own faults? Generally that’s the only way we grow. In being humbled by our own inadequacies we learn those lessons in life that we are deaf to when we are strutting in confidence and pride. There are secrets, says John Updike, which are hidden from health. This lesson is everywhere in scripture and permeates every spirituality in every religion worthy of the name.

Raymond E. Brown, offers an illustration of this from scripture: Reflecting on how at one point in its history, God’s chosen people, Israel, betrayed its faith and was consequently humiliated and thrown into a crisis about God’s love and concern for them, Brown points out that, long range, this seeming disaster ended up being a positive experience: “Israel learned more about God in the ashes of the Temple destroyed by the Babylonians than in the elegant period of the Temple under Solomon.”

What does he mean by that? Just prior to being conquered by Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, Israel had just experienced what, to all outside appearances, looked like the high point of her history (politically, socially, and religiously). She was in possession of the promised land, had subdued all her enemies, had a great king ruling over her, and had a magnificent temple in Jerusalem as a place to worship and a center to hold all the people together. However, inside that apparent strength, perhaps because of it, she had become complacent about her faith and increasing lax in being faithful to it. That complacency and laxity led to her downfall. In 587 BCE, she was overrun by a foreign nation who, after taking the land, deported most of the people to Babylon, killed the king, and knocked the temple down to its last stone. Israel spent the next nearly half-century in exile, without a temple, struggling to reconcile this with her belief that God loved her.

However, in terms of the bigger picture, this turned out to be a positive. The pain of being exiled and the doubts of faith that were triggered by the destruction of her temple were ultimately offset by what she learned through this humiliation and crisis, namely, that God is faithful even when we aren’t, that our failures open our eyes to us our own complacency and blindness, and that what looks like success is often its opposite, just as what looks like failure is often its opposite. As Richard Rohr might phrase it, in our failures we have a chance to “fall upward”.

There’s no better image available, I believe, by which to understand what the church is now undergoing through the humiliation thrust on it through the clerical sexual abuse crisis within Roman Catholicism and within other churches as well. To recast Raymond Brown’s insight: The church can learn more about God in the ashes of the clerical sexual abuse crisis than it did during its elegant periods of grand cathedrals, burgeoning church growth, and unquestioned acquiescence to ecclesial authority. It can also learn more about itself, its blindness to its own faults, and its need for some structural change and personal conversion. Hopefully, like the Babylonian exile for Israel, this too will be for the churches something that’s positive in the end.

Moreover, what’s true institutionally for the church (and, not doubt, for other organizations) is also true for each of us in our personal lives. The humiliations that beset us because of our inadequacies, complacencies, failures, betrayals, and blindness to our own faults can be occasions to “fall upward”, to learn in the ashes what we didn’t learn in the winner’s circle.

Almost without exception, our major successes in life, our grander achievements, and the boost in status and adulation that come with that generally don’t deepen us in any way. To paraphrase James Hillman, success usually doesn’t bring a shred of depth into our lives. Conversely, if we reflect with courage and honesty on all the things that have brought depth and character into our lives we will have to admit that, in virtually every case, it would be something that has an element of shame to it – a feeling of inadequacy about our own body, some humiliating element in our upbringing, some shameful moral failure in our life, or something in our character about which we feel some shame. These are the things that have given us depth.

Humiliation makes for depth; it drives us into the deeper parts of our soul. Unfortunately, however, that doesn’t always make for a positive result. The pain of humiliation makes us deep; but it can make us deep in two ways: in understanding and empathy but also in a bitterness of soul that would have us get even with the world.

But the positive point is this: Like Israel on the shores of Babylon, when our temple is damaged or destroyed, in the ashes of that exile we will have a chance to see some deeper things to which we are normally blind.

Unfinished Relationships

March 4, 2019

A colleague of mine, a clinical therapist, shares this story: A woman came to him in considerable distress. Her husband had recently died of a heart attack. His death had been sudden and at a most inept time. They’d been happily married for thirty years and, during all those years, had never had a major crisis in their relationship. On the day her husband died, they had gotten into an argument about something very insignificant and it had escalated to where they began to hurl some mean and cutting words at each other. At a point, agitated and angry, her husband stomped out of the room, told her he was going shopping, then died of a heart attack before he got to the car. Understandably, the woman was devastated, by the sudden death of her spouse but also by that last exchange. “All these years,” she lamented, “we had this loving relationship and then we have this useless argument over nothing and it ends up being our last conversation!”

The therapist led off with something meant partially in humor. He said: “How horrible of him to do that to you! To die just then!” Obviously the man hadn’t intended his death, but its timing was in fact awfully unfair to his wife, as it left her holding a guilt that was seemingly permanent with no apparent avenue for resolution.

However, after that opening, the therapist followed by asking her: “If you had your husband back for five minutes what would you say to him?” Without hesitation, she answered: “I’d tell him how much I loved him, how good he was to me for all these years, and how our little moment of anger at the end was a meaningless epi-second that means nothing in terms our love.”

The therapist then said: “You’re a woman of faith, you believe in the communion of saints; well, your husband is alive still and present to you now, so why don’t you just say all those things to him right now. It’s not too late to express that all to him!”

He’s right. It’s never too late! It’s never too late to tell our deceased loved ones how we really feel about them. It’s never too late to apologize for the ways we might have hurt them. It’s never too late to ask their forgiveness for our negligence in the relationship, and it’s never too late to speak the words of appreciation, affirmation, and gratitude that we should have spoken to them while they were alive. As Christians, we have the great consolation of knowing that death isn’t final, that it’s never too late.

And we desperately need that particular consolation … and that second chance. No matter who we are, we’re always inadequate in our relationships. We can’t always be present to our loved ones as we should, we sometimes say things in anger and bitterness that leave deep scars, we betray trust in all kinds of ways, and we mostly lack the maturity and self-confidence to express the affirmation we should be conveying to our loved ones. None of us ever fully measures up. When Karl Rahner says that none of us ever experience the “full symphony” in this life, he isn’t just referring to the fact that none of us ever fully realizes her dream, he’s also referring to the fact that in all of our most important relationships none of us ever fully measures up.

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

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

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

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

Struggling Inside our own Skin

February 25, 2019

I’ve been both blessed and cursed by a congenital restlessness that hasn’t always made my life easy. I remember as a young boy restlessly wandering the house, the yard, and then the open pastures of my family’s farm on the prairies. Our family was close, my life was protected and secure, and I was raised in a solid religious faith. That should have made for a peaceful and stable childhood and, for the most part, it did. I count myself lucky.

But all of this stability, at least for me, didn’t preclude an unsettling restlessness. More superficially, I felt this in the isolation of growing up in a rural community that seemed far removed from life in the big cities. The lives I saw on television and read about in the newspapers and magazines appeared to me to be much bigger, more exciting, and more significant than my own. My life, by comparison, paled, seemed small, insignificant, and second-best. I longed to live in a big city, away from what I felt to be the deprivations of rural life. My life, it seemed, was always away from everything that was important.

