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.

Our Lack of Welcome

November 19, 2018

“Widows, orphans, and strangers”, that’s code in scripture for the three most vulnerable groups within a society at any given time. And both the great Jewish prophets and Jesus, himself, assure us that ultimately we will be judged by how we treated these while we were alive.

It’s interesting to look at any given book in the bible ask this question: “What did the author of this book consider as the very essence of religion? You’ll get different answers. For example, if you had asked that question to the authors of Exodus, Deuteronomy, or Numbers, they would have answered that what was central to their faith was proper religious practice, keeping the Commandments and being faithful to the other prescribed codes of religious practice of their time.

However when the great prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Joel) came along they painted a different picture. For them, true religiosity was not identified simply with fidelity to religious practice; it was judged rather on how one treated the poor. For them, the quality of your faith is to be judged by the quality of justice in the land; and the quality of justice in the land is always to be judged by how “widows, orphans, and strangers” fare while you are alive. For the prophets, the practice of justice took priority over proper religious belonging and fidelity to religious practice.

We see numerous sayings by the prophets that warn us that what God wants from us is not sacrifice on altars but fair wages for the poor, not the recitation of prescribed prayers but justice for widows, and not the honoring of religious festivals but the giving of hospitality to strangers.

It should be noted, of course, that, after the prophets, we have the great wisdom figures in Jewish history. For them, the essence of religion was neither faithful religious practice nor simple outreach to the poor, but having a wise and compassionate heart, out of which you would then be faithful to both proper religious practice and outreach to the poor.

This is the tradition that Jesus inherits. What does he do with it? He ratifies all three. For Jesus, true religiosity asks for all of these: faithful religious practice, outreach to the poor, and a wise and compassionate heart. For Jesus, you don’t pick between these, you do them all. He tells us clearly: “If you love me, you will keep my commandments” (John 14); but he also tells us that we will ultimately be judged on the basis of how we treat the poor (Matthew 25); even as he tells us that what God really wants from us is a wise, compassionate heart. (Luke 6 & 15)

For Jesus, we are true disciples when we have compassionate hearts out of which we keep the commandments, humbly worship our God, but make it a religious priority to reach out to the most vulnerable groups in our society. Indeed, on this latter point, Jesus’ warnings are much stronger even than those of the great Jewish prophets. The prophets affirmed that God favors the poor; Jesus affirmed that God is in the poor (“whatsoever you do to the least, you do to me”). How we treat the poor is how we are treating God.

Moreover (and I doubt we’ve ever taken this seriously) Jesus tells us that, at the final judgment, we will be judged for heaven or hell on the basis of how we treated the poor, particularly on how we treated the most vulnerable among them (“widows, orphans, and strangers”). In Matthew 25, he lays out the criteria upon which we will be judged, for heaven or for hell. Notice that in these particular criteria there aren’t any questions about whether we kept the commandments, about whether we went to church or not, or even whether our sexual lives were in order. Here we’re to be judged solely on how we treated the poor. It can be rather frightening and confusing to take this at face value, namely, that we will go to heaven or hell solely on the basis of how we treated the poor.

I highlight this because today so many of us, sincere, church-going, Christians do not seem to have either an eye or a heart for the “widows, orphans, and strangers” around us. Who are the most vulnerable groups on our world today? Who today, as Gustavo Gutierrez defines the poor, does not have a right to have rights?

Let me risk stating the obvious: Among the “widows, orphans, and strangers” in our world today are the unborn, the refugees, and the immigrants. Happily, most sincere Christians are not blind to the plight of the unborn. Less happily, too many of us are religiously blind to the plight of millions of refugees looking for someone to welcome them. Every newscast we watch tells us that we’re not much welcoming the stranger.

How soon we forget God’s warning: “You are to love those who are foreigners, for you yourselves were once foreigners.” (Deuteronomy 10, 18-19)

Dual Citizenship

November 12, 2018

I live on both sides of a border. Not a geographical one, but one which is often a dividing line between two groups.

I was raised a conservative Roman Catholic, and conservative in most other things as well. Although my dad worked politically for the Liberal party, most everything about my upbringing was conservative, particularly religiously. I was a staunch Roman Catholics in every way. I grew up under the papacy of Pius XII (the fact that my youngest brother is named Pius, will tell you how loyal our family was to that Pope’s version of things). We believed that Roman Catholicism was the one true religion and that Protestants needed to convert and return to the true faith. I memorized the Roman Catholic catechism and defended its every word. Moreover, beyond being faithful church-goers, my family was given over to piety and devotions: we prayed the rosary together as a family every day; had statues and holy pictures everywhere in our house; wore blessed medals around our necks; prayed litanies to Mary, Joseph, and the Sacred Heart; and practiced a warm devotion to the saints. And it was wonderful. I will forever be grateful for that religious foundation.

