Our Struggle with Riches

September 18, 2017

A number of years ago I attended a funeral. The man to whom we were saying goodbye had enjoyed a full and rich life. He’d reached the age of 90 and was respected for having been both successful and honest. But he’d always been a strong man, a natural leader, a man who took charge of things. He’d had a good marriage, raised a large family, been successful in business, and held leadership roles in various civic and church organizations. He was a man who commanded respect although he was sometimes feared for his strength.

His son, a priest, was presiding at his funeral. He began his homily this way: “Scripture tells us that seventy is the sum of a man’s years, eighty for those who are strong. Now, our dad lived for ninety years. Why the extra ten years? Well, it’s no mystery really. It took God an extra ten years to mellow him out! He was too strong and cantankerous to die at eighty! But during the last ten years of his life he suffered a series of massive diminishments. His wife died, he never got over that. He had a stroke, he never got over that. He had to be moved into an assisted living complex, he never got over that. All these diminishments did their work. By the time he died, he could take your hand and say: ‘Help me’. He couldn’t say that from the time he could tie his own shoelaces until those last years. He was finally ready for heaven. Now when he met St. Peter at the gates of heaven he could say: ‘Help me!’ rather than tell St. Peter how he might better organize things.”

This story can help us understand Jesus’ teaching that the rich find it difficult to enter the kingdom of heaven while little children enter it quite naturally. We tend to misunderstand both why the rich find it hard to enter the kingdom and why little children enter it more easily.

Why do little children enter the kingdom quite naturally? In answering this we tend to idealize the innocence of little children, which can indeed be striking. But that’s not what Jesus is holding up as an ideal here, an ideal of innocence which for us adults is impossible in any case. It’s not the innocence of children that Jesus praises; rather it’s the fact that children have no illusion of self-sufficiency. Children have no choice but to know their dependence. They’re not self-sufficient and know that they cannot provide for themselves. If someone doesn’t feed them they go hungry. They need to say, and to say it often: “Help me!”

It’s generally the opposite for adults, especially if we’re strong, talented, and blessed with sufficient wealth. We easily nurse the illusion of self-sufficiency. In our strength we more naturally forget that we need others, that we’re not self-reliant.

The lesson here isn’t that riches are bad. Riches, be that money, talent, intelligence, health, good looks, leadership skills, or flat-out strength, are gifts from God. They’re good. It’s not riches that block us from entering the kingdom. Rather it’s the danger that, having them, we will more easily also have the illusion that we’re self-sufficient. We aren’t. As Thomas Aquinas points out by the very way he defines God (as Esse Subsistens – Self-sufficient Being) only God does not needs anyone or anything else. The rest of us do, and little children more easily grasp this than do adults, especially strong and gifted adults.

Moreover the illusion of self-sufficiency often spawns another danger: Riches and the comfort they bring, as we see in the parable of the rich man who has a beggar at his door, can make us blind to the plight and hunger of the poor. That’s one of the dangers in not being hungry ourselves. In our comfort, we tend not to see the poor.

And so it’s not riches themselves that are bad. The moral danger in being rich is rather the illusion of self-sufficiency that seems to forever accompany riches. Little children don’t suffer this illusion, but the strong do. That’s the danger in being rich, money-wise or otherwise.

How do we minimize that danger? By being generous with our riches. Luke’s Gospel, while being the Gospel that’s hardest on the rich is also the Gospel that makes most clear that riches aren’t bad in themselves. God is rich. But God is prodigiously generous with that richness. God’s generosity, as we learn from the parables of Jesus, is so excessive that it’s scandalous. It upsets our measured sense of fairness. Riches are good, but only if they’re shared. In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus praises the generous rich but warns the hoarding rich. Generosity is Godlike, hoarding is antithetical to heaven.

And so from the time we learn to tie our own shoelaces until the various diminishments of life begin to strip away the illusion of self-sufficiency, riches of all kinds constitute a danger. We must never unlearn the words: “Help me!”

God’s Command to Kill the Canaanites

September 11, 2017

In his autobiography, Eric Clapton, the famed rock and blues artist, shares very candidly about his long struggle with an addiction to alcohol. At one point in his life, he admitted his addiction and entered a rehab clinic, but he didn’t take his problem as seriously as was warranted. Returning to England after his stint in the clinic he decided that he could still drink light spirits, beer and wine, but would give up hard liquor. You can guess the result. Before long he was again enslaved inside his addiction. He returned to the clinic, to appease friends, but convinced that he was still strong enough to handle his problems on his own.

But grace intervened. Just before his second rehab stint ended, he had powerful experience within which he was shaken to his very soul by the recognition of his own helplessness and the mortal danger he faced from his addiction. On the basis of that grace, he finally gave himself over to the program with his whole heart, accepting that he could never touch alcohol again. He has retained his sobriety since.

His story can be helpful in understanding the meaning of certain texts in scripture which, when read literally, can give us the impression that God is arbitrary, cruel, and murderous.

We see such texts, for example, in the Book of Exodus and the Book of Joshua where, before entering the Promised Land, God instructs Israel to kill all the people and all the animals who at that time inhabit that land. Why such a command to exterminate others simply because they’re living in a certain place?

Obviously we need to ask ourselves: Is this really the word of God? What kind of God would give this kind of command? And what about the people being killed, aren’t they too God’s people? Does God play favorites? What about the Canaanites whom Joshua is asked to exterminate, don’t they count? What can be behind this kind of command?

These texts, though divinely inspired and rich in meaning, clearly should not be taken literally. This command, while not exactly metaphorical, is archetypal, meaning that it’s not meant to be taken literally as a command to kill what’s foreign to us, but rather as a counsel teaching that when we’re trying to enter a new way of living we must take all the necessary measures to ensure that we can properly enter that life and sustain it. Metaphorically, we need to “kill” off every element inside us and around us which, if left unaddressed, might eventually compromise and choke off the new life we’re trying to live. Jesus, in fact, gives us the identical command, except he employs a softer metaphor: Don’t put new wine into old wineskins.

People in Recovery Programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous tend to more quickly understand what’s asked of us in these texts. Like Eric Clapton they’ve learned from experience that to enter the promised land of sobriety demands that one kill off all of “the Canaanites”, that is, accepting that all half-measures won’t work but that some brute, raw, bitter renunciations have to be made.

This biblical image, the command from God to kill the “Canaanites”, can serve us well too in other areas of our lives, particularly, I believe, in our struggles with making commitments and being faithful to them.

For example, consider someone entering a marriage. Like Israel they’re entering the “promised land”, but for them to establish this new life and remain faithful to it, they need to kill off a good number of things, namely, former romances, old relational habits of promiscuity and infidelity, the propensity to flirt with attractive temptations, the belief that one can have one’s cake and eat it too, and the long standing habit of putting one’s own needs first and worrying mainly about taking care of oneself.

Every choice is a series of renunciations. To have a life-giving marriage means renouncing a lot of old habits, otherwise these old habits will eventually sabotage the marriage. There are things one must do before entering a marriage or any serious commitment.

But what about those “Canaanites” that already inhabit the land we’re entering? Who might they be today?

In terms of threatening to contaminate a marriage, I would submit that what must be killed off today in order to have a life-long, life-giving marriage is our present cultural ethos about sex, namely, the belief that sex need not be confined to monogamy, permanent commitment, and marriage. If we don’t kill off that ethos as we enter a marriage, we will not sustain ourselves life-long in that Promised Land.

To live lives of sobriety, commitment, and fidelity demands more than half-measures. An alcoholic in recovery knows that he or she cannot have it both ways. The same is true in terms of sustaining ourselves in any life-giving commitment. New wine must be put into new wineskins and this demands some bitter renunciations.