Beyond that, I tormented myself by comparing my life, my body, and my anonymity to the grace, attractiveness, and fame of the professional athletes, movie stars, and other celebrities I admired and whose names were household words. For me, they had real lives, ones I could only envy. Moreover, I felt a deeper restlessness that had to do with my soul. Despite the genuine intimacy of a close family and a close-knit community within which I had dozens of friends and relatives, I ached for a singular, erotic intimacy with a soulmate. Finally, I lived with an inchoate anxiety that I didn’t understand and which mostly translated itself into fear, fear of not measuring up and fear of how I was living life in face of the eternal.

That was the cursed part, but all of this also brought a blessing. Inside the cauldron of that disquiet I discerned (heard) a call to religious life which I fought for a long time because it seemed the antithesis of everything I longed for. How can a burning restlessness, filled with eros, be a call to celibacy? How can an egotistical desire for fame, fortune, and recognition be an invitation to join a religious order whose charism is to live with the poor? It didn’t make sense, and, paradoxically, that’s why, finally, it was the only thing that did made sense. I gave in to its nudging and it was right for me.

It landed me inside religious life and what I’ve lived and learned there has helped me, slowly through the years, to process my own restlessness and begin to live inside my own skin. Beyond prayer and spiritual guidance, two intellectual giants in particular helped me. As a student, aged 19, I began to study Saint Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. My mind was still young and unformed but I grasped enough of what I was reading to begin to befriend the restless complexities inside my own soul – and inside the human soul in general. Even at age 19 (maybe particularly at 19) one can existentially understand Augustine’s dictum: You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.

And then there was Thomas Aquinas who asked: What is the adequate object of the human intellect and will? In short, what would we have to know and be in love with in order to satisfy every flame of restlessness within us? His answer: Everything! The adequate object of the human intellect and will is Being as such – God, all people, all nature. Only that would satisfy us.

Except … that’s not what we mostly think. The particular restlessness that I experienced in my youth is today in fact a near-universal disease. Virtually all of us believe that the good life is had only by those who live elsewhere, away from our own limited, ordinary, insignificant, and small-town lives. Our culture has colonized us to believe that wealth, celebrity, and comfort are the adequate object of the human intellect and will. They are, for us, “Being as such”. In our culture’s current perception, we look at the beautiful bodies, celebrity status, and wealth of our athletes, movie stars, television hosts, and successful entrepreneurs and believe that they have the good life and we don’t. We’re on the outside, looking in. We’re now, in effect, all farm kids in the outback envying life in the big city, a life accessible only to a highly select few, while we’re crucified by the false belief that life is only exciting elsewhere, not where we live.

But our problem is, as Rainer Marie Rilke once pointed out to an aspiring young poet who believed that his own humble surroundings didn’t provide him with the inspiration he needed for poetry, that if we can’t see the richness in the life we’re actually living then we aren’t poets.

An Honorable Defeat

February 18, 2019

In 1970, the famed British writer, Iris Murdoch, wrote a novel entitled, A Fairly Honorable Defeat. The story had numerous characters, both good and bad, but ultimately took its title from the travails of one character, Tallis Browne, who represents all that is decent, altruistic, and moral among the various characters. Despite being betrayed by most everyone, he stays the course in terms himself never betraying trust. But the story does not end well for him.

On the basis of his seeming defeat, Murdoch poses the question: Where’s justice? Where’s fairness? Shouldn’t goodness triumph? Murdoch, an agnostic, suggests that in reality a good life doesn’t always make for the triumph of goodness. However, if goodness sustains itself and does not betray itself, its defeat will be honorable.

So, for her, what you want to avoid is a dishonorable defeat, meaning: Defeat you will face, your goodness notwithstanding. Sometimes you cannot save the world or even the situation. But you can save your own integrity and bring that moral component to the world and to the situation and by doing that you preserve your own dignity. You went down in defeat, but in honor. Goodness then will not have suffered a dishonorable defeat.

That’s a beautiful stoicism and if you aren’t a believer it’s about as wise a counsel as there is: Be true to yourself! Don’t betray who and what you are, even if you find yourself as unanimity-minus-one. However, Christianity, while respecting this kind of stoicism, places the question of victory and defeat into a very different perspective.

Inside our Christian faith, defeat and victory are radically redefined. We speak, for instance, of the victory of the cross, of the day Jesus died as “Good” Friday, of the transforming power of humiliation, and of how we gain our lives by losing them. Earthly defeat, for us, can still be victory, just as earthily victory can be a sad defeat. Indeed, in a Christian perspective, without even considering the next life, sometimes our defeats and humiliations are what allows depth and richer life to flow into us and sometimes our victories rob us of the very things that bring us community, intimacy, and happiness. The paschal mystery radically redefines both defeat and victory.

But this understanding doesn’t come easily. It’s the antithesis of cultural wisdom. Indeed, it didn’t even come easy for Jesus’ contemporaries. After Jesus died in the most humiliating way a person could die at that time, by being crucified, the first generation of Christians had a massive struggle with both the fact that he died and particularly with the manner in which he died. First, for them, if Jesus was the long-awaited Messiah, he wasn’t supposed to die at all. God is above death and certainly beyond being killed by humans. Moreover, as a creedal doctrine, they believed that death was the result of sin and, thus, if someone did not sin, he or she was not supposed to die. But Jesus had died. Finally, most faith-perplexing of all, was the humiliating manner of his death. Crucifixion was designed by the Romans not just as capital punishment but as a manner of death that totally and publically humiliated the person’s body. Jesus died a most humiliating death. No one called Good Friday “good” during the first days and years following his death. However, given his resurrection, they intuited without explicitly understanding it, that Jesus’ defeat in the crucifixion was the ultimate triumph and that the categories that make for victory and defeat were now forever different.

Initially, they lacked the words to express this. For several years after the resurrection, Christians were reluctant to mention the manner of Jesus’ death. It was a defeat in the eyes of the world and they were at loss to explain it. So they remained mostly silent about it. St. Paul’s conversion and his subsequent insights changed this. As someone who was raised in the Jewish faith, Paul also struggled with explaining how a humiliating defeat in this world could be in fact a victory. However, after his conversion to Christianity he eventually understood how goodness could take on sin and even “become sin itself” for our sake. That radically flipped our conceptions of defeat and victory. The cross was now seen as the ultimate victory and, instead of the humiliation of the cross being a source of shame, it now became the crown jewel: “I preach nothing but the cross of Christ.” That gave us the passion narratives.

We live in a world that, mostly, still defines defeat and victory in terms of who gets to be on top in terms of success, adulation, fame, influence, reputation, money, comfort, pleasure, and security in this life. There will be plenty of defeats in our lives and if lack a Christian perspective then the best we can then do is to take Iris Murdoch’s advice to heart: Realistically, goodness will not triumph, so try to avoid a dishonorable defeat.

Our Christian faith, while honoring that truth, challenges us to something more.

Celibacy – A Personal Apologia

February 11, 2019

As a vowed, religious celibate I’m very conscious that today celibacy, whether lived out in a religious commitment or in other circumstances, is suspect, under siege, and is offering too little by way of a helpful apologia to its critics.

