As young boy, I longed to be a professional athlete but I had to soon accept the unwelcome fact that I simply wasn’t gifted with an athlete’s body. Speed, strength, coordination, instinct, vision, I got by in ordinary life with what I had been given of these, but I wasn’t physically robust enough to be an athlete.

It took some years to make peace with that, but it took me even longer, well into mid-life, before I came to both acknowledge and give thanks for the fact that, while I wasn’t blessed with an athlete’s body, I had been given a robust mental health, and that this was a mammoth undeserved blessing, more important for life than an athlete’s body. I had often wondered what it would be like to have an athlete’s body, to possess that kind of speed, strength, and grace, but I had never wondered what it must be like not to have a strong, steady, resilient mind, one that knows how to return a lob, split a defense, not be afraid of contact, absorb a hit, and not let the rigors of the game break you.

And that recognition was bought and paid for by some of the most painful moments of my life. As I aged, year after year, I began to see a number of my former classmates, colleagues, trusted mentors, acquaintances of all kinds, and dear friends lose their battle with mental health and sink, slowly or rapidly, into various forms of clinical depression, mental paralysis, mental anguish, dementia of various kinds, dark personality changes, suicide, and, and worst of all, even into murder.

Slowly, painfully, haltingly, I came to know that not everyone has the internal circuits to allow them the sustained capacity for steadiness and buoyancy. I also came to learn that one’s mental health is really parallel to one’s physical health, fragile, and not fully within one’s own control. Moreover just as diabetes, arthritis, cancer, stroke, heart attacks, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and multiple sclerosis, can cause debilitation and death, so too can mental diseases wreak deadly havoc inside the mind, also causing every kind of debilitation and, not infrequently, death, suicide.

How might one define robust mental health? Robust mental health is not to be confused with intelligence or brilliance. It’s neither. Rather it is steadiness, a capacity to somehow always be anchored, balanced, buoyant, and resilient in the face of all that life throws at you, good and bad. Indeed, sometimes it can be a positive blockage to creativity and brilliance. Some people, it seems, are just too grounded and sane to be brilliant! And brilliant people, gifted artists, poets, musicians, not infrequently struggle to stay solidly grounded. Brilliance and steadiness are frequently very different gifts. Through the years that I have been writing on suicide, I have received many letters, emails, and phone calls, with anguished concerns about understanding mental health.  One letter came for a woman, a brilliant psychoanalyst, somewhat anxious about her own steadiness and that of her family, who wrote: “Everyone in my family is brilliant, but none of us is very steady!” Of course, we all know families where the reverse is true.

In short, we need a better understanding of mental health; perhaps not so much among doctors, psychiatrists, and mental health professionals, where there is already a considerable understanding of mental health and where valuable research goes on, but within the culture at large, particularly as this pertains to suicide.

When we see someone suffering from a physical disability or a bodily disease, it’s easy to understand this limitation and be moved to empathy. But this is predicated largely on the fact that we can see, physically see, the disability or the sickness. We may feel frustrated, helpless, and even angry in the face of what we see, but we generally understand. We get it! Nature has dealt this person a particular hand of cards, no one’s to blame!

But that’s not the situation with mental health.  Here the disability or sickness is not so overt or easily understood. This is particularly true where the breakdown of a person’s mental health results in suicide. For centuries, this has been badly misdiagnosed, not least morally and religiously. Today, more and more, we claim to understand, even as we don’t really understand. A deeper, more-intuitive eye is still required. We still don’t really understand mental fragility.

Our physical health can be robust or fragile, the same for our mental health.  In both cases, how strong we are depends a lot upon the hand of cards we were dealt, our genetic endowment and the environment that shaped us. We don’t get to order our bodies and minds from a catalogue, and nature and life don’t always deal the cards evenly.

We need to better understand mental health and mental breakdown.  Psychologically and emotionally, we are not immune to all kinds of cancers, strokes, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. And they too can be terminal, as is the case with suicide.

Why don’t we live happier lives? Why are we forever caught up in frustrations, tensions, angers, and resentments?

The reasons of course are too many to name. Each day, as Jesus himself tells us, brings problems enough for the day. We’re unhappy for reasons too many to count. And yet it can be helpful to ask ourselves sometimes: Why am I so chronically sitting just outside the gates of happiness?