God’s commands, properly understood, aren’t harsh and arbitrary. They’re wise and universal.

Achievement versus Fruitfulness

September 4, 2017

There’s a real difference between our achievements and our fruitfulness, between our successes and the actual good that we bring into the world.

What we achieve brings us success, gives us a sense of pride, makes our families and friends proud of us, and gives us a feeling of being worthwhile, singular, and important. We’ve done something. We’ve left a mark. We’ve been recognized. And along with those awards, trophies, academic degrees, certificates of distinction, things we’ve built, and artifacts we’ve left behind comes public recognition and respect. We’ve made it. We’re recognized. Moreover, generally, what we achieve produces and leaves behind something that is helpful to others. We can, and should, feel good about our legitimate achievements.

However, as Henri Nouwen frequently reminds us, achievement is not the same thing as fruitfulness. Our achievements are things we have accomplished. Our fruitfulness is the positive, long-term effect these achievements have on others. Achievement doesn’t automatically mean fruitfulness. Achievement helps us stand out, fruitfulness brings blessing into other people’s lives.

Hence we need to ask this question: How have my achievements, my successes, the things that I’m proud to have done, positively nurtured those around me? How have they helped bring joy into other people’s lives? How have they helped make the world a better, more-loving place? How have any of the trophies I’ve won or distinctions I’ve been awarded made those around me more peaceful rather than more restless?

This is different than asking: How have my achievements made me feel? How have they given me a sense of self-worth? How have my achievements witnessed to my uniqueness?

It’s no secret that our achievements, however honest and legitimate, often produce jealousy and restlessness in others rather than inspiration and restfulness. We see this in how we so often envy and secretly hate highly successful people. Their achievements generally do little to enhance our own lives but instead trigger an edgy restlessness within us. The success of others, in effect, often acts like a mirror within which we see, restlessly and sometimes bitterly, our own lack of achievement. Why?

Generally there’s blame on both sides. On the one hand, our achievements are often driven from a self-centered need to set ourselves apart from others, to stand out, to be singular, to be recognized and admired rather than from a genuine desire to truly help others. To the extent that this is true, our successes are bound to trigger envy. Still, on the other hand, our envy of others is often the self-inflicted punishment spoken of in Jesus’ parable of the talents wherein the one who hides his talent gets punished for not using that talent.

And so the truth is that we can achieve great things without being really fruitful, just as we can be very fruitful even while achieving little in terms of worldly success and recognition. Our fruitfulness is often the result not so much of the great things we accomplish, but of the graciousness, generosity, and kindness we bring into the world. Unfortunately our world rarely reckons these as an achievement, an accomplishment, a success. We don’t become famous for being gracious. Yet, when we die, while we may well be eulogized for our achievements, we will be loved and remembered more for the goodness of our hearts than for our distinguished achievements. Our real fruitfulness will flow from something beyond the legacy of our accomplishments.

It will be the quality of our hearts, more so than our achievements, that will determine how nurturing or asphyxiating is the spirit we leave behind us when we’re gone.

Henri Nouwen also points out that when we distinguish between our achievements and our fruitfulness, we will see that, while death may be the end of our success, productivity, and importance, it isn’t necessarily the end of our fruitfulness. Indeed, often our true fruitfulness occurs only after we die when our spirit can finally flow out more purely. We see that this was true too for Jesus. We were able to be fully nurtured by his spirit only after he was gone. Jesus teaches this explicitly in his farewell discourse in John’s Gospel when he tells us repeatedly that it’s better for us that he goes away because it’s only when he’s gone that we will be able to truly receive his spirit, his full fruitfulness. The same is true for us. Our full fruitfulness will only show after we have died.

Great achievement doesn’t necessarily make for great fruitfulness. Great achievement can give us a good feeling and can make our families and loved ones proud of us. But those feelings of accomplishment and pride are not a lasting or deeply nourishing fruit. Indeed the good feeling that accomplishment gives us is often a drug, an addiction, which forever demands more of us and sets loose envy and restlessness in others as it underscores our separateness.

The fruit that feeds love and community tends to come from our shared vulnerability and not from those achievements that set us apart.

Stuck in Traffic

August 28, 2017

There’s a famous billboard that hangs along a congested highway that reads: You aren’t stuck in traffic. You are traffic! Good wit, good insight! How glibly we distance ourselves from a problem, whether it is our politics, our churches, the ecological problems on our planet, or most anything else.

We aren’t, as we want to think, stuck in a bad political climate wherein we can no longer talk to each other and live respectfully with each other. Rather we ourselves have become so rigid, arrogant, and sure of ourselves that we can no longer respect those who think differently than we do. We are a bad political climate and not just stuck in one.

Likewise for our churches: We aren’t stuck in churches that are too self-serving and not faithful enough to the teachings of Jesus. Rather we are Christians who too often, ourselves, out of self-interest compromise the teachings of Jesus. We aren’t stuck in our churches, we comprise those churches.

The same is true apposite the ecological challenges we face on this planet: We aren’t stuck on a planet that’s becoming oxygen-starved and a junkyard for human wastage. Rather it’s we, not just others, who are too careless in how we are using up the earth’s resources and how we are leaving behind our waste.

Admittedly, this isn’t always true. Sometimes we are stuck in negative situations for which we bear no responsibility and within which, through no fault of our own, we are simply the unfortunate victim of circumstance and someone else’s carelessness, illness, dysfunction, or sin. We can, for instance, be born into a dysfunctional situation which leaves us stuck in a family and an environment that don’t make for easy freedom. Or, sometimes simple circumstance can burden us with duties that take away our freedom. So, metaphorically speaking, we can be stuck in traffic and not ourselves be part of that traffic, though generally we are, at least partially, part of the traffic we’re stuck in.

Henri Nouwen often highlighted this in his writings. We are not, he tells us, separate from the events that make up the world news each day. Rather, what we see written large in the world news each night simply reflects what’s going on inside of us. When we see instances of injustice, bigotry, racism, greed, violence, murder and war on our newscasts we rightly feel a certain moral indignation. It’s healthy to feel that way, but it’s not healthy to naively think that it’s others, not us, who are the problem.

When we’re honest we have to admit that we’re complicit in all these things, perhaps not in their crasser forms, but in subtler, though very real, ways: The fear and paranoia that are at the root of so much conflict in our world are not foreign to us. We too find it hard to accept those who are different from us. We too cling to privilege and do most everything we can to secure and protect our comfort. We too use up an unfair amount of the world’s resources in our hunger for comfort and experience. As well, our negative judgments, jealousies, gossip, and bitter words are, at the end of the day, genuine acts of violence since, as Henri Nouwen puts it: Nobody is shot by a gun that isn’t first shot by a word. And nobody is shot by a word before he or she is first shot by a murderous thought: Who does she thinks she is! The evening news just shows large what’s inside our hearts. What’s in the macrocosm is also in the microcosm.

And so we aren’t just viewers of the evening news, we’re complicit in it. The old catechisms were right when they told us that there’s no such a thing as a truly private act, that even our most private actions affect everyone else. The private is political. Everything affects everything.

The first take-away from this is obvious: When we find ourselves stuck in traffic, metaphorically and otherwise, we need to admit our own complicity and resist the temptation to simply blame others.

But there’s another important lesson here too: We are never healthier than when we are confessing our sins; in this case, confessing that we are traffic and not just stuck in traffic. After recognizing that we are complicit, hopefully we can forgive ourselves for the fact that, partially at least, we are helpless to not be complicit. No one can walk through life without leaving a footprint. To pretend otherwise is dishonest and to try to not leave a footprint is futile. The starting point to make things better is for us to admit and confess our complicity.

