Thomas Aquinas once suggested that it’s a sin to not give a compliment to someone when it’s deserved because by withholding our praise we’re depriving that person of the food that he or she needs to live on. He’s right. Perhaps it’s not a sin to withhold a compliment but it’s a sad impoverishment, both for the person deserving the compliment and for the one withholding it.

We don’t live on bread alone. Jesus told us that. Our soul too needs to be fed and its food is affirmation, recognition, and blessing. Every one of us needs to be healthily affirmed when we do something well so as to have resources within us with which to affirm others. We can’t give what we haven’t got! That’s self-evident. And so, for us to love and affirm others we must first be loved, first be blessed, and first be praised. Praise, recognition, and blessing build up the soul.

But complimenting others isn’t just important for the person receiving the compliment, it’s equally important for the person giving it. In praising someone we give him or her some needed food for their soul; but, in doing this, we also feed our own soul. There’s a truth about philanthropy that holds true too for the soul: We need to give to others not just because they need it but because we cannot be healthy unless we are giving ourselves away. Healthy admiration is a philanthropy of the soul.

Moreover, admiring and praising others is a religious act. Benoit Standaert submits that “giving praise comes out of the roots our existence.”  What does he mean by that?

In complimenting and praising others, we are tapping into what’s deepest inside us, namely, the image and likeness of God. When we praise someone else then, like God creating, we are breathing life into a person, breathing spirit into them. People need to be praised. We don’t live on bread alone, and we don’t live on oxygen alone either.

The image and likeness of God inside us is not an icon, but an energy, the energy that’s most real inside us. Beyond our ego, wounds, pride, sin, and the pettiness of our hearts and minds on any given day, what’s most real within us is a magnanimity and graciousness which, like God, looks at the world and wants to say: “It is good! It is very good!” When we’re at our best, our truest, speaking and acting out of our maturity, we can admire. Indeed, our willingness to praise others is a sign of maturity, and vice versa. We become more mature by being generous in our praise.

But praise is not something we give out easily. Mostly we are so blocked by the disappointments and frustrations within our lives that we give in to cynicism and jealousy and operate out of these rather than out of our virtues. We rationalize this of course in different ways, either by claiming that what we’re supposed to admire is juvenile (and we’re too bright and sophisticated to be impressed) or that the admirable act was done for someone’s self-aggrandizement and we’re not going to feed another person’s ego. However, more often than not, our real reason for withholding praise is that fact that we ourselves have been insufficiently praised and, because of that, harbor jealousies and lack the strength to praise others. I say this sympathetically, all of us are wounded.

Then too in some of us there’s a hesitation to praise others because we believe that praise might spoil the person and inflate his or her ego. Spare the rod and spoil the child! If we offer praise it will go to that person’s head.  Again, more often than not, that’s a rationalization. Legitimate praise never spoils a person. Praise that’s honest and proper works more at humbling its recipient than spoiling him or her. We can’t be loved too much, only loved wrongly.

But, you might ask, what about children who end up self-centered because they’re only praised and never disciplined?  Real love and real maturity distinguish between praising those areas of another’s life that are praiseworthy and challenging those areas of another’s life that need correction. Praise should never be undeserved flattery, but challenge and correction are only effective if the recipient first knows that he or she is loved and properly recognized.

Genuine praise is never wrong. It simply acknowledges the truth that’s there. That’s a moral imperative. Love requires it. Refusing to admire when someone or something merits praise is, as Thomas Aquinas submits, a negligence, a fault, a selfishness, a pettiness, and a lack of maturity. Conversely, paying a compliment when one is due is a virtue and a sign of maturity.

Generosity is as much about giving praise as about giving money. We may not be stingy in our praise. The 14^th century Flemish mystic, John of Ruusbroec, taught that “those who do not give praise here on earth shall be mute for all eternity.”

