Stirring the Smoldering Ashes of Our Faith

June 11, 2018

Anyone who has ever watched a fire knows that at a point the flames subside and disappear into smoldering coals which themselves eventually cool and turn into cold, grey ash. But there’s a moment in that process, before they cool off, that the coals can be stirred so as to make them burst into flame again.

That’s the image St. Paul uses to encourage us rekindle the fires of our faith when they seem to be burning low: “I remind you to stir into flame the gift of God that was once given you.” It’s a meaningful image. Our faith sometimes needs some stirring in its roots to make it alive and affective again. But how’s that to be done? How do we stir into flame again the fire of our faith?

We stir our faith back into flame by re-situating ourselves inside its roots. Despite the fact that faith is a divine gift, it can be helpful sometimes to journey back and examine what earthily forces helped plant the faith inside us.

Who and what helped give us faith? Of course, that’s a deeply personal question that each of us can only answer for himself or herself. For myself, when I try to go back and touch the roots of my faith a number of things come into focus.

First, there was the faith and witness of my parents, the critical piece. Faith was the most important thing in their lives and they did everything in their power to ensure that this was true too for us, their children. And their lives never belied their faith. That’s a strong witness and a gift of incalculable value.

Then there was the witness of my parish church, a rural, immigrant community, small enough so that everyone knew everyone else’s joys and sorrows and was able to share them in faith, even if not always in full neighborly warmth. It takes a village to raise a child, in my case it was a parish. As a boy growing up, I could glance around a church and see most everyone I knew, friend or not, all kneeling together in one faith. That’s a rarity today and no small gift.

Next came the dedication and faith witness of the Ursuline sisters who came into our rural community to teach in our public schools and were not only our best teachers academically but also catechized us. By the time I’d reached my teens, I’d memorized two catechisms and had a solid intellectual grasp of the tenets of my faith, a gift whose importance I recognized only later on.

Finally, and in a way that left deep, permanent roots in my soul, there was the voice of the God of my youth. During my youth, God’s voice was strong and clear inside me. Admittedly some of what I took to be God’s voice then was in actuality the voice of fear, timidity, tribalism, and what Freudians term the superego. But, that being admitted, God’s voice was there too, unavoidable, clear. I know that because much of my youthful fear, timidity, crass tribalism, and superego have long since departed, and the voice of the God of my youth remains inside me still.

However, now, sometimes that voice can be quite silent, and it can feel as simply the voice of the naiveté of my youth – Santa, the Easter Bunny, and Jesus – and not something that’s real anymore or indeed ever was really real. For me, as for everyone, faith-wise, sometimes my imagination and affectivity simply run dry so that my preoccupations preclude God’s presence. It’s then that I need to stir the seemingly smoldering coals of my faith by making a journey back to reground myself in the reality of my parents’ faith, in the reality of what branded my soul in our small parish community, in the reality of the witness and catechesis of the Ursuline sisters who taught me, and, not least, in that clear, deeply moral, divine voice that spoke inside me and guided me in my youth.

This kind of journey, I believe, can be helpful for most everybody, with one cautionary flag: The seeming silence of God in our lives as adults can in fact be a deeper modality of God’s presence rather than a sign of a deteriorating faith. The voice of God often seems clear in our youth but later on that clarity gives way to what the mystics call “dark nights of the soul”, where God’s seeming absence is not a question of a loss of faith but of a new, richer, less-imaginative mode of God’s presence in our lives. Fervor is not always a sign of a deep faith, just as the seeming absence of God is not necessarily a sign of a weakening faith. God must be patiently waited for and will arrive in our lives only on God’s terms, not ours.

Even so, St. Paul’s advice remains: “I remind you to stir into flame the gift of God that was once given you.”

On Being the Beloved Disciple

June 4, 2018

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.

Mercy, Truth, and Pastoral Practice

May 28, 2018

Recently a student I’d taught decades ago made this comment to me: “It’s been more than twenty years since I took your class and I’ve forgotten most everything you taught. What I do remember from your class is that we’re supposed to always try not to make God look stupid.”

I hope that’s true. I hope that’s something people take away from my lectures and writings because I believe that the first task of any Christian apologetics is to rescue God from stupidity, arbitrariness, narrowness, legalism, rigidity, tribalism, and everything else that’s bad but gets associated with God. A healthy theology of God must underwrite all our apologetics and pastoral practices. Anything we do in the name of God should reflect God.

It’s no accident that atheism, anti-clericalism, and the many diatribes leveled against the church and religion today can always point to some bad theology or church practice on which to base their skepticism and anger. Atheism is always a parasite, feeding off bad religion. So too is much of the negativity towards the churches which is so common today. An anti-church attitude feeds on bad religion and so we who believe in God and church should be examining ourselves more than defending ourselves.

Moreover more important than the criticism of atheists are the many people who have been hurt by their churches. A huge number of persons today no longer go to church or have a very strained relationship to their churches because what they’ve met in their churches doesn’t speak well of God.

I say this in sympathy. It’s not easy to do God adequately, let alone well. But we must try, and so all of our sacramental and pastoral practices need to reflect a healthy theology of God, that is, reflect the God whom Jesus incarnated and revealed. What did Jesus reveal about God?

First, that God has no favorites and that there must be full equality among races, among rich and poor, among slave and free, and among male and female. No one person, race, gender, or nation is more favored than others by God. Nobody is first. All are privileged.

Next, Jesus taught that God is especially compassionate and understanding towards the weak and towards sinners. Jesus scandalized his religious contemporaries by sitting down with public sinners without first asking them to repent. He welcomed everyone in ways that often offended the religious propriety of the time and he sometimes went against the religious sensitivity of his contemporaries, as we see from his conversation with the Samaritan woman or when he grants a healing to the daughter of a Syro-Phoenician woman. Moreover he asks us to be compassionate in the same way and immediately spells out what that means by telling us the God loves sinners and saints in exactly the same way. God does not have preferential love for the virtuous.

Shocking to us too is the fact that Jesus never defends himself when attacked. Moreover he is critical of those who, whatever their sincerity, try to block access to him. He surrenders himself to die rather than defend himself. He never meets hatred with hatred and dies loving and forgiving those who are killing him.