Do I believe in the value of consecrated celibacy? The only real answer I can give must come from my own life. What’s my response to a culture that, for the most part, believes celibacy is both a naiveté and a dualism that stands against the goodness of sexuality, renders its adherents less than fully human, and lies at the root of the clerical sexual abuse crisis within the Roman Catholic Church? What might I say in its defence?

First, that celibacy isn’t a basis for pedophilia? Virtually all empirical studies indicate that pedophilia is a diagnosis not linked to celibacy. But then let me acknowledge its downside: Celibacy is not the normal state for anyone. When God made the first man and woman, God said: “It is not good for the human being to be alone.” That isn’t just a statement about the constitutive place of community within our lives (though it is that); it’s a clear reference to sexuality, its fundamental goodness, and its God-intended place in our lives. From that it flows that to be a celibate, particularly to choose to be one, comes fraught with real dangers. Celibacy can, and sometimes does, lead to an unhealthy sense of one’s sexual and relational self and to a coldness that’s often judgmental. It can too, understandably, lead to an unhealthy sexual preoccupation within the celibate and it provides access to certain forms of intimacy within which a dangerous betrayal of trust can occur. Less recognized, but a huge danger, is that it can be a vehicle for selfishness. Simply put, without the conscriptive demands that come with marriage and child-raising there’s the ever-present danger that a celibate can, unconsciously, arrange his life too much to suit his own needs.

Thus celibacy is not for everyone; indeed it’s not for the many. It contains an inherent abnormality. Consecrated celibacy is not simply a different lifestyle. It’s anomalous, in terms of the unique sacrifice it asks of you, where, like Abraham going up the mountain to sacrifice Isaac, you’re asked to sacrifice what’s most precious to you. As Thomas Merton, speaking of his own celibacy, once said: The absence of woman is a fault in my chastity. But, for the celibate as for Abraham, that can have a rich purpose and contain its own potential for generativity.

As well, I believe that consecrated celibacy, like music or religion, needs to be judged by its best expressions and not by its aberrations. Celibacy should not be judged by those who have not given it a wholesome expression but by the many wonderful women and men, saints of the past and present, who have given it a wholesome and generative expression. One could name numerous saints of the past or wonderfully healthy and generative persons from our own generation as examples where vowed celibacy has made for a wholesome, happy life that inspires others: Mother Teresa, Oscar Romero, Raymond E. Brown, and Helen Prejean, to name just a few. Personally, I know many very generative, vowed celibates whose wholesomeness I envy and who make celibacy credible – and attractive.

Like marriage, though in a different way, celibacy offers a rich potential for intimacy and generativity. As a vowed celibate I am grateful for a vocation which has brought me intimately into the world of so many people. When I left home at a young age to enter the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, I confess, I didn’t want celibacy. Nobody should. I wanted to be a missionary and a priest and celibacy presented itself as the stumbling block. But once inside religious life, almost immediately, I loved the life, though not the celibacy part. Twice I delayed taking final vows, unsure about celibacy. Eventually I made the decision, a hard leap of trust, and took the vow for life. Full disclosure, celibacy has been for me singularly the hardest part of my more than fifty years in religious life … but, but, at the same time, it has helped create a special kind of entry into the world and into others’ lives that has wonderfully enriched my ministry.

The natural God-given desire for sexual intimacy, for exclusivity in affection, for the marriage bed, for children, for grandchildren, doesn’t leave you, and it shouldn’t. But celibacy has helped bring into my life a rich, consistent, deep intimacy. Reflecting on my celibate vocation, all I may legitimately feel is gratitude.

Celibacy isn’t for everyone. It excludes you from the normal; it seems brutally unfair at times; it’s fraught with dangers ranging from serious betrayal of trust to living a selfish life; and it’s a fault in your very chastity – but, if lived out in fidelity, it can be wonderfully generative and does not exclude you from either real intimacy or real happiness.

Ecumenism – The Path Forward

February 4, 2019

I was very blessed during my theological formation to have had the privilege of taking classes from two very renowned Catholic scholars, Avery Dulles and Raymond E. Brown. The former was an ecclesiologist whose books often became textbooks which were prescribed reading in seminaries and theology schools. The latter was a scripture scholar whose scholarship stands out, almost singularly, still nearly 30 years after his death. Nobody questions the scholarship, the personal integrity, or the faith-commitment of these men.

They were in different theological disciplines but what they shared, beyond the high respect of scholars and church persons everywhere, was a passion for ecumenism and a capacity to form deep friendships and invite warm dialogue across every kind of denominational and inter-religious line. Their books are studied not just in Roman Catholic circles, but in theological schools and seminaries in Protestant, Evangelical, Mormon, and Jewish seminaries as well. Both were deeply respected for their openness, friendship, and graciousness towards those who held religious views different than their own. Indeed, Raymond Brown spent of his most productive years teaching at Union Theological Seminary in New York, even as he, a Sulpician priest, more than anything else cherished his Roman Catholic identity and priesthood. After losing his own father and mother, he spoke of the Roman Catholic Church and his Sulpician community as “the family that still remains for me.”

And what these two shared in their vision for ecumenism was this: The path towards Christian unity, the road that will eventually bring all sincere Christians together into one community, around one altar, is not the way of somehow winning the other over to our own particular denomination, of getting others to admit that they are wrong and that we are right and of them returning to the true flock, namely, our particular denomination. In their view, that’s not the route forward, practically or theologically. The path forward needs to be, as Avery Dulles puts it, the path of “progressive convergence”. What is this path?

It begins with the honest admission by each of us that none of us, no one denomination, has the full truth, incarnates the full expression of church, and is fully faithful to the Gospel. We are all deficient in some ways and each of us in some ways is selective in terms of which parts of the Gospels we value and incarnate and which parts we ignore. And so the path forward is the path of conversion, personal and ecclesial, of admitting our selectiveness, of recognizing and valuing what other churches have incarnated, of reading scripture more deeply in search of what we have ignored and absented ourselves from, and of individually and collectively trying to live lives that are truer to Jesus Christ. By doing this, by each of us and each church living the Gospel more fully, we will “progressively converge”, that is, as we grow closer to Christ we will grow closer to each other and thus “progressively converge” around Christ and, as we do that, we will eventually find ourselves around one common altar and will see each other as part of the same community.

The path to unity then lies not in converting each other over, but in each of us living the Gospel more faithfully so as to grow closer to each other in Christ. This doesn’t mean that we do not take our divisions seriously, that we simplistically assert that all denominations are equal, or that we justify our divisions today by pointing to divisions that already existed in the New Testament churches. Rather we must all begin by each of us admitting that do not possess the full truth and that we are in fact far from being fully faithful.

Given that starting point, Raymond E. Brown then gives this challenge to all the churches: “recognition of the range of New Testament ecclesiological diversity makes the claim of any church to be absolutely faithful to the Scriptures much more complex. We are faithful but in our own specific way; and both ecumenics and biblical studies should make us aware that there are other ways of being faithful to which we do not do justice. … In short, a frank study of the New Testament ecclesiologies should convince every Christian community that it is neglecting part of the New Testament witness. … I contend that in a divided Christianity, instead of reading the Bible to assure ourselves that we are right, we would do better to read it to discover where we have not been listening. As we Christians of different churches try to give hearing to the previously muffled voices, our views of the church will grow larger; and we will come closer to sharing common views. Then the Bible will be doing for us what Jesus did in his time, namely, convincing those who have ears to hear that all is not right, for God is asking of them more than they thought.”