So the next time you’re stuck in traffic, irritated and impatient, muttering angrily about why there are so many people on the road, you might want to glance at yourself in rearview mirror, ask yourself why you are on the road at that time, and then give yourself a forgiving wink as you utter the French word, touché.

The Power of Ritual

August 21, 2017

I don’t always find it easy to pray. Often I’m over-tired, distracted, caught-up in tasks, pressured by work, short on time, lacking the appetite for prayer, or more strongly drawn to do something else. But I do pray daily; despite the fact that I often don’t want to and despite the fact that many times prayer can be boring and uninteresting. I pray daily because I’m committed to a number of rituals for prayer, the office of the Church, lauds and vespers, the Eucharist, and daily meditation.

And these rituals serve me well. They hold me, keep me steady, and keep me praying regularly even when, many times, I don’t feel like praying. That’s the power of ritual. If I only prayed when I felt like it, I wouldn’t pray very regularly.

Ritual practice keeps us doing what we should be doing (praying, working, being at table with our families, being polite) even when our feelings aren’t always onside. We need to do certain things not because we always feel like doing them, but because it’s right to do them.

And this is true for many areas of our lives, not just for prayer. Take, for example, the social rituals of propriety and good manners that we lean on each day. Our heart isn’t always in the greetings or the expressions of love, appreciation, and gratitude that we give to each other each day. We greet each other, we say goodbye to each other, we express love for each other, and we express gratitude to each other through a number of social formulae, ritual words: Good morning! Good to see you! Have a great day! Have a great evening! Sleep well! Nice meeting you! Nice to work with you! I love you! Thank you!

We say these things to each other daily, even though we have to admit that there are times, many times, when these expressions appear to be purely formal and seem not at all honest to how we are feeling at that time. Yet we say them and they are true in that they express what lies in our hearts at a deeper level than our more momentary and ephemeral feelings of distraction, irritation, disappointment, or anger. Moreover these words hold us in civility, in good manners, in graciousness, in neighborliness, in respect, and in love despite the fluctuations in our energy, mood, and feelings. Our energy, mood, and feelings, at any given moment, are not a true indication of what’s in our hearts, as all of us know and frequently need to apologize for. Who of us has not at some time been upset and bitter towards someone who we love deeply? The deep truth is that we love that person, but that’s not what we’re feeling at the moment.

If we only expressed affection, love, and gratitude at those times when our feelings were completely onside, we wouldn’t express these very often. Thank God for the ordinary, social rituals which hold us in love, affection, graciousness, civility, and good manners at those times when our feelings are out of sorts with our truer selves. These rituals, like a sturdy container, hold us safe until the good feelings return.

Today, in too many areas of life, we no longer understand ritual. That leaves us trying to live our lives by our feelings; not that feelings are bad, but rather that they come upon us as wild, unbidden guests. Iris Murdoch asserts that our world can change in fifteen seconds because we can fall in love in fifteen seconds. But we can also fall out of love in fifteen seconds! Feelings work that way! And so we cannot sustain love, marriage, family, friendship, collegial relationships, and neighborliness by feelings. We need help. Rituals can help sustain our relationships beyond feelings.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer used to give this instruction to a couple when he was officiating at their wedding. He would tell them: Today you are in love and you believe that your love can sustain your marriage. But it can’t. However your marriage can sustain your love. Marriage is a not just a sacrament, it’s also a ritual container.

Ritual not only can help sustain a marriage, it can also help sustain our prayer lives, our civility, our manners, our graciousness, our humor, our gratitude, and our balance in life. Be wary of anyone who in the name of psychology, love, or spirituality tells you that ritual is empty and you must rely on your energy, mood, and feelings as your guiding compass. They won’t carry you far.

Daniel Berrigan once wrote: Don’t travel with anyone who expects you to be interesting all the time. On a long journey there are bound to be some boring stretches. John of the Cross echoes this when talking about prayer. He tells us that, during our generative years, one of the biggest problems we will face daily in our prayer is simple boredom.

And so we can be sure our feelings won’t sustain us, but ritual practices can.

God Needs Better Press

August 14, 2017

The word “Protestant” is generally misunderstood. Martin Luther’s protest that led to the Protestant reformation was not, in fact, a protest against the Roman Catholic Church; properly understood, it was a protest for God. God, in Luther’s view, was being manipulated to serve human and ecclesial self-interest. His protest was a plea to respect God’s transcendence.

We need a new protest today, a new plea, a strong one, to not connect God and our churches to intolerance, injustice, bigotry, violence, terrorism, racism, sexism, rigidity, dogmatism, anti-eroticism, homophobia, self-serving power, institutional self-protection, security for the rich, ideology of all kinds, and just plain stupidity. God is getting a lot of bad press!

A simple example can be illustrative here: In a recent book that documents an extraordinary fifty-year friendship with his former coach, basketball legend (and present-day exceptional writer), Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, shares why he became a Muslim. Raised a Roman Catholic, a graduate of Catholic schools, he eventually left Christianity to become a Muslim. Why?

In his own words: Because “the white people who were bombing churches and killing little girls, who were shooting unarmed black boys, who were beating black protestors with clubs loudly declared themselves to be proud Christians. The Ku Klux Klan were proud Christians. I felt no allegiance to a religion with so many evil followers. Yes, I was also aware that the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was also a proud Christian, as were many of the civil rights leaders. Coach Wooden was a devout Christian. The civil rights movement was supported by many brave white Christians who marched side by side with blacks. When the KKK attacked, they often delivered even worse beatings to the whites, whom they considered to be race traitors. I didn’t condemn the religion, but I definitely felt removed from it.”

His story is only one story and by his own admission has another side to it, but it’s highly illustrative. It’s easy to connect God to the wrong things. Christianity, of course, isn’t the only culprit. Today, for instance, we see perhaps the worst examples of tying God to evil in the violence of ISIS and other such terrorist groups who are killing, randomly and brutally, in the name of God. You can be sure that the last words uttered, just as a suicide bomber randomly kills innocent people, is: God is great! What horrible thing to say as one is committing an act of murder! Doing the ungodly in the name of God!

And yet we so often do the same thing in subtler forms, namely, we justify the ungodly (violence, injustice, inequality, poverty, intolerance, bigotry, racism, sexism, the abuse of power, and rich privilege) by appealing to our religion. Silently, unconsciously, blind to ourselves, grounded in a sense of right and wrong that’s colored by self-interest, we give ourselves divine permission to live and act in ways that are antithetical to most everything Jesus taught.

We can protest, saying that we’re sincere, but sincerity by itself is not a moral or religious criterion. Sincerity can, and often does, tie God to the ungodly and justifies what’s evil in the name of God: The people conducting the Inquisition were sincere; the slave traitors were sincere; those who protected pedophile priests were sincere, racists are sincere; sexists are sincere; bigots are sincere; the rich defending their privilege are sincere; church offices making hurtful, gospel-defying pastoral decisions that deprive people of ecclesial access are very sincere and gospel-motivated; and all of us, as we make the kind of judgments of others that Jesus told us time and again not to make, are sincere. But we think that we’re doing this all for the good, for God.

However in so many of our actions we are connecting God and church to narrowness, intolerance, rigidity, racism, sexism, favoritism, legalism, dogmatism, and stupidity. And we wonder why so many of our own children no longer go to church and struggle with religion.

The God whom Jesus reveals is the antithesis of much of religion, sad but true. The God whom Jesus reveals is a prodigal God, a God who isn’t stingy; a God who wills the salvation of everyone, who loves all races and all peoples equally; a God with a preferential love for the poor; a God who creates both genders equally; a God who strongly opposes worldly power and privilege. The God of Jesus Christ is a God of compassion, empathy, and forgiveness, a God who demands that spirit take precedence over law, love over dogma, and forgiveness over juridical justice. And very importantly, the God whom Jesus incarnates isn’t stupid, but is a God whose intelligence isn’t threatened by science, and a God who doesn’t condemn and send people to hell according to our limited human judgments.