A particularly powerful Gospel story recounts Jesus meeting with a Syro-Phoenician woman. Central to that story is where their encounter takes place. It takes place on the borders of Samaria. For Jesus, Samaria was a foreign territory, both in terms of ethnicity and religion. In his encounter with this woman, he is standing at the edges, the borders, of how he then understood himself religiously.

I believe that this is where we are standing today as Christians, on new borders in terms of relating to other religions, not least to our Islamic brothers and sisters. The single most important agenda item for our churches for the next fifty years will be the issue of relating to other religions, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Indigenous Religions in the Americas and Africa, and various forms, old and new, of Paganism and New Age. Simply stated, if all the violence stemming from religious extremism hasn’t woken us yet then we are dangerously asleep.  We have no choice. The world has become one village, one community, one family, and unless we begin to understand and accept each other more deeply we will never be a world at peace.

Moreover for us, as Christians, the threat of hatred and violence coming from other religions isn’t the main reason we are called to understand non-Christian believers more compassionately. The deeper reason is that the God we honor calls us to do that. Our God calls us to recognize and welcome all sincere believers into our hearts as brothers and sisters in faith. Jesus makes this abundantly clear most everywhere in his message, and at times makes it uncomfortably explicit: Who are my brothers and sisters? It is those who hear the word of God and keep it. … It is not necessarily those who say Lord, Lord, who enter the Kingdom of Heaven but those who do the will of God on earth. Who can deny that many non-Christians do the will of God here on earth?

But what about the extremism, violence, and perverse expressions of religion we frequently see in other religions? Can we really consider these religions as true, given the awful things done in their name?

All religions are to be judged, as Huston Smith submits, by their highest expressions and their saints, not by their perversions. This is true too for Christianity. We hope that others will judge us not by our darkest moments or by the worst acts ever done by Christians in the name of religion, but rather by all the good Christians have done in history and by our saints. We owe that same understanding to other religions, and all of them in their essence and in their best expressions call us to what’s one, good, true, and beautiful – and all of them have produced great saints. 

But what of Christ’s uniqueness? What about Christ’s claim that he is the (only) way, truth, and life and that nobody can come to God except through him?

Throughout its 2000-year history, Christian theology has never backed away from the truth and exclusivity of that claim, save for a number of individual theologians whose views have not been accepted by the churches.  So how can we view the truth of other religions in the light of Christ’s claim that he is the only way to the Father?

Christian theology (certainly this is true for Roman Catholic theology) has always accepted and proactively taught that the Mystery of Christ is much larger than what can be observed in the visible, historical enfolding of Christianity and the Christian churches in history. Christ is larger than our churches and operates too outside of our churches. He is still telling the church what Jesus once told his mother: “I must be about my Father’s business.”

Formerly we expressed this by affirming that the Body of Christ, the full body of believers, has both a visible and invisible element. In explicit, baptized believers we see the visible Body of Christ. However at the same time we acknowledge that there are countless others who for all kinds of inculpable reasons have not been explicitly baptized and do not profess an explicit faith in Christ, but who by the goodness of their hearts and actions must be considered as kin to us in the faith.

This may come as a surprise to some but, in fact, the dogmatic teaching of the Roman Catholic Church is that sincere persons in other religions can be saved without becoming Christians, and to teach the contrary is heresy. This is predicated on an understanding of the God whom we worship as Christians.  The God whom Jesus incarnated wills the salvation of all people and is not indifferent to the sincere faith of billions of people throughout thousands of years. We dishonor our faith when we teach anything different. All of us are God’s children.

There is in the end only one God and that God is the Father of all of us – and that means all of us, irrespective of religion.

He’s a loser! You’re a loser!  Among all the hurtful slurs we mindlessly utter this particular one is perhaps the most hurtful and damaging. It needs to be forbidden in our public discourse and stricken from our vocabulary.