Jesus is also clear that it’s not necessarily those who explicitly profess God and religion who are his true followers, but rather those, irrespective of their explicit faith or church practice, who do the will of God on earth.

Finally, and centrally, Jesus is clear that his message is, first of all, good news for the poor, that any preaching in his name that isn’t good news for the poor is not his gospel.

We need to keep these things in mind even as we recognize the validity and importance of the ongoing debates among and within our churches about whom and what makes for true discipleship and true sacrament. It is important to ask what makes for a true sacrament and what conditions make for a valid and licit minister of a sacrament. It is important too to ask who should be admitted to the Eucharist and it is important to set forth certain norms be followed in preparation for baptism, Eucharist, and marriage.

Difficult pastoral questions arise around these issues, among other issues, and this is not suggesting that they should always be resolved in a way that most immediately and simplistically reflects God’s universal will for salvation and God’s infinite understanding and mercy. Admittedly, sometimes the long-term benefit of living a hard truth can override the short-range need to more quickly take away the pain and the heartache. But, even so, a theology of God that reflects the compassion and mercy of God should always be reflected in every pastoral decision we make. Otherwise we make God look stupid – arbitrary, tribal, cruel, and antithetical to church practice.

Marilynne Robinson says Christianity is too great a narrative to be underwritten by any lesser tale and that should forbid in particular its being subordinated to narrowness, legalism, and lack of compassion.

On Friendship

May 21, 2018

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.”

On Suicide and Despair

May 14, 2018

For centuries, suicide was considered as an act of despair and despair itself was seen as the most grievous sin of all. In many religious circles, despair was seen as the most sinful of all acts and ultimately unforgivable.

Sadly, a strong residue of that remains, suicide is still seen by many as an act of despair, an affront to God and to life itself, an unforgivable relinquishing of hope. Many church people still see suicide as an act of despair and as the unforgivable sin against the Holy Spirit. But this is a misunderstanding. Suicide is not an act of despair and is not an act which cannot be forgiven. That suicide is an act of despair is not what the Christian Churches, and certainly not the Roman Catholic Church, believe or teach.

My purpose here is not to disparage what our churches teach about either suicide or despair, but rather to highlight with more accuracy what they do teach. The same holds true for people who still believe that suicide is an act of despair and an unforgivable sin. I am not disparaging their belief but trying rather to free them from a false fear (based on a misunderstanding) which surely must cause them grief and anxiety vis-à-vis loved ones who have died by suicide.

Suicide is not despair. Dictionaries define despair as the complete lack or absence of hope. But that’s not what happens in most suicides. What does happen?

The person who is taking his or her own life is not intending that act as an insult or affront to God or to life (for that would be an act of strength and suicide is generally the antithesis of that). What happens in most suicides is the polar opposite. The suicide is the result of a mammoth defeat.

There’s a powerful scene in the musical adaption of Victor Hugo’s, Les Miserables. A young woman, Fantine, lies dying. She tells of once being youthful and full of hopeful dreams; but now worn-down by a lifetime of poverty, crushed by a broken heart, and overcome by physical illness, she is defeated and has to submit to the tearful fact that “there are storms we cannot weather”.

She’s right, and anyone who does not accept that truth will one day come to a painful and bitter understanding of it. There are things in this life that will crush us, and surrender isn’t an act of despair and indeed isn’t a free act at all. It’s a humbling, sad defeat.

And that’s the case with most people who die from suicide. For reasons ranging from mental illness to an infinite variety of overpowering storms that can break a person, there’s sometimes a point in people’s lives where they are overpowered, defeated, and unable to continue to will their own living – parallel to one who dies as a victim of a drought, hurricane, cancer, heart disease, diabetes, or Alzheimer’s. There’s no sin in being overpowered by a deadly storm. We can be overpowered, and some people are, but that’s not despair (which can only be willful and an act of strength).

To begin with, we don’t understand mental illness, which can be just as a real and just as death-producing as any physical illness. We don’t blame someone for dying from cancer, a stroke, or a physical accident, but we invariably cast moral shadows on someone who dies as a result of various mental illnesses which play a deadly role in many suicides. Happily, God is still in charge and our flawed understanding, while generally permanently tainting the way someone is remembered in this world, doesn’t in effect salvation on the other side.

Beyond mental illness we can be defeated in life by many other things. Tragedy, heartbreaking loss, unrequited obsession, and crippling shame can at times break a heart, crush a will, kill a spirit, and bring death to a body. And our judgment on this should reflect our understanding of God: What all-loving, merciful God would condemn someone because he or she, like Victor Hugo’s, Fantine, could not weather the storm? Does God side with our own narrow notions where salvation is mostly reserved for the strong? Not if Jesus is to be believed.

Notice when Jesus points out sin he doesn’t point to where we are weak and defeated; rather he points to where we are strong, arrogant, indifferent, and judgmental. Search the Gospels and ask this question: On whom is Jesus hardest? The answer is clear: Jesus is hardest on those who are strong, judgmental, and have no feeling for those who are enduring the storm. Notice what he says about the rich man who ignores the poor man at his doorstep, what he says about the priest and scribe who ignore the man beaten in a ditch, and how critical he is of the scribes and Pharisees who are quick to define who falls under God’s judgment and who doesn’t.

Only a faulty understanding of God can underwrite the unfortunate notion that being crushed in life constitutes despair.

Protest, Sanity, and a Christian Response

May 7, 2018

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.

Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience in a Secular Age

April 30, 2018

Cardinal Francis George was once asked what he thought of the radical pacifism of people like Dorothy Day and Daniel Berrigan, prophetic figures who believed in absolute nonviolence. How can this be practical, he was asked, it’s utterly naïve to believe that we can live without police and without soldiers. This was his reply: The world needs pacifists in the same way as it needs vowed celibates: They’re not practical. They’re out of place in this world. But they point to the eschatological world, the world of heaven, a world within which there will be no guns, where relational exclusivities will not exist as they exist now, where family will not be based on biology, blood, or marriage, where there will be no poor people, and where everything will belong to everyone.

I thought of that recently as I was conducting a workshop on religious life for a group of young people who were discerning whether or not to enter vowed religious life. My task was not to try to persuade them to join a religious community but to help them understand what that life, should they join it, would entail. That meant, of course, long discussions on the three vows that people take to be in religious life: poverty, chastity, and obedience (classically termed “the Evangelical Counsels”).