Indeed: God is asking more of us than we think.

Spirituality and Spiritualities

January 28, 2019

What is spirituality and what makes for different spiritualities?

The word spirituality is relatively new within the English-speaking world, at least in terms of how it is being used today. Prior to the 1960s you would have found very few books in English with the word “spirituality” in their title, though that wasn’t true for the French-speaking world. A half-century ago spiritual writers within Roman Catholicism wrote about spirituality but mostly under titles such as “The Spiritual Life” and “Ascetical Theology”, or under the guise of devotional treatises. Protestants and Evangelicals, for the most part, identified spirituality with Roman Catholic devotions and steered clear of the word.

What is spirituality, as generally understood within church circles today? Definitions abound within spiritual writings of every sort, each of which defines spirituality with a particular end-goal in mind. Many of these definitions are helpful within academic discussions but are less so outside those circles. So, let me risk simplifying things with a definition that’s wide, interreligious, ecumenical, and hopefully simple enough to be helpful.

Spirituality is the attempt by an individual or a group to meet and undergo the presence of God, other persons, and the cosmic world so as to come into a community of life and celebration with them. The generic and specific disciplines and habits that develop from this become the basis for various spiritualities.

Stripped to its root, spirituality can be spoken of as a “discipline” to which someone submits. For example, in Christianity we call ourselves “disciples” of Jesus Christ. The word “discipleship” takes it root in the word “discipline”. A disciple is someone who puts herself under a discipline. Hinduism and Buddhism call this a “yoga”. To be a practicing Hindu or Buddhist you need be practicing a certain spiritual “discipline”, which they term a yoga. And that’s what constitutes any religious practice.

All religious practice is a question of putting oneself under a certain “discipline” (which makes you a “disciple”). But we can distinguish among various religious “disciplines”. Aristotle gave us a distinction which can be helpful here. He distinguished between a “genus” and a “species”; e.g., bird is a genus, robin is a species. Thus looking at various spiritualities we can distinguish between “generic” disciplines and “specific” disciplines: Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Taoism, and various Native Religions are “generic” spiritualities. But within each of these you will then find a wide range of “specific” spiritualities. For example within the wide category of Christianity you will find Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Episcopalians, Protestants, Evangelicals, Mormons, and Congregationalists. Each of these is a species.

Then we can distinguish still further: Within each of those you will find a wide range of “sub-species”, that is, particular Christian “disciplines”. For instance, within Roman Catholicism, we can speak of persons who have Charismatic spirituality or a Jesuit, Franciscan, Carmelite, or Salesian spirituality, to offer just a few examples. Notice the pattern here – from genus to species to sub-species. As a spirituality, Christianity is a genus, Roman Catholicism is a species, and being a Jesuit or a Franciscan (or, in my case, being an Oblate of Mary Immaculate) is a sub-species.

I apologize if this seems a bit irreverent, that is, to speak so clinically of genus, species, and sub-species in reference to cherished faith traditions wherein martyrs blood has been shed. But the hope is that this can help us understand more clearly a complex issue and its roots.

No one serves one’s God fully, just as no one lives out one’s God-given dignity fully. We need guidance. We need trusted, God-blessed patterns of behavior and disciplines that ultimately come from divine revelation itself. We call these religions. Then, inside of these religions, we can be further helped by models of behavior lived out by certain saints and wisdom figures. Thus, inside of Christianity, we have the time-tested example and wisdom of 2000 years of faithful women and men who have carved out various “disciplines” which can be helpful for us to better live out our own discipleship. Jesuit, Franciscan, Carmelite, Salesian, Mazenodian, Charismatic, Opus Dei, Focolare, Catholic Worker, Sant’Egidio, Cursillo, Acts-Missions, and Catholic Christian Outreach, among others, are spiritualities, and just as the exercise and diet regiments of health experts can help us keep our bodies more healthy, so too can the discipleship practices of particular saints, spiritual giants, and wisdom figures help make our following of Jesus more faithful and generative.

Which one of these spiritualities is best for you? That depends upon your individual temperament, your particular vocation and call, and your circumstance within life. One size doesn’t fit all. Just as each snowflake is different from every other snowflake, so too with us. God gives us different gifts and different callings and life puts us in different situations.

They say the book you need to read finds you and finds you at the exact time that you need to read it. That’s true too for spiritualities. The one you need will find you, and will find you at the exact time when you need it.

Snake-bitten …

January 21, 2019

Everything is of one piece. Whenever we don’t take that seriously, we pay a price.

The renowned theologian, Hans Urs Von Balthasar gives an example of this. Beauty, he submits, is not some little “extra” that we can value or denigrate according to personal taste and temperament, like some luxury that we say we cannot afford. Like truth and goodness, it’s one of the properties of God and thus demands to be taken seriously as goodness and truth. If we neglect or denigrate beauty, he says, we will soon enough begin to neglect other areas of our lives. Here are his words:

“Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters without taking then along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance. We can be sure that whoever sneers at her name, as if she were an ornament of a bourgeois past, whether he admits it or not, can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love.”

Here’s a simpler expression of that. There’s a delightful little African tale that highlights the interconnectedness of everything and illustrates how, if we separate a thing from its sisters, we soon pay a price. The tale goes this way:

Once upon a time, when animals still talked, the mice on a farm called a summit of all the other animals. They were worried, they lamented, because they had seen the mistress of the house buy a mousetrap. They were now in danger. But the other animals scoffed at their anxiety. The cow said that she had nothing to worry about. A tiny little contraption couldn’t harm her. She could crush it with her foot. The pig reacted in a similar way. What did he have to worry about in the face of a tiny trap? The chicken also announced that it had no fear of this gadget. “It’s your concern. No worry for me!” it told the mice.

But all things are interconnected and that soon became evident. The mistress set the mousetrap and, on the very first night, heard it snap. Getting out of her bed to look what it had caught and she saw that it had trapped a snake by its tail. In trying to free the snake she was bitten and the poison soon had her feeling sick and running a fever. She went to the doctor who gave her medicines to combat the poison and advised her: “What you need now to get better is chicken broth.” (You can guess where the rest of this is going.) They slaughtered the chicken, but her fever lingered. Relatives and neighbors came to visit. More food was needed. They slaughtered the pig. Eventually the poison killed her. A huge funeral ensued. A lot of food was needed. The slaughtered the cow.

The moral of the story is clear. Everything is interconnected and our failure to see that leaves us in peril. Blindness to our interdependence, willful or not, is dangerous. We are inextricably tied to each other and to everything in the world. We can protest to the contrary but reality will hold its ground. And so, we cannot truly value one thing while we disdain something else. We cannot really love one person while we hate someone else. And we cannot give ourselves an exemption in one moral area and hope to be morally healthy as a whole. Everything is of one piece. There are no exceptions. When we ignore that truth we are eventually be snake-bitten by it.

