The Search for an Indubitable Truth

October 1, 2018

In a book, 12 Rules for Life – An Antidote to Chaos, that’s justifiably making waves in many circles today, Jordan Peterson shares about his own journey towards truth and meaning. Here’s that story:

At one point in his life, while still young and finding his own path, he reached a stage where he felt agnostic, not just about the shallow Christianity he’d been raised on, but also about most everything else in terms of truth and trust. What really can we believe in? What’s ultimately to be trusted?

Too humble to compare himself to one of the great minds in history, Rene Descartes, who, five hundred years ago, struggled with a similar agnosticism, Peterson nonetheless could not help but employ Descartes’ approach in trying to find a truth that you could not doubt. So, like Descartes, he set off in search off an “indubitable” (Descartes’ term), that is, to find a premise that absolutely cannot be doubted. Descartes, as we know, found his “indubitable” in his famous dictum: I think, therefore, I am! Nobody can be deceived in believing that since even to be deceived would be indisputable proof that you exist. The philosophy that Descartes then built upon the indubitable premise is left for history to judge. But history doesn’t dispute the truth of his dictum.

So Peterson sets out with the same essential question: What single thing cannot be doubted? Is there something so evidently true that nobody can doubt it? For Peterson, it’s not the fact that we think which is indisputable, it’s the fact that we, all of us, suffer. That’s his indubitable truth, suffering is real. That cannot be doubted: “Nihilists cannot undermine it with skepticism. Totalitarians cannot banish it. Cynics cannot escape its reality.” Suffering is real beyond all doubt.

Moreover, in Peterson’s understanding, the worst kind of suffering isn’t that which is inflicted upon us by the innate contingencies of our being and our mortality, nor by the sometimes blind brutality of nature. The worst kind of suffering is the kind that one person inflicts upon another, the kind that one part of humankind inflicts upon another part, the kind we see in the atrocities of the 20^th century – Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and countless others responsible for the torture, rape, suffering, and death of millions.

From this indubitable premise he submits something else that too cannot be disputed: This kind of suffering isn’t just real, it’s also wrong! We can all agree that this kind of suffering is not good and that there is something that is (beyond dispute) not good. And if there’s something that is not good, then there’s something that is good. His logic: “If the worst sin is the torment of others, merely for the sake of the suffering produced – then the good is whatever is diametrically opposed to that.”

What flows from this is clear: The good is whatever stops such things from happening. If this is true, and it is, then it is also clear as to what is good, and what is a good way of living: If the most terrible forms of suffering are produced by egotism, selfishness, untruthfulness, arrogance, greed, lust for power, willful cruelty, and insensitivity to others, then we are evidently called to the opposite: selflessness, altruism, humility, truth-telling, tenderness, and sacrificing for others.

Not incidentally, Peterson affirms all of this inside a chapter within which he highlights the importance of sacrifice, of delaying private gratification for a greater good long-range. His insight here parallels those of Rene Girard and other anthropologists who point out that the only way of stopping unconscious sacrifice to blind gods (which is what happened in the atrocities of Hitler and what happens in our own bitter slandering of others) is through self-sacrifice. Only when we accept at the cost of personal suffering our own contingencies, sin, and mortality will we stop projecting these on to others so to make them suffer in order to feel better about ourselves.

Peterson writes as an agnostic or perhaps, more accurately, as an honest analyst, an observer of humanity, who for purposes of this book prefers to keep his faith private. Fair enough. Probably wise too. No reason to impute motives. It’s where he lands that’s important, and where he lands is on very solid ground. It’s where Jesus lands in the Sermon on the Mount, it’s where the Christian churches land when they’re at their best, it’s where the great religions of the world land when they’re at their best, and it’s where humanity lands when it’s at its best.

The medieval mystic, Theresa of Avila, wrote with great depth and challenge. Her treatise on the spiritual life is now a classic and forms part of the very canon of Christian spiritual writings. In the end, she submits that during our generative years the most important question we need to challenge ourselves with is: How can I be more helpful? Jordan Peterson, with a logic and language that can be understood by everyone today, offers the same challenge.

What’s in a Name?

September 24, 2018

We’re called to a name change.

We’re all familiar with the incident in the bible where God changes the name of Abram to Abraham. The change seems so small that often times it isn’t even picked up by those reading that text. What’s the difference between Abram and Abraham?

The name Abram, meaning “Exalted Father”, is the name given the great patriarch to whom God made the promise that one day he would be the father of all the descendants of the nation of Judaism. But later when God promises this same man that he is to be the father as well of all nations everywhere, God changes his name to Abraham: “You will no longer be called Abram; your name will be Abraham, for I have made you a father of many nations.” (Genesis 17, 5).

What is implied in this change? The name, Abraham, in its very etymology, connotes a stretching to become something larger; he’s now to be the father of all nations. Abram, the father of one nation, now becomes Abraham (in Hebrew, Ab hamon goyim) the father of all the other nations, the “goyim”.

That change doesn’t just stretch a word; it stretches Abraham, a Jew, and redefines his understanding of himself and his mission. He’s no longer to understand himself as the patriarch of just one nation, his own, his ethnic and religious family, but he’s to see himself and the faith he is entrusted with as someone and something for all nations. He’s no longer to think of himself as the patriarch of one particular tribe, since God is not a tribal God. As well, he’s no longer to think of just his own tribe as his family, but to think of all others, irrespective of ethnicity or faith, as also his children.

