The Dangers in Being a Warrior Prophet

November 21, 2016

A prophet makes a vow of love, not of alienation. Daniel Berrigan wrote those words and they need to be highlighted today when a lot of very sincere, committed, religious people self-define as cultural warriors, as prophets at war with secular culture.

This is the stance of many seminarians, clergy, bishops, and whole denominations of Christians today. It is a virtual mantra within in the “Religious Right” and in many Roman Catholic seminaries. In this outlook, secular culture is seen as a negative force that’s threatening our faith, morals, religious liberties, and churches. Secular culture is viewed as, for the main part, being anti-Christian, anti-ecclesial, and anti-clerical and its political correctness is seen to protect everyone except Christians. More worrisome for these cultural warriors is what they see as the “slippery slope” wherein they see our culture as sliding ever further away from our Judeo-Christian roots. In the face of this, they believe, the churches must be highly vigilant, defensive, and in a warrior stance.

Partly they’re correct. There are voices and movements within secular culture that do threaten some essentials within our faith and moral lives, as is seen in the issue of abortion, and there is the danger of the “slippery slope”. But the real picture is far more nuanced than this defensiveness merits. Secularity, for all its narcissism, false freedoms, and superficiality, also carries many key Christian values that challenge to us to live more deeply our own principles. Moreover the issues on which they challenge us are not minor ones. Secular culture, in its best expressions, is a powerful challenge to everyone in the world to be more sensitive and more moral in the face of economic inequality, human rights violations, war, racism, sexism, and the ravaging of Mother Nature for short-term gain. The voice of God is also inside secular culture.

Christian prophecy must account for that. Secular culture is not the anti-Christ. It ultimately comes out of Judeo-Christian roots and has inextricably embedded within its core many central values of Judeo-Christianity. We need then to be careful, as cultural warriors, to not blindly be fighting truth, justice, the poor, equality, and the integrity of creation. Too often, in a black-and-white approach, we end up having God fighting God.

A prophet has to be characterized first of all by love, by empathy for the very persons he or she is challenging. Moreover, as Gustavo Gutierrez teaches, our words of challenge must come more out of our gratitude than out of our anger, no matter how justified the anger. Being angry, being in someone else’s face, shredding those who don’t agree with us with hate-filled rhetoric, and winning bitter arguments, admittedly, might be politically effective sometimes. But all of these are counter-productive long term because they harden hearts rather than soften them. True conversion can never come about by coercion, physical or intellectual. Hearts only change when they’re touched by love.

All of us know this from experience. We can only truly accept a strong challenge to clean up something in our lives if we first know that this challenge is coming to us because someone loves us, and loves us enough to care for us in this deep way. This alone can soften our hearts. Every other kind of challenge only works to harden hearts. So before we can effectively speak a prophetic challenge to our culture we must first let the people we are trying to win over know that we love them, and love them enough to care about them in this deep way. Too often this is not the case. Our culture doesn’t sense or believe that we love it, which, I believe, more than any other factor renders so much of our prophetic challenge useless and even counter-productive today.

Our prophecy must mirror that of Jesus: As he approached the city of Jerusalem shortly before his death, knowing that it inhabitants, in all good conscience, were going to kill him, he wept over it. But his tears were not for himself, that he was right and they were wrong and that his death would make that clear. His tears were for them, for the very ones who opposed him, who would kill him and then fall flat on their faces. There was no glee that they would fall, only empathy, sadness, love, for them, not for himself.

Father Larry Rosebaugh OMI, one of my Oblate confreres who spent his priesthood fighting for the peace and justice and was shot to death in Guatemala, shares in his autobiography how on the night before his first arrest for civil disobedience he spent the entire night in prayer and in the morning as he walked out to do the non-violent act that would lead to his arrest, was told by Daniel Berrigan: “If you can’t do this without getting angry at the people who oppose you, don’t do it! This has to be an act of love.”

Prophecy has to be an act of love; otherwise it’s merely alienation.

Why Dark Nights of the Soul?

November 14, 2016

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.

The Real Presence

November 7, 2016

When I was a graduate student in Belgium, I was privileged one day to sit in on a conference given by Cardinal Godfried Danneels of Brussels. He was commenting on the Eucharist and our lack of understanding of it full richness when he highlighted this contrast: If you stood outside of a Roman Catholic church today as people were coming out of the church and asked them: “Was that a good Eucharist?”, most everyone would answer on the basis of the homily and the music. If the homily was interesting and the music lively, most people would answer that it had been a good Eucharist. Now, he continued, if you had stood outside a Roman Catholic church sixty or seventy years ago and asked: “Was that a good mass today?” nobody would have even understood the question. They would have answered something to the effect of: “Aren’t they all the same!”

Today our understanding of the Eucharist, in Roman Catholic circles and indeed in most Protestant and Anglican circles, is very much concentrated on three things: the liturgy of the Word, the music, and communion. Moreover, in Roman Catholic churches, we speak of the real presence only in reference to the last element, the presence of Christ in the bread and wine.

While none of this is wrong, the liturgy of the word, the music, and communion are important, something is missing in this understanding. It misses the fact that the real presence is not just in the bread and wine, it is also in the liturgy of the Word and in the salvific event that is recalled in the Eucharistic prayer, namely, the death and resurrection of Jesus.

Most churchgoers already recognize that when the scriptures are celebrated in a liturgical service God’s presence is made special, more physically tangible, than God’s normal presence everywhere or God’s presence inside our private prayer. The Word of God, when celebrated in a church is, like Christ’s presence in the consecrated bread and wine, also the real presence.

But there’s a further element that’s less understood: The Eucharist doesn’t just make a person present; it also makes an event present. We participate in the Eucharist not just to receive Christ in communion, but also to participate in the major salvific event of his life, his death and resurrection.

What’s at issue here?