What’s to be said about poverty, chastity, and obedience in a world that, for the most part, places its hope in material riches, generally identifies chastity with frigidity, and values individual freedom above all else?

Well, no doubt, poverty, chastity, and obedience are seen as radically counter-cultural; but that’s mostly because they are generally not very well understood (sometimes even by those who are living them out). For the most part they are seen as a drastic renunciation, the sacrificing of a full life, the unnatural denial of one’s sexuality, and the adolescent signing over of one’s freedom and creativity. But that’s a misunderstanding.

Poverty, chastity, and obedience are not a missing out on riches, sexuality, and freedom. They are rather a genuine, rich, modality of riches, sexuality, and freedom.

The vow of poverty isn’t primarily about living with cheaper things, not having a dishwasher and doing your own housework. It’s also not about renouncing the kinds of riches that can make for the full flourishing of life. A life of voluntary poverty is a lived way of saying that all material possessions are gift, that the world belongs to everyone, that nobody owns a country, and that nobody’s needs are first. It’s a vow against consumerism and tribalism, and it brings its own wonderful riches in terms of meaning and in the happiness and joy of a shared life.

Likewise for the vow of chastity: Properly understood, it is not a missing out on the joys of sexuality. It’s a rich modality of sexuality itself, given that being sexual means more than having sex. Sexuality is a beautiful, God-given drive within us for lots of things: community, friendship, togetherness, wholeness, family, play, altruism, enjoyment, delight, creativity, genital consummation, and for everything that takes us beyond our aloneness and makes us generative. And so the very real joys that are found in community, friendship, and service of others are not a second-rate substitute for sex. They bring their own sexual flourishing in terms of leading us out of our aloneness.

The same holds true for obedience. Properly understood, it’s not a missing out on real freedom. Rather it’s a rich modality of freedom itself, one practiced by Jesus (who repeatedly says: “I do nothing on my own. I do only the Father’s will.”) Obedience, as a religious vow, is not an immature sacrificing of one’s freedom and adulthood. It’s rather a radical submitting of one’s human ego (with all its wounds, desires, lusts, private ambitions, and envies) to something and Someone higher than oneself, as seen in the human and religious commitments in persons from Jesus, to Teilhard de Chardin, to Dag Hammarskjold, to Simone Weil, to Mother Teresa, to Jean Vanier, to Daniel Berrigan. In each of these we see a person who walked this earth in a freedom we can only envy but clearly too in a freedom that’s predicated on a genuflecting of one’s individual will to something higher than itself.

Our thoughts and our feelings are strongly influenced by the cultural software within which we find ourselves. Thus, given how our culture understands riches, sex, and freedom today, this may well be the most difficult time in many centuries to make the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience and live them out. Small wonder religious communities are not over-flooded with applications. But because it is more difficult than ever, it is also more important than ever that a number of women and men choose, voluntarily, to prophetically live out these vows.

And their seeming sacrifice will be amply rewarded because, paradoxically, poverty brings its own riches, chastity brings its own flourishing, and obedience provides us with the deepest of all human freedoms.

The Shortcomings of a Digital Immigrant

April 23, 2018

Information technology and social media aren’t my mother tongue. I’m a digital immigrant. I wasn’t born into the world of information technology but migrated into it, piece-meal. I first lived in some foreign territories.

I was nine years old before I lived with electricity. I had seen it before; but neither our home, our school, nor our neighbors had electricity. Electricity, when I first saw it, was a huge revelation. And while I grew up with radio, I was fourteen before our family got its first television set. Again, this was a revelation – and manna for my adolescent hunger for connection to the larger world. Electricity and television quickly became a mother tongue, one lit our home and other brought the big world into it. But the phone was still foreign. I was seventeen when I left home and our family had never had a phone.

The phone wasn’t much to master, but it would be a goodly number of years before I mastered much in the brave new world of information technology: Computers, the internet, websites, mobile phones, smart phones, television and movie access through the internet, cloud storage, social media, virtual assistants, and the world of myriad apps. It’s been a journey! I was thirty-eight when I first used a VCR, forty-two before I first owned a computer, fifty before I first accessed the web and used email, fifty-eight when I owned my first mobile phone, the same age when I first set up a website, sixty-two before I first texted, and sixty-five before I joined Facebook. With email, texting, and Facebook being all I can handle, I still do not have either an Instagram or Twitter account. I’m the only person in my immediate religious community who still prays the office of the church out of a book rather than off a mobile device.

I protest that paper has soul while digital devices do not. The responses I get are not particularly sympathetic. But it’s for reasons of soul that I much prefer to have a book in my hand than a kindle device. I’m not against information technology; mainly it’s just that I’m not very good at it. I struggle with the language. It’s hard to master a new language as an adult and I envy the young who can speak this language well.

What’s to be said about the revolution in information technology? Is it good or bad?

Obviously, it has many positives: It’s making us the most informed people ever in the history of this world. Information is power and the internet and social media have leveled the playing field in terms of access to information and this is serving well the developing nations in the world. Moreover it’s creating one global village out of the whole world. We now know all of our neighbors, not just those who live nearby. We’re the best-informed and best-connected people ever.

But all of this also has a pejorative underbelly: We talk to each other less than we text each other. We have many virtual friends but not always many real friends. We watch nature on a screen more than we ever physically touch it. We spend more time looking at device in our hands than actually engaging others face to face. I walk through an airport or basically any other public space and I see the majority of people staring at their phones. Is this a good thing? Does it foster for friendship and community or is it their substitute? It’s too early to tell. The initial generations who lived through the industrial revolution did not have any way of knowing what the effects of this would be long-range. The technological revolution, I believe, is just as radical as the industrial revolution and we are its initial generation. At this time we have no way of knowing where this will ultimately take us, for good or bad.

But one negative that seems already evident is that the revolution within information technology we are living through is destroying the few remaining remnants we still retain in terms of keeping “Sabbath” in our lives. The 13^th century mystic, Rumi, once lamented: “I have lived too long where I can be reached.” That’s infinitely truer of us today than it was for those living in the 13^th century. Thanks to the electronic devices we carry around with us we can be reached all the time – and, too often, let ourselves be reached all time. The result is that now we no longer have any time apart from what we regularly do. Our family times, our recreational times, our vacation periods, and even our prayer times are constantly rendered regular time by our “being reached”. My fear is that while we are going to be the most informed people ever we may well end up the least contemplative people ever.

