Celibacy Revisited

February 19, 2018

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.

Our Most Common Sin

February 12, 2018

Classically Christianity has listed seven sins as “deadly” sins, meaning that most everything else we do which is not virtuous somehow takes its root in one these congenital propensities. These are the infamous seven: pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth.

In spiritual literature the first three, pride, greed, and lust get most of the ink and attention. Pride is presented as the root of all sin, Lucifer’s primordial defiance of God as forever echoed in our own lives: I will not serve! Greed is seen as the basis for our selfishness and our blindness towards others and lust has often been given the ultimate notoriety, as if the Sixth Commandment were the only commandment.

Not to deny the importance of these, but I suspect that the sin which most commonly afflicts us and is not much mentioned in spiritual literature is wrath, that is, anger and hatred. I venture to say that most of us operate, however unconsciously, out of anger and this shows itself in our constant criticism of others, in our cynicism, in our jealousy of others, in our bitterness, and in our inability to praise others. And unlike most of our other sins, anger is easy to camouflage and rationalize as virtue.

At one level, anger often rationalizes itself as justified indignation over the foibles, stupidity, egotism, greed, and faults of others: How can I not be angry given what I see every day! Here anger shows itself in our constant irritation and in our quickness to correct, criticize, and make a cynical remark. Conversely we’re very slow to praise and affirm. Perfection then becomes the enemy of the good and since nothing and no one is perfect, we’re always in critical mode and we see this as a virtue rather than for what it in fact is, namely, an inchoate anger and unhappiness inside of ourselves.

But our unhappy cynicism isn’t the biggest problem here. More seriously, anger too often parades itself as Godly-virtue, as righteousness, as prophecy, as a healthy, divinely-inspired militancy for truth, for cause, for virtue, for God. And so we define ourselves as “holy warriors” and “vigilant defenders of truth”, taking justification in the popular (though false) conception that prophets are angry people, on passionate fire for God.

However there’s a near infinite distance between true prophetic anger and the anger that today commonly parades itself as prophecy. Daniel Berrigan, in his criteria for prophecy, submits (and rightly) that a prophet is someone who takes a vow of love, not of alienation. Prophecy is characterized by love aching for reconnection, not anger pushing for separation.

And love isn’t generally what characterizes most so-called prophetic anger in our world today, especially as it pertains to God, religion, and defense of truth. You see this in its worst form in Islamic extremism where, in the name of God, every kind of hatred, violence, and random murder puts on God’s cloak. Blaise Pascal captures this well in his Pensees where he writes: “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.” He’s wrong on one thing; mostly we aren’t doing it cheerfully but angrily. One only has to read the letters to the editor in our newspapers, listen to most talk-radio stations, or listen to any debate on politics, religion, or morality to see raw hatred and anger justifying themselves on moral and divine grounds.

There is such a thing as healthy prophetic anger, a fiery response when the poor of God, the word of God, or the truth of God are being slandered, abused, or neglected. There are important causes and boundaries to be defended. But prophetic anger is an anger that emanates out of love and empathy and always, regardless of the hatred it meets, still exhibits love and empathy, like a loving mother in the face of a belligerent child. Jesus on occasion exhibits this kind of anger, but his anger is antithetical to most of what masquerades as prophetic anger today, where love and empathy are so noticeably absent.

Someone once said that we spend the first half of life struggling with the Sixth Commandment, and then spend the second-half of life struggling with the Fifth Commandment: Thou shalt not kill! We see this illustrated in the famous parable of the Prodigal Son, his Older Brother, and his Prodigal Father. The younger son is effectively out of his father’s house through wrestling with the seductive energies of youth. The older brother is just as effectively outside his father’s house, not through sin, but through wrestling with anger.

As a young boy I was catechized to confess “bad thoughts” as sinful, but bad thoughts then were defined as sexual thoughts. As we age, I suggest, we might continue to confess “bad thoughts”, but now those “bad thoughts” have to do with anger.

A cynic, it’s said, is someone who has given up, but not shut up! He’s also someone who has confused one of the seven deadly sins, wrath, with virtue.

Faith and Superstition

February 5, 2018

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.

How does God Act in Our World?

January 29, 2018

There’s an oddity in the gospels that begs for an explanation: Jesus, it seems, doesn’t want people to know his true identity as the Christ, the Messiah. He keeps warning people not to reveal that he is the Messiah. Why?

Some scholars refer to this as “the messianic secret”, suggesting that Jesus did not want others to know his true identity until the conditions were ripe for it. There’s some truth in that, there’s a right moment for everything, but that still leaves the question unanswered: Why? Why does Jesus want to keep his true identity secret? What would constitute the right conditions within which his identity should be revealed?

That question is center-stage in Mark’s gospel, at Caesarea Philippi, when Jesus asks his disciples: “Who do you say that I am?” Peter answers: “You are the Christ.” Then, in what seems like a surprising response, Jesus, rather than praising Peter for his answer, warns him sternly not to tell anyone about what he has just acknowledged. Peter seemingly has given him the right answer and yet Jesus immediately, and sternly, warns him to keep that to himself. Why?

Simply put, Peter has the right answer, but the wrong conception of that answer. He has a false notion of what means to be the Messiah.