I emphasize this because today, virtually everywhere, a dangerous tribalism is setting in. Everywhere, not unlike the animals in that African tale, we see families, communities, churches, and whole countries focusing more or less exclusively on their own needs without concern for other families, communities, churches, and countries. Other people’s problems, we believe, are not our concern. From the narrowness in our churches, to identity politics, to whole nations setting their own needs first, we hear echoes of the cow, pig, and chicken saying: “Not my concern! I’ll take care of myself. You take care of yourself!” This will come back to snake-bite us.

We will eventually pay the price for our blindness and non-concern and we will pay that price politically, socially, and economically. But we will even pay a higher price personally. What that snake-bite will do is captured in Von Balthasar’s warning: Whoever ignores or denigrates beauty will, he asserts, eventually be unable to pray or to love. That’s true too in all cases when we ignore our interconnectedness with others. By ignoring the needs of others we eventually corrupt our own wholeness so that we are no longer be able to treat ourselves with respect and empathy and, when that happens, we lose respect and empathy for life itself – and for God – because whenever reality isn’t respected it bites back with a mysterious vengeance.

Wendy Beckett – RIP

January 14, 2019

No community should botch its deaths. The renowned anthropologist, Mircea Eliade, suggested this and its truth applies to communities at every level. No family should send off a member without proper reflection, ritual, and blessings.

On December 26^th, 2018, the family of art and the family of faith lost a cherished member. Sr. Wendy Beckett, aged 88, famed art critic, committed woman of faith, and nurturing friend to many, died. Since 1970, Sr. Wendy had been living as a consecrated virgin and hermit on the grounds of a Carmelite convent in England, praying for several hours a day, translating religious tracts, and going to daily Eucharist.

Early on, after choosing this way of life, she began to study art history, started writing articles for magazines, and published the first of more than 30 books on art. In 1991, she did a short BBC documentary on television and was an immediate hit with a wide audience. She soon began to host her own BBC show, Sister Wendy’s Odyssey, which was so popular it sometimes attracted one quarter of the British television audience.

Anyone who watched her programs was soon taken by three things: The absolute joy that was present in her as she discussed a piece of art; her capacity to articulate in a simple and clear language the meaning of a particular work of art; and her earthy appreciation of sensuality and the nude human body which she, as a consecrated virgin, could describe with a disarming appreciation.

All of those qualities (her joy, her simplicity of language, and her capacity to give the pure gaze of admiration to the nude human body) were what endeared her to her audience but also brought scorn from a number of critics. They mocked her simplicity of language, criticized her for not being more critical of the art she presented, and were put off by that fact that she, a consecrated virgin, could so comfortably discuss sensuality and the nude human body. They found it difficult to digest that this pious woman, a consecrated virgin, clad in a traditional religious habit, sporting thick glasses and buck-teeth, could be so much at ease with sensuality. Robert Hughes, of Time magazine, once mocked her as a “relentlessly chatty pseudo-hermit with her signature teeth” whose observations were “pitched to a 15-year-old” audience. Germaine Greer challenged her competence to describe erotic art given the fact that she was a consecrated virgin.

Sr. Wendy mostly smiled at these criticisms and countered them this way: “I’m not a critic”, she would say, “I am an appreciator”. As to her comfort with sensuality and the nude body, she would answer that just because she was committed to celibacy did not mean that she was not fully appreciative of human sensuality, sexuality, and the beauty of the human body – all of it.

There are of course different ways in which the unclothed human body can be perceived, and Sr. Wendy was a smiling, unapologetic appreciator of one of them. An unclothed human body can be shown as “nude” or as “naked”. Good art uses nudity to honor the human body (surely one of God’s great masterpieces) while pornography uses nakedness to exploit the human body.

Sr. Wendy was also unapologetic about the fact that her consecrated virginity did not disprivilege her from appreciating the erotic. She was right. Somewhere we have developed the false, debilitating notion that consecrated celibates must, like little children, be protected from the erotic so that even while they’re supposed to be doctors of the soul they should be shielded from the deep impulses and secrets of the soul. Sr. Wendy didn’t buy that. Neither should we. Chastity is not intended to be that kind of naiveté.

Full disclosure: I had a personal link to Sr. Wendy. Many years ago, when I was young and still searching for my own voice as a spiritual writer, she sent me a large, beautifully- framed, print of Paul Klee’s, famous 1923 painting, Eros. For the past 29 years it has hung on a wall behind my computer screen so that I see it every time I write and it has helped me understand that it’s God’s color, God’s light, and God’s energy that inform erotic longing.

In 1993, while visiting the monastery where Sr. Wendy lived, I had the opportunity to go out to a restaurant with her. Our waiter was initially taken aback by her traditional religious habit. With some trepidation he timidly asked her: “Sister, might I bring you some water?” She flashed her trademark smile and said: “No, water’s for washing. Bring me some wine!” The waiter relaxed and much enjoyed bantering with her for the rest of the meal.

And that was Sr. Wendy, an anomaly to many: a consecrated virgin discoursing on eros, a hermit but famous art critic, and an intellectually brilliant woman who befuddled critics with her simplicity. But, like all great minds, there was a remarkable consistency at a deeper level, at that place where the critic and the appreciator are one.

Struggling for Sustenance

January 7, 2019

We all struggle to not give in to coldness and hatred. This was even a struggle for Jesus. Like the rest of us he had to struggle, mightily at times, to remain warm and loving.

It’s interesting to trace this out in the Gospel of Luke. This is the gospel of prayer. Luke shows Jesus praying more than all the other gospels combined. Moreover, in Luke’s gospel, Jesus’ disciples were intrigued by his prayer. They sensed something extraordinary about Jesus, not because he could walk on water and do miracles, but because, unlike the rest of us, he could in fact turn the cheek. He was strong enough not to give into coldness in the face of hatred, so strong that it threatened his very life. In every situation, no matter how bitter, he could be understanding and forgiving and never doubt that love and grace are what’s most real.

His disciples sensed that he drew this strength from a hidden source, some deep well of sustenance which he called his Father and which he accessed through prayer. For this reason, in Luke’s gospel, the disciples ask Jesus to teach them how to pray. They too want draw sustenance from this source.

But we see too in Luke’s gospel that this doesn’t always come without struggle. Sometimes things seem easy for Jesus; he meets love and understanding, and his ministry is joyous and easy. But when things begin to collapse, when the forces of hatred begin to encircle him, when majority of his followers abandon and betray him, and when his own death becomes imminent, then like the rest of us, fear and paranoia threaten to overwhelm him. This is in fact the essence of his struggle in the Garden of Gethsemane, his so-called agonia.

Simply put, it’s easy enough to be understanding, loving, and forgiving when you are bathed in them. It’s quite another thing when your very adherence to them is making you the object of misunderstanding, hatred, and murder. And so, in Gethsemane, we see Jesus prostrate, humanly devastated, on the ground, struggling mightily to cling to a cord of sustenance that had always sustained him in trust, love, and forgiveness and had kept paranoia, hatred, and despair at bay. And the answer doesn’t come easy for him. He has to pray repeatedly and, in Luke’s words, “sweat blood” before he can regain his balance and root himself again in that grace that sustained him throughout his ministry. Love and forgiveness are not easy. Not giving into to anger, bitterness, self-pity, hatred, and the desire for vengeance didn’t come easy for Jesus either.