But I’m an outsider on this, a digital immigrant. I need to bow to the judgments of those who speak this language as their mother tongue.

Moral Outrage

April 16, 2018

Moral outrage is the antithesis of morality. Yet it’s everywhere present in our world today and is everywhere rationalized on the basis of God and truth.

We live in a world awash in moral outrage. Everywhere individuals and groups are indignant and morally outraged, sometimes violently so, by opposing individuals, groups, ideologies, moral positions, ecclesiologies, interpretations of religion, interpretations of scripture, and the like. We see this everywhere, television networks outraged at the news coverage of other networks, church groups bitterly demonizing each other, pro-life and pro-choice groups angrily shouting at each other, and politics at its highest levels paralyzed as different sides feel so morally indignant that they are unwilling to contemplate any accommodation whatever with what opposes them.

And always, on both sides, there’s the righteous appeal to morality and divine authority (however explicit or implicit) in way that, in essence, says: I have a right to demonize you and to shut my ears to anything you have to say because you’re wrong and immoral and I, in the name of God and truth, am standing up to you. Moreover, you’re immorality gives me the legitimate right to bracket the essentials of human respect and treat you as a pariah to be eliminated – in the name of God and of truth.

And this this kind of attitude doesn’t just make for the angry divisions, bitter polarizations, and the deep distrust we live with today within our society, it’s also what produces terrorists, mass shootings, and the ugliest bigotry and racism. It produced Hitler – someone who was able to capitalize so powerfully on moral outrage that he was able to sway millions of people to turn against what was best inside themselves.

But moral outrage, however much it tries to justify itself on some lofty basis, religion, morality, patriotism, historical hurt, or personal injustice, remains always the opposite of genuine morality and genuine religious practice? Why? Because genuine morality and religious practice are always characterized by the opposite of what’s seen in moral outrage. Genuine morality and genuine religious practice are always marked by empathy, understanding, patience, tolerance, forgiveness, respect, charity, and graciousness – all of which are glaringly absent in virtually every expression of moral outrage we see today.

In trying to draw us into a genuine morality and religiosity, Jesus says this: Unless your virtue goes deeper than that of the Scribes and the Pharisees you will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven. What was the virtue of the Scribes and Pharisees? On the surface, theirs was a very high virtue. To be a good Scribe or Pharisee meant keeping the Ten Commandments, being faithful to the prescribed religious practices of the time, and being a man or woman who was always just and fair in your dealings with others. So what’s lacking in that?

What’s missing is that all of these things (keeping the commandments, faithful religious observance, and being fair to others) can be done with a bitter, accusatory, unforgiving heart just as easily (and perhaps even more so) than with a warm, empathic, forgiving heart. Keeping the commandments, going to church, and being a just person can all be done (as is only too clear sometimes) out of moral outrage. To paraphrase Jesus: Anyone can be gracious to those who are gracious to you. Anyone can love those who love you. And anyone can be good to those who do good to you … but can you be gracious to those who are bitter towards you? Can you be loving towards those who hate you? And can you forgive those who kill you? That’s the litmus test for Christian morality and religious practice – and nowhere inside of anyone who passes this test will you still find the kind of moral outrage where we believe that God and truth are asking us to demonize those who hate us, do us evil, or try to kill us.

Moreover what we do in moral outrage is deny that we are ourselves morally complicit in the very things we demonize and pour our hatred out on. As we watch the world news each day and see the anger, bitter divisions, violence, injustices, intolerance, and wars that characterize our world, a deep, honest, courageous scrutiny should make us aware that we cannot fully separate ourselves from those things. We live in a world of longstanding and present injustice, of ever-widening economic inequality, of endemic racism and sexism, of countless people living as victims of plunder and rape in history, of millions of refugees with no place to go, and in a society where various people are branded and ostracized as “losers” and “sickos”. Should we be surprised that our society produces terrorists? However sincere and innocent we might personally feel, how we’re living helps create the ground the breeds mass killers, terrorists, abortionists, and playground bullies. We’re not as innocent as we think we are.

Our moral outrage is not an indicator that we are on the side of God and truth. More often than not, it suggests the opposite.

Reasons to Believe in God

April 9, 2018

Today belief in God is often seen as a naiveté. For many, believing in God is like believing in Santa and the Easter Bunny, nice, something for the kids, a warm nostalgia or a bitter memory, but not something that’s real, that stands up to hard scrutiny and indeed stands up to the dark doubts that sometimes linger below the surface of our faith. Where’s there evidence that God exists?

A true apologetics, I believe, needs at a point to be personal. So here are my own reasons why I continue to believe in God in the face of the agnosticism of our overly-adult world and despite the dark nights that sometimes beset me.

First, I believe in God because I sense, at the deepest level of my being, that there’s an inalienable moral structure to things. Life, love, and meaning are morally-contoured. There’s an inalienable “law of karma” that’s experienced everywhere and in everything: good behavior is its own happiness, just as bad behavior is its own sorrow. Different religions word it differently but the concept is at the heart of all religion and is in essence the very definition of morality: The measure you measure out will be the measure that’s measured back to you. That’s Jesus’ version of it, and can be translated this way: The air you breathe out is the air you will re-inhale. Simply but: If we cut down too many trees we will soon be breathing in carbon monoxide. If we breathe out love, we will meet love. If we breathe out hate and anger we will soon enough find ourselves surrounded by hated and anger. Reality is so structured that goodness brings goodness and sin brings sin.

I believe in God because blind chaos could not have designed things this way, to be innately moral. Only an intelligent Goodness could have built reality this way.

My next reason for believing in God is the existence of soul, intelligence, love, altruism, and art. These could not have emerged simply from blind chaos, from billions and billions of cosmic bingo chips coming out of nothing, with no intelligent loving force behind them, endlessly churning through billions of years. Random chaos, empty of all intelligence and love from its origins, could not have eventually produced soul and all that’s highest inside it: intelligence, love, altruism, spirituality, and art. Can our own hearts and all that’s noble and precious within them really be just the result of billions of fluke chances colliding within a brute, mindless process?

