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!

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!

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.

Writing in the first person is always a risk, but the subject matter of this column is best done, I feel, through personal testimony. In a world where chastity and celibacy are seen as naïve and to be pitied and where there’s a general skepticism that anyone is actually living them out, personal testimony is perhaps the most effective protest.

What’s to be said for celibacy and chastity, whether these are lived out in a vowed religious context or are simply the given situation of anyone who is going through life celibate?  Here’s my story:

At the age of seventeen, I made the decision to become a priest and enter a religious order, the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate. That decision involved committing myself to celibacy for life. Strange as this may sound, since I was only seventeen, I didn’t make that decision naively or out of some passing fancy. I intuited pretty accurately the cost, so much so that I virtually everything inside me strongly resisted the call. Anything but that! While I was drawn to ministry the accompanying vow of celibacy was a massive stumbling block. I didn’t want to live as a celibate. Who does? Indeed nobody should. But the inner call was so strong that, despite its downside, when I finished high school I gave a reluctant but solid assent and entered a religious congregation.  Now, looking back on it more than fifty years later, I see it still as the purest, most unselfish decision I’ve ever made.

I’ve been in religious life now for more than fifty years and have served as a priest for more than forty-five of those years and, all told, celibacy has served me well, just as I can honestly say that I have served it in essential fidelity. Celibacy has its upside: Beyond the inner work it forced me to do in terms of my relationship to God, to others, and to myself (often painful work done in restlessness and prayer and on occasion with the help of a counsellor) celibacy also afforded me a privileged availability for the ministry.  If you move through this life as a priest and missionary, celibacy can be a friend.

But it isn’t always a friend. For me, celibacy has always been the hardest struggle within religious life and ministry, a habitual emotional crucifixion, as it should be. There have been seasons – days, weeks, months, and sometimes many months  – when most everything inside of me screamed against it, when because of falling in love, or dealing with an obsession, or dealing with the one-sided energy within a male congregation, or when I was overcome with the fact I will never have children, or, when the simple, raw physical and emotional power of sexuality left me restlessness and frustrated enough that the man inside of me wanted to take back what the priest inside of me had once vowed. Celibacy will have you sweating blood in the Garden of Gethsemane sometimes. It goes against some of the deepest, innate, God-given instincts and energies within you and so it doesn’t allow itself to be dealt with lightly.

That being said though, something else also needs to be said, something too little understood today: Celibacy can also be very generative because sexuality is about more than having sex. Just before creating the sexes, God said: It is not good for the man to be alone! That’s true for every person who will ever walk this earth. Sexuality is given to us to take us beyond our aloneness; but many things do that for us and full sexual intimacy is only one of them.

Perhaps the single, biggest misunderstanding about sex today is the belief that deep friendship, warm companionship, faith community, and non-genital forms of intimacy are only a substitute, some second-best compensation, for sex rather than a rich, generative modality of sex itself. These aren’t a consolation prize for missing the real thing. They are, just as is having sex, one rich aspect of the real thing.

Recently, I phoned a priest on the 60^th anniversary of his ordination. Eighty-five years old now, he had this to say:  “There were some rough times, all of my classmates left the ministry and I had my temptations too. But I stayed and, now, looking back, I am pretty happy with the way my life turned out.”

Looking back on own life and my commitment to celibacy I can say something similar. Celibacy has made for some tough seasons and remains, as Merton once put it, the deep anguish within chastity. But celibacy has also provided me with a life rich in friendship, rich in community, rich in companionship, rich in family of every kind, and rich in opportunity to be present to others. I will die without children, my life, like everyone’s, an incomplete, never-fully-consummate symphony. But looking back on it all, I’m pretty happy with the way it turned out. Celibacy can be a very life-giving way of being sexual, of creating family, and of being happy.

The power of a subordinate clause, one nuance within a sentence and everything takes on a different meaning.

That’s the case in a recent brilliant, but provocative, novel, The Ninth Hour, by Nina McDermott. She tells a story which, among other things, focuses on a group of nuns in Brooklyn who work with the poor. Times are hard, people are needy, and the nuns, who work mostly in home care for the poor, appear utterly selfless in their dedication. Nothing, it seems, can deflect them from their mission to give their all, their every of ounce of energy, to help the poor. And on this score, McDermott gives them their due. As well, for anyone familiar with what goes on inside of a religious community, McDermott’s portrayal of these nuns is both nuanced and accurate. Nuns aren’t all of a kind. Each has her own unique history, temperament, and personality.  Some are wonderfully warm and gracious, others nurse their own wounds and aren’t always evident paradigms of God’s love and mercy. And that’s case with the nuns that McDermott describes here. But, quirks of individual personality aside, as a community, the nuns she describes serve the poor and their overall witness is beyond reproach.

