A Tradition of the Heart – Roman Catholic Devotions

September 29, 2025

Growing up in a Roman Catholic home, devotions were always a vital part of our religious diet. While our family saw the Eucharist as more important than devotions, we nourished our spiritual lives a lot on devotions, as did many Roman Catholics back then.

Among other things, we prayed the rosary every day, prayed the Angelus daily, prayed special litanies (St. Joseph in March, Mary in May and October, and the Sacred Heart of Jesus in June), prayed the Stations of the Cross each Friday in Lent, were anxious to attend Eucharist on First Fridays and First Saturdays to obtain special promises from God, and said special prayers to obtain indulgences.

As well, there were pilgrimages to Marian shrines for those who could afford them and most everyone wore medals from Lourdes or Fatima and had a special devotion to those shrines (with a special devotion in my own family and parish to Our Lady of the Cape, at Cap De Madeleine, Quebec). Devotions were a big part of our spiritual lives.

What’s to be said about devotions from a theological view and from the view of a culture that mostly distrusts them?

We might begin with the reaction of Martin Luther and the great Protestant reformers. They were fearful of two things in devotions. First, at that time, some devotions were too unbridled and were simply bad theology (famously, selling indulgences). Second, they saw devotions, not as necessarily bad in themselves, but as often displacing Jesus and God’s Word as our center and main focus. And so, they distanced themselves from basically all Roman Catholic devotions, the unbridled as well as the healthy.

For the most part that Protestant and Evangelical distrust of Roman Catholic devotions has come down right to our own day. While that distrust is breaking down today in some non-Roman churches today, it is still the prevalent attitude inside most Protestant and Evangelical circles. In brief, they distrust most devotions because they are seen not just as deflecting our focus from the centrality of Jesus and the Word, but also as potentially unhealthy contaminates, as junk food in our spiritual diet.

What’s to be said about that?

It’s a fair and needed warning to Roman Catholics (and others) who nourish their spiritual lives with devotions. Bottom line, devotions can easily ground themselves on shaky theology and can be a junk food contaminating our spiritual diet: where devotions replace scripture, Mary replaces Jesus as center, and certain ritual practices make God seem like a puppet on a string.

However, that being admitted, as Goethe once said, the dangers of life are many and safety is one of those dangers. Yes, devotions can be a danger, but they can also be a rich healthy supplement in our essential diet of Word and Eucharist.

Here’s how Eric Mascall (the renowned Anglican theologian at Oxford with C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Dorothy Sayers, and Austin Ferrar) spells out both the danger of devotions and the danger of not having devotions as part of your spiritual life: The protestant reformers (Luther, Calvin, Zwingli) were so afraid of contamination by Roman Catholic devotions, that they put us on a diet of antiseptics. When you’re on a diet of antiseptics, you won’t suffer from food poisoning, but you can suffer from malnutrition.

That’s an equal challenge to both those who practice devotions and those who fear them. The theology undergirding certain devotions admittedly can be sloppy (for example, Mary is not a co-redeemer with Jesus). However, inside many devotions (to Mary, to the saints, to Eucharist adoration, to the Sacred Heart) there can be a rich nutrition which helps nourish the center, namely, God’s Word and the Eucharist.

The late Wendy Wright in her book Sacred Heart: Gateway to God makes a wonderful apologia for Catholic devotional practices, particularly devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. For her, Catholic devotional practices are a tradition of the heart. While Jesus remains central and his resurrection remains the real anchor for our faith, devotions can give us something beyond just this raw essential.

Using devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus as an example, she writes: “In this devotion, we, and Jesus and the saints, exist in some essential way outside the chronology of historical time. The tradition of the heart makes this vividly, even grotesquely, clear. The divine–human correspondence is intimate. It is discovered in the flesh. Our fleshy hearts are fitted for all that is beyond flesh by conforming to the heart of Jesus. That divine–human heart is the passageway between earth and heaven. That heart is the tactile tracings of divine love on the created order. That heart is the widest, wildest longing of humankind’s own love.”The dangers of life are many and safety is one of those dangers. Devotions can deflect us from what’s more central and can take their root in some questionable theology, but they can also, in Wendy Wright’s words, be a blessed passageway for the heart between heaven and earth.

Everything is Wrong About Them, Except Themselves

September 22, 2025

Gilbert K. Chesterton, the renowned Catholic apologist, was great friends with George Bernard Shaw, the famous playwright, even though Shaw, an agnostic, had major issues with Chesterton’s belief in God and especially with him becoming a Roman Catholic. Indeed, when he heard that Chesterton had become a Roman Catholic, he wrote him a letter expressing his disappointment.

Ever the colorful writer, Shaw ended that letter describing to Chesterton a vision he had of him going to confession: “You will have to go to confession next Easter, and I find the spectacle – the box, your portly kneeling figure – all incredible, monstrous, comic. …. Now however I’m becoming personal (how else can I be sincere?).”

But these differences didn’t deter them from being great friends. They had a deep respect for each other and valued each other. Indeed, at one stage, Chesterton felt a need to defend Shaw from well-intentioned Christians who were vilifying him because of his agnosticism. Speaking in Shaw’s defense, he wrote: “There is one fundamental truth in which I have never for a moment disagreed with him. Whatever else he is, he has never been a pessimist or in spiritual matters a defeatist. He is at least on the side of Life. Everything is wrong about him except himself.”

Most of us, I suspect, have friends like that, people who no longer walk the path of explicit faith with us. From a certain Christian point of view, most everything is wrong with them, except themselves. They aren’t professed agnostics or atheists, but they don’t fit the description of a practicing Christian either. They rarely go to church, mostly disregard the church’s teaching on sex, pray only when in crisis, consider us church-goers naïve, and are too immersed in life here-and-now to think much about God, church, and eternity.

Yet they radiate life, often in ways that challenge us. There’s something about them that’s very right, inspiring even, and life giving. They may be practical agnostics and ecclesial atheists, but their presence often brings positive energy, goodness, love, intelligence, sunshine, and humor into a room.

Don’t read this wrong: This does not imply (as does an over- simplistic, rationalizing notion that’s popular today) that those who do go to church and try to follow the church’s rules are the naive and immature, while those who don’t go to church and make their own rules are the enlightened and the mature. No. There’s nothing enlightened about people drifting away from the church, thinking they are beyond church, living outside its rules, or believing that a passionate focus on this life justifies a neglect of the other world. That’s a fault in religiosity, and often a fault too in wisdom and maturity.

Simply put, the wonderful energy we see in the many good people we know who no longer go to church is precisely just that, wonderful energy, though not something to be confused with depth.

For example, I look at many of our talented pop musicians and see how they can make people dance, no small thing, a godly thing even. We dance too little and our spirits are often too heavy. But that doesn’t give us license to confuse playful energy (“Ob-la-dee, Ob-la-da, life goes on!”) with wisdom or depth. It’s a wonderful thing to make people dance, to bring sunshine into a room, to lift human hearts so they can drink in life a bit more, but that’s not the full menu, nor indeed the deeper part of the menu. It is what it is, a good thing in itself, but only that.

But it’s on the right side of things. It’s on the side of life. It helps bring divine energy into a room, and that needs to be blessed. That’s why, as Christians, we need to bless our good ecclesial agnostic friends and let ourselves be blessed by them.

That’s also why we should be more discriminating in our use of phrases like “a culture of life” and “a culture of death.” God is the ultimate author of all that is good, whether that goodness, sunlight, energy, color, and warmth is seen inside a church building or outside of it. And wherever that energy is good, there’s “a culture of life,” even if it might also be carrying some elements of “a culture of death.”