What does that mean for us? T.S. Eliot might answer that by saying: Home is where we start from. Our particular ethnic, religious, cultural, and civic roots are precious and important, but they’re not the fully mature tree into which we’re meant to grow. Our roots are where we start from.

I grew up a very sheltered child, in a very close family, in a very enclosed rural environment. We were all of one kind, our neighbors, my classmates, everyone I knew, all of us, we shared a common history, ethnicity, religion, cultural background, set of values, and lived in a young country, Canada, that for the most part looked exactly like we did. I value those roots. They’re a great gift. Those roots have given me a stability that has freed me up for the rest of my life. But they’re only my roots, precious, but merely the place where I start from.

And it’s the same for all of us. We take root inside a particular family, an ethnicity, a neighborhood, a country, and a faith, with a particular slant on the world and, with that, some people constitute our tribe and others don’t. But that’s where we start from. We grow, change, move, meet new people, and live and work with others who don’t share our background, nationality, ethnicity, skin color, religion, or particular slant on life.

And so today we share our countries, cities, neighborhoods, and churches with the “goyim”, the people of other tribes, and that makes for the long struggle, hopefully successful, to eventually see that those others who are different from us, share the same God, are also our brothers and sisters, and have lives that are just as real, important, and precious as those of our own biological, national, and religious families. Like Abraham we need a name change so that we don’t make idolatry out of our youthful patriotism which has us believe that our own tribe is special and that our own country, skin color, background, and religion give us a unique and privileged claim to God.

Our world is globalizing at a dizzying pace and countries, neighborhoods, and churches are becoming ever-more plural and diverse ethnically, linguistically, culturally, and religiously. Our countries, neighborhoods, workplaces, and churches are literally taking on a different face. The old sheltered communities that gave us our roots are disappearing and for many of us this is scary and the temptation is retrench, to go hard to the right, to militantly defend the old boundaries, and to claim God and truth more exclusively again for ourselves. That’s understandable, but not where we’re called to be by what’s best inside our humanity and our faith. Like Abraham, we’re called to a name change.

We’re called to cherish our heritage, country, mother tongue, culture, faith, and church because only by being firmly rooted within primary community are we stable and altruistic enough to offer family to those outside of our own. But home is where we start from. From those wonderful families that give us roots, we’re called to stretch our hearts religiously, ethnically, culturally so that everyone eventually is embraced as family. We’re called to move from being Abram to becoming Abraham.

Bridging the Unbridgeable Gap

September 17, 2018

“Besides all this, between you and us a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who might want to pass from here to you cannot do so, and no one can cross from there to us.”

Abraham speaks these words to a soul in hell in the famous parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16, 19-21) and they are generally understood to mean that there exists between heaven and hell a gap that’s impossible to bridge. Nobody passes from hell to heaven. Hell is forever and no amount of regret or repentance there will get you to heaven. Indeed, once in hell, nobody in heaven can help you either, the gap between the two is eternally fixed!

But that’s not what this parable is teaching.

The “unbridgeable chasm” referred to here is not the gap between heaven and hell as this is understood in the popular mind. Rather, the unbridgeable gap exists already in this world in terms of the gap between the rich and the poor, a gap that we have forever been unable to bridge. Moreover it’s a gap with more dimensions than we first imagine.

What separates the rich from the poor so definitively with a chasm that, seemingly, can never be bridged? What would bridge that gap?

The prophet Isaiah offers us a helpful image here (Isaiah 65, 25). Drawing upon a messianic dream he tells us how that gap will finally be bridged. It will be bridged, he submits, in the Messianic age, when we’re in heaven because it’s there, in an age when God’s grace is finally able to affect universal reconciliation, that the “the wolf and lamb will feed together” (or, as this is commonly read, “the lion and the lamb will lie down together.”)

The lion and the lamb will lie down together. But lions kill lambs! How can this change? Well, that’s the unbridgeable gap between heaven and hell. That’s the gap between the victim and the killer, the powerless and the powerful, the bullied and the bully, the despised and the bigot, the oppressed and the oppressor, the victim and the racist, the hated and the hater, the older brother and his prodigal brother, the poor and the rich. That’s the gap between heaven and hell.

If this is what Isaiah intuits, and I think it is, then this image contains a powerful challenge which goes both ways: It isn’t just the lion that needs to convert and become sensitive, understanding and non-violent enough to lie down with the lamb; the lamb too needs to convert and move to deeper levels of understanding, forgiveness and trust in order to lie down with the lion. Ironically, this may be a bigger challenge to the lamb than to the lion. Once wounded, once victimized, once hated, once spit on, once raped, once beaten-up by a bully, once discriminated against because of gender, race, religion, or sexual orientation, and it becomes very difficult, almost impossible existentially, to truly forgive, forget, and move with trust towards the one who hurt us.

This is a tough saying, but life can be grossly unfair sometimes and perhaps the greatest unfairness of all is not the injustice of being victimized, violated, raped, or murdered, but that, after all this has been done to us, we’re expected to forgive the one who did it to us while at the same time knowing that the one who hurt us probably has an easier time of it in terms of letting go of the incident and moving towards reconciliation. That’s perhaps the greatest unfairness of all. The lamb has to forgive the lion who killed it.

