Recently I read, in succession, three books on suicide, each written by a mother who lost one of her children to suicide. All three books are powerful, mature, not given to false sentiment, and worth reading: Lois Severson, Healing the Wound from my Daughter’s Suicide, Grief Translated into Words, lost her daughter, Patty, to suicide; Gloria Hutchinson, Damage Done, Suicide of an Only Son, lost her son, David, to suicide; and Marjorie Antus, My Daughter, Her Suicide, and God, A Memoir of Hope, lost her daughter, Mary, to suicide. Patty and David were in their mid-twenties, Mary was still a teen.

You cannot read these biographies and not have your heart ache for these three young people who died in this unfortunate manner. What these books describe in each case is a person who is very loveable, oversensitive, has a history of emotional struggles, and is in all likelihood suffering from a chemical imbalance.  Hearing their stories should leave you more convinced than ever that no God worth worshipping could ever condemn any of these persons to exclusion from the family of life simply because of the manner of their deaths. Gabriel Marcel had an axiom which said: To love someone is to say of that person, you at least will not die. That’s solid Christian doctrine.

As Christians we believe that, as a community of believers, we make up the Body of Christ along with all of those who have died in faith before us. Part of that belief is that Christ has given us the power to bind and loose which, among other things, means that our love for someone can hold that person inside our family, inside the community of grace, and inside of heaven itself. In all three of these books, these mothers make it clear that this is exactly what they are doing.  Their family, their circle of grace, their love, and their heaven includes their lost child. My heaven too includes these three young people, as should any true understanding of God, of grace, of love, and of the family of life.

That’s a deep consolation, but it doesn’t take away the pain.  For a parent, the loss of a child to any kind of death leaves a wound that, this side of eternity, will find no healing. The death of one’s child goes against nature, parents aren’t supposed to bury their children. The death of any child is hard, but if that death comes by suicide, that pain is compounded. There’s the frustration and anger that, unlike a death from a physical disease, this is unwarranted, unnecessary, and an act of betrayal in some way. And there’s the endless second-guessing: How responsible am I for this? How should have I been more alert? Where was I negligent? Why wasn’t I around at the crucial moment?  Guilt and anger comingle with the grief.

But that isn’t all. Beyond all of this, which is itself more than sufficient to break a person, lies the stigma attached to suicide. In the end, despite a better understanding of suicide and a more enlightened attitude towards it, there is still a social, moral, and religious stigma attached to it, equally true in both secular and religious circles. In the not too-distant past, churches used to refuse to bury someone who died by suicide on blessed ground. The churches have changed their attitudes and their practice on this, but, truth be told, many people still struggle in their gut to accord a blessed, peaceful farewell to someone who has died by suicide. The stigma still remains. Someone who dies in this manner is still seen as somehow accursed, as dying outside the family of life and the circle of grace. There is, for most people, nothing consoling in their deaths.

I have suggested elsewhere in my writings that the majority of suicides should be understood as death by a mortal illness: a deadly chemical imbalance, an emotional stroke, an emotional cancer, or an oversensitivity that strips someone of the resiliency needed to live. Here, however, I want address more specifically the issue of the stigma attached to suicide.

There’s still a stigma attached to suicide, that’s clear. With that in mind, it can be helpful to reflect upon the manner in which Jesus died. His death was clearly not a suicide, but it was similarly stigmatized.  Crucifixion carried a stigma from every point of view: religious, moral, and social. A person dying in this way was understood to be dying outside the mercy of God and outside the blessing and acceptance of the community. The families of those crucified carried a certain shame and those who died by crucifixion were also buried apart, in grounds that then took on their own stigma. And it was understood that they were outside the mercy of God and of the community.

Jesus death was clearly not a suicide, but it evoked a similar perception. The same stigma as we attach to suicide was also attached to the manner in which he died.

What does it profit you if you gain the whole world but suffer the loss of your own soul?

Jesus taught that and, I suspect, we generally don’t grasp the full range of it meaning. We tend to take Jesus’ words to mean this: What good is it if someone gains riches, fame, pleasure, and glory and then dies and goes to hell? What good is earthly glory or pleasure if we miss out on eternal life?

Well, Jesus’ teaching does mean that, no question, but there are other lessons in this teaching that have important things to teach us about health and happiness already here in this life. How do we lose our souls? What does it mean “to lose your soul” already in this world? What is a soul and how can it be lost?

