Ordinary Goodness and Our Spiritual Journey

May 30, 2016

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.

Faith and Fear

May 23, 2016

A common soldier dies without fear, yet Jesus died afraid. Iris Murdoch wrote this and that truth can be somewhat disconcerting. Why? If someone dies with deep faith, shouldn’t he or she die within a certain calm and trust drawn from that faith? Wouldn’t the opposite seem more logical, that is, if someone dies without faith shouldn’t he or she die with more fear? And perhaps the most confusing of all: Why did Jesus, the paragon of faith, die afraid, crying out in a pain that can seem like a loss of faith?

The problem lies in our understanding. Sometimes we can be very naïve about faith and its dynamics, thinking that faith in God is a ticket to earthly peace and joy. But faith isn’t a path to easy calm, nor does it assure us that we will exit this life in calm, and that can be pretty unsettling and perplexing at times. Here’s an example:

The renowned spiritual writer, Henri Nouwen, in a book entitled, In Memoriam, shares this story around his mother’s death: Nouwen, a native of the Netherlands, was teaching in the USA when he received a call that his mother was dying back home in the Netherlands. On his flight home, from New York to Amsterdam, he reflected on his mother’s faith and virtue and concluded that she was the most Christian woman he had ever known. With that as a wonderfully consoling thought, he fantasied about how she would die, how her last hours would be filled with faith and calm, and how that faith and calm would be her final, faith-filled witness to her family.

But that’s not the way it played out. Far from being calm and unafraid, his mother, in the final hours leading up to her death, was seemingly in the grip of some inexplicable darkness, of some deep inner disquiet, and of something that looked like the antithesis of faith. For Nouwen this was very disconcerting. Why? Why would his mother be undergoing this disquiet when for all her life she had been a woman of such strong faith?

Initially this unsettled him deeply, until a deeper understanding of faith broke through: His mother had been a woman who every day of her adult life had prayed to Jesus, asking him to empower her to live as he lived and to die as he died. Well, seemingly, her prayer was heard. She did die like Jesus who, though having a rock-solid faith, sweated blood while contemplating his own death and then cried out on the cross, anguished with the feeling that God had forsaken him. In brief, her prayer had been answered. She had asked Jesus to let her die as he did and, given her openness to it, her prayer was granted, to the confusion of her family and friends who had expected a very different scene. That is also true for the manner of Jesus’ death and the reaction of his family and disciples. This isn’t the way anyone naturally fantasizes the death of a faith-filled person.

But a deeper understanding of faith reverses that logic: Looking at the death of Henri Nouwen’s mother, the question is not, how could this happen to her? The question is rather: Why wouldn’t this happen to her? It’s what she asked for and, being a spiritual athlete who asked God to send her the ultimate test, why wouldn’t God oblige?

There’s a certain parallel to this in the seeming doubts suffered by Mother Teresa. When her diaries were published and revealed her dark night of the soul, many people were shocked and asked: How could this happen to her? A deeper understanding of faith would, I believe, ask instead: Why wouldn’t this happen to her, given her faith and her openness to enter into Jesus’ full experience?

But, this has still a further complication: Sometimes for person of deep faith it doesn’t happen this way and instead he or she dies calm and unafraid, buoyed up by faith like a safe ship on stormy waters. Why does this happen to some and not to others? We have no answer. Faith doesn’t put us all one the same conveyor-belt where one dynamic fits all. Sometimes people with deep faith die, as Jesus did, in darkness and fear; and sometimes people with deep faith they die in calm and peace.

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross submits that each of us goes through five clear stages in dying, namely, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Kathleen Dowling Singh suggests that what Kubler-Ross defines as acceptance needs some further nuance. According to Singh, the toughest part of that acceptance is full surrender and, prior to that surrender, some people, though not everyone, will undergo a deep interior darkness that, on the surface, can look like despair. Only after that, do they experience joy and ecstasy.

All of us need to learn the lesson that Nouwen learned at his mother’s deathbed: Faith, like love, admits of various modalities and may not be judged simplistically from the outside.

Youth Today – Who are They Really?

May 16, 2016

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.

The Ten Commandments of Mercy

May 9, 2016

Among the Ten Commandments, one begins with the word “remember”: Remember to keep holy the Sabbath day”. It reminds us to recall something we already know. There are commandments of mercy written into our very DNA. We already know them, but we need to remember them more explicitly. What are they?

The Ten Commandments of Mercy:

Remember that mercy lies deepest in God’s heart.

Few things so much approximate the essence of God as does mercy. Mercy is God’s essence. Scripture uses words such as loving-kindness and compassion to try to define what constitutes God’s mercy, but the central biblical concept, captured in the Hebrew concept of hesed, connotes a relationship that loves, embraces, and forgives even when, and especially when, we cannot measure up or deserve what’s given us

Remember that mercy is the essence of all true religion.

Inside religion and spirituality, within all faiths, three things try to lay claim to what’s central: proper religious practice, outreach to the poor, and compassion. Ultimately they are not in opposition, but complementary pieces of one religious whole. But for religious practice and outreach to the poor to be an extension of God’s love and not of human ego, they need to be predicated upon compassion, mercy. Deepest inside of every religion is the invitation: Be compassionate, merciful, as God is compassionate.

Remember that we all stand forever in need of mercy.

There is more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who converts than over ninety-nine righteous persons. Does God love sinners more than the righteous? There are no righteous persons. It’s rather that we feel God’s love more when we admit that we’re sinners. None of us ever measure up. But, as St. Paul so consolingly teaches, the whole point is that we don’t have to measure up. That’s what mercy means. It’s undeserved, by definition.

Remember that, having received mercy, we must show mercy to others.