Richard Rohr says not everything can be fixed or cured, but it should be named properly. What’s wrong is wrong, and should be named as wrong, but what’s good is good, and should be named as good. I look at some of my “pagan” friends, at their energy, their warmth, what they bring into a room, and it helps lift my heart. Everything is wrong about them, except themselves. God also made their sunshine and their warmth. They don’t go to church, and that isn’t good; but they are often on the side of life and their implicit faith helps me to remain on the right side of things. And that is good.

A Father’s Blessing

September 15, 2025

My father died when I was twenty-three, a seminarian, green, still learning about life. It’s hard to lose your father at any age, and my grief was compounded by the fact that I had just begun to appreciate what he had given me.

Only later did I realize that I no longer needed him, though I still very much wanted him. What he had to give me, he had already given. I had his blessing.

I knew I had his blessing. My life and the direction it had taken pleased him. Like God’s voice at the baptism of his Jesus, he had already communicated to me: You are my son in whom I am well pleased. Not everyone is that lucky. That’s about as much as a person may ask from a father.

And what did he leave me and the rest of his offspring?

Too much to name, but among other things, moral steadiness. He was one of the most moral people I have ever known, allowing himself minimal moral compromise. He wasn’t a man who bought the line that we are only human and so it’s okay to allow ourselves some exemptions. He used to famously tell us: “Anyone can show me humanity; I need someone to show me divinity!” He expected you not to fail, to live up to what faith and morality asked of you, to not make excuses. If we, his family, inhaled anything from his presence, it was this moral stubbornness.

Beyond this, he had a steady, almost pathological sanity. Today we joke that moderation was his only excess. There were no hysterical outbursts, no depressions, no giddiness, no lack of steadiness, no having to guess where his soul and psyche might be on a given day.

With that steadiness, along with my mother’s supporting presence, he made for us a home that was always a safe cocoon, a boring place sometimes, but always a safe one. When I think of the home where I grew up, I think of a safe shelter where you could look at the storms outside from a place of warmth and security. Again, not everyone is that lucky.

And because we were a large family and his love and attention had to be shared with multiple siblings, I never thought of him as “my” father, but always as “our” father. This has helped me grasp the first challenge in the Lord’s Prayer, namely, that God is “Our” Father, whom we share with others, not a private entity.

Moreover, his family extended to more than his own children. I learned early not to resent the fact that he couldn’t always be with us, that he had good reasons to be elsewhere: work, community, church, hospital and school boards, political involvement. He was an elder for a wider family than just our own.

Finally, not least, he blessed me and my brothers and sisters with a love for baseball. He managed a local baseball team for many years. This was his particular place where he could enjoy some Sabbath.

But blessings never come pure. My father was human, and a man’s greatest strength is often too his greatest weakness. In all that moral fiber and rock-solid sanity, there was also a reticence that sometimes didn’t allow him to fully drink in life’s exuberance. Every son watches how his father dances and unconsciously sizes him up against certain things: hesitancy, fluidity, abandonment, exhibitionism, momentary irrationality, irresponsibility.

My father never had much fluidity or abandon to his dance step, and I have inherited that, something that can pain me deeply. There were times, both as a child and as an adult, when, in a given situation, I would have traded my father for a dad who had a more fluid dance step, for someone with a little less reticence in the face of life’s exuberance.

And that is partly my struggle to receive his full blessing. I’m often reminded of William Blake’s famous line in Infant Sorrow, where he mentions “Struggling in my father’s hands.” For me, that means struggling at times with my dad’s reticence to simply let go and drink in life’s full gift.

But, if there was hesitancy, there was no irresponsibility in his dance, even if sometimes that meant standing outside the dance. I was grieved at his funeral, but proud too, proud of the respect that was poured out for him, for the way he lived his life. There was no judgment that day on his reticence. I’m older now than he was when he died. My earthly days now outnumber his by fifteen years. But I still live inside his blessing, consciously and unconsciously, striving to measure up, to honor what he gave me. And mostly that’s good, though I also have moments when I find myself standing outside of life’s exuberance, looking in at the dance, reticent, his look on my face, feeling a certain envy of those who have a more fluid dance step – me, ever my father’s son.

Atheists, Dark Nights, Good Friday, and Revelation

September 8, 2025

The classical atheistic thinkers of the Enlightenment, philosophers such as Frederick Nietzsche and Ludwig Feuerbach, taught that all religious experience is simply human projection. God does not exist. We create God, and we create him in our image and likeness, ultimately to serve our needs. We create the notion of God because we need a God for our own purposes. Moreover, what we believe to be God’s word, divine revelation, (scriptures, creeds, and dogmas) is all ultimately human projection.

How true is this?

They are largely correct, not in that God doesn’t exist, but that we are forever shaping and distorting the idea of God and God’s word to serve our own needs. We have God’s word in Christ and in our scriptures, but we are forever shaping it to fit our needs. That’s why we have so many different religions and Christian denominations. That’s also why (by happy coincidence) God always hates the same people we do and always loves the same people we love.

When atheists tell us that God is a human projection to serve our needs, they are doing us a favor because they are holding up a mirror in which we can see that, in fact, we do perennially shape and distort divine revelation so that it works for our advantage. Their critique keeps pressure on us to clean up our notion of God and divine revelation.

But, while they may be 90% correct, they are 10% wrong, and that 10% makes all the difference. In that 10%, we allow God to flow into our lives in a way that we cannot shape or distort the experience but only receive it purely.

This happens in what mystics call “dark nights of the soul”, and that phrase refers to those times in our lives when our natural faculties of imagination, intellect, and affectivity (as they pertain to God and faith) are at an impasse, paralyzed, and unable to function. All our former ways of imagining and thinking about God now feel empty, counterfeit, useless. We can no longer imagine that God exists, feel like atheists, and are unable to think our way out of that helplessness.

That helpless condition, when we can no longer imagine God or affectively feel God’s presence, is in fact a gift. Why? Because when our natural faculties are paralyzed, we are also paralyzed in our ability to imagine God. Now we can only receive God as God is, not as we imagine God to be. We no longer have the power to shape or distort our experience.

The ultimate example of this, of course, is Good Friday, that time in history when the Gospels tell us it grew dark at midday. Good Friday was the ultimate “dark night of the soul” for Jesus’ followers.

They had been following him, listening to his word, his revelation; but, notwithstanding Jesus’ repeated attempts to correct their view, they had shaped and distorted his person and his words to fit their own notion of what they wanted in a Messiah. What they wanted was a divine superman who would destroy all their enemies, be dazzling in glory, and bring glory to them.

Good Friday completely devastated them. Jesus died in a horrible manner, stripped naked, shamed, beaten, powerless, seen as a criminal. That shattered all their expectations of how they imagined a Messiah should be. There was no earthly glory, only shame, and no overt display of divine power. That completely shattered their religious understanding.

They were stunned, literally. Every notion they had of what a Messiah should be was turned upside down. They were mute imaginatively, unable to imagine how any of this could make sense. Their religious world had turned dark in the middle of the day. Indeed, it took some years (and the insights of St. Paul) for light to appear again, before the meaning of Good Friday broke through to them, before it made sense.

But then it broke through cleanly, without distortion, because the religious dark night that paralyzed them on Good Friday had left them imaginatively, affectively, and intellectually disabled completely in terms of interpreting what was being spoken to them through Jesus’ unexpected shameful death. Consequently, they couldn’t distort their experience but only receive it.