But then, after telling this story of faith and dedication and reflecting on how today there are few groups of nuns who still live so radical a commitment, McDermott, through the voice her narrator, introduces the subversive subordinate clause: “The holy nuns who sailed through the house when we were young were a dying breed even then. … The call to sanctity and self-sacrifice, the delusion and superstition it required, faded from the world even then.”

Wow! The delusion and the superstition it required. As if this kind of radical self-sacrifice can only be the product of false fear. As if whole generations of Christian self-sacrifice, vowed celibacy, and single-minded dedication can be dismissed, post-factum, as ultimately predicated on delusion and superstition.

How true is that?

I grew up in the world McDermott is describing, where nuns were like that, and where a powerful Catholic ethos supported them and declared what they were doing was anything but delusion and superstition. Admittedly that was another time and much of that ethos has not stood the test of time and has, indeed, to a large part succumbed to the raw power of secularity. And so McDermott is right, partially. Some of that selflessness was based upon an unhealthy fear of hell fire and God’s anger. To an extent too it was based on a notion of faith that believed that God does not really want us to flourish much here on earth but that our lives are meant to be mostly a somber preparation for the next world. Perhaps this isn’t exactly delusion and superstition, but it is bad theology and it did help underwrite some of the religious life in the world McDermott describes and in the Catholic world of my youth.

But there was also something else undergirding this ethos, and I inhaled it deeply in my youth and in a way that branded my soul for good, like nothing else I have ever breathed in in this world.  Notwithstanding some false fears, there was inside of that a biblical faith, a raw mandate, that taught that your own comfort, your own desires, and even your own legitimate longings for human flourishing, sexuality, marriage, children, freedom, and having what everyone else has, are subject to a higher purpose, and you may be asked to sacrifice them all, your legitimate longings, to serve God and others. It was a faith that believed you were born with a God-given vocation and that your life was not your own.

I saw this first in my own parents who believed that faith made those demands upon them, who accepted that, and who consequently had the moral authority to ask this of others. I saw it too in the Ursuline Nuns who taught me in school, women with full red blood flowing through their veins but who sacrificed these longings to come into the public schools in our remote rural areas and teach us. I saw it too in the little prairie community that nurtured me in my youth, a whole community who, by and large, lived out this selflessness.

Today I live in a world that prizes sophistication above all else, but where as a whole society we’re no longer sure what’s “fake news” as opposed to what we can believe in and trust. In this unsteady world the faith of my youth, of my parents, of the nuns who sacrificed their dreams to teach me, and of the nuns whom Nina McDermott describes in The Ninth Hour, can look very much like delusion and superstition. Sometimes it is delusion, admittedly; but sometimes it isn’t, and in my case the faith my parents gave me, with its belief that your life and your sexuality are not your own, is, I believe, the truest, most non-superstitious thing of all.

We live in a world of deep divisions. Everywhere we see polarization, people bitterly divided from each other by ideology, politics, economic theory, moral beliefs, and theology. We tend to use over-simplistic categories within which to understand these divisions: the left and the right opposing each other, liberals and conservatives at odds, pro-life vying with pro-choice.

Virtually every social and moral issue is a war-zone: the status of women, climate change, gender roles, sexuality, marriage and family as institutions, the role of government, how the LGBTQ community is to be understood, among other issues. And our churches aren’t exempt; too often we cannot agree on anything. Civility has disappeared from public discourse even within our churches where there is now as much division and hostility within each denomination as there is between them. More and more, we cannot discuss openly any sensitive matter, even within our own families. Instead we discuss politics, religion, and values only within our own ideological circles; and there, rather than challenging each other, we mostly end up feeding each other in our biases and indignations thus becoming even more intolerant, bitter, and judgmental.

Scripture calls this enmity, hatred, and indeed that’s its proper name. We are becoming hate-filled people who both fuel and justify our hatred on religious and moral grounds. We need only to watch the news on any night to see this. How’s this to be overcome?

At the more macro level in politics and religion, it’s hard to see how these bitter divides will ever be bridged, especially when so much of our public discourse is feeding and widening the division. What’s needed is nothing short of religious conversion, a religious change of heart, and that’s contingent on the individual. The collective heart will change only when individual hearts first do. We help save the sanity of the world by first safeguarding our own sanity, but that’s no easy task.

It’s not as simple as everyone simply agreeing to think nicer thoughts. Nor, it seems, will we find much common ground in our public dialogues. The dialogue that’s needed isn’t easily come by; certainly we haven’t come by it yet. Many groups are trying for it, but without much success. Generally what happens is that the even most-well intended dialogue quickly degenerates into an attempt to by each side to score its own ideological points rather than in genuinely trying to understand each other. Where does that leave us?