I went from my family home to the seminary at the tender age of seventeen and my early seminary years solidly reinforced what my family had given me. The academics were good and we were encouraged to read great thinkers in every discipline. But this higher learning was still solidly set within a Roman Catholic ethos that valued all the things religiously and devotionally I’d been raised on. My studies were still friends with my piety. My mind was expanding, but my piety remained intact.

But home is where we start from. Gradually though through the years my world changed. Studying at different graduate schools, teaching on different graduate faculties, being in daily contact with other expressions of the faith, reading contemporary novelists and thinkers, and having academic colleagues as cherished friends has, I confess, put some strain on the piety of my youth. It’s no secret; we don’t often pray the rosary or litanies to Mary or the Sacred Heart in graduate classrooms or at faculty gatherings.

However academic classrooms and faculty gatherings bring something else, something vitally needed in church pews and in circles of piety, namely, wider theological vision and critical principles to keep unbridled piety, naïve fundamentalism, and misguided religious fervor within proper boundaries. What I’ve learned in the academic circles is also wonderful and I am forever grateful for the privilege of higher education.

But, of course, that’s a formula for tension, albeit a healthy one. Let me use someone else’s voice to articulate this. In a recent book, Silence and Beauty, a Japanese-American artist, Makoto Fujimura, shares this incident from his own life. Coming out of church one Sunday, he was asked by his pastor to add his name to a list of people who had agreed to boycott the film, The Last Temptation of Christ. He liked his pastor and wanted to please him by signing the petition, but felt hesitant to sign for reasons that, at that time, he couldn’t articulate. But his wife could. Before he could sign, she stepped in and said: “Artists may have other roles to play than to boycott this film.” He understood what she meant. He didn’t sign the petition.

But his decision left him pondering the tension between boycotting such a movie and his role as an artist and critic. Here’s how he puts it: “An artist is often pulled in two directions. Religiously conservative people tend to see culture as suspect at best, and when cultural statements are made to transgress the normative reality they hold dear, their default reaction is to oppose and boycott. People in the more liberal artistic community see these transgressive steps as necessary for their ‘freedom of expression’. An artist like me, who values both religion and art, will be exiled from both. I try to hold together both of these commitments, but it is a struggle.”

That’s also my struggle. The piety of my youth, of my parents, and of that rich branch of Catholicism is real and life-giving; but so too is the critical (sometimes unsettling) iconoclastic, theology of the academy. The two desperately need each other; yet someone who is trying to be loyal to both can, like Fujimura, end up feeling exiled from both. Theologians also have other roles to play than boycotting movies.

The people whom I take as mentors in this area are men and women who, in my eyes, can do both: Like Dorothy Day, who could be equally comfortable, leading the rosary or the peace march; like Jim Wallis, who can advocate just as passionately for radical social engagement as he can for personal intimacy with Jesus, and like Thomas Aquinas, whose intellect could intimidate intellectuals, even as he could pray with the piety of a child.

Circles of piety and the academy of theology are not enemies; they need to embrace.

When is our Life Fulfilled?

November 5, 2018

When is our life fulfilled? At what point in our lives do we say: “That’s it! That’s the climax! Nothing I can do from now on will outdo this. I’ve given what I have to give.”

When can we say this? After we’ve reached the peak of our physical health and strength? After giving birth to a child? After successfully raising our children? After we’ve published a best-seller? After we’re famous? After we’ve won a major championship? After we’re celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of our marriage? After we’ve found a soulmate? After we’re at peace after a long struggle with grief? When is it finally done? When has our growth reached its furthest place?

The medieval mystic, John of the Cross, says we reach this point in our lives when we have grown to what he calls “our deepest center”. But he doesn’t conceive of this the way we commonly picture it, namely, as the deepest center inside our soul. Rather, for John, our deepest center is the optimum point of our human growth, that is, the deepest maturity we can grow to before we begin to die. If this is true, then for a flower, its deepest center, its ultimate point of growth, would be not its bloom but the giving of its seed as it dies. That’s its further point of growth, its ultimate accomplishment.