I believe in God because if our hearts are real than so is God.

Next, I believe in God because the Gospel works – if we work it. What Jesus incarnated and taught ultimately resonates with what’s most precious, most noble, and most meaningful inside of life and inside each of us. Moreover, this checks out in life. Whenever I have the faith and courage to actually live out the Gospel, to roll the dice on its truth, it always proves to be true, the loaves multiply and feed the thousands and David defeats Goliath. But it doesn’t work unless I risk it. The Gospel works, if we work it.

The objection could be raised here, of course, that many sincere, faith-filled people risk their lives and truth on the Gospel and, from all appearances in this world, it doesn’t work for them. They end up poor, as victims, on the losing side of things. But again, that’s a judgment we make from the standards of this world, from the Gospel of Prosperity where whoever has the most worldly success wins. The Gospel of Jesus undercuts this. Anyone who lives it out as faithfully as he or she is able, will be blessed with something beyond worldly success, namely, the deeper joy of a life well-lived, a joy which Jesus assures us is deeper, less ephemeral, and more lasting that any other joy.

I believe in God because the Gospel works! As does prayer!

Finally, though certainly not least, I believe in God because of the community of faith that stretches back to the beginning of time, that stretches back to the life and resurrection of Jesus, and that baptized me into the faith. Throughout all of history virtually all human communities have been also communities of faith, of belief in God, of worship, and of sacred ritual and sacrament.

I believe in God because of the existence of families of faith and the existence of church and sacrament.

I wrote my doctoral thesis on the classical proofs for the existence of God, arguments for God’s existence taken from some of the great intellectuals in history: Anselm, Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, Leibnitz, Spinoza, and Alfred North Whitehead. I rambled through nearly 500 hundred pages of articulating and evaluating these proofs and then ended with this conclusion.

We don’t come to believe in God because of the compelling power of some mathematical equation or logical syllogism. God’s existence becomes real to us when we live an honest, sincere life.

When Time Stands Still

April 2, 2018

The theory of relativity tells us that space and time are not what they appear to be. They’re relative, meaning that don’t always function in the same way and they aren’t always experienced in the same way. Time can stand still.

Or can it? This side of eternity, it would seem not. Ever since the universe started with a mammoth explosion some 13.8 billion years ago the clock has been running non-stop, like a merciless meter, moving relentlessly forwards.

However, our faith suggests that time will be different in eternity, so different in fact that we cannot now even imagine how it will be in heaven. As St. Paul tells us in his letter to the Corinthians: Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God has prepared for them that love him. How will time be experienced in heaven? As we’ve just affirmed, that cannot be imagined now.

Or can it? In a wonderful new book on the Resurrection and Eternal Life, Is This All There Is, the renowned, German scripture scholar, Gerhard Lohfink, suggests that we can and sometimes do have an experience of time as it will be experienced in eternity. For Lohfink, we experience this whenever we’re in adoration.

For him, the highest form of prayer is adoration. But what does it mean to “adore” God and why is that the highest form of prayer? Lohfink answers: “In adoration we ask nothing more of God. When I lament before God it is usually my own suffering that is the starting point. Even when I petition God, the occasion is often my own problem. I need something from God. And even when I thank God, unfortunately I am usually thankful for something I have received. But when I adore, I let go of myself and look only to God.”

Admittedly, lament, petition, and thanksgiving are high forms of prayer. An old, classical, and very good, definition of prayer defines prayer as “lifting mind and heart to God”, and what’s in our hearts virtually at all times is some form of lament, petition, or thanksgiving. Moreover, Jesus invites us to ask God for whatever is in our heart at a given moment: “Ask and you will receive.” Lament, petition, and thanksgiving are good forms of prayer; but, in praying them, we’re still focused in some manner on ourselves, on our needs and our joys.

However in adoration we look to God or at some attribute of God (beauty, goodness, truth, or oneness) so strongly that everything else drops away. We stand in pure wonder, pure admiration, ecstatic awe, entirely stripped of our own heartaches, headaches, and idiosyncratic focus. God’s person, beauty, goodness, and truth overwhelm us so as to take our minds off of ourselves and leave us standing outside of ourselves.

And being free of our own selves is the very definition of ecstasy (from the Greek, EK STASIS, to stand outside oneself.) Thus, to be in adoration is to be in ecstasy – though, admittedly, that’s generally not how we imagine ecstasy today. For us, ecstasy is commonly imagined as an earthshaking standing inside of ourselves, idiosyncrasy in its peak expression. But true ecstasy is the opposite. It’s adoration.

Moreover, for Lohfink, not only is adoration the only true form of ecstasy, it’s also a way of being in heaven already right now and of experiencing time as it will be in heaven. Here’s how he puts it: “In the miracle of adoration we are already with God, entirely with God, and the boundary between time and eternity is removed. It is true that we cannot now comprehend that adoring God will be endless bliss. We always want to be doing something. We want to criticize, intervene, change, improve, shape. And rightly so! That is our duty. But in death, when we come to God, that all ceases. Then our existence will be pure astonishment, pure looking, pure praise, pure adoration – and unimaginable happiness. That is why there is also a form of adoration that uses no words. In it I hold out my own life to God, in silence, and with it the whole world, knowing God as Creator, as Lord, as the one to whom belongs all honor and praise. Adoration is the oblation of one’s life to God. Adoration is surrender. Adoration means entrusting oneself entirely to God. As we dwell in adoration, eternity begins – an eternity that does not withdraw from the world but opens to it utterly.”

Time can stand still! And it stands still when we’re in pure admiration, in awe, in wonder, in adoration. In those moments we stand outside of ourselves, in the purest form of love that exists. At that moment too we are in heaven, not having a foretaste of heaven, but actually being in heaven. Eternity will be like that, one moment like a thousand years and a thousand years like one moment.

When we adore, time stands still – and we’re in heaven!

Putting God on Trial

March 26, 2018

In both our piety and our agnosticism, we sometimes put God on trial and whenever we do that, it’s we who end up being judged. We see that in the Gospel accounts of the trial of Jesus, particularly in John’s Gospel.