We only receive and appropriate God’s mercy and the mercy of others when we extend that same mercy to others. Mercy has to flow through us. If we don’t extend it to others we become self-indulgent and too harsh on others.

Remember that only the practice of mercy sets us free.

Receiving and giving mercy is the only thing that frees from our congenital propensity to self-seek, self-justify, and judge others. Nothing frees us more from the tyranny of ego than does the practice of mercy.

Remember that mercy is not opposed to justice, but is its fulfillment.

Mercy, as Walter Kasper so aptly puts it, is not “a kind of fabric softener that undermines the dogmas and commandments and abrogates the central and fundamental meaning of truth.” That’s the accusation the Pharisees made against Jesus. Mercy is where justice is meant to terminate.

Remember that only the practice of mercy will make God’s Kingdom come.

Jesus promised us that someday the meek will inherit the earth, the poor will eat plentiful, rich food, and all tears will be wiped away. That can only happen when mercy replaces self-interest.

Remember that mercy needs too to be practiced collectively.

It is not enough for us to be merciful in our own lives. Mercy is marginalized in a society that doesn’t sufficiently attend to those who are weak or needy, just as it is marginalized in a church that is judgmental. We must create a society that is merciful and a church that is merciful. Mercy, alone, enables the survival of the weakest.

Remember that mercy calls us to do works both spiritual and physical.

Our Christian faith challenges us to perform mercy in a double way, corporeally and spiritually. The classic corporal works of mercy are: Feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, shelter the homeless, cloth the naked, visit the sick, visit the imprisoned, and bury the dead. The classic spiritual works of mercy are: instruct the ignorant, counsel the doubtful, comfort the afflicted, admonish the sinner, forgive offenses, bear wrongs patiently, and pray for the living and the dead. God has given us different gifts and all of us are better at some of these than at others, but mercy is manifest in all of them.

Remember that our lives are a dialogue between God’s mercy and our weaknesses.

The only thing at which we are adequate is being inadequate. We are forever falling short at something, no matter the strength of our sincerity, good intention, and willpower. Only mercy, receiving it and giving it, can lead us out of the choppy waters of our own anxieties, worry, and joylessness. Only in knowing mercy do we know gratitude.

This year, 2016, Pope Francis has asked us all to live a year of mercy, to contemplate the mystery of mercy “as a wellspring of joy, serenity, and peace.” Mercy, he believes, is the secret to putting a credible face to God, to putting a credible face to our churches, and to walking with steadiness inside our own lives.

Daniel Berrigan – RIP

May 2, 2016

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.

Marking an Anniversary

April 25, 2016

What we cease to celebrate we will soon cease to cherish. This year, 2016, marks the 200^th anniversary of the founding of the religious congregation to which I belong, The Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate. We have a proud history, 200 years now, of ministering to the poor around the world. This merits celebrating.

As a writer, I don’t normally highlight the fact that I am a professed religious, just as I don’t usually highlight the fact that I’m a Roman Catholic priest, because I fear that labels such as “Catholic priest”, “Father”, or “Oblate of Mary Immaculate” attached to an author’s name serve more to limit his readership than to increase it. Jesus, too, was pretty negative on religious labels. Mostly though I avoid writing under a specific religious label because I want to speak more through the wider prism of my humanity and my baptism than through the more specific prism of my priesthood and vowed religious commitment. It’s a choice I’ve made, respecting the choice of others.

With that being said, I want to break my own rules here and speak more specifically through the prism of my identity as vowed religious. So I write this particular column as Father Ronald Rolheiser OMI, proud member of The Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate.

Let me begin with a little history: Our Congregation was founded in Southern France in 1816 by Eugene de Mazenod, declared a saint by the church in 1995. Eugene was a diocesan priest who immediately upon entering the ministry saw that the Gospel wasn’t reaching many of the poor and so he began to focus his own ministry very much on reaching out to the poor. It takes a village to raise and child and, soon enough, he realized that it takes more than one person to bring about effective change. It takes a community to make compassion effective: What we dream alone remains a dream, what we dream with others can become a reality. So he sought-out other like-minded men, diocesan priests like himself, and called them together around this mission and eventually they began to live together and formed a new religious congregation dedicated to serving the poor.

That was 200 years ago and the Oblates (as we’re commonly called) have had a proud, if not always comfortable, history since. Today we are ministering in 68 countries on every continent on earth and our mission is still the same. We serve the poor. That’s why you’ll find us ministering mainly on the margins of society, where mainstream society prefers not to cast its glance, on the borders with migrants, on Native reservations, in immigrant areas of our cities, in tough inner-city places where the police are reluctant to go, and in developing countries where access to food, health, and education are still scarce commodities. Our mission is not to the privileged, though we try to bring them onside with our mission, and our members themselves are often drawn from among the poor and our message to the young men entering our ranks is: If you join us, consider what’s not in it for you!

And we’re missionaries, meaning that we understand our task to be that of establishing communities and churches, helping them to become self-sufficient, and then moving on to do this over and over again. That may be a noble task, but it’s also a formula for heartache. It isn’t easy on the heart to be forever building something only to give it over to someone else and move on. You don’t ever get to have a permanent home; but there’s a compensation, as a missionary, after a while every place is home.

We aren’t a large congregation, we’re only about 4000 members scattered in some 68 countries, humble in comparison to the likes of the Jesuits, Franciscans, and Dominicans. Indeed in an early version of the famous French Larousse Dictionary, we were described as “a kind of mini-Jesuit found mostly in rural areas.” We are flattered by this description. Our call is not to be in the limelight, but to be at the edges. No accident that it’s there, at the edges, in a rural area, where I met the Oblates.

