Recently a man came to me, asking for help.  He carried some deep wounds, not physical wounds, but emotional wounds to his soul.  What surprised me initially was that, while he was deeply wounded, he had not been severely traumatized either in childhood or adulthood. He seemed to have just had to absorb the normal bumps and bruises that everyone has to absorb: some belittling, some bullying, never being the favorite, dissatisfaction with his own body, unfairness within his family and siblings, career frustration, unfairness in his workplace, the sense of being chronically ignored, the sense of never being understood and appreciated, and the self-pity and lack of self-confidence that results from this.

But he was a sensitive man and the combination of all these seemingly little things left him, now in late mid-life, unable to be the gracious, happy Elder he wanted to be. Instead, by his own admission, he was chronically caught-up in a certain wounded self-absorption, namely, in a self-centered anxiety that brought with it the sense that life had not been fair to him. Consequently he was forever somewhat focused on self-protection and was resentful of those who could step forward openly in self-confidence and love. “I hate it,” he shared, “when I see persons like Mother Teresa and Pope John Paul speak so with such easy self-confidence about how big their hearts are. I always fill with resentment and think: ‘Lucky you!’ You haven’t had to put up with what I’ve had to put up with in life!”

This man had been through some professional therapy that had helped bring him to a deeper self-understanding, but still left him paralyzed in terms of moving beyond his wounds. “What can I do with these wounds?” he asked.

My answer to him, as for all of us who are wounded, is: Take those wounds to the Eucharist. Every time you go to a Eucharist, stand by an altar, and receive communion, bring your helplessness and paralysis to God, ask him to touch your body, your heart, your memory, your bitterness, your lack of self-confidence, your self-absorption, your weaknesses, your impotence.  Bring your aching body and heart to God. Express your helplessness in simple, humble words: Touch me. Take my wounds. Take my paranoia. Make me whole. Give me forgiveness. Warm my heart. Give me the strength that I cannot give myself.

Pray this prayer, not just when you are receiving communion and being physically touched by the body of Christ, but especially during the Eucharistic prayer because it is there that we are not just being touched and healed by a person, Jesus, but we are also being touched and healed by a sacred event. This is the part of the Eucharist we generally do not understand, but it is the part of the Eucharist that celebrates transformation and healing from wound and sin. In the Eucharist prayer we commemorate the “sacrifice” of Jesus, that is, that event where, as Christian tradition so enigmatically puts it, Jesus was made sin for us. There is a lot in that cryptic phrase. In essence, in his suffering and death, Jesus took on our wounds, our weaknesses, our infidelities, and our sins, died in them, and then through love and trust brought them to wholeness.

Every time we go to Eucharist we are meant to let that transforming event touch us, touch our wounds, our weaknesses, our infidelities, our sin, and our emotional paralysis and bring us to a transformation in wholeness, energy, joy, and love.

The Eucharist is the ultimate healer. There is, I believe, a lot of value in various kinds of physical and emotional therapies, just there is immeasurable value in 12-Step programs and in simply honestly sharing our wounded selves with people we trust. There is too, I believe, value in a certain willful self-effort, in the challenge contained in Jesus’ admonition to a paralyzed man: Take up your couch and walk! We should not allow ourselves to be paralyzed by hyper-sensitivity and self-pity. God has given us skin to cover our rawest nerves.

But, with that being admitted, we still cannot heal ourselves.  Therapy, self-understanding, loving friends, and disciplined self-effort can take us only so far, and it is not into full healing. Full healing comes from touching and being touched by the sacred. More particularly, as Christians, we believe that this touching involves a touching of the sacred at that place where it has most particularly touched our own wounds, helplessness, weaknesses, and sin, that place, where God “was made sin for us”. That place is the event of the death and rising of Jesus and that event is made available to us, to touch and enter into, in the Eucharistic prayer and in receiving the body of Christ in communion.