At the Last Supper, Jesus invited his followers to continue to meet and celebrate the Eucharist “in memory of me”. But his use of the word “memory” and our use of that word are very different. For us “memory” is a weaker word. It simply means calling something to mind, remembering an event like the birth of your child, your wedding day, or the game when your favorite sports team finally won the championship. That’s a simple remembering, a passing recollection. It can stir deep feelings but it does nothing more. Whereas in the Hebrew concept out of which Jesus was speaking, memory, making ritual remembrance of something, implied much more than simply recalling something. To remember something was not simply to nostalgically recall it. Rather it meant to recall and ritually re-enact it so as to make it present again in a real way.

For example, that’s how the Passover Supper is understood within Judaism. The Passover meal recalls the Exodus from Egypt and the miraculous passing through the Red Sea into freedom. The idea is that one generation, led by Moses, did this historically, but that by re-enacting that event ritually, in the Passover Meal, the event is made present again, in a real way, for those at table to experience.

The Eucharist is the same, except that the saving event we re-enact so as to remake it present through ritual is the death and resurrection of Jesus, the new Exodus. Our Christian belief here is exactly the same as that of our Jewish brothers and sisters, namely, that we are not just remembering an event, we are actually making it present to participate in. The Eucharist, parallel to a Jewish Passover meal, remakes present the central saving event in Christian history, namely, Jesus’ Passover from death to life in the Paschal mystery. And just as the consecrated bread and wine give us the real presence of Christ, the Eucharist also gives us the real presence of the central saving event in our history, Jesus’ passage from death to life.

Thus at a Eucharist, there are, in effect, three real presences: Christ is really present in the Word, namely, the scriptures, the preaching, and the music. Christ is really present in the consecrated bread and wine; they are his body and blood. And Christ is really present in a saving event: Jesus’ sacrificial passing from death to life.

And so we go to Eucharist not just to be brought into community by Jesus’ word and to receive Jesus in communion, we go there too to enter into the saving event of his death and resurrection. The real presence is in both a person and in an event.

Our Resistance to Love

October 31, 2016

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.

Boredom – A Fault within Ourselves

October 24, 2016

In 2011, a book by a young writer, Bieke Vandekerckhove, won the award as The Spiritual Book of the Year in her native Belgium. Entitled, The Taste of Silence, the book chronicles her own struggles after being diagnosed at age nineteen with ALS, commonly called Lou Gehrig’s disease, a degenerative neurological condition that always results in a massive debilitation of one’s body and almost always results in death not long afterwards. Not an easy diagnosis for a vibrant young woman to accept.

But, after a deep, initial depression, she found meaning in her life through meditation, silence, literature, art, poetry, and, not least, through a relationship that eventually led to marriage. Unexpectedly too her disease went into remission and she lived for another twenty years. Among the many rich insights she shares with us, she offers an interesting reflection on boredom.

Discussing the prevalence of boredom today, she highlights an irony, namely, that boredom is increasing among us even as we are daily producing every kind of gadget to help us avoid it. Given that today we carry in our hands technological devices that link us to everything from the world news of the day to photos of our loved ones playing with their children, shouldn’t we be insulated against boredom? Ironically, the opposite seems true. All those technological gadgets are not alleviating our boredom. Why not? We still wrestle with boredom because all the stimulation in the world doesn’t necessarily make for meaning. Meaning and happiness, she suggests, do not consist so much in meeting interesting people and being exposed to interesting things; rather they consist in taking a deeper interest in people and things.

The word interest is derived from two Latin words: inter (inside) and esse (being) which, when combined, connote being inside of something. Things are interesting to us when we are interested enough in them to really get inside of them. And our interest isn’t necessarily predicated on how naturally stimulating something is in itself, though admittedly certain events and experiences can be so powerful as to literally conscript our interest. That’s what explains our strong interest in major world events, championship sports matches, Academy Award celebrations, as well as our less-than-healthy obsession with the private lives of our celebrities. Certain persons, things, and events naturally interest us and we want to be on the “inside” of those lives and events.

But major world news stories, championship sporting events, the Academy Awards, and the private lives of our celebrities are not our ordinary fare, our family dinner table, our workplace, our commute to work, our church service, our neighborhood bake-sale, our daily routine, our daily bread. And it’s here where we tend to suffer boredom because it’s here that we tend to not be deeply inside the reality of the people and events with whom and with which we are interacting. It’s here that we often feel life as flat, dull, and routine. But, at the end of the day, we wrestle with boredom not because our families, workplaces, colleagues, neighbors, churches, and friends aren’t interesting. We’re bored because we’re too internally impoverished, distracted, or self-centered to take a genuine interest in them. Experience is not what happens to us, it’s what we do with that happens to us. So says Einstein.

Vandekerckhove highlights yet another irony: It’s ironic that we tend to wrestle with boredom and dullness when we are in the full bloom of our lives, healthy and working; whereas people like her, who have lost their health and are staring death in the face, often find the most ordinary experiences in life exhilarating.

Her insights bear a lot of resemblance to those of Rainer Maria Rilke in his, Letters to a Young Poet. Like Vandekerckhove, he too suggests that boredom is a fault on our side, a disinterested eye. In his correspondence with an aspiring young poet, he takes up the young man’s complaint that he, the young man, wasn’t enough exposed to the kind of experiences that spawn poetry because lived in a small town where nothing exciting ever seemed to happen. He went on to confess that he envied Rilke who traveled extensively throughout Europe and met all kinds of interesting people. For him, Rilke’s poetic insights were very much predicated on the fact that he hung out in big cities, met interesting people, and was stimulated in ways that a young man in a small town could never hope to approximate.

Rilke’s reply to this young man has become a classic answer to the question of boredom: “If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place.”

Finding life interesting isn’t dependent upon where you are and who you meet but rather on your own capacity to see deeply into things. Life everywhere is rich enough to be interesting; but we, on our part, have to be interested.

On not Cultivating Restlessness

October 17, 2016

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.