And that’s our ultimate moral struggle: to not give into to our natural reaction whenever we are not respected, slighted, ignored, misunderstood, hated, or in small or large ways victimized. In the face of these, paranoia automatically takes over and most everything inside us conspires to create an obsessive pressure towards giving back in kind, slight for slight, disrespect for disrespect, ugliness for ugliness, hatred for hatred, violence for violence.

But there’s another possibility: Like Jesus, who himself had to struggle mightily to not give in to coldness and hatred, we too can draw strength through the same umbilical cord that nurtured him. His Father, God’s grace and strength, can nurture us too.

In his famous movie, The Passion of the Christ, Mel Gibson focuses on the physical suffering Jesus had to endure during his passion and death. Partly this has some merit since Jesus’ sufferings were in fact pretty horrific. But mostly it misses the point, as we see from the gospels. They make it a point to minimize any focus on the physical sufferings of Jesus. For the gospels, Jesus’ passion is not a physical drama but a moral one, indeed the ultimate moral drama. The real struggle for Jesus as he sweated blood in Gethsemane was not whether he would allow himself to die or invoke divine power and escape. The question was only about how he was going to die: In bitterness or love? In hatred or forgiveness?

That’s also our ultimate moral struggle, one which won’t just confront us at the moment of death but one which confronts us daily, hourly. In every situation in our lives, small or large, where we are unfairly ignored, slighted, insulted, hated, or victimized in any way, we face a choice of how to respond: Bitterness or understanding? Hatred or love? Vengeance or forgiveness?

And, like Jesus struggling in Gethsemane, we will have to struggle to continue to cling onto something beyond our natural instincts, beyond common sense, beyond our cultural dictates. Doing what comes naturally will not serve us well. Something beyond our DNA needs to be accessed.

The first word out of Jesus’ mouth in the Synoptic gospels is the word metanoia. Among its other meanings, it’s the opposite of paranoia. It means to trust even in the face of distrust. Paranoia is natural to us, metanoia isn’t; it requires struggling to draw sustenance from a deeper source.

My Top Ten Books in Spirituality for 2018

December 31, 2018

This year I will restrict myself to focusing only on books that deal explicitly with spirituality, notwithstanding some very fine novels and books on social commentary that I read this year.

But first, an apologia: Taste is idiosyncratic. Keep that in mind as you read these recommendations. These are books that I liked, that spoke to me, and that I believe can be helpful for someone seeking guidance and inspiration on the journey. They may not speak to you in the same way.

Which spiritual books did I find most helpful this year?

Veronica Mary Rolf, Julian’s Gospel, Illuminating the Life and Revelations of Julian of Norwich. Julian of Norwich is one of the great Christian mystics, but her thought is not easily accessible to most readers. This book gives a good introduction to her life and her writings and highlights as well how much of a spiritual oasis she was in a time when most parts of Christianity conceived of God in very harsh terms.
John Shea, To Dare The Our Father, A Transformative Spiritual Practice. Shea takes up each article within the Lord’s Prayer to challenge us regarding various aspects of our lives, not least vis-à-vis our struggle to come to reconciliation with others. The section on Jesus’ own struggle in Gethsemane is especially insightful.
Gerhard Lohfink, Is This All There Is? A world-class scripture scholar takes up the question of the afterlife as spoken of in scripture. This is first-rate scholarship rendered accessible to everyone. Lohfink is a gifted scholar and gifted teacher. This is a graduate course on the afterlife made available to everyone regardless of academic background.
Benoit Standaert, Spirituality An Art of Living. Standaert is a Dutch Benedictine monk and this book (easy to read because it is broken up into short meditations) is gem of wisdom and challenge. Those of you with Protestant and Evangelical backgrounds schooled on Oswald Chambers’ classic will know what I mean when I say this book is a “My Utmost” for all Christians.
Thomas Moore, Ageless Soul, The Lifelong Journey Toward Meaning and Joy. Moore is always brilliant and this book is no exception. He’s one of our generation’s best defenders of soul. But this book comes with a bit of a warning label: Some people may find it a bit too much of a stretch in terms of lacking religious boundaries. Be that as it may, it’s a brilliant book.
Elizabeth Johnson, Creation and the Cross, The Mercy of God for a Planet in Peril. One of the foremost Catholic theologians of our generation pushes her thought (and ours) a little further apposite the issue of how the incarnation of God, in Christ, is a “deep incarnation” that affects physical creation as well as humanity. Christ came not only to save the people on this earth, but also to save the earth itself. Christ also takes in nature. Johnson helps explain how that might be better understood. The book contains an expert theological synthesis on Christian views of why Christ came to earth.
Jordan Peterson, 12 Rules for Life, An Antidote to Chaos. This is one of the most argued about books of this past year. It’s brilliant, a good read, even if you don’t agree with everything or even most of what Peterson says. Some conservatives have used the book very selectively to suit their own causes; just as some liberals have unfairly rejected the book because of some of its attacks on liberal excesses. Both these readings, to my mind, are unfair. Peterson’s overall depth and nuance doesn’t allow for the way it has been misused on the right and criticized on the left. In the end, Peterson lands where Jesus did, with the Sermon on the Mount. Its title is somewhat unfortunate in that it can give the impression that this is just another popular self-help book. It’s anything but that.
Makoto Fujimura, Silence and Beauty. This is a beautiful book, written by an artist highly attuned to aesthetics. It’s a book about art, faith, and religion. Fujimura is a deeply committed Christian and an artist. For most people this would constitute a tension, but Fujimura not only shows how he holds faith and art together, he also makes a sophisticated apologia for religion.
Pablo d’Ors, Biography of Silence. Ors is a Spanish author of both novels and spiritual essays. This book (small, short, and an easy read) can be a good shot in the arm for anyone who, however unconsciously, feels that prayer isn’t worth the time and the effort. Writing out of a long habit of silent meditation, Ors shows us what kind of gifts prayer can bring into our lives.
Trevor Herriot, Towards a Prairie Atonement. Herriot is a Canadian writer and in this, his latest book, he submits that just as when we wound others reconciliation demands some kind of atonement, so too with our relationship with earth. We need to make some positive atonement to nature for our historical abuses.

Happy reading!

The Double Message of Christmas

December 17, 2018

Christmas 2018

I’ve never been happy with some of my activist friends who send out Christmas cards with messages like: May the Peace of Christ Disturb You! Can’t we have one day a year to be happy and celebrate without having our already unhappy selves shaken with more guilt? Isn’t Christmas a time when we can enjoy being children again? Moreover, as Karl Rahner once said, isn’t Christmas a time when God gives us permission to be a happy? So why not?

Well, it’s complex. Christmas is a time when God gives us permission to be happy, when the message from God speaks through the voice of Isaiah and says: “Comfort my people. Speak words of comfort!” But Christmas is also a time that points out that when God was born two thousand years ago there wasn’t any room for him to be born in all the normal homes and places of the day. There was no room for him at the inn. Peoples’ busy lives and expectations kept them from offering him a place to be born. That hasn’t changed.