Our initial answer would probably focus on the tensions in our lives that have to do with tiredness, with our health, with stress in our relationships, stress in our work, and anxieties about security. There’s always something! A second reflection would, I suspect, drag up deeper reasons: unacknowledged disappointment with how our lives have turned out, with what our lives have come down to, and with the many dreams we had which were frustrated.

But a still deeper reflection, I believe, would shine a light on something else, something that lies beyond the ordinary stresses and deeper disappointments in our lives. It would, I submit, reveal an underlying, unacknowledged insecurity which works at perennially turning the positive into the negative, has us habitually cursing rather than blessing, and has us projecting a negativity and bitterness right in the God and religion we believe in. What is this insecurity?

This insecurity is, at root, a feeling that we are not sufficiently welcome in this world, that God and the universe are somehow hostile to us, that we are not unconditionally loved and forgiven.  And, because of this, we harbor a certain paranoia and hostility towards others. Their energy is a threat to the welcome we desire.

Here’s how Thomas Merton diagnoses this. Commenting on the negativity in the politics, churches, and communities of his time, he offers this reason for the bitterness and division: “In the climate which is not that of life and mercy, but of death and condemnation, the personal and collective guilts of men and of groups wrestle with one another in death struggle. Men, tribes, nations, sects, parties set themselves up in forms of existence which are mutual accusations. They thus seek survival and self-affirmation by living demonically, for the demon is the ‘accuser of the brethren.’ A demonic existence is one which insistently diagnoses what it cannot cure, what it has no desire to cure, what it seeks only to bring to full potency in order that it may cause the death of its victim. Yet this is the temptation which besets the sin-ridden dasein [existential situation] of man, for whom a resentful existence implies the need and decision to accuse and to condemn all other existences.”

And, when this is true, Merton submits, “God becomes a tribal totem, a magnification of the self-seeking existent striving to establish its autonomy in its own void. Can such a God be anything but the embodiment of resentments, hatreds, and dreads? It is in the presence of such idols that vindictive and death-dealing orthodoxies flourish. These gods of party and sect, race and nation, are necessarily the gods of war.”  …  And this can only be remedied “when men [people] realize that they are all debtors, and that the debt is unpayable.”

And isn’t all of this so true today? How vicious, demonizing, polarizing, and stalemated are our own political processes, churches, and communities! How resentful we all are! How much we have turned our God in the embodiment of our resentments, hatred, and fears! How much we are selling death-dealing orthodoxies as religion! How much our communities and churches are creating their own tribal gods! We see this, of course, most clearly in the religious terrorists who bomb and kill in the name of God, but no one is exempt. We all struggle to believe in a God who actually loves everyone and who is not just our own tribal deity. Indeed part of the historical reason for present-day religious terrorism has to do with our own, longstanding, paranoia and how we have projected our own resentments, fears, and hatreds into the God we believe in and the religion we practice.

But Merton shares too the secret of how to move beyond this, of how to stop projecting our own resentments and fears into God and into our churches. His answer? Things will change when, at the root of our being, we accept that we are debtors and that the debt is unpayable. Then we will finally accept God’s welcome and love and, accepting our own welcome, we will no longer resent others.  It’s only when we know our own welcome that we can let acceptance, and not judgment, flow out of our lives. And then, and only then, can we let our God be too the God of others.

At the root of our deepest resentment sits an insecurity about our own welcome in the world and with that comes a failure to understand the real nature of God, that is, because we feel threatened, we invariably create a God and religion that protects us against others.

“I am a citizen, not of Athens or Greece, but of the world.” Socrates wrote those words more than twenty-four hundred years ago. Today more than ever these are words which we would need to appropriate because, more and more, our world and we ourselves are sinking into some unhealthy forms of tribalism where we are concerned primarily with taking care of our own.

We see this everywhere today. We tend to think that this lives only in circles of extremism, but it is being advocated with an ever-intensifying moral fervor in virtually every place in the world.  It sounds like this:  America first! England first! My country first! My state first! My church first! My family first! Me first! More and more, we are making ourselves the priority and defining ourselves in ways that are not just against the Gospel but are also making us meaner in spirit and more miserly of heart. What’s to be said about this?