Since a soul is immaterial and spiritual it cannot be pictured. We have to use abstract terms to try to understand it. Philosophers, going right back to Aristotle, have tended to define the soul as a double principle inside every living being: For them, the soul is both the principle of life and energy inside us as well as the principle of integration. In essence, the soul is two things: It’s the fire inside us giving us life and energy and it’s the glue that holds us together. While that sounds abstract, it’s anything but that because we have first-hand experience of what this means.

If you have ever been at the bedside of a dying person, you know exactly when the soul leaves the body. You know the precise moment, not because you see something float away from the body, but rather because one minute you see a person, whatever her struggle and agony, with energy, fire, tension in her body and a minute later that body is completely inert, devoid of all energy and life. Nothing animates it anymore. It becomes a corpse. As well, however aged or diseased that body might be, until the second of death it is still one integrated organism. But at the very second of death that body ceases to be one organism and becomes instead a series of chemicals which now begin to separate and go their own ways. Once the soul is gone, so too are gone all life and integration. The body no longer contains any energy and it’s no longer glued together.

And since the soul is a double principle doing two things for us, there are two corresponding ways of losing our souls. We can have our vitality and energy go dead or we can become unglued and fall apart, petrification or dissipation, in either case we lose our souls.

If that is true, then this very much nuances the question of how we should care for our souls. What is healthy food for our souls? For instance, if I am watching television on a given night, what’s good for my soul? A religious channel? A sports channel? A mindless sitcom? The nature channel? Some iconoclastic talk-show?  What’s healthy for my soul?

This is a legitimate question, but also a trick one. We lose our soul in opposite ways and thus care of the soul is a refined alchemy that has to know when to heat things up and when to cool things down: What’s healthy for my soul on a given night depends a lot upon what I’m struggling with more on that night: Am I losing my soul because I’m losing vitality, energy, hope, and graciousness in my life?  Am I growing bitter, rigid, sterile, becoming a person who’s painful to be around?  Or, conversely, am I full of life and energy but so full of it that I am falling apart, dissipating, losing my sense of self?  Am I petrifying or dissipating? Both are a loss of soul. In the former situation, the soul needs more fire, something to rekindle its energy. In the latter case, the soul already has too much fire; it needs some cooling down and some glue.

This tension between the principle of energy and the principle of integration within the human soul is also one of the great archetypal tensions between liberals and conservatives. In terms of an oversimplification, but a useful one, it’s true to say that liberals tend to protect and promote the energy-principle, the fire, while conservatives tend to protect and promote the integration-principle, the glue. Both are right, both are needed, and both need to respect the other’s instinct because the soul is a double principle and both these principles need protection.

After we die we can go to heaven or hell. That’s one way of speaking about losing or saving our souls. But Christian theology also teaches that heaven and hell start already now. Already here in this life, we can weaken or destroy the God-given life inside us by either petrification or dissipation. We can lose our souls by not having enough fire or we can lose them by not having enough glue.

There are now more than seven billion people on this earth and each one of us feels that he or she is the center of the universe. That accounts for most of the problems we have in the world, in our neighborhoods, and in our families. 

And no one’s to blame for this, save God perhaps, for making us this way. Each of us is created in the image and likeness of God, meaning that, each of us, holds within a divine spark, a piece of infinity, and an ingrained knowledge of that unique dignity.  We are infinite souls inside a finite world. To paraphrase St. Augustine, we are made for the divine and our hearts aren’t just dissatisfied until they rest there again, they’re also grandiose along the journey, enflamed by their own uniqueness and dignity. God has made everything beautiful in its own season, Ecclesiastes tells us, but God has put timelessness into the human heart so that we are out of sync with the seasons from beginning to end. We’re overcharged for this planet, and we know it.

Moreover that sense of specialness lies at the center of our awareness: I think, therefore I am! Descartes was right: The only thing we can be absolutely sure of is that we exist and that our own thoughts and feelings are real. We may be dreaming everything else. We awake to self-consciousness aware of our specialness, frustrated by the fact that the world cannot give us what we crave, and insufficiently aware of the fact that everyone else on this earth is also equally unique and special. That’s human nature and it’s always been this way.