But first, the comfort of his birth: A number of years ago, I participated in a large diocesan synod. At one point the animator in charge had us divide into small groups and each group was asked to answer the question: What’s the single most-important thing that the church should challenge the world with right now?

The groups reported back and each group named some important spiritual or moral challenge: “We need to challenge our society towards more justice!” “We need to challenge the world to have real faith and not confuse God’s word with its own wishes.” “We need to challenge our world towards a more responsible sexual ethos. We’ve lost our way!” Wonderful, needed challenges, all of them. But no group came back and said: “We need to challenge the world to receive God’s consolation!” Granted, there’s a lot of injustice, violence, racism, sexism, greed, selfishness, sexual irresponsibility, and self-serving faith around; but most of the adults in our world are also living in a lot pain, anxiety, disappointment, loss, depression, and unresolved guilt. Everywhere you look, you see heavy hearts. Moreover, so many people living with hurt and disappointment do not see God and the church as an answer to their pain but rather as somehow part of its cause.

So our churches, in preaching God’s word, need first of all to assure the world of God’s love, God’s concern, and God’s forgiveness. Before doing anything else, God’s word is meant to comfort us; indeed, to be the ultimate source of all comfort. Only when the world knows God’s consolation will it accept the concomitant challenge.

And that challenge, among others, is to then make room for Christ at the inn, that is, to open our hearts, our homes, and our world as places were Christ can come and live. From the safe distance of two thousand years we too easily make a scathing judgment on the people at the time of Jesus’ birth for not knowing what Mary and Joseph were carrying, for not making a proper place for Jesus to be born, and for not recognizing him as Messiah afterwards. How could they be so blind? But that same judgment is still being made of us. We aren’t exactly making room in our own inns.

When a new person is born into this world, he or she takes a space where before there was no one. Sometimes that new person is warmly welcomed and a cozy, loving space is instantly created and everyone around is happy for this new invasion. But that isn’t always the case; sometimes, as was the case with Jesus, there is no space created for the new person to enter the world and his or her presence is unwelcome.

We see this today (and this will constitute a judgment on our generation) in the reluctance, almost all over the world, to welcome new immigrants, to make room for them at the inn. The United Nations estimates that there are 19.5 million refugees in the world today, persons whom no one will welcome. Why not? We are not bad people and we are capable most times of being wonderfully generous. But letting this flood of immigrants enter our lives would disturb us. Our lives would have to change. We would lose some of our present comforts, many of our old familiarities, and some of our securities.

We are not bad people, neither were those innkeepers two thousand years ago who, not knowing what was unfolding, in inculpable ignorance, turned Mary and Joseph away. I’ve always nursed a secret sympathy for them. Maybe because I am still, unknowingly, doing exactly what they did. A friend of mine is fond of saying: “I’m against more immigrants being allowed in … now that we’re in!”

The peace of Christ, the message inside of Christ’s birth, and the skewed circumstances of his birth, if understood, cannot but disturb. May they also bring deep consolation.

Outside the City

December 10, 2018

God, it seems, favors the powerless, the unnoticed, children, babies, outsiders, and refugees with no resources or place to go.

That’s why Jesus was born outside the city, in a stable, unnoticed, outside all fanfare, away from all major media, and away from all the persons and events that were deemed important at the time, humble and anonymous. God works like that. Why?

In the rock opera, Jesus Christ Superstar, that question is asked of Jesus: Why’d you choose such a backward time in such a strange land? If you’d come today you could have reached a whole nation. Israel in 4 BC had no mass communication.

Scripture answers by telling us that God’s ways are not our ways and our ways are not God’s ways. That’s true here. We tend to understand power by how it works in our world. There it works through popularity, through mass media, through historical privilege, through financial clout, through higher education, through idiosyncratic genius, and, not infrequently, through raw aggression, greed, and insensitivity to the needs of others and of nature.

But even a quick reading of scripture tells us that’s not how God works. The God that Jesus incarnates doesn’t enter into this world with a huge splash, as a royal birth eagerly anticipated and then announced by all the major media outlets, with photos of him and his parents on the cover of every popular magazine, with universal predictions as to his future greatness and influence, and then with privileged access to the best educational institutions and circles of power and influence.

Clearly, clearly, that’s not the story of Jesus’ birth, nor of how his life unfolded. God, as scripture shows, works more through anonymity than through the headlines, more through the poor than the powerful, and more through those outside the circles of power than those inside them. When we examine how God works, we see it’s no accident that Jesus was born outside the city and that after he was crucified he was also buried outside the city.

God’s work in our world generally does not make the headlines. God never breaks into our world or into our consciousness by showy displays of power. God works more discretely, in quiet, touching soul, touching conscience, and touching that previously touched part inside of us where we still unconsciously bear the memory of once, long before birth, being touched, caressed, and loved by God. That’s why Christ was born into this world as a baby and not as superstar, as someone whose only power was the capacity to touch and soften the hearts of those around him. Babies overpower no one, physically, intellectually, or athletically. They lie helpless and cry for love and care. That’s why, paradoxically, at the end of the day, they’re more powerful than anyone else. No physical, intellectual, or athletic power can ultimately touch the human conscience as can a baby – and similar sights of innocent helplessness, a wounded bird, an abandoned kitten, a young child alone and crying. What’s best in us enflames, healthily, in the presence of powerlessness and innocence.

That’s how God enters into us, gently, unnoticed. No big splash. That’s also why God tends to bypass circles of power to favor the abandoned and vulnerable. For example, when the Gospel of Luke records how John the Baptist came to be specially blessed, it takes a scathing swipe at both the civic and religious powers of its time. It names all the major civil and religious leaders of the time (the Roman rulers, the kings in Palestine, and the religious high priests) and then tells us plainly that the word of God bypassed them all and came instead to John, a solitary, living in the wilderness. (Luke 3, 1-3) According to the Gospels, the wilderness is where we’re most likely to find and experience God’s presence because God tends to bypasses the centers of power and influence to find a place instead in the hearts of those outside those circles.

You see this too, though admittedly without the same theological weight as is manifest in scripture, in the various apparitions of Mary, Jesus’ mother, that have been approved by the church. What’s common to all of them? Mary has never appeared to a president, a pope, a major religious leader, a Wall Street banker, the CEO of a major company, or even to an academic theologian in his study. None of these. She’s appeared to children, to a young woman of no earthly importance, to an illiterate peasant, and to various other persons of no worldly status.

We tend to understand power as residing in financial influence, political clout, charismatic talent, media influence, physical strength, athletic prowess, grace, health, wit, and attractiveness. On the surface, that assessment is accurate enough, and indeed none of these are bad in themselves. But, looked at more deeply, as we see in the birth of Christ, God’s word bypasses the centers of power and gestates instead in the hearts and consciences of those outside the city.

A Different Kind of Bucket-List

December 3, 2018

What’s still unfinished in your life?

Well, there’s always a lot that’s unfinished in everyone’s life. Nothing is ever really finished. Our lives, it seems, are simply interrupted by our dying. Most of us don’t complete our lives, we just run out of time. So, consciously or unconsciously, we make a bucket-list of things we still want to see, do, and finish before we die.