First of all, it’s against the Gospel, against most everything Jesus taught. If the Gospels are clear on anything, they are clear that all persons in this word are equal in the sight of God, that all persons in this world are our brothers and sisters, that we are asked to share the goods of this world fairly with everyone, especially the poor, and, most importantly, that we are not to put ourselves first, but are always to consider the needs of others before our own. All slogans that somehow put “me”, “us”  “my own”, “my group”, “my country” first, deny this. Moreover, this doesn’t just apply at the micro-level, where we graciously step back in politeness to let someone else enter the room before us, it applies, and especially so, to us as whole nations. For us, as nations, there is a certain immorality and immaturity in thinking first of all, and primarily, of our own interests, as opposed to thinking as citizens of the world, concerned for everyone’s good.

And the truth of this is found not just in Jesus and the Gospels, but also in what’s highest and best in us. The very definition of being big-hearted is predicated on precisely rising above self-interest and being willing to sacrifice our own interests for the good of others and the good of the larger community. The same is true for being big-minded. We are big-minded exactly to the extent that we are sensitive to the wider picture and can integrate into our thinking the needs, wounds, and ideologies of everyone, not just those of their own kind. That’s what it means to understand rather than simply be intelligent. When we are petty we cannot understand beyond our own needs, our own wounds, and our own ideologies.

We know this too from experience. On our best days our hearts and minds are more open, more willing to embrace widely, more willing to accept differences, and more willing to sacrifice self-interest for the good of others. On our best days we are gracious, big-hearted, and understanding, and, on those days, it’s unthinkable for us to say: Me first! We only put ourselves first and let our concerns trump our own goodness of heart on days when our frustrations, wounds, tiredness, and ideological infections overwhelm us. And even when we do revert to pettiness, part of us knows that this isn’t us at our best, but that we are more than what our actions betray at that moment. Below our wounds and ideological sicknesses, we remain riveted to the truth that we are, first, citizens of the world. A healthy heart still beats below our wounded, infected one.

Sadly almost everything in our world today tempts us away for this. We are adult children of Rene Descartes, who helped shape the modern mind with his famous dictum: “I think, therefore, I am!” Our own headaches and heartaches are what’s most real to us and we accord reality and value to others primarily in relationship to our own subjectivity. That’s why we can so easily say: “Me first! My country first! My heartaches first!”

But there can be no peace, no world community, no real brother and sisterhood, and no real church community, as long as we do not define ourselves as, first, citizens of the world and only second as members of our own tribe.

Admittedly, we need to take care of our own families, our own countries, and our own selves. Justice asks that we also treat ourselves fairly. But, ultimately, the tension here is a false one, that is, the needs of others and our own needs are not in competition. Athens and the world are of one piece. We best serve our own when we serve others. We are most fair to ourselves when we are fair to others. Only by being good citizens of the world are we good citizens in our own countries.

Putting ourselves first goes against the Gospel. It’s also poor strategy: Jesus tells us that, in the end, the first will be last.

“The most damaging idolatry is not the golden calf but enmity against the other.” The renowned anthropologist, Rene Girard, wrote that and its truth is not easily admitted.  Most of us like to believe that we are mature and big-hearted and that we do love our neighbors and are free of enmity towards others. But is this so?

In our more honest, more accurately perhaps, in our more humble moments, I think that all of us admit that we don’t really love others in the way that Jesus asked. We don’t turn the other cheek. We don’t really love our enemies. We don’t wish good to those who wish us harm. We don’t bless those who curse us. And we don’t genuinely forgive those who murder our loved ones. We are decent, good-hearted persons, but persons whose heaven is still too-predicated on needing an emotional vindication in the face of anyone or anything that opposes us. We can be fair, we can be just, but we don’t yet love the way Jesus asked us to, that is, so that our love goes out to both those who love us and to those who hate us. We still struggle, mightily, mostly unsuccessfully, to wish our enemies well.

But for most of us who like to believe ourselves mature that battle remains hidden, mostly from ourselves. We tend to feel that we are loving and forgiving because, essentially, we are well-intentioned, sincere, and able to believe and say all the right things; but there’s another part of us that isn’t nearly so noble.  The Irish Jesuit, Michael Paul Gallagher, (who died recently and will be dearly missed) puts this well when he writes (In Extra Time): “You probably don’t hate anyone, but you can be paralyzed by daily negatives. Mini-prejudices and knee-jerk judgements can produce a mood of undeclared war. Across barbed wire fences, invisible bullets fly.”  Loving the other as oneself, he submits, is for most of us an impossible uphill climb.

So where does that leave us? Serving out a life-sentence of mediocrity and hypocrisy? Professing to loving our enemies but not doing it? How can we profess to be Christians when, if we are honest, we have admit that we are not measuring up to the litmus-test of Christian discipleship, namely, loving and forgiving our enemies?