Contemplative Prayer

October 10, 2016

Contemplative prayer, as it is classically defined and popularly practiced, is subject today to considerable skepticism in a number of circles. For example, the method of prayer, commonly called Centering Prayer, popularized by persons like Thomas Keating, Basil Bennington, John Main, and Laurence Freeman is viewed with suspicion by many people who identify it with anything from “New Age”, to Buddhism, to “Self-Seeking”, to atheism.

Admittedly not all of its adherents and practitioners are free from those charges, but certainly its true practitioners are. Understood and practiced correctly this method of prayer, which allows for some variations in its practice, is in fact the form of prayer which the Desert Fathers, John of the Cross, and the author of the Cloud of Unknowing call Contemplation.

What is contemplation, as defined within this classical Christian tradition? With apologies to the tradition of Ignatius of Loyola, who formats things differently, but is very much in agreement with this definition, contemplation is prayer without images and imagination, that is, prayer without the attempt to concentrate one’s thoughts and feelings on God and holy things. It is a prayer so singular in its intention to be present to God alone that it refuses everything, even pious thoughts and holy feelings so as to simply sit in darkness, in a deliberate unknowing, within which all thoughts, imaginations, and feelings about God are not fostered or entertained, as is true for all other thoughts and feelings. In the words of The Cloud of Unknowing, it is a simple reaching out directly towards God.

In contemplative prayer, classically understood, after a brief, initial act of centering oneself in prayer, one simply sits, but sits inside the intention of reaching out directly towards God in a place beyond feeling and imagination where one waits to let the unimaginable reality of God breakthrough in a way that subjective feelings, thoughts, and imaginations cannot manipulate.

And it is precisely on this point where contemplative prayer is most often misunderstood and criticized. The questions are: Why shouldn’t we try to foster and entertain holy thoughts and pious feelings during prayer, isn’t that what we’re trying to do in prayer? How can we be praying when we aren’t doing anything, just sitting? Isn’t this some form of agnosticism? How do we meet a loving, personal God in this? Isn’t this simply some form of transcendental meditation which can be used as a form of self-seeking, a mental yoga? Where’s Jesus in this?

I will let the author of The Cloud of Unknowing reply to this: “It would be very inappropriate and a great hindrance to a man who ought to be working in this darkness and in this cloud of unknowing, with an affective impulse of love to God himself alone, to permit any thought or any meditation of God’s wonderful gifts, kindness or his work in any of his creatures, bodily or spiritual, to rise up in his mind so as to press between him and his God, even if they be very holy thoughts, and give him great happiness and consolation. … For as long as the soul dwells in this mortal body, the clarity of our understanding in the contemplation of all spiritual things, and especially of God, is always mixed up with some sort of imagination.” We cannot imagine God, we can only know God.

In essence, the idea is that we may never mistake the icon for the reality. God is ineffable and consequently everything we think or imagine about God is, in effect, an icon, even the words of scripture itself are words about God and not the reality of God. Admittedly icons can be good, so long as they are understood precisely as icons, as pointing to a reality beyond themselves; but as soon as we take them for the reality, our perennial temptation, the icon becomes an idol.

The difference between meditation and contemplation is predicated on this: In meditation we focus on icons, on God as God appears in our thoughts, imagination, and feelings. In contemplation, icons are treated as idols, and the discipline then is to sit in a seeming darkness, beneath a cloud of unknowing, to try to be face to face with a reality which is too big to grasp within our imagination. Meditation, like an icon, is something that is useful for a time, but ultimately we are all called to contemplation. As the Cloud of Unknowing puts it: “For certainly, he who seeks to have God perfectly will not take his rest in the consciousness of any angel or any saint that is in heaven.”

Karl Rahner agrees: “Have we tried to love God in those places where one is not carried on a wave of emotional rapture, where it is impossible to mistake oneself and one’s life-force for God, where one accepts to die from a love that seems like death and absolute negation, where one cries out in an apparent emptiness and an utter unknown?”

That, in short, is contemplative prayer, authentic centering prayer, as a discipline.

The Struggle to not make God our Own Tribal Deity

October 3, 2016

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.

Software, Moral Formatting, and Living in Sin

September 26, 2016

While I was doing graduate studies in Belgium, I lived at the American College in Leuven. On staff there at the time, in the housekeeping and maintenance department, was a wonderfully colorful woman whose energy brought oxygen into a room but whose history of marriage somewhat paralleled that of the Samaritan woman in John’s Gospel. None of us knew for sure how often she’d been married and the man she was living with at the time was not her husband.

One day an Archbishop was visiting the College and there was a formal reception line of which she was part. The Archbishop would shake each person’s hand and engage him or her in a brief exchange. When he came to her, she gave him her name and told him what she did at the college. He shook her hand and, by way of greeting and conversation, asked her: “Are you married?” She wasn’t quite prepared for that question. She stammered a bit and replied: “Yes, no, well, kind of.” Then, breaking into a grin, said: “Actually, your Grace, I’m living in sin!” To his credit, the Archbishop grinned as well. He got what she was saying, not just her words, but too the nuance that her grin conveyed.

Living in sin. Acts that are inherently disordered. What’s Catholic moral theology trying to say with this kind of concept when so many people today, including many Roman Catholics, find such concepts unintelligible and offensive?

To the credit of classical Roman Catholic moral teaching, these concepts have an intelligibility and a palatability inside a certain moral framework within which their proper meaning and nuance is predicated on the overall system. In a simpler language, they make sense within that system. In today’s language, classical Roman Catholic moral theology might be compared to a highly specialized software; indeed one which was honed, nuanced, and upgraded through centuries so that, as a system, it has smooth internal coherence. The problem, though, is that today so much of our culture and so many of our churches no longer use, nor understand how to use, that software. As a consequence, its formatting and language are misunderstood and can appear offensive. Not everyone, like the Archbishop just described, has a sense of humor about this.

