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.

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.

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.

Hell is never a nasty surprise waiting for a basically happy person. Hell can only be the full-flowering of a pride and selfishness that have, through a long time, twisted a heart so thoroughly that it considers happiness as unhappiness and has an arrogant disdain for happy people. If you are essentially warm of heart this side of eternity, you need not fear that a nasty surprise awaits you on the other side because somewhere along the line, unknowingly, you missed the boat and your life went terribly wrong.

Unfortunately for many us, the preaching and catechesis of our youth sometimes schooled us in the idea that you could tragically miss the boat without knowing it and that there was no return. You could live your life sincerely, in essential honesty, relate fairly to others, try your best given your weaknesses, have some bounce and happiness in life, and then die and find that some sin you’ve committed or mistake you’d made, perhaps even unknowingly, could doom you to hell and there was no further chance for repentance. The second of your death was your last chance to change things, no second chances after death, no matter how badly you might like then to repent. As a tree falls so shall it lie! We were schooled to fear dying and the afterlife.

But, whatever the practical effectiveness of such a concept, because it really could make one hesitate in the face of temptation because of the fear of hell, it is essentially wrong and should not be taught in the name of Christianity. Why? Because it belies the God and the deep truths that Jesus revealed. Jesus did teach that there was a hell and that it was a possibility for everyone. But the hell that Jesus spoke of is not a place or a state where someone is begging for one last chance, just one more minute of life to make an act of contrition, and God is refusing. The God whom Jesus both incarnates and reveals is a God who is forever open to repentance, forever open to contrition, and forever waiting our return from our prodigal wanderings.

With God we never exhaust our chances. Can you imagine God looking at a repentant man or woman and saying: “Sorry! For you, it’s too late! You had your chance! Don’t come asking for another chance now!” That could not be the Father of Jesus.

And yet, the Gospels can give us that impression. We have, for example, the famous parable of the rich man who ignores the poor man at his doorstep, dies, and ends up in hell, while the poor man, Lazarus, whom he had ignored, is now in heaven, comforted in the bosom of Abraham. From his torment in hell, the rich man asks Abraham to send Lazarus to him with some water, but Abraham replies that there is an unbridgeable gap between heaven and hell and no one can cross from one side to the other. That text, along with Jesus’ warnings about that the doors of the wedding banquet will at a point be irrevocably closed, has led to the common misconception that there is a point of no return, that once in hell, it is too late to repent.

But that’s not what this text, nor Jesus’ warning on the urgency of repentance, teaches. The “unbridgeable gap” here refers, among other things, to a gap that remains forever unbridged here in this world between the rich and the poor. And it remains unbridged because of our intransigence, our failure to change heart, our lack of contrition, not because God runs out of patience and says: “Enough! No more chances!” It remains unbridged because, habitually, we become so set in our ways that we are incapable of change and genuine repentance.

Jesus’ story of the rich man and Lazarus actually draws upon a more ancient, Jewish, story that illustrates this intransigence: In the parallel Jewish parable, God does hear the rich man’s plea from hell for a second chance and grants it to him. The rich man, now full of new resolutions, returns to life, goes immediately to the market, loads his cart with food, and, as he is driving home, meets Lazarus on the road. Lazarus asks for a loaf of bread. The rich man jumps off his cart to give it to him, but, has he pulls a huge loaf of bread from his cart, his old self starts to reassert itself. He begins to think: “This man doesn’t need a whole loaf! Why not just give him a part! And why should he have a fresh loaf, I’ll give him some of the stale bread!” Immediately he finds himself back in hell! He still cannot bridge the gap.

Kathleen Dowling Singh submits that in making a series of mental contractions we create our own fear of death. That’s true too for the afterlife: By making a series of unfortunate theological contractions we create our own fear of hell.

There’s a haunting text in the Book of Revelation where poetic image, for all its beauty, can be dangerously misleading. The author there writes: “So the angel swung his sickle over the earth and cut the earth’s vintage. He threw it into the great winepress of God’s fury.” A fierce angel cleansing the world! God in a boiling anger! What’s to be understood by that?

Like so many other things in scripture, this is to be taken seriously, but not literally. Clearly the text, as other texts in scripture which speak of God’s jealousy, anger, and vengeance, has something important to teach, but, like those other texts which have God jealous and angry, it can be dangerously misunderstood. What it doesn’t teach is that God gets angry, that God is sometimes furious with us, and that God wreaks havoc on the planet because of sin. What it does teach is that the chickens always come home to roost, that our actions have consequences, that sin wreaks havoc on the planet and on our own souls, driving us to anger, self-hatred, and lack of self-forgiveness, and that this feels as if God is angry and punishing us.

God doesn’t get angry, pure and simple. God is not a creature, another existent among others, a being like us. God’s ways are not our ways. This has been affirmed from Isaiah through 2000 years of Christian tradition. We cannot project our way of being, thinking, and loving unto God. And nowhere is this truer than when we imagine God as getting angry. Mercy, love, and forgiveness are not attributes of God, as they are for us. They constitute God’s nature. God doesn’t get angry like we do.

Scripture and Christian tradition do, of course, speak of God as getting angry, but that, as Christian theology clearly teaches, is anthropomorphism, that is, it is a projection of human thought and feeling into God. In saying things such as God is angry with us or God is punishing us for our sins, we are not, in essence, saying how God feels about us but rather how we, at that moment, feel about God and how we feel about ourselves and our own actions.

For example, when St. Paul tells us that when we sin, we feel “the wrath of God” he is not telling us that God gets angry with us when we sin. Rather we get angry at ourselves when we sin. The concept of God’s wrath is a metaphor, illustrated, for example, by a hangover: If someone is immoderate in his or her use of alcohol, God doesn’t get displeased and give that person a headache.  The wrath issues from the act itself: Excessive alcohol dehydrates the brain, causing a headache. The pain is not from God, though it feels like divine punishment, like God’s fury at our irresponsibility. But this is a projection on our part, anthropomorphism.

We flatter ourselves, and do God no favors, when we say that we offend God and that God gets angry with us. God is not just the ground of our being, our Creator, the Unmoved Mover. God is too a person who loves us individually and passionately, and so it is natural to imagine that God sometimes gets angry, natural to project our own limits unto God. But God’s love and mercy infinitely dwarf our own thoughts and feelings and limited capacities to actualize love in our lives. Imagine, for example, a loving grandparent picking up his or her newborn grandchild: Is there anything which that newborn can do to offend that grandparent? God’s maturity, understanding, and love infinitely dwarf that of any grandparent. How is God to be offended?

Yet, still, isn’t the language of God’s anger a vital part of our tradition, our scriptures, our prayers, our psalms, and our liturgy? They all speak of us as offending God and as God getting angry. Are these simply to be written off? No. They teach an important truth, even as they must be called for what they are, anthropomorphisms. They are meant to challenge the soul the way indigestion challenges the body. God doesn’t punish us for eating the wrong things or for overeating. Our own biology does and, in doing so, it sends us a nasty signal that we’ve been doing something wrong. Metaphorically speaking, indigestion comes at you like a vengeful angel and throws you into the great winepress of biological fury.

God doesn’t hate us when we do something wrong, but we hate ourselves; God doesn’t wreak a vengeance on us when we sin, but we beat ourselves up whenever we do; and God never withholds forgiveness from us, no matter what we’ve done, but we find it very difficult to forgive ourselves for our own transgressions. There is indeed an angelic razor and a winepress of God’s fury, but those are names for the experience of discontent and self-hatred inside of us whenever we are unfaithful, they have nothing to do with God’s nature.

We live in a world wherein most everything over-stimulates our grandiosity, even as we are handed less and less tools to deal with that.

Several years ago, Robert L. Moore wrote a very significant book entitled, Facing the Dragon. The dragon that most threatens us, he believes, is the dragon of our own grandiosity, that sense inside us that has us believe that we are singularly special and destined for greatness. This condition besets us all. Simply put, each of us, all seven billion of us on this planet, cannot help but feel that we are the center of the universe. And, given that this is mostly unacknowledged and we are generally ill-equipped to deal with it, this makes for a scary situation. This isn’t a recipe for peace and harmony, but for jealousy and conflict.

And yet this condition isn’t our fault, nor is it in itself a moral flaw in our nature. Our grandiosity comes from the way God made us. We are made in the image and likeness of God. This is the most fundamental, dogmatic truth inside the Judaea-Christian understanding of the human person. However it is not to be conceived of simplistically, as some beautiful icon stamped inside our souls. Rather it needs to be conceived of in this way: God is fire, infinite fire, an energy that is relentlessly seeking to embrace and infuse all of creation. And that fire is inside of us, creating in us a feeling of godliness, an intuition that we too have divine energies, and a pressure to be singularly special and to achieve some form of greatness.

In a manner of speaking, to be made in the image and likeness of God is to have a micro-chip of divinity inside us. This constitutes our greatest dignity but also creates our biggest problems. The infinite does not sit calmly inside the finite. Because we have divine energy inside us we do not make easy peace with this world, our longings and desires are too grandiose. Not only do we live in that perpetual disquiet that Augustine highlighted in his famous dictum: “You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you!” but this innate grandiosity has us forever nursing the belief that we are special, uniquely-destined, and born to somehow stand out and be recognized and acknowledged for our specialness.

And so all of us are driven outwards by a divine gene to somehow make a statement with our lives, to somehow create a personal immortality, and to somehow create some artifact of specialness that the whole world has to take note of. This isn’t an abstract concept; it’s utterly earthy. The evidence for this is seen in every newscast, in every bombing, in every dare-devil stunt, and in every situation where someone seeks to stand out. It’s seen too in the universal hunger for fame, in the longing to be known, and in the need to be recognized as unique and special.

But this grandiosity, of itself, isn’t our fault, nor is it necessarily a moral flaw. It comes from the way we are made, ironically from what is highest and best in us. The problem is that, today, we generally aren’t given the tools to grapple with it generatively. More and more, we live in a world within which, for countless reasons, our grandiosity is being over-stimulated, even as this is not being recognized and even as we are being given less-and-less the religious and psychological tools with which to handle that. What are these tools?

Psychologically, we need images of the human person that allow us to understand ourselves healthily but in ways that include an acceptance of our limitations, our frustrations, our anonymity, and the fact that our lives must make gracious space for everyone else’s life. Psychologically, we must be given the tools to understand our own life, admittedly as unique and special, but still as one life among millions of other unique and special lives.  Psychologically, we need better tools for handling our grandiosity.

Religiously, our faith and our churches need to offer us an understanding of the human person that gives us the insights and the disciplines (discipleship) to enable us to live out our uniqueness and our specialness, even as we make peace with our own mortality, our limitations, our frustrations, our anonymity, and create space for the uniqueness and specialness of everyone else’s life.  In essence, religion has to give us the tools to healthily access the divine fire inside us and act healthily on the talents and gifts God has graced us with, but with the concomitant discipline to humbly acknowledge that these gifts are not our own, that they come from God, and that all we are and achieve is God’s grace. Only then will we not be killed by failure and inflated by success.

The task in life, Robert Lax suggests, is not so much finding a path in the woods as of finding a rhythm to walk in.

The Gospels tell us that after King Herod died, an angel appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt, telling him: “Get up! Take the Child and His Mother and go to the land of Israel, for those seeking the Child’s life are now dead.”  (Matthew 2, 19-20). The angel, it would seem, spoke prematurely, the Child, the Infant-Christ, was still in danger, is still in danger, is still mortally threatened, and is still being tracked down, right to this day.

God still lies vulnerable and helpless in our world and is forever under attack. All forms of violence, of aggression, of intimidation, of bullying, of ego-parading, of seeking advantage, are still trying to kill the child. And the Child is threatened too in less-overt ways, namely, whenever we turn a blind eye on those who lie helpless and exposed in war, poverty, and economic injustice, we are still killing the Child. Herod may be dead, but he has many friends. The child is forever threatened.

Many of us are familiar with the story of the Trappist monks in Algeria who were martyred by terrorists in 1996. Some months before being taken captive and executed, they had been visited by the terrorists; ironically on Christmas Eve, just as they were preparing to celebrate the Christmas Eve Eucharist. The terrorists, heavily armed with guns, left after a tense standoff wherein the monks would did not agree to give them the medical supplies they were demanding. But the monks, understandably, were badly shaken. What was their response?  They went immediately to their chapel and sang the Christmas mass, putting special emphasis on how Jesus entered this world radically vulnerable and helpless and was immediately under threat. Their measured, eventual response honored this immediate reaction: Living now under the threat of death, they refused to arm themselves or accept military protection, believing that there was an unbridgeable incongruity between what they had vowed themselves to and the presence of guns inside their monastery. Moreover, after that initial encounter with armed terrorists, their Abbott, Christian de Cherge, introduced a special mantra into his daily prayer: Disarm me! Lord, disarm me! Living under the threat of arms, he prayed daily to remain disarmed, physically helpless against potential attack, to be like a newborn child, like the newborn Jesus, exposed and helpless before the threat of violence.

But that’s not an easy thing to imitate, especially since most everything in our world today beckons us towards its opposite, namely, to arm ourselves, to counter every threat, gun for gun, to meet all potential threat with armed resistance. It’s the times: Like Christian de Cherge and his community of monks, we too live under the threat of terrorism and widespread violence.  And our paranoia is heightened as, daily, our news reports give us images of terrorist shootings, bombings, beheadings, mass-shooting, street violence, and domestic violence. We live in violent times. Understandably there’s an itch to arm ourselves.

So how realistic is it to refuse to arm ourselves? How realistic is it to pray to be disarmed?

Christianity has always defended both justified self-defense and just war. Beyond even this, no prudent society would ever choose to disband its police force and its military and these, necessarily, carry guns and other weapons. Indeed it might be said that those who argue for radical pacifism can do so only because they are already protected by police and soldiers with guns. It’s not too much of a stretch to say that, except for the guns and weapons that protect us, we all stand helpless before the criminals and psychopaths of this world.  But, that needs some nuance.

Among other things, there’s still a powerful case to be made for remaining personally disarmed. The late Cardinal of Chicago, Francis George, argued it this way: We need pacifists in the same way as we need vowed religious celibates, that is, we need gospel-inspired persons to give a particular, sometimes-singular, witness to what the Gospels ultimately point to, namely, to a place beyond our present imagination, a heaven within which we will relate to each other in an intimacy which we cannot yet imagine and where there will be no arms or weapons. In heaven, we will be utterly defenseless before each other. There will be no guns in heaven.

This reality is already imaged in the newborn Christ, helpless and vulnerable and already so threatened.

It is also imaged in our own modern-day pacifists, from Dorothy Day to Martin Luther King, from Mother Teresa to Christian de Cherge, from Daniel Berrigan to Larry Rosebaugh, we have been gifted by the witness of Gospel-inspired persons who, in the face of physical threat and violence, chose to risk their lives rather than pick up a gun. The times are forcing us too to choose: Do we arm ourselves or not?

Because those seeking the life of the child are still around, paranoid folks, like King Herod, killing indiscriminately for fear that a helpless child might soon threaten their throne and their privilege.

Daniel Berrigan, in one of his famous quips, once wrote: Before you get serious about Jesus, first consider carefully how good you are going to look on wood!

In saying this, he was trying to highlight something that’s often radically misunderstood from almost every side, namely, how and why authentic religion brings suffering into our lives.

On the one hand, all too common is the idea that if you welcome God into your life you will have an easier walk through life; God will spare you from many of the illnesses and sufferings that afflict others.  Conversely, many others nurse the feeling, if not explicit belief, that God means for us to suffer, that there’s an intrinsic connection between suffering and depth, and that the more painful something is the better it is for you spiritually. There is, of course, some deep truth in this, spiritual depth is inextricably connected to suffering, as the Cross of Jesus reveals; and scripture does say that God chastises those who draw close to Him. But there are countless ways to misunderstand this.

Jesus did say that we must take up our cross daily and follow him and that following him means precisely accepting a special suffering. But we might ask: Why? Why should suffering enter into our lives more deeply because we take Jesus seriously? Shouldn’t the opposite be true? Does true religion somehow stand against our natural exuberance? Is suffering deep and joy superficial? And, what does this say about God? Is God masochistic? Does God want and demand our suffering? Why is a certain inflow of pain necessarily concomitant with taking God seriously?

Pain will flow into us more deeply when we take God seriously not because God wants it or because pain is somehow more blessed than joy. None of these. Suffering and pain are not what God wants; they’re negatives, to be eliminated in heaven. But, to the extent that we take God seriously, they will flow more deeply into our lives because in a deeper opening to God we will stop falsely protecting ourselves against pain and become much more sensitive so that life can flow more freely and more deeply into us. In that sensitivity, we will stop unconsciously manipulating everything so as to keep ourselves secure and pain-free. Simply put, we will experience deeper pain in our lives because, being more sensitive, we will be experiencing everything more deeply.

The opposite is also true. If someone, as a crass expression might put it, is so insensitive so as to be thick as plank, his own insensitivity will surely immunize him against many sufferings and the pain of others will rarely disturb his peace of mind. Of course, he won’t experience meaning and joy very deeply either, that’s the price tag for insensitivity.

A number of years ago, Michael Buckley, the California Jesuit, preached at the first mass of a newly ordained priest. In his homily, he didn’t ask the newly ordained man if he was strong enough to be a priest, but rather if he was weak enough to be a priest. In teasing out what’s contained in that paradox, Buckley helps answer the question of why drawing nearer to God also means drawing nearer to suffering: “Is this man deficient enough so that he cannot ward off significant suffering from his life, so that he lives with a certain amount of failure, so that he feels what it is to be an average man?  Is there any history of confusion, of self-doubt, of interior anguish?  Has he had to deal with fear, come to terms with frustrations, or accepted deflated expectations?”

Buckley then goes on to make a comparison between Socrates and Jesus, as a study in human excellence, and highlights how Socrates appears, in many ways, to be the stronger person. Like Jesus, he too was unjustly condemned to death, but, unlike Jesus, he never went into fear and trembling or “sweated blood” over his impending death. He had drank the poison with calm and died. Jesus, as we know, didn’t undergo his death with nearly the same calm.

The superficial judgment, Buckley suggests, is to see their different reactions to death in the light of their different deaths, crucifixion so much more horrible than drinking poison. But that, Buckley submits, while containing some truth, is secondary, not the real reason. Why did Jesus struggle more deeply with his death than Socrates did with his? Because of his extraordinary sensitivity.  Jesus simply was less able to protect himself against pain. He felt things more deeply and consequently was more liable to physical pain and weariness, more sensitive to human rejection and contempt, more affected by love and hate.

Socrates was a great, heroic man, no doubt; but, unlike Jesus who wept over Jerusalem, he never wept over Athens, never expressed sorrow and pain over the betrayal of friends.  He was strong, possessed, calm, never overwhelmed. Jesus, for his part, was less able to protect himself against pain and betrayal and, consequently, was sometimes overwhelmed.