We’ve come a long ways today in forbidding certain language in our public discourse. Mostly the terms that we outlaw have to do with pejorative phrases that refer to someone’s race, gender, or disability.  Categorically forbidding them in our language was long overdue and may not be dismissed as simple political correctness. It’s a matter of correctness, plain and simple, of justice, of charity, of fundamental human decency. Language is an economy that’s also often unjust. It unfairly affirms some and unduly slanders others. We need to be careful with it. Language can deeply scar others, even as it keeps us unconsciously locked inside negative stereotypes that leave our minds and our hearts colored by racism, bigotry, and misogyny.

But racial, gender, and disability slurs are not the only slurs that cut, wound, and scar others. Terrible as they are, those insulted by them have the consolation of knowing that the insult is aimed at millions (or, in the case of gender, billions) of others. There’s consolation in numbers! Being shamed along with millions or billions of others still hurts, but you’re in good company.

There are slurs however, insults, that are more brutally singular and more cruelly personal, which aim to shame one’s particularly private inadequacies. With such a slur you’re no longer in good company, you’re now unanimity-minus-one. The term “loser” is such a slur. It aims to shame a person in a very singular, hurtful way. When you’re called a “loser”, you’re not being singled out and shamed because you belong to a certain set, a race, a gender, or a class of people. You’re being shamed because you – you alone, singularly, personally – are judged as not measuring up, as not worthy of respect, and as not worthy of full acceptance. You’re judged as inferior with an inferiority that cannot be blamed on anyone except yourself. You’re deemed a loser! And you’re alone in that!

This kind of shaming isn’t new. It has ever been thus. Certain people have always been shunned, shamed, and ostracized. We have this curious human flaw that, unless it’s addressed, has us believe that for us to be happy it isn’t enough that we be accepted, someone else has to be excluded.

In biblical times, people who had leprosy were ostracized from society, condemned to live in regions outside of normal life, and cry out “unclean” whenever anyone approached them. But they had legitimate reasons for putting these persons outside the circle of normal life. Leprosy held the danger of contagion. Today, without any kind of legitimacy, we’re still designating certain people as “lepers”, as unfit to flourish inside the circles of normal life. We classify them as “losers” and condemn them to the fringes. They’re the new lepers.

Examples of this abound, but perhaps we see this most simplistically played out in our high schools where there is always a crowd that’s popular, an “in” crowd who dictates the ethos, decides what’s acceptable, and holds down the center of the community, even as they don’t constitute its majority. The majority of students are outside that more-exclusive inner circle of popularity, on the edges of it, trying for full acceptance, not fully “in” and not fully “out”. But there’s always still another set, the ones seen as “losers”, as not measuring up, as not being worthy of full status and recognition. This group is not given permission to fully belong. Every human circle has that category of persons.

There are a myriad of complex reasons, many to do with mental health, which can help explain why, sometimes, tragically, a high school boy will take up a gun, come into his school, and shoot his classmates. But it’s hard not to notice that, almost always, it’s a young man who has been deemed a “loner”, a loser. We can’t blame his immediate peers and his classmates for deeming him such, however consciously or unconsciously this is done. His classmates are victims, not just of this young man’s illness and rage, but also of a society that blindly helps produce this kind of illness and rage.

I’m not a parent, but if I were, I would try with all the moral powers that I possessed as a parent to have my children purge their vocabulary of racial, gender, and disability slurs.  But I would, too, use every moral and persuasive power I had to have them purge their vocabulary of pejorative words that shame someone else in his or her singularity. The word “loser” would be forbidden in the house.

Both society and the church are houses. We have, thank goodness, in recent decades forbidden the use of words that disparage another person on the basis of his or her race, gender, or disability.  It’s time we forbid some other slurs inside the house!

Ralph Waldo Emerson calls the stars in the night sky “envoys of beauty, lighting the universe with their admonishing smile” and submits that if they appeared for a single night only every thousand years, we’d be on our knees in worship and would cherish the memory for the rest of our lives. But since they come out every night, the miracle goes mostly unnoticed. We watch television instead.

