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.

God as Holy, but also as Playful, Witty, and Erotic

June 9, 2025

God is the object of all desire, no matter how earthy and unholy our desire might seem. Everything we desire is inside of God. Both Jesus and the Psalms tell us this.

God is the object of all desire and only in God will our deepest longings be satisfied. We express this in our prayers, perhaps without ever being conscious of what we are saying: My soul longs for you in the night. You, Lord, alone, can fill my heart. We say those words, but is it really God that we long for in the night and ache for in our desires? Do we really believe that God is the object of our desires?

When we look at what’s beautiful, full of life, attractive, sexually alluring, and pleasurable on earth, do we really think and believe that this is contained in an infinitely richer way inside of God and inside the life into which God invites us? Do we really believe that the joys of heaven will surpass the pleasures of earth and that, already in this world, the joys of virtue are superior to the sensations of sin?

It is not easy to believe this because we struggle congenitally with turning our conscious attention toward God. Often we find religious practice and prayer more of a disruption to life than an entry into it, more a duty than a joy, more an asceticism than a pleasure, and more as something that takes us away from real life than as something that helps us enter its depths.

Moreover, if we are honest, we must admit that we often harbor a secret envy of those who recklessly plumb sacred energy for their own pleasure. Many of us doggedly do our duty in committing ourselves to something higher; but, like the older brother of the Prodigal Son, too often serve God out of obligation and are bitter about the fact that many others do not. This side of eternity, virtue often envies sin, and (full disclosure) this is particularly true regarding sexuality.

Partly this is natural and a sign of health, given the brute fact of our physicality and the weight of the present moment. These naturally impose themselves on us in a way that can make the things of God and spirit seem abstract and unreal. That’s simply the human condition and God, no doubt, understands. Only in certain graced, mystical moments are we affectively above this.

Thus, it can be helpful to more explicitly tease out something we profess in faith but struggle to actually believe, namely, that all that we find attractive, beautiful, irresistible, erotic, and pleasurable here on earth is found even more fully inside of its author, God.

If we believe that God is the author of all that is good, then God is better looking than any movie star, more intelligent than the brightest scientist or philosopher, wittier and funnier than the best comedian, more creative than any artist, writer, or innovator, more sophisticated than the most-learned person on earth, more exuberant and playful than any child, more dynamic than any rock star, and, not least, more erotic and sexually attractive than any person on earth.

We don’t ordinarily think about God this way, but the truth of that is given in Scripture and is codified in Christian dogma where, in essence, we are taught that God is one, true, good, and beautiful and is the author and ultimate source of all that is one, good, true, and beautiful. Which means that God is also witty, playful, and erotic. Everything that is alluring on earth is inside of God.

But knowing that does not take away the power of earthly things to allure, nor should it. Countless things can overwhelm us: a beautiful person, a sunset, a piece of music, a work of art, youthful exuberance, a child’s playfulness, a baby’s innocence, someone’s wit, feelings of intimacy, feelings of nostalgia, a glass of wine on the right evening, a stirring in our sexuality, or, most deeply of all, an inchoate sense of the uniqueness and preciousness of human life itself.

We need to honor these things and thank God for the gift, even as we make ourselves aware that all of this is found more-richly inside of God and that we lose nothing when virtue, religion, or commitment ask us to sacrifice these things for something higher. Jesus, himself, promises that whatever we give up for the sake of what is higher will be given back to us a hundredfold. Knowing this, we can live our lives enjoying fully what is earthy and earthly. The beauties and pleasures of this life are a gift from God, meant to be enjoyed. Moreover, by being aware of their source, we can then also be free enough to accept the very real limits that life puts on our desires. Better still, we need not fear death since what we will lose will be eclipsed a hundredfold by what we gain.

It is Better for You that I Go Away

June 2, 2025

It is better for you that I go away! These are some of Jesus’ parting words on the night before he died.

How can it be better for us when someone we love deeply goes away? That would make sense only if the relationship is dysfunctional or abusive. But how can that be true in a case where we love someone deeply and will painfully miss him or her?

The ascension of Jesus supplies the roots for an answer. He tells his disciples that it is better for them that he goes away because, if he doesn’t, they will be unable to receive his spirit. Why not? Why must he go away in order that those who love him can receive his spirit?

This plays on the mystery of presence and absence. We bring something to others with our presence, but we also leave something with them in our absence. In brief, what we leave in our absence is a new space within which they can receive our person more purely. This may sound hopelessly abstract, but we experience this in ordinary ways in our lives.

Here’s an example: Imagine a young woman, deeply loved by her parents, who has just graduated from high school and is leaving home to attend college, or train for the work force, or begin working in a job. Her childhood years are forever over and she senses it, as do her parents. There’s pain and sadness on both sides. She probably won’t have the words, but if she did, she could say to her parents what Jesus said to his loved ones as he spoke his words of farewell: It is better for you that I go away; otherwise you cannot receive my spirit.