In the centuries leading up to the birth of Jesus and among Jesus’ contemporaries there were numerous notions of what the Christ would look like. We don’t know which notion Peter had but obviously it wasn’t the right one because Jesus immediately shuts it down. What Jesus says to Peter is not so much: “Don’t tell anyone that I’m the Christ” but rather “Don’t tell anyone that I am what you think the Christ should be. That’s not who I am.”

Like virtually all of his contemporaries and not unlike our own fantasies of what a Savior should look like, Peter no doubt pictured the Savior who was to come as a Superman, a Superstar who would vanquish evil through a worldly triumph within which he would simply overpower everything that’s wrong by miraculous powers. Such a Savior would not be subject to any weakness, humiliation, suffering, or death and his superiority and glory would have to be acknowledged by everyone, willing or begrudgingly. There would be no holdouts; his demonstration of power would leave no room for doubt or opposition. He would triumph over everything and would reign in a glory such as the world conceives of glory, that is, as the Ultimate Winner, as the Ultimate Champion – the winner of the Olympic medal, the World Cup, the Super Bowl, the Academy Award, the Nobel Prize, the winner of the great trophy or accolade that definitively sets one above others.

When Peter says: “You are the Christ!” that’s how he’s thinking about it, as earthily glory, worldly triumph, as a man so powerful, strong, attractive, and invulnerable that everyone would simply have to fall at his feet. Hence Jesus’ sharp reply: “Don’t tell anyone about that!”

Jesus then goes on to instruct Peter, and the rest of us, who he really is a Savior. He’s not a Superman or Superstar in this world or a miracle worker who will prove his power through spectacular deeds. Who is he?

The Messiah is a dying and rising Messiah, someone who in his own life and body will demonstrate that evil is not overcome by miracles but by forgiveness, magnanimity, and nobility of soul and that these are attained not through crushing an enemy but through loving him or her more fully. And the route to this is paradoxical: The glory of the Messiah is not demonstrated by overpowering us with spectacular deeds. Rather it is demonstrated in Jesus letting himself be transformed through accepting with proper love and graciousness the unavoidable passivity, humiliation, diminishment, and dying that eventually found him. That’s the dying part. But when one dies like that or accepts any humiliation or diminishment in this way there’s always a subsequent rising to real glory, that is, to the glory of a heart so stretched and enlarged that it is now able to transform evil into good, hatred into love, bitterness into forgiveness, humiliation into glory. That’s the proper work of a Messiah.

In Matthew’s Gospel this same event is recorded and this same question is asked and Peter gives the same response, but Jesus’ answer to him here is very different. In Matthew’s account, after Peter says: “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God”, rather than warn him not to talk about it, Jesus praises Peter’s answer. Why the difference? Because Matthew recasts the scene so that, in his version, Peter does understand the Messiah correctly.

How do we imagine the Messiah? How do we imagine triumph? Imagine Glory? If Jesus looked us square in the eye and asked, as he asked Peter: “How do you understand me?” Would he laud us for our answer or would he tell us: “Don’t tell anyone about that!”

Overcoming the Divisions that Divide Us

January 22, 2018

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.

Can You Lose Your Vocation?

January 15, 2018

Recently I received a letter from a man who shared that he was still deeply haunted by a story he’d heard in grade school many years before. One of his religion teachers had read them a story about a priest who went to visit a childhood friend. While staying with his friend, the priest noticed that, while his friend was cheerful and affable enough, he seemed to be harboring some deep, residual sadness. When he asked his friend about it his friend confessed that he “had lost his salvation” because he had felt a call to priesthood when he was young but had chosen instead to marry. Now, he felt, there was no existential redemption from that. He had had a vocation and lost it and, with that, also lost for good his chance at happiness. Though happily enough married, he felt that he would bear forever the stigma of having been being unfaithful in not accepting his God-given vocation.

I was raised on stories like that. They were part of the Catholicism of my youth. We were taught to believe that God marked out a certain vocation for you, that is, to be a priest, a sister, a married person, or a single person in the world, and if you didn’t accept that, once you knew your calling, then you had “missed” or “lost” your vocation and the consequence would an abiding sadness and even the danger of missing heaven. Such were the vocation stories of my youth, and, truth be told, I went to the seminary to become a priest with that lingering as a shadow in my mind. But it was only a shadow. I didn’t enter religious life and priesthood out of fear, though some moral fears did play a part in it, as they should. Fear can also be a healthy thing.

But it can also be unhealthy. It’s not healthy to understand both God and your vocation in terms that can have you missing out on happiness and salvation on the basis on singular choice made while you are still young. God doesn’t work like that.

It’s true that we are called by God to a vocation which we are meant to discern through conscience, through community, through circumstance, and through the talents that we’ve been given. For a Christian, existence does not preceded essence. We’re born with a purpose, with a mission in life. There are many clear texts in scripture on this: Jesus, praying for entire nights to know his Father’s will; Peter conscripted on a rock to led by a belt that will take him where he would rather not go; Paul being led into Damascus and instructed by an elder as to his vocation; Moses being called to do a task because he saw the suffering of the people; and all of us being challenged to use our talents or be stripped of them. We’re all called to mission and so each of us has a vocation. We’re not morally free to live our lives simply for ourselves.

But God doesn’t give us just one chance which if we miss it or turn down will leave us sad forever. No. God opens a new door every time we close one. God gives us 77×7 chances, and more after that, if needed. The question of vocation is not so much a question of guessing right (What very specifically was I predestined for?) but rather a question of giving oneself over in faith and love to the situation that we’ve chosen (or which more often than not has by circumstance chosen us). We should not live in unhealthy fear about this. God continues to love us and desire our happiness, even when we don’t always follow to where we are ideally called.