But, their beauty notwithstanding, shining stars are not the most prominent miracle which goes unnoticed. The greatest miracles have to do with gratuity, with love, with unfreezing a soul, with forgiveness. Our great poverty is that these go mostly unnoticed. There are much more astonishing things than the stars for which to be down on our knees in gratitude and there are more profound things to cherish in memory than a starlit night.

The Belgium spirituality writer, Benoit Standaert, suggests that the greatest miracle is “that the freely given exists, that there is love that makes whole and that embraces what has been lost, that chooses what had been rejected, that forgives what has been found guilty beyond appeal, that unites what had seemingly been torn apart forever.”  

The greatest miracle is that there’s redemption for all that’s wrong with us. There’s redemption from all we’ve failed to live up to because of our inadequacies. There’s redemption from our wounds, from all that’s left us physically, emotionally, and spiritually limping and cold. There’s redemption from injustice, from the unfairness we suffer ourselves and from the hurt which we inflict knowingly or unknowingly on others. There’s redemption from our mistakes, our moral failures, our infidelities, our sins. There’s redemption from relationships gone sour, from marriages, families, and friendships that have been torn apart by misunderstanding, hatred, selfishness, and violence. There’s redemption from suicide and murder. Nothing falls outside the scope of God’s power to forgive, to resurrect and make new, fresh, innocent, and joyful again.

Our lives, to a greater or lesser extent, all end up incomplete, broken, unfairly ripped away from us, and causing hurt to others because of our weaknesses, infidelities, sin, and malice; and still, ultimately, it can all wash clean again. There’s redemption, new life after all the ways we’ve gone wrong in this world. And that redemption comes through forgiveness.

Forgiveness is the greatest miracle, the pan-ultimate miracle, which, along with everlasting life, is the real meaning of the resurrection of Jesus. There’s nothing more godlike, or miraculous, than a moment of reconciliation, a moment of forgiveness.

It’s for this reason that when the Gospels write up the resurrection of Jesus their emphasis, again and again, is on forgiveness. Indeed, Luke’s Gospel does not distinguish the announcement of the resurrection from the announcement of the forgiveness of sins. Forgiveness and resurrection are inextricably linked. Likewise, in the Gospel of John, in Jesus’ first resurrection appearance to the assembled community (with them all hiding behind locked doors in fear) he gives them the power to forgive sins. The message of the resurrection is that a dead body can be raised again from its grave. But this isn’t just true for our physical bodies, which die, but it’s also true, especially, for hearts that are frozen and dead from disappointment, bitterness, anger, separation, and hatred. The miracle of the resurrection is as much about raising deadened souls to new life as it is about raising dead bodies to new life.

Despite being nearly overwhelmed by new inventions today, machines and gadgets that do everything including talking to us, in truth, we see very little that’s genuinely new, that’s not the norm. Sure, we see new innovations every day coming at us so rapidly that we have trouble coping with the changes they are bringing about.  But, in the end, these innovations don’t genuinely surprise us, at least not at a deep level, at the level of the soul, morally. They’re simply more of what we already have, extensions of ordinary life, nothing really surprising.

But when you see a woman forgive another person who has genuinely hurt her, you are seeing something that’s not normal, that’s surprising. You are seeing something that is not simply another instance of how things naturally unfold. Likewise, when you see warmth and love break through to a man who has long been captive of a bitter and angry heart, you are seeing something that’s not just another instance of normal life, of ordinary unfolding. You’re seeing newness, redemption, resurrection, forgiveness. Forgiveness is the only thing that’s new on our planet, everything else is just more of the same.

And so, in the words of Benoit Standaert: “Whenever we strive to bring a little more peace through justice here on earth and, in whatever form, change sadness into happiness, heal broken hearts, or assist the sick and the weak, we arrive directly at God, the God of the resurrection.”

Forgiveness is the most astonishing miracle we will ever see or experience this side of eternity. It, alone, makes for the possibility of heaven – and happiness.