The real answer, I believe, lies in an understanding of how the cross and death of Jesus brings about reconciliation. The author of the Letter to the Ephesians tells us that Jesus broke down the barrier of hostility that existed between communities by creating one person where formerly there had been two – and he did it this “by reconciling both [sides] in one body through his cross, which put that enmity to death.” (Ephesians 2, 16)

How does the cross of Christ put enmity to death?   Not through some kind of magic. Jesus didn’t break down the divisions between us by mystically paying off some debt for our sins through his suffering, as if God needed to be appeased by blood to forgive us and open the gates of heaven. That image is simply the metaphor behind our icons and language about being washed clean of sin and saved by the blood of Christ. What happened in the cross and death of Jesus is something that asks for our imitation not simply our admiration. What happened in the cross and death of Jesus is an example for us to imitate. What are we to imitate?

What Jesus did in his passion and death was to transform bitterness and division rather than to retransmit them and give them back in kind. In the love which he showed in his passion and death Jesus did this:  He took in hatred, held it inside himself, transformed it, and gave back love. He took in bitterness, held it, transformed it, and gave back graciousness. He took in curses, held them, transformed them, and gave back blessing. He took in paranoia, held it, transformed it, and gave back big-heartedness. He took in murder, held it, transformed it, and gave back forgiveness. And he took in enmity, bitter division, held it, transformed it, and through that revealed to us the deep secret for forming community, namely, we need to take away the hatred that divides us by absorbing and holding it within ourselves and thereby transforming it. Like a water purifier which holds within itself the toxins and the poisons and gives back only pure water, we must hold within ourselves the toxins that poison community land give back only graciousness and openness to everyone. That’s the only key to overcome division.

We live in bitterly divisive times, paralyzed in terms of meeting amicably on virtually every sensitive issue of politics, economics, morality, and religion. That stalemate will remain until one by one, we each transform rather than enflame and retransmit the hatred that divides us.

There’s a line in the writings of Julian of Norwich, the famous 14^th century mystic and perhaps the first theologian to write in English, which is endlessly quoted by preachers, poets, and writers: But all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well. It’s her signature teaching.

We all have an intuitive grasp of what that means. It’s our basis for hope. In the end, the good will triumph. But the phrase takes on added meaning when it’s seen in its original context. What was Julian trying to say when she coined that phrase?

She was struggling with the problem of evil, sin, and suffering: Why does God allow them? If God is both all-loving and all-powerful what possible explanation can there be for the fact that God lets us suffer, lets us sin, and lets evil be present all over the world? Why didn’t God create a world without sin, where we would all be perfectly happy from birth onwards?

Julian had heard enough sermons in church to know the standard apologetic answer for that, namely, that God allows it because God gave us the great gift of freedom. With that comes the inevitability of sin and all its sad consequences. That’s a valid answer, though one that’s often seen as too abstract to offer much consolation to us when we are suffering. But Julian, despite being a loyal daughter of the church and having been schooled in that answer, doesn’t go there. She offers something different.

For her, God allows evil, sin, and suffering because God will use them in the end to create for everyone a deeper mode of happiness than they would have experienced if sin, evil, and suffering hadn’t been there. In the end, these negatives will work towards creating some deeper positives.

Let me quote Julian in the original (the Middle English within which she wrote): Jesus, in this vision informed me of all that I needed answered by this word and said: ‘Sinne is behovely, but alle shalle be wele, and alle shalle be wele, and all manner of thing shalle be wele.’

She shares that Jesus says that sin is “behovely”. In Middle English, behovely has these connotations: “useful”, “advantageous”, “necessary”. In her vision, sin, evil, and suffering are ultimately advantageous and even necessary in bringing us to deeper meaning and greater happiness. (Not unlike what we sing in our great Easter hymn: O happy fault, O necessary sin of Adam.)

What Julian wants us to draw out from this is not the idea that sin and evil are of little consequence but rather that God, being so unimaginable in love and power, is able to draw good out of evil, happiness out of suffering, and redemption out of sin in ways that we cannot yet grasp. This is Julian’s answer to the question: Why does God allow evil? She answers by not answering because, in essence, no adequate answer can ever be imagined. Rather, she sets the question into a theology of God within which, beyond what we can imagine at present and beyond what theology can really account for, God’s power and love will eventually make all things well, dry every tear, redeem every evil, erase every bad memory, unfreeze every cold heart, and turn every manner of suffering into happiness. There’s even a hint in this that the final triumph of God will be to empty hell itself so that, indeed, absolutely every manner of being will be well.

In a subsequent vision, Julian received a five-fold assurance from God that God may, can, will, and shall make all things well and we ourselves will see it.