Today however a number of things are conspiring together to exacerbate both our grandiosity and our restlessness. In brief, today we are mostly overstimulated in our grandiosity and are not generally given the tools to handle that inflammation of soul.

How are we overstimulated in our grandiosity today? Various factors play together here, but contemporary media and information technology need to be highlighted. Through them, in effect, the whole world is being made available to us during every waking minute of our lives. We are not easily equipped to handle that. While information alone is mostly neutral, and at times even morally inspiring, the downside is that contemporary media overstimulates our grandiosity and restlessness by inundating us with the intimate details of the lives of the rich, the famous, the beautiful, the talented, the powerful, the super-intelligent, the mega-achievers, and the perverted in a way that titillates, seduces, and at times assaults our interior balance so as to leave us cultivating private fantasies of grandiosity, of standing out in a way that makes the world take notice. We see this in an extreme and perverted form in some of the mass shootings that occur in our society, where a lonely, deranged person randomly kills others out of sick vision of grandiosity.  We see it too in the growing phenomenon of anorexia. These examples may be atypical, but we’re becoming a society within which most everyone is perilously overstimulated in his or her grandiosity.

And today we are generally without sufficient personal tools to handle this. Human beings have always been restless and grandiose, but in previous generations they had more tools – religious and societal – to handle restlessness, grandiosity, and frustration. For example, in previous generations the cultural ethos gave people much less permission to cultivate ego than it does today. Previous to our own generation, one had to be more apologetic about self-promotion, self-canonization, overt greed, and crass self-centeredness. Humility was espoused as a virtue and no one was supposed to get too big for his or her britches. That threw a lot of cold water on ego, crass self-assertion, and greed, in effect dampening grandiosity. The message back then was clear: You’re not the center of the universe!

By and large, that’s no longer the case today. Society, more and more, gives us license to be grandiose, to set ourselves up as the center and proudly announce that publicly. Not only are we allowed today to get too big for our britches, we aren’t culturally admired unless we do assert ourselves in that way. And that’s a formula for jealousy, bitterness, and violence. Grandiosity and restlessness need healthy guidance both from the culture and from religion. Today, we generally do not see that guidance.

We are dangerously weak in inculcating into the consciousness of society, especially into the consciousness of the young, a number of vital human and religious truths: To God alone belongs the glory! In this life ultimately all symphonies remain unfinished. You are not the center of the earth. There is real sin! Selfishness is not a virtue! Humility is a virtue! You will only find life by giving it away! Other lives are as real as your own!

We have failed our youth by giving them unrealistic expectations, even as we are depriving them of the tools with which to handle those expectations.

Sometime soon we will witness the canonization of Dorothy Day. For many of us today, especially those who are not Roman Catholic, a canonization draws little more than a yawn. How does a canonization impact our world? Moreover, isn’t canonization simply the recognition of a certain piety to which most people cannot relate? So why should there be much interest around the canonization of Dorothy Day – who in fact protested that she didn’t want people to consider her a saint and asserted that making someone a saint often helps neutralize his or her influence?

Well, Dorothy Day wasn’t the kind of saint who fits the normal conceptions of piety. Many of us, no doubt, are familiar with a basic sketch of her life. She was born in New York in 1897 and died there in 1980. She was a journalist, a peace-activist, a convert to Christianity, who, together with Peter Maurin, established the Catholic Worker Movement to combine direct aid to the poor and homeless with nonviolent action on behalf of peace and justice. The movement remains vibrant today. She served too on the newspaper she founded, Catholic Worker, from 1933 until her death.

Her person and the movement she started have powerfully inspired Christians of every denomination to try to more effectively take the Gospels to the streets, to try to bring together Jesus and justice in a more effectual way. She is invoked today as the primary role-model for virtually everyone, Christian and non-Christian alike, working in the area of social justice.

The honor is well-deserved. She, perhaps better than anyone else in her generation, was able to wed together the Gospel and justice, Jesus and the poor, and take the fruits of that marriage to the streets in an effective way.  That’s a rare and very difficult feat.

Ernst Kasemann once commented that the problem in both the world and the church is that the liberals aren’t pious and the pious aren’t liberal. He’s right. Politics and religion are both generally impoverished because the pious won’t be liberal and the liberals won’t be pious. You normally don’t see the same person leading the rosary and the peace march. You normally don’t see the same person championing both the pro-life movement and women’s choice.  And you don’t normally see the same person scrupulously defending the most-intimate matters within private morality and having the same moral passion for the global-issues of social justice. But that was Dorothy Day. She was equally comfortable leading a peace march and leading the rosary. Someone once quipped: If you drew out what’s deepest and best within both the conservatives and liberals and put them through a blender, what would come out is Dorothy Day.