Sadly, too often that’s not the God of religion, of our churches, of our spirituality, or of our private consciences.

God isn’t narrow, stupid, legalistic, bigoted, racist, violent, or vengeful, and it’s time we stopped connecting God to those things.

Our Utmost in Dealing with Our Faith

August 7, 2017

The complexity of adulthood inevitably puts to death the naiveté of childhood. And this is true too of our faith. Not that faith is a naiveté. It isn’t. But our faith needs to be constantly reintegrated into our persons and matched up anew against our life’s experience; otherwise we will find it at odds with our life. But genuine faith can stand up to every kind of experience, no matter its complexity.

Sadly, that doesn’t always happen and many people seemingly leave their faith behind, like belief in Santa and the Easter Bunny, as the complexity of their adult lives seemingly belies or even shames their childhood faith.

With this in mind, I recommend a recent book, My Utmost, A Devotional Memoir, by Macy Halford. She is a young, thirty-something, writer working out of both Paris and New York and this is an autobiographical account of her struggle as a conservative Evangelical Christian to retain her faith amidst the very liberal, sophisticated, highly secularized, and often agnostic circles within which she now lives and works.

The book chronicles her struggles to maintain a strong childhood faith which was virtually embedded in her DNA, thanks to a very faith-filled mother and grandmother. Faith and church were a staple and an anchor in her life as she was growing up. But her DNA also held something else, namely, the restlessness and creative tension of a writer, and that irrepressible energy naturally drove her beyond the safety and shelter of the churches circles of her youth, in her case, to literary circles in New York and Paris.

She soon found out that living the faith while surrounded by a strong supportive faith group is one thing, trying to live it while breathing an air that is almost exclusively secular and agnostic is something else. The book chronicles that struggle and chronicles too how eventually she was able to integrate both the passion and the vision of her childhood faith into her new life. Among many good insights, she shares how each time she was tempted to cross the line and abandon her childhood faith as a naiveté, she realized that her fear of doing that was “not a fear of destroying God or a belief; [but] a fear of destroying self.” That insight testifies to the genuine character of her faith. God and faith don’t need us; it’s us that need them.

The title of her book, My Utmost, is significant to her story. On her 13^th birthday, her grandmother gave her a copy of a book which is well-known and much-used within Evangelical and Baptist circles, My Utmost for His Highest, by Oswald Chambers. The book is a collection of spiritual aphorisms, thoughts for every day of the year, by this prominent missionary and mystic. Halford shares how, while young and still solidly anchored in the church and faith of her childhood, she did not read the book daily and Chamber’s spiritual counsels meant little to her. But her reading of this book eventually became a daily ritual in her life and its daily counsel began, more and more, to become a prism through which she was able to reintegrate her childhood faith with her adult experience.

At one point in her life she gives herself over to a serious theological study of both the book and its author. Those parts of her memoir will intimidate some of her readers, but, even without a clear theological grasp of how eventually she brings it all into harmony, the fruit of her struggle comes through clearly.

This is a valuable memoir because today many people are undergoing this kind of struggle, that is, to have their childhood faith stand up to their present experience. Halford simply shows us how she did it and her struggle offers us a valuable paradigm to follow.

A generation ago, Karl Rahner, famously remarked that in the next generation we will either be mystics or unbelievers. Among other things, what Rahner meant was that, unlike previous generations where our communities (family, neighborhood, and church) very much helped carry the faith for us, in this next generation we will very much have to find our own, deeper, personal grounding for our faith. Macy Halford bears this out. Inside a generation within which many are unbelievers, her memoir lays out a path for a humble but effective mysticism.

The late Irish writer, John Moriarty, in his memoirs, shares how as a young man he drifted from the faith of his youth, Roman Catholicism, seeing it as a naiveté that could not stand up to his adult experiences. He walked along in that way until one day, as he puts it, “I realized that Roman Catholicism, the faith of my childhood, was my mother tongue.”

Macy Halford eventually re-grounded herself in her mother tongue, the faith of her youth, and it continues now to guide her through all the sophistications of adulthood. The chronicle of her search can help us all, irrespective of our particular religious affiliation.

Suicide – Redeeming the Memory of a Loved One

July 31, 2017

One year ago, virtually everyone who knew him was stunned by the suicide death of the most prominent American Hispanic theologian that we have produced up to now, Virgilio Elizondo. Moreover, Virgil wasn’t just a very gifted, pioneering theologian, he was also a beloved priest and a warm, trusted friend to countless people. Everyone dies, and the death of a loved one is always hard, but it was the manner of his death that left so many people stunned and confused. Suicide! But he was such a faith-filled, sensitive man. How could this be possible?

And those questions, like the muddy waters of a flood, immediately began to seep into other emotional crevices, leaving most everyone who knew him with a huge, gnawing question: What does this do his work, to the gift that he left to the church and to the Hispanic community? Can we still honor his life and his contribution in the same way as we would have had he died of a heart attack or cancer? Indeed, had he died of a heart attack or cancer, his death, though sad, would undoubtedly have had about it an air of healthy closure, even of celebration, that we were saying farewell to a great man we had had the privilege to know, as opposed to the air of hush, unhealthy quiet, and unclean grief that permeated the air at his funeral.

Sadly, and this is generally the case when anyone dies by suicide, the manner of that death becomes a prism through which his or her life and work are now seen, colored, and permanently tainted. It shouldn’t be so, and it’s incumbent on us, the living who love them, to redeem their memories, to not take their photos off our walls, to not speak in guarded terms about their deaths, and to not let the particular manner of their deaths color and taint the goodness of their lives. Suicide is the least glamorous and most misunderstood of all deaths. We owe it to our loved ones, and to ourselves, to not further compound a tragedy.

So each year I write a column on suicide, hoping it might help produce more understanding around the issue and, in a small way perhaps, offer some consolation to those who have lost a loved one in this way. Essentially, I say the same things each year because they need to be said. As Margaret Atwood once put it, some things need to be said and said and said again, until they don’t need to be said any more. Some things need still to be said about suicide.

What things? What needs to be said, and said again and again about suicide? For the sake of clarity, let me number the points:

First, in most cases, suicide is the result of a disease, a sickness, an illness, a tragic breakdown within the emotional immune system or simply a mortal biochemical illness.
For most suicides, the person dies, as the does the victim of any terminal illness or fatal accident, not by his or her own choice. When people die from heart attacks, strokes, cancer, and accidents, they die against their will. The same is true in suicide.
We should not worry unduly about the eternal salvation of a suicide victim, believing (as we used to) that suicide is the ultimate act of despair. God’s hands are infinitely more understanding and gentler than our own. We need not worry about the fate of anyone, no matter the cause of death, who leaves this world honest, over-sensitive, over-wrought, too bruised to touch, and emotionally-crushed, as is the case with most suicides. God’s understanding and compassion exceed our own. God isn’t stupid.
We should not unduly second-guess ourselves when we lose a loved one to suicide: What might I have done? Where did I let this person down? What if? If only I’d been there at the right time!Rarely would this have made a difference. Most of the time, we weren’t there for the very reason that the person who fell victim to this disease did not want us to be there. He or she picked the moment, the spot, and the means precisely so we wouldn’t be there. Suicide seems to be a disease that picks its victim precisely in such a way so as to exclude others and their attentiveness. This is not an excuse for insensitivity, but is a healthy check against false guilt and fruitless second-guessing. Suicide is a result of sickness and there are some sicknesses which all the love and care in the world cannot cure.
Finally, it’s incumbent upon us, the loved ones who remain here, to redeem the memory of those who die in this way so at to not let the particular manner of their deaths become a false prism through which their lives are now seen. A good person is a good person and a sad death does not change that. Nor should a misunderstanding.