And yet this is the invitation to all of us who have ever been victimized. Parker Palmer suggests that violence is what happens when someone doesn’t know what else to do with his or her suffering and that domestic abuse, racism, sexism, homophobia, and contempt for the poor are all cruel outcomes of this. What we need, he suggests, is a bigger “moral imagination”.

He’s right, I believe, on both scores: violence is what happens when people don’t know what to do with their sufferings and we do need a bigger moral imagination. But understanding that our abuser is in deep pain, that the bully himself was first bullied, doesn’t generally do much to ease our own pain and humiliation. As well, imagining how ideally we should respond as Christians is helpful, but it doesn’t of itself give us the strength to forgive. Something else is needed, namely, a strength that’s presently beyond us.

This is a tough teaching, one that should not be glibly presented. How do you forgive someone who violated you? In this life, mostly, it’s impossible; but remember Isaiah is speaking about the messianic time, a time when, finally, with God’s help, we will be able to bridge that unbridgeable chasm.

Chastity and Love

September 10, 2018

Woe to chastity that is not practiced out of love, but woe to love that excludes chastity.

These are the words of Benoit Standaert, a Benedictine monk, and I believe they can be profitably read in our culture today where, to the detriment of everyone, the sexually active and vowed celibates alike, sexuality and chastity are generally seen as opposed to each other, as enemies.

Unfortunately, this opposition is not very well understood today, either in our culture or in our churches. In our current culture, chastity is mostly seen as a naiveté, a lack of critical sophistication, a quality you honor and protect only in children. Indeed, within the popular culture today, chastity is often disdained and seen as a fear-based moral rigidity. Ironically many of us in our churches who are trying to defend chastity are no healthier. We never link the chastity we defend to a spirituality that’s wholesome enough to able to celebrate sexuality as a beautiful gift from God that’s intended to be linked to exuberance, spirituality, and delight.

Sexuality and chastity aren’t enemies, as our culture and churches make them out to be. They’re different sides of the same coin. They need each other. Sexuality without chastity is invariably soulless and not respectful. Conversely, chastity that sees itself as somehow above or divorced from sex will invariably end up in sterility, judgment, and anger. Woe to either – if it doesn’t take the other seriously.

Unfortunately, with few exceptions, our churches have never grasped sexuality well; just as our culture, with even fewer exceptions, has never grasped chastity well. One searches, mostly in vain, for a Christian spirituality of sexuality that’s truly wholesome and which properly honors the wonderful gift God gave us in our sexuality. Likewise, one searches, mostly entirely in vain, for a secular voice that grasps the importance of chastity. When Moses was standing before the burning bush and God told him, Take off your shoes because the ground you are standing on is holy, God was speaking pre-eminently about how we, as humans, stand before each other inside the mystery of love and sexuality. Sex is life-giving only if it is given and received with proper respect.

Sexuality, as we know, is more than sex. When God created the first human beings, God looked at them and said: “It’s not good for a person to be alone!” That wasn’t just true for Adam and Eve, it’s true for every human being, every living thing, and every molecule and atom in the universe. It’s not good to be alone and sexuality is the fire within us that at every level of our being, conscious and unconscious, body and soul, drives us outward beyond our aloneness, towards family, community, friendship, companionship, procreation, co-creation, celebration, delight, and consummation. Sexuality is linked to our very instinct to continue breathing and cannot be separated from the sacredness we feel inside of us as creatures made in the image and likeness of God. And, as an energy, sexuality is sacred, never to be denigrated in the name of something higher or reduced to the casual.

Chastity, as we don’t always know, is first of all not even a sexual concept. It’s about much more. Chastity is proper respect and proper patience, not just for how we stand before sex but for how we stand before all of life. Chastity is not celibacy, much less frigidity. One can be celibate, but not chaste; just as one can be sexually active, and chaste. Chastity, properly understood, is not anti-sexual; it strives to protect sexuality from its own excessive power by surrounding it with the needed filters, patience and respect, thus allowing the other person to be fully herself or himself, allowing us to be fully ourselves, and allowing sex to be what it was intended to be, a sacred, life-giving gift.

Annie Dillard in Holy the Firm offers an interesting image of chastity. She describes how, one day, watching a butterfly struggle to emerge from its cocoon, she gave in to impatience. The process was fascinating but interminably slow; at a point, she took a candle and added some heat to the cocoon. The butterfly then emerged more quickly, but, because the process had not been given the necessary time and freedom to unfold on its own terms, the butterfly emerged with damaged wings. The natural order of things had not been given its due, a fault in chastity, an ill-advised impatience, a prematurity that causes a limp in nature.

Sexuality and chastity need each other. Sexuality brings the energy, the longing, the fire, and the urgency which keep us aware, consciously and unconsciously, that it’s not good to be alone. If we shut that off, we become sterile and angry. Chastity, on the other hand, tells us that, in that process of seeking union with all that’s beyond us, we must have enough patience and respect to let the other fully be other and ourselves be fully ourselves.

An Ode to the Church

September 3, 2018

Carlo Carretto was an Italian monk who died in 1988. For many years he lived as a hermit in the Sahara Desert, translated the scriptures into the Tuareg language, and from the solitude of the desert wrote some extraordinary spiritual books. His writings and his faith were special in that they had a rare capacity to combine an almost childlike piety with (when needed) a blistering iconoclasm. He loved the church deeply, but he wasn’t blind to its faults and failures, and he wasn’t afraid to point out those shortcomings.