In a remarkable book, The Crucified God, Jurgens Moltmann writes: “Our faith begins at the point where atheists suppose it must end. Our faith begins with the bleakness and power which is the night of the cross, abandonment, temptation, and doubt about everything that exists! Our faith must be born where it is abandoned by all tangible reality; it must be born of nothingness; it must taste this nothingness and be given it to taste in a way no philosophy of nihilism can imagine.” That was the experience of Good Friday, and that is the experience of what mystics call a “dark night of the soul”. And it is inside the frustrating darkness of that experience that God can flow into our lives without distortion.

Becoming a Practicing Mystic

September 1, 2025

I teach a course on the renowned mystic John of the Cross. Since this is never a required course for any student, I usually begin the first class by asking each student why he or she is interested in this course. The answers vary widely: “I am taking this course because my spiritual director told me to take it.” “I’ve always been curious about mysticism.” “I’m majoring in whatever is taught on Tuesday evenings!” One night however a woman gave this answer: I’m taking this course because I’m a practicing mystic. That raised some eyebrows. Really? A practicing mystic?

Can someone be a practicing mystic?

That depends upon how you understand mystical experience. If you equate mystical experience with the extraordinary, with supernatural phenomena (religious visions, religious ecstasies, radically altered states of consciousness, or the miraculous appearance of Jesus, Mary, an angel, or a saint) then you cannot be a practicing mystic. While such extraordinary phenomena can in fact be mystical experience (and indeed do mark the experience of some classical mystics), normal mystical experience is not characterized by any extraordinary religious phenomena. Indeed, it generally distrusts anything extraordinary and asks that it be discerned with extra scrutiny.

Normal mystical experience, most mysticism, does not draw on the extraordinary. To the contrary, it draws on what is precisely the very ground of normality. What’s meant by this?

A renowned contemporary mystic, British Carmelite Ruth Burrows, defines mystical experience this way. Mystical experience is being touched by God in a way that is beyond what we can articulate, picture, or even consciously feel. It is something we know more than think.

In essence, an ineffable God touches us in an ineffable way; a God beyond concepts, touches us in a way that cannot be put into concepts; a God beyond language touches us in a way that can never be adequately put into words; and a God who is source of all being, touches us at the very source of our own being, so that we know, intuitively, both who we are and how we stand before God.

This may sound rather abstract, but it’s not, as Ruth Burrows explains, using her own story.

In her autobiography, Before the Living God, Ruth Burrows (who died in 2023) shares the story of how, just as she was finishing her initial education and making plans for university, a mystical experience marked her and radically changed her life.

At that time in her life, she was not particularly serious about her faith. The practice of her faith was more rote than fervorous, but she was on a retreat with a number of other young women her age. One of the things she was asked to do on that retreat was to sit in a chapel in silence for an hour several times a day. Those hours of silence wore heavily on her and she dreaded them.

However, one day, during one of those hours, sitting in silence, she had (what she later calls) a mystical experience. There were no supernatural visions, no religious ecstasy, no appearances of angels, but only a moment of extraordinarily graced clarity; a moment within which she knew herself clearly for the first time, beyond what she could think, put into concepts, or articulate. It was a moment where stripped of all pretense, stripped of all ideology, stripped of all false self-images, stripped of all posturing to others, emotionally and morally naked, she just knew – knew who she was and how she stood before God and others.

Her mystical moment was a moment of complete sincerity, a moment without wax, as the Latin roots of that word suggest (sine- without and cere-wax). Like all mystics, she struggled to put into words something which is largely ineffable, but which branded her soul in a way that radically changed her life.

Given that definition of mysticism, we are all invited to be practicing mystics, that is, we are all invited in the silence of our hearts, or perhaps in an experience of being lifted up in soul or crushed in soul, to stand or kneel before God in complete sincerity, without wax, morally naked, stripped of all pretense, stripped of all that’s false, so that in that moment we can know in truth who we are and how we stand before God, others, and our true selves. We need to pray for that clarity and make that an explicit intention in our prayer.

How do we do that? We do that by trying very intentionally in prayer to center ourselves in sincerity and nakedness of soul, by asking God to see through all that’s false in us so that we can know how we are known by God.

Dag Hammarskjold, in his prayer, used to ask God, “allow me in clarity of mind to mirror life and in purity of heart mold it, and to have a conscious self-scrutiny that sets me on a path towards mirroring the greatness of life.” To ask that in prayer is to be a practicing mystic.

Mourning our Unfinished Symphony

August 25, 2025

There are parts of scripture that should come with a warning label, the kind they sometimes flash at the end of a movie which reads: No animals were harmed.

One such text is a story in the Book of Judges (11,29-39). It’s the story of a king named Jephthah who is at war and makes a promise to God that if God lets him win the war, he will sacrifice as a burnt offering to God, the first person he meets when he gets back home. God lets him win the war and Jephthah returns home and the first person he meets is his own daughter, who is in the bloom of youth. On seeing her, he deeply regrets his vow. However, his daughter agrees to let herself be offered as a burnt offering, but she asks for one thing first, to be given two months to go to the mountains “to mourn my virginity with my companions.” Her father grants her the favor and she goes off with her companions to mourn the fact that she will die a virgin. She returns and is sacrificed as a burnt offering to God.

Taken literally, this is simply an awful story – a foolish promise made to God, a God who accepts such a vow and grants a favor because of it, child sacrifice, an undertow of callous patriarchy.

But that’s not what this story is about. No one dies in this story. It’s not to be taken literally, but as a metaphor, and its message is not about God granting favors in exchange for human sacrifice. Its real message has to do with the young woman in the story, with her asking for the chance to mourn the fact that she will die a virgin, her life in some deep way incomplete.

What’s she asking for? What does it mean to mourn one’s virginity? How does one mourn this?

What lies inside this metaphor is the fact that every one of us, woman or man, married or celibate, long life or short life, will ultimately die a virgin, without having had the full symphony.

In its more literal modality, we see this played out in someone who has never married, is single, has never had a partner with whom he or she became one flesh, and who will die in that state. Like Jephthah’s daughter, he or she will die a virgin. Sometimes when leading a retreat for priests or nuns, I will ask them this question: Have you ever mourned your celibacy? Have you ever grieved the fact that you will go through life without sexual intimacy, without children, without being a grandparent?

But there are less literal modalities of this. The “virginity” that Jephthah’s daughter needs to mourn is something we all need to mourn, even if we have sexual intimacy, children, and grandchildren.

I was once at a faculty gathering where a number of priests on faculty were discussing celibacy when a colleague, a happily married woman, challenged us with these words: You celibates feel too sorry for yourselves. Do you know what’s worse than sleeping alone? Sleeping alone when you’re not sleeping alone. Sexual intimacy, even at its best, doesn’t take away your aloneness.

She’s right. No one gets the full symphony. Karl Rahner once replied to a friend who had written to him lamenting that, while he was in a good marriage, he still felt deeply alone in many ways. Rahner advised him not to blame his wife nor his marriage for his loneliness, but rather to learn to accept that “here in this life there is no finished symphony.” All of us will die with some unfulfilled dreams; none of us will find full, abiding, ecstatic embrace this side of eternity.

However, we can still live happy, full lives despite this absence. But there’s a condition, the one Jephthah’s daughter expresses, namely, we need to mourn our incompleteness so that we can die at peace with our partial symphony.

If we do not recognize that incompleteness and mourn it, our non-acceptance will work in stealth to color our lives with disappointment, anger, and depression. Worse still, if we cannot make peace with the fact that life cannot give us the full symphony, we will have an unconscious propensity to be too hard on others (our marriage partners, our families, our friends, our churches, and life itself) because they cannot measure up and give us the full symphony.

And how might we mourn our incompleteness?