Angels and the City

July 24, 2017

Several years ago Hollywood made a movie, City of Angels, about an angel named Seth whose job it was to accompany the spirits of the recently deceased to the afterlife. On one such mission, waiting in a hospital, he fell in love with a brilliant young woman surgeon. As an angel, Seth has never experienced touch or taste and now, deeply in love, he longs to physically touch and make love to his beloved. But this is his dilemma: As an angel with free will he has the option to let go of his angelic status and become a human person, but only at the cost of renouncing his present immortality as an angel.

It’s a tough choice: Immortality, but no sensual experience, or, sensual experience, but with all the contingencies that earthily morality brings – diminishment, aging, sickness, eventual death? He chooses the latter, renouncing his status as an immortal angel for the pleasure that earthly senses can bring.

The vast majority of people watching this movie, I suspect, will laud his choice. Most everything in our hearts moves us to believe that it’s cold and inhuman not to make this choice. The overpowering reality of the senses, especially when in love, can make everything else seem unreal, ethereal, and second best. What we experience through our senses, what we see, hear, taste, touch, and smell is what’s real for us. We have our own version of Descartes. For us, the indubitable is: I feel, therefore, I am!

Spirituality, in virtually every major religious tradition, at least in its popular conception, has seemingly said the opposite. Spirit has classically (and sometimes almost dogmatically) been affirmed as above the senses, as higher, superior, a needed guard against the senses. Sensual pleasure, except for how it was occasionally honored in the realm of aesthetics, was perennially denigrated as furtive, superficial, and a hindrance to the spiritual life. We took St. Paul’s admonition that the “flesh lusts against the spirit” in the Greek, dualistic sense where body is bad and spirit is good.

Today, in the secularized world, the opposite seems true. The senses resoundingly trump the spirit. Secularized angels, unlike the religious angels of old, make the same option as Seth. The seeming vagueness of the spirit is no match for the reality of the senses.

So which is more real?

At the end of the day, it’s a false dichotomy. Our senses and our spirit both offer life, both are very important, and neither operates without the other.

As Christians, we believe that we’re both body and soul, flesh and spirit, and that neither can be separated from the other. We’re both mammal and angel, and in our search for life, meaning, happiness, and God, we should not forget that we are both. Our spirit is open to life only through our senses, and our senses provide depth and meaning only because they are animated by spirit.

We all know the few things that man, as mammal, can do, William Auden once wrote. He’s right, but we’re not just mammal we’re equally part angel and once we add that to the equation then the very limited joys that mammals can enjoy (animal pleasure) can become unlimited joys for us as human in what we can experience in love, friendship, altruism, aesthetics, sexuality, mysticism, food, drink, humor. Our senses make these real, even as our spirit gives them meaning.

And so a healthy spirituality needs to honor both the senses and the spirit. The ordinary pleasures of life can be deep or shallow, more mystical or more mammal, depending upon how much we honor what’s spirit and what’s angel within us. Conversely, our spirituality and our prayer lives can be real or more of a fantasy, depending upon how much we incarnate them in what’s sensual and what’s mammal within us.

This holds true in every realm of our lives. For example, sexuality can be deep or shallow, more mystical or more mammal, contingent upon how much of it is soul and how much of it is merely sensual; just as it can be disembodied, sterile, and merely fantasy, contingent upon it also being body and not just soul. The same is true of our experience of beauty, be that in our seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, or smelling. Any sensual experience can be deep or shallow; depending upon how much soul is in it, just as any experience of beauty can seem unreal and imaginary if it is too divorced from the senses.

Some years ago, I was attending a seminar in anthropology. At one point, the lecturer said this: “What psychology and spirituality keep forgetting is that we are mammals.” As a theologian and spiritual writer (and celibate) the truth of his words hit me hard. He’s right! How easily do we forget this in religious circles. But religious circles are right too in consistently reminding us that we are also an angel.

Poor Seth, the tormented angel of City of Angels, he shouldn’t have had to make that choice.

The Gospel Challenge to Enjoy Our Lives

July 17, 2017

Joy is an infallible indication of God’s presence, just as the cross is an infallible indication of Christian discipleship. What a paradox! And Jesus is to blame.

When we look at the Gospels we see that Jesus shocked his contemporaries in seemingly opposite ways. On the one hand, they saw in him a capacity to renounce the things of this world and give up his life in love and self-sacrifice in a way that seemed to them almost inhuman and not something that a normal, full-blooded person should be expected to do. Moreover he challenged them to do the same: Take up your cross daily! If you seek your life, you will lose it; but if you give up your life, you will find it.

On the other hand, perhaps more surprisingly since we tend to identify serious religion with self-sacrifice, Jesus challenged his contemporaries to more fully enjoy their lives, their health, their youth, their relationships, their meals, their wine drinking, and all the ordinary and deep pleasures of life. In fact he scandalized them with his own capacity to enjoy pleasure.

We see, for example, a famous incident in the Gospels of a woman anointing Jesus’ feet at a banquet. All four Gospel accounts of this emphasize a certain raw character to the event that disturbs any easy religious propriety. The woman breaks an expensive jar of very costly perfume on his feet, lets the aroma permeate the whole room, lets her tears fall on his feet, and then dries them with her hair. All that lavishness, extravagance, intimation of sexuality, and raw human affection is understandably unsettling for most everyone in the room, except for Jesus. He’s drinking it in, unapologetically, without dis-ease, without any guilt or neurosis: Leave her alone, he says, she has just anointed me for my impending death. In essence, Jesus is saying: When I come to die, I will be more ready because tonight, in receiving this lavish affection, I’m truly alive and hence more ready to die.

In essence, this is the lesson for us: Don’t feel guilty about enjoying life’s pleasures. The best way to thank a gift-giver is to thoroughly enjoy the gift. We are not put on this earth primarily as a test, to renounce the good things of creation so as to win joy in the life hereafter. Like any loving parent, God wants his children to flourish in their lives, to make the sacrifices necessary to be responsible and altruistic, but not to see those sacrifices themselves as the real reason for being given life.

Jesus highlights this further when he’s asked why his disciples don’t fast, whereas the disciples of John the Baptist do fast. His answer: Why should they fast? The bridegroom is still with them. Someday the bridegroom will be taken away and they will have lots of time to fast. His counsel here speaks in a double way: More obviously, the bridegroom refers to his own physical presence here on earth which, at a point, will end. But this also has a second meaning: The bridegroom refers to the season of health, youth, joy, friendship, and love in our lives. We need to enjoy those things because, all too soon, accidents, ill health, cold lonely seasons, and death will deprive us of them. We may not let the inevitable prospect of cold lonely seasons, diminishment, ill health, and death deprive us of fully enjoying the legitimate joys that life offers.

This challenge, I believe, has not been sufficiently preached from our pulpits, taught in our churches, or had a proper place in our spirituality. When have you last heard a homily or sermon challenging you, on the basis of the Gospels, to enjoy your life more? When have you last heard a preacher asking, in Jesus name: Are you enjoying your health, your youth, your life, your meals, your wine drinking, sufficiently?

Granted that this challenge, which seems to go against the conventional spiritual grain, can sound like an invitation to hedonism, mindless pleasure, excessive personal comfort, and a spiritual flabbiness that can be the antithesis of the Christian message at whose center lies the cross and self-renunciation. Admittedly there’s that risk, but the opposite danger also looms, namely, a bitter, unhealthily stoic life. If the challenge to enjoy life is done wrongly, without the necessary accompanying asceticism and self-renunciation, it carries those dangers; but, as we see from the life of Jesus, self-renunciation and the capacity to thoroughly enjoy the gift of life, love, and creation are integrally connected. They depend on each other.