So what’s to be done? How do we move forward? Do we simply abandon a lot of classical moral teachings because so many people today are taking offense at its concepts and language?

Admittedly it’s a huge problem, with a lot of sincere people weighing-in very differently on the issue, as was seen at the recent Synod in Rome on Marriage and Family Life. How do we hold authentic Christian moral ground and, at the same time, properly account for the actual, existential reality of millions and millions of people, including many of our own families and children? How do we name the moral reality of people who are living in situations that, while clearly life-giving, are not in line with Christian principles? How do we name the moral reality of so many of our own children and loved ones who are living with partners to whom they are not married, but are drawing life from that relationship? How do we name the moral situation of a gay couple whose relationship is clearly life-giving? And how do we name the moral situation of the Samaritan woman and the woman I mentioned earlier who, while irregular in terms of the Church’s teaching on marriage, bring life, joy, and oxygen into a room? Are they living in sin? Does their situation include some intrinsic evil?

We need a new software within moral theology to answer those questions, or at least to format them in a language that our culture understands and can be challenged by. And it won’t be a simple or easy task, as the tensions and polarizations within our churches and at our dinner tables highlight. The task is to hold our moral ground, challenge a culture which no longer understands or accepts our former way of understanding these things, and yet, at the same time, not bend the truth to the times, nor the Gospel to the world, even as we better name the moral situation within which so much of our world and so many of our loved ones find themselves.

The truth sets us free, but God often works through crooked lines. I’m a student of classical moral theology and truly believe in its principles, even as I am daily humbled and challenged by the love, grace, faith, and wonderful oxygen I see flowing out of people whose situations are “irregular”. How can the good be bad? At this stage in time, along with many of the rest of you, I suspect, I am forced to stay with the ambiguity, to live the question.

We need a new software, a new way of morally formatting things, a new way of holding truth in empathy, a new way of holding the essential within the existential.

Indulgences Revisited

September 19, 2016

When Pope Francis launched the Holy Year of Mercy, he promised that Christians could gain a special indulgence during this year. That left a lot of present-day Roman Catholics, and even more Protestants and Evangelicals, scratching their heads and asking some hard questions: Is Roman Catholicism still dealing in indulgences? Didn’t we learn anything from Luther and the Reformation? Do we really believe that certain ritual practices, like passing through designated church doors, will ease our way into heaven?

These are valid questions that need to be asked. What, indeed, is an indulgence?

Pope Francis in his decree, The Face of Mercy, (Misericordiae Vultus), says this about indulgences: “A Jubilee also entails the granting of indulgences. This practice will acquire an even more important meaning in the Holy Year of Mercy. God’s forgiveness knows no bounds. In the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God makes even more evident his love and its power to destroy all human sin. Reconciliation with God is made possible through the paschal mystery and the mediation of the Church. Thus God is always ready to forgive, and he never tires of forgiving in ways that are continually new and surprising. Nevertheless, all of us know well the experience of sin. We know that we are called to perfection (Mt. 5, 48), yet we feel the heavy burden of sin. Though we feel the transforming powered of grace, we also feel the effects of sin typical of our fallen state. Despite being forgiven, the conflicting consequences of our sins remain. In the Sacrament of Reconciliation, God forgives our sins, which he truly blots out; and yet sin leaves a negative effect on the way we think and act. But the mercy of God is stronger even than this. It becomes an indulgence on the part of the Father who, through the Bride of Christ, his Church, reaches the pardoned sinner and frees him from every residue left by the consequence of sin, enabling him to act in charity, to grow in love rather than to fall back into sin.

The Church lives within the communion of the saints. In the Eucharist, this communion, which is a gift from God, becomes a spiritual union binding us to the saints and the blessed ones whose number is beyond counting (Rev. 7, 14). Their holiness comes to the aid of our weaknesses in a way that enables the Church, with her maternal prayers and her way of life, to fortify the weakness of some with the strength of others. Hence, to live the indulgence of the Holy Year means to approach the Father’s mercy with the certainty that his forgiveness extends to the entire life of the believer. To gain an indulgence is to experience the holiness of the Church, who bestows upon all the fruits of Christ’s redemption, so that God’s love and forgiveness may extend everywhere. Let us live this Jubilee intensely, begging the Father to forgive our sins and to bathe us in his merciful ‘indulgence’’’.

What’s the pope saying here? Clearly, he’s not teaching what has been for so long the popular (and inaccurate notion) that an indulgence is a way of shortening one’s time in purgatory. Rather he is tying the idea of indulgences to two things: First, an indulgence is the acceptance and celebration of the wonderful gratuity of God’s mercy. An indulgence is, in effect, the more-conscious acceptance of an indulgence, that is, the conscious acceptance of a love, a mercy, and a forgiveness, that is completely undeserved. Love can be indulgent. Parents can be indulgent to their children. Thus whenever we do a prayer or religious practice with the intent of gaining an indulgence the idea is that this prayer or practice is meant to make us more consciously aware of and grateful for God’s indulgent mercy. We live within an incredulous, ineffable mercy of which we are mostly unaware. During the Holy Year of Mercy, Pope Francis invites us to do some special prayers and practices that make us more consciously aware of that indulgent mercy.

Beyond this, Pope Francis links the notion of indulgences to another concept, namely, our union and solidarity with each other inside the Body Christ. As Christians, we believe that we are united with each other in a deep, invisible, spiritual, and organic bond that is so real that it forms us into one body, with the same flow of life and the same flow of blood flowing through all of us. Thus inside the Body of Christ, as in all live organisms, there is one immune system so that what one person does, for good or for bad, affects the whole body. Hence, as the pope asserts, since there is a single immune system inside the Body of Christ, the strength of some can fortify the weakness of others who thereby receive an indulgence, an undeserved grace.

To walk through a holy door is make ourselves more consciously aware of God’s indulgent mercy and of the wonderful community of life within we live.