Recently I heard a homily in a church in which the priest compared God to a GPS, a Global Positioning System, that is, that computerized instrument, complete with human voice, that countless people have today in their cars and which gives them ongoing instructions on how to get to their destination. One of its features is this: No matter how many times you disregard or disobey its command, the voice never expresses impatience, yells at you, or gives up on you. It simply says “Recalculating”. Sooner or later, no matter how many times you disregard it, it gets you home.

Delightful as is that image, it’s still but a very weak analogy in terms of understanding God’s patience and forgiveness. None of us should be haunted, long-term, by sadness and fear because we feel that we’ve missed our vocation, unless we are living a selfish life. Selflessness rather than selfishness, a life in pursuit of service rather than a life in pursuit of comfort, not guessing correctly, constitutes one’s vocation. Our Christian vocation is to make what we are in fact living – married, priest, religious, single in the world – a life of selflessness and service to others. Happiness and salvation are contingent upon that, not upon guessing correctly.

How Can It All Have a Happy Ending?

January 8, 2018

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.”

My Top Ten Books for 2017

January 1, 2018

Taste is subjective. Keep that in mind as I share with you the ten books that most touched me this past year. That isn’t necessarily a recommendation that you read them. They may leave you cold, or angry at me that I praised them. Be your own critic here and one who isn’t afraid to be critical of my taste. Nobody buys everything that’s advertised in a store.

So, what ten books most touched me this year?

First, I single out some wonderful religious biographies:

Kate Hennessey’s, Dorothy Day, The World Will be Saved by Beauty.To my mind, this book is a treasure. As Dorothy Day’s granddaughter, Kate Hennessey had a privileged, intimate relationship with Dorothy, but that relationship also had its headaches and heartaches. Dorothy was a complex person who when called a saint, reacted by saying: “I don’t want to be dismissed that lightly!” This book captures both the saint and the woman resistant to that label.
Jim Forest, At Play in the Lion’s Den – A Biography and Memoir of Daniel Berrigan. A great insight as to who Daniel Berrigan was as a man, as Jesuit, as a friend, and as a prophet. There will be numerous biographies still written on Berrigan, but none, I venture to say, will surpass this one. Forest knows his subject well.
Suzanne M. Wolfe, The Confessions of X, A Novel. This is fictional biography, a story of St. Augustine’s mistress, Augustine’s love for her, their child, and St. Monica’s role in breaking up that relationship. Not historical, but researched well-enough to make it credible.

Next, some religious autobiographies:

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Coach Wooden and Me, Our 50-Year Friendship On and Off the Court.You may wonder why I list this book as religious autobiography, but it only needs to be read to answer that question. This isn’t a sports book, but a book that reflects deeply on life, meaning, friendship, race, and religion. Raised a Roman Catholic, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar shares very candidly on what prompted his religious move to Islam. There are lessons to be learned here. This is a wonderfully warm story amidst all the pain it shares.
Macy Halford, My Utmost, A Devotional Memoir. As an Evangelical Christian, Halford grew up with a deep faith, but one that wasn’t strongly challenged in her youth. As a young woman she moved to New York and then later to Paris to become a writer. Surrounded now mostly by friends and colleagues who consider faith a naiveté, she struggled to root her childhood faith more deeply so as to withstand the challenge of the new world she lives in. Her struggle and her eventual solid landing within the faith of her childhood can be a help to all us, regardless of denomination, as we struggle to keep our faith in an overly-adult world.
Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy, A Story of Justice and Redemption. Bryan Stevenson is a Harvard-educated lawyer who has chosen to put his talents to work in helping the poor, in this case, prisoners on death row who don’t have any means of helping themselves. The issues of racism, poverty, inequality, and how we blind ourselves to them, are front and center in this powerful book.
Nina Riggs, The Bright Hour – A Memoir of Living and Dying. Nina Riggs died in February and this book shares her blogs as she, a young mother with two preteen children, journeys through terminal cancer, alongside her best friend, also a young mother, who is dying of cancer as well. They died a week apart. While Riggs doesn’t write out of an explicit faith, she faces both life and death with a courage, buoyancy, and wit that will make a saint envious. A delightful, deep book: you’ll laugh, you’ll cry – and you’ll learn how death can be faced.

A fine book in the area of Existentialism:

Sarah Blackwell, At the Existentialist Café, Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails. This is one of the best books written on Existentialism that’s accessible to a non-professional reader. It will introduce you to the giants of Existential philosophy: Sartre, Heidegger, Simone de Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, Camus, Husserl, and Jaspers. Bakewell believes you will understand a thinker’s philosophy much more accurately if you also have a picture of his or her life: “Ideas are interesting, but people are vastly more so.” Those without a background in philosophy will get lost occasionally but if you continue reading you will soon find yourselves again fascinated by the lives of these famous, colorful thinkers.

Finally, two books in spirituality, where the author’s pedigree is sufficient recommendation:

Tomas Halik, I Want You to Be – On The God of Love.Halik, a Czechoslovakian priest, is a renowned spiritual writer, winner of the Templeton Prize. This is a book of rare insight and depth.
Henri Nouwen, Beyond the Mirror, Reflections on Death and Life. Nouwen needs no introduction, though this is a unique book within his corpus, chronicling his near-death experience after a serious accident.