What’s our ultimate point of growth? I suspect that we tend to think of this in terms of some concrete, positive accomplishment, like a successful career or some athletic, intellectual, or artistic achievement that’s brought us satisfaction, recognition, and popularity. Or, looked at from the point of view of depth of meaning, we might answer the question differently by saying that our ultimate achievement was a life-giving marriage, or being a good parent, or living a life that served others.

When, like a flower, do we give off our seed? Henri Nouwen suggests that people will answer this very differently: “For some it is when they are enjoying the full light of popularity; for others, when they have been totally forgotten; for some, when they have reached the peak of their strength; for others, when they feel powerless and weak; for some it is when their creativity is in full bloom, for others, when they have lost all confidence in their potential.”

When did Jesus give off his seed, the fullness of his spirit? For Jesus, it wasn’t immediately after his miracles when the crowds stood in awe, and it wasn’t after he had just walked on water, and it wasn’t when his popularity reached the point where his contemporaries wanted to make him king that he felt he had accomplished his purpose in life and that people began to be touched in their souls by his spirit. None of these. When did Jesus have nothing further to achieve?

It’s worth quoting Henri Nouwen again, in answering this question: “We know one thing, however, for the Son of Man the wheel stopped when he had lost everything: his power to speak and to heal, his sense of success and influence, his disciples and friends – even his God. When he was nailed against a tree, robbed of all human dignity, he knew that he had aged enough, and said: ‘It is fulfilled’” (John 19, 30).

“It is fulfilled!” The Greek word here is Tetelesti. This was an expression used by artists to signify that a work was completely finished and that nothing more could be added to it. It was also used to express that something was complete. For example, Tetelesti was stamped on a document of charges against a criminal after he had served his full prison sentence; it was used by banks when a debt had been repaid; it was used by a servant to inform his master that a work had been completed; and it was used by athletes when, tired and exhausted, they successfully crossed the finish line in a race.

It is finished! A flower dies to give off its seed so it’s appropriate that these were Jesus’ last words. On the cross, faithful to the end, to his God, to his word, to the love he preached, and to his own integrity, he stopped living and began dying, and that’s when he gave off his seed and that’s when his spirit began to permeate the world. He had reached his deepest center, his life was fulfilled.

When does our living stop and our dying begin? When do we move from being in bloom to giving off our seed? Superficially, of course, it’s when our health, strength, popularity, and attractiveness begin to wane and we start to fade out, into the margins, and eventually into the sunset. But when this is seen in the light of Jesus’ life, we see that in our fading out, like a flower long past its bloom, we begin to give off something of more value than the attractiveness of the bloom. That’s when we can say: “It is fulfilled!”

A Right Way Of Dying

October 29, 2018

I do not want to die from some medical condition; I want to die from death!

Ivan Illich wrote that. What’s meant here? Don’t we all die from death? Of course, in reality that’s what we all die from, but in our idea of things, most often, we die from a medical condition or from bad luck through cancer, heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, or as the victim of an accident. Sometimes, because of how we think of death, we do die from a medical condition.

That’s what Ivan Illich is trying to highlight here. Death is meant to be met and respected as a normal human experience, not as a medical failure. Death and its inevitability in our lives are to be understood as a growth point, a necessary maturation, something to which we are organically and spiritually destined and not as an aberration or unnatural intrusion into the life cycle (an intrusion that could have been avoided except for an accident or failure of medicine.) We need to understand death the way a woman carrying a child contemplates its delivery, not as some aberration or risky medical procedure but as the full flowering of a life process.

We pay a price for our false idea on dying, more than we imagine. When death is seen as a medical failure or as tragic bad luck, its threat then becomes a menacing specter and a threatening darkness inside that cauldron of all those other energies and fears we do not consciously deal with and into which we dare not venture.

Ernest Becker speaks of something he calls “the denial of death” and suggests that our refusal to meet and respect death as a natural process rather than as an aberration impoverishes us in untold ways. When we falsely fear death then the inchoate sense of our own mortality becomes a dark corner from which we stay away. We pay a price for this in that, paradoxically, by falsely fearing death we are unable to properly enter into life.

Martin Heidegger affirms much the same thing in his understanding of life. He suggests that each of us is (in his words) a “being-towards-death”, that is, from the second we are born we already have a terminal condition (called life) and we can only be free of false fear if we consciously live out our lives in the face of that non-negotiable truth. We are dying. His language around this can leave us depressed but, like Illich, he makes a positive point. For Heidegger, in the end, we don’t die because of bad medicine or bad luck. We die because nature has its course and nature runs that course and we will, in fact, enjoy our lives more if we respect that natural course because that acceptance will help us to value more how precious our moments of life and love are.