All of this is predicated of course on a particular concept of God. The God that Julian of Norwich invites us to believe in is a God who is precisely beyond our imagination both in power and in love. Any God we can imagine is incapable of making all manner of being well (as many atheistic critics have already pointed out). This not just true in terms of trying to imagine God’s power, it’s particularly true in terms of trying to imagine God’s love. It’s unimaginable in our present human condition to picture anyone, God or human, who cannot be offended, is incapable of anger, holds nothing against anyone no matter what evil he or she may have perpetrated, and who (as Julian describes God) is completely relaxed and has a face like a marvelous symphony. The God of our imagination, re-enforced by certain false interpretations of scripture, does get offended, does get angry, does take vengeance, and does meet sin with wrath. Such a God is incapable of making all manner of things well. But such a God is also not the God whom Jesus revealed.

Were we to look into the eyes of God’s, says Julian, what we would see there would “melt our hearts with love and break them in two with ecstasy.”

Christmas 2017

Every year Time magazine recognizes someone as “Person of the Year”. The recognition isn’t necessarily an honor; it’s given to the person whom Time judges to have been the newsmaker of the year – for good or for bad. This year, instead of choosing an individual to recognize as newsmaker of the year, it recognized instead a category of persons, the Silence Breakers, namely, women who have spoken out about having experienced sexual harassment and sexual violence.

Part of the challenge of Christmas is to recognize where Christ is being born in our world today, where two thousand years after the birth of Jesus we can again visit the stable in Bethlehem, see the new-born child, and have our hearts moved by the power of divine innocence and powerlessness.

For Christmas this year, I suggest we honor refugee children as the “Christ-Child of the Year”. They bring as close to the original crib in Bethlehem as we can get within our world today because for them, as for Jesus two thousand years ago, there is no room at the inn.

Jesus’ birth, like his death, comes wrapped in paradox: He came as God’s answer to our deepest desire, badly wanted, and yet, both in birth and in death, the outsider. Notice that Jesus is born outside the city and he dies outside the city. That’s no accident. He wasn’t born a “wanted” child and he wasn’t an accepted child. Granted, his mother, Mary, and those with genuine religious hearts wanted him, but the world didn’t, at least not on the terms on which he came, as a powerless child. Had he come as a superstar, powerful, a figure so dominant that knees would automatically bend in his presence, a messiah tailored to our imagination, every inn door would have opened to him, not just at birth but throughout his whole life.

But Christ wasn’t the messiah of our expectations. He came as an infant, powerless, hidden in anonymity, without status, invited, unwanted. And so Thomas Merton describes his birth this way: Into this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for Him at all, Christ has come uninvited. But because He cannot be at home in it, because He is out of place in it, and yet He must be in it, His place is with those others for whom there is no room.

There was no room for him at the inn! Biblical scholars tell us that our homilies and imaginings about the heartlessness of the innkeepers who turned Mary and Joseph away on Christmas Eve miss the point of that narrative. The point that the Gospels want to make here is not that the innkeepers in Bethlehem were cruel and calloused and this singular, poor, peasant couple, Joseph and Mary, were treated unfairly. The motif of “no room at the inn” wants rather to make a much larger point, the one Thomas Merton just highlighted, namely, that there’s never room in our world for the real Christ, the one who doesn’t fit comfortably into our expectations and imaginings. The real Christ generally shocks our imagination, is a disappointment to our expectations, comes uninvited, is perennially here, but is forever on the outside, on the periphery, excluded by our imaginations and sent packing from our doors. The real Christ is forever seeking a home in a world within which there’s no room for him.

So who best fits that description best today? I suggest the following: Millions of refugee children. The Christ-Child can be seen most clearly today in the countless refugee children who, with their families, are being driven from their homes by violence, war, starvation, ethnic cleansing, poverty, tribalism, racism, and religious persecution. They, and their families, best fit the picture of Joseph and Mary, searching for a room, outsiders, powerless, uninvited, no home, no one to take them in, on the periphery, strangers, labeled as “aliens”. But they are the present-day Holy Family and their children are the Christ-Child for us and our world.

Where is the crib of Bethlehem today? Where might we find the infant Christ to worship? In many places, admittedly in every delivery room and nursery in the world, but “preferentially” in refugee camps; in boats making perilous journeys across the Mediterranean; in migrants trekking endless miles in hunger, thirst, and dangerous conditions; in people waiting in endless lines to be processed in hope of being accepted somewhere, in persons arriving at various borders after a long journey only to be sent back; in mothers in detention centers, holding their young and hoping; and most especially, preferentially, in the faces of countless refugee children.

The face of God at Christmas is seen more in the helplessness of children than in all the earthly and charismatic power in our world. And so today, if we want, like the shepherds and wise men, to find our way to the crib in Bethlehem we need to look at where, in this demented inn, the most helpless of the children dwell.