Perhaps we are not as bad as we think we are. If we are still struggling, we are still healthy.  In making us, it seems, God factored in human complexity, human weakness, and how growing into deeper love is a life-long journey. What can look like hypocrisy from the outside can in fact be a pilgrimage, a Camino walk, when seen within a fuller light of patience and understanding.

Thomas Aquinas, in speaking about union and intimacy, makes this important distinction. He distinguishes between being in union with something or somebody in actuality and being in union with that someone or something through desire. This has many applications but, applied in this case; it means that sometimes the heart can only go somewhere through desire rather than in actuality. We can believe in the right things and want the right things and still not be able to bring our hearts onside. One example of this is what the old catechisms (in their unique wisdom) used to call “imperfect contrition”, that is, the notion that if you have done something wrong that you know is wrong and that you know that you should feel sorry for, but you can’t in fact feel sorry for, then if you can wish that you could feel sorry, that’s contrition enough, not perfect, but enough. It’s the best you can do and it puts you at the right place at the level of desire, not a perfect place, but one better than its alternative.

And that “imperfect” place does more for us than simply providing the minimal standard of contrition needed for forgiveness. More importantly it accords rightful dignity to whom and to what we have hurt.

Reflecting on our inability to genuinely love our neighbor, Marilynne Robinson submits that, even in our failure to live up what Jesus asks of us, if we are struggling honestly, there is some virtue. She argues this way: Freud said that we cannot love our neighbor as ourselves, and no doubt this is true. But since we accept the reality that lies behind the commandment, that our neighbor is as worthy of love as ourselves, then in our very attempt to act on Jesus’ demand we are acknowledging that our neighbor is worthy of love even if, at that this point in our lives, we are too weak to provide it.

And that’s the crucial point: In continuing to struggle, despite our failures, to live up to the Jesus’ great commandment of love we acknowledge the dignity inherent in our enemies, acknowledge that they are worthy of love, and acknowledge our own shortcoming. That’s “imperfect” of course, but, I suspect, Thomas Aquinas would say it’s a start!

The spirituality writer, Tom Stella, tells a story about three monks at prayer in their monastery chapel. The first monk imagines himself being carried up to heaven by the angels. The second monk imagines himself already in heaven, chanting God’s praises with the angels and saints. The third monk cannot focus on any holy thoughts but can only think about the great hamburger he had eaten just before coming to chapel. That night, when the devil was filing his report for the day, he wrote: “Today I tried to tempt three monks, but I only succeeded with two of them.”

There’s more depth to this story that initially meets the eye. I wish that, years ago, I had grasped how both angels and great hamburgers play a role in our spiritual journey.  You see, for too many years, I identified the spiritual quest with only explicit religious thoughts, prayers, and actions. If I was in church, I was spiritual, whereas if I was enjoying a good meal with friends, I was merely human. If I was praying and could concentrate my thoughts and feelings on some holy or inspiring thing, I felt I was praying and was, for that time, spiritual and religious; whereas if I was distracted, fatigued, or too sleepy to concentrate, I felt I had prayed poorly. When I was doing explicitly religious things or making more-obvious moral decisions, I felt religious, everything else was, to my mind, mere humanism.

While I was not particularly Manichaean or negative on the things of this world, nonetheless the good things of creation (of life, of family and friendship, of the human body, of sexuality, of food and drink) were never understood as spiritual, as religious. In my mind, there was a pretty sharp distinction heaven and earth, the holy and the profane, the divine and the human, between the spiritual and the earthly. This was especially true for the more earthy aspects of life, namely, food, drink, sex, and bodily pleasures of any kind. At best, these were distractions from the spiritual; at worst, they were negative temptations tripping me up, obstacles to spirituality.

But, by stumbling often enough, we eventually learn: I tried to live like the first two monks, with my mind on spiritual things, but the third monk kept tripping me up, ironically not least when I was in church or at prayer. While in church or at prayer and trying to force mind and heart onto the things of the spirit, I would forever find myself assailed by things that, supposedly, had no place in church: memories and anticipations of gatherings with friends, anxieties about relationships, anxieties about unfinished tasks, thoughts about my favorite sports teams, thoughts of wonderful meals with pasta and wine, of grilled steaks and bacon-burgers, and, most pagan of all, sexual fantasies that seemed the very antithesis of all that’s spiritual.