John’s Gospel, as we know, paints a portrait of Jesus from the point of view of his divinity, not his humanity. Thus, in John’s Gospel, Jesus has no human weaknesses whatsoever. He’s God from the first line to the last line of the Gospel. This is true to the tiniest detail. For instance, in John’s Gospel at the feeding of the multitudes, Jesus asks his disciples how many loaves and fishes they have. John notes in brackets: “He already knew”. There are no gaps on a divine radar screen.

We see this most clearly in how John writes up the passion and death of Jesus. Unlike the other Gospels, wherein Jesus is shown as afraid and cringing before his bitter fate, in John’s Gospel, throughout his entire passion journey, Jesus is unafraid, in complete control, serene, carrying his own cross, and the antithesis of a victim. Instead, throughout the whole account, Jesus is someone who is acting freely, out of love, and has complete power over the situation.

John makes this point very strongly: When they come to arrest him, Jesus stands up and all those who are apprehending him fall to the ground so that, in contrast to the other Gospels, it is not he who is prostrate on the ground but rather it’s the Roman soldiers and temple police who are prostrate – and in that prostration symbolically doing him reverence. And the symbolism continues: Jesus is sentenced to death at noon, at the exact hour when the priests began to slaughter the paschal lambs. After his death he is buried with a staggering amount of myrrh and aloes, as only a king would have been accorded, and he is laid in a “virgin” tomb (just as he was born from a virgin womb). John makes it clear that this God we’re dealing with.

With this in mind, namely, that Jesus was always divine and in charge, we will be able to understand more clearly what John is trying to teach in his account of Jesus’ death. What John focuses on most is the trial of Jesus. The bulk of his passion story is centered on the trial and the main characters in that trial. But his account has this ironic twist: Seemingly Jesus is on trial; but, in actuality, he is only one who isn’t on trial. Pilate is on trial, the religious authorities are on trial, the people are on trial, and we, today, reading the story, are on trial. Everyone’s on trial, except Jesus.

Pilate is on trial on a number of counts: He knows Jesus is innocent but lacks the courage to stand up to the crowd and thus allows the fickle, mindless frenzy of a crowd to have its way. He’s judged for his weakness. But he’s also on trial for his agnosticism, namely, his belief (however sincere) that he could treat truth and faith as realities that he, himself, could steer clear of, that he could assess these from a neutral, non-committed position, and that these were other peoples’ issues, nothing to do with him. But he’s judged for this. Nobody can coolly ask: “What is truth?” as if that answer didn’t affect him or her. Jesus’ trial finds Pontius Pilate and those of us like him, guilty – guilty of agnosticism, a non-involvement, an indifference, that is in the end dishonest. Ironically, Pilate’s weakness in not rescuing Jesus ends up making him perhaps the most famous governor and judge forever in history. With his name in the Christian creeds, millions and millions of people pronounce his name every day.

But Pilate isn’t alone on trial here; so are the religious authorities of the time. In their very effort to protect God from what they deem irreverence, heterodoxy, and blasphemy, they are also complicit in “killing” God. The judgment made against them at Jesus’ trial is the exact judgment that is being made, down to this very day, on a lot of religious and ecclesial authority, that is, its feverous proclivity to protect God often helps crucify God in this world.

Last, not least, Jesus’ contemporaries are also on trial and, with them, so are we. In the heat of the moment, caught up on the mindless, feverous energy of a crowd, they abandon their messianic hope for the slogan of the day: “Crucify him!” How little different from so many of the political and religious slogans we mouth at political and church rallies today. The trial of Jesus is a very harsh judgment on the mindlessness, fickleness, and dangers of crowd energy.

The genius of John’s account of Jesus’ death is that it shows what happens whenever through our misguided religious fervor or through our cool agnosticism we put God on trial. It’s we who end up being judged.

Our Need to Pray

March 19, 2018

Unless you somehow have a foot outside of your culture, the culture will swallow you whole. Daniel Berrigan wrote that and it’s true too in this sense: Unless you can drink in strength from a source outside yourself, your natural proclivities for paranoia, bitterness, and hatred will invariably swallow you whole.

The disciples in Luke’s Gospel understood this. They approached Jesus and asked him to teach them how to pray because they saw him doing things that they did not see anyone else doing. He was able to meet hatred with love, to genuinely forgive others, to endure misunderstanding and opposition without giving in to self-pity and bitterness, and to retain within himself a center of peace and non-violence. This, they knew, was as extraordinary as walking on water, and they sensed that he was drawing the strength to do this from a source outside him, through prayer.

They knew they themselves were incapable of resisting bitterness and hatred and they wanted to be as strong as Jesus and so they asked him: Lord, teach us to pray. No doubt they imagined that this would simply be a question of learning a certain technique; but as the Gospels make clear, linking to a divine source outside of ourselves isn’t always easy or automatic, even for Jesus, as we see from his struggle in the Garden of Gethsemane, his “agony in the garden”.

Jesus, himself, had to struggle mightily at times to ground himself in God as we see from his prayer in Gethsemane. His struggle there is described as an “agony”, and this needs to be carefully understood. “Agony” was a technical term used at the time for athletes. Before entering the stadium or arena for a contest, athletes would first work their bodies into a sweat, a warm lather, an agony, to make their muscles warm and ready for the contest. The Gospels tell us that Jesus also worked himself into a sweat, except in his case he sweated blood as he readied himself in his heart for the contest, the test, he was about to enter, his passion.

And what was that contest? The test he was readying himself for wasn’t as it is commonly believed an agonizing over the decision whether to let himself be crucified or whether to invoke divine power and save himself from this humiliation and death. That was never the issue in his struggle in Gethsemane. He had long before accepted that he was going to die. The question was how, how would he die, in love or in bitterness?

In the end, it was a struggle to strengthen his will so that he would die with a loving, warm, forgiving heart. And it was a struggle; a positive outcome was in doubt. Amidst all the darkness, hatred, bitterness, injustice, and misunderstanding that surrounded him, amidst everything that stood unfairly against him and was antithetical to his person and message, Jesus struggled mightily to cling to a source that could give him the strength to resist the hatred and violence around him, that could give him the heart to forgive his enemies, that could give him the graciousness to forgive the good thief, and that could give him the inner strength to turn humiliation, pain, and injustice into compassion rather than bitterness.