Excess and hedonism are, in the end, a bad functional substitute for genuine enjoyment. Genuine enjoyment, as Jesus taught and embodied, is integrally tied to renunciation and self-sacrifice.

And so, it’s only when we can give our lives away in self-renunciation that we can thoroughly enjoy the pleasures of this life, just as it is only when we can genuinely enjoy the legitimate pleasures of this life that we can give our lives away in self-sacrifice.

Understanding Grace more Deeply

July 10, 2017

The mark of genuine contrition is not a sense of guilt, but a sense of sorrow, of regret for having taken a wrong turn; just as the mark of living in grace is not a sense of our own worth but a sense of being accepted and loved despite our unworthiness. We are spiritually healthy when our lives are marked by honest confession and honest praise.

Jean-Luc Marion highlights this in a commentary on St. Augustine’s famous Confessions. He sees Augustine’s confession as a work of a true moral conscience because it is both a confession of praise and a confession of sin. Gil Bailie suggests that this comment underlines an important criterion by which to judge whether or not we are living in grace: “If the confession of praise is not accompanied by the confession of sin it an empty and pompous gesture. If the confession of sins is not accompanied by a confession of praise, it is equally vacuous and barren, the stuff of trashy magazines and tabloid newspapers, a self-preening parody of repentance.”

Gil is right, but doing both confessions at one and the same time is not an easy task. We generally find ourselves falling into either a confession of praise where there is no real confession of our own sin; or into the “self-preening parody of repentance” of a still self-absorbed convert, where our confession rings hollow because it shows itself more as a badge of sophistication than as genuine sorrow for having strayed.

In neither case is there a true sense of grace. Piet Fransen, whose masterful book on grace served as a textbook in seminaries and theology schools for a generation, submits that neither the self-confident believer (who still secretly envies the pleasures of the amoral that he’s missing out on) nor the wayward person who converts but still feels grateful for his fling, has yet understood grace. We understand grace only when we grasp existentially what’s inside the Father’s words to his older son in the parable of the prodigal son: My son, you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.

The older brother would not be bitter if he understood that everything his father owns is already his, just as he would not be envious of the pleasures his wayward brother tasted if he understood that, in real life, his brother had been dead. But it takes a deeper grasp of what grace is to intuit that, namely, to grasp that life inside God’s house dwarfs all other pleasures. The same is true for the convert who has given up his wayward life but still secretly rejoices in the experience and sophistication it brought him and nurses a condescending pity for the less-experienced. He too has not yet really understood grace.

In his book, The Idea of the Holy, now considered a classic, Rudolf Otto submits that in the presence of the holy we will always have a double reaction: fear and attraction. Like Peter at the Transfiguration, we will want to build a tent and stay there forever; but, like him too before the miraculous catch of fish, we will also want to say: “Depart from me for I am a sinful man.” In the presence of the holy, we want to burst forth in praise even as we want to confess our sins.

That insight can help us to understand grace. Piet Fransen begins his signature book on grace, The New Life of Grace, by asking us to imagine this scene: Picture a man who lives his life in mindless hedonism. He simply drinks in the sensual pleasures of this world without a thought for God, responsibility, or morality. Then, after a long life of illicit pleasure, he has a genuine deathbed conversion, sincerely confesses his sins, receives the sacraments of the church, and dies in that happy state. If our spontaneous reaction to this story is: “Well, the lucky fellow! He had fling and still made it in the end!” we have not yet understood grace but instead are still embittered moralizers standing like the older brother in need of a further conversation with our God.

And the same holds true too for the convert who still feels that what he’s experienced in his waywardness, his fling, is a deeper joy than the one known by those who have not strayed. In this case, he’s come back to his father’s house not because he senses a deeper joy there but because he deems his return an unwanted duty, less exciting, less interesting, and less joy-filled than a sinful life, but a necessary moral exit strategy. He too has yet to understand grace.

Only when we understand what the father of the prodigal son means when he says to the older brother: Everything I have is yours”, will we offer both a confession of praise and a confession of sin.

Inchoate Desire

July 2, 2017

Sometimes while praying the Psalms, I’m caught looking quite uncomfortably into a mirror reflecting back to me my own seeming dishonesty. For example, we pray these words in the Psalms: My soul longs for you in the night. … Like a deer that yearns for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you my God. … For you alone do I long! For you alone do I thirst!

If I’m honest, I have to admit that a lot of times, perhaps most times, my soul longs for a lot of things that do not seem of God. How often can I honestly pray: For you, God, alone do I long. For you alone do I thirst! In my restlessness, my earthy desires, and natural instincts, I long for many things that don’t appear very God-focused or heavenly at all. I suspect that’s true for most of us for good parts of our lives. Rare is the mystic who can say those prayers and mean them with her full heart on any given day.

But human desire is a complex thing. There’s a surface and there’s a depth, and in every one of our longings and motivations we can ask ourselves this: What am I really looking for here? I know what I want on the surface, here and now, but what am I ultimately longing for in this?

This discrepancy, between what we’re aware of on the surface and what’s sensed only in some dark, inchoate way at a deeper level, is what’s captured in a distinction philosophers make between what’s explicit in our awareness and what’s implicit within it. The explicit refers to what we are aware of consciously (“I want this particular thing!’); whereas the implicit refers to the unconscious factors that are also in play but of which we are unaware. These we only sense, vaguely, in some unconscious part of our soul.

For instance, Karl Rahner, who was fond of this distinction and who puts it to good use in his spirituality, offers us this (crass though clear) example of the distinction between the explicit and the implicit within our motivation and desires. Imagine this, he says: A man, lonely and restless and depressed on a Saturday night, goes to a singles’ bar, picks up a prostitute and goes to bed with her. On the surface his motivation and desire are as undisguised as they are crass. He’s not longing for God in his bed on this particular night. Or is he?

On the surface, of course he’s not, his desire seems purely self-centered and the antithesis of holy longing. But, parsed out to its deepest root, his desire is ultimately a longing for divine intimacy, for the bread of life, for heaven. He’s longing for God at the very depth of his soul and at the very depth of his motivation, except he isn’t aware of this. Raw desire for immediate gratification is all that he’s consciously aware of at this time, but this doesn’t change his ultimate motivation, of which this is a symptom. At a deeper level, of which he is not consciously aware, he’s still longing for the bread of life, for God alone. His soul is still that of a deer, longing for clear flowing streams, except that on this given night another stream is promising him a more immediate tonic that he can have right now.

Recently I taught a course on the spirituality of aging and dying. Stealing a line from Goethe’s poem, Holy Longing, I entitled the course poetically: Insane for the Light. In a term paper, one of the students, a woman, reflecting on her own journey towards aging and dying, wrote these words:

“And then last night I began to think that dying is making love with God, the consummation after a lifetime of flirtations, encounters, meetings in the dark, and constant yearning, longing, and sense of loneliness that does make one insane for the light. I reflected on the Song of Songs and thought that it could be an analogy of how I see dying, not necessarily as the body’s disintegration and demise, but rather as the entire transition that I was born destined to make. I think of my life as a love story with its ups and downs like any love story, but always going in the direction of God with the finality of death being the wedding of the love between God and myself after a lifetime betrothal.”

She puts it as well as Rahner and the philosophers, though her words are more direct. She too, in analyzing her desire, points out there are levels, explicit and implicit, conscious and unconscious.