We need to bring our wounds to the Eucharist because it is there that the sacred love and energy that lie at the ground of all that breathes can cauterize and heal all that is not whole within us.

So much of life, particularly today, constitutes an unconscious conspiracy against reading. Lack of time, the pressure of our jobs, and electronic technology, among other things, are more and more putting books out of reach and out of mind. There is never enough time to read. The upside of this is that when I do find time to pick up a book this becomes a precious, cherished time. And so I try to pick books that I read carefully: I read reviews, listen to colleagues, and keep track of my favorite authors. I also try to make sure that my reading diet, each year, includes some spiritual books (including at least one historical classic), some biographies, some novels, and some essays.

Among the books that I read this year, these are the ones that touched me.  I cannot promise that they will touch you, but each of them left me with something.

Among books in spirituality 

Gil Bailie, God’s Gamble, The Gravitational Power of Crucified Love.  Bailie again takes up Rene Girard’s anthropology to shed some new light on how the cross of Christ is the most monumental moral and religious event in history. The text is very dense and (truthfully) a tough read, but its insights are exceptional.

Heather King, Shirt of Flame, A Year with Saint Therese of Lisieux. This book will make for a very good, private retreat for anyone struggling with an addiction or obsession, or just with mediocrity in his or her spiritual life.

Christophe Lebreton, Born From the Gaze of God, The Tibhirine Journal of Martyr Monk, 1993-1996. This is the diary of one of the Trappist monks who was martyred in Algeria in 1996. It is the intimate journal of a young man which chronicles how he moves from paralyzing fear to the strength for martyrdom.

Kathleen Dowling Singh, two books: The Grace in Dying and The Grace in Aging. According to Singh, the process of aging and dying is exquisitely calibrated to bring us into the realm of spirit. In these two remarkable books, she traces this out with the depth that, outside of the great classical mystics, I have not seen.

Christine M. Bochen, Editor, The Way of Mercy. This is a series of remarkable essays on mercy, including some by Pope Francis and Walter Kasper.

The Cloud of Unknowing. I finally had the chance to study this classic in some depth and it is, no doubt, the signature book on contemplation and centering prayer.

Among biographies and essays:

Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness of Things, Essays. These essays are dense, deep, robustly sane, and are Marilynne Robinson, the gifted novelist, at her religious best.

Michael N. McGregor, Pure Act, The Uncommon Life of Robert Lax. This is the biography of the man who was Thomas Merton’s closest soul-friend, lived out his life as a secular monk, and who carried his solitude at a very high and noble level. It will help re-awaken your idealism.

Fernando Cardenal, Faith and Joy, Memoirs of a Revolutionary Priest. This is a great read about an exceptional man, a priest and a Jesuit, who played a leading role in Daniel Ortega’s government in Nicaragua and was commanded by John Paul to step down. It is a private journal that tells the other side of what much of history has one-sidedly recorded about the struggles for justice in Latin America.

Daniel Berrigan, Essential Writings, Edited by John Dear. Daniel Berrigan died in late April of this year. His writings set the compass for what it means to be a Christian prophet, and this is an excellent selection of his writings.

Three books that deal with facing aging and dying:

Michael Paul Gallagher, Into Extra Time, Living Through the Final Stages of Cancer and Jottings along the Way. A man of faith and letters, Gallagher shares the journal he kept during the last nine months of his life, when he already knew he was dying.

Katie Roiphe, The Violet Hour, Great Writers at the End. How did a number of great writers, including Sigmund Freud, John Updike and Susan Sontag face terminal illness? This book tells us how.

Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air. This is a remarkable journal of a young doctor facing a terminal diagnosis that documents his courage, faith, and insight.

Three novels that I recommend:

Paula Hawkins, The Girl on the Train. This didn’t make for a great movie, but the book is a page-turner.

Ian McEwan, Nutshell and Edna O’Brien, The Little Red Chairs. The pedigree of these two authors alone is enough of a recommendation, but neither will disappoint you here.