Late in life, when his health forced him to leave the desert he retired to a religious community in his native Italy. While there, late in life, he read a book by an atheist who took Jesus to task for a phrase in the Sermon on the Mount where he says: “Seek and you shall find”, meaning, of course, that if you seek God with an honest heart you will find God. The atheist had entitled his book, I Sought and I Didn’t Find, arguing from his own experience that an honest heart can seek God and come up empty.

Carretto wrote a book in reply called: I Sought and I Found. For him, Jesus’ counsel rang true. In his own search, despite encountering many things that could indicate the absence of God, he found God. But he admits the difficulties, and one of those difficulties is, at times, the church. The church can, and sometimes does, through its sin, make it difficult for some to believe in God. Carretto admits this with a disarming honesty but argues that it’s not the whole picture.

Hence his book combines his deep love for his faith and his church with his refusal to not turn a blind eye to the very real faults of Christians and the churches. At one point in the book he gives voice to something which might be described as an Ode to the Church. It reads this way:

How much I must criticize you, my church and yet how much I love you!

How you have made me suffer much and yet owe much to you.

I should like to see you destroyed and yet I need your presence.

You have given me much scandal and yet you alone have made me understand holiness.

Never in this world have I seen anything more obscurantist, more compromised, more false, and yet never in this world have I touched anything more pure, more generous, and more beautiful.

Many times I have felt like slamming the door of my soul in your face – and yet how often I have prayed that I might die in your sure arms!

No, I cannot be free of you, for I am one with you, even though not completely you.

Then, too – where would I go? To build another church?

But I cannot build another without the same defects, for they are my own defeats I bear within me.

And again, if I build one, it will be my Church, and no longer Christ’s.

No, I am old enough to know that I am no better than others.

I shall not leave this Church, founded on so frail a rock, because I should be founding another one on an even frailer rock: myself.

And then, what do rocks matter?

What matters is Christ’ promise, what matters is the cement that binds the rocks into one: the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit alone can build the Church with stones as ill‐hewn as we.

This is an expression of a mature faith; one which isn’t so romantic and idealistic that it needs to be shielded from the darker side of things and one which is real enough so as not to be so cynical that it blinds itself to the evident goodness that also emanates from the church. In truth, the church is both horribly compromised and wonderfully grace-filled. Honest eyes can see both. A mature heart can accept both. Children and novices need to be shielded from the dark underbelly of things; scandalized adults need to have their eyes opened to the evident goodness that’s also there.

Many people have left the church because it has scandalized them through its habitual sins, blind spots, defensiveness, self-serving nature, and arrogance. The recent revelations (again) of sexual abuse by priests and the cover-up by church authorities have left many people wondering whether they can ever again trust the church’s structure, ministers, and authorities. For many, this scandal seems too huge to digest.

Carlo Carretto’s Ode, I believe, can help us all, whether scandalized or pious. To the pious, it can show how one can accept the church despite its sin and how denial of that sin is not what’s called for by love and loyalty. To the scandalized, it can be a challenge to not miss the forest for the trees, to not miss seeing that, in the church, frailty and sin, while real, tragic, and scandalous, never eclipse the superabundant, life-giving grace of God.

How to Respond

August 27, 2018

Sometimes all you can do is to put your mouth to the dust and wait. That’s a counsel from the Book of Lamentations and while perhaps not the best response to the recent revelations of clerical sexual abuse and cover-up in the Roman Catholic Church, it seems the only helpful response available to me as Roman Catholic priest today. Beyond prayer, I’ve been hesitant to respond otherwise to this current situation for three reasons.

My first hesitation has to do with the seeming futility of yet another apology and breast-beating. Since the report on sexual abuse and clerical cover-up was released in Pennsylvania a few weeks back, there have been apologies issued by virtually every diocese, every parish, and every priest in America, including one from the Pope himself. While these apologies have been almost universally sincere, non-defensive, and rightly focused on the victims, they’ve also for the most part not been well-received. More generally the response has been: “What good does that do now! Where were you when this was all happening?” The apologies have generally met with more cynicism and anger than acceptance. And yet it’s important that they be made, though I’m not sure my adding another one will be helpful.

My second hesitancy stems from the fact that there’s so much anger and grief around this issue right now that words, even the right ones, generally don’t hit their mark, akin to telling someone freshly grieving the death of loved one that “she’s in a better place.” The words are true, but moment’s too raw for the words to be heard. They only become effective later. And that’s the situation now; we’re in a time of raw anger and dark grief. These are in fact the same emotion (just that one’s hard and the other soft) and so for many people dealing with the revelations of clerical sexual abuse and cover-up right now, apologies, while necessary, are not being heard. The moment is too raw.

And, one last hesitation: As a priest with a vow of celibacy I’m painfully aware that right now I’m at an understandable disadvantage to speak out on this. Victims speak from a position of moral privilege, rightly so, their voices carry extra authority; but those who stand symbolically connected to the perpetrators, and that’s me, are understandably heard with suspicion. I accept that. How could it be otherwise? At this particularly charged moment, what moral authority can my voice carry on this issue? What does my apology add?