We mourn in our own way, but all mourning begins with recognizing what’s lost, what’s been taken from us. So, we begin mourning our “virginity” by recognizing and accepting what Rahner told his friend, that here, in this life, there is no finished symphony.

How do we mourn that? Some might take it to spiritual direction, psychological therapy, or some ritual practice, but all of us must consciously take it to prayer and then, like Jephthah’s daughter, spend some months in the mountains giving free range to our tears.

What Makes a Good Marriage?

August 18, 2025

No amount of preaching shapes a soul as much as seeing someone living an honest life. If that’s true, and it is, then no marriage course is ever as powerful to teach about marriage as is the witness of a good marriage.

I understood this first-hand several years ago when I attended the 50^th wedding anniversary of an uncle and aunt. Theirs was a good marriage: harmony, hospitality, family, faith.

However, and only they knew the price tag, this did not always come easily. They spent the first years of their marriage without much money and without extras, raising a large family. His first job, clerking in a store, paid him a pittance. She couldn’t find any work at all, since in the small town where they lived, women weren’t much wanted in the job market then.

As well, as in all families, there were countless other struggles and, in their case, countless hours spent by both, beyond their own family concerns, working in church and community circles.

More than two hundred of us, family and friends, gathered to toast and roast them. At the end of the banquet my uncle stood up to thank everyone and ended his comments with these words.

“When we got married fifty years ago, we didn’t have much, but we had an unconscious trust that if we lived by the Ten Commandments and the laws of the church, then things would turn out all right – and I think they did.”

What an understatement! They turned out better than all right.

A good marriage can best be described, I believe, by four images, and theirs is the prime analogate of each:

A good marriage is a warm fireplace. The love that the two people have for each other generates a warm place. But the warmth it creates does not just warm the two of them, it also warms everyone else who comes near them: their children, their neighbors, their community, and everyone who meets them.
A good marriage is a big table, loaded with food and drink. When two people love each other in a true sense, that love becomes a place of hospitality, a table where people come to be fed, figuratively and literally. In a good marriage, love feeds not just the two people who are generating it, it always contains more than enough surplus to feed everyone who is fortunate enough to meet it. This is what makes it sacramental.
A good marriage is a container which holds suffering. An old axiom says: “Everything can be borne if it can be shared!” That’s true. Anyone fortunate enough to have a true moral partner in life can bear a lot of suffering. This is particularly true in a good marriage where the wife and husband, because of their deep moral affinity, can carry not just their own sufferings but also can help carry the sufferings of many others.
Finally, a good marriage is Christ’s body, flesh that is “food for the life of world.” Christ left us his body to feed the world. A good marriage does precisely that, it feeds everything and everybody around it. This, above all else, is what makes marriage a sacrament.

Many of us have experienced this in some of the married people we’ve met. Having them in our lives is a constant source of moral, psychological, and religious nourishment.

The marriage of my aunt and uncle can be described by these images. Their relationship with each other was a fireplace, where many people, including myself, found warmth. It was a table; their houses always had big tables, loaded refrigerators, and friendly doors that welcomed and gave hospitality and food and drink to everyone who crossed their threshold.

And their relationship was a container for suffering. Through the years, thanks to their love for each other, they were able to bear with faith, dignity, soft hearts, and an ever-deepening charity, all the pain, tragedy, and suffering that came their way, and were able to help many other people carry their sufferings.

Finally, their relationship was, in real human flesh, Christ’s body, food for the life of the world. Virtually everyone whose path ever crossed theirs was in some way fed, nourished, and given vitamins for their souls.

In an age which no longer understands sacrament, we might look at a marriage like this one to better understand what constitutes a sacrament.

Sometimes the answers we seek are not found in a book, but in the house across the street; sometimes the divine grace we seek is found when someone opens a door of welcome to us; sometimes the elusive consolation we seek is given us by a friend who understands our pain; and sometimes the sacrament we seek to feed our souls is found in a warm living room, at a loaded table, in the banter and humor flowing back and forth across the table, and in a couple who are happily married.

An Unnatural Wound

August 11, 2025

Few things in life are as difficult as the death of a young person, particularly one’s own child. There are many mothers and fathers, with broken hearts, having lost a daughter, a son, or a grandchild. Despite time and even the consolation of faith, there often remains a wound that will not heal.

There’s a reason why this wound is so unrelenting, and it lies not so much in a lack of faith, as in a certain lack within nature itself. Nature equips us for most situations, but it does not equip us to bury our young.

Death is always hard. There’s a finality and an irrevocability that cauterizes the heart. This is true even if the person who has died is elderly and has lived a full life. Ultimately nothing prepares us, fully, to accept the deaths of those whom we love.

But nature has equipped us better to handle the deaths of our elders. We are meant to bury our parents. That’s the way nature is set up, the natural order of things. Parents are meant to die before their children, and generally that’s the way it happens. This brings its own pain. It’s not easy to lose one’s parents or one’s spouse, one’s siblings, or one’s friends. Death always exacts its toll. However, nature has equipped us to handle these deaths.

Metaphorically stated, when our elders die, there are circuits in our hardwiring that we can access and through which we can draw some understanding and acceptance. Ultimately, the death of a fellow adult washes clean, and normality returns because it’s natural, nature’s way, for adults to die. That’s the proper order of things. One of life’s tasks is to bury one’s parents.

But it’s unnatural for parents to bury their children. That’s not the way nature intended things, and nature has not properly equipped us for the task. Again, to utilize the metaphor, when one of our children dies (be it through natural disease, accident, or suicide) nature has not provided us with the internal circuits we need to open to deal with this.

The issue is not, as with the death of our elders, a matter of proper grieving, patience, and time. When one of our children dies, we can grieve, be patient, give it time and still find that the wound does not get better, that time does not heal, and that we cannot fully accept what’s happened.

A hundred years ago Alfred Edward Housman wrote a famous poem entitled, To An Athlete Dying Young. At one point he says this to the young man who has died:

Smart lad, to slip betimes away

From fields where glory does not stay.

Sometimes a young death does freeze forever a young person’s beauty that, given time, would eventually have slipped away. To die young is to die in full bloom, in the beauty of youth.

However, that addresses the issue of the young person who is dying, not the grief of those who are left behind. I’m not so sure they, the ones left behind, would say: “Smart lad, to slip betimes away.” Their grief is not so quick to slip away because nature has not provided them with the internal circuits needed to process what they need to process. We are more likely to feel a darkness of soul that W.H. Auden once expressed in the face of the death of a loved one:

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;

Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;

For nothing now can ever come to any good. (Twelve Songs)

When one of our children dies, it’s easier to feel what Auden expresses. Moreover, even understanding how much against nature it is to have to bury one of your own children does not bring that child back, nor put things back to normal, because it’s abnormal for a parent to bury a child.

However, what that understanding can bring is an insight into why the pain is so deep and so unrelenting, why it is natural to feel intense sorrow, and why no easy consolation or challenge is very helpful. At the end of the day, the death of one’s child has no answer.

It’s also helpful to know that faith in God, albeit powerful and important, does not take away that wound. It’s not meant to. When one of our children dies, something has been unnaturally cut off, like the amputation of a limb. Faith in God can help us live with the pain and the unnaturalness of being less than whole, but it does not bring back the limb or make things whole again. In effect, what faith can do is teach us how to live with the amputation, how to open that irreparable violation of nature to something and Someone beyond us, so that this larger perspective, God’s heart, can give us the courage to live healthily again with an unnatural wound.

Losing Our Innocence

August 4, 2025

What is innocence?

Perhaps in its ideal form, innocence might be described as a human heart stripped of ego and lust, something akin to what James Joyce describes in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man when his hero, young Steven, sees a half-naked girl on a beach and instead of being moved by sexual desire is moved only by an overwhelming wonder and admiration.