A wildcard:

Kenneth Rolheiser, Dreamland and Soulscapes, A Prairie Love Story. Full disclosure, Kenneth is my brother and I lived through many of the stories he shares, so there is admittedly a huge bias here. But the book delivers on its title and will give you a more realistic sense of what it was like to grow up in a Little House on the Prairies.

Happy reading!

Whenever we have been at our best, as Christians, we have opened our churches as sanctuaries to the poor and the endangered. We have a long, proud history wherein refugees, homeless persons, immigrants facing deportation, and others who are endangered, take shelter inside our churches. If we believe what Jesus tells us about the Last Judgment in the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew’s Gospel, this should serve us well when we stand before God at the end.

Unfortunately our churches have not always provided that same kind of sanctuary (safety and shelter) to those who are refugees, immigrants, and homeless in their relationship to God and our churches. There are millions of persons, today perhaps the majority within our nations, who are looking for a safe harbor in terms of sorting out their faith and their relationship to the church. Sadly, too often our rigid paradigms of orthodoxy, ecclesiology, ecumenism, liturgy, sacramental practice, and canon law, however well-intentioned, have made our churches places where no such sanctuary is offered and where the wide embrace practiced by Jesus is not mirrored. Instead, our churches are often harbors only for persons who are already safe, already comforted, already church-observing, already solid ecclesial citizens.

That was hardly the situation within Jesus’ own ministry. He was a safe sanctuary for everyone, religious and non-religious alike. While he didn’t ignore the committed religious persons around him, the Scribes and Pharisees, his ministry always reached out and included those whose religious practice was weak or non-existent. Moreover, he reached out especially to those whose moral lives where not in formal harmony with the religious practices of the time, those deemed as sinners. Significantly too he did not ask for repentance from those deemed as sinners before he sat down at table with them. He set out no moral or ecclesial conditions as a prerequisite to meet or dine with him. Many repented after meeting and dining with him, but that repentance was never a pre-condition. In his person and in his ministry, Jesus did not discriminate. He offered a safe sanctuary for everyone.

We need today in our churches to challenge ourselves on this. From pastors, to parish councils, to pastoral teams, to diocesan regulators, to bishops’ conferences, to those responsible for applying canon and church law, to our own personal attitudes, we all need to ask: Are our churches places of sanctuary for those who are refugees, homeless, and poor ecclesially? Do our pastoral practices mirror Jesus? Is our embrace as wide as that of Jesus?

These are not fanciful ideals. This is the gospel which we can easily lose sight of, for seemingly all the right reasons. I remember a Diocesan Synod within which I participated some twenty years ago. At one stage in the process we were divided in small groups and each group was given the question: What, before all else, should the church be saying to the world today?

The groups returned with their answers and everyone, every single group, proposed as its first priority apposite what the church should be saying to the world some moral or ecclesial challenge: We need to challenge the world in terms of justice! We need to challenge people to pray more! We need to speak again of sin! We need to challenge people about the importance of going to church! We need to stop the evil of abortion! All of these suggestions are good and important. But none of the groups dared say: We need to comfort the world!

Handel’s Messiah begins with that wonderful line from Isaiah 40: “Comfort, comfort my people, says your God.” That, I believe, is first task of religion. Challenge follows after that, but may not precede it. A mother first comforts her child by assuring it of her love and stilling its chaos. Only after that, in the safe shelter produced by that comfort, can she begin to offer it some hard challenges to grow beyond its own instinctual struggles.

People are swayed a lot by the perception they have of things. Within our churches today we can protest that we are being perceived unfairly by our culture, that is, as narrow, judgmental, hypocritical, and hateful. No doubt this is unfair, but we must have the courage to ask ourselves why this perception abounds, in the academy, in the media, and in the popular culture. Why aren’t we being perceived more as “a field hospital” for the wounded, as is the ideal of Pope Francis?

Why are we not flinging our churches doors open much more widely? What lies at the root of our reticence? Fear of being too generous with God’s grace? Fear of contamination? Of scandal?