Except, for her, the words would sound like this: It is better for you (and for me) that I go away; otherwise I will always be your little girl and will be unable to gift you with my adult presence. I need to go away so that my absence creates the space for me to come back to you as an adult.

Such is the mystery of presence and absence. Such too is the mystery of Jesus’ ascension, how new spirit can be recognized and received only after there has been an absence, a going away.

This is depicted powerfully in the scene in John’s Gospel where Mary Magdala meets the resurrected Jesus on Easter Sunday. Initially, she doesn’t recognize him; but, after she does, her immediate reaction is to embrace him in a familiar hug. However, Jesus stops her with the words, “Don’t cling to me because I have not yet ascended to my Father and to your Father.”

Why? Why is Jesus seemingly reluctant to receive a familiar embrace from a longtime friend?

The hesitancy has precisely to do with the familiarity. Mary wanted to welcome back her old Jesus, but this wasn’t her old Jesus. This was the resurrected Christ, who now had something new to give her. What Jesus was gently telling her when he asked her not to “cling” to him was that if she continued to cling to his old person, to the way she once had him, she would be unable to receive his new presence and what he was now bringing to her.

Mary Magdala’s attempt to embrace the risen Jesus is akin to loving parents who, having painfully missed their now adult daughter while she was away, welcome her home with a hug and the words: Our little girl is back home! Hearing these words, the daughter, whether she voices that or not, would need to say gently: If you cling to the little girl you once had, you will be unable to receive the riches which your adult daughter can now bring you.

This dynamic, how the painful absence of someone we love can transform their presence so that they can now nurture us in a deeper way, is the essence of the mystery of the ascension, Jesus’ ascension and our own.

Still, it’s hard not to cling. As we watch those around us change, grow, move away, and become something other than how we have always known and loved them, like Mary Magdala, it can have us both weeping in joy and regret: in joy to see our little girl now a vibrant adult woman; in regret because we have lost her in how we once had her as our beautiful little girl.

It is better for you that I go away. Jesus spoke those words on the night before he died. I was at the deathbed of both my father and my mother. Our family clung them. There was no way we believed that it was better for us that they were going away. It’s been fifty years now since they died and, painful as their leaving was, we realize they are now able to give us something we could not receive from them before they went away.

Scrutinizing our Motives

May 26, 2025

The main character in T.S. Eliot’s play Murder in the Cathedral is Thomas a Beckett, a bishop, who from every outward appearance is saint. He is scrupulously honest, generous to a fault, and a defender of the faith who dies as a martyr. Yet, at a certain point in his life, prior to his martyrdom, he recognizes that he might not be distinguishing between temptation and grace.

Many of us are familiar with how he famously expressed this:

The last temptation is the greatest treason:

To do the right deed for the wrong reason. …

For those who serve the greater cause

May make the cause serve them.

What’s the temptation here that can look like grace?

Simply put, we can be doing a lot of good for the wrong reasons. Moreover, this can be enormously subtle; not least in those of us who serve the greater cause, because, as T.S. Eliot points out, it is easy to make the cause serve us.

How can we make the cause serve us? How can we be doing good for the wrong reasons?

Here’s an example: I can be doing a lot of good things that help others and serve God’s purpose here on earth. I can be generous to the point of martyrdom. However, what if I am doing this (serving the greater cause) mainly because it makes me look good, makes me feel moral and righteous, draws respect, earns me praise and admiration, and will leave behind me a good name?

These questions probe the difference between temptation and grace. I can be doing the right things and, while not doing them for a bad reason, I can still for the most part be doing them for myself. I can be making the cause serve me more so than I am serving the cause.

The late Jesuit Michael J. Buckley (one of the major spiritual mentors in my life) pushes us to make a painful examination of conscience on this. Am I doing things to serve God and others or am I doing them to make myself look and feel good?

In his book What Do You Seek? The Questions of Jesus as Challenge and Promise, Buckley writes this: “For, in a thousand ways, those who serve the greater cause may make the cause serve them. This can be enormously subtle. Sometimes a nuance at the initial formulation of an action or of a life can work the unexpected twist, the unrealized but profound reorientation so that zeal masks a hidden but vicious ambition; it is hidden because ambition and zeal, however profoundly contradictory, can look initially so much alike. The desire to get something achieved can mix the intrinsic worth of a project with the reflected glory of the accomplishment.”

As a priest, in ministry for more than fifty years, I find this a particularly challenging prism through which to examine myself and my fifty plus years of ministry. How much have I served the greater cause and how much have I, blind to self, made it serve me? Who is the bigger winner here: God and the church or me and my good name?

Granted, motivation is tricky to discern and this side of eternity is rarely pure. We are a bundle of mixed motivations, some which serve others and some which serve ourselves; and, as Buckley astutely points out, initially they can look very much alike. Moreover, certain sayings of Jesus seem to suggest that sometimes explicit motivation is less important than actually doing the right thing.