But, for what it’s worth, even given those caveats, I do offer an apology: As Roman Catholic priest, I want to publicly say that what’s happened in the church in terms of sexual abuse by the clergy and cover-up by the hierarchy is inexcusable, deeply sinful, has harmed thousands of lives irrevocably, and needs radical redress in terms of reaching out to the victims and of prompting structural change in the church to ensure that this will never happen again.

Let me add something else: First, as a Roman Catholic priest, I do not distance myself from this by morally separating myself from those who have done wrong by declaring: “They’re guilty and I’m not!” The cross of Jesus doesn’t allow such an escape. Jesus was crucified between two thieves. He was innocent, they weren’t; but he didn’t protest his innocence, and those looking at three crosses that day didn’t distinguish between who was innocent and who was guilty. The crosses were all painted with the same brush. There are times when one does not protest one’s innocence. Part of Jesus’ mission, as our liturgy puts it, was “to become sin for us”, to risk having his innocence mixed in with guilt and be perceived as sin so as to help carry darkness and sin for others.

Beyond our apologies, all of us, clergy and laity alike, are invited to do something for the church right now, namely, help carry this scandal as Jesus did. Indignantly separating ourselves morally from this sin is not the way of Jesus and the cross.

Like Mary standing under the cross, we must not replicate the anger and darkness of the moment so as to give it back in kind. Instead, like her, we must do the only thing possible sometimes when standing beneath the consequence of sin, that is, let our posture, like Mary’s, speak deeply through a voice that, unlike bitterness or collapse, says: “Today, I can’t stop this darkness, nobody can. Sometimes darkness just has its hour. But I can stop some of the sin and bitterness that’s in the moment by absorbing it, not distancing myself from it, and not giving it back in kind.” Sometimes darkness has its moment and we, followers of Jesus, may not self-servingly distance ourselves from the sin but need to help absorb it.

Sometimes all we can do is put our mouths to the dust … and pray … and wait. Knowing that, at some future time, the stone will again roll away from the tomb.

Beautiful Stoics

August 20, 2018

There’s a rich literature being written today by some highly intelligent, sensitive men and women who might best be described as agnostic stoics. Unlike some of their atheistic counterparts whose one-sided attacks on religion suggest that they “doth protest too much”, this group doesn’t protest at all. They don’t attack faith in God; indeed they often see salient religious doctrines like belief in the incarnation in Christ, belief in original sin, and belief in a resurrection as helpful myths that can be invaluable for our self-understanding, akin to the great myths of the ancient world. They’re warm to spirituality and are sometimes better apologists for depth of soul and the place of mystery in our lives than their explicitly religious counterparts. It’s just that, in the end, they bracket belief in God.

At an intellectual level, you see this in people like the late James Hillman and many of his followers (though some of those followers have, unlike their master, taken a more belligerent and negative attitude towards faith in God and religion). You see this too is in a good number of contemporary novelists who write from fairly deliberate agnostic perspective. And you see this in wonderful biographical books, like Nina Riggs’, The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying.

What these authors all have in common is this: They look at life’s deepest questions and face those questions with courage and sensitivity, but only from an agnostic and stoic perspective. How do you make sense of things, if there’s no God? How do you face the finality of death, if there’s no afterlife? How do you ground love as an absolute, if there’s no Absolute upon which to ground it? How can the precious events of our lives have lasting meaning, if there’s no personal immortality? How do we face the shortcomings of our lives and own mortality, if this life is all there is?

They face these questions honestly and courageously without an explicit belief in God and come to peace with them, find meaning for themselves, and garner the insight and courage they need to live with answers that don’t include faith in God and belief in an afterlife. There’s a courageous stoicism in that for sure, but in many of their writings there’s also a certain beauty. You get the sense that this is an honest, beautiful soul wrestling with life’s deepest questions and coming to an acceptable peace that itself encapsulates the kind of compassion that all the great religions place at their center. Inside of religious literature you can meet some beautiful saints. Inside of secular literature you can meet some beautiful stoics.

But there’s one thing upon which I want to challenge these beautiful stoics: They try to answer a deep question: How do we make sense of life if there’s no God and no afterlife and how do we make sense of life if the tenets of faith are not true, but mere projection? That’s a fair question, worth asking. But this is my protest: While these authors face with courage and honesty the question of what it means if God doesn’t exist and there’s no afterlife, they never face with the same courage and honesty the question: What if there really is a God and an afterlife and the essential tenets of faith are true? How does one live then? What if our probing minds and noble sentiments are in fact grounded in a loving, personal God? That would be an even more-honest and more-courageous agnosticism, and an even more beautiful stoicism.

True agnosticism speaks of an open mind, one so open that it’s reticent to shut down any real possibility. And the existence of God is a real possibility.

At any given time in history, our age included, the vast majority of human beings believe in the existence of God and the existence of an afterlife. Atheists have never been the cognitive majority. If this is true, and it is, then why are good, courageous, honest, and sensitive men and women reluctant to take their agnosticism down both alleyways, that is: How do we shape our lives if there’s no God and no afterlife – and how do we shape our lives if there is a God and an afterlife?

If one wants to look at the meaning of life as courageously and honestly as possible, shouldn’t the question of God and the afterlife, and not just its antithesis, be one of the horizons against which that discernment occurs? I suspect the reluctance of many of these authors to give equal consideration to the possibility of the truth of religion comes from the fact that, up to modern times, the bulk of all literature perennially considered life’s deep questions more or less exclusively from a religious rather than an agnostic perspective. What our agnostic authors are contributing is an alternative, a different voice from the dominant voice in history (though not the dominant voice within secular society today).