From Paranoia to Metanoia

September 12, 2016

Sometimes we’re a mystery to ourselves, or, perhaps more accurately, sometimes we don’t realize how much paranoia we carry within ourselves. A lot of things tend to ruin our day.

I went to a meeting recently and for most of it felt warm, friendly towards my colleagues, and positive about all that was happening. I was in good spirits, generative, and looking for places to be helpful. Then, shortly before the meeting ended, one of my colleagues made a biting comment which struck me as bitter and unfair. Immediately a series of doors began to close inside me. My warmth and empathy quickly turned into hardness and anger and I struggled not to obsess about the incident. Moreover the feelings didn’t pass quickly. For several days a coldness and paranoia lingered inside me and I avoided any contact with the man who had made the negative comments while I stewed in my negativity.

Time and prayer eventually did their healing, a healthier perspective returned, and the doors that had slammed shut at that meeting opened again and metanoia replaced my paranoia.

It’s significant that the first word out of Jesus’ mouth in the Synoptic Gospels is the word, metanoia. Jesus begins his ministry with these words: “Repent [metanoia] and believe in the good news” and that, in capsule, is a summary of his entire message. But how does one repent?

Our English translations of the Gospels don’t do justice to what Jesus is saying here. They translate, metanoia, with the word, repent. But, for us, the word repent has different connotations from what Jesus intended. In English, repentance implies that we have done something wrong and must regretfully disavow ourselves of that action and begin to live in a new way. The biblical word, metanoia, has much wider connotations.

The word, metanoia, comes from two Greek words: Meta, meaning above; and Nous, meaning mind. Metanoia invites us to move above our normal instincts, into a bigger mind, into a mind which rises above the proclivity for self-interest and self-protection which so frequently trigger feelings of bitterness, negativity, and lack of empathy inside us. Metanoia invites us to meet all situations, however unfair they may seem, with understanding and an empathic heart. Moreover, metanoia stands in contrast to paranoia. In essence, metanoia is “non-paranoia”, so that Jesus’ opening words in the Synoptic Gospels might be better rendered: Be un-paranoid and believe that it is good news. Live in trust!

Henri Nouwen, in a small but deeply insightful book entitled, With Open Hands, describes wonderfully the difference between metanoia and paranoia. He suggests that there are two fundamental postures with which we can go through life. We can, he says, go through life in the posture of paranoia. The posture of paranoia is symbolized by a closed fist, by a protective stance, by habitual suspicion and distrust. Paranoia has us feeling that we forever need to protect ourselves from unfairness, that others will hurt us if we show any vulnerability, and that we need to assert our strength and talents to impress others. Paranoia quickly turns warmth into cold, understanding into suspicion, and generosity into self-protection.

The posture of metanoia, on the other hand, is seen in Jesus on the cross. There, on the cross, we see him exposed and vulnerable, his arms spread in a gesture of embrace, and his hands open, with nails through them. That’s the antithesis of paranoia, wherein our inner doors of warmth, empathy, and trust spontaneous slam shut whenever we perceive a threat. Metanoia, the meta mind, the bigger heart, never closes those doors.

Some of the early church fathers suggested that all of us have two minds and two hearts. For them, each of us has big mind and a big heart. That’s the saint in us, the image and likeness of God inside us, the warm, generative, and empathic part of us. All of us harbor a true greatness within. But each of us also has within us a petty mind and a petty heart. That’s the narcissistic part of us, the wounded part, the paranoid part that turns self-protective and immediately begins to close the doors of warmth and trust whenever we appear threatened. Such is our inner complexity. We are both big-hearted and petty, open-minded and bigoted, trusting and suspicious, saint and narcissist, generous and hording, warm and cold. Everything depends upon which heart and which mind we are linked to and operating out of at any given moment. One minute we are willing to die for others, a minute later we would see them dead, one minute we want to give ourselves over in love, a minute later we want to use our gifts to show our superiority over others. Metanoia and paranoia vie for our hearts.

Jesus, in his message and his person, invites us to metanoia, to move towards and stay within our big minds and big hearts, so that in the face of a stinging remark our inner doors of warmth and trust do not close.

Feeding off Life’s Sacred Fire

September 5, 2016

See the wise and wicked ones
Who feed upon life’s sacred fire

These are lines from Gordon Lightfoot’s song, Don Quixote, and they highlight an important truth, both the wise and the wicked feed off the same energy. And it’s good energy, sacred energy, divine energy, irrespective of its use. The greedy and the violent feed off the same energy as do the wise and the saints. There’s one source of energy and, even though it can be irresponsibly, selfishly, and horrifically misused, it remains always God’s energy.

Unfortunately, we don’t often think of things that way. Recently I was listening to a very discouraged man who, looking at the selfishness, greed, and violence in our world, blamed it all on the devil. “It must be the anti-Christ,” he said, “How else do you explain all this, so many people breaking basically every commandment. “

He’s right in his assessment that the selfishness, greed, and violence we see in our world today are anti-Christ (though perhaps not the Anti-Christ spoken of in scripture). However he’s wrong about where selfishness, greed, and violence are drawing their energy from. The energy they are drawing upon comes from God, not from the devil. What we see in all the negative things that make up so much of the evening news each day is not evil energy but rather the misuse of sacred energy. Evil deeds are not the result of evil energies but the result of the misuse of sacred energy. Whether you consider the devil a person or a metaphor, either way, he has no other origin than from God. God created the devil, and created him good. His wickedness results from the misuse of that goodness.