One wonders whether more people, especially the young and the estranged, would grace our churches today if we were perceived in the popular mind precisely as being sanctuaries for searchers, for the confused, the wounded, the broken, and the non-religious, rather than as places only for those who are already religiously solid and whose religious search is already completed.

People are forever predicting the end of the world. In Christian circles this is generally connected with speculation around the promise Jesus made at his ascension, namely, that he would be coming back, and soon, to bring history to its culmination and establish God’s eternal kingdom. There have been speculations about the end of the world ever since.

This was rampant among the first generation of Christians. They lived inside a matrix of intense expectation, fully expecting that Jesus would return before many of them died. Indeed, in John’s Gospel, Jesus assures his followers that some of them would not taste death until they had seen the kingdom of God. Initially this was interpreted to mean that some of them would not die before Jesus returned and the world ended.

And so they lived with this expectation, believing that the world, at least as they knew it, would end before their deaths. Not surprisingly this led to all kinds of apocalyptic musings: What signs would signal the end? Would there be massive alterations in the sun and the moon? Would there be great earthquakes and wars across the world that would help precipitate the end? Generally though the early Christians took Jesus’ advice and believed that it was useless and counterproductive to speculate about the end of the world and about what signs would accompany the end. The lesson rather, they believed, was to live in vigilance, in high alert, ready, so that the end, whenever it would come, would not catch them asleep, unprepared, carousing, and drunk.

However, as the years moved on and Jesus did not return their understanding began to evolve so that by the time John’s Gospel is written, probably about seventy years after Jesus’ death, they had begun to understand things differently: They now understood Jesus’ promise that some of his contemporaries would not taste death until they had seen the kingdom of God as being fulfilled in the coming of the Holy Spirit. Jesus was, in fact, already back and the world had not ended. And so they began to believe that the end of the world was not necessarily imminent.

But that didn’t change their emphasis on vigilance, on staying awake, and on being ready for the end.  But now that invitation to stay awake and live in vigilance was related more to not knowing the hour of one’s own death. As well, more deeply, the invitation to live in vigilance began to be understood as code for God’s invitation to enter into the fullness of life right now and not be lulled asleep by the pressures of ordinary life, wherein we are consumed with eating and drinking, buying and selling, marrying and giving in marriage. All of these ordinary things, while good in themselves, can lull us to sleep by keeping us from being truly attentive and grateful within our own lives.

And that’s the challenge that comes down to us: Our real worry should not be that the world might suddenly end or that we might unexpectedly die, but that we might live and then die, asleep, that is, without really loving, without properly expressing our love, and without tasting deeply the real joy of living because we are so consumed by the business and busy pressures of living that we never quite get around to fully living.

Hence being alert, awake, and vigilant in the biblical sense is not a matter of living in fear of the world ending or of our lives ending. Rather it is a question of having love and reconciliation as our chief concerns, of thanking, appreciating, affirming, forgiving, apologizing, and being more mindful of the joys of living in human community and within the sure embrace of God.

Buddha warned against something he called, “slouching”.  We slouch physically when we let our posture break down and become slothful. Any combination of tiredness, laziness, depression, anxiety, tension, over-extension, or excessive pressure can bring down our guard and make our bodies slouch.  But that can also happen to us psychologically and morally. We can let a combination of busyness, pressure, anxiety, laziness, depression, tension, and weariness break down our spiritual posture so that, in biblical terms, we “fall asleep”, we cease being vigilant, we are no longer alert.

We need to be awake spiritually, not slouching. But the end of the world shouldn’t concern us, nor should we worry excessively about when we will die. What we should worry about is in what state our dying will find us. As Kathleen Dowling Singh puts in her book, The Grace in Aging: “What a waste it would be to enter the time of dying with the same old petty and weary thoughts and reactions running through our mind.”

But, still, what about the question of when the world will end?