Our culture doesn’t give us easy permission to mourn. Its underlying ethos is that we move on quickly from loss and hurt, keep our griefs quiet, remain strong always, and get on with life.

But mourning is something that’s vital to our health, something we owe to ourselves. Without mourning our only choice is to grow hard and bitter in the face of disappointment, rejection, and loss. And these will always make themselves felt.

We have many things to mourn in life: We are forever losing people and things. Loved ones die, relationships die, friends move away, a marriage falls apart, a love we want but can’t have obsesses us, a dream ends in disappointment, our children grow away from us, jobs are lost, and so too one day our youth and our health. Beyond these many losses that ask for our grief there’s the need to grieve the simple inadequacy of our lives, the perfect symphony and consummation that we could never have. Like Jephthah’s daughter, all of us have to mourn our inconsummation.

How? How do we mourn so that our mourning is not an unhealthy self-indulgence but a process that restores us to health and buoyancy?

There’s no simple formula and the formula is different for everyone. Grieving, like loving, has to respect our unique reticence, what we’re comfortable with and not comfortable with. But some things are the same for all of us.

First, there’s the need to accept and acknowledge both our loss and the pain which with we’re left. Denial of either, loss or pain, is never a friend. The frustration and helplessness within which we find ourselves must be accepted, and accepted with the knowledge too that there’s no place to put the pain except, as Rilke says, to give it back to earth itself, to the heaviness of the oceans from which ultimately comes the saltwater which makes up our tears. Our tears connect us still to the oceans that spawned us.

Next, mourning is a process that takes time, sometimes a lot of time, rather than something we can achieve quickly by a simple decision. We cannot simply will our emotions back to health. They need to heal and healing is an organic process. What’s involved?

In many instances there’s the need to give ourselves permission to be angry, to rage for a time, to allow ourselves to feel the disappointment, loss, unfairness, and anger. Loss can be bitter and that bitterness needs to be accepted with honesty, but also with the courage and discipline to not let it have us lash out at others. And for that to happen, for us not to lay blame and lash out at others, we need help. All pain can be borne if it can be shared and so we need people to listen to us and share our pain without trying to fix it.  Pride is our enemy here. We need the humility to entrust others to see our wound.

Finally, not least, we need patience, long-suffering, perseverance. Mourning can’t be rushed. The healing of soul, like the healing of body, is an organic process with its own non-negotiable timetable for unfolding.  But this can be a major test of our patience and hope. We can go through long periods of darkness and grief where nothing seems to be changing, the heaviness and the paralysis remain, and we’re left with the feeling that things will never get better, that we will never find lightness of heart again. But grief and mourning call for patience, patience to stay the course with the heaviness and the helplessness.  The Book of Lamentations tells us that sometimes all we can do is put our mouths to the dust and wait. The healing is in the waiting.

Henri Nouwen was a man very familiar with mourning and loss. An over-sensitive soul, he sometimes suffered depressions and obsessions that left him emotionally paralyzed and seeking professional help. On one such occasion, while working through a major depression, he wrote his deeply insightful book, The Inner Voice of Love. There he gives us this advice:  “The great challenge is living your wounds through instead of thinking them through. It is better to cry than to worry, better to feel your wounds deeply than to understand them, better to let them enter into your silence than to talk about them. The choice you face constantly is whether you are taking your hurts to your head or to your heart. In your head you can analyze them, find their causes and consequences, and coin words to speak and write about them. But no final healing is likely to come from that source. You need to let your wounds go down into your heart. Then you can live them through and discover that they will not destroy you. Your heart is greater than your wounds.”

We are greater than our wounds. Life is greater than death. God’s goodness is greater than all loss. But mourning our losses is the path to appropriating those truths.

The Gospel of John presents us with a very powerful and rather earthy mystical image: As John describes the Last Supper scene he tells us that as they were at table the beloved disciple was reclining with his head against Jesus’ breast.