The Gospels put this metaphorically as a struggle to “stay awake”, namely, to stay awake to his inner identity as God’s Beloved, an identity that he appropriated at his baptism and which shaped his very consciousness during all the years of his ministry. In Gethsemane, amidst everything that invites him (and us) into moral amnesia, Jesus manages to stay awake to his deeper reality and to his identity as God’s beloved. His disciples don’t. As the Gospels tell us, during Jesus’ great struggle they fell asleep and their sleep (“out of sheer sorrow”) was more than physical fatigue. This is evident when, immediately after Jesus has managed to ground himself against hatred and non-violence, Peter succumbs to both and cuts off the ear of the high priest’s servant. Peter was asleep, in more ways than one, in a sleep that signifies the absence of prayer in one’s life.

Prayer is meant to keep us awake, which means it’s meant to keep us connected to a source outside our of natural instincts and proclivities which can keep us grounded in love, forgiveness, non-retaliation, and non-violence when everything inside of us and around us screams for bitterness, hatred, and retaliation. And if Jesus had to sweat blood in trying to stay connected to that source when he was tested, we can expect that the cost for us will be the same, struggle, agony, wanting in every fiber of our being to give in, clinging to love precariously by the skin of our teeth, and then having God’s angel strengthen us only when we’ve been writhing long enough in the struggle so that we can let God’s strength do for us what our own strength cannot do.

Lord, teach us to pray!

The Ups and Downs of Faith

March 12, 2018

The poet, Rumi, suggests that we live with a deep secret that sometimes we know, then not, and then know again. That’s a good description of faith. Faith isn’t something you nail down and possess once and for all. It goes this way: Sometimes you walk on water and sometimes you sink like a stone.

The Gospels testify to this, most graphically, in the story of Peter walking on the water: Jesus asks Peter to step out of a boat and walk across the water to him. At first it works, Peter, unthinking, walks on the water, then becoming more conscious of what he is doing he sinks like a stone. We see this too in the massive fluctuations in belief that Jesus’ disciples experience during the “forty days” after the resurrection. Jesus would appear to them, they would trust he was alive, then he would disappear again, and they would lose their trust and go back to the lives they’d led before they met him, fishing and the sea. The post-resurrection narratives illustrate the dynamics of faith pretty clearly: You believe it. Then you distrust. Then you believe it again. At least, so it seems on the surface.

We see another example of this in the story of Peter betraying Jesus. In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus tells us that there is a secret which separates those who have faith from those who don’t: To you is given the secret of the kingdom, but to those outside everything exists in parables. That sounds like Gnosticism, that is, the idea that there’s a secret code somewhere (e.g., The Di Vinci Code) that some know and some don’t and you are in or out depending upon whether you know it or not. But that’s not what Jesus is saying here. His secret is an open one, accessible to all: the meaning of the cross. Anyone who understands this will understand the rest of what Jesus means, and vice versa. We are in or out, depending upon whether or not we can grasp and accept the meaning of Jesus’ death.

But, being in or out isn’t a once and for all thing. Rather, we move in and out! After Peter denied Jesus, we’re told: “he went outside”. This is intended both literally and metaphorically. After his denial, Peter stepped outside a gate into the night to be away from the crowd, but he also stepped outside the meaning of his faith.

Our faith also bounces up and down for another reason, we misunderstand how it works: Take for example the Rich Young Man who approaches Jesus with this question: “Good master, what must I do to possess eternal life?” That’s an interesting choice of a verb: to possess. Eternal life as a possession? Jesus’ gentle correction of the young man’s verb teaches us something vital about faith. Jesus says to him: “Now if you wish to receive eternal life”, meaning that faith and eternal life are not something you possess so that they can be stored and guarded like grain in a barn, money in a bank, or jewelry in a box. They can only be received, like the air we breathe. Air is free, is everywhere, and our health doesn’t depend upon its presence, for it’s always there, but rather upon the state of our lungs (and mood) at any given moment. Sometimes we breathe deeply and appreciatively; but, sometimes, for various reasons, we breathe badly, gasp for breath, are out of breath, or are choking for air. Like breathing, faith too has its modalities.

And so, we need to understand our faith not as a possession or as something we achieve once and for all, which can be lost only by some huge, dramatic, life-changing shift inside of us, where we move from belief to atheism. “Faith isn’t some constant state of belief,” suggests Abraham Heschel, “but rather a sort of faithfulness, a loyalty to the moments when we’ve had faith.”

And that teases out something else: To be real, faith need not be explicitly religious, but can express itself simply in faithfulness, loyalty, and trust. Fox example, in a powerful memoir written as she as dying of cancer, The Bright Hour, Nina Riggs shares her strong, but implicit, faith as she calmly faces her death. Not given to explicit religious faith, she is challenged at one point by a nurse who says to her: “Faith, you gotta have it, and you’re gonna need it!” The comment triggers a reflection on her part about what she does or doesn’t believe in. She comes to peace with the question and her own stake in it with these words: “For me, faith involves staring into the abyss, seeing that it is dark and full of the unknown – and being okay with that.”

We need to trust the unknown, knowing that we will be okay, no matter that on a given day we might feel like we are walking on water or sinking like a stone. Faith is deeper than our feelings.

The Passing of a Good Shepherd

March 5, 2018

No community should botch its deaths. Last month a wonderful leader within the faith community in Canada died and it could profit us all to more fully receive his spirit. How do we do that? It can be helpful for us, I believe, to highlight those places where his life, his energy, and his leadership more particularly helped steady us in our faith and helped us to use our own gifts more fully to serve God. Who was this man? Joseph Neil MacNeil, Emeritus Archbishop of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

I was lucky enough to have had him as my bishop for the first eighteen years of my priesthood. He was a good mentor and I needed one. I had just finished seminary and, not unlike many a naïve young man just turned loose in ministry, I had overly-rigid views on what was wrong with the world and how to fix that, views rooted more in personal immaturity than in prudence, views in need of a lot of leveling out. He was a guiding hand, not just for me but for many others.

And this was a time as well where the church as a whole was struggling for a deeper maturity. The church was just engaging the reforms of Vatican II, wondering whether it was going too far or not far enough, and reeling at the same time from the radical cultural and sexual changes of the late 1960s. Change was everywhere. Nothing, church-wise or otherwise, was as before. We were a pioneer generation ecclesially in need of new leadership.