More practically, the late Allan Bloom, in The Closing of the American Mind, suggests that, in the end, innocence is chastity, and that chastity is more than a sexual concept. For Bloom, there needs to be a “chastity” in all our experiencing, that is, we need to experience things only if and only when we can experience them in such a way that we remain integrated. Simply put, we lose our innocence when we experience anything in a way that “unglues” us in that it breaks down our wholeness in some way. And we can become unglued in many ways: moral, psychological, emotional, spiritual, and physical.

Bloom suggests that today most of us lack chastity and are already somewhat unglued. This, he suggests, manifests itself not first of all in the spiraling rates of emotional breakdown or drug and alcohol abuse, but, more commonly, in a certain deadness of soul that leaves us (in his words) “erotically lame”, without fire in our eyes, and without much in the way of the sublime in our hearts and in our dreams.

Moreover, adult innocence needs to be distinguished from the natural innocence of a child. For an adult, innocence no longer should be naiveté. It needs to be something that might aptly be called second naiveté or post-sophistication. There is a huge distinction between childishness, the spontaneous innocence of a child which is partly predicated on lack of experience and naiveté, and childlikeness, the post-sophistication of an informed, experienced adult who again has taken on the wonder of a child.

How did Jesus define innocence? He pointed at two things: the heart of a child and the heart of a virgin. Unless you have the heart of a child you will not enter the kingdom of heaven, and the Kingdom of heaven can be compared to ten virgins waiting for their bridegroom.

For Jesus, the heart of a child is one that is fresh, receptive, full of wonder, and which does not yet contain the hardness and cynicism that calcify inside us because of wound or sin. And for him, the heart of a virgin is one that can live in patience in the face of inconsummation without demanding the finished symphony, knowing that, as a child, many of the things that it deeply desires cannot be had just yet.

The child’s heart is one that still trusts in goodness and the virgin’s heart is one that does not test its God.

In her novel The Stone Angel, Margaret Laurence describes a woman, Hagar Shipley, who, one day, after overhearing a child call her an old hag, examines her face in a mirror and is surprised and horrified by what she sees. She scarcely recognizes her own face. What she sees frightens her. It’s a face that has not just grown older, it’s also grown cold and lifeless, devoid of eagerness and innocence. She wonders how this could have happened because she still imagines herself as an attractive, pleasant, wholesome person. But the mirror shows her the bitter truth. She has lost the child in her, lost her innocence.

This can happen to us all, and for periods of time does happen to all of us. We must never lose our desire for innocence. That would constitute one of the deadliest sicknesses of all.

Annie Dillard once wrote: “Innocence is not the prerogative of infants and puppies, and far less of mountains and fixed stars, which have no prerogatives at all. It is not lost to us; the world is a better place than that. Like any other of the spirit’s good gifts, it is there if you want it, free for the asking, as has been stressed by stronger words than mine. It is possible to pursue innocence as hounds pursue hares, single-mindedly, driven by a kind of love, crashing over creeks, keening and lost in fields and forests, circling, vaulting over hedges and hills, wide-eyed, giving loud tongue all unawares to the deepest, most incomprehensible longing, a root-flame in the heart, and that warbling chorus resounding back from the mountains.” These words are a poignant reminder that one of the deepest underpinnings for a healthy (and happy) life is innocence, if not its achievement, certainly its desire. Just as a healthy child longs for the experience of an adult, a healthy adult longs for the heart of a child. To lose the desire for innocence is to lose touch with one’s soul. In fact, to lose one’s desire for innocence is to lose one’s soul, and to lose entirely the desire for innocence is one of the qualities of being in hell.

God’s Nudge Inside of Us

July 28, 2025

God’s presence inside us and in our world is rarely dramatic, overwhelming, sensational, impossible to ignore. God doesn’t work like that. Rather God’s presence is something that lies quiet and seemingly helpless inside us. It rarely makes a huge splash.

We should know that from the very way God was born into our world. Jesus, as we know, was born into our world with no fanfare and no power, a baby lying helpless in the straw, another child among millions. Nothing spectacular to human eyes surrounded his birth. Then, during his ministry, he never performed miracles to prove his divinity, but only as acts of compassion or to reveal something about God. His ministry, like his birth, wasn’t an attempt to prove his divinity or prove God’s existence. It was intended rather to teach us what God is like and how God loves us unconditionally.

In essence, Jesus’ teaching about God’s presence in our lives makes clear that this presence is mostly quiet and under the surface, a plant growing silently as we sleep, yeast leavening dough in a manner hidden from our eyes, spring slowly turning a barren tree green, an insignificant mustard plant eventually surprising us with its growth, a man or woman forgiving an enemy. God works in ways that are seemingly hidden and can be ignored by our eyes. The God that Jesus incarnates is neither dramatic nor flashy.

And there’s an important lesson in this. Simply put, God lies inside us, deep inside, but in a way that is almost unfelt, often unnoticed, and can easily be ignored. However, while that presence is never overpowering, it has inside of it a gentle, unremitting imperative, a compulsion, which invites us to draw upon it. And if we do, it gushes up in us as an infinite stream that instructs, nurtures, and fills us with life and energy.

This is important for understanding how God is present inside us. God lies inside us as an invitation that always respects our freedom and never overpowers us, but also never goes away. It lies there precisely like a baby lying helpless in the straw, gently beckoning us, but helpless in itself to make us pick it up.

For example, C.S. Lewis shares this in explaining why, despite a strong affective and intellectual reluctance, he eventually became a Christian (“the most reluctant convert in the history of Christendom”). He became a believer, he says, because he was unable to ultimately ignore a quiet but persistent voice inside him which, because it was gentle and respectful of his freedom, he could ignore for a long time. But it never went away.

In retrospect, he realized it had always been there as an incessant nudge, beckoning him to draw from it, a gentle unyielding imperative, a “compulsion” which, if obeyed, leads to liberation.

Ruth Burrows, the British Carmelite and mystic, describes a similar experience. In her autobiography Before the Living God, she tells the story of her late adolescent years and how at that time in her life she thought little about religion and faith. Yet she eventually ends up not only being serious about religion but becoming a Carmelite nun and a gifted spiritual writer. What happened?

Triggered by a series of accidental circumstances, one day she found herself in a chapel where, almost against her conscious will, she left herself open to a voice inside her which she had until then mainly ignored, precisely because it had never forced itself upon her freedom. But once touched, it gushed up as the deepest and most real thing inside her and set the direction of her life forever.

Like C.S. Lewis, she too, once she had opened herself to it, felt that voice as an unyielding moral compulsion opening her to ultimate liberation.

This is true too for me. When I was seventeen years old and graduating from high school, I had no natural desire whatsoever to become a Roman Catholic priest. But, despite a strong affective resistance, I felt a call to enter a religious order and become a Catholic priest. Despite that strong resistance inside me, I obeyed that call, that compulsion. Now, sixty years later, I look back on that decision as the clearest, most unselfish, faith-based, and life-giving decision I have ever made. I could have ignored that beckoning. I’m forever grateful I didn’t.

Fredrick Buechner suggests that God is present inside us as a subterranean presence of grace. The grace of God is “beneath the surface; it’s not right there like the brass band announcing itself, but it comes and it touches and it strikes in ways that leave us free to either not even notice it or to draw back from it.”

God never tries to overwhelm us. More than anyone else, God respects our freedom. God lies everywhere, inside us and around us, almost unfelt, largely unnoticed, and easily ignored, a quiet, gentle nudge; but, if drawn upon, the ultimate stream of love and life.