Taste may be subjective, but these are good books!

The Christ-Child of the Year

December 22, 2017

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.

Fear of God as Wisdom

December 18, 2017

Why don’t we preach hellfire anymore? That’s a question asked frequently today by a lot of sincere religious people who worry that too many churches and too many priests and ministers have gone soft on sin and are over-generous in speaking about God’s mercy. The belief here is that more people would come to church and more people would obey the commandments, particularly the sixth one, if we preached the raw truth about mortal sin, God’s wrath, and the danger of going to hell when we die. The truth will set you free, these folks assert, and the truth is that there is real sin and that there are real and eternal consequences for sin. The gate to heaven is narrow and the road to hell is wide. So why aren’t we preaching more about the dangers of hellfire?

What’s valid in this kind of reasoning is that preaching about mortal sin and hellfire can be effective. Threats work. I grew up subjected to this kind of preaching and readily admit that it had a real effect on my behavior. But that effect was ambivalent: On the positive side it left me scared enough before God and life itself to never stray very far morally or religiously. On the negative side, it also left me religiously and emotionally crippled in some deep ways. Simply stated, it’s hard to be intimate friends with a God who frightens you and it’s not good religiously or otherwise to be overly timid and afraid before life’s great energies. Fear of divine punishment and fear of hellfire, admittedly, can be effective as a motivator.

So why not preach fear? Because it’s wrong, pure and simple. Brainwashing and physical intimidation are also effective, but fear is not the proper fuel for love. You don’t enter a love relationship because you feel afraid or threatened. You enter a love relationship because you feel drawn there by love.

More importantly, preaching divine threat dishonors the God in whom we believe. The God whom Jesus incarnates and reveals is not a God who puts sincere, good-hearted people into hell against their will, on the basis of some human or moral lapse which in our moral or religious categories we deem to be a mortal sin. For example, I still hear this threat being preached sometimes in our churches: If you miss going to church on Sunday it’s a mortal sin and should you do that and die without confessing it you will go to hell.

What kind of God would underwrite this kind of a belief? What kind of God would not give sincere people a second-chance, a third one, and seventy-seven times seven more chances if they remain sincere? What kind of God would say to a person in hell: “Sorry, but you knew the rules! You’re repentant now, but it’s too late. You had your chance!

A healthy theology of God demands that we stop teaching that hell can be a nasty surprise waiting for an essentially good person. The God we believe in as Christians is infinite understanding, infinite compassion, and infinite forgiveness. God’s love surpasses our own and if we, in our better moments, can see the goodness of a human heart despite its lapses and weaknesses, how much more so will God do this. We’ve nothing to fear from God.

Or, have we? Doesn’t scripture tell us that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom? How does that square with not being afraid of God?

There are different kinds of fear, some healthy and others not. When scripture tells us that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, the kind fear it is talking about is not contingent upon feeling threatened or feeling anxious about being punished. That’s the kind of fear we feel before tyrants and bullies. There is however a healthy fear that’s innate within the dynamics of love itself. This kind of fear is essentially proper reverence, that is, when we genuinely love someone we will fear being selfish, boorish, and disrespectful in that relationship. We will fear violating the sacred space within which intimacy occurs. Metaphorically we will sense we’re standing on holy ground and that we’d best have our shoes off before that sacred fire.

Scripture also tells us that when God appears in our lives, generally the first words we will hear are: “Don’t be afraid!” That’s because God is not a judgmental tyrant but a loving, creative, joy-filled energy and person. As Leon Bloy reminds us, joy is the most infallible indication of God’s presence.

The famous psychiatrist, Fritz Perls, was once asked by a young fundamentalist: “Have you been saved?’ His answer: “Saved? Hell no! I’m still trying to figure out how to be spent!” We honor God not by living in fear lest we offend him, but in spending the wonderful energy that God gives us to help life flourish. God is not a law to be obeyed, but a joyous energy within which to generatively spend ourselves.

The Real Tragedy of Sin

December 11, 2017

The real tragedy of sin is that often the one who is sinned against eventually becomes a sinner, inflicting on others what was first inflected upon him or her. There’s something perverse within us whereby when we are sinned against we tend to take in the sin, complete with the sickness from which it emanated, and then struggle not to act out in that same sick way. The ultimate triumph of sin is that first being sinned against, we often become sinners.

We see this, in an elementary form, in the effects that certain sadistic hazing rituals have on those who undergo them. From high school football teams to college sororities to certain schools of military training, we see sadistic hazing rituals used as forms of initiation. The interesting thing is that those who undergo them generally can’t wait for their turn to inflict them upon someone else. Having undergone some sadism something sadistic arises within them.

There’s an axiom within certain schools of psychology which submits that every abuser was first abused. Mostly that’s true. The bully was himself first bullied, the sadist was himself first victimized, and the bitter alienated outsider (whom in arrogance we label “a loser”) was himself first unfairly excluded. What produces an outsider? What produces a sadistic person? Indeed, what produces a mass killer? What must have happened to the heart of a man for him to put on military fatigues, take up an assault rifle, and begin to shoot helpless school children?