A second feature which characterized Dorothy Day and her spirituality was her ability to simply act, and to act effectively.  She not only had faith, she acted upon that faith. She was a do-er, not just a listener; and she was able to institutionalize her faith and embed it into an institution, the Catholic Worker, which not only was able to minister directly to the poor but was able to form itself into something larger and more permanent than the faith, vision, and power of a single person. Dorothy was able to act in a way that was bigger and more effective than her own person. There’s an axiom that says: Whatever we dream alone remains a dream, but what we dream with others can become a reality.  Dorothy dreamed with others and made that dream a reality. Today, most of us struggle both to act on our faith and, even more so, to embed our faith concretely into effective, sustained community action.

Finally, Dorothy Day can be an inspiration to us because she did the right thing for the right reason. Dorothy’s commitment to the poor arose not out of guilt, or neurosis, or anger, or bitterness towards society. It arose out of gratitude. Her route to faith, Jesus, and the poor was rather unorthodox. In the years prior to her conversion she was an atheist, a communist, a woman ideologically opposed to the institution of marriage, and a woman who had had an abortion. Her turning to God and to the poor happened when she gave birth to her daughter, Tamar Theresa, and experienced in the joy of giving birth a gratitude that seared her soul.  In her autobiography, The Long Loneliness, she describes how, at seeing her baby daughter for the first time, she was so overcome with gratitude that a faith and love were born in her that never again left her. Her passion for God and the poor were fueled by that.

She was also an earthy saint. She will, no doubt, be the first canonized saint whose photographs show a woman with a cigarette in her mouth. She’s a saint for our time. She showed us how we can serve God and the poor in a very complex world, and how to do it with love and color.

Just because something is politically-correct doesn’t mean that it might not also be correct. Sometimes we have to swallow hard to accept truth.

Some years ago, I served on a Priests’ Council, an advisory board to the bishop in a Roman Catholic diocese. The bishop, while strongly conservative by temperament, was a deeply-principled man who did not let his natural temperament or his spontaneous feelings dictate his decisions. His decisions he made on principle, and sometimes that meant he had to swallow hard.

At one point, for example, he found himself under strong pressure to raise the salaries of lay employees in the diocese. The pressure was coming from a very vocal group of social-justice advocates who were quoting the Church’s social doctrines in the face of protests that the diocese could not afford to pay the kind of wages they were demanding.  Their cause also leaned on politically-correctness.  This didn’t make things easy for the bishop, given his conservative temperament and conservative friends.

But he was, as I said, a man of principle. He came one morning to the Priests’ Council and asked the priests to give him a mandate to give the diocesan employees the wage increase they are demanding. The Priests’ Council told him that they would not bow to political-correctness and voted against it. A month later, the bishop came back to the Priest’s Council and asked the priests again for their support, prefacing his request by telling the priests that, should they vote against it again, he would do it on his own, invoking executive privilege. One of the priests, a close personal friend of his, said: “You’re only asking us to do this because it’s politically correct.” The bishop answered him: “No, we’re not doing this because it’s politically correct. We’re doing it because it is correct!  We can’t preach the gospel with integrity if we don’t live it out ourselves.  We need to pay a living-wage because that’s what the gospel and Catholic social doctrine demands – not because it’s politically correct.” In saying this, the bishop was swallowing hard, swallowing his own temperament, swallowing his friend’s irritation, and swallowing his own irritation at having to bow to something that was presented as politically-correct. But principle trumped feeling.

And principle needs to trump feeling because, so often, when something comes at us with the label that this must be accepted because it is politically-correct, our spontaneous reaction is negative and we are tempted, out of emotional spite, to reject it simply because of the clock it’s wearing and the voices who are advocating for it.  I’ve had my own share of experiences with this, in dealing with my emotions in the face of political-correctness. Teaching in some pretty sensitive classrooms through the years, where sometimes every word is a potential landmine that might blow up in your face, it’s easy to fall into an unhealthy sensitivity-fatigue. I remember once, frustrated with the hypersensitivity of some students (and the pompousness evident inside that sensitivity), I told a student to “lighten up”. He immediately accused me of being a racist on the basis of that remark.