Suicide and Jesus’ Descent into Hell

July 21, 2025

In a book entitled Peculiar Treasures, the renowned novelist and spiritual writerFrederick Buechner reflects on the character of Judas, the man who betrayed Jesus with a kiss and then died by suicide.

Buechner, who had lost his own father to suicide, speculates on the reasons why Judas dies by suicide. Referring to an ancient church tradition, he suggests that perhaps Judas chose suicide out of hope instead of despair, that is, he felt dammed and counted on Jesus’ mercy after death, thinking that perhaps “hell might be his last chance of making it to heaven.”

Then, imagining Jesus’ descent into hell, Buechner writes: “It’s a scene to conjure with. Once again they met in the shadows, the two old friends, both of them a little worse for wear after all that had happened, only this time it was Jesus who was the one to give the kiss, and this time it wasn’t the kiss of death that was given.” (Jeffrery Munroe, Reading Buechner, InterVarsity Press)

As Christians, as very article of faith in our Creeds, we believe that after his death Jesus “descended into hell.” What’s meant by that?

The popular conception of this in the language of our catechesis, in our iconography, and in Christian piety, might be summarized this way. After the sin of Adam and Eve, ‘original sin,’ the gates of heaven were closed, so that from the time of Adam and Eve until the death of Jesus, no one could go to heaven. However, in his death, Jesus atoned for our sins and during the time between his death on Good Friday and his resurrection on Easter Sunday, he went to that place in the underworld, Sheol, where all the good people who had died throughout history were waiting and he led them into heaven. This was his “descent into hell.”

But, whatever the literal truth in that popular conception, there’s a powerful theological truth undergirding the doctrine. In essence it’s this: The love and compassion that Jesus manifested in his death has the power to go into hell itself, that is, there is no “hell” (physical, psychological, or spiritual) we can create that Christ’s love cannot penetrate so as to offer healing for the very wound which caused that hell itself.

God’s love, healing, and forgiveness can penetrate any hell we can create and heal the wound that caused that hell.

This is perhaps the single most consoling doctrine not just in Christianity but in all religion. When we are powerless to help others or ourselves, God can still help us.

It’s for this reason that Christians don’t believe in reincarnation. It isn’t needed. We don’t need to get ourselves completely right to go to heaven. When we are powerless, God can still do for us what we can’t do for ourselves.

That’s a deep consolation because not everyone dies a happy death. Many of us die in anger, in bitterness, not fully reconciled with others, with unfinished business of soul. And some of us die by suicide, imprisoned in a private hell where, due to illness and wound rather than moral fault, we believe our death is our only way to life.

The doctrine of Jesus’ descent into hell is particularly helpful regarding how we might understand how those who die by suicide are met by God after their deaths. For too long we have been falsely anxious about this, fearing that suicide is a grave human and moral failure, an act of despair, unforgiveable (certainly on this side of eternity). However, in most cases, it is an illness, one not freely chosen. Like cancer, a heart attack, or an accident, it takes someone out of life against his or her committed choice. For this reason, we are encouraged to no longer use the phrase “committed suicide.” Nobody “commits” cancer or “commits” a heart attack. He or she “succumbs” to it. So too for most suicides.

With this in mind, we can better appreciate the image Frederick Buechner uses in speculating about the suicide of Judas’ and his meeting with Jesus in hell.

In essence, this is Buechner’s image: After his betrayal of Jesus, Judas descends into a private hell wherein he senses that what he has done cannot be forgiven and he is doomed forever to live in that darkness. That falsity, that illness, that fatally misguided logic tells him that going to hell is his last chance of going to heaven. So, he takes his own life. After his death, Jesus meets him in the shadows of that misguided hell and kisses him, not in condemnation or damnation, but in unconditional love, understanding, and forgiveness.

This image, I believe, can help us understand what happens in suicide: the misguided logic of those taking their own lives, and God’s loving, compassionate, forgiving, invitational descent into their private hell within which they believe their deaths are a favor to their loved ones and that “hell might be their last chance to go to heaven.”

Purgatory as Purification Through Love

July 14, 2025

Imagine being born blind and living into adulthood without ever having seen light and color. Then, through some miraculous operation, doctors are able to give you sight. What would you feel immediately upon opening your eyes? Wonder? Bewilderment? Ecstasy? Pain? Some combination of all of these?

We now know the answer to that question. This kind of sight-restoring operation has been done and is being done, and we now have some indication of how a person reacts upon opening his or her eyes and seeing light and color for the first time. What happens might surprise us. Here’s how J.Z. Young, an authority on brain function, describes what happens:

“The patient on opening his eyes gets little or no enjoyment; indeed, he finds the experience painful. He reports only a spinning mass of light and colors. He proves to be quite unable to pick up objects by sight, to recognize what they are, or to name them. He has no conception of space with objects in it, although he knows all about objects and their names by touch. ‘Of course,’ you will say, ‘he must take a little time to learn to recognize them by sight.’ Not a little time, but a very long time, in fact, years. His brain has not been trained in the rules of seeing. We are not conscious that there are any such rules; we think we see, as we say naturally. But we have in fact learned a whole set of rules during childhood.” (See: Emilie Griffin, Souls in Full Flight, p. 143-144)

Might this be a helpful analogy for what happens to us in what Roman Catholics call purgatory? Could the purification we experience after death be understood analogously in this way, namely, as an opening of our vision and heart to a light and a love that are so full so as to force upon us the same kind of painful relearning and reconceptualization that have just been described? Might purgatory be understood precisely as being embraced by God in such a way that perfect warmth and light so dwarf our earthly concepts of love and knowledge that, like a person born blind who is given sight, we need to struggle painfully in the very ecstasy of that light to adapt to a radically deeper way of thinking and loving? Might purgatory be understood not as God’s absence or as some kind of punishment or retribution for sin, but as what happens to us when we are finally fully embraced, in ecstasy, by God, perfect love and perfect truth?

Indeed, isn’t this what faith, hope, and charity, the three theological virtues, are already trying to move us toward in this life? Isn’t faith a knowing beyond what we can conceptualize? Isn’t hope an anchoring of ourselves in something beyond what we can control and guarantee for ourselves? And isn’t charity a reaching out beyond what affectively comes naturally to us?

St. Paul, in describing our condition on earth, tells us that in this life we see only as “through a mirror, reflecting dimly” but after death we will see “face to face”. Clearly in describing our present condition on earth he is highlighting a certain blindness, a congenital darkness, an inability to actually see things as they really are. It is significant to note too that he says this in a context wherein he is pointing out that already now in this life, faith, hope, and charity help lift away that blindness.

Of course, these are only questions, perhaps unsettlingly to Protestants and Roman Catholics alike. Many Protestants and Evangelicals reject the very concept of purgatory on the grounds that, biblically, there are only two eternal places, heaven and hell. Many Roman Catholics, on the other hand, get anxious whenever purgatory seems to get stripped of its popular conception as a place or state apart from heaven. But purgatory conceived of in this way, as the full opening of our eyes and hearts so as to cause a painful reconceptualization of things, might help make the concept more palatable to Protestants and Evangelicals and help strip the concept of some of its false popular connotations within Roman Catholic piety.

True purgation can happen only through love because it is only when we experience love’s true embrace that we see our sin clearly for what it is and are empowered with the grace to move beyond it. Only light dispels darkness, and only love casts out sin.

Therese of Lisieux would sometimes pray to God: “Punish me with a kiss!” The embrace of full love is the only possible purification for sin because only when we are embraced by love do we actually understand what sin is and, only then, are we given the desire, the vision, and the strength to live in love and truth.