Mental illness, no doubt, is often the factor, but there are other factors too, most of which we don’t have the courage to honestly face. Our spontaneous judgment on the perpetrator of a mass shooting or terrorist bombing most naturally expresses itself this way: “I hope he fries in hell!” What’s wrong with that reaction is its failure to understand that this person was already frying in some private hell and this terrible acting-out is an attempt to get out of hell or at least to take as many people as he can to hell with him. What perpetrators of violence mostly want to do is to ruin heaven for others since they themselves feel unfairly deprived of it. This isn’t everywhere true of course since mental illness and the mystery of human freedom also play in, but it’s true enough to challenge us towards a better understanding of why some people have bitter, sadistic hearts while others have gracious, loving ones. What shapes a heart? What makes someone bitter or gracious?

Sin and blessing shape a heart, the former deforming it and the latter healing it. Sin, our own not less than anyone else’s, wounds others and shields us from having to own what’s sick inside us because we have now inflicted our sickness onto someone else where it works at making that person ill. Blessing does opposite. It relieves others of the sickness that was unfairly inflicted on them, helps turn their bitterness into graciousness, and soothes the very root of their wounds.

And so we need to stop classifying people as “winners” and “losers”, as if they alone were responsible for their success or failure. They aren’t. Not many Mother Teresas, I suspect, were traumatically abused as children. Not many Saint Francises suffered debilitating ridicule as young children, were bullied on Facebook, or shamed for their appearance. Cruelty and grace, as Leonard Cohen submits, both come upon us undeserved. And then they imprint themselves into our psyches and even our bodies. How we carry ourselves, our bodily posture, how we radiate spiritually, our self-confidence, our shame, our big-heartedness, our pettiness, our ability to express love, our resistance of love, how much we bless and how much we curse, is very much contingent on how much we ourselves have been undeservedly blessed or cursed, that is, the various undeserved graces and cruelties we have undergone.

Admittedly, this is still colored by the mystery of human freedom. Some Mother Teresas do come from abusive backgrounds and some St. Francises did suffer cruelty and bullying as a child and yet became one-in-million wounded healers, turning the very sin against them into a powerful healing grace. Unfortunately, they’re the exception, not the rule, and their greatness, more than anything else, lies in that exact achievement.

There are many challenges for us in this: First, we must not let our emotions sway us into making the kind of judgements where we would like to see someone “fry in hell”. Second, we should be much less smug and arrogant about those whom we label as “losers”. Next, we need to learn that perhaps the ultimate human and spiritual challenge is to not let what we suffer from the sins and failings of others turn us bitter so that we in turn begin to inflict that same sin onto others. Finally, and not least, understanding more deeply what’s undeserved in our lives should lead us to a deeper gratitude towards God and towards all who have so, undeservedly, loved and gifted us.

Reticence and Secrecy as Virtue

December 4, 2017

In all healthy people there’s a natural reticence about revealing too much of themselves and a concomitant need to keep certain things secret. Too often we judge this as an unhealthy shyness or, worse, as hiding something bad. But reticence and secrecy can be as much virtue as fault because, as James Hillman puts it, when we’re healthy we will normally “show the piety of shame before the mystery of life.”

When are secrets healthy and when are they not? When is it healthy to “cast our pearl” before others and when is it not? This is often answered too simplistically on both sides.

No doubt secrets can be dangerous. From scripture, from spirituality in every tradition, from what’s best in psychology, and, not least, from the various “12-Step Programs” that today help so many people back to health, we learn that keeping secrets can be dangerous, that what’s dark, obsessive, and hidden within us has to be brought to light, confessed, shared with someone, and owned in openness or we can never be healthy. Scripture tells us that the truth will set us free, that we will be healthy only if we confess our sins, and that our dark secrets will fester in us and ultimately corrupt us if we keep them hidden. Alcoholics Anonymous submits that we are as sick as our sickest secret. Psychology tells us that our psychic health depends upon our capacity to share our thoughts, feelings, and failings openly with others and that it’s dangerous to keep things bottled up inside ourselves. That’s right. That’s wise.

There are secrets that are wrongly kept, like the dark secrets we keep when we betray or the secrets a young child clutches to as an exercise in power. Such secrets fester in the soul and keep us wrongly apart. What’s hidden must be brought into the light. We should be wary of secrets.

But, as is the case with most everything else, there’s another side to this, a delicate balance that needs to be struck. Just as it can be bad to keep secrets, we can also be too loose in sharing ourselves. We can lack proper reticence. We can trivialize what’s precious inside us. We can open ourselves in ways that takes away our mystery and makes us inept subjects for romance. We can lose our depth in ways that makes it difficult for us to be creative or to pray. We can lack “the piety of shame before the mystery of life.” We all need to keep some secrets.

Etymologically to keep a secret means to keep something apart from others. And we need to do that in healthy ways because a certain amount of honest privacy is necessary for us to nurture our individuality, for us to come to know our own souls. All of us need to keep some secrets, healthy secrets. What this does, apart from helping us know more deeply our individuality, is that secrets protect our mystery and depth by shielding them under a certain mystique, from which we can more richly offer our individuality to others.

We derive both the words mystery and mystic from the Greek word myein which is a word that’s used to describe what we are left looking at when a flower closes its petals or a person closes his or her eyelids. Something’s hidden then, something of beauty, of intelligence, of wit, of love. Its depths are partially closed off and so that individual flower or person takes on a certain mystique which triggers a desire within us to want to uncover those depths. Romance has its origins here, as does creativity, prayer, and contemplation. It’s no accident that when artists paint persons at prayer normally they are depicted with their eyelids closed. Our souls need to be protected from over-exposure. Just as our eyes need to be closed at times for sleep, so too our souls. They need time away from the maddening crowd, time alone with themselves, time to healthily deepen their individuality so as to make them richer for romance.