Still it makes for some valuable insights from some beautiful stoics.

The Power of a Compliment

August 13, 2018

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.”

Why I Believe in God

August 6, 2018

Some of my favorite authors are agnostics, men and women who face life honestly and courageously without faith in a personal God. They’re stoics mostly, persons who have made peace with the fact that God may not exist and that perhaps death ends everything for us. I see this, for example, in the late James Hillman, a man whom I greatly admire and who has much to teach believers about what it means to listen to and honor the human soul.

But here’s something I don’t admire in these agnostic stoics: While they face with courage what it should mean for us if God doesn’t exist and death ends our personal existence, they don’t, with the same courage ask the question of what it should mean for us if God does exist and death does not end our personal existence. What if God does exist and what if the tenets of our faith are true? They need too to face that question.

I believe that God exists, not because I have never had doubts, or because I was raised in the faith by persons whose lives gave deep witness to its truth, or because perennially the vast majority of people on this planet believe in God. I believe that a personal God exists for more reasons than I can name: the goodness of saints; the hook in my own heart that has never let me go; the interface of faith with my own experience, the courage of religious martyrs throughout history; the stunning depth of Jesus’ teachings; the deep insights contained in other religions, the mystical experience of countless people; our sense of connection inside the communion of saints with loved ones who have died; the convergence of the anecdotal testimony of hundreds of individuals who have been clinically dead and resuscitated back to life; the things we sometimes intuitively know beyond all logical reason; the constant recurrence of resurrection in our lives; the essential triumph of truth and goodness throughout history; the fact that hope never dies, the unyielding imperative we feel inside of ourselves to be reconciled with others before we die; the infinite depth of the human heart; and, yes, even the very ability of atheists and agnostics to intuit that somehow it still all makes sense, points to the existence of a living, personal God.

I believe that God exists because faith works; at least to the extent we work it. The existence of God proves itself true to the extent that we take it seriously and live our lives in face of it. Simply put, we’re happy and at peace to the exact extent that we risk, explicitly or implicitly, living lives of faith. The happiest people I know are also the most generous, selfless, gracious, and reverent persons I know. That’s no accident.

Leon Bloy once asserted that there’s only one true sadness in life, that of not being a saint. We see that in the story of the rich young man in Gospels who turns down Jesus’ invitation to live his faith more deeply. He goes away sad. Of course, being a saint and being sad are never all or nothing, both have degrees. But there’s a constant: We’re happy or sad in direct proportion to our fidelity or infidelity to what’s one, true, good, and beautiful. I know that existentially: I’m happy and at peace to the exact extent that I take my faith seriously and live it out in fidelity; the more faithful I am, the more at peace I am, and vice versa.

Inherent in all of this too is a certain “law of karma”, namely, the universe gives back to us morally exactly what we give to it. As Jesus worded it, the measure you measure out is the measure that will be measured back to you. What we breathe out is what we’re going to inhale. If I breathe out selfishness, selfishness is what I will inhale; if I breathe out bitterness, that’s what I’ll meet at every turn; conversely, if I breathe out love, gracious, and forgiveness, these will be given back to me in the exact measure that I give them out. Our lives and our universe have a deep, innate, non-negotiable structure of love and justice written into them, one that can only be underwritten by a living, personal, divine mind and heart of love.

None of this, of course, proves God’s existence with the kind of proof we find in science or mathematics; but God isn’t found at the end of an empirical test, a mathematical equation, or a philosophical syllogism. God is found, explicitly or implicitly, in living a good, honest, gracious, selfless, moral life, and this can happen inside of religion or outside of it.

The Belgium Benedictine, Benoit Standaert, submits that wisdom is three things, and a fourth. Wisdom is a respect for knowledge; wisdom is a respect for honesty and aesthetics; and wisdom is a respect for mystery. But there’s a fourth – wisdom is a respect for Someone.

Standing on New Borders

July 30, 2018

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.

To the Friends I’ve Known

July 23, 2018

Recently, reading Commonweal magazine, I was struck by this line by Jerry Ryan, a Little Brother of Jesus: “I have lost contact with so many people who meant a lot to me at different stages of my life, people I loved dearly and really cared for and who had given me so much and made me what I am.”

That’s so true for me and, I suspect, for most of us. People enter our lives, friendships develop, and then some of those friends disappear from our lives. Sometimes we move away, sometimes they move away, sometimes things change and we drift apart, or sometimes the affective bonds that held us together disintegrate and they, and we, move on. To the degree that we’re sensitive, there’s always some pain and guilt in this. It’s not an unhealthy thing to feel the loneliness of that loss, nor is it unhealthy to feel that somehow we’ve failed and been less than attentive.

Indeed sometimes we have been less than faithful, but mostly the blame for that (to the extent that some applies) lies inside our inculpable inadequacy. Only God is adequate. Only God has a heart big enough to be attentive to everyone personally and intimately at the same time. Only God never moves away or grows tired. And only God has the strength to forever be faithful. We cannot not be inadequate.

I struggle mightily with that inadequacy. Being a missionary, given the work I do, and given the quirks of my personality, I find myself perennially overwhelmed by my inadequacy in the area of staying close to family and friends, including very dear friends. The task isn’t easy.