We also pride ourselves on being robust, practical, earthy, and close to those we serve, and our dress often betrays this. Our families and close friends are forever buying us clothing to try to upgrade our less-than-stellar wardrobes. It’s not that we deliberately cultivate an image of being somewhat unkempt; it’s more that we tend to draw men to our ranks who have other priorities.

And our founder? He wasn’t an easy man, obsessed as he was, as sometimes saints are, by a single-mindedness that doesn’t easily tolerate weaknesses among those around him. He could exhibit blessed rage sometimes. I’m secretly glad that I never met him in person, fearing his judgment on my own weaknesses; but I’m wonderfully glad for his charism and for that motley group of men, often over-casually dressed, who continue his mission.

Loyalty and Patriotism Revisited

April 18, 2016

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.

Love – A Projection and a Reality

April 11, 2016

The famed Jungian writer, Robert Johnson, makes this observation about falling in love: “To fall in love is to project the most noble and infinitely valuable part of one’s being onto another human being. … We have to say that the divinity we see in others is truly there, but we don’t have a right to see it until we have taken away our own projections. … Making this fine distinction is the most delicate and difficult task in life. “

And indeed it is. Sorting through what is genuine in love and what is projection is indeed one of the more delicate and difficult tasks of life. We can, and do, for instance, sometimes fall in love with persons who are utterly wrong for us and know from experience that once our initial infatuation is over our passion can very quickly turn into indifference or even hatred. For this reason we might ask: Whom or what are we really loving in those magical moments of infatuation when we see so much goodness and divinity inside of another person? Are we really in love with that person or, as Johnson suggests, are we simply projecting some of our own noble qualities onto that other so that, in effect, this is more self-love than real love?

The answer to that, as Johnson highlights, is complex. The goodness and nobility we see in the other person are in fact there, normally at least; however, until a certain projection, an idealization within which we envelope the other, is stripped away we are not yet really loving and valuing that other.

As an example: Imagine a man falling in love with a woman. At that early stage of love, his feelings for her are very strong, obsessive even, and his eyes are open mostly only to her good qualities and blind to her faults. Indeed, at this stage, her faults can even appear attractive rather than problematic. Of course, as bitter experience teaches us, that won’t be the case once the infatuation wears off.

And so we are left with an important question: Are those wonderful qualities that we so naturally see in another person in the early stages of love really there? Yes. Absolutely. They are there; but they may not be what we are actually seeing. As Johnson highlights, and as spiritual writers everywhere attest to, at this stage of love, there is the ever-present possibility that the beautiful qualities we are seeing in someone are more of a projection of our own selves than actual gifts we see inside him or her. Though the other person actually possesses those gifts, what we are really seeing is a projection of ourselves, an idealization with which we have enveloped the other, so that in effect, at this stage, we is not so much in love with the other as we are in love with certain good qualities that are inside of ourselves. That’s why we can fall in love with people of very different temperaments and virtue and, at an early stage of our love, still always have the same feelings.

That’s also why falling love is such an ambiguous thing and needs the discernment offered by time and the counsel of wise friends and family. We can fall in love with many different kinds of people, including some who are very wrong for us. The heart, as Pascal asserts, has its reasons, some of which are not always favorable to our long-range health.

What’s the lesson here? Simply this: In all of our intimate relations we should be aware of our natural propensity to project our own more-noble qualities onto the other person and to be aware too that we do not truly love and appreciate that other person until we have withdrawn that projection so that we are actually seeing the other person’s goodness, not our own. The same holds true as regards hatred of someone else. Just as we tend to idealize others we also tend to demonize them, projecting our own dark side onto them and enrobing them with our own worse qualities. Thus, by Robert Johnson’s logic, we don’t have a right either to hate anyone, until we have withdrawn our own dark projection. We over-demonize just as we over-idealize.

In his classic novel, Stoner, John Williams describes for us how his main character understands love: “In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart.”

The Power of Prayer and Ritual inside our Helplessness

April 4, 2016

In the movie based upon Jane Austen’s classic novel, Sense and Sensibility, there’s a very poignant scene where one of her young heroines, suffering from acute pneumonia, is lying in bed hovering between life and death. A young man, very much in love with her, is pacing back and forth, highly agitated, frustrated by his helplessness to do anything of use, and literally jumping out of his skin. Unable to contain his agitation any longer, he goes to the girl’s mother and asks what he might do to be helpful. She replies that there’s nothing he can do, the situation is beyond them. Unable to live with that response her says to her: “Give me some task to do, or I shall go mad!”

We’ve all had the feeling at times when in the face of a dire situation we need to do something, but there’s nothing we can do, no magic wand we can wave to make things better.

But there is something we can do.

I recall an event in my own life several years ago: I was teaching summer school in Belgium when, late one evening, just as I was getting ready for bed, I received an email that a two friends of mine, a man and a woman recently engaged, had been involved that day in a fatal car accident. He was killed instantly and she was in serious condition in hospital. I was living by myself in a university dorm, thousands of miles from where this all happened, and thousands of miles from anyone with whom I could share this sorrow. Alone, agitated, panicked, and desperately needing to do something but being absolutely helpless to do anything, I was literally driven to my knees. Not being able to do anything else, I picked up the prayer-book that contains the Office of the Church and prayed, by myself, the Vespers prayer for the dead. When I’d finished, my sorrow hadn’t gone away, my friend was still dead, but my panic had subsided, as had my desperate need to do something (when there was nothing I could do).

My prayer that night gave me some sense that the young man who’d died that day was alright, safe somewhere in a place beyond us, and it also relieved me of the agitation and panicked pressure of needing to do something in the face of agitated helplessness. I’d done the only thing I could do, the thing that’s been done in the face of helplessness and death since the beginning of time; I’d given myself over to prayer and to the rituals of the community and the faith of the community.