Ironically, euthanasia, for all its sophisticated claims to be something that lets us control death, would have us die precisely from a medical condition and not from death (which is a natural process).

Of course, wanting to die from death and not from a medical condition does not mean we do not value medicine and what it offers for our health and the preservation of our lives. We are obliged by our nature, by our loved ones, by common sense, and by an inalienable principle right within the moral order itself to take all ordinary medical measures available to preserve our health. Modern medicine is wonderful and many of us, including myself, are alive today thanks only to modern medicine. But we must be clear too that when we come to die it won’t be because of a medical failure but rather because death is our natural end. Just as we were once born from our mother’s womb, there comes a time when we need to be born again from the earth’s womb.

Moreover accepting death in this way is not a negative stoicism which robs life of delight and joy. To the contrary, as anyone who has ever had a health crisis the brought him or her close to death will tell you, facing death makes everything in life all the more precious since it is no longer taken for granted.

One cautionary flag: This kind of talk is not necessarily for the young in whom the denial of death is, for a good reason, very powerful. While young people should not be willfully blind to their own mortality or live their lives as if life here were to go on forever, they shouldn’t yet be focused on death. Their task is to build a future for themselves and the world. Death can be dealt with later. Metaphorically speaking, they need to be focused more on nurturing the embryo than worrying about its delivery.

At the center of Jesus’ teaching lies a great paradox: Whoever clings to life will lose it and whoever lets go of life will find it. Ivan Illich, it would seem, agrees.

Faith and Levity

October 23, 2018

Shusaku Endo, the Japanese author of the classic novel, Silence (upon which Martin Scorsese based his movie) was a Catholic who didn’t always find his native land, Japan, sympathetic to his faith. He was misunderstood but kept his balance and good heart by placing a high value on levity. It was his way of integrating his faith with his own experience of occasional personal failure and his way of keeping his perspective on a culture which misunderstood him. Levity, he believed, makes faith livable.

He’s right. Levity is what makes faith livable because humor and irony give us the perspective we need to forgive ourselves and others for our weaknesses and mistakes. When we’re too serious there’s no forgiveness, least of all for ourselves.

What is humor? What’s its meaning? A generation ago, Peter Berger wrote a book, A Rumor of Angels, in which he looked at the question of humor philosophically. I like his conclusion. In humor, he submits, we touch the transcendent. To be able to laugh at a situation, no matter how dire or tragic, shows that we’re in some way above that situation, that there’s something in us that’s not imprisoned by that situation, or any situation.

There’s a wonderful example of this in the writings of the Russian poet, Anna Akhmatova. During the purges of Stalin, her husband had been arrested, as had many others. She occasionally tried to visit the prison he was in to leave letters and packages for him. Standing in long lines outside of that prison in St. Petersburg, she waited alongside other women whose husbands or sons had also been arrested. The situation bordered on the absurd. None of them even knew whether their loved ones were even alive and the guards made them wait for hours without explanation, often in the cold of winter. One day, as she was standing in line waiting, another woman recognized her, approached her, and asked: “Can you describe this?” Akhmatova replied: “I can,” and when she said this something like a smile passed between them.

A smile passed between them. That smile contained some levity and that allowed them both to realize, however unconsciously, that they were transcendent to that situation. The smile that passed between them alerted them both to the fact that they were more than what they were in that moment. Awful as it was, they weren’t ultimately prisoners to that moment. Moreover that smile was a prophetic and political act of defiance, based upon faith. Levity is subversive.

This is true too not just for how we live inside our faith lives; it’s true too for how we live, healthily, inside our families. A family that’s too serious will not allow for forgiveness. Its heaviness will eventually drive its members either into depression or away from the family. Moreover it will make an idol out of itself. Conversely, a family that can take itself seriously but still laugh at itself will be a family where there is forgiveness because levity will give them a healthy perspective on their foibles. A family that’s healthy will sometimes look at itself honestly and with the kind of smile that passed between Anna Akhmatova and her friend, say of itself: “Aren’t we pathetic!”

That’s true too of nationalism. We need to take our nation seriously, even as a certain kind levity keeps this seriousness in perspective. I’m a Canadian. As Canadians, we love our country, are proud of it, and would, if push came to shove, die for it. But we have a wonderful levity about our patriotism. We make jokes about it and enjoy it when others make jokes about us. Consequently we don’t have any bitter controversies regarding who loves the country and who doesn’t. Our lightness keeps us in unity.