The power of that image has, I believe, been better captured by artists than by theologians and biblical scholars. Artists and iconographers generally present the image to us in this way: The beloved disciple has his head leaning on Jesus’ breast in such a way that his ear is directly above Jesus’ heart but in such a way that his eyes are fixed outward looking at the world.

What a powerful image! If you put your ear at just the right place on someone’s chest you can hear that person’s heartbeat. The beloved disciple then is the one who is attuned to the heartbeat of God and is looking out at the world from that vintage point.

Further, John gives us a series of other images to flesh out the implications of hearing God’s heartbeat.

First, the beloved disciple stands with Jesus’ mother at the foot of the cross as Jesus is dying. What’s encapsulated in this image? In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus admits that sometimes darkness seems to overpower grace and God seems powerless: Sometimes darkness just has its hour! His death was one of those hours and the beloved disciple, like Jesus’ mother, could do nothing other than stand in helplessness inside and beneath that darkness and injustice. There was nothing to be done but to stand inside the helplessness. But, by standing there, the beloved disciple also stands in solidarity with the millions of poor and victimized all over the world who can do nothing against their plight. When one stands in helplessness when there’s nothing possible to be done one gives silent voice to human finitude, the deepest prayer possible at that moment.  Then, afterwards, the beloved disciple takes the mother of Jesus into his home, an image that doesn’t need much elaboration.

However, a second image connected with the beloved disciple leaning on Jesus’ breast does need some elaboration: As the beloved disciple reclines on the breast of Jesus an interesting dialogue takes place: Jesus tells his disciples that one of them will betray him. Peter turns to the beloved disciple and says to him: “Ask him who it is?” This begs the question: Why doesn’t Peter himself ask Jesus who it is who will betray him? Peter would not have been sitting so far away from Jesus as to not be able to ask the question himself.

Moreover Peter’s question takes on its real significance when seen in its historical context. Scholars estimate that the Gospel of John was written somewhere between the years 90 – 100 AD. By then Peter had been Pope and had been martyred. What the Gospel is suggesting here is that intimacy with Jesus trumps everything else, including ecclesial office, including being Pope. Everyone’s prayer has to go through the beloved disciple. The Pope cannot pray as Pope but only pray as the beloved disciple (which, like any other Christian, he can be). He can offer prayers for the world and for the church as Pope, but he can pray personally only as beloved disciple.

Finally, the notion in the Gospel of John that intimacy with Jesus is more important the ecclesial office is further illustrated on the morning of the Resurrection. Mary Magdala comes running from tomb and tells the disciples that the tomb is empty. Peter and the beloved disciple set off at once, running towards the tomb. We can easily guess who will arrive there first. The beloved disciple easily outruns Peter, not because he’s perhaps a younger man but because love outruns authority. The Pope can also get there first, if he runs as the beloved disciple rather than as a pope.

It is commonly assumed that the beloved disciple was the Evangelist himself, John. That may in fact be correct, but that is not what the Gospel text wants you to conclude. The historical identity of the beloved disciple is deliberately left an open question because the Gospel wants that concept, to be the beloved disciple of Jesus, to be a designation that beckons and fits you – and beckons and fits every Christian in the world, including, hopefully too, the Pope himself.

Who is the beloved disciple? The beloved disciple is any person, woman, man, or child who is intimate enough with Jesus so as to be attuned to the heartbeat of God and who then sees the world from that place of intimacy, prays from that place of intimacy, and sets off in love to seek the Risen Lord and grasp the meaning of his empty tomb.  

Mystical images are best illuminated by other mystical images. With this in mind, I leave you with an image from the 4^th century Desert Father, Evagrius of Pontus:

Breast of the Lord

Kingdom of God

Who rests against it

A theologian shall be.

One of the richest experiences of grace that we can have this side of eternity is the experience of friendship.