Some years ago in an American television sitcom, a mother issued this warning to her teenage daughter just as this young person was leaving for a party with friends: “Now remember your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit – not a public amusement park!” Inside that wit, there’s wisdom. The mother’s warning is about properly guarding one’s body, but the body is connected to the soul and, like the body, the soul too shouldn’t be trivialized and become fodder for recreation.

Jesus warns us to not give to the dogs what’s sacred or throw pearls to swine. That’s strong talk, but what he’s warning us about merits strong language. Soul is a precious commodity that needs to be properly cherished and guarded. Soul is also a sacred commodity that needs to be accorded its proper reverence. We protect that preciousness and sacredness when we confess openly are sick secrets and then properly guard our healthy ones.

Playing Loose With the Truth

November 27, 2017

It can be quite disheartening to watch the news these days. Our world is full of hatred, bigotry, racism, and over-stimulated greed and ego. The gap between the rich and poor is widening and random, senseless violence is an everyday occurrence. One lives with hope, but without much optimism.

Among all of this, perhaps the most distressing thing of all is the erosion of our capacity to recognize and acknowledge the truth. From the highest government offices, to the major media outlets, to our local newspapers, to the thousands of bloggers, down to our dinner tables, we are becoming irresponsible, manipulative, and outright dishonest with the truth, denying it where it’s inconvenient, bending it to suit our own purposes, or labeling it as “fake news”, “an alternative fact”, “misinformation”, “a truth that’s no longer operative”, or as “political correctness” with no truth value. Studies from major scientific institutes are dismissed as just another opinion with the result that we are creating an entire society within which it’s becoming more and more difficult for any of us to trust what’s a fact and what isn’t. That’s dangerous territory, not just politically but especially spiritually.

Scripture tells us that Satan is the Prince of Lies and Jesus makes it clear that, among all sins, failure to acknowledge the truth is far and away the most dangerous. We see this motif particularly in the text that warns us that we can commit a sin that’s unforgiveable because it’s a blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. .

What’s this sin? Why is it unforgiveable? And what has it got to do with telling lies?

The unforgiveable sin is precisely the sin of lying which can become unforgiveable because of what lying can do to us. Here’s how the biblical text unfolds: Jesus has just cast out a demon. Part of the Jewish faith at that time was the belief that only someone who came from God had power to cast out a demon. Jesus had done that, but the Scribes and Pharisees who have just witnessed this found it to be an inconvenient truth since they denied Jesus’ goodness. So in the face of truth they had to either acknowledge something that they did not want to or they had to manipulate the truth to give it a different meaning. They chose the latter and, clearly aware that they were manipulating the truth, accused Jesus of performing the miracle through the power of Satan. They knew better, knew they were lying, but the actual truth was too difficult to accept.

Jesus initially tries to argue with them, pointing out that there’s no logic in suggesting that Satan is casting out demons. They persist, and it’s then Jesus utters his warning: “In truth I tell you, all human sins will be forgiven, and all the blasphemies ever uttered, but anyone who blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven, but is guilty of an eternal sin.” (Mark 3,28-29 parallel text in Matthew 12, 31-32). What exactly is this warning?

Jesus is saying this: Be careful about what you are doing just now, putting a false spin on something because it is too awkward to accept as true. The danger is that if you continue doing this you may eventually come to believe your own lie. That will be unforgiveable, given that you will no longer want to be forgiven because you will see truth as a lie and a lie as the truth. The sin cannot be forgiven, not because God doesn’t want to forgive it but because we no longer want to be forgiven.

Dictionaries tell us that blasphemy is the act of insulting or showing contempt or lack of reverence for God. We don’t blaspheme when we use foul language when we’re frustrated; nor do we blaspheme when we shake our fists at God in anger or turn away from him in bitterness. God can handle that. The one thing God cannot handle is lying, where we lie to the point of believing our own lies (the real danger in lying) because that eventually warps our consciences so that we can no longer tell truth from falsehood or falsehood from truth.

Theology teaches us that God is One, this means that God’s inner integrity assures that all of reality also has an inner integrity, an intelligibility, meaning that something cannot be and not be at the same time; meaning that two plus two cannot equal anything but four; meaning that a tree is always a tree no matter what you say it is; and meaning that black can never be white. God’s Oneness allows us to both trust reality and trust our normal perception of it.

That’s what’s under attack today, most everywhere. It’s the ultimate moral danger: God is One and so two plus two can never be five – and if it is then we are no longer in touch with God or with reality, are warped in conscience, and are blaspheming the Holy Spirit.

God’s Closeness

November 20, 2017

There’s a growing body of literature today that chronicles the experience of persons who were clinically dead for a period of time (minutes or hours) and were medically resuscitated and brought back to life. Many of us, for example, are familiar with Dr. Eben Alexander’s book, Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife. More recently Hollywood produced a movie, Miracles from Heaven, which portrays the true story of a young Texas girl who was clinically dead, medically revived, and who shares what she experienced in the afterlife.