It’s easy then to react with spite rather than empathy. But, like the bishop, whose story I cited earlier, we need to be principled and mature enough to not let emotion and temperament sway our perspective and our decisions. Just because a truth comes cloaked in political correctness and we hear it voiced in self-righteousness doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t the truth. Sometimes we just have to swallow hard, eat our pride and irritation, and accept the truth of what is being presented. Political correctness is normally irritating, exaggerated, unbalanced, pompous, and lacking in nuance, but it serves an important purpose. We need this mirror: How we spontaneously speak about others flushes out a lot of our blind-spots.

Among other things, political correctness, as a check on our language, helps keep civil discourse civil, something in short supply today. Talk-radio, cable-television, blogs, tweets, and editorials are today more and more being characterized by a language that’s rude, insensitive, and flat-out disrespectful and, in its very disdain for political correctness, is, ironically, the strongest argument for political correctness. Politics, church, and community at every level today need to be much more careful about language, careful about being politically-correct, because the violence in our culture very much mirrors the violence in our language.

Moreover, attentiveness to language helps, long-term, to shape our interior attitudes and widen our empathy. Words work strongly to shape attitudes and if we allow our words to chip away at elementary courtesy and respect and allow them to offend others we help spawn a culture of disrespect.

Political correctness comes to us from both the left and the right. Both liberals and conservatives help dictate it and both can be equally self-righteous and bullying. But we must always be conscious that just because something is politically-correct doesn’t mean that it also might not be correct. Sometimes we just need to swallow hard and accept the truth.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. That axiom still holds true for our understanding of suicide. Despite all the advances in our understanding, there are still a number of stigmas around suicide, one of which pertains to how we write the obituary of a loved one who dies in this way. In writing an obituary we still cannot bring ourselves to write the word, suicide: He died by his own hand. We still turn to euphemisms: He died expectantly. Her sudden death brings great sadness.

Suicide, in many cases, perhaps in most cases, is the result of a disease, the emotional and psychological equivalent of cancer, stroke, or heart attack. If that is true, and it is, why then, when I loved one dies of suicide, might we not write this kind of an obituary?

We are sad to report the death of J__ D__ who died after a long and courageous struggle with emotional cancer. Jane, as you know, was born into this world with a tortured sensitivity, a gift and an affliction she grappled with from her earliest youth. She found comfort and peace at times, but was never able to fully extricate herself from some inner chaos which was always partially hidden to those around her and which medicine could not cure, counsellors could not quiet, and our affection and solicitousness could not adequately soothe. In the end, despite her courage and our best efforts to help her, the disease was incurable. Her temperament was both her blessing and her curse. She was a gentle person, not given to ego and unhealthy self-assertion, always overly-anxious not to hurt others or to claim too much space for herself. But her self-effacement was part of her disease as well. No amount of encouragement was able to ultimately take away this inchoate constriction that somehow deprived her of her full freedom. In the end, she died, against her will; but her life, lived with such sensitivity, was a precious gift to all who knew her, even as it sometimes brought anxiety and heartbreak to those around her. Given the sad circumstance of her death, she, with her extraordinary sensitivity, would be the last person who would want us to feel guilty and second-guess ourselves about what we might have done to help prevent her death. When a disease is terminal, all the love and concern in the world can still not bring a cure. But she died inside of our love even as we feel frustrated that our love could not do more to help her. She lives now, still, inside our love and affection, and, God-willing, inside a peace and security that so much eluded her in this life. In lieu of flowers please make donations to the Mental Health Association.