Perhaps, given the infinity of God, it will never end. Because when do infinite creativity and love reach their limit? When do they say: “Enough! That’s all! These are the limits of our creativity and love!”

Atheism is a parasite that feeds on bad religion. That’s why, in the end, atheistic critics are our friends. They hold our feet to the fire.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Feuerbach, and Karl Marx, for example, submit that all religious experience is ultimately psychological projection. For them, the God we believe in and who undergirds our churches is, at the end of the day, simply a fantasy we have created for ourselves to serve our own needs. We have created God as opium for comfort and to give ourselves divine permission to do what we want to do.

They’re largely correct, but partially wrong, and it’s in where they’re wrong that true religion takes it root. Admittedly, they’re right in that a lot of religious experience and church life is far from pure, as is evident in our lives. It’s hard to deny that we are forever getting our own ambitions and energies mixed up with what we call religious experience. That’s why, so often, we, you and I, sincere religious people, don’t look like Jesus at all: We’re arrogant where we should be humble, judgmental where we should be forgiving, hateful where we should be loving, self-concerned where we should be altruistic, and, not least, spiteful and vicious where we should be understanding and merciful. Our lives and our churches often don’t radiate Jesus. Atheism is a needed challenge because far too often we have our own life force confused with God and our own ideologies confused with the Gospel.

Fortunately, God doesn’t let us get away with it for long. Rather, as the mystics teach, God inflicts us with a confusing, painful grace called, a dark night of the soul. What happens in a dark night of the soul is that we run out of gas religiously in that the religious experiences that once sustained us and gave us fervor dry up or get crucified in a way that leaves us with no imaginative, affective, or emotional sense of either God love or of God’s existence.  No effort on our part can again conjure up the feelings and images we once had about God and the security we once felt within ourselves about our faith and religious beliefs. The heavens empty and inside of ourselves we feel agnostic, as if God didn’t exist, and we are no longer able to create an image of God that feels real to us. We become helpless inside of ourselves to generate a sense of God.

But that’s precisely the beginning of real faith. In that darkness, when we have nothing left, when we feel there is no God, God can begin to flow into us a pure way. Because our interior religious faculties are paralyzed we can no longer manipulate our experience of God, fudge it, project ourselves into it, or use it to rationalize divine permission for our own actions. Real faith begins at the exact point where our atheistic critics think it ends, in darkness and emptiness, in religious impotence, in our powerlessness to influence how God flows into us.

We see this clearly in the life of Mother Teresa. As seen in her diaries, for the first twenty-seven years of her life she had a deep, felt, imaginative, affective sense of God in her life. She lived with a rock-like certainty about God’s existence and God’s love. But at age twenty-seven, praying on a train one day, it was as if someone turned off some switch that connected her to God. In her imagination and her feelings, the heavens emptied. God, as she had known him in her mind and feelings, disappeared.

But we know the rest of the story: She lived out the next sixty years of her life in a faith that truly was rock-solid and she lived out a dedicated, selfless commitment that would disempower even the strongest atheistic critic from making the accusation that her religious experience was selfish projection and that her practice of religion was not essentially pure. In her religious darkness, God was able to flow into her in essential purity; unlike for so many of us where a faith-life that’s clearly self-serving belies a belief that we are listening to God and not to ourselves.

Even Jesus, in his humanity, had to undergo this darkness, as is evident in Gethsemane and his cry of abandonment on the cross. After his agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, we are told that an angel came and strengthened him. Why, we might ask, didn’t the angel come earlier when seemingly he most needed the help? God’s assistance couldn’t come until he was completely spent in terms of his own strength; his humanity wouldn’t have let the divine flow in purely but would have inserted itself into the experience. He had to be completely spent of his own strength before the divine could truly and purely flow in. So too for us.

Dark nights of faith are needed to wash us clean because only then can the angel come to help us.