It took some years and better spiritual guidance to learn that a many of these tensions were predicated on a poor and faulty understanding of Christian spirituality and of the real dynamics of prayer.

The first faulty understanding had to do with misunderstanding God’s intent and design in creating us.  God did not design our nature in one way, that is, to be sensual and to be so rooted deeply in the things of this earth, and then demand that we live as if we were not corporeal and as if the good things of this earth were only sham and obstacles to salvation, as opposed to being an integral part of salvation.  Moreover, the incarnation, the mystery of God becoming corporeal, sensual, taking on human flesh, teaches unequivocally that we find salvation not by escaping the body and the things of this earth but by entering them more deeply and correctly. Jesus affirmed the resurrection of the bodily, not the flight of the soul.

The second misunderstanding had to do with the dynamics of prayer. Initially, in its early stages, prayer is about focus and concentration on the sacred, on conversations with God, on trying to leave aside, for a time, the things of this world to enter into the realm of the sacred. But that’s the early stage of prayer. Eventually, as prayer deepens and matures, in the words of John of the Cross, the important things begin to happen under the surface and sitting in chapel with God is not unlike sitting down with someone you sit down with regularly. If you visit someone on a daily basis you won’t each day have deep, intense conversations; mostly you will talk about everyday things, family concerns, the weather, sports, politics, the latest TV programs, food, and so on – and you’ll find yourself looking at your watch occasionally. It’s the same with our relationship to God. If you pray regularly, daily, you don’t have to agonize about concentrating and keeping the conversation focused on deep, spiritual things.  You only have to be there, at ease with a friend. The deep things are happening under the surface.

A seminarian I know recently went to a party on a Friday evening at a local university campus. The group was a crowd of young, college students and when he was introduced as a seminarian, as someone who was trying to become a priest and who had taken a vow of celibacy, the mention of celibacy evoked some giggles in the room, some banter, and a number of jokes about how much he must be missing out on in life. Poor, naïve fellow! Initially, within this group of millenniums, his religious beliefs and what this had led to in his life was regarded as something between amusing and pitiful. But, before the evening was out, several young women had come, cried on his shoulder, and shared about their frustration with their boyfriends’ inability to commit fully to their relationship.

This incident might serve as a parable describing today’s young people in our secularized world. They exhibit what might aptly be called a bi-polar character about faith, church, family, sexual ethos, and many other things that are important to them.

They present an inconsistent picture: On the one hand, by and large, they are not going to church, at least with any regularity; they are not following the Christian ethos on sexuality; they seem indifferent to and even sometimes hostile to many cherished religious traditions; and they can appear unbelievably shallow in their addiction and enslavement to what’s trending in the world of entertainment, fashion, and information technology. Looked at from one perspective, our kids today can appear irreligious, morally blasé, and on a heavy diet of the kind of superficiality that characterizes reality television and video games.  More seriously still, they can also appear myopic, greedy, pampered, and excessively self-interested. Not a pretty picture.

But this isn’t exactly the picture. Beneath that surface, in most cases, you will find someone who is very likeable, sincere, soft, good-hearted, gracious, moral, warm, generous, and searching for all the right things (without much help from a culture that lacks clear moral guidance and is fraught with over-choice). The good news is that most young people, at the level of their real desires, are not at odds at all with God, faith, church, and family. For the most part, youth today are still very good people and want all the right things.

But, that isn’t always so evident. Sometimes their surface seems to trump their depth so that who they really are and what they really want is not so evident. We see the surface and, seen there, our youth can appear more self-interested than generous, more shallow than deep, more blasé than morally sensitive, and more religiously indifferent than faith-filled. They can also manifest a smugness and self-sufficiency that suggests little vulnerability and no need for guidance from anyone beyond themselves.

Hence their bi-polarity: Mostly they want all the right things, but, too often, because of a lack of genuine guidance and their addiction to the culture, they aren’t making the kinds of choices that will bring them what they more-deeply desire. Sexuality is a prime example here: Studies done on millenniums indicate that most of them want, at the end of the day, to be inside a monogamous, faithful marriage. The problem is that they also believe that they can first allow themselves ten to fifteen years of sexual promiscuity, without having to accept that practicing ten to fifteen years of infidelity is not a good preparation for the kind of fidelity needed to a sustain marriage and family. In this, as in many other things, they are caught between their cultural ethos and their own fragile securities. The culture trumpets a certain ethos, liberation from the timidities of the past, complete with a smugness that belittles whatever questions it. But much of that smugness is actually whistling in the dark. Deep down, our youth are pretty insecure and, happily, this keeps them vulnerable and likeable.