Or perhaps, in another situation, it might read like this:

We are sad to report the death of J__ D__ who died expectantly of an emotional heart attack. His death came as shock since those closest to him had no reason to suspect that he suffered from dangerously high emotional cholesterol or that he carried inside him some congenital heart disease that had not yet manifested itself clearly and had not been medically or psychologically diagnosed. In the face of this, understandably, we find ourselves questioning ourselves as to why we were not more alert or attentive to his person and his health and why we did not pick up on any symptoms manifesting themselves in his situation. Sometimes a potentially fatal disease can lurk beneath the surface and remain unobserved until it is too late. Such is the nature, often times, of deadly heart attacks and strokes. While his death leaves us feeling raw, struggling for understanding, at loss to explain how this could happen, and needing to resist the temptation project a certain anger at him for keeping for keeping his disease so private and hidden, we can also understand that much of his disease was hidden from him too and that the anatomy of this particular kind of death has within itself a particularly pernicious pathology which demands of its victim precisely this propensity to hide what he is undergoing from those closest to him. And this asks for our understanding: Everyone’s life is its own mystery, and not always open to outside understanding. Moreover, emotional heart attacks and strokes, like their biological equivalents, are not willed and claim their victim against his or her will. J__ was a gentle soul who wished no one any harm and tried to do no one any harm. He, no doubt, is as grieved as we are that his unwanted death has caused so much pain. But, no doubt too, he asks for our continued love and affection and, especially, for our understanding. In lieu of flowers, please make a donation to your local mental health association.

It is hard to lose loved ones to suicide, but we should not also lose the truth and warmth of their mystery and their memory.

A recent book, by Robyn Cadwallander, The Anchoress, tells the story of young woman, Sarah, who chooses to shut herself off from the world and lives as an Anchoress (like Julian of Norwich). It’s not an easy life and she soon finds herself struggling with her choice. Her confessor is a young, inexperienced, monk named Father Ranaulf. Their relationship isn’t easy. Ranaulf is a shy man, of few words, and so Sarah is often frustrated with him, wanting him to say more, to be more empathic, and simply to be more present to her. They often argue, or, at least, Sarah tries to coax more words and sympathy out of Ranaulf. But whenever she does this he cuts short the visit and leaves.

One day, after a particularly frustrating meeting that leaves Ranaulf tongue-tied and Sarah in hot anger, Ranaulf is just about to close the shutter-window between them and leave, his normal response to tension, when something inside him stops him from leaving. He knows that he must offer Sarah something, but he has no words. And so, having nothing to say but feeling obliged to not leave, he simply sits there in silence. Paradoxically his mute helplessness achieves something that his words don’t, a breakthrough. Sarah, for the first time, feels his concern and sympathy and he, for his part, finally feels present to her.

Here’s how Cadwallander describes the scene: “He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. There was no more he could say, but he would not leave her alone with such bitterness. And so he remained on his stool, feeling the emptiness of the room around him, the failure of his learning, the words he had stacked up in his mind, page upon page, shelf upon shelf. He could not speak, but he could stay; he would do that. He began to silently pray, but did not know how to go on, what to ask for. He gave up, his breath slowed.

The silence began as a small and frightened thing, perched on the ledge of his window, but as Ranaulf sat in stillness, it grew, very slowly, and filled up the parlor, wrapped itself around his neck and warmed his back, curled under his knees and around his feet, floated along the walls, tucked into the corners, nestled in the crevices of stone. … The silence slipped through the gaps under the curtain and into the cell beyond. A velvet thing, it seemed. It swelled and settled, gathering every space into itself. He did not stir; he lost all sense of time. All he knew was the woman but an arm’s length away in the dark, breathing. That was enough.

When the candle in the parlor guttered, he stirred, looked into the darkness. ‘God be with you, Sarah.’  ‘And with you, Father.’ Her voice was lighter, more familiar.”

There’s a language beyond words. Silence creates the space for it. Sometimes when we feel powerless to speak words that are meaningful, when we have to back off into unknowing and helplessness, but remain in the situation, silence creates the space that’s needed for a deeper happening to occur. But often, initially, that silence is uneasy. It begins “as a small frightened thing” and only slowly grows into the kind of warmth that dissolves tension.

There are many times when we have no helpful words to speak. We’ve all had the experience of standing by the bedside of someone who is dying, of being at a funeral or wake, of sitting across from someone who is dealing with a broken heart, or of reaching a stalemate in trying to talk through a tension in a relationship, and finding ourselves tongue-tied, with no words to offer, finally reduced to silence, knowing that anything we say might aggravate the pain. In that helplessness, muted by circumstance, we learn something:  We don’t need to say anything; we only need to be there. Our silent, helpless presence is what’s needed.

And I must admit that this is not something I’ve learned easily, have a natural aptitude for, or in fact do most times when I should. No matter the situation, I invariably feel the need to try to say something useful, something helpful that will resolve the tension. But I’m learning, both to let helplessness speak and how powerfully it can speak.