There’s nothing simple about being a human being.  We’re a mystery to ourselves and often our own worst enemies. Our inner complexity befuddles us and, not infrequently, stymies us. Nowhere is this truer than in our struggle with love and intimacy.

More than anything else, we hunger for intimacy, to be touched where we are most tender, where we are most ourselves, where all that’s most precious in us lies, vulnerable and yearning.  Yet, in the actual face of intimacy, sensitive people often become disquieted and resistant.

We see two powerful instances of this in the Gospels: The first in a story, recorded in all four Gospels, where a woman enters a room where Jesus is dining and, in a series of lavish gestures, breaks an expensive bottle of perfume, pours the perfume onto his feet, washes his feet with her tears, dries them with her hair, and then begins to kiss his feet. What’s the response of those in the room, save for Jesus? Discomfort and resistance. This shouldn’t be happening!  Everyone shifts uncomfortably in their chairs in the face of this raw expression of love and Jesus, himself, has to challenge them to look at the source of their discomfort.

Among other things, he points out that, ironically, what they are uncomfortable with is what lies at the very center of life and at the very center of their deepest desires, namely, the pure giving and receiving of love and affection. It’s this, Jesus affirms, for which we are alive and it’s this experience which prepares us for death. It’s what we are alive for. It’s also what we most yearn for? So why our discomfort and resistance when we actually face it in life?

The second instance occurs in John’s Gospel where, at the Last Supper, Jesus tries to wash his disciples’ feet. As John records it, Jesus got up from the table, stripped off his outer robe, took a basin and towel, and began to wash his disciples’ feet. But he meets discomfort and resistance, clearly voiced by Peter who simply tells Jesus: “Never! You will never wash my feet!”

Why? Why the resistance? Why resistance in the face of the fact that, no doubt, more than anything else, what Peter most deeply desired was exactly that Jesus should wash his feet, that he would enjoy this kind of intimacy with Jesus?

Answering the question of our struggle with intimacy in this context provides one clue for why we sometimes become uncomfortable and resistant when we are in the actual face of what we desire so deeply. Our feet are too-intimate; they’re a part of our bodies where we worry about dirt and smell, not a part of ourselves that we feel comfortable having others touch. There’s an innate vulnerability, a discomfort, an inchoate shame, attached to having someone else touch and wash so intimate a part of us. Intimacy demands an ease which our vulnerability sometimes renders impossible. And so this text speaks to one kind of resistance to intimacy, to a particular unease within certain circumstances.

But Peter’s resistance here speaks too of something else, something more salient:  If we are healthily and sensitive, we all will naturally experience a certain discomfort and resistance in the face of raw gift, before raw intimacy, before raw gratuity.  And, while this is something to be overcome, it’s not a fault, a moral or psychological flaw on our part.  On the contrary, in its normal expression, it’s a sign of moral and psychological sensitivity.  Why do I say this?

Why is something that seems to block us from moving towards the very essence of life not a sign that there’s something fundamentally wrong inside of us? I suggest that it’s not a flaw but rather a healthy mechanism inside us because narcissistic, boorish, and insensitive persons are often immune to this discomfort and resistance. Their narcissism shields them from shame and their callousness allows them an easy and brute ease with intimacy, like someone who is sexually jaded  enough to be comfortable with pornography or like someone who takes intimacy as something to be had by right, casually or even aggressively.  In this case, there’s no shame or discomfort because there’s no real intimacy.

Sensitive people, on the other hand, struggle with the rawness of intimacy because genuine intimacy, like heaven, is not something that can be glibly or easily achieved. It’s a lifelong struggle, a give and take with many setbacks, a revealing and a hiding, a giving over and a resistance, an ecstasy and a feeling of unworthiness, an acceptance that struggles with real surrender, an altruism that still contains selfishness, a warmth that sometimes turns cold, a commitment that still has some conditions, and a hope that struggles to sustain itself.

Intimacy isn’t like heaven. It is salvation. It is the Kingdom. Thus, like the Kingdom, both the road and the gate towards it are narrow, not easily found. So be gentle, patient, and forgiving towards others and self in that struggle.