But that inbreaking of love and light can be, all at the same time, delightful and bewildering, ecstatic and unsettling, wonderful and excruciating, euphoric and painful – nothing less than purgatory.

Poetry and Spirituality

July 7, 2025

Who still reads poetry? In a digital age and in a time when the empirical has for the most part replaced the spiritual, what’s the value of poetry? What does it bring to the table?

One of the intellectual giants of our generation, Charles Taylor, in a recent book Cosmic Connections, Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment, answers that question. Poetry is meant to reenchant us, to help us see beyond the tedium of everyday ordinariness, to see again the deep innate connections among all things.

For Taylor, as children, we are in touch naturally with the deep innate connections among all things; however, our normal growth and development work away at dissolving our original inarticulate sense of cosmic order. But we sense this loss and have an inchoate longing to recover that sense of wholeness.

And that’s where good poetry can help us.

When we experience something, we don’t simply receive it, like a camera taking a photo, we help define its meaning. In Taylor’s words, “We do not just register things; we re-create the meaning of things.” Thus, like any good work of art, the function of poetry is to transfigure a scene so that the deeper order of things becomes visible and shines through. The French poet, Stephane Mallarme, suggests that the function of art is not to paint something, but to paint the effect it is meant to produce.

For Taylor, a good poem can do that. How? By helping us see things from a bigger perspective.

Wrapped up in our own lives, we are too close and so absorbed that we cannot properly name what we are going through. “Poetry gives it a plot, a story, and this in a way that gives it a dramatic shape. We can now see our life as a story, a drama, a struggle, with the dignity and deeper meaning that it has. For example, by giving poetic expression to a distressful emotion, poetry allows us to hold it at a distance. The business of the poet is to make poetry out of the raw material of the unpoetical. As William Wordsworth once said, poetry is “emotion recollected in tranquility.”

And to do that, the poet needs to employ a different language.

Here’s how Taylor puts this: “Poetry is the ‘translation’ of insight into subtler languages. What cannot adequately be understood in instrumental language, namely, value, morality, ethics, love, and art, require explorations which can only be carried out in other vocabularies. The language of empiricism is essentially an instrument by which we can build a responsible and reliable picture of the world as it lies before us, but that world is no longer seen as the site of spirit and magic forces. Rather the universe is now understood in terms of laws defined purely by efficient causality.”

And he goes on: “So a crucial distinction comes to the fore, between ordinary, flat, instrumental language which designates different objects, and combines these designates into accurate portraits of things and events, all of which serve the purpose of controlling and manipulating things. … [while] on the other hand, truly insightful speech [good art] reveals the very nature of things and restores contact with them. Poetic language gives us a sense that we are called, we receive a call. There is someone or something out there.”

Poetry parallels music as a paralinguistic practice. But what has any of this to do with spirituality, not least Christian spirituality? Aren’t poetry and art purely subjective and, as such, often amoral? Taylor would sharply disagree in so far at this pertains to good poetry and goodart. Good art, he suggests, is never a matter “of shifting taste”.

Taylor suggests that the meanings we experience in good poetry and art have their place alongside moral and ethical demands. Why? Because, for Taylor, in good poetry and good art “the experience is one of joy and not just one of pleasure.” The difference? “You experience joy when you learn or are reminded of something positive, which has a strong ethical or spiritual significance, whereas intense pleasure tends to enfold you even more in yourself.” For Taylor, joy awakens a “felt intuition” which is not merely subjective. It is an opening to the ontological, to God.

Finally, quoting Baudelaire, Taylor leaves us with this insight: “It is both by poetry and through poetry, by and through music, that the soul glimpses the splendor beyond the grave; and when an exquisite poem brings tears to the edge of the eyes, these tears are not the proof of an excess of enjoyment, they are rather the testimony of an irritated melancholy, of a postulation of the nerves of a nature exiled in the imperfect and which would like to seize immediately, on this earth, a revealed paradise.”

So, what has poetry to do with spirituality”? To recast St. Augustine: You have made us for yourself, Lord, and when poetry and music stir our hearts with irritated melancholy, we recognize that ultimately our rest lies in you alone.

Does God have a sense of humor?

June 30, 2025

Does God have sense of humor?

This may seem a frivolous or impious question, it’s anything but that. It’s an important question and a reverent one as well. Why? Because healthy humor and playful banter help bring joy, lightness of heart, and healthy perspective into our lives. Can we imagine all that wonderful lightness of heart having no connection to God?

Does God have a sense of humor? For sure! Without doubt! Jesus teaches that God is the author of all good things. Humor, playfulness, and healthy banter are good, healthy things. They can have their ultimate origin only in God.

Why are they good things? What positive role do they play in our lives?

Freud once suggested that sometimes we can understand things more clearly by looking at their opposites. What are the opposites of humor, playfulness, and banter? We see their opposite in three things: over-seriousness, needless irritation, and pomposity (none of which are healthy).

Consider this example: I have lived almost my entire adult life within a religious community of men, and by and large it has been positive and life-giving. But among the (literally) hundreds of men with whom I have shared community over more than fifty years, there have sometimes been confreres who were over-serious and their presence in the community room or at table could sometimes effectively rob the room of joy.

I recall one such incident at table where someone shared a rather earthy joke (spicy, though not in bad taste). Most of us responded with a hearty laugh, but as soon as the laughter died down, one of our confreres in a heavy and overly pious tone, asked: Would you tell a joke like that in front of the Blessed Sacrament? That not only ended the laughter in the room and injected a certain heaviness into our gathering, it also effectively drained the oxygen out of the room.

Over-seriousness, while not a moral deficiency, can leave us too raw before the demands of family and community to which we can never perfectly measure up. On the other hand, playfulness, humor, and banter, when healthy, can provide some important “grease” for family and community life.

For example, when you join a religious congregation you take a vow to live within a community (of men, in my case) for the rest of your life. Moreover, you don’t get to choose with whom you get to live. You are simply assigned to a community, which invariably will include some members whose temperament is very different from yours and with whom you would not normally choose to live.

Well, I have lived in this type of religious community for nearly sixty years and, with very few exceptions, it has been life-giving and enjoyable; mostly because I have been blessed nearly always to live in a community where part of our very ethos has been the daily exchange of humor, playfulness, and banter. Prayer and a common mission of course have been the main glue that held us together but humor, playfulness, and banter have been the grease that have kept petty tensions and the occupational hazard of pomposity at bay.

It’s interesting to note that the classical Greek philosophers understood love as having six components: Eros – infatuation and attraction; Mania – obsession; Asteismos – playfulness and banter; Storge – care; Philia – friendship; and Agape – altruism. When we define love we generally make room for most of those components, except Asteismos, playfulness and banter. We pay a price for that.

My Oblate novice master, a wonderful French-Canadian priest, once shared with us (a group of young novices) a joke with a purpose. It runs this way: a family was planning the wedding of their daughter but were unable to afford a venue for the festivities after the church service. So, the priest made them an offer: “Why don’t you use the entrance, the foyer, of the church? There’s enough room for a reception. Bring in a cake and have your reception there.” Things were fine, until the father of the bride asked the priest if they might bring liquor to the reception. The priest replied most emphatically, “Absolutely not! You may not have liquor in a church!” The father of the bride protested, “but Jesus drank wine at the wedding feast of Cana.” To which the priest replied, “But not in front of the Blessed Sacrament!”

This joke can serve as a parable, cautioning us vis-à-vis stripping God of humor and playfulness.