For example, Jesus says that it is not necessarily those who say Lord, Lord who will enter the kingdom of heaven, but it is those who in fact do the will of the Father on earth who will enter the kingdom. (Matthew 7, 21) As well, in teaching that we will ultimately be judged on the basis of how we treated the poor (Whatsoever you do to the poor, you do to me), notice that neither group, those who did it right and those who did it wrong, knew explicitly what they were doing. They were rewarded or punished solely on the basis of their actions. (Matthew 25)

So, can we be doing the right things for the wrong reasons? And, indeed, if we are doing them for less than purely altruistic reasons (approval, respect, a good name, good feelings about ourselves) how bad is this? Does it denigrate or destroy the good we are doing? Is the desire for respect, a good name, and good feelings about ourselves genuinely at odds with altruism? Might the two befriend each other? Is God judging us more by our motivation than by our actions?

Am I serving the greater cause or am I having it serve me? That is a critical question for self-reflection. Why? Because it is easy to be blind to our own hypocrisy, even as it is just as easy to be too hard on ourselves.

Jesus – Checking our Emotions

May 19, 2025

There is a poignant scene in the series The Chosen which, irrespective of our reaction to it, demands reflection.

This is the scene: Just before curing Peter’s mother-in-law of a fever, Jesus has a private conversation with Peter’s wife. He begins by telling her that he knows how close they are to each other as husband and wife and then expresses his sympathy to her for the fact that his call has effectively taken Peter out of their house. Then in a gentle tone he asks her how she feels about this. Her answer assures him that, while there is pain, she (like her husband) will willingly make the sacrifice.

Among other things, this sheds light on the fact that when one individual (like Peter) leaves all to follow Christ, he doesn’t pay the cost alone. Those close to him also pay a price. What did it cost the wives of apostles when Jesus called their husbands?

Moreover, this incident (albeit expressed fictionally here) sheds some needed light on how Jesus is not indifferent to the emotional crucifixions we sometimes undergo in order to respond to his call. It assures us that Jesus understands and gives us divine permission not to feel guilty about the pain we feel.

No doubt many will challenge the value of this scene from The Chosen since it is not historical (in so far as we know) but merely a fictional creation. Did the historical Jesus ever have this kind of a conversation with Peter’s wife or the wife of any of his apostles?

However, whether or not this scene is historical is not the point here. The point is that Jesus would not have been callous or indifferent to the pain of the wives and others whom the apostles left behind to follow him.

Mostly we avoid probing this question because we tend to take too literally some of Jesus’ sayings about leaving behind father, mother, wife, and children to follow him. For example, at one point Jesus says this: “If you come to me but will not leave your family, you cannot be my follower. You must love me more than your father, mother, wife, children, brothers, and sisters—even more than your own life!” (Luke 14:25-27). Perhaps even colder and more callous in its literal expression, is this Gospel text: “He said to another man, ‘Follow Me.’ The man replied, ‘Lord, first let me go and bury my father.’ But Jesus told him, ‘Let the dead bury their own dead. You, however, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.’ Still another said, ‘I will follow You, Lord; but first let me bid farewell to my family.’ Jesus replied, ‘No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God.’” (Luke 9, 60-62)

It is easy to misunderstand what Jesus is saying here about not looking back while following him. The images he employs are stark, cold, and emotionally brutal. But these are images, not literal spiritual counsels. The hard, brute emotional choices that one must sometimes make in fidelity to the Gospels might aptly be named as emotional crucifixion. In choosing Jesus we also choose the cross and there is real death, and the pain involved here cannot be softened or explained away.

However, and this is crucial to grasp, the choices we make to renounce ourselves and give ourselves over in genuine self-sacrifice are not made at the psychological or emotional level. Those choices are made at a deeper level, a moral level, where something deeper than our emotions and feelings rules and can for the sake of a deeper meaning and a deeper happiness, override the emotional and the psychological. Thus, when Jesus says, if you come to me but will not leave your family, you cannot be my follower, he is addressing our deepest moral center, that place inside us where we ultimately choose right from wrong and meaning from emptiness. He is not addressing our emotions. He is not challenging us to an unhealthy emotional stoicism.

In challenging us to give up everything to become his disciple, Jesus is not dismissive of the emotional and psychological pain that this will cause us. When he invites us to take up his cross and follow him, he understands this will be an emotional crucifixion. But, in offering us the challenge, at the same time, he gives us permission to feel without guilt the brute affective pain of that choice on our emotions. He is not challenging us to a cold, inhuman stoicism, where for the love of God we are not supposed to feel the pain of losing precious relationships and precious freedoms. Like the Jesus in The Chosen, compassionately checking with Peter’s wife as to where her emotions were vis-à-vis what Jesus is asking of them, Jesus is offering each of us the challenge of self-renunciation and at the same time checking with us how we are dealing emotionally with it.