Thirty-four years ago when I launched this column, I would never have said this: Restlessness is not something to be cultivated, no matter how romantic that might seem. Don’t get Jesus confused with Hamlet, peace with disquiet, depth with dissatisfaction, or genuine happiness with the existential anxiety of the artist. Restlessness inside us doesn’t need to be encouraged; it wreaks enough havoc all on its own.

But I’m a late convert to this view. From earliest childhood through mid-life, I courted a romance with restlessness, with stoicism, with being the lonely outsider, with being the one at the party who found it all too superficial to be real.  Maybe that contributed to my choosing seminary and priesthood; certainly it helps explain why I entitled this column, In Exile. For most of my life, I have equated restlessness with depth, as something to be cultivated,

This came naturally to me and all along the way I’ve found powerful mentors to help me carry my solitude in that way. During my high school years, I was intrigued with Shakespeare’s, Hamlet. I virtually memorized it. Hamlet represented depth, intensity, and romance; he wasn’t a beer-drinker.  For me, he was the lonely prophet, radiating depth beyond superficiality.

In my seminary years I graduated to Plato (“We are fired into life with a madness that comes from the gods and has us believe that we can achieve a great embrace, make ourselves immortal, and contemplate the divine”); to Augustine (“You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you”); to John of the Cross (We go through life fired by love’s urgent longings); to Karl Rahner (“In the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable, we learn that here in this life there is no finished symphony”). Reading these thinkers helped me put my youthful romanticism under a high symbolic hedge.

Alongside these spiritual writers, I was much influenced by a number of novelists who helped instill in me the notion that life is meant to be lived with such an inner intensity and high romanticism so as to preclude any simple satisfaction in life’s normal, everyday pleasures and domestic joys. For me, Nikos Kazantzakis’ characters radiated a passion that made them virtually godlike and irresistibly enviable, even as they struggled not to self-destruct; Iris Murdoch described loves that were so obsessive, and yet so attractive, as to make everything outside of them unreal; and Doris Lessing and Albert Camus seduced me with images of an inner disquiet that made ordinary life seem flat and not worthwhile. The idea grew in me that it was far nobler to die in unrequited longing than to live in anything else. Better dead in intensity that alive in domestic normalcy. Restlessness was to be encouraged.

And much in our culture, especially in the arts and the entertainment industry, foster that temptation, namely, to self-define as restless and to identify this disquiet with depth and with the angst of the artist. Once we define ourselves in this way, as complex, incurable romantics, we have an excuse for being difficult and we also have an excuse for betrayal and infidelity.  For now, in the words of a song by The Eagles, we are restless spirits on an endless flight. Understandably, then, we fly above the ordinary rules for life and happiness and our complexity is justification enough for whatever ways we act out.  As Amy Winehouse famously self-defines: “I told you I was troubled, and you know that I’m no good.” Why should anyone be mystified by our refusal of normal life and ordinary happiness?

There’s something inside us, particularly when we are young, that tempts us towards that kind of self-definition. And, for that time in our lives, when we’re young, I believe, it’s healthy. The young are supposed to overly-idealistic, incurably romantic, and distrustful of any lazy fall into settling for second-best. As Doris Lessing puts it, there’s only one real sin in life and that’s calling second-best by anything other than what it is, second-best!  My wish is that all young people would read Plato, Augustine, John of the Cross, Karl Rahner, Nikos Kazantzakis, Iris Murdoch, Doris Lessing, Jane Austin, and Albert Camus.

But, except for authors such as Plato, Augustine, John of the Cross and Karl Rahner, who integrate that insatiable restlessness and existential angst into a bigger, meaningful narrative, we should be weary of defining ourselves as restless and cultivating that. High romanticism will only serve us well if we eventually set it within a self-understanding that doesn’t make restlessness an end in itself. Just feeling noble won’t bring much peace into our lives and, as we age and mature, peace does become the prize.  Romeo, Juliet, Hamlet, Zorba the Greek, Doctor Zhivago, and the other such mega-romantic figures on our screens and in our novels can enflame our romantic imaginations, but they aren’t in the end images for the type of intimacy that makes for a permanent meeting of hearts inside the body of Christ.