God has a sense of humor, a sense of playfulness, and a talent for banter far beyond that of our best comedians. How could it be otherwise? Can you imagine spending eternity in heaven without laughter and playfulness? Can you imagine a God who is perfect love, but with whom you would be afraid to joke and banter? Is the last laugh before we die to be our last laugh forever? No. God has a sense of humor which will without doubt be for all of us a delightful surprise.

What To Do When There’s Nothing You Can Do

June 23, 2025

What do you do when a wound or a loss leaves you hopelessly disconsolate and there’s nothing you can do to amend the situation?

As well, what do you do or say when you are trying to console someone who is paralyzed by loss? For example, what do you say to someone who is keeping vigil at the bedside of a loved one who is dying young? What do you say to someone who has just lost a loved one to suicide?

What do you do or say when you are helpless to do anything practical to amend a fractured situation?

The poet Rainer Marie Rilke once received a letter from a man who had just lost a loved one, was fighting despair, and was desperately searching for anything to keep his heart from breaking.

Rilke sent him these words: “Don’t be afraid to suffer—take your heaviness and give it back to the earth’s own weight; the mountains are heavy, the oceans are heavy.” (Sonnets to Orpheus) These words echo words from the Book of Lamentations (3,29) where the sacred author tells us that sometimes all you can do is to put your mouth to the dust and wait.

Sometimes all we can do is to put our mouths to the dust and wait!Sometimes we must give the heaviness of our grief back to the earth itself.

It’s curious that we can accept those words and the patience they ask for when the pain that afflicts us is physical rather than emotional and psychological. For instance, if we have an accident and suffer a badly broken leg, we simply accept that, no matter the frustration, we will be incapacitated for a number of weeks or months and there’s nothing that can be done about it. We simply must accept the situation and let nature take its course. To our detriment we don’t often accept emotional and psychological fractures in the same way. When our heart is broken, we want a fix in short order. We don’t want our heart on crutches or in a wheelchair for some weeks or months.

Well, not all losses and heartbreaks are the same. There are losses that are less paralyzing, where despite a bitter blow to the heart, there are already elements of consolation and healing present. We experience this, for example, at the funeral of a loved one who lived and died in such a way that, despite losing her to death, at a deeper level we already feel a certain peace, even in her departure.

But there are losses where, for a period afterwards, there is no consolation and there are no words (however true and faith-filled they may be) which take away the bitterness and pain of our loss. For example, I have seen this at times at the funeral of someone who died by suicide. In that raw moment, there is nothing that we can do or say that will lift from the dust the hearts of the loved ones who are left behind and grieving. The words that are needed, words which express our faith and our hope, will be helpful later, but they lose their existential power when the grief is so raw.

I remember a funeral I attended several years ago. The woman to whom we were saying an earthly farewell had died of cancer, still young, in her early fifties. Understandably, her husband was disconsolate. At the reception after the church service, one of his close friends, trying to cheer him up, said to him: “She’s with God; she’s in a better place.” Despite being a man of faith and having just walked out of a church service that publicly celebrated that faith, his response was: “I know you mean well; but that’s the last thing I need to hear today.”

The words of faith we speak to each other in the face of bitter loss and death are true. This woman, no doubt, was in a better place. But in a moment of raw grief, words will not have much emotional or psychological impact.

So, what can we offer others in situations like these? What can others offer us when we are paralyzed by grief?

We can offer our helplessness, our muted selves, our inability to say or do anything that will take the heaviness away. And perhaps nothing is as fruitful in a tragic situation than the empathy that flows out of mutual helplessness. We might still utter the words of faith, but we need to accept that they will bear their full fruit only later.

What our grief-muted selves are saying in moments of helplessness is what both the Book of Lamentations and the poet Rilke are saying: Sometimes all you can do is to put your mouth to the dust and wait – and by doing that you will be giving your heaviness back to the earth itself. Paradoxically, the acceptance of heaviness can be the one thing that can lift our spirits.

Are You a Practicing Christian?

June 16, 2025

The Acts of the Apostles says that it was at Antioch that the followers of Jesus were first called “Christians”.

I once heard a challenging homily where the priest asked: “If you were put on trial and accused of being a Christian, would they find enough evidence to convict you?” An interesting question, without a simple answer. How exactly would we be judged? What might constitute hard evidence that we are Christians?

I grew up in a Roman Catholic culture that had certain agreed-upon criteria for what made you “a practicing Catholic”, namely: Do you go to church regularly? Are you keeping the Sixth Commandment? Is your married life in order? More recently, both Roman Catholics and other denominations have become fond of judging your Christian standing by your stance on certain moral issues like abortion or gay marriage.

What about Jesus, what did he teach in terms of what makes for a practicing Christian?

There is no simple answer. Jesus, the Gospels, and the rest of the New Testament are complex. For example, when teaching how we will ultimately be judged, Jesus doesn’t mention attending church, keeping the sixth commandment, or how we stand on abortion or gay marriage. He has only these criteria: Did you feed the hungry? Give drink to the thirsty? Welcome the refugee? Visit the sick? Visit prisoners?

What would the verdict be if these were the central criteria by which a jury judges us?

Then there is the Sermon on the Mount. Counselling us as to what it means to be his disciple, Jesus asks: Do you love those who hate you? Bless those who curse you? Do good to those who harm you? Forgive those who have hurt you? Forgive the one who kills you? Do you love beyond your innate instincts? Have you ever really turned the other cheek? Do you radiate God’s compassion which goes out equally to everyone, good and bad alike?

Again, how would our discipleship of Jesus stand up to judgment vis-à-vis these criteria?

However, there are other critical criteria about what does or does not make us practicing followers of Jesus.

One such criterion has to do with community. The scriptures tell us that God is love and whoever abides in love abides in God and God abides in that person. The word used here for love is “agape”, and in this context it might also be rendered as “shared existence”. God is shared existence, and everyone who shares his or her existence in community lives in God.

If that is true, and it is, then whenever we live inside of family and community, we are a “practicing Christian”. Of course, this may not be simplistically equated with explicit ecclesial community, with going to church, but it does hint strongly at belonging to a graced community. So, does going to church make me a practicing Christian?

Finally, there is another critical criterion. The earthly Jesus left us only one ritual, the Eucharist. On the night before he died, he instituted the Eucharist and told us to continue to celebrate it until he returns. For 2000 years we have been faithful to that invitation, we have kept the Eucharist going. According to the theologian Ronald Knox, this constitutes “our one great act of fidelity”, in that we haven’t always been faithful in other ways. Sometimes we haven’t turned the other cheek, haven’t loved our enemies, haven’t fed the hungry, and haven’t welcomed the refugee, but we have been faithful to Jesus in one critically important way: we have kept celebrating the Eucharist. We have been practicing Christians in at least one important way.

So, facing a jury set to judge whether we are a Christians or not, could the most telling evidence of all be that we regularly participate in the Eucharist? Could this single action convict us as being a practicing Christian?

Among all these potential criteria, which one makes for a practicing Christian?

Perhaps the more fruitful path toward an answer is not to weigh these criteria against each other to try to discern which is most important in determining what makes for a practicing Christian. Perhaps it is more fruitful to focus on the verb “practicing”.

To practice something doesn’t imply that you have mastered it, that you are proficient at it, not alone that you are perfect at it. It only means that you are working at it, trying to master the skill.

Given human nature, all of us have certain shortcomings in terms of measuring up to the demands of Christian discipleship. Like someone struggling to master a musical instrument or an athletic skill, we are all still practicing. Thus, to the extent that we are trying to get better at feeding the hungry, at welcoming the stranger, at loving our enemy, at radiating God’s wide compassion, at sharing our existence in community, and at being habitually at the table of the Eucharist, we are in fact practicing Christians.