It’s these, prayer and ritual, which we have at our disposal at those times when, like the man in Sense and Sensibility, we need to do something or we will go mad. That’s not only true for heavy, sorrowful times when loved ones are sick or dying or killed in accidents and we need to do something but there’s nothing we can do. We also need ritual to help us celebrate happy times properly. What should we do when our own children are getting married? Among other things, we need to celebrate the ritual of marriage because no wedding planner in the world can do for us what the ritual, especially the church-ritual, of marriage can do. Weddings, just like funerals, are a prime example of where we need ritual to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves.

Sadly, today, we are a culture that for the most part is ritually tone-deaf. We don’t understand ritual and therefore mostly don’t know what to do when we need to be doing something but we don’t know what to do. That’s a fault, a painful poverty, in our understanding.

The Trappist monks who were martyred in Algeria in 1996 were first visited by the Islamic extremists who would later kidnap and kill them, on Christmas Eve, just as they were preparing to celebrate Christmas mass. After some initial threats, their eventual murderers left. The monks were badly shaken. They huddled together as a group for a time to digest what had just happened. Then, not knowing what else to do in the face of this threat and their fear, they sang the Christmas mass. In the words of their Abbott: “It’s what we had to do. It’s all we could do! It was the right thing.” He shared too, as did a number of the other monks (in their diaries) that they found this, celebrating the ritual of mass in the face of their fear and panic, something that calmed their fear and brought some steadiness and regularity back into their lives.

There’s a lesson to be learned here, one that can bring steadiness and calm into our lives at those times when we desperately need to do something, but there’s nothing to do.

Ritual: It’s what we have to do. It’s all we can do! It’s the right thing.

The Triumph of Goodness

March 28, 2016

The stone which rolled away from the tomb of Jesus continues to roll away from every sort of grave. Goodness cannot be held, captured, or put to death. It evades its pursuers, escapes capture, slips away, hides out, even leaves the churches sometimes, but forever rises, again and again, all over the world. Such is the meaning of the resurrection.

Goodness cannot be captured or killed. We see this already in the earthly life of Jesus. There are a number of passages in the Gospels which give the impression that Jesus was somehow highly elusive and difficult to capture. It seems that until Jesus consents to his own capture, nobody can lay a hand on him. We see this played out a number of times: Early on in his ministry, when his own townsfolk get upset with his message and lead him to the brow of a hill to hurl him to his death, we are told that “he slipped through the crowd and went away.” Later when the authorities try to arrest him we are told simply that “he slipped away”. And, in yet another incident when he is in temple area and they try to arrest him, the text simply says that he left the temple area and “no one laid a hand upon him because his hour had not yet come.” Why the inability to take him captive? Was Jesus so physically adept and elusive that no one could imprison him?

These stories of his “slipping away” are highly symbolic. The lesson is not that Jesus was physically deft and elusive, but rather that the word of God, the grace of God, the goodness of God, and power of God can never be captured, held captive, or ultimately killed. They are adept. They can never be held captive, can never be killed, and even when seemingly they are killed, the stone that entombs them always eventually rolls back and releases them. Goodness continues to resurrect from every sort of grave.

And it is this, the constant resurrection of goodness, not that of viciousness and evil, which speaks the deepest truth about our world and our lives. The Jewish-Hungarian writer, Imre Kertesz, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2002, gives a poignant testimony of this. He had as a young boy been in a Nazi death camp, but what he remembered most afterwards from this experience was not the injustice, cruelty, and death that he saw there, but rather some acts of goodness, kindness, and altruism he witnessed amidst that evil. After the war, it left him wanting to read the lives of saints rather than biographies of war. The appearance of goodness fascinated him. To his mind, evil is explicable, but goodness? Who can explain it? What is its source? Why does it spring up over and over again all over the earth, and in every kind of situation?

It springs up everywhere because God’s goodness and power lie at the source of all being and life. This is what is revealed in the resurrection of Jesus. What the resurrection reveals is that the ultimate source of all that is, of all being and life, is gracious, good, and loving. Moreover it also reveals that graciousness, goodness, and love are the ultimate power inside reality. They will have the final word and they will never be captured, derailed, killed, or ultimately ignored. They will break through, ceaselessly, forever. In the end, too, as Imre Kertesz suggests, they are more fascinating than evil.

And so we are in safe hands. No matter how bad the news on a given day, no matter how threatened our lives are on a given day, no matter how intimidating the neighborhood or global bully, not matter how unjust and cruel a situation, and no matter how omnipotent are anger and hatred, love and goodness will reappear and ultimately triumph.

Jesus taught that the source of all life and being is benign and loving. He promised too that our end will be benign and loving. In the resurrection of Jesus, God showed that God has the power to deliver on that promise. Goodness and love will triumph! The ending of our story, both that of our world and that of our individual lives, is already written – and it is a happy ending! We are already saved. Goodness is guaranteed. Kindness will meet us. We only need to live in the face of that wonderful truth.

They couldn’t arrest Jesus, until he himself allowed it. They put his dead body in a tomb and sealed it with a stone, but the stone rolled away. His disciples abandoned him in his trials, but they eventually returned more committed than ever. They persecuted and killed his first disciples, but that only served to spread his message. The churches have been unfaithful sometimes, but God just slipped away from those particular temple precincts. God has been declared dead countless time, but yet a billion people just celebrated Easter.

Goodness cannot be killed. Believe it!