I was blessed to grow up in a very sheltered and safe environment. My childhood was lived inside of a virtual cocoon. In the remote, rural, first-generation, immigrant community I grew up in, we all knew each other, all went to the same church, all belonged to the same political party, all were white, all came from the same ethnic background, all shared the same accent when we spoke English, all had a similar slant on how we understood morality, all shared similar hopes and fears about the outside world, and all worshipped God quite confidently from inside that cocoon. We knew we were special in God’s eyes.

There’s a wonderful strength in that, but also a pejorative underside.  When there are no real strangers in your life, when everyone looks like you do, believes what you do, and speaks like you do, when your world is made up of only your own kind, it’s going to take some painful subsequent stretching, at some very deep parts of your soul, to accept, existentially accept, and be comfortable with the fact, that people who are very different from you, who have different skin colors, speak different languages, live in different countries, have different religions, and have a different way of understanding things are just as real and precious to God as you are.

Of course not everyone has a background like mine, but I suspect most everyone also struggles to accept, beyond our too-easy espousal of how open we are, that all lives in the world are equally as precious to God as is our own.  It is hard for us to believe that we, and our own kind, are not specially blessed and are not of more value than others. There are lots of reasons for that.

First, there’s our innate narcissism: Simply put, we cannot not feel that our own reality is more real and more precious than that of others; after all, as Rene Descartes put it, classically and forever, the only thing we can know for sure is that we are real, that our joys and pains are real. We may be dreaming everything else. Beyond that natural narcissism, other things begin play in: Blood, language, country, and religion are thicker than water. Consequently our own kind always seem more real to particularly apposite race, country and us. Too many of us live with the notion that God has blessed our race and country more than God has blessed other races and countries and that we are special in God’s eyes. That’s a dangerously false and unchristian notion, directly contrary to the Judeo-Christian scriptures. God doesn’t value some races and some countries more than others.

Where might we go with all of this, given that it’s hard to see how everyone else’s life is as real and precious as our own? How do we bring out hearts to existentially accept a truth that we espouse with our lips, namely, that God loves everyone equally, with no exceptions?

We might begin by admitting the problem, by admitting that our natural narcissism and propensity for tribalism do block us from seeing others’ lives as being as real and precious as our own. Very particularly, I suggest, we need to look at our false patriotism. We aren’t special as a nation, at least no more special than any other nation.  Our dreams, our heartaches, our headaches, our joys, our pains, our deaths, do not count more before God than those of persons in other places in the world, perhaps even less, since God has a preferential option for the poor. The lives of the hundreds of thousands of present-day refugees, so easy to lump into one mass of anonymity to which we can accord abstract sympathy, are just as precious as those of our own children; perhaps more so, given the truth of our scriptures about God taking flesh in the excluded ones. Today they may be the people of manifest destiny, the ones carrying God’s special blessing.

As well, and importantly, we must also correct our bad theologies. The God whom Jesus revealed and incarnated may never be turned into a God of our own, a God who considers us more precious and gifted than other peoples, a God who blesses us specially above others. Sadly, we are perennially prone to turn God into our own tribal deity, in the name of family, blood, church, and country. God too easily becomes our God. But true faith doesn’t allow for that. Rather a healthy and orthodox Christian theology teaches that God is especially present in the other, in the poor and in the stranger. God’s revelation comes to us most clearly through the outsider, through what’s foreign to us, through what stretches us beyond our comfort zone and our expectations, particularly our expectations regarding God.

God is everyone’s God equally, not especially ours, and God is too great to be reduced to serving the interests of family, ethnicity, church, and patriotism.