There are now hundreds of stories like this, gathered through dozens of years, published or simply shared with loved ones. What’s interesting (and consoling) is that virtually all these stories are wonderfully positive, irrespective of the person’s faith or religious background. In virtually every case their experience, while partially indescribable, was one in which they felt a warm, personal, overwhelming sense of love, light, and welcome, and not a few of them found themselves meeting relatives of theirs that had passed on before them, sometimes even relatives that they didn’t know they had. As well, in virtually every case, they did not want to return to life here but, like Peter on the Mountain of the Transfiguration, wanted to stay there.

Recently while speaking at conference, I referenced this literature and pointed out that, among other things, it seems everyone goes to heaven when they die. This, of course, immediately sparked a spirited discussion: “What about hell? Aren’t we judged when we die? Doesn’t anyone go to hell?” My answer to those questions, which need far more nuance than are contained in a short soundbite, was that while we all go to heaven when we die, depending upon our moral and spiritual disposition, we might not want to stay there. Hell, as Jesus assures us, is a real option; though, as Jesus also assures us, we judge ourselves. God puts no one to hell. Hell is our choice.

However it was what happened after this discussion that I want to share here: A woman approached me as I was leaving and told me that she had had this exact experience. She had been clinically dead for some minutes and then revived through medical resuscitation. And, just like the experience of all the others in the literature around this issue, she too experienced a wonderful warmth, light, and welcome, and did not want to return to life here on earth. Inside of all of this warmth and love however what she remembers most and most wants to share with others is this: I learned that God is very close. We have no idea how close God is to us. God is closer to us than we ever imagine! Her experience has left her forever branded with a sense of God’s warmth, love, and welcome, but what’s left the deepest brand of all inside her is the sense of God’s closeness.

I was struck by this because, like millions of others, I generally don’t feel that closeness, or at least don’t feel it very affectively or imaginatively. God can seem pretty far away, abstract and impersonal, a Deity with millions of things to worry about without having to worry about the minutiae of my small life.

Moreover, as Christians, we believe that God is infinite and ineffable. This means that while we can know God, we can never imagine God. Given that truth, it makes it even harder for us to imagine that the infinite Creator and Sustainer of all things is intimately and personally present inside us, worrying with, sharing our heartaches, and knowing our most guarded feelings.

Compounding this is the fact that whenever we do try to imagine God’s person our imaginations come up against the unimaginable. For example, try to imagine this: There are billions of persons on this earth and billions more have lived on this earth before us. At this very minute, thousands of people are being born, thousands are dying, thousands are sinning, thousands are doing virtuous acts, thousands are making love, thousands are experiencing violence, thousands are feeling their hearts swelling with joy, all of this part of trillions upon trillions of phenomena. How can one heart, one mind, one person be consciously on top of all of this and so fully aware and empathetic that no hair falls from our heads or sparrow from the sky without this person taking notice? It’s impossible to imagine, pure and simple, and that’s part of the very definition of God.

How can God be as close to us as we are to ourselves? Partly this is mystery, and wisdom bids us befriend mystery because anything we can understand is not very deep! The mystery of God’s intimate, personal presence inside us is beyond our imaginations. But everything within our faith tradition and now most everything in the testimony of hundreds of people who have experienced the afterlife assure us that, while God may be infinite and ineffable, God is very close to us, closer than we imagine.

A Threat to Our Decency

November 13, 2017

Jesus tells us that in the end we will be judged on how we dealt with the poor in our lives, but there are already dangers now, in this life, in not reaching out to the poor

Here’s how Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy, teases out that danger: “I’ve come to believe that the true measure of our commitment to justice, the character of our society, our commitment to the rule of law, fairness, and equality cannot be measured by how we treat the rich, the powerful, the privileged, and the respected among us. The true measure of our character is how we treat the poor, the disfavored, the accused, the incarcerated, and the condemned. We are all implicated when we allow other people to be mistreated. An absence of compassion can corrupt the decency of a community, a state, a nation. Fear and anger can make us vindictive and abusive, unjust and unfair, until we all suffer from the absence of mercy and we condemn ourselves as much as we condemn others.”

What needs to be highlighted here is what we do to ourselves when we don’t reach out in compassion to the poor. We corrupt our own decency. As Stevenson puts it: An absence of compassion corrupts our decency – as a state, as a church, as family, and as individuals. How so?

St. Augustine teaches that we can never be morally neutral, either we are growing in virtue or falling into vice. We never have the luxury of simply being in some neutral, holding state. There’s no moral neutrality. Either we are growing in virtue or sliding into virtue’s opposite. That’s true for all of life. A thing is either growing or it’s regressing.

So too with our attitude towards justice and the poor: Either we are actively reaching out to the poor and being more drawn into concern for them or we are unconsciously hardening our hearts against them and unknowingly sliding into attitudes that trivialize their issues and distance ourselves from them. If we are not actively advocating for justice and the poor, it is inevitable that at a point we will, with completely sincere hearts, downplay the issues of poverty, racism, inequality, and injustice.

It’s interesting to note that in the famous text on the final judgment in the Gospel where Jesus describes how God will divide the sheep from the goats on the basis of how they treated the poor, neither group, those who did it correctly and those who didn’t, actually knew what they were doing. The group who did it right state that they didn’t know that in touching the poor they were touching Christ; and the group who got it wrong protest that had they known that Christ was in the poor, they would have reached out. Jesus assures us that it doesn’t matter. Mature discipleship lies simply in the doing, irrespective of our conscious attitude.

