“Why did early Christianity alight on the ideal of virginity, when an intelligent or even just a suspicious Roman could see that its adoption would undermine the very fabric of ancient society?” That’s a comment from historian Kate Cooper and it poses some questions worth examining.

Does the single state, celibacy, (vowed or otherwise) undermine something inside the fabric of society? Is it somehow a statement against marriage? Does it go against something within nature itself where there is an innate imperative to “increase and multiply”?

The latter question is easier to answer. The human race has now exceeded eight billion. There is much less need to ensure that there are enough people in the world to ensure our biological survival. In former times, indeed in biblical times, there was a strong, quasi-sacred imperative that people marry and have children. Remaining unmarried was looked upon negatively, as an abnormality. Nature is not being honored or fulfilled here. Why is this person not doing his or her duty in terms of having children? That’s one of the reasons why Jesus’ choice of celibacy stands out as something abnormal in his world.

Next, does single life, celibacy, somehow speak against marriage? Does it, simply by definition, undermine the fabric of society? Doesn’t God, at the creation of the human race, pronounce that it is not good for the human person to be alone?

That question deserves more than a hurried answer. God did say this, and God meant it. We are meant to live inside family, in community, and not live alone. Thus, the single life has its dangers. Thomas Merton was once asked by a journalist what it was like to live as a celibate. His answer: It’s hell. You live in a loneliness that God Himself condemned. But, then he quickly added that this was a loneliness that could be very fruitful.

Still the question remains, is the single life, celibacy, somehow a statement against marriage? It can be. Choosing not to be married can be a statement that marriage isn’t the best way to live, that it is a container (a prison) which unhealthily restricts human freedom and human maturity. Single life in that instance (which is then often far from celibate) is a statement against marriage.

Healthy marriage and healthy single life in fact support each other. There’s an axiom which says: If you are here faithfully, you bring us health and support. If you are here unfaithfully, you bring us restlessness and chaos.

Fidelity in either marriage or in celibacy is a marathon with temptations of every kind along the way. It demands the capacity to sweat blood at times to remain faithful to what you have promised and to what is best in you. But it needs the support and witness of others. In neither vocation are you meant to go it alone, to be the lonely, stoic, ascetic hero. You are meant instead to be buoyed up and held by the support and faithful witness of others.

Thus, when a celibate sees fidelity being lived out inside a marriage, it becomes easier for him or her to remain faithful inside celibacy. Conversely, when a celibate sees infidelity inside of a marriage, he or she feels more isolated and alone inside celibacy and lacks a certain grace (which comes through witness) to sweat blood in terms of being faithful inside of celibacy.

The same dynamic holds true for a married person. If he or she sees a celibate faithfully and fruitfully living inside the single life, he or she is graced through that witness to find both some insight and strength to be true to his or her commitment. Conversely, if a married person sees a celibate living unfaithfully, he or she will lack a special grace that comes from witnessing fidelity which can help him or her sweat the blood that is sometimes required in order to remain faithful in a commitment.

As curious as this may sound, Marriage and Celibacy need each other. We need each other’s witness. We need to see, and feed off, each other’s fidelity.

And that’s true beyond just seeing each other being faithful. There’s a deeper reality undergirding this, a mystical one. As Christians, we believe that we are all part of one body, the Body of Christ, and that our unity there is not simply a corporate one (one team). Rather we are an organic unity, all part of one living organism. Hence, what one part does affects all the parts. If we are faithful, we are a healthy part of the immune system inside the Body of Christ. If we are unfaithful, in either marriage or celibacy, we are an unhealthy virus, a cancer cell, inside the body.

For Christians, there is no such a thing as a private act. We are either a healthy enzyme or an unhealthy virus inside a single body, where our fidelity or infidelity affects everyone else.

And so, we need each other’s fidelity – in marriage and in celibacy.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.