All energy comes from God and all energy is good, but it can be wickedly misused. Moreover, it’s ironic that the ones who seem to drink most deeply from the wellsprings of divine energy are, invariably, the best and the worst, the wise and the wicked, saints and sinners. These mainline the fire. The rest of us, living in the gap between saints and sinners, tend to struggle more to actually catch fire, to truly drink deeply from the wellsprings of divine energy. Our struggle isn’t so much in misusing divine energy, but rather in not succumbing to chronic numbness, depression, fatigue, flatness, bitterness, envy, and the kind of discouragement which has us going through life lacking fire and forever protesting that we have a right to be uncreative and unhappy. Great saints and great sinners don’t live lives of “quiet desperation”; they drink deeply sacred energy, become inflamed by that fire, and make that the source for either their extraordinary wisdom or their wild wickedness.

This insight, saints and sinners feed off the same source, isn’t just an interesting irony. It’s an important truth that can help us better understand our relationship to God, to the things of this world, and to ourselves. We must be clear on what’s good and what’s bad, otherwise we end up both misunderstanding ourselves and misunderstanding the energies of our world.

A healthy spirituality needs to be predicated on a proper understanding of God, ourselves, the world, and the energies that drive our world and these are the non-negotiable Christian principles within which we need to understand ourselves, the world, and the use of our energies: First, God is good, God is the source of all energy everywhere, and that energy is good. Second, we are made by God, we are good, and our nature is not evil. Finally, everything in our world has been made by God and it too is good.

So where do sin and evil enter? They enter in when we misuse the good energy that God has given us and they enter in when we relate in bad ways to the good things of creation. Simply put: We are good and creation around us is good, but we can relate to it in the wrong way, precisely through selfishness, greed, or violence. Likewise, our energies are good, including all those energies that underlie our propensity towards pride, greed, lust, envy, anger, and sloth; but we can misuse those energies and draw upon life’s sacred fire in very self-serving, lustful, greedy, and wicked ways.

Sin and evil, therefore, arise out of the misuse of our energies, not out of the energies themselves. So, too, sin and evil arise out of how we relate to certain things in the world, not out of some inherent evil inside of our own persons or inside of the things themselves. The wicked aren’t evil persons drawing energy from the devil. They’re good people, irresponsibly and selfishly misusing sacred energy. The energy itself is still good, despite its misuse.

We don’t tap into evil energies when we give in to greed, lust, envy, sloth, or anger. No, rather we misuse the good and sacred energy within which we live and move and have our being. The wise and wicked both feed off the same sacred fire.

Utopia, With Limits

August 29, 2016

When I was a child there was a popular song whose chorus repeated this line: Everyone is searching for Utopia. And we all are. Every one of us longs for a world without limits, for a life where nothing goes wrong, for a place where there’s no tension or frustration. But it never happens. There’s no such place.

Anahid Nersessian recently wrote a book entitled, Utopia, Limited: Romanticism and Adjustment, within which she criticizes various ideologies for, naively, giving the impression that we can have a world without limits. She particularly blames liberal ideology which, she submits, privileges limitlessness by setting “itself, almost by default, against the governing and guiding of desire.” But, as she argues in the book, limitation is what’s life-giving. We will find happiness only when we accommodate ourselves to the world by minimizing the demands we place on it. For Nersessian, if Utopia is to be had, it will be had only by finding the realistic limits of our lives and adjusting ourselves to them. Over-expectation makes for disappointment.

She’s right. Believing there’s a world without limits makes for unrealistic expectations and a lot of frustration. By thinking we can find Utopia, we invariably set up the perfect as the enemy of the good; thus habitually denigrating our actual relationships, marriages, careers, and lives because they, unlike our fantasies, perpetually have limits and therefore always seem second-best.

Nersessian tends to blame liberal ideology for giving us this impression, but the unrealistic dream and expectation of Utopia is most everywhere in our world. In effect, we no longer have, either in our churches or in our world, the symbolic tools to properly explain or handle frustration. How so?

When I was a child, my head didn’t just reverberate with the tune, Everyone is Looking for Utopia, it was also reverberated with a number of other tunes I’d learned in church and in the culture at large. Our churches then were teaching us about something it called, “original sin”, the belief that a primordial fall at the origins of human life has, until the end of time, flawed both human nature and nature itself in such a way that what we will meet and experience in this life will always be imperfect, limited, somewhat painful, and somewhat frustrating.

Sometimes this was understood in an overly simplistic way and sometimes it left us wondering about the nature of God, but nonetheless it gave us a vision within which to understand life and handle frustration. At the end of the day, it taught us that, this side of eternity, there’s no such a thing as a clear-cut, pure joy. Everything has a shadow. Happiness lies in accepting these limits, not in stoic resignation, but in a practical, buoyant vision that, because it has already incorporated limit and has no false expectations, lets you properly receive, honor, and enjoy the good things in life. Since the perfect cannot be had in this life, you then give yourself permission to appreciate the imperfect.

This religious vision was re-enforced by a culture which also told us that there was no Utopia to be had here. It told us instead that, while you may dream high and you may expect to live better than your parents did, don’t expect that you can have it all. Life cannot deliver that to you. Like its religious counterpart in its explanation of original sin, this secular wisdom too had its over-simplistic and flawed expressions. But it helped imprint in us some tools with which to more realistically understand life. It told us, in its own flawed way, a truth that I have often quoted from Karl Rahner: In the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable we ultimately learn that, here in this life, there is no finished symphony. How succinct and how accurate!

It’s interesting to note how this religious view is paralleled in the atheistic view of Rahner’s contemporary, the Nobel-Prize winning writer, Albert Camus. Camus, who did not believe in God, famously proposed an image within which to understand human life and its frustrations: He compared this world to a medieval prison. Some medieval prisons were deliberately built to be too small for the prisoner, with a ceiling so low that the prisoner could never stand fully upright and the room itself too small for the prisoner to ever stretch out fully. The idea was that the frustration of not being able to stand up or stretch out fully would eventually break the prisoner’s spirit, like a trainer breaking a horse. For Camus, this is our experience of the world. We can never stand fully upright and or stretch out fully. The world is too small for us. While this may seem severe, stoic, and atheistic; in the end, it teaches the same truth as Christianity, there’s no Utopia this side of eternity.