He led us well, nothing too daring, nothing reactionary, just good, steady, charitable leadership that helped us, among other things, be more pastorally sensitive, more ecumenical, less self-absorbed, less clerical, more open to lay involvement, and more sensitive to the place of women. He kept things steady but inching forward, even while properly honoring the past.

Among his many gifts, three qualities of his leadership, for me, particularly stand out as a challenge for us all to live out our own discipleship more deeply.

First, he could live with ambiguity and not panic when tension seemed everywhere. He was not frightened or put off by polarization and criticism. He sorted them through with patience and charity. That helped create space for a more-inclusive church, one within which people of different temperaments and ecclesiologies could still be within the same community. He kept his eyes on the big picture and not on the various side-shows, skirmishes that so easily deflect attention away from what’s important. Good people carry tension so as to not let it spell over unnecessarily onto others. Good leaders put up with ambiguity so as to not resolve tensions prematurely. He was a good person and a good leader. He could be patient with unresolved tension.

Second, he understood the innate tension that comes from our baptism wherein we are perennially torn between two loyalties, that is, the tension between being loyal to the church and its dogmas and rules on the one hand, and being loyal at the same time to the fact that we are also meant to be universal instruments of salvation who radiate God’s compassion to everyone within all the churches and within the world at large. Here’s one example of that: In the face of a very messy and painful pastoral situation, I once phoned him asking him what I should do. His answer properly interfaced law and mercy: “Father, you know the mind of the church, you know canon law, you know my mind, and so you know what ideally should be done here … but you also know the principle of Epikeia, you are standing before the pain of these people, and God has put you there. You need to bring all of this together and make a decision based on that. Tell me afterwards what you decide and then I’ll tell you whether I agree or not.” I did make a decision, phoned him afterwards, he didn’t agree with me, but he thanked me for doing what I did.

Finally, as a faith leader he understood the difference between catechesis and theology and he honored and defended the special place of each of them. Catechesis is needed to ground us; theology is needed to stretch us. He understood that. As a former President of a University who had done graduate work at the University of Chicago, he wasn’t threatened by theologians and generally came to our defense when we were attacked. One of his pet sayings when one of his theological faculty came under scrutiny or attack was simply: “They’re theologians! They speculate. That’s what theologians do. They aren’t catechists.” He offered an equal defense for his catechists.

In church parlance, a bishop, an archbishop, a cardinal, or a pope is considered A Prince of the Church. He was that, a Prince of the Church … not because the church anointed him as such, but because he had the intelligence, grace, and heart of a leader.

Our Ache For Earthly Immortality

February 26, 2018

We share the world with more than seven and a half billion people and each of us has the irrepressible, innate sense that we are special and uniquely destined. This isn’t surprising since each one of us is indeed unique and special. But how does one feel special among seven and half billion others?

We try to stand out. Generally we don’t succeed, and so, as Allan Jones puts it, “We nurse within our hearts the hope that we are different, that we are special, that we are extraordinary. We long for the assurance that our birth was no accident, that a god had a hand in our coming to be, that we exist by divine fiat. We ache for a cure for the ultimate disease of mortality. Our madness comes when the pressure is too great and we fabricate a vital lie to cover up the fact that we are mediocre, accidental, mortal. We fail to see the glory of the Good News. The vital lie is unnecessary because all the things we truly long for have been freely given us.”

All of us know what those words mean: We sense that we are extraordinary, precious, and significant, irrespective of our practical fortunes in life. Deep down we have the feeling that we are uniquely loved and specially called to a life of meaning and significance. We know too, though more in faith than in feeling, that we are precious not on the basis of what we accomplish but rather on the basis of having been created and loved by God.

But this intuition, however deep in our souls, invariably wilts in the face of trying to live a life that’s unique and special in a world in which billions of others are also trying to do the same thing. And so we can be overwhelmed by a sense of our own mediocrity, anonymity, and mortality and begin to fear that we’re not precious but are merely another-among-many, nobody special, one of billions, living among billions. When we feel like this, we are tempted to believe that we are precious and unique only when we accomplish something which precisely sets us apart and ensures that we will be remembered. For most of us, the task of our lives then becomes that of guaranteeing our own preciousness, meaning, and immortality because, at the end of the day, we believe that this is contingent upon our own accomplishments, on creating our own specialness.

And so we struggle to be content with ordinary lives of anonymity, hidden in God. Rather we try to stand out, to leave a mark, to accomplish something extraordinary, and so ensure that we will be recognized and remembered. Few things impede our peace and happiness as does this effort. We set for ourselves the impossible, frustrating task of assuring for ourselves something which only God can give us, significance and immortality. Ordinary life then never seems enough for us, and we live restless, competitive, driven lives. Why isn’t ordinary life enough for us? Why do our lives always seem too small and not exciting enough? Why do we habitually feel dissatisfied at not being special?

Why our need to leave a mark? Why does our own situation often feel so suffocating? Why can’t we more easily embrace each other as sisters and brothers and rejoice in each other’s gifts and each other’s existence? Why the perennial feeling that the other is a rival? Why the need for masks, for pretense, to project a certain image about ourselves?

The answer: We do all of these things to try to set ourselves apart because we are trying to give ourselves something that only God can give us, significance and immortality.

Scripture tells us that “faith alone saves.” That simple line reveals the secret: Only God gives eternal life. Preciousness, meaning, significance and immortality are free gifts from God and we would be a whole lot more restful, peaceful, humble, grateful, happy, and less competitive if we could believe that. A humble, ordinary life, shared with billions of others, would then contain enough to give us a sense of our preciousness, meaning, and significance.

Thomas Merton, on one of his less restless days wrote: “It is enough to be, in an ordinary human mode, with one’s hunger and sleep, one’s cold and warmth, rising and going to bed. Putting on blankets and taking them off, making coffee and then drinking it. Defrosting the refrigerator, reading, meditating, working, praying. I live as my Fathers have lived on this earth, until eventually I die. Amen. There is no need to make an assertion of my life, especially so about it as mine, though doubtless it is not somebody else’s. I must learn to live so as to gradually forget program and artifice.”

Ordinary life is enough. There isn’t any need to make an assertion with our lives. Our preciousness and meaning lie within the preciousness and meaning of life itself, not in having to accomplish something special.