The Understanding and Compassion of Good Friday

March 21, 2016

As Jesus is being crucified he utters these words: “Forgive them, they know not what they do.” It is not easy to say these words and it is perhaps even more difficult to grasp them in their depth. What does it mean, really mean, to understand and forgive a violent action against you?

There are various approaches here: For example, in a tragic note, shared countless times on Social Media, a man who lost his wife in the terrorist attacks in Paris in 2015 wrote these words, addressed to those who killed his wife:

“On Friday evening you stole the life of an exceptional person, the love of my life, the mother of my son, but you will not have my hatred. I don’t know who you are and I don’t want to know, you are dead souls. If this God for whom you kill blindly made us in his image, every bullet in the body of my wife is a wound in his heart. So no, I will not give you the satisfaction of hating you. You want it, but to respond to hatred with anger would be to give in to the same ignorance that made you what you are. … We are only two, my son and I, but we are more powerful than all the world’s armies… every day of his life this little boy will insult you with his happiness and freedom.”

While this response is wonderfully heroic and virtuous, it does not, I believe, go deep enough in its understanding and compassion. Virtuous as it is, it still carries a note of moral separateness, of a certain superiority. Further still, it lacks all admission of being itself somehow complicit in the unfortunate circumstances of culture and history that helped bring about this horrible act because it avoids the question: Why do you hate me? It is a very positive and helpful note in its refusal of hatred; but, I fear, it may have exactly the opposite effect upon those whom it accuses. It will further enflame their hatred.

Contrast this with the letter the Trappist Abbott, Christian de Cherge, wrote to his family, just before he, himself, was killed by Islamic terrorists. He writes:

“If it should happen one day—and it could be today—that I become a victim of the terrorism which now seems ready to encompass all the foreigners living in Algeria, I would like my community, my Church, my family, to remember that my life was given to God and to this country. I ask them to accept that the One Master of all life was not a stranger to this brutal departure. … I ask them to be able to associate such a death with the many other deaths that were just as violent, but forgotten through indifference and anonymity. … I have lived long enough to know that I share in the evil which seems, alas, to prevail in the world, even in that which would strike me blindly. I should like, when the time comes, to have a clear space which would allow me to beg forgiveness of God and of all my fellow human beings, and at the same time to forgive with all my heart the one who would strike me down. … I do not see, in fact, how I could rejoice if this people I love were to be accused indiscriminately of my murder. It would be to pay too dearly for what will, perhaps, be called “the grace of martyrdom,” to owe it to an Algerian, whoever he may be, especially if he says he is acting in fidelity to what he believes to be Islam. I know the scorn with which Algerians as a whole can be regarded. I know also the caricature of Islam which a certain kind of Islamism encourages. It is too easy to give oneself a good conscience by identifying this religious way with the fundamentalist ideologies of the extremists. … This is what I shall be able to do, if God wills—immerse my gaze in that of the Father, to contemplate with him his children of Islam just as he sees them, all shining with the glory of Christ, the fruit of his Passion, filled with the Gift of the Spirit, whose secret joy will always be to establish communion and to refashion the likeness, delighting in the differences. … And you also, the friend of my final moment, [my executioner], who would not be aware of what you were doing. Yes, for you also I wish this “thank you”—and this adieu—to commend you to the God whose face I see in yours. And may we find each other, happy ‘good thieves,’ in Paradise, if it pleases God, the Father of us both. Amen.

Ah, to have grace and compassion to hope to have a drink one day with our enemies in heaven, laughing together at our former misguided hatred, under the loving gaze of the same God!

The Power of Fear

March 14, 2016

Fear is the heartbeat of the powerless. So writes Cor de Jonghe. That’s true. We can deal with most everything, except fear.

The late Belgium spiritual writer, Bieke Vandekerkehove, in a very fine book, The Taste of Silence, shared very honestly about the demons that beset her as she faced a terminal illness at age nineteen. She singled out three particular demons that tormented her as she faced the prospect of death, sadness, anger, and fear, and she suggested that we can more easily cope with the first two, sadness and anger, than we can with the third, fear. Here’s her thought:

Sadness can be handled through tears, through grieving. Sadness fills us like a water glass, but a glass can be emptied. Tears can drain sadness of its bite. We have all, no doubt, experienced the release, the catharsis, that can come through tears. Tears can soften the heart and take away the bitterness of sadness, even while its heaviness remains. Sadness, no matter how heavy, has a release valve. So too does anger. Anger can be expressed and its very expression helps release it so that it flows out of us. No doubt too we have also experienced this. The caution, of course, is that in expressing anger and giving it release we need to be careful not to hurt others, which is the ever-present danger when dealing with anger. With anger we have many outlets: We can shout in rage, beat drum, punch a bag, use profanity, physically exercise until we’re exhausted, smash some furniture, utter murderous threats, and rage away at countless things. This isn’t necessarily rational and some of these things aren’t necessarily moral, but they offer some release. We have means to cope with anger.

Fear, on the other hand, has no such release valves. Most often, there’s nothing we can do to lighten or release it. Fear paralyses us, and this paralysis is the very thing what robs us of the strength we would need to combat it. We can beat a drum, rage in profanity, or cry tears, but fear remains. Moreover, unlike anger, fear cannot be taken out on someone else, even though we sometimes try, by scapegoating. But, in the end, it doesn’t work. The object of our fear doesn’t go away simply because we wish it away. Fear can only be suffered. We have to live with it until it recedes on its own. Sometimes, as the Book of Lamentations suggests, all we can do is to put our mouth to the dust and wait. With fear, sometimes all we can do is endure.

What’s the lesson in this?