And we need, in healthy ways, to be integrating this truth into lives so as to better equip ourselves to handle frustration and appreciate the lives that we are actually living.

God’s Nature – Exuberance or the Cross?

August 22, 2016

It’s funny where you can learn a lesson and catch a glimpse of the divine. Recently, in a grocery store, I witnessed this incident:

A young girl, probably around 16 years of age, along with two other girls her own age, came into the store. She picked up a grocery basket and began to walk down the aisle, not knowing that a second basket was stuck onto the one she was carrying. At a point the inevitable happened, the basket stuck to hers released and crashed to the floor with a loud bang, startling her and all of us around her. What was her reaction? She burst into laughter, exuding a joy-filled delight at being so startled. For her the surprise of the falling basket was not an irritation but a gift, an unexpected humor happily fracturing dram routine.

If that had happened to me, given how I’m habitually in a hurry and easily irritated by anything that disrupts my agenda, I would probably have responded with a silent expletive rather than with laughter. Which made me think: Here’s a young girl who probably isn’t going to church and probably isn’t much concerned about matters of faith, but who, in this moment, is wonderfully radiating the energy of God, while, me, a vowed religious, over-serious priest, church-minister and spiritual writer, in such a moment, too often radiate the antithesis of God’s energy, irritation.

But is this true? Does God really burst in laughter at falling grocery baskets? Doesn’t God ever get irritated? What’s God’s real nature?

God is the unconditional love and forgiveness that Jesus reveals, but God is also the energy that lies at the base of everything that is. And that energy, as is evident in both creation and scripture, is, at its root, creative, prodigal, robust, joy-filled, playful, and exuberant. If you want to know that God is like look at the natural exuberance of children, look at the exuberance of a young puppy, look at the robust, playful energy of young people, and look at the spontaneous laughter of sixteen-year-old when she is startled by a falling basket. And to see God’s prodigal character, we might look at billions and billions of planets that surround us. The energy of God is prodigal and exuberant.

Then what about the Cross? Doesn’t it, more than anything else, reveal God’s nature? Isn’t it what shows us God? Isn’t suffering the innate and necessary route to maturity and sanctity? So isn’t there a contradiction between what Jesus reveals about the nature of God in his crucifixion and what scripture and nature reveal about God’s exuberance?

While there’s clearly a paradox here, there’s no contradiction. First, the tension we see between the cross and exuberance is already seen in the person and teachings of Jesus. Jesus scandalized his contemporaries in opposite ways: He scandalized them in his capacity to willingly give up his life and the things of this world, even as he scandalized them equally with his capacity to enjoy life and drink in its God-given pleasures. His contemporaries weren’t able to walk with him while he carried the cross and they weren’t able to walk with him either as he ate and drank without guilt and felt only gift and gratitude when a woman anointed his feet with expensive perfume.

Moreover, the joy and exuberance that lie at the root of God’s nature are not to be confused with the bravado we crank up at parties, carnival, and Mardi Gras. What’s experienced there is not actual delight but, instead, a numbing of the brain and senses induced by frenzied excess. This doesn’t radiate the exuberance of God, nor indeed does it radiate the powerful exuberance that sits inside us, waiting to burst forth. Carnival is mostly an attempt to keep depression at bay. As Charles Taylor astutely points out, we invented carnival because our natural exuberance doesn’t find enough outlets within our daily lives, so we ritualize certain occasions and seasons where we can, for a time, imprison our rationality and release our exuberance, as one would free a caged animal. But that, while serving as a certain release-valve, is not the ideal way to release our natural exuberance.

When I was a child, my parents would often warn me about false exuberance, the exuberance of wild partying, false laughter, and carnival. They had this little axiom: After the laughter, come the tears! They were right, but only as this applies to the kind of laugher that we tend to crank up at parties to keep depression at bay. The cross however reverses my parents’ axiom and says this: After the tears, comes the laughter! Only after the cross, is our joy genuine. Only after the cross, will our exuberance express the genuine delight we once felt when we were little, and only then will our exuberance truly radiate the energy of God.

Jesus promises us that if we take up his cross, God will reward us with an exuberance that no one can ever take from us.

A Happy Death

August 15, 2016

In the Roman Catholic culture within which I grew up, we were taught to pray for a happy death. For many Catholics at the time, this was a standard petition within their daily prayer: “I pray for a happy death.”

But how can one die happy? Isn’t the death-process itself excruciating? What about the pain involved in dying, in letting go of this life, in saying our last goodbyes? Can one die happy?

But the vision here, of course, was religious. A happy death meant that one died in good moral and religious circumstances. That meant that you didn’t die in some morally-compromised situation, you didn’t die alienated from your church, you didn’t die bitter or angry at your family, and, not least, you didn’t die from suicide, drug or alcohol overdose, or engaged in some criminal activity.

The catechetical picture of a happy death most often was an anecdotal story of some person who grows up in a good Christian family, is an honest, faith-filled, chaste, church-going person, but for a period of time drifts from God, from church-going, and from observance of the commandments so that, at a point, he no longer thinks much about God, no longer goes to church, and no longer takes Christian morality seriously. But, shortly before his death, some chance circumstance becomes for him a moment of grace, and he repents of his laxity, his immorality, and his negligence of church practice, returns to church, makes a sincere confession, goes to communion, and, shortly after, is struck down by a heart attack or an accident. But grace has done its work: After years of moral and religious drifting, he has returned to the fold and dies a happy death.

Indeed we all know stories that fit that description; but, sadly, we also all know stories where this is not the case, where the opposite happens, where good people die in very unfortunate, sad, and tragic situations. We have all lost loved ones to suicide, alcoholism, and other ways of dying that are far from ideal. We also all know of people, good people, who have died in morally-compromised situations or who died in bitterness, not able to let their hearts soften in forgiveness. Did they die unhappy deaths?