Dictionaries define friendship as a relationship of mutual affection, a bond richer than mere association. They then go on to link friendship to a number of words: kindness, love, sympathy, empathy, honesty, altruism, loyalty, understanding, compassion, comfort, and (not least) trust. Friends, the dictionaries assert, enjoy each other’s company, express their feelings to each other, and make mistakes without fear of judgment from the other.

That basically covers things, but to better grasp the real grace in friendship a number of things inside that definition need explication.

First, as the Greek Stoics affirmed and as is evident in the Christian spirituality, true friendship is only possible among people who are practicing virtue. A gang is not a circle of friendship, nor are many ideological circles. Why? Because friendship needs to bring grace and grace is only found in virtue.

Next, friendship is more than merely human, though it is wonderfully human. When it is genuine, friendship is nothing less than a participation in the flow of life and love that’s inside of God.  Scripture tells us that God is love, but the word it uses for love in this case is the Greek word agape, a term which might be rendered as “family”, “community”, or “the sharing of life”.  Hence the famous text (“God is Love”) might be transliterated to read: God is family, God is community, God is shared existence, and whoever shares his or her existence inside of community and friendship is participating in the very flow of life and love that is inside the Trinity.

But this isn’t always true. Friendship and family can take different forms.  Parker Palmer, the contemporary Quaker writer, submits: “If you come here faithfully, you bring great blessing.” Conversely, the great Sufi mystic, Rumi, writes: “If you are here unfaithfully, you bring great harm.” Family and community can bring grace or block it. Our circle can be one of love and grace, or it can be a one of hatred and sin. Only the former merits the name friendship. Friendship, says St. Augustine, is the beauty of the soul.

Deep, life-giving friendship, as we all know, is as difficult as it is rare. Why? We all long for it in the depths of our soul, so why is it so difficult to find? We all know why: We’re different from each other, unique, and rightly cautious as to whom we give entry into our soul. And so it isn’t easy to find a soulmate, to have that kind of affinity and trust. Nor is it easy to sustain a friendship once we have found one. Sustained friendship takes hard commitment and that’s not our strong point as our psyches and our world forever shift and turn. Moreover, today, virtual friendships don’t always translate into real friendships.

Finally, not least, friendship is often hindered or derailed by sex and sexual tension.  This is simply a fact of nature and a fact within our culture and all other cultures. Sex and sexuality, while they ideally should be the basis for deep friendship, often are the major hindrance to friendship. Moreover, in our own culture (whose ethos prizes sex over friendship) friendship is often seen as a substitute, and a second-best one at that, for sex.

But while that may be in our cultural ethos, it’s clearly not what’s deepest in our souls. There we long for something that’s ultimately deeper than sex – or is sex in a fuller flowering. There’s a deep desire in us all (be that a deeper form of sexual desire or a desire for something that’s beyond sex) for a soulmate, for someone to sleep with morally. More deeply than we ache for a sexual partner, we ache for a moral partner, though these desires aren’t mutually exclusive, just hard to combine.

Friendship, like love, is always partly a mystery, something beyond us. It’s a struggle in all cultures. Part of this is simply our humanity. The pearl of great price is not easily found nor easily retained. True friendship is an eschatological thing, found, though never perfectly, in this life.  Cultural and religious factors always work against friendship, as does the omnipresence of sexual tension.

Sometimes poets can reach where academics cannot and so I offer these insights from a poet vis-à-vis the interrelationship between friendship and sex. Friendship, Rainer Marie Rilke suggests, is often one of the great taboos within a culture, but it remains always the endgame:  “In a deep, felicitous love between two people you can eventually become the loving protectors of each other’s solitude. … Sex is, admittedly, very powerful, but no matter how powerful, beautiful, and wondrous it may be. If you become the loving protectors of each other’s solitude, love gradually turns to friendship.”

And as Montaigne once affirmed: “The end of friendship may be more important than love.  The epiphanies of youth are meant to blossom and ripen into something everlasting.”