In her memoirs, the Russian poet, Anna Akhmatova, recounts an encounter she once had with another woman, as the two of them waited outside a Russian prison. Both of their husbands had been imprisoned by Stalin and both of them were there to bring letters and packages to their husbands, as were a number of other women. But the scene was like something out of the existential literature of the absurd. The situation was bizarre. First of all, the women were unsure of whether their husbands were even still alive and were equally uncertain as to whether the letters and packages they were delivering would ever be given to their loved ones by the guards. Moreover the guards would, without reason, make them wait for hours in the snow and cold before they would collect their letters and packages, and sometimes they wouldn’t meet the women at all. Still, every week, despite the absurdity of it, the women would come, wait in the snow, accept this unfairness, do their vigil, and try to get letters and packages to their loved ones in prison. One morning, as they were waiting, seemingly with no end in sight, one of the women recognized Akhmatova and said to her: “Well, you’re a poet. Can you tell me what’s happening here?” Akhmatova looked at the woman and replied: “Yes, I can!” And then something like a smile passed between them.

Why the smile? Just to be able to name something, no matter how absurd or unfair, no matter our powerlessness to change it, is to be somehow free of it, above it, transcendent in some way. To name something correctly is to partly free ourselves of its dominance. That’s why totalitarian regimes fear artists, writers, religious critics, journalists, and prophets. They name things. That’s ultimately the function of prophecy. Prophets don’t foretell the future, they properly name the present. Richard Rohr is fond of saying: Not everything can be fixed or cured, but it should be named properly. James Hillman has his own way of casting this. He suggests that a symptom suffers most when it doesn’t know where it belongs.

This can be helpful in dealing with fear in our lives. Fear can render us impotent. But, naming that properly, recognizing where that symptom belongs and how powerless it leaves us, can help us to live with it, without sadness and anger.

How the Soul Matures

March 7, 2016

In a deeply insightful book, The Grace of Dying, Kathleen Dowling Singh shares insights she has gleaned as a health professional from being present to hundreds of people while they are dying. Among other things, she suggests that the dying process itself, in her words, “is exquisitely calibrated to automatically produce union with Spirit.” In essence, what she is saying is that what is experienced by someone in the final stages and moments of dying, particularly if the death is not a sudden one, is a purgation that naturally lessens the person’s grip on the things of this world as well as on his or her own ego so as to be ready to enter into a new realm of life and meaning beyond our present realm of consciousness. The dying process itself, she submits, midwifes us into a wider, deeper life.

But that does not come without a weighty price tag. The dying process is not a pleasant one. Most of us do not die peacefully in our sleep, comfortable, dignified, and serene. The norm rather is the kind of death that comes about by aging or by terminal disease. What happens then is not comfortable, dignified, or serene. Rather there is a painful, sometimes excruciating, almost always humiliating, breakdown of the body. In that process we lose basically everything that is dear to us: our health, our natural bodily beauty, our dignity, and sometimes even our mind. Dying is rarely beautiful, save in another aesthetic.

And so how is the process of dying calibrated to help ease our grip on this world and more gracefully move on to the next world? Dying matures the soul. How so?

Writing about aging, James Hillman poses this question: Why have God and nature so constructed things that as we age and mature and are finally more in control of our lives, our bodies begin to fall apart and we need a bevy of doctors and medicines to keep functioning. Is there some wisdom in the very DNA of the life-process that mandates the breakdown of physical health in late life? Hillman says, yes. There’s an innate wisdom in the process of aging and dying: The best wines have to be aged in cracked old barrels. The breakdown of our bodies deepens, softens, and matures the soul.

Jesus teaches us this lesson, and it is a truth he himself had to accept, with considerable reluctance, in his own life. Facing his own death the night before he died, prostrate on the ground in Gethsemane, he begs his Father: “Let this cup pass from me! Yet, not my will, but yours, be done.” In essence, he is asking God whether there is a road to glory and vision of Easter Sunday without passing through the pain and humiliation of Good Friday. It seems there isn’t. Humiliation and depth are inextricably linked. After his resurrection, talking with his disciples on the road to Emmaus, he says to them: “Wasn’t it necessary that the Christ should so suffer?” This is more a revelation of truth than a question. The answer is already clear: The road to depth necessarily passes through pain and humiliation. Kathleen Dowling Singh and James Hillman simply format this positively: Pain and humiliation are naturally calibrated to move us beyond what is more superficial to what is deeper. Pain and humiliation, and there is invariably a certain dying in these, help open us up to deeper consciousness.

And we know this already from common sense. If we honestly assess our own experience we have to admit that most of the things that have made us deep are things we would be ashamed to talk about because they were humiliating. Humiliation is what humbles and deepens us. Our successes, on the contrary, which we do like to talk about, generally produce inflations in our lives.

The famed psychologist/philosopher, William James, submits that there are realms of reality and consciousness that lie beyond what we presently experience. All religion, not least Christianity, tells us the same thing. But our normal consciousness and self-awareness literally set up boundaries that prevent us from going there. Normally, for us, there’s this world, this reality, and that’s all! The dying process helps break open that contraction in our perception, awareness, and consciousness. It is calibrated to open us up to a reality and a consciousness beyond what we presently deem as real.

But there are other paths to this too, outside the process of dying. Prayer and meditation are meant to do for us exactly what the dying process does. They too are exquisitely calibrated to loosen our grip on this world and open our awareness to another. As Singh puts it: “The path to the transpersonal realms, which the saints and sages of every age have known through the practice of meditation and prayer, appears to be the same transformative path that each of us traverses in the process of dying.”

That’s consoling: God is going to get us, one way or the other.