I remember once, as a young priest, full of seminary learning and anxious to share that learning, sitting across from someone whose heart had just been broken, searching through answers and insights in my head, coming up empty, and finally confessing, by way of apology, my helplessness to the person across from me. Her response surprised me and taught me something I’d didn’t know before. She said simply: Your helplessness is the most precious gift you could share with me right now. Thanks for that. Nobody expects you to have a magic wand to cure their troubles.

Sometimes silence does become a velvet thing that swells and settles, gathering every space into itself.

Today we no longer understand the value and power of ritual. This is more than an individual failing. It’s the cultural air we breathe. In the words of Robert L. Moore, we’ve gone “ritually tone-deaf”.  The effects of this can be seen everywhere: Allow me two examples:

First, we see this today in the failure by so many couples to grasp the need to formalize their relationship in a ceremony of marriage. They make a private commitment to live together but feel no need to formalize this before a civil authority or inside a church. Their belief is that their love and private commitment to each other is all that’s needed. What does a formal ceremony or a church blessing add to that commitment? The prevalent feeling is that a formal ceremony, ideally even in a church, is nice as a celebration and as something to please others, but, beyond that, it adds little or nothing in terms of anything important. What does ritual contribute to actual life?

We see this same view in many current attitudes towards church-going, prayer, and the sacraments. What’s the value of participating in something when seemingly our hearts aren’t in it? What’s the value of going to church when we feel it’s meaningless? What’s the value of praying formally when, today, our hearts are a million miles away from what our words are saying?  Further still, what’s the value in going to church or in saying prayers at those times when we feel a certain positive repugnance to what we’re doing? Indeed these questions are often expressed as an accusation: People are just going through the motions of church and prayer, parroting words that aren’t really meaningful to them, going through an empty ritual! What’s the value in that? The value is that the ritual itself can hold and sustain our hearts in something deeper than the emotions of the moment.

Matthew Crawford, in his recent book, The World Beyond Your Head, suggests that ritual acts positively even when our feelings are negative. His words:  “Consider as an example someone who suffers not from some ragging emotion of lust, resentment, or jealousy … but rather sadness, discontent, boredom, or annoyance. A wife, let us say, feels this way about her husband. But she observes a certain ritual: she says “I love you” upon retiring at night. She says this not as a report about her feelings – it is not sincere – but neither it is a lie. What it is is a kind of prayer. She invokes something that she values – the marital bond – and in doing so turns away from her present discontent and toward this bond, however elusive it may be as an actual experience. It has been said that ritual (as opposed to sincerity) has “subjunctive” quality to it: one acts as if some state of affairs were true, or could be. … It relieves one of the burden of ‘authenticity’.  …  “The ritual of saying ‘I love you’ … alters somewhat the marital scene; it may not express love so much as to invoke it, by incantation. One spouse invites the other to join with her in honoring the marriage, something one could honor. It is an act of faith: in one another, but also in a third thing, which is the marriage itself.”

What Crawford highlights here is precisely, “a third thing”, that is, something beyond the emotions of a given moment and our faith in each other, namely, the institution of marriage itself as a ritual container, as a sacrament that can hold and sustain a relationship beyond the emotions and feelings of the moment. Marriage, as an institution, human and divine, is designed to sustain love inside of and beyond the emotional and affective fluctuations that inevitably occur inside of every intimate relationship. Marriage allows two people to continue to love each other despite boredom, irritation, anger, bitterness, wound, and, in some cases, even infidelity.  The ritual act of getting married places one inside that container.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, when preaching at marriage ceremonies, would frequently give this counsel to couples: Today you are much in love and you feel that love will sustain your marriage. It wouldn’t. But marriage can sustain your love. Being ritually tone-deaf, we struggle to understand that.

The same holds true for church-going, the sacraments, and private prayer. It’s not a question of going through the motions on days when the feelings aren’t there. Rather it’s going through the ritual as an incantation, as an honoring of our relationship to God, and as an act of faith in prayer.

If we only said “I love you” when we actually felt that emotion and if we only prayed when we actually felt like it, we wouldn’t express love or pray very often. When we say “I love you” and when we do formal prayer at those times when our feelings seem to belie our words, we aren’t being hypocritical or simply going through the motions, we’re actually expressing some deeper truths.