Dreaming is sometimes the most realistic thing we can do. Or, is there still something else we might do, like public protest, or something else?

In his book on prophecy, Commandments for the Long Haul, Daniel Berrigan offers this advice. Prophetic gestures aren’t always politically effective. Often they accomplish nothing that’s practical; but he adds:  If you can’t save the world at least you can save your own sanity.

Sometimes that’s all that can be accomplished by our protests against injustice. Moreover struggling to salvage our own sanity is not as privatized as it first appears. When we protest something that’s wrong, even though we know our protest is not going to practically change anything, the sanity we are saving is not just our own. We’re also saving the sanity of the moment.

Commenting on the current activism on the issues of human rights and the environment of Booker Prize winning novelist, Arundhati Roy, art critic, John Berger, says this: “Profound political protest is an appeal to a justice that is absent, and is accompanied by a hope that in the future this justice will be established; this hope, however, is not the first reason the protest is made. One protests because not to protest would be too humiliating, too diminishing, too deadly. One protests (by building a barricade, taking up arms, going on a hunger strike, linking arms, shouting, writing) in order to save the present moment, whatever the future holds. … A protest is not principally a sacrifice made for some alternative, more just future; it is an inconsequential redemption of the present.”  In essence, it preserves some sanity in the present moment.

But it may be inconsequential in terms of practically changing anything.  Most everything remains the same. The injustice continues, the poor continue to be poor, the international scene continues to threaten war, racists continue to be racist, the environment continues to be ravaged, corruption continues to go unchecked, and dishonesty continues to get away with its lies.  And so people go on marches, go to prison, go on hunger strikes, and sometimes even die for protesting, while the injustice, corruption, and dishonesty go on. At a certain point, logically and inevitably, we need to ask ourselves the question young Marius, in Jean Val Jean’s, Les Miserables, asks after his friends have died while protesting and nothing seemingly changed: What was your sacrifice for? Was this worth dying for?

Those questions are valid, but they can have a positive answer. They didn’t die in vain, for nothing, for an impractical idealism, for a naïve dream, for something they’d have outgrown had they lived longer. Rather their death was “an inconsequential redemption” of the present moment, meaning, its practical effectiveness may be immeasurable, but the moral seed it sows inside that moment will eventually help produce things that are measurable. All the women who initially protested for the vote never got to vote. But today many women do get to vote.  The moral seed they planted in their inconsequential protests eventually produced something practical.

Sometimes you might feel pretty alone in making your protest and it might seem that you’re working only at saving your own sanity and bewailing only your own diminishment and humiliation. But no one is an island. Your diminishment, your humiliation, and your sanity, are part of the immune system of all humanity. Everyone’s health is partially dependent upon your health; just your health is partially dependent upon everyone else’s.

And so protest is always in order and is indeed mandated by our faith. We may not remain passive in the face of injustice, inequality, racism, indifference to the poor, indifference to the Mother Nature, corruption, and dishonesty. We need to sow moral seeds into the present moment. How?

Not all of us (perhaps even most of us) are called upon to take up placards, make public protest, have ourselves arrested, or lay down our lives for a cause – except when the injustice or corruption is so extreme as to merit that. Normally, for most of us, our protest must be real but need not be the witness of martyrs.

I very much like a counsel proposed by Archbishop Paul-Andre Durocher of Gatineau, Quebec, in a recent issue of America magazine.  Commenting on the tensions that exist today between our Christian faith and the complex challenges that come to us from the world, Durocher, after first acknowledging that there are no easy answers, offers this counsel:  “The first step is to acknowledge them [the tensions]. Second, to understand why they arise. Third, to accept and even embrace them. And fourth, to commit to living a mature Christian faith in spite of those tensions.” (America, April 30, 2018)

In the face of all that’s happening in our world, some of which goes against everything we believe in and hold dear, sometimes all we can do is to hold our own moral ground, humbly, prophetically – and perhaps quietly.

And since that’s all we can do, it’s surely enough.