All of this, of course, is doubly true of faith and spirituality. Real faith is deep, an indelible brand inside the soul, a DNA that dictates behavior. Moreover, real faith does not sidestep the tragic within our lives but equips us to face the heaviness in life where we meet disappointment, personal failure, heartbreak, injustice, betrayal, the breakdown of cherished relationships, the death of loves ones, sickness, the diminishment of our own health, and ultimately our own death. This is not to be confused with any natural or contrived optimism that refuses to see the dark. Rather real faith, precisely because it is real and therefore keeps us inchoately aware of our identity and transcendence, will always allow us a discreet, knowing, smile, no matter the situation. Like the English martyr, Thomas More, we will be able to joke a bit with our executioner and we will also be able to forgive others and ourselves for not being perfect.

Our lives often are pathetic. But it’s okay. We can still laugh with each other! We’re in good hands. The God who made obviously has a sense of humor – and therefore understanding and forgiveness.

Too many books on Christian spirituality might more aptly be entitled: The Unbearable Heaviness of Faith.

Beyond Criticism and Anger – The Invitation to a Deeper Empathy

October 15, 2018

Recently I attended a symposium where the keynote speaker was a man exactly my age. Since we had both lived through the same cultural and religious changes in our lives, I resonated with much of what he said and with how he felt about things. And in his assessment of both the state of affairs in our politics and our churches today, he was pretty critical, even angry. Not without reason. In both our governments and our churches today there isn’t just a bitter polarization and an absence of fundamental charity and respect, there’s also a lot of seemingly inexcusable blindness, lack of transparency, and self-serving dishonesty. Our speaker was plenty eager to point these out.

And for the most part, I agreed with him. I feel the same way that he does. The current state of affairs, whether you’re looking at politics or the churches, is depressing, bitterly polarized, and cannot but leave you feeling frustrated and accusatory at those whom you deem responsible for the blindness, dishonesty, and injustice that seem inexcusable. But, while I shared much of his truth and his feelings, I didn’t share where he landed. He landed in pessimism and anger, seemingly unable to find anything other than indignation within which to stand. He also ended very negative in terms of his attitude towards those whom he blames for the problem.

I can’t fault his truth and I can’t fault his feelings. They’re understandable. But I’m not at ease with where he landed. Bitterness and anger, no matter how justified, are not a good place to stay. Both Jesus and what’s noble inside of us invite us to move beyond anger and indignation.

Beyond anger, beyond indignation, and beyond justified criticism of all that’s dishonest and unjust, lies an invitation to a deeper empathy. This invitation doesn’t ask us to be stop being prophetic in the face of what’s wrong but it asks us to be prophetic in a deeper way. A prophet, as Daniel Berrigan so often said, makes a vow of love not of alienation.

But that’s not easy to do. In the face of injustice, dishonesty, and willful blindness, all of our natural instincts militate against empathy. Up to a point, this is healthy and shows that we’re still morally robust. We should feel anger and indignation in the face of what’s wrong. It’s understandable too that we might also feel some hateful, judgmental, thoughts towards those whom we deem responsible. But that’s a beginning (a healthy enough starting point) but it’s not where we’re meant to stay. We’re called to move towards something deeper, namely, an empathy which previously we did not access. Deep anger invites deep empathy.

At the truly bitter moments of our lives, when we’re feeling overwhelmed by feelings of misunderstanding, slight, injustice, and rightful indignation and we’re staring across at those whom we deem responsible for the situation, anger and hatred will naturally arise within us. It’s okay to dwell with them for a time (because anger is an important mode of grieving) but, after a time we need to move on. The challenge then is to ask ourselves: How do I love now, given all this hatred? What does love call me to now in this bitter situation? Where can I now find a common thread that can keep me in family with those at whom I’m angry? How do I reach through, reach through the space that now leaves me separated by my own justified feelings of anger? And, perhaps most important of all: “From where can I now find the strength to not give into hatred and self-serving indignation?

How am I called to love now? How do I love in this new situation? That’s the challenge. We’ve never before been called upon to love in a situation like this. Our understanding, empathy, forgiveness, and love have never before been tested in this way. But that’s the ultimate moral challenge, the “test” that Jesus himself faced in Gethsemane. How do you love when everything around you invites you to the opposite?