First, I come from a very large family which through the generations has expanded into a virtual tribe. It could be a fulltime job just staying in touch with family. Next, I’ve been ministering for more than forty years and during that time have lived inside various Oblate houses with almost two hundred different people. Community is family and, again, it would be a fulltime task just staying in meaningful touch with them all. Then, during my years of doing graduate work, I had the privileged opportunity to develop long-lasting friendships with a number of classmates from different parts of the world. Finally, during all those years of ministry, I’ve met hundreds of students in classrooms and thousands of people doing workshops and retreats. Most of those encounters were temporary and casual, but through the years a good number of meaningful friendships developed there as well. And, while all this was happening, I’ve lived and worked in four different countries and made friends in each of those places.

Then today there’s the further struggle to stay in touch with all the contacts that one necessarily has to deal with on social media.

How does one keep meaningful contact with everyone? How does one not betray friends by simple neglect?

Even as I’m deeply thankful to have so rich a treasury of family and friends, not infrequently I’m overwhelmed with the task of staying in meaningful contact with them and at those times I feel some guilt about forever being out of touch with so many people I was once close to. Sometimes friends whom I have been out of touch with remind me, and not always delicately, of my neglect of our friendship. But as the years go by and the problem grows larger rather than smaller, I am making more peace with my inadequacy and guilt – if not always with some of my neglected friends.

What helps is to remind myself constantly of what a great grace it is to have so large a family and to have such a large number of friends. There are few things for which to be more grateful. Next, I do try to stay in meaningful touch with them to the extent that time, energy, and distance allow. Most importantly, though, given my inadequacy, I try to meet my family and friends at a place where time, energy, and distance are eclipsed by an immediate, intimate presence. There’s one place where we’re not inadequate, where we can be at more places than one at the same time and where we can love countless people individually and intimately, namely, inside the Body of Christ.

Scripture tells us that, as believers, we form together a body that, as much as any living body, is a true living organism, with all parts affecting all other parts. Inside that body we’re present to each other, not fully consciously of course, but deeply, truly, actually. And to the extent that we’re living our lives faithfully and sharing honest friendship and fellowship with those who are immediately around us, we’re not only healthy enzymes helping bring health to the body, we’re also present to each other, affectively, in a way that touches us at the deepest level of our souls There is a place where we are not neglecting each other.

And so, to all my friends: we’re still together!

A Slur that Cuts Deep

July 16, 2018

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!

Consecrated Celibacy – An Apologia

July 9, 2018

Huston Smith, the renowned commentator on world religions, submits that you should not judge a religion by its worst expressions, but by its best, its saints. That’s also true in terms of judging the merits of vowed, consecrated celibacy. It should be judged by its best, not perverse, examples, as is true too for the institution of marriage.

I write this apologia because today consecrated celibacy is under siege from critics in almost every circle. Celibacy is no longer understood or deemed realistic by a culture which basically refuses to accept any restrictions in the area of sexuality and in effect sees all celibacy, lived for whatever reason, as frigidity, naiveté, or a misfortune of circumstance. Our culture constitutes a virtual conspiracy against celibacy.

More critical still is how consecrated celibacy is being judged in the wake of the clerical sexual abuse scandal. More and more, there’s a popular conception both within society and within church circles that sexual abuse in general and pedophilia in particular is more prevalent among priests and religious than in the population at large and that there’s something inherent in consecrated celibacy itself that makes priests and vowed religious more prone to sexual misconduct and emotional ill health. How true is this? Are celibates more prone to sexual misconduct than their non-celibate contemporaries? Are celibates more likely to be less healthy and happy in general than those who are married or who are sexually active outside of marriage?

This must be adjudicated, I believe, by looking at the deepest intentions of sex itself and, from there, assessing where both married persons and celibates for the most part tend to end up. What’s the ultimate intention of sex? What is this powerful archetypal energy meant to do in us? Generically, the answer is clear: Sex is meant to lead us out of ourselves, out of aloneness, out of selfishness, into altruism, into family, into community, into generativity, into mellowness of heart, into delight, into happiness, and ultimately (perhaps not always this side of eternity) into ecstasy.

Viewed through the prism of this criterion how do marriage and vowed celibacy compare? Mostly we see parallels: Some people get married, become healthily generous and generative, remain faithful to their spouses, and age into wholesome, happy, forgiving persons. Others write a different chronicle. They get married (or are sexually active outside of marriage) but do not become more generous and generative, do not remain faithful to their commitments in love, and age instead in sullenness, bitterness, and unhappiness.

The same is true for vowed celibates: Some make the vow and become healthily generous and generative, remain faithful to the vow, and age into wholesome, happy, forgiving persons. For some others, most everything in their lives belies the transparency and fruitfulness that should stem from their celibacy and they do not become more selfless, generative, mellow, or happy. Instead, like some of their sexually active contemporaries, they also grow sullen, bitter, and unhappy. Sometimes this is the result of breaking their vow and sometimes it’s the result of an unhealthily repressed sexuality. In either case, their vow isn’t fruitful and generally leads to unhealthy compensatory behaviors.