Maybe Louis Dupre, the retired philosopher who taught for some many years at Yale, captures it best when he says that today’s young people are not bad, they’re just not finished.  That’s a simple insight that captures a lot. Someone can be wonderful and very likeable, but still immature. Moreover, if you’re young enough, that can even be attractive, the very definition of cool. The reverse is also, often times, true: More than a few of us, adults, suffer from our own bi-polarity: we are mature, but far from wonderful and likeable. This makes for some strange, paradoxical binaries.

So who is the actual young person of today? Is it the person who is wrapped up in his or her own world, obsessive about physical appearance, addicted to social media, living outside marriage with his or her partner, smug in his or her own non-traditional moral and religious views? That, I believe, is the surface appearance. The actual young person of today is warm, good-hearted, generous, and waiting, waiting consciously for love and affirmation, and waiting unconsciously for God’s embrace.

Before you get serious about Jesus, first consider how good you’re going to look on wood! Daniel Berrigan wrote those words and they express a lot about who he was and what he believed in. He died yesterday at age 94.

No short tribute can do justice to Dan Berrigan. He defies quick definition and facile description. He was, at once, the single-minded, obsessed activist, even as he was one of the most complex spiritual figures of our generation. He exhibited both the fierceness of John the Baptist and the gentleness of Jesus. An internationally-known social justice advocate, an anti-war priest, a poet, a first-rate spiritual writer, a maverick Jesuit, he, along with his close friend, Dorothy Day, was one of our generation’s foremost advocates for non-violence.  Like Dorothy Day, he believed that all violence, no matter how merited it seems in a given situation, always begets further violence. For him, violence can never justify itself by claiming moral superiority over the violence it is trying to stop. Non-violence, he uncompromisingly advocated, is the only road to peace. Like Dorothy Day, he couldn’t imagine Jesus with a gun.

Berrigan lived by the principle of non-violence and spent his life trying to convince others of its truth. This got him into a lot of trouble, both in society at large and in the church. It also landed him to prison. In 1968, along with his brother, Philip, he entered a federal building in Catonsville, Maryland, removed a number of draft records and burned them in garbage cans. For this, he was given three and a half years in prison. But this also indelibly stamped him into the consciousness of a whole generation. He was forever after known as a member of the Catonsville Nine and once appeared on the cover of Time Magazine.

I was in the seminary during those tumultuous years in the late 1960s, when anti-war protests in the USA were drawing such huge crowds and Daniel Berrigan was one of their poster boys. Moreover, I was in a seminary where most everything in our ethos was asking us to distrust Berrigan and the anti-war movement. In our view at that time, this was not what a Catholic priest was supposed to be doing. I wasn’t a fan of his then. I’m a late convert.

That conversion began when, as a graduate student, I began to read Berrigan’s books. I was gripped by three things:  First, by the gospel challenge he was spelling out so clearly; next, by his spiritual depth; and, finally, not least, by the brilliance and poetry of his language. He was, flat-out, a very good writer and a very challenging Christian. I envied his vocabulary, his turn of phrase, his intelligence, his wit, his depth, and his radical commitment. I began to read everything he’d written and he began to have a growing influence on my life and ministry. I had never before seen how non-negotiable is Jesus’ challenge to act not just with charity about also with justice.

Father Larry Rosebaugh, an Oblate colleague who also went to prison for anti-war protests and who was later shot to death in Guatemala, shares in his autobiography how, the night before he performed his first act of civil disobedience that landed him in prison, he spent the entire night in prayer with Daniel Berrigan. Berrigan’s advice to him then was this: If you can’t do this without becoming bitter and angry at those who arrest you, don’t do it! Prophecy is about making a vow of love, not of alienation. There’s a thin line here, one that’s too often crossed when we are trying to be prophetic.

Ironically, for all his critical counsel on this, Berrigan, by his own admission, struggled mightily with exactly this, namely, to have his protest issue forth from a center of love and not from a center of anger. At age 62, he wrote an autobiography, To Dwell in Peace, within which he candidly shared that he had never enjoyed a healthy relationship with his own father and that his father had never blessed him or his brother, Philip. Rather his father was always more threatened by his sons’ energies and talents than proud of them. With this admission, Berrigan went on to ask whether it was any wonder that he, Daniel, had forever been a thorn in the side of every authority-figure he ever encountered: presidents, popes, bishops, religious superiors, politicians, policemen. It took him 60 years to make peace with the absence of his father’s blessing; but, God writes straight with crooked lines, the radicalness this fired in him helped challenge a generation.