Admittedly they died in an unfortunate way, but a happy or unhappy death is not judged by whether death catches us on an up-bounce or a down-bounce. For every person that fits the picture of a happy death, as described above, where death catches us on an up-bounce, there are others whose lives were marked by honesty, goodness, and love, but who then had the misfortune of being struck down in moment of anger, in a moment of weakness, in a moment of depression, or who ended up dying from an addiction or suicide. Death caught them on a down-bounce. Did they die an unhappy death? Who is to judge?

What is a happy death? I like Ruth Burrows’ description: Burrows, a Carmelite nun, shares the story of a fellow-nun with whom she once lived. This sister, Burrows tells us, was a good-hearted, but weak, woman. She had entered a contemplative convent to pray, but she could never quite muster the discipline for the task. And so she lived for years in that state: good-hearted, but mediocre. Later in life, she was diagnosed with a terminal disease which frightened her enough so that she began to make new efforts at becoming what she was supposed to be her whole life, a woman of prayer. But a half century of bad habits are not so easily changed. Despite new resolutions, the woman never succeeded in turning her life around. She died in her weakness. But, Burrows asserts, she died a happy death. She died the death of a weak person, asking God to forgive her for a lifetime of weakness.

To die a happy death is to die in honesty, irrespective of whether the particular circumstances of our death look good religiously or not. Dying in right circumstances is, of course, a wonderful consolation to our families and loved ones, just as dying in sad circumstances can be heartbreaking for them. But dying in circumstances which don’t look good, humanly or religiously, doesn’t necessarily equate with an unhappy death. We die a happy death when we die in honesty, irrespective of circumstance or weakness.

And this truth offers another challenge: The circumstances of someone’s death, when those circumstances are sad or tragic, should not become a prism through which we then see that person’s whole life. What this means is that if someone dies in a morally-compromised situation, in a moment or season of weakness, away from his or her church, in bitterness, by suicide, or by an addiction, the goodness of that life and heart should not be judged by the circumstances that death. Death caught that person on a down-bounce, which can make for a more guarded obituary, but not for a true judgment as to the goodness of his or her heart.

Fear

August 8, 2016

Unless you are already a full saint or a mystic, you will always live in some fear of death and the afterlife. That’s simply part of being human. But we can, and must, move beyond our fear of God.

As a child, I lived with a lot of fear. I had a very active imagination and too-frequently imagined murderers under my bed, poisonous snakes slithering up my leg, deadly germs in my food, playground bullies looking for a victim, a hundred ways in which I could meet an accidental death, and threats of every kind lurking in the dark. As a child, I was often afraid: afraid of the dark, afraid of death, afraid of the afterlife, and afraid of God.

As I matured, so too did my imagination; it no longer pictured snakes hiding everywhere or murderers under my bed. I began to feel strong, in control, imagining the unknown, with its dark corners, more as opportunity for growth than as threat to life. But it was one thing to block out fear of snakes, murderers, and the dark. Not so easily did I overcome my fear of death, fear of the afterlife, and fear of God. These fears are the last demons to be exorcised, and that exorcism is never final, never completely done with. Jesus, himself, trembled in fear before death, before the unknown that faces us in death. But he didn’t tremble in fear before God, the opposite in fact. As he faced death and the unknown, he was able give himself over to God, in childlike trust, like a child clinging to a loving parent, and that gave him the strength and courage to undergo an anonymous, lonely, and misunderstood death with dignity, grace, and forgiveness.

We need never be afraid of God. God can be trusted. But trust in God does include a healthy fear of God because one particular fear is part of the anatomy of love itself. Scripture says: The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. But that fear, healthy fear, must be understood as a reverence, a loving awe, a love that fears disappointing. Healthy fear is love’s fear, a fear of betraying, of not being faithful to what love asks of us in return for its gratuity. We aren’t afraid of someone we trust, fearing that he or she will suddenly turn arbitrary, unfair, cruel, incomprehensible, vicious, unloving. Rather we are afraid about our own being worthy of the trust that’s given us, not least from God.

But we must trust that God understands our humanity: God doesn’t demand that we give him our conscious attention all of the time. God accepts the natural wanderings of our hearts. God accepts our tiredness and fatigue. God accepts our need for distraction and escape. God accepts that we usually find it easier to immerse ourselves in entertainment than to pray. And God even accepts our resistances to him and our need to assert, with pride, our own independence. Like a loving mother embracing a child that’s kicking and screaming but needs to be picked up and held, God can handle our anger, self-pity, and resistance. God understands our humanity, but we struggle to understand what it means to be human before God.

For many years, I feared that I was too immersed in the things of this world to consider myself a spiritual person, always fearing that God wanted more from me. I felt that I should be spending more time in prayer, but, too often, I’d end up too tired to pray, more interested in watching a sports event on television or more interested in sitting around with family, colleagues, or friends, talking about everything except spiritual things. For years, I feared that God wanted me to be more explicitly spiritual. He probably did! But, as I’ve aged, I’ve come to realize that being with God in prayer and being with God in heart is like being with a trusted friend. In an easeful friendship, friends don’t spend most of their time talking about their mutual friendship. Rather they talk about everything: local gossip, the weather, their work, their children, their headaches, their heartaches, their tiredness, what they saw on television the night before, their favorite sports teams, what’s happening in politics, and the jokes they’ve heard recently – though they occasionally lament that they should ideally be talking more about deeper things. Should they?

John of the Cross teaches that, in any longer-term friendship, eventually the important things begin to happen under the surface, and surface conversation becomes secondary. Togetherness, ease with each other, comfort, and the sense of being at home, is what we give each other then.

That’s also true for our relationship with God. God made us to be human and God wants us, with all of our wandering weaknesses, to be in his presence, with ease, with comfort, and with the feeling that we are at home. Our fear of God can be reverence or timidity; the former is healthy, the latter is neurotic.