Celibacy, admittedly, comes fraught with some extra dangers because marriage and sex are the normal path that God intended for us. As Merton once put it, in celibacy we live inside a loneliness which God, himself, has condemned: It is not good for the man to be alone! Sex and marriage are the norm and celibacy deviates from that. But that doesn’t mean celibacy cannot be highly generative, meaningful, and healthy and make for wholesomeness and happiness. Some of the most generative and wholesome people that I know are vowed celibates, aging into an enviable mellowness and peace. Sadly, the reverse is also true for some celibates. Of course, all of this is equally true, both ways, for the married people that I know.

By their fruits you shall know them. Jesus offers us this as a criterion for judgment. But in judging celibacy and marriage (just in judging religions) we might add Huston Smith’s counsel that we should judge each by its best expressions, by its saints, and not by its unhealthy expressions. Looking at marriage and celibacy, we see in each both healthy and unhealthy manifestations; and it doesn’t seem that either side trumps the other in terms of manifesting sanctity or dysfunction. That’s not surprising since, in the end, both choices demand the same thing, namely, a willingness to sacrifice and sweat blood for the sake of love and fidelity.

Some celibates are unfaithful, and some are pedophiles, but some become Mother Teresa. It’s worth mentioning too that Jesus was a celibate. Some married persons are unfaithful, some are abusive, and some murder their spouses, but some give tangible, embodied, holy expression to God’s unconditional love for the world and Christ’s unbreakable bond with his church.

Sexuality is a reality that can be lived out in different modalities, and both marriage and celibacy are holy choices that can, sadly, go wrong.

Real Miracles

July 2, 2018

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.

The Mary of Scripture and the Mary of Devotions

June 25, 2018

There’s an axiom that says: Roman Catholics tend to adore Mary while Protestants and Evangelicals tend to ignore Mary. Neither is ideal.

Mary, the Mother of Jesus, has, in effect, two histories within Christian tradition. We have the Mary of Scripture and we have the Mary of Devotions, and both offer something special for our Christian journey.

The Mary of Devotions is the more well-known, though mostly within Roman Catholic circles. This is the Mary invoked in the rosary, the Mary of popular shrines, the Sorrowful Mother of our litanies, the Mother with the soft heart through whom we can get the ear of God, the Mary of purity and chastity, the Mother who understands human suffering, the Mother who can soften the hearts of murderers, and the Mother we can always turn to.

And this Mary is pre-eminently the Mother of the poor. Karl Rahner once pointed out that when you look at all the apparitions of Mary that have been officially approved by the church you will notice that she has always appeared to a poor person – a child, an illiterate peasant, a group of children, someone without social standing. She’s never appeared to a theologian in his study, to a pope, or to a millionaire banker. She’s always been the person to whom the poor look. Marian devotion is a mysticism of the poor.

We see this, for example, very powerfully in the effect that Our Lady of Guadalupe has had on much of Latin America. In all of the Americas, most of the indigenous peoples are now Christian. However, in North America, while most of the indigenous peoples are Christian, Christianity itself is not seen as a native religion, but rather as a religion brought to the native peoples from elsewhere. In Latin America, in every place where Our Lady of Guadalupe is popular, Christianity is seen to be a native religion.

But piety and devotions also run the risk of theological sloppiness and unhealthy sentimentality. That’s the case too with the Mary of Devotions. We’ve tended to elevate Mary to divine status (which is simply wrong) and we have far too often encrusted her in so much piety that she, the Mary of Devotions, cannot possibly be the same person who wrote the Magnificat. The Mary of Devotions is often so enshrined in piety, over-simplicity, and asexuality that she needs to be protected from human complexity. Still, the Mary of Devotions offers us a lot vis-à-vis our spiritual journey.

Much more ignored is the Mary of Scripture and the role the various Gospels assign to her.

In the Synoptic Gospels, Mary is presented as a model of discipleship. More simply, she’s shown to us as the one person who gets it right from the beginning. But that isn’t immediately evident. On the surface, the opposite sometimes seems to be the case. For example, on a couple of occasions as Jesus is speaking to a crowd he is interrupted and told that his mother and his family are outside wanting to speak to him. His response: “Who are my mother and who are my brothers and sisters? It’s those who hear the word of God and keep it.” In saying this, Jesus isn’t distancing his mother from himself and his message, the opposite. Before this incident is recorded in the Gospels, the evangelists have been very careful to point out that Mary was the first person to hear the word of God and keep it. What happens here is that Jesus singles out his mother first of all for her faith, not for her biology. In the Synoptic Gospels, Mary is the paradigm for discipleship. She’s the first to hear the word of God and keep it.

John’s Gospel gives her a different role. Here she’s not the paradigm of discipleship (a role John gives to the Beloved disciple and to Mary Magdala) but is presented as Eve, the mother of humanity, and the mother of each of us. Interestingly, John never gives us Mary’s name, in his Gospel she is always referred to as “the Mother of Jesus”. And in this role she does two things:

First, she gives voice to human finitude, as she does at the wedding feast of Cana when she tells her son (who is always divine in John’s Gospel) that “they have no wine”. In John’s Gospel, this is not just a conversation between Mary and Jesus; but also a conversation between the Mother of Humanity and God. Secondly, as Eve, as universal mother, and as our mother, she stands in helplessness under human pain and within human pain when she stands under the cross. In this, she shows herself as universal mother but also as an example of how injustice must be handled, namely, by standing within it in a way that does not replicate its hatred and violence so as to give it back in kind.

Mary offers us a wonderful example, not to be adored or ignored.

Mourning

June 18, 2018

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.