The Cries of Finitude

February 29, 2016

What most moves your heart? I was asked this question recently at a workshop. We were asked to respond to this question: When do you most naturally feel compassion in your heart? For me, the answer came easily. I am most moved when I see helplessness, when I see someone or something helpless to tend to its own needs and to protect its own dignity. It might be baby, hungry and crying, too little to feed itself and to safeguard its own dignity. It might a woman in a hospital, sick, in pain, dying, helpless to get better, also unable to attend to her own dignity. It might be an unemployed man, down on his luck, unable to find work, the odd man out when everyone else seems to be doing great. It might be a little girl on the playground, helpless as she is teased and bullied, suffering indignity. Or it might just be a baby kitten, hungry, helpless, pleading with its eyes, unable to speak or attend to its own need. Helplessness tugs at the heart. I am always touched in the softest place inside me by helplessness, by the pleading of finitude. I suspect we all are.

We’re in good company. This is what moved Mary, Jesus’ mother, at the Wedding Feast of Cana to go over to Jesus and say: “They have no wine!” Her request here has different layers of meaning. At one level, it is a very particular request at a particular occasion in history; she is trying to save her hosts at a wedding from embarrassment, from suffering an indignity. No doubt the shortage of wine was due to some poverty on their part, either a shortage of money or a shortage of good planning, but, either way, they stood to be embarrassed before their guests. But, as with most things in the Gospels, this incident has a deeper meaning. Mary isn’t just speaking for a particular host on a particular occasion. She’s also speaking universally, as the mother of humanity, Eve, voicing for all of us what John Shea so aptly calls, “the cries of finitude”.

What is finitude? The finite, as we can see from the word itself, contrasts itself to the infinite, to what is not limited, to God. God, alone, is not finite. God, alone, is self-sufficient. God, alone, is never helpless, and God, alone, never needs help from anyone else. Only God is never subject to sickness, hunger, tiredness, irritation, fatigue, bodily and mental diminishment, and death. God, alone, never has to suffer the indignity of need, of getting caught short, of inadequate self-expression, of not measuring up, of being embarrassed, of being bullied, of being unable to help Himself, and of having to beg silently with His eyes for someone to come and help.

Everything else is finite. Thus, as humans, we are subject to helplessness, illness, lameness, blindness, hunger, tiredness, irritation, diminishment, and death. Moreover, within all these, we are also subject to indignity. So many of our words and actions are, in the end, cries of finitude, cries for assistance, the cries of a baby for food, for warmth, for protection, and for a safeguard from indignity. Although we are infinitely more sophisticated in our humanity, we are all still, at one level, the baby kitten, pleading with our eyes for someone to feed us, and all the assertions of self-sufficiency of the rich, the strong, the healthy, the arrogant, and of those who seemingly need no help are in the end nothing other than attempts to keep helplessness at bay. Not matter how strong and self-sufficient we might believe ourselves to be, finitude and mortality admit of no exemptions. Tiredness, illness, diminishment, death, and painful hungers will eventually find us all. Our wine too will eventually run out. Hopefully someone like the Mother of Jesus will speak for us: They have no wine!

What’s the lesson in this? A number of things:

First, recognizing our finitude can lead to a healthier self-understanding. Knowing and accepting our finitude can help quell a lot of frustration, restlessness, and false guilt in our lives. I once had a spiritual director, an elderly nun, who challenged me to live by this axiom: Fear not, you are inadequate. We need to forgive ourselves for our own limits, for the fact that we are human, finite, and are unable to provide ourselves and those around us all that we need. But inadequacy is a forgivable condition, not a moral fault.

Beyond forgiving ourselves for our helplessness, recognizing and accepting our finitude should challenge us too to hear more clearly the cries of finitude around us. And so whether it’s the cry of a baby, the humiliation in the eyes of someone looking for work, the ravaged eyes of the terminally ill patient, or simply the pleading eyes of a young kitten, we need, like Mary, to take up their cause and ensure that someone spares them from indignity by changing their water into wine, by calling out: They have no wine!

Mourning Our Barrenness

February 21, 2016

Several years ago, while teaching a summer course at Seattle University, I had as one of my students, a woman who, while happily married, was unable to conceive a child. She had no illusions about what this meant for her. It bothered her a great deal. She found Mother’s Day very difficult. Among other things, she wrote a well-researched thesis on the concept of barrenness in scripture and developed a retreat on that same theme which she offered at various renewal centers.

Being a celibate whose vows also conscript a certain biological barrenness, I went on one of her weekend retreats, the only male there. It was a powerful group experience, but it took most of the weekend for that to happen. Initially most everyone on the retreat was tentative and shy, not wanting to admit to themselves or others the kind of pain the loss of biological parenthood was creating in their lives. But things broke open on the Saturday night, after the group watched a video of a 1990s British film, Secrets and Lies, a subtle but powerful drama about the pain of not having children. The tears in the movie catalyzed tears within our group and the floodgates opened. Tears began to flow freely and one by one the women began to tell their stories. Then, after the tears and stories had stopped, the atmosphere changed, as if a fog had lifted and a weight had been removed. Lightness set in. Each person in the group had mourned her loss and now each felt a lightness in knowing that one might never have a child and still be a happy person, without denying the pain in that.

Barrenness is not just a term that describes a biological incapacity to have children or a life-choice to not have them. It’s wider. Barrenness describes the universal human condition in its incapacity to be generative in the way it would like and the vacuum and frustration that leaves inside lives. Karl Rahner summarizes that in these words: In the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable we ultimately learn that here, in this life, all symphonies must remain unfinished. No matter if we have biological children of our own or not, we still all find ourselves barren in that for none of us is there a finished symphony here on earth. There’s always some barrenness left in our lives and biological barrenness is simply one analogate of that, though arguably the prime one. None of us die having given birth to all we wanted to in this world.