Yes, our lives, with all their tensions, restlessness, youthful immaturities, adult depressions, cold lonely seasons, times of doubt, times of desperation, breakdowns, and occasional irresponsible exuberance will surely be marked by flirtations and encounters that seem to exhibit desires that are not for the bread of life. But, they are, ultimately, and one day they will find and know their full consummation.

To Whom Can We Go?

June 26, 2017

“To whom else shall we go? You have the message of eternal life.” Peter says these words to Jesus. But they are spoken in a very conflicted context: Jesus had just said something that upset and offended his audience and the gospels tell us that everyone walked away grumbling that what Jesus was teaching was “intolerable”. Jesus then turns to his apostles and asks them: “Do you want to walk away too?” Peter answers: “To whom else can we go?” But that’s more a statement of stoic resignation than an actual question.

His words function at two levels. On the surface, they express an unwanted humility and helplessness that sometimes beset us all: “I have no alternative! I’m so invested in this relationship that now I have no other options. I’m stuck with this!” That’s a humble place to stand and anyone who has ever given himself or herself over in an authentic commitment will eventually stand on that place, knowing that he or she no longer has another practical choice.

But those words also express a much deeper quandary, namely, where can I find meaning if I cannot find it in faith in God? All of us have at some point asked ourselves that question. If I didn’t believe in God and had no faith or religion, what would give meaning to my life?

Where can we go if we no longer have an explicit faith in God? A lot of places, it seems. I think immediately of so many attractive stoics who have wrestled with this question and found solace in various forms of what Albert Camus would call “metaphysical rebellion” or in the kind of Epicureanism that Nikos Kazantzakis advocates in Zorba, the Greek. There’s a stoicism which offers its own kind of salvation by drawing life and meaning simply from fighting chaos and disease for no other reason than that that these cause suffering and are an affront to life, just as there is an Epicureanism that meaningfully grounds life in elemental pleasure. There are, it would seem, different kinds of saints.

There are also different kinds of immortality. For some, meaning outside of an explicit faith, is found in leaving a lasting legacy on this earth, having children, achieving something monumental, or becoming a household name. We’re all familiar with the axiom: Plant a tree; write a book; have a child!

Poets, writers, artists, and artisans often have their own place to find meaning outside of explicit faith. For them, creativity and beauty can be ends in themselves. Art for art’s sake. Creativity itself can seem enough.

And there are still others for whom deep meaning is found simply in being good for its own sake and in being honest for its own sake. There’s also virtue for virtue’s sake and virtue is indeed its own reward. Simply living an honest and generous life can provide sufficient meaning with which to walk through life.

So, it appears that there are places to go outside of explicit faith where one can find deep meaning. But is this really so? Don’t we believe that true meaning can only be found in God? What about St. Augustine’s classic line? You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until the rest in you. Can anything other than faith and God really quiet the restless fires within us?

Yes, there are things that can do that, but all of them – fighting chaos, curing diseases, having children, living for others, building things, inventing things, achieving goals, or simply living honest and generous lives – leave us, in an inchoate way, radiating the transcendental properties of God and working alongside God to bring life and order to the world. How so?

Christian theology tells us that God is One, True, Good, and Beautiful. And so, when an artist gives herself over to creating beauty, when a couple has a child, when scientists work to find cures for various diseases, when artisans make an artifact, when builders build, when teachers teach, when parents parent, when athletes play a game, when manual laborers labor, when administrators administrate, when people just for the sake integrity itself live in honesty and generosity, and, yes, even when hedonists drink deeply of earthily pleasure, they are, all of them, whether they have explicit faith or not, acting in some faith because they are putting their trust in either the Oneness, Truth, Goodness, or Beauty of God.

Lord, to whom else can we go? You have the message of eternal life. Well, it seems that there are places to go and many go there. But these aren’t necessarily, as is sometimes suggested by misguided spiritual literature, empty places that are wrong and self-destructive. There are, of course, such places, spiritual dead-ends; but, more generally, as we can see simply by looking at the amount of positive energy, love, creativity, generosity, and honesty that still fill our world, those places where people are seeking God outside of explicit faith still has them meeting God.

Being Good-Hearted is Not Enough

June 19, 2017

Charity is about being good-hearted, but justice is about something more. Individual sympathy is good and virtuous, but it doesn’t necessarily change the social, economic, and political structures that unfairly victimize some people and unduly privilege others. We need to be fair and good of heart, but we also need to have fair and good policies.

Jim Wallis, speaking more-specifically about racism, puts it this way: When we protest that we are not implicated in unjust systems by saying things like: “I have black friends”, we need to challenge ourselves: It’s not just what’s in our hearts that’s at issue; it’s also what’s at the heart of public policy. We can have black friends but if our policies are racist there’s still no justice in land. Individual good will alone doesn’t always make for a system that’s fair to everyone.

And it’s precisely on this point where we see the crucial distinction between charity and justice, between being good-hearted as individuals and trying as a community to ensure that our social, economic, and political systems are not themselves the cause of the very things we are trying to respond to in charity. What causes poverty, racism, economic disparity, lack of fair access to education and health care, and the irresponsibility with which we often treat nature? Individual attitudes, true. But injustice is also the result of social, economic, and political policies that, whatever their other merits, help produce the conditions that spawn poverty, inequality, racism, privilege, and the lack of conscientious concern for the air we breathe.

Most of us, I suspect, are familiar with a story that’s often used to distinguish between charity and justice. It runs this way: There was a town built alongside a river, but situated around a bend so that the townsfolk could see only that part of the river that bordered their town. One day a few of the children were playing by the river when they saw five bodies floating in the water. They quickly ran for help and the townspeople they alerted did what any responsible persons would do in that situation. They took care of the bodies. Pulling them from the river they found that two were dead and they buried them. Three were still alive. One was a child for whom they quickly found a foster home; another was a severely ill woman, her they put in a hospital; the last was a young man and, for him, they found a job and a place to live.

But the story didn’t end there. The next day more bodies appeared and, again, the townsfolk responded as before. They took care of the bodies. They buried the dead, placed the sick in hospitals, found foster homes for the children, and jobs and places to live for the adults. And so it went on for years so that taking care of the bodies that they found each day became a normal feature of their lives and became part of the life of their churches and their community. A few altruistically motivated people even made it their life’s work to take care of those bodies.

But … and this is the point, nobody ever went up the river to see from where and for what reasons those bodies kept appearing each day in the river. They just remained good-hearted and generous in their response to the bodies that found their way to their town.

The lesson is clear enough: It’s one thing (needed, good, and Christian) to take care of the needy bodies we find on our doorsteps, but it’s another thing (also needed, good, and Christian) to go upstream to try to change the things that are causing those bodies to be in the river. That’s the difference between good-hearted charity and acting for social justice.

Sadly though, as good church-going Christians we have been too slow to grasp this and consequently have not brought the demands of Jesus and faith to bear as strongly upon the question of social justice as we have been to bring them to bear upon charity. Too many, good, good-hearted, church-going, charitable women and men simply do not see the demands of justice as being anything beyond the demands of private charity and good-heartedness. And so we are often good-hearted enough that we will, literally, give a needy person the shirt off our back even as we refuse to look at why our closets are overfull while some others don’t have a shirt.

But this should not be misunderstood. The gospel-demand that we act for justice does not in any way denigrate the virtue of charity. Charity is still the ultimate virtue and, sometimes, the only positive difference we can make in our world is precisely the, one-to-one, love and respect that we give to each other. Our own individual goodness is sometimes the only candle that is ours to light.

But that goodness and light must shine publicly too, namely, in how we vote and in what public policies we support or oppose.