And so we need to be alert not just to our conscious attitudes but to what we are actually doing. We can, in all sincerity, in all good conscience, in all good heart, be blind towards justice and the poor. We can be moral men and women, pious church-goers, generous donors to those who ask help from us, warm to our own families and friends, and yet, blind to ourselves, though not to the poor, be unhealthily elitist, subtle racists, callous towards the environment, and protective of our own privilege. We are still good persons no doubt, but the absence of compassion in one area of our lives leaves us limping morally.

We can be good persons and yet fall into a certain hardness of heart because of kindred, ideological circles that falsely affirm us. Within any circle of friends, either we are talking about ways that we can more effectively lessen the gaps between rich and poor or we are talking, however unconsciously, about the need to defend the gaps that presently exist. One kind of conversation is stretching our hearts; the other is narrowing them. Lack of compassion for justice and the poor will inevitably work at turning a generous heart into a defensive one.

We all have friends who admire us and send us signals that we are good, big-hearted, virtuous persons. And no doubt this is substantially true. But the affirmation we receive from our own kind can be a false mirror. A truer mirror is how those who are politically, racially, religiously, and temperamentally different from ourselves assess us. How do the poor feel about us? How do refugees assess our goodness? How do other races rate our compassion?

And what about the mirror that Jesus holds up for us when he tells us that our goodness will be judged by how we treat the poor and that the litmus test of goodness consists is how well we love our enemies?

An absence of compassion in even one area subtly corrupts the decency of a community, a state, a nation, and that eventually turns our generosity into defensiveness.

Paralysis, Exasperation, and Helplessness as Prayer

November 6, 2017

Several years ago I received an email that literally stopped my breath. A man who had been for many years an intellectual and faith mentor to me, a man whom I thoroughly trusted, and a man with whom I had developed a life-giving friendship, had killed both his wife and himself in a murder-suicide. The news left me gasping for air, paralyzed in terms of how to understand and accept this as well as how to pray in the face of this.

I had neither words of explanation nor words for prayer. My heart and my head were like two water pumps working a dry well, useless and frustrated. Whatever consolation I had was drawn from an assurance from persons who knew him more intimately that there had been major signs of mental deterioration in the time leading up to this horrible event and they were morally certain that this was the result of an organic dysfunction in his brain, not an indication of his person. Yet … how does one pray in a situation like this? There aren’t any words.

And we have all experienced situations like this: the tragic death of someone we love by murder, suicide, overdose, or accident. Or, the exasperation and helplessness we feel in the face of the many seemingly senseless events we see daily in our world: Terrorists killing thousands of innocent people; natural disasters leaving countless persons dead or homeless; mass killings by deranged individuals in New York, Paris, Las Vegas, Florida, San Bernardino, Sandy Hook, among other places; and millions of refugees having to flee their homelands because of war or poverty. And we all we know people who have received terminal sentences in medical clinics and had to face what seems as an unfair death: young children whose lives are just starting and who shouldn’t be asked at so tender an age to have to process mortality and young mothers dying whose children still desperately need them.

In the face of these things, we aren’t just exasperated by the senselessness of the situation we struggle too to find both heart and words with which to pray. How do we pray when we are paralyzed by senselessness and tragedy? How do we pray when we no longer have the heart for it?

St. Paul tells us that when we don’t know how to pray, the Spirit in groans too deep for words prays through us. What an extraordinary text! Paul tells us that when we can still find the words with which to pray this is not our deepest prayer. Likewise when we still have the heart to pray, this too is not our deepest prayer. Our deepest prayer is when we are rendered mute and groaning in exasperation, in frustration, in helplessness. Wordless exasperation is often our deepest prayer. We pray most deeply when we are so driven to our knees so as to be unable to do anything except surrender to helplessness. Our groaning, wordless, seemingly the antithesis of prayer, is indeed our prayer. It is the Spirit praying through us. How so?

The Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit, is, as scripture assures us, the spirit of love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, longsuffering, fidelity, mildness, faith, and chastity. And that Spirit lives deep within us, placed there by God in our very make-up and put into us even more deeply by our baptism. When we are exasperated and driven to our knees by a tragedy which is too painful and senseless to accept and absorb our groans of helplessness are in fact the Spirit of God groaning in us, suffering all that it isn’t, yearning for goodness, beseeching God in a language beyond words.

Sometimes we can find the heart and the words with which to pray, but there are other times when, in the words of the Book of Lamentation, all we can do is put our mouths to the dust and wait. The poet, Rainer Marie Rilke, once gave this advice to a person who had written him, lamenting that in the face of a devastating loss he was so paralyzed that he did not know what he could possibly do with the pain he was experiencing. Rilke’s advice: Give that heaviness back to the earth itself, the earth is heavy, mountains are heavy, the seas are heavy. In effect: Let your groaning be your prayer!

When we don’t know how to pray, the Spirit in groans too deep for words prays through us. So every time we are face-to-face with a tragic situation that leaves us stuttering, mute, and so without heart that all we can do is say, I can’t explain this! I can’t accept this! I can’t deal with this! This is senseless! I am paralyzed in my emotions! I am paralyzed in my faith! I no longer have the heart to pray, it can be consoling to know that this paralyzing exasperation is our prayer – and perhaps the deepest and most sincere prayer we have ever offered.