What do we do in the face of this? Is there an answer? Is there a response that can take us beyond simply gritting our teeth and stoically getting on with it? There is. The answer is tears. In mid-life and beyond, we need, as Alice Miller normatively suggests in her classic essay, The Drama of the Gifted Child, to mourn so that our very foundations are shaken. Many of our wounds are irreversible and many of our shortcomings are permanent. We will go to our deaths with this incompleteness. Our loss cannot be reversed. But it can be mourned, both what we lost and what we failed to achieve. In that mourning there is freedom.

I have always been struck by the powerful metaphor inside the story of Jephthah’s daughter in the biblical story in the Book of Judges, chapter 11. It captures in an archetypal image the only answer there is, this side of eternity, to barrenness. Condemned to death in the prime of her youth by a foolish vow her father made, she tells her father that she is willing to die on the altar of sacrifice, but only on one condition. She will now die without experiencing either the consummation of marriage or the birthing of children. So she asks her father to give her two months before her death to “mourn her virginity”. Properly mourned, an incomplete life can be both lived in peace and left in peace.

Tears are the answer to barrenness, to all loss and inadequacy. Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, in her book, A Faithful Farewell, has this to say about tears: “Tears release me into honest sorrow. They release me from the strenuous business of finding words. They release me into a childlike place where I need to be held and find comfort in embrace – in the arms of others and in the arms of God. Tears release me from the treadmill of anxious thoughts, and even from fear. They release me from the strain of holding them back. Tears are a consent to what is. They wash away, at least for a time, denial and resistance. They allow me to relinquish the self-deceptive notion that I’m in control. Tears dilute resentment and wash away the flotsam left by waves of anger.”

Not insignificantly, tears are salt water. Human life originated in the oceans. Tears connect us to the source of all life on this earth, within which prodigal fecundity trumps all barrenness.

God’s Inexhaustibility

February 15, 2016

Many of us, I am sure, have been inspired by the movie, Of Gods and Men, which tells the story of a group of Trappist monks who, after making a painful decision not to flee from the violence in Algeria in the 1990s, are eventually martyred by Islamic extremists in 1996. Recently, I was much inspired by reading the diaries of one of those monks, Christophe Lebreton. Published under the title, Born from the Gaze of God, The Tibhirine Journal of a Martyr Monk, his diaries chronicle the last three years of his life and give us an insight into his, and his community’s, decision to remain in Algeria in the face almost certain death.

In one of his journal entries, Christophe shares how in this situation of hatred and threat, caught between Islamic extremists on one side and a corrupt government on the other, in seeking ground for hope, he draws upon a poem, The Well, by a French poet, Jean-Claude Renard:

But how can we affirm it’s already too late

to fulfill the desire-

so patient does the gift remain;

and when always, perhaps, something or

someone says, from the depth of silence and nakedness,

that an ineffable fire continues to dig in us

beneath wastelands peopled by thorns

a well that nothing exhausts.

A well that nothing exhausts. Perhaps that is the real basis for hope.

For all of us there are times in life when we seem to lose hope, when we look at the world or at ourselves and, consciously or unconsciously, think: “It’s too late! This has gone too far! Nothing can redeem this! All the chances to change this have been used up! It’s hopeless!”

But is this natural, depressive feeling in fact a loss of hope? Not necessarily. Indeed it is precisely when we feel this way, when we have succumbed to the feeling that we have exhausted all of our chances, it’s then that hope can arrive and replace its counterfeits, wishful thinking and natural optimism. What is hope?

We generally confuse hope with either wishful thinking or with natural optimism, both of which have little to do with hope. Wishful thinking has no foundation. We can wish to win a lottery or to have the body of a world-class athlete, but that wish has no reality upon which to draw. It’s pure fantasy. Optimism, for its part, is based upon natural temperament and also has little to do with hope. Terry Eagleton, in a recent book, Hope without Optimism, suggests rather cynically that optimism is simply a natural temperament and an enslaving one at that: “The optimist is chained to cheerfulness.” Moreover, he asserts, that the optimist’s monochrome glaze over the world differs from pessimism only by being monochromatically rosy instead of monochromatically gray. Hope isn’t a wish or a mood; it is a perspective on life that needs to be grounded on a sufficient reality. What is that sufficient reality?

Jim Wallis, a salient figure of Christian hope in our time, says that our hope should not be grounded on what we see on the news of the world each night because that news constantly changes and, on any given night, can be so negative so as to give us little ground for hope. He’s right. Whether the world seems better or worse on a given evening is hardly sufficient cause for us to trust that in the end all will be well. Things might change drastically the next night.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who perennially protested that he was a man of hope rather than of optimism, in an answer to a question, once suggested that there are two sufficient reasons for hope. Asked what would happen if we blew up the world with an atomic bomb, he replied: That would set things back a few million years, but God’s plan for the earth would still come about. Why? Because Christ promised it and, in the resurrection, God shows that God has the power to deliver on that promise. Hope is based on God’s promise and God’s power.

But there is still another reason for our hope, something else that grounds our hope and gives us sufficient reason to live in trust that eventually all will be well, namely, God’s inexhaustibility. Underneath and beneath, beneath us and beneath our universe, there is a well that nothing exhausts.

And it is this which we so often forget or slim down to the limited size of our own hearts and imaginations: God is a prodigal God, almost unimaginable in the scope of physical creation, a God who has created and is still creating billions upon billions of universes. Moreover, this prodigal God, so beyond our imagination in creativity, is, as has been revealed to us by Jesus, equally unimaginable in patience and mercy. There is never an end to our number of chances. There is no limit to God’s patience. There is nothing that can ever exhaust the divine well.

It’s never too late! God’s creativity and mercy are inexhaustible.