Christianity and Noon-Day Fatigue

June 12, 2017

There’s a popular notion which suggests that it can be helpful to compare every century of Christianity’s existence to one year of life. That would make Christianity twenty-one years old, a young twenty-one, grown-up enough to exhibit a basic maturity but still far from a finished product. How insightful is this notion?

That’s a complex question because Christianity expresses itself in communities of worship and in spiritualities that vary greatly across the world. For instance, just to speak of churches, it is difficult to speak of the Christian church in any global way: In Africa, for the most part, the churches are young, full of young life, and exploding with growth, with all the strengths and problems that come with that. In Eastern Europe the churches are still emerging from the long years of oppression under communism and are struggling now to find a new balance and new energy within an ever-intensifying secularity. Latin American churches have given us liberation theology for a reason. There the issues of social injustice and those advocating for it in Jesus’ name and those reacting against them have deeply colored how church and spirituality are lived and understood. In Asia, the situation is even more complex. One might talk of four separate ecclesial expressions and corresponding spiritualities in Asia: There is Buddhist Asia, Hindu Asia, Moslem Asia, and a seemingly post-Christian Asia. Churches and spiritualities express themselves quite differently in these different parts of Asia. Finally there is still Western Europe and North America, the so-called “West”. Here, it would seem, Christianity doesn’t radiate much in the way of either youth or vitality, but appears from most outward appearances to be aged, grey-haired, and tired, an exhausted project.

How accurate is this as a picture of Christianity in Western Europe, North America, and other highly secularized part of the world? Are we, as churches, old, tired, grey-haired, and exhausted?

That’s one view, but the picture admits of other interpretations. Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx, along with many Enlightenment figures, saw Christianity as a spent project, as a dying reality, its demise the inevitable death of childhood naiveté. But Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, looking at the same evidence, saw things in exactly the opposite way. For him, Christianity was still “in diapers”, struggling still to grow in maturity, a child still learning to walk; hence its occasional stumbles. Contemporary spiritual writer, Tomas Halik, the recent winner of the prestigious Templeton Award, suggests still another picture. For Halik, Christianity in the West is undergoing a “noon-day fatigue”, a writer’s block, a crisis of imagination. In this, he is very much in agreement with what Charles Taylor suggests in his monumental study, A Secular Age. For Taylor, what we are experiencing today is not so much a crisis of faith as a crisis of imagination and integration. Older Christian writers called this a “dark night of the soul”, and Halik suggests that it is happening to us not at the end of the day but at noontime.

My own sympathies are very much with Halik. Christianity, the churches, and the spiritualities in Western Europe and North America aren’t old and dying, a spent project. Rather they are young, figuratively speaking only twenty-one years old, with still some growing up to do. But, and here is where I agree with conservative critics, growth into that maturity is not guaranteed but is rather contingent upon us making some clear choices and hard commitments inside a genuine faith. As any parent can tell you, there are no guarantees that a twenty-one year old will grow to maturity. The opposite can also happen, and that’s true too for Christianity and the churches today. There are no guarantees.

But, inside of faith and inside the choices and commitments we will have to make, it is important that we situate ourselves under the correct canopy so as to assign to ourselves the right task. We are not old and dying. We are young, with our historical afternoon still to come, even as we are presently suffering a certain “noon-day fatigue”. Our afternoon still lies ahead and the task of the afternoon is quite different than the task of the morning or the evening. As James Hillman puts it: “The early years must focus on getting things done, while the later years must consider what was done and how.”

But the afternoon years must focus on something else, namely, the task of deepening. Both spirituality and anthropology agree that the afternoon of life is meant to be an important time within which to mature, an important time for some deeper inner work, and an important time to enter more deeply our own depth. Note that this is a task of deepening and not one of restoration.

Our noon-day fatigue will not be overcome by returning to the task of the morning in hope of refreshing ourselves or by retiring passively to the evening’s rocking chair. Noon-day fatigue will be overcome by finding new springs of refreshment buried at deeper places inside us.

The Seamless Garment

June 5, 2017

John of the Cross teaches that within spirituality and morality there are no exempt areas. Simply put, you cannot be a saint or a highly moral person if you allow yourself a moral exemption or two. Thus, I may not allow myself to split off one moral flaw or sinful habit and see it as unimportant in the light of my positive qualities and the overall good that I do. For John of the Cross, you cannot be a saint and have a moral blind-spot, even if it’s a minor one. A bird tethered to a rock, he says, cannot fly irrespective of whether the cord holding it is a cable or a string.

The same is true for our efforts to protect life and foster justice in our world. The protection of life and the promotion of justice are all of one piece. We cannot be an authentic prophet and have a few moral blind spots.

A huge consequence flows from this, namely, we cannot treat issues like abortion, nuclear war, lack of ecological sensitivity, the plight of refugees, racism, sexism, poverty and inequality, poor access to health care, unequal access to education, sexual irresponsibility, and discrimination against the LGBT community in isolation from each other, as if these were wholly discrete issues. Whether we admit it or not, these areas are all inextricably interconnected. To quote Cardinal Bernardin: “The success of any one of the issues concerning life requires a concern for the broader attitude in society about the respect for human life.” That’s a strong challenge for all of us, on all sides of the ideological spectrum.

Thus, those of us who are concerned about abortion need to accept that the problem of abortion cannot be effectively addressed without at the same time addressing issues of poverty, access to health care, sexual morality, and even capital punishment. The interconnection here is not wholly mystical. It’s real. Abortion is driven more by poverty and lack of adequate support than by any liberal ideology. Hence, the struggle against abortion must also focus on the issues of poverty and support for pregnant women. As well, to morally accept killing in one area (capital punishment) helps sanction its acceptance in another area (abortion). Sexual morality must also be addressed since abortion is the inevitable bi-product of a society within which two people who are not married to each other have sex with each other.

It’s all one piece, and any opposition to abortion that fails to adequately recognize the wider perspective that more fully defines Pro-life leaves many sincere people unable to support anti-abortion groups.

Conversely, those of us who are concerned with the issues of poverty, health-care, capital punishment, ecology, war, racism, sexism, and LGBT rights, need to accept that these issues cannot be effectively addressed without also addressing the issue of abortion. Again, the interconnection isn’t just mystical, it’s empirical: Failure to be sensitive to who is weak and vulnerable in one area deeply compromises one’s moral standing on other issues that deal with the weak and the vulnerable. We must advocate for and strive to protect everyone who falls victim within our present way of living, and that includes the unborn.

It’s all of one piece! There can be no exempt areas, thus opposition to the protection of the unborn is not just antithetical to what’s central within a social justice agenda, but it, perhaps more than anything else, leaves liberal ideology and its political allies compromised in a way that allows many sincere people to withhold their support.

Clearly, of course, nobody is asked to give equal energy to every justice issue in the world. Accepting that none of these issues can be effectively dealt within isolation shouldn’t stop us from passionately working on one issue or another. But knowing that these issues are all of one piece does demand that we always recognize that, however important our particular issue, we may not see it in simple black and white, without nuance, as an issue that can be dealt with within one ideological, political, or religious silo. We must always be sensitive to the whole, to the big picture, to the intricate interconnections among all these social issues.

And, not least, we must be humble before and sensitive to our own moral inconsistencies.

We will, this side of eternity, always have them and we must forgive ourselves for them and not let perfection, that fact we can’t be fully consistent, be the enemy of the good, that fact that we can do some good work that is effective. But acknowledging both our own inconsistencies and the complexities of the issues should make us more open to listening to the views of others and make us less doctrinaire and fundamentalist in our own attitudes.

All the issues that deal with justice and peace, are of one piece, one whole, one moral corpus, one seamless garment; and, like the soldiers casting dice for Jesus’ clothing, we should hesitate to tear this garment into different pieces.