What do we still want to do? A number of things probably immediately come to the fore: We want to see our children grow up. We want to see our daughter’s wedding. We want to see our grandchildren. We want to finish this last work of art, of writing, of building. We want to see our 80^th birthday. We want to reconcile with our family.

Beyond these, more important things, we generally have another list of things we were too busy, preoccupied, or economically disadvantaged to do earlier in life: We want to walk the Camino, travel to the Holy Land, see the historical sites of Europe, back-pack through parts of Asia, travel the country with our grandkids, enjoy our retirement.

But in fantasizing about what’s unfinished in our lives there’s the danger of missing out on the richness of what’s actually going on in our lives and our real task in the moment. The better question is: How do I want to live now so as to be ready to die when it’s my time?

In a wonderful little book on contemplation, Biography of Silence, Spanish author, Pablo d’Ors, stares his mortality in the face and decides that this is what he wants to do in face of the inalienable fact that he’s one day to die. Here’s his bucket list: “I have decided to stand up and open my eyes. I have decided to eat and drink in moderation, to sleep as necessary, to write only what contributes toward improving those who read me, to abstain from greed, and never compare myself to others. I have also decided to water my plants and care for an animal. I will visit the sick, I will converse with the lonely, and I will not let much time go by before playing with a child. In the same manner I have decided to recite my prayers every day, to bow several times before the things I consider sacred, to celebrate the Eucharist, to listen to the Word, to break bread and share the wine, to give peace, to sing in unison. And to go for walks, which I find essential. And to light the fire, which is also essential. And to shop without hurry, to greet my neighbors even when I do not like seeing their faces, to subscribe to a newspaper, to regularly call my friends and siblings on the phone. And to take excursions, swim in the sea at least once a year, and to read only good books, or reread those that I have liked. … I will live for those things according to an ethics of attention and care. And this is how I will arrive at a happy old age, when I will contemplate, humble and proud at the same time, the small but grand orchard that I have cultivated. Life as cult, culture, and cultivation.”

Life as a cult, culture, and cultivation: I’m a two-time cancer survivor. When first diagnosed with cancer seven years ago, the prognosis was good. I had a scare, but time still stretched out endlessly before me. But when the cancer returned four years ago, the doctors were less optimistic and told me, in unequivocal terms, that my time was probably short, no more endless days. That prognosis clarified my thoughts and feelings as nothing ever before. Stunned, I went home, sat down in prayer, and then wrote this mini-creed for myself, with a different kind of bucket-list:

I am going to strive to be as productive as long as I can.

I am going to make every day and every activity as precious and enjoyable as possible.

I am going to strive to be as gracious, warm, and charitable as possible.

I am going to strive to be as healthy as long as I can.

I am going to strive to accept others’ love in a deeper way than I have up to now.

I am going to strive to live a more-fully “reconciled” life. No room for past hurts anymore.

I am going to strive to keep my sense of humor intact.

I am going to strive to be as courageous and brave as I can.

I am going to strive, always, to never look on what I am losing, but rather to look at

how wonderful and full my life has been and is.

And, I am going to, daily, lay all of this at God’s feet through prayer.

Not incidentally, since then I have also begun to water plants, care for a feral cat, and feed all the neighborhood birds. Life as cult, culture, and cultivation.

A Lesson in a Parking Lot

November 26, 2018

Our natural instincts serve us well, to a point. They’re self-protective and that’s healthy too, to a point. Let me explain.

Recently I was at a football game with a number of friends. We arrived at the game in two cars and parked in the stadium’s underground parking lot. Our tickets were in different parts of the stadium and so we separated for the game, each of us finding our own seats. When the game ended, I arrived at the cars with one of our party about ten minutes before the others showed up. During that wait, my friend and I scanned the crowd, looking for members of our party. But our scanning eyes drew some unwelcome attention. Two women approached us and, angrily, demanded why we had been looking at them: “Why were you looking at us? Are you trying to pick us up?”

That’s when natural instinct cuts in. Immediately, before any rational reflection had a chance to mitigate my thoughts and feelings, there was an automatic flash of anger, of indignation, of injustice, of coldness, of shame, and, yes, of hatred. Those feelings weren’t asked for; they simply flooded in. And, with them, came the concomitant accusatory thoughts: “If this is the “Me Too” movement; I’m against it! This is unfair!”

Fortunately, none of this was expressed. I apologized politely and explained that we were scanning the crowd for our lost party. The women passed on, no harm done, but the feelings lingered, lingered until I had a chance to process them, set them into perspective, and honor them for precisely what they are, instinctual, self-protective, feelings that are meant eventually to be replaced by something else, namely, by an understanding that goes beyond reflexive reaction.

On reflection, I didn’t see this incident as an aberration of the “Me Too” movement or as something to be indignant about. Rather, it helped me realize why there is a “Me Too” movement to begin with. The reaction of these two women no doubt was triggered by a history of injustice that they themselves (or other women they’ve known) have experienced in terms of sexual harassment, unwanted solicitation, and gender violence – injustices that absolutely dwarf the mini-mosquito bite of “injustice” that I experienced by their gratuitous remark.

It’s not without reason that this kind of exchange occurs in parking lots. Recently, I read statistics from a study that concluded that more than 80% of women in America have experienced some form of sexual harassment in their lifetime. In my naiveté, that figure seemed high, so I asked several women colleagues for their reaction to that statistic. Their reaction caught both me and my naiveté by surprise. Their reaction: “80% is far too low; it’s everyone! Rare is the woman who goes through life without experiencing some form of sexual harassment in her life.” Given that perspective, the paranoia expressed in the parking lot no longer seemed out of order.

Something else too: Reflecting further on this, I began to see more clearly the distance between natural instinct and mature empathy. Nature gives us powerful instincts that serve us well, to a point. They are inherently self-protective, selfish, even as they contain within them a certain amount of natural empathy. Instinct can sometimes be wonderfully sympathetic. For example, we are naturally drawn to reach out to a helpless child, a wounded bird, or a lost kitten. But what draws us to these is still, however subtle, self-interest. At the end of the day, our reaching out to them makes us feel better and their helplessness poses absolutely no threat to us. Natural instinct can be quite empathic when it is not threatened in any way.

But the situation changes, and very quickly, when any kind of threat is perceived; when, to put it metaphorically, something or somebody “is in your face”. Then our natural empathy slams shut like a trap door, our warmth turns cold, and every instinct inside us raises its self-interested head and voice. That’s what I felt in the parking lot at the football game.

And the danger then is to confuse those feelings with the bigger truth of the situation and with who we really are and what we really believe in. At that point, natural instinct no longer serves us well and, indeed, is no longer protective of our long-term good. What’s good for us long-term is, at that moment, hidden from our instincts. At moments like this we are called to an empathy beyond any feelings of having been slighted and beyond the ideologies we can lean on to justify our indignation: “This is political correctness (of the right or the left) gone amuck! This is an aberration!”

Our feelings are important and need to be acknowledged and honored, but we’re always more than our feelings. We’re called beyond instinct to empathy, to pray that the day will soon come when these two women, and their daughters and granddaughters, will no longer need to feel any threat in a parking lot.