Almost all of our natural instincts militate against this kind of empathy, as does most everything around us. In the face of injustice our natural instincts spontaneously begin, one by one, to shut the doors of trust and make us judgmental. They also invite us to feel indignation and hatred. Now those feelings do produce a certain catharsis in us. It feels good. But that kind of cathartic feeling is a drug that doesn’t do much for us long range. We need something beyond feelings of bitterness and hatred for our long range health. Empathy is that something.

While not denying what’s wrong, nor denying the need to be prophetic in the face of all that’s wrong, empathy still calls us to a post-anger, a post-indignation, and a post-hatred. Jesus modeled that for us and today it’s singularly the most needed thing in our society, our churches, and our families.

Suicide and the Soul

October 8, 2018

More than fifty years ago, James Hillman wrote a book entitled, Suicide and the Soul. The book was intended for therapists and he knew it wouldn’t receive an easy reception there or elsewhere. There were reasons. He frankly admitted that some of the things he proposed in the book would “go against all common sense, all medical practice, and rationality itself.” But, as the title makes clear, he was speaking about suicide and in trying to understand suicide, isn’t that exactly the case? Doesn’t it go against all common sense, all medical practice, and rationality itself? And that’s his point.

In some cases, suicide can be the result of a biochemical imbalance or some genetic predisposition that militates against life. That’s unfortunate and tragic, but it’s understandable enough. That kind of sickness goes against common sense, medical practice, and rationality. Suicide can also result from a catastrophic emotional breakdown or from a trauma so powerful that it cannot be integrated and simply breaks apart a person’s psyche so that death, as sleep, as an escape, becomes an overwhelming temptation. Here too, even though common sense, medical practice, and rationality are befuddled, we have some grasp of why this suicide happened.

But there are suicides that are not the result of a biochemical imbalance, a genetic predisposition, a catastrophic emotional distress, or an overpowering trauma. How are these to be explained?

Hillman, whose writing through more than fifty years have been a public plea for the human soul, makes this claim: The soul can make claims that go against the body and against our physical wellbeing, and suicide is often that, the soul making its own claims. What a stunning insight! Our souls and our bodies do not always want the same things and are sometimes so much at odds with each other that death can be the result.

In the tension between soul and body, the body’s needs and impulses are more easily seen, understood, and attended to. The body normally gets what it wants or at least clearly knows what it wants and why it is frustrated. The soul? Well, its needs are so complex that they are hard to see and understand, not alone attended to. As Pascal so famously put it: “The heart has it reasons of which reason knows nothing.” That is virtually synonymous with what Hillman is saying. Our rational understanding often stands bewildered before some inchoate need inside us.

That inchoate need is our soul speaking, but it is not easy to pick up exactly what it is asking of us. Mostly we feel our soul’s voice as a dis-ease, a restlessness, a distress we cannot exactly sort out, and as an internal pressure that sometimes asks of us something directly in conflict with what the rest of us wants. We are, in huge part, a mystery to ourselves.

Sometimes the claims of the soul that go against our physical wellbeing are not so dramatic as to demand suicide but in them, we can still clearly see what Hillman is asserting. We see this, for example, in the phenomenon where a person in severe emotional distress begins to cut herself on her arms or on other parts of her body. The cuts are not intended to end life; they are intended only to cause pain and blood. Why? The person cutting herself mostly cannot explain rationally why she is doing this (or, at least, she cannot explain how this pain and this blood-letting will in any way lessen or fix her emotional distress). All she knows is that she is hurting at a place she cannot get at and by hurting herself at a place she can get at, she can deal with a pain that she cannot get to. Hillman’s principle is on display here: The soul can, and does, make claims that can go against our physical well-being. It has its reasons.

For Hillman, this is the “root metaphor” for how a therapist should approach the understanding of suicide. It can also be a valuable metaphor for all us who are not therapists but who have to struggle to digest the death of a loved one who dies by suicide.

Moreover this is also a metaphor that can be helpful in understanding each other and understanding ourselves. The soul sometimes makes claims that go directly against our health and well-being. In my pastoral work and sometimes simply being with a friend who is hurting, I sometimes find myself standing helplessly before someone who is hell-bent on some behavior that goes against his or her own well-being and which makes no rational sense whatsoever. Rational argument and common sense are useless. He’s simply going to do this to his own destruction. Why? The soul has its reasons. All of us, perhaps in less dramatic ways, experience this in our own lives. Sometimes we do things that hurt our physical health and well-being and go against all common sense and rationality. Our souls too have their reasons.

And suicide too has its reasons.