In his later years, Berrigan began to work in a hospice, finding among the dying a depth that grounded him against what he so feared in our culture, shallowness.

His own generation will give him a mixed judgment: loved by some, hated by others. But history will speak well of him. He was always on the side of God, peace, and the poor.

Daniel Berrigan RIP.

In a recent article in America magazine, Grant Kaplan, commenting on the challenge of the resurrection, makes this comment: “Unlike previous communities in which the bond among members forges itself through those it excludes and scapegoats, the gratuity of the resurrection allows for a community shaped by forgiven-forgivers.”

What he is saying, among other things, is that mostly we form community through demonizing and exclusion, that is, we bond with each other more on the basis of what we are against and what we hate than on the basis of what we are for and hold precious. The cross and the resurrection, and the message of Jesus in general, invite us to a deeper maturity within which we are invited to form community with each other on the basis of love and inclusion rather than upon hatred and demonization.

How do we scapegoat, demonize, and exclude so as to form community with each other? A number of anthropologists, particularly Rene Girard and Gil Bailie, have given us some good insights on how scapegoating and demonization worked in ancient times and how they work today.

In brief, here’s how they work: Until we can bring ourselves to a certain level of maturity, both personal and collective, we will always form community by scapegoating. Imagine this scenario: A group of us (family or colleagues) are going to dinner. Almost always there will some divisive tensions among us – personality clashes, jealousies, wounds from the past, and religious, ideological, and political differences. But these can remain under the surface and we can enjoy a nice dinner together. How? By talking about other people whom we mutually dislike, despise, fear, or find weird or particularly eccentric. As we “demonize” them by emphasizing how awful, bad, weird, or eccentric they are, our own differences slide wonderfully under the surface and we form bonds of empathy and mutuality with each other. By demonizing others we find commonality among ourselves.  Of course, you’re reluctant to excuse yourself and go to the bathroom, for fear that, in your absence; you might well be the next item on the menu.

Moreover, we do that too in our individual lives to maintain balance.  If we’re honest, we probably all have to admit the tendency within us to steady ourselves by blaming our anxieties and bad feelings on someone else.  For example: We go out some morning and for various reasons feel out of sorts, agitated and angry in some inchoate way. More often than not, it won’t take us long to pin that uneasiness on someone else by, consciously or unconsciously, blaming them for our bad feeling. Our sense is that except for that person we wouldn’t be feeling these things! Someone else is blame for our agitation!  Once we have done this we begin to feel better because we have just made someone else responsible for our pain. As a colorful commentary on this, I like to quote a friend who submits this axiom: If the first two people you meet in the morning are irritating and hard to get along with, there’s a very good chance that you’re the one who’s irritating and hard to get along with.

Sadly we see this played out in the world as a whole. Our churches and our politics thrive on this.  Both in our churches and in our civic communities, we tend to form community with our own kind by demonizing others. Our differences do not have to be dealt with, nor do we have to deal with the things within ourselves that help cause those differences, because we can blame someone else for our problems. Not infrequently church groups bond together by doing this, politicians are elected by doing this, and wars are justified and waged on this basis – and the rich, healthy concepts of loyalty, patriotism, and religious affiliation then become unhealthy because they now root themselves in seeing differences primarily as a threat rather than seeing them as bringing a fuller revelation of God into our lives.

Granted, sometimes what’s different does pose a real threat, and that threat has to be met. But, even then, we must continue to look inside of ourselves and examine what in us might be complicit in causing that division, hatred, or jealousy, which is now being projected on us. Positive threat must be met, but it is best met the way Jesus met threats, namely, with love, empathy, and forgiveness. Demonizing others to create community among ourselves is neither the way of Jesus nor the way of human maturity. Loyalty to one’s own, loyalty to one’s religion, loyalty to one’s country, and loyalty to one’s moral values must be based upon what is good and precious within one’s family, community, religion, country, and moral principles, and not on fear and negative feelings towards others.

The lesson in Jesus, especially in his death and resurrection, is that genuine religion, genuine maturity, genuine loyalty, and genuine patriotism lie in letting ourselves be